There was an almost dreamlike quality to the situation, a detachment from yourself. You'd seen the state of the lines behind you, of the men retreating. You watched another group of soldiers get shot in the back and flop lifelessly into the mud. Another fleeing man threw down his rifle and threw up his hands as the line of mustard yellow marched on towards the shell-hole he had been hiding in. Mercifully, no one shot him and instead he was roughly grabbed and shoved back towards the Caspian lines.
This was the moment.
"My orders are to hold this position, and if we do, we can give our men a chance to escape and rally. If we don't hold them here for at least a while, they're going to run right over our lines. Can I count on you?"
The officer (a captain, you thought now that you looked at his insignia but everything was covered in mud) looked at you, looked back down the hill at where his men were smoking cigarettes and swigging water from canteens. Some of them had started talking to your sailors and you didn't like that. They might be encouraging your boys to run and that was the last thing you needed. You were worried for a moment, scared that he might say 'no' and leave. Instead, he nodded.
"If you're staying, I'm staying." He said simply. There was a tidal wave of implication behind those words you did not have time for right now.
"Alright, get your men to start digging shell-scrapes at the hilltop, we'll move the guns up." You said. "Unless you think-"
"No, that's good. Boys! On your feet!"
The soldiers scrambled to the top of the hill, finding shell-holes and shoring them up while you got your battery to start moving the guns. One of them slipped back into the mud and was stuck fast, and after a minute of digging, shoving, and swearing you ordered the crew to spike it on the spot: you weren't getting it into position in the next five minutes and you needed every man working on the guns that would. The man in charge of it looked dismayed at the order--you understood. Sailors took pride in their guns and in the last few weeks keeping them parade-ground clean had become something of a religion for some of the men who had warmed to you a bit. There was pride in it and having to abandon one stung, no doubt. There was nothing for it, though, and the petty officer cursed as he opened up the gun's inner workings to tug free the bolt assembly and hurl it into the mud, where it would be lost with the other detritus of the battle.
The guns only had to move about ten meters, but it felt like a mile under time constraints. Fortunately, the crest of this hill seemed a little more solid that most of the ground, as the water drained down it into the dips below, so the guns quickly rolled into the shell-holes. Shovels and mattocks, bayonets and helmets were rising and falling, flinging wet, sticky mud away as your sailors and the loose skirmish line of soldiers feverishly dug in around the gentle rise of the hill. You didn't really know how best to prepare for what was coming and left the officer to manage the disposition of his men. The crew of the abandoned gun, though, you moved back slightly, had them check their rifles. They weren't infantrymen, but they were something-- a reserve you could use to shore up one of your guns or throw desperately into a breach.
You felt cold squeezing inside your chest for a moment. Could you do that? Order men to plug a gap, knowing that some of them--all of them?--would die? Is this what the infantry officer felt like every time his men moved from their trenches? It seemed so different here than on the deck of the submarine. There, even with shells screaming around you it had felt detached. Separated in some way. This was was disturbingly, eerily personal. There would be Caspian rifle sights set directly on you.
You checked your revolver again, the comforting weight of the absurdly heavy Albian gun heavy in your hand. Made sure that your sword was loose enough in its scabbard to be drawn easily if you needed it. Looked over your men. Kwon crouched next to you in the shell-scrape that you had made your 'headquarters', rifle clenched in his hands, along with a pair of men you had grabbed from the quartermaster to use as your runners. Tried to smile confidently. The officer slithered into your shell-scrape, crawling on his belly.
"I've set my men to watch your flanks and keep them getting around the back of the hill. You and your and guns are going to have to keep them from coming up the forward slope," he said simply. Then he reached out towards you and you realized he was offering you his hand and you reached out to shake it with nerveless fingers.
"Good luck," you said.
"Let's just kill the bastards," he said and then vanished back over the top of the shell-scrape, presumably back to his own men.
The world suddenly erupted into noise and pressure and light, so fierce and sudden that it pressed you into the mud like a boot to an ant. Artillery, shells screaming ahead of the enemy advance, landing directly on your position. You clutched the comfort of the steel helmet and tried to pull yourself in as small as possible, huddled against the edge of the hole. As soon as it had started, it suddenly stopped, and you found yourself tried to find your breathe again, as though it had been hammered out of your body.
One of the gun positions was simply a mass of twisted metal, and stains that might once have been bodies. You weren't sure if they were army, navy, or both. You carefully peaked around the top of the hole, around at the rest of the unit. Somewhere, someone was screaming, high and wordless. You wanted them to stop more than anything else in the world right now but it didn't stop and you had to try and block the sound of human misery out of your head so you didn't go mad. There was a body out in the open that wasn't there before, an army soldier lying atop his rifle, and the landscape had been shaped by the artillery fire into something even more unfamiliar, but it looked like your men were still in position.
You turned to Kwon, to order him to get a man to retrieve the rifle from the downed soldier, and saw him looking pale, paler than you'd ever seen him. He nodded weakly, shifted, and pitched face-first into the mud.
You and one of the runners shifted over to him, grabbing his jacket and turning him over as best you can. You wiped the mud away from his mouth and nose as best you could, and it bubbled as he exhaled and coughed. You couldn't see a wound on him, and you couldn't tell if the blood on your hands was his, the horses, or somebody else's.
+1 Stress
You propped him out of the water as best you could, then called over one of your runners. He appeared, wild-eyed.
"Ma'am?"
"Find Petty Officer Kudo. Tell him that if anything happens to me, he's got to take over the battery. Petty Officer Kwon is wounded."
"Aye, aye, ma'am." The man replied and then clambered away to find your next-most senior man. There. That was done. You peeked over the top of your shell-scrape at the oncoming line of men in mustard-yellow and mud-colored uniforms. Now that they were closer you could see that they wore strange conical helmets, covering their ears to the sides, with an absurdly tiny rim that barely jutted over their eyes. They were close enough you could see their eyes. You cleared your throat and tried to speak--had to spit.
"Battery! Range 300! Commence firing!" For a moment, you thought everyone was too shell-shocked to do anything and then your two surviving guns opened fire with the familiar rattling thud-thud-thud and gaps opened up in the advancing skirmish line as mud and water and blood was scattered skyward. Rifles snapped and fired alongside the guns, picking off men to slow to react, and within moments of the shooting starting, pockets of blue-clad troops, invisible until this moment, rose out of the mud and started sprinting for your position on the ridge. Or at least in your general direction.
The advancing line, which had seemed so imposing a moment before, melted away as men dove to the ground, seeking cover from your guns. They hadn't expected it--had thought there were no Akitsukuni positions between here and your lines. You had the element of surprise, and it was devastating.
Over the dull thumping of your guns you heard the sharp crack of more organized rifle fire start up a few moments later, first off to your left. They were trying to move around you, then. Just like your infantryman friend had said. You'd had maybe four or five minutes of this battle your way, and now it was about to get bad. It didn't feel like it had been very long at all, and yet everything seemed like it was moving slowly.
You crawled over the to the leftward side of the position, your revolver feeling inadequate in your hands. You peaked over the top of the ridge and, sure enough, a knot of Caspian troops were pushing towards your position, outside the available arc of the guns. Absurdly, you propped your revolver over the edge of the hole and levelled the crude sights over one of the men, then you pulled the trigger.
The weapon kicked back into your hand in a flash of powder, punching against your palm. When you glanced back to your target you couldn't tell if you had hit anyone. There was too much going on. A crackle of rifle fire again. Another group of Akitsukuni soldiers, possibly some of those that had been pinned down in between the lines, had opened fire on the advancing Caspians from further to your left and the advance was bogging down. You fired again. Again. Your arm and hand hurt and you wondered why the hell you had picked such a big revolver in the first place.
+1 Stress
The Caspians were firing back and a bullet cracked overhead and they were moving. Darting forward in ones and twos and threes before they dove to the ground again and you couldn't fire quickly enough. You wriggled back down and broke open the revolver, starting to reload it with shaking fingers. You could still hear your guns firing but they were slacking off--fainter. You jerked the revolver closed and started crawling back the way you had come as the battle raged around you. Strange.
Thirty minutes ago (or five hours ago or however long it had been you didn't know how long it had been) you would have been disgusted at crawling through icy, cold mud like this and now it seemed like the last thing on your mind. You felt frigid and numb but you ignored the sensation. What a strange thought to have at a time like this. As you tumbled into your nearest gun's position, a sailor was frantically trying to put a belt into position on the open action, his hands shaking, mud-slick fingers slipping off the bolt he was trying to open. You took the shells and freed up his other hand, and the gun started back into action.
"Th-thank you, sir--ma'am," he said briefly and then hurried back towards the ammunition reserve to get another box.
Someone tugged on your sleeve and you lowered your head slightly, looking back to see your runner, pale and mud-streaked.
"Sir! Petty Officer Kudo says---" Whatever petty officer Kudo had to tell you never materialized, because it was cut off by the sudden thunder of a shell impacting nearby. Just one, a stray from one side or the other, but it threw all of you flat, the infantry from instinct and the sailors from fear. You got back to your knees, and the runner didn't.
+1 Stress
The guns were falling silent now, the outgoing rifle fire slacking. You looked around the position and were surprised to see it had more men now than it did before, having been joined by Akitsukuni soldiers who had rallied to the guns and laid in rifle fire, but now everyone was just pressing into the mud, trying to look small. You glanced over the edge of the hill along the barrel of the gun and saw the enemy line picking themselves up, moving again, closer than ever. Less than a hundred meters, their bayonets gleaming in the sun.
There would be no retreat from this position. They would take the hill and shoot you all down as you ran. If you didn't shoot now, if there wasn't a proper response, they would overrun the hill and they would plunge those bayonets into your bodies and you would die here. Or worse, they might take you prisoner, the mere thought of which filled you with shame and fear in equal measure.
You looked to the shaking gunner, lying flat in the bottom of a hole so filled with water he had to prop his head up to not drown. At another man face down in the water who wasn't moving. Around at the men huddled in ditches and holes and whatever depressions they could find, curled as small as they could as rifle rounds cracked and whistled overhead. The tide of fire and violence had washed over these men and were pushing them into the mud, and they'd be buried there.
You had to stand and fight, and the first step was to stand. You weren't meant to be crawling around in the mud, you were to stand on the deck and direct the guns with a booming voice and a commanding presence and a sword.
You took a moment to steady yourself, put your hand on your hilt, and you pushed yourself to your feet, where all your men could see you. Where all the enemy could see you. You closed fingers around the hilt of your sword, took a breath and hesitated for just the barest second. Then you tightened your grip and your sword left your scabbard.
"Pull yourselves together! We're staying! Right! Here!" Your voice cracked and you had to swallow, forced yourself not to dive into the mud again. "May the Empress reign ten thousand years!"
You reached out and hauled the huddled sailor back up towards his gun, your muscles screaming in protest.
"Stand to your gun, sailor! Fire!
FIRE!" The man reached out to take hold of the gun and depressed the trigger.
"Ten thousand years!" You yelled again, waved your sword as bullets cracked and whistled around you, opened your mouth to exhort the men again.
There was a ringing blow that felt like someone had taken a baseball bat (why, of all things, did you think of a baseball bat?) and slammed it across the top of your head and you went tumbling further into the shell hole. There was something warm on your face and your vision was swimming, but you pulled your pistol up to the edge of the hole and you fired blindly, lending to the tide of fire around you. The whole world felt like it was tipping sideways, slowly but surely, gravity getting stronger and stronger and pulling you to the ground.
Oh, you'd been shot. That's what this was. You tried to wipe the sweat off your brow, and the back of your glove came away soaked with blood.
+1 Stress
You stumbled and fell against the side of the hole, doing your best to clear a spot for the next man to take up your firing spot. A soldier rushed past, giving you just a small glance before taking your place and firing down into the enemy. One of the pom-poms started up again, the world shaking, the sound rattling your skull.
The man ahead ducked into the hole, fumbling for a clip for his rifle. A shape emerged from the smoke above him, and you raised your pistol and fired as quick as you could, emptying the remaining cylinders. The shape dropped, and the soldier found his rounds and slotted them as you kept the empty gun trained uselessly over his head.
Reload, you had to reload. You stowed your sword, opened the revolver, and the extractor sent the shells flying into your face, the hot brass stinging your skin and pattering off your helmet. You tried to pry open the cartridge pouch on your belt, your fingers closed around a round, and you did your best to line it up with a cylinder.
One. Five more to go.
+1 Stress
You looked up, and the man who had taken your spot was dead.
You looked back down and tried to get the next round in place, and it slipped from your cold, numb, fingers and into the muddy water. Something moved ahead of you, and you snapped the weapon closed and pointed.
One in six chance it was loaded. Caspian roulette.
It was Petty Officer Kudo, reaching out a hand. Behind him, two more soldiers were pressing into the spot where you'd been, where the dead man had been. The pom-pom trailed off, the rifle fire slowed.
"Are you alright, ma'am?"
You nodded wordlessly. You weren't sure if you could speak if you wanted to. You wished you had something to drink. You tried anyway.
"What's going on?"
"The Caspians are pulling back, ma'am. The Army guys are saying we need to move now, before one of them tells their artillery where we are.
That didn't make much sense. You picked yourself up as best you could and made your way to the firing spot, staring over the heads of the soldiers there just a moment.
All the way down the hill, as far as you could see, were prone bodies in mustard uniforms. At least a hundred, some still shifting weakly, most still.
"Are we retreating?" Kudo asked again.
"... yes. In good order, Petty Officer. Leave the guns."
----
Somehow, the sun was setting over your retreat. You tried to string the hours together and it didn't make any sense. How was that a day? It was either a week, or it was an hour, but nothing in between made sense. As you had clambered free of your position on the hill you had nearly stumbled over the officer who had, in the end, decided to throw his small group of soldiers against the oncoming Caspians with you. At some point his arm had been put in a sling improvised out someone's rifle sling, perhaps by himself. Perhaps by one of his soldiers. It didn't matter much because he was dead, a single neat hole through the center of the soft cap he was wearing. If it weren't for the trickle of blood on his face, you might think he was sleeping.
The whole thing made you feel numb and cold inside your chest to match the mud clinging to what felt like every inch of your skin.
You were on the road back to your previous position, sans guns. Sans most things, with your walking wounded loaded into your quartermaster's wagons. The same weary officer that had sent you forward had shrugged his shoulders and directed you back there, unsure what else to do with you, and so you went. To your surprise, most of your battery had survived the fight: you counted six dead and ten wounded, among them Kwon. The Navy had a motor-ambulance standing by to take your wounded, while the Army's had to settle for carts or a long journey by stretcher. You were too tired to feel any kind of way about that. A medic had examined you and determined that the helmet, which had a ragged hole in it now, had saved your life. Then he had wrapped a bandage around your head with the pronouncement that it was a superficial injury which you wouldn't require time in the hospital for.
Finally, the little spot you'd called home for the last few weeks came into view. The same pits for the guns, still empty, the same sleeping spots sailors had somehow made cozy, the same little way house on the side of the road. After looking a moment at the mud soaking you in your reflection in a puddle, you leaned against the side of your little house. The door opened after a moment and Min-Seo's pale, anxious face emerged, staring.
"Hot water, please." You said. You didn't have the energy to summon your Joseon at this moment. "I don't want to truck mud in the house." Hearing the words you were saying sounded absurd. Was this really the time to worry about mud in your cramped little headquarters building? You still had manners, you guessed.
Some amount of time passed--it might have been five minutes or maybe an hour or maybe a week. You weren't sure. Eventually Min-Seo returned, a steaming wooden pail of water in one hand and your spare uniform hanging over her forearm.
Spirits. You could kiss her. You reached out to take the bucket and started to stumble around to the far side of the house that would shield you from the view of the gun pits and the road--the most private you could hope for. Not that you found that you cared if the men saw you (they bathed out in the open on any day warm enough for it), but the propriety mattered, you supposed. Min-Seo followed, silent. Your everything ached from your head down into your soul and it took you what felt ages just to undress, each muddy, stiff piece of your uniform tossed into a pile. Maybe it could be saved. Maybe not. You didn't care. You just wanted to be clean.
You didn't really pay attention after that. All you knew was that soon you were inside, wrapped in a dry blanket and a cup of tea in one hand as you sat on the edge of your bed, your still damp hair clinging to the back of your neck. You head still hurt and you had a fresh bandage. Even with vigorous washing, it felt like the mud would never come out. Maybe you should finally just cut it: some of the Europan military women you'd seen wore it short, in a sort of androgynous style. It felt weird just thinking about.
The cup of tea was empty now, but you wrapped your hands around it as though to extract the last of the warmth and set it down on your little desk. You had reports to write, probably, and your eyes cast around for your pens. Did you take them with you? Were they lying in the mud somewhere with the ruined guns and most of the battery's supplies?
As you pondered the question uselessly, a shadow appeared at your door. You looked over to see Min-Seo there, looking nervous, wringing her hands a little as she stood there. Her weight shifted a little, maybe a hint of uncertainty in the way she was looking at you.
"Min-Seo? What is it?"
She took a second, steadied her breathing, and then walked towards you in slow, deliberate strides, the door swinging most of the way closed behind her. You felt transfixed, too tired to react, as her hand settled on her shoulder, her knees on the mattress to either side of you, and her lips met yours.
She felt warm.
[ ] Protest
[ ] Give In (-2 Stress)
There is a manual voting moratorium. We will let you know when voting is open. Haruna currently has 10 stress.
Have fun.
