Chương 14: Arc 0 - Chapter 14 - Frontline

The group recovered surprisingly quickly from their surprise at the Lieutenant's actions and marched down toward the western side of the trenches. As they passed through, squads split off to reinforce positions along the frontline that needed it, while the rest kept pushing toward the westernmost edge of the battlefield. Thea was glad to have a squad around her right now, even if she didn't know the name of a single one of them.

She felt thoroughly out of her depth and having other marines around her that she could take cues from was extremely soothing to the senses. There were easily over a thousand marines packed into these trenches, all caught up in what was, by her standards, an absolutely apocalyptic battle. No matter where she looked, marines were frantically shooting over the top of the trench line, firing out of pillboxes, or lobbing grenades toward the enemy. The sheer volume of it all made it hard to keep a clear head.

Projectiles cracked through the air on supersonic shockwaves, while lasers struck dirt, armour, and flesh—melting, sizzling, and popping on whatever surface they hit with a violent hiss. Explosions boomed through the trenches and sent deep shockwaves rolling through her bones, easily drowning out everything else on the battlefield. She had thought she'd gotten used to the intensity on the way to the frontline… But the actual front was several times worse than she'd ever expected.

Her breathing grew shallow from the sheer effort of trying to keep pace with the rest of the marines while also trying to stay focused through the constant wall of noise and chaos around her. Even as their reinforcement group moved through the lines however, nobody spared them even a single glance. Everyone was fully absorbed in the fighting happening just over the trench walls. The only time anyone acknowledged them was when a squad leader flagged them down to pull specific marines off to reinforce their position.

After roughly three hundred more metres of trench, it happened yet again.

"We need at least three heavies over here—Defensive if possible, but I'll take Offense too," the defending Squad Leader called out.

"Lost all of ours on the last push. Without them, we're going to be a weak link when the next major push hits. You got anything for us?" Heavies, as Thea had started to appreciate during her time in this simulation, were a vital lynchpin in the UHF's fighting force. They—the Offensive ones—brought the highest raw firepower of any role on the field, and their thick armour let them soak up a punishment that would have shredded anyone else—especially against the Stellar Republic's low-tech weapons.

That combination let them act as both spear and shield at once, freeing the medium and light armour marines around them to actually do their jobs without getting chewed apart in the process. Against the Stellar Republic specifically, Offensive Heavies seemed to be the most sought-after type of marine on the battlefield. Every single squad that had been pulled aside to reinforce a position had included at least two of them. The problem was that heavies were the second rarest type of marine overall.

Light armour wearers like Thea were the rarest, with heavies slightly more common. By far the most common, though—by a factor of roughly five-to-one compared to heavies and lights combined—were the Mediums. Mediums were the typical grunt Marine of the UHF, Thea had figured out by now. They generally came equipped for all-round fighting: Assault rifles, a backup heavy weapon like a grenade launcher for when things got ugly, and whatever utility gear the squad needed.

Squad comms units, entrenching gear, drone factories—that kind of thing almost always ended up on a medium's back, unless a Heavy or Light happened to be specialised for the role. By now, most of the heavies from the reinforcement group had already peeled off to join the defence in the squads Lieutenant Frost had put together at the start of the march. That left Thea's squad as one of the only ones still able to answer the local Squad Leader's request. Three heavies, one medium, one light.

'Fits the bill pretty well, all things considered.' No one needed to say it out loud. They exchanged nothing but a quick look amongst themselves and filed out of the large group, falling in with the existing defence and waiting on their new Squad Leader for orders. He was a grizzled-looking veteran with a limp arm hanging uselessly at his right side—fresh blood still seeping from it, which told Thea everything she needed to know about how the last push had gone.

He looked them over without much ceremony, sizing them up the way someone did when they were already calculating how to use what they'd been given.

"Alright, new blood," he barked.

"We're expecting a major push from the Stellar Republic soon—probably in the next ten to twenty. Priority is holding the line, no breaches, as you'd expect. You Heavies, you're with me. We form the core, make sure nothing gets through. Light and Medium, you're on support—cover the flanks, deal with whatever surprises they throw at us."

'Flanks and surprises. Got it.' Thea's heart was already thumping harder than she wanted to admit as she moved to her assigned position alongside her squad, each of them settling in without a word. Once they were in place, the heavies opened up—massive, sustained fire pouring into the Stellar Republic's lines, their broad backs filling a large chunk of Thea's field of view.

She could clearly see the recoil working through their bodies with every shot—even with the heavy armour and the sheer physical strength those frames implied, the weapons pushed back hard.

'There's no way a human being should be able to even lift those things, let alone fire them,' she thought with the same mild confusion about the UHF Marine's capabilities that had been trailing her ever since she first set foot inside the Cube. Before stepping into this simulation, she would have sworn up and down to anyone who'd listen that the prior statement was unequivocally true. Now, however? She was literally watching it happen in front of her own eyes.

Two of them were battling with the recoil of the standard-issue heavy machine guns, similar to the one she'd watched the Lieutenant casually sling around like it weighed absolutely nothing.

'Which, again, is completely insane?!' It only made the gap between the Lieutenant and everyone else seem ever wider. The third heavy's weapon, though, was something else entirely.

'And what the actual fuck is that thing?' The gun was colossal—an engineering marvel, as far as Thea was concerned, packed with mechanisms and details she didn't even have the vocabulary to fully describe. The barrel alone was nearly as long as the marine carrying it was tall, braced by a whole array of stabilisers and shock-absorbing systems that were clearly the only reason the marine could handle it at all. Even then, the strain was visible every time he fired.

The plating was matte-black, broken up by a handful of glowing indicators that hinted at whatever was going on inside it. She could see the reloading mechanism cycling constantly—feeding enormous shells into the chamber one after another. Each shot was spectacular in a way that made her stomach drop a little. The pressure differential alone was physical, rippling outward from the muzzle like the air itself was flinching.

The sound that followed wasn't quite like anything else on the battlefield—a deep, deafening pop, and then the high whistle of the shell streaking toward the enemy lines at a speed that made tracking it almost pointless. The shells were not simple projectiles, however. Instead, they were clearly some kind of proprietary weapons technology of the UHF, as they imploded on contact, dragging air, dirt, smog, and debris violently inward toward the point of impact before the ground buckled and caved under the force.

The devastation left behind after each shot was total. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

'Salvation or annihilation. Depending entirely on which side of that barrel you're on…' The thought had barely finished forming when the rest of the marines opened up as well, the combined roar of their weapons snapping her back to the present. The air filled almost instantly with a dense storm of projectiles and laser fire. Thea took a breath, realizing that she should stop staring and get to work, before carefully peering over the top of the trench for the first time.

The Stellar Republic's lines stretched out roughly a hundred and fifty to two hundred metres away. Despite the distance, the scene was all too clear and horrifying in its intensity. The enemy lines seemed to stretch out endlessly—soldiers in their distinct rag-covered armour spreading across the war-torn landscape as far as she could see. Their trenches and fortifications looked battered and scarred, worn down by what had clearly been countless assaults and relentless explosions from both sides.

Smoke rose from multiple points along their positions and the ground between the two sides was a gruesome no man's land—craters everywhere, and the bodies of fallen soldiers piled up in places where the fighting had been heaviest.

'And yet, it doesn't even matter that there's so many dead...' Despite the unending casualties, the Stellar Republic forces showed not even the faintest sign of slowing down. Wave after wave kept emerging from their trenches and bunkers, charging straight into the hailstorm of bullets and explosions with the kind of numbers that only their duplication ability could explain.

'They just keep coming… How do you beat something that can replace every single loss on the spot?' The answer, as far as Thea was concerned, was that you didn't beat the numbers. You targeted the source creating them.

'Find the originals. Drop as many as possible. That's the job.' She moved in short bursts, using her light armour's agility to dart between cover before firing, then moving again before anyone could get a bead on her. Getting pinned down—like she had in the foxhole just hours ago—was not happening twice. The Medium beside her kept pace as best he could, laying down covering fire to keep heads down while Thea picked her shots carefully, trusting her Focus-powered instinct to flag the high-priority targets.

He clearly didn't seem to fully understand what she was doing or how she was doing it, but after a few dozen shots he could clearly see the effect—entire pockets of soldiers on the enemy side simply dropped and stopped reinforcing—so he stopped picking his own targets and started focusing exclusively on supporting her. They worked like that for a couple of minutes until her rifle chimed—a sharp alarm tone warning her it was close to overheating. She reached for her energy cells… and grabbed nothing.

'... Oh no. I'm an idiot.'" Fuck!" she hissed.

"I forgot to bring energy cells—!" When she'd resupplied back at the station, she'd been so caught up in saying the right things and not embarrassing herself that she'd completely blanked on requesting a new pack and extra ammunition.

'Of all the things to forget.' The laser rifle had bought her time—it could theoretically keep firing without a cell as long as you gave it time in between shots for the internal generator to recharge, so the oversight hadn't entirely blown up in her face right away. But if she wanted to stay useful to the defence, she needed cells, and she needed them soon. She scanned around quickly for any loose ones. Nothing just sitting out in the open—which made sense, unfortunately.

Energy cells weren't the kind of thing you left lying around in the middle of an active warzone. They packed a serious amount of energy into a small package, and a stray bullet or a nearby explosion hitting one at the wrong angle could rupture it—sending searing flames and razor-sharp shrapnel in every direction. No marine wanted to be anywhere near that. She pulled back from the front of the trench and started making her way toward the squad leader.

'Fuck me—why does this always happen…' It wasn't the first time her lacking social instincts had landed her in a mess like this. A handful of uncomfortable memories surfaced without being invited, and one in particular stuck. She'd lost several hundred credits that her Old Man had trusted her with once—because she hadn't spoken up about a wrongly priced item at the market. He'd chewed her out for it, and then laughed at her, which had somehow been even worse. He still brought it up sometimes, just to needle her.

"You could likely kill anyone in the Undercity in a straight-up fight without breaking a sweat—yet when you should speak up for yourself about an honest mistake, you fold immediately, missy." She shook the memory off and kept walking.

'He's going to think I'm a complete idiot. Why did I have to screw up something this simple…?!' She approached the grizzled squad leader from behind, took a quiet breath, and kept her voice as flat and matter-of-fact as she could manage.

"SL—I'm out of energy cells. Any supplies nearby?"

'Here it comes…' She braced herself for it. She understood it, honestly. What kind of marine forgot their ammunition at the resupply point? The squad leader didn't even turn around. He kept firing his pistol into the Stellar Republic's ranks with his good arm, steady as anything.

"Energy cells? Yeah, I got some spares. Can't use my main gun anymore with this useless arm anyway—oh, and grab the ones off my corpse over there too." A brief gesture of the pistol toward the opposite side of the trench.

'... Huh? That's—That's it? Where's the yelling…?' Not about to give him a chance to reconsider, she moved quickly to the backpack he'd indicated with a nudge of his foot and grabbed the spare cells. Then she turned toward the opposite side of the trench. A row of around a dozen UHF corpses had been propped against the back wall. She'd gotten used to seeing bodies scattered around by now—hard not to, at this point—but getting close enough to actually loot one was different.

Her movements gave that away, even if she didn't mean them to. She crouched down beside the first body and reached out—and stopped dead in her tracks.

'Wait a second, what? Did he just say " my corpse"?' She took a closer look at the face.

'... No fucking way.' It literally was him. The squad leader she'd spoken to thirty seconds ago was leaning dead against the trench wall right in front of her. Wide-eyed, she glanced back toward the front of the trench. The same grizzled man was still evidently right there —firing his pistol into the Stellar Republic's lines, barking the occasional order to the rest of the squad like nothing had happened. She looked back at the corpse.

'What. The. Fuck.' The disconnect was immediate and deeply uncomfortable. The fact that he'd told her to loot his own body so casually—like it was a perfectly normal thing to say—made absolutely no sense to her. And yet, the longer she spent inside this simulation, the harder it was to call it abnormal. The UHF Marines she'd encountered treated death less like a tragedy and more like a mild inconvenience. An annoying scheduling issue, at worst. That's when it hit her: The rez-pods.

They'd been mentioned a few times throughout the challenge, and she'd assumed at first that they were just a way to give challenge-takers more attempts—a respawn mechanic for the "players" like her.

'But maybe that's not it at all…' The Squad Leader in front of her wasn't a player. Neither were most of the marines she'd marched back to the frontline with. And apparently, as evidence suggested, they'd all made use of the rez-pods regardless.

'So what is it, then? Why build that into the simulation in the first place…? For training?' If it was just to balance out the Stellar Republic's duplication ability, then why include the duplication ability at all? If parity was the goal, why create the disparity to begin with? To add flavour? To test the people taking the challenge for something specific?

'I have no damn idea… But I'm not going to figure it out right now, no matter how much time I spend standing around and thinking about it.' She filed it away with the pile of other unanswered questions the simulation had been quietly stacking up in the back of her head.

'The damn Old Man is getting absolutely grilled the second I walk out of here…!' She grabbed the spare pack from the corpse, loaded it up with every energy cell she could find, and headed back to the front of the trench. She slotted a fresh cell into her rifle. The exhaust ports let out a sharp, loud hiss as the stored heat of the overclocking generator—which had tried to recharge her rifle as fast as possible without a cell to help it—vented out on the surge of new supplementary power.

'Okay. Crisis averted. Nobody ever needs to know about this one.' A small, satisfied smile tugged at her lips as she settled back into position and started scanning the Stellar Republic's lines for original bodies… Thea slipped back into her rhythm quickly. Original bodies dropped every couple of seconds, as clean and consistent as they had before her little ammunition-requisition-excursion.

She moved like a spectre through the chaos—every time she fired, soldiers fell in clusters, as if her laser carried some invisible side-effect that simply reaped anyone standing too close to her target. Pop up, identify, fire, drop back behind the trench wall. A few metres to the left. Sometimes all the way to the other side, using the three heavies as her central anchor point. Everything else ceased to exist. She didn't notice the incredulous looks the medium kept shooting her way.

She didn't actively register the return fire from the Stellar Republic's side steadily picking up in intensity more and more. She didn't see the moment one of the Heavies caught a rocket to the chest and got flung twenty metres back by the blast.

'Identify. Confirm. Aim. Fire. Move. Repeat…' That was all there was. The whole world had narrowed down to that single, clean loop, and nothing seemed capable of breaking her out of it—" Which one of you complete fucking lunatics is killing all those Duplicators?!" The voice hit her like an HMG round through a sheet of durasteel. Thea blinked back into reality, turned toward the source—and froze.

Lieutenant Frost was standing mere metres away, a bone-chilling, manic grin spread across her face, looking around for anyone brave enough to answer her yelled question…