“PRAISE THE GOD EMPEROR!”
The shout became a chorus, rippling outwards through the mass of flesh and bone and steel. A Harlequin Knight to Jessi’s left slammed scything claws together with the solid pangs of steel on steel. A loud, stilted applause. Thousands upon thousands of voices chattered, rose, and fell all around her.
Serah was to her left, jostled between some other crew they didn’t know. They had chosen to represent their crew each with a tattoo of the Black X across their faces. Serah looked scared, in such a show as this! Hadn’t he heard the speeches and songs at the battle feast the previous night? This was a foregone conclusion. The Armada would take Blend. RAZE THE CITIES! Erect statues and idols and monoliths to Emperor Xex. His guidance and control would settle over this heretical place and make it into a paradise.
Stupid Serah.
Fear devours you from insides-out.
I’m not afraid.
Words in her head, but not reality.
Jessi checked her rusty old machete and scavenged plasma rifle one more time.
Almost out of the little cylinders.
I’ll have to find a new gun.
The crowd simmered, upwelling and downwelling with frenzy and fervor as someone would get wracked with religious zeal. Those not in full mania were checking their weapons and readying themselves for the carnage that was foretold in the great sermons last night. Somebody nearby had a tattoo gun, so Jessi got another X across her collarbone to grit her resolve and show her devotion.
Then everything got quiet, quite quickly – hushed awe falling like a blanket of snow.
Even the Harlequins stilled their clicking, clanking machine noises.
The silence moved.
A Dread Knight.
Coming forth to lead the charge across no man’s land.
She wore no helmet, the left side of her face a mess of scar tissue and cybernetic prosthetics, but where the scars ended, the long red hair cascaded down. A pike in one gauntlet, ends aflame in seething blue plasma. The other held a spike pistol, sized so large that only someone with such powered armor could ever hope to lift it, unless perhaps one went the path of The Harlequin – replacing body with machine.
Devotion.
Praise.
Awe.
His chosen ones.
Hand-picked.
“PRAISE HIM!”
Jessi felt the words come out in a roar, directed at the Dread Knight as she stalked forwards through the crowd.
A thousand eyes and ten thousand bodies turned in the hush.
The Knight raised her pike in a sweep of blue.
“PRAISE THE EMPEROR!”
Ten thousand voices all at once followed her together.
Jessi felt it coming.
The crowd became a wave of bodies – she had never felt so close and so loved by so many. This was the closest she could fathom to enlightenment. Ten thousand people all moving together with one single purpose – to crush the enemies of the God-Emperor, Xex. Her legs were burning, but she couldn’t stop.
It must be a couple kilometres across the blasted and pock-marked open grasses to the edge of the city where the trenches and barricades were waiting. Her legs burned and burned.
Serah tripped, stumbled, fell behind in the crush of bodies.
Was lost to sight almost immediately.
The mortars came down at random all around them. Chayot shells arcing in chemtrails as distant puffs of accelerant popped into the air. She could see the red and white of their bulky armored suits, bigger and denser than even Dread Knights. They were popping out against the grays and browns of cover even from here.
Smoke, gas, explosives, all. The canisters and shells rained down.
Around her, bodies flailed. She watched the Harlequin Knight lose his right arm and leg in a wash of blood and hydraulic oil. Stumbled at the concussion of the blast. He fell beneath the feet behind him.
Gone like Serah.
No time to mourn, Xex was calling.
She could see the Dread Knight, her pike raised forwards, her hair blowing wildly in the howling wind of ten thousand breathing bodies. Her bulky powered shell moved in chunky movements as it pushed her forwards, equal parts muscle and servos.
Her spike pistol was flaring now too, as streams of tracer rounds and plasma bolts began arcing out in constant retort. At this extreme range the plasma began to blossom out and drop charge. Her gauntlet swept out and batted one bolt into a spray of boiling orange flame across her pauldron.
Jessi felt her stomach twist and butterflies crush her windpipe.
Her legs were jelly, and she finally had to slow.
Was quickly outpaced at a jog by dozens, hundreds, thousands.
The guns chattered.
Bodies fell like raindrops.
Jessi soon couldn’t see the Dread Knight anymore.
ZQs bounced past on fragile legs, servos and jet thrusters whining as the drones and pilots inside pushed ahead of the main swarm and used their four-legged machines to break the line.
Jessi watched the guns bear down on the foremost pilot.
Could hear his distant screams across the plain as the torso of the spindly machine melted into slag and shrapnel in a spray. Liquid globules of armor plating and crushed ceramic plating fell into the gait of the legs.
The remainder of the pack pushed past.
It was the opportunity they needed. Jessi found her second wind.
Felt the hunger for death ingrained into her from her school days. Grinned madly as she leapt o’ertop bodies and scooped up what she could as she jogged. Plasma grenades, a dagger. Rifle slung across her back, she picked up a large handle from the ground, recognizing it from films.
Ignited the blue blade.
Felt invincible as she crested the top of the trench lines – following the massacre the ZQs were leaving behind them as they broke a wedge into the lines of Seraphs, Chayots, Shock Troopers, and Harbingers. Plunged the blade into the chest of a soldier at the bottom of the first slide down into the furrow, savoring his hissing, crackling breath as she felt resistance give way with the heat of the handle. Turned and continued around the blind corner, shoving the end of the luminescent cyan flare through the gas mask and bottom half of a helmeted figure hiding there.
Felt the pop as the helmet melted away like butter and she felt the handle sink through the expanse of skull within. Wrenched it back out when it slowed in movement against the helmet on the other side.
Was given a moment of pause.
Nobody she knew.
Alone.
Gunshots everywhere.
The booming of mortars.
Whistling and roaring of jet engines overhead. Skyjacks, Tyrants, and Justices roared at hypersonic speeds in pitched battle as Attack Skiffs, Spyders, Soldiers, and other Berserkers flowed in from behind her.
She turned the hot handle off, shoved it in her cargo pants, feeling the welts form there near the tip where the metal and plastic was still scorching hot.
Pulled the rifle across her body. Started thinking slower. Bloodlust was fading into more tactical thoughts.
“FOR THE EMPEROR!”
She responded to the call from behind her before she could help it.
The old habits, dying hard.
A gunshot somewhere nearby. Silence thereafter outside the pitched frenzies of battle.
The exchange of gunfire again, from further in. Heard screams and the sound of flesh and bones ripping.
Jessi pushed onwards, finding mostly remnants of battle as she wound through the trench lines and pushed into the outskirts of the city. Bodies in tatters lay here and there, shredded by passing quadrupeds, with their forged-steel razor-sharp claws and scything jaws.
Buildings, many demolished or scattered as rubble reared up as the trenches ended, saw where the ZQs had finally been thwarted – a four story high-rise tower swarming with white-armored enemies. Rockets and streams of machine-gun fire streaked down at the Berserkers desperately trying to force through the barricades of the ground floor to cull the enemies gunning them down from above.
The Berserkers were thinning, bodies lay everywhere across a square – a plaza in front of the office building.
Residential homes were scattered here and there, where they hadn’t been demolished by heavy ordnance. Several were ablaze, ignored in the chaos.
A squad of Harlequin Knights rolled up as she pitifully tried to pick off the figures moving in the upper floors. The ZQ’s fallen armor provided good enough cover, but her older model plasma rifle wasn’t suited for such extreme range. It was like shooting peanuts at water tanks. By the time her bolts neared the targets, the plasma had lost enough temperature, cohesion, and force to only wash across the white armor as a yellow or orange fireball without much effect.
Those that even connected.
But she wasn’t stupid enough to charge unarmored into the bloodbath near the lobby like her fellow Berserkers.
The Harlequins moved towards the lobby, lobbing explosives and heavier caliber fire. One of them waved her mechanical arm forward to rally the Berserkers floundering in the plaza.
Jessi scampered to the next fallen quadruped, scooping up an older-style Kalashnikov. It felt barbaric, but as a Berserker, she would expect nothing less.
“FOR HIS GLORY!”
A Dread Knight, rallying the Armada forces across the plaza, a hand outstretched and a long cutlass pointed straight at the barricades on the steps of the lobby.
The frenzy and bloodlust stirred, Jessi found herself moving behind the Harlequins who were pushing their way to the steps. Watched as a sniper round pierced the mostly mechanical skull of one and he fell backwards to the concrete.
Her gun was chattering, a burst here, a burst there. Doing what she could to keep the defenders above and below in cover to help her comrades advance.
An Attack Skiff soared across the plaza, dodging the fallen armor and colliding into a row of sandbags, scattering them in a sickening crunch as the nose cone crumpled and the Spyders scattered every which direction, their thruster packs blazing.
The chaos allowed the Harlequin Knight squad to climb the steps, their heavier armaments making short work of the Guardian Army Shocktroopers left to guard the entrance. Spikes and heavy slugs punched through the white armor like toothpicks through paper, exit wounds more gruesome than the entry holes.
Jessi followed them up the next flight of stairs.
Froze on the third story, when the Chayot rounded the corner. His forearm mounted launcher punched a canister dangling from the long chains across the armor into the lead Harlequin, who exploded milliseconds later and took several of his comrades with him.
The Chayot was a walking tank consisting of a filthy heretic inside a suit of heavy power armor – bomb-squad style reinforcement and heavier hydraulics. Canisters began spinning left and right, as napalm and concussive explosives popped with the thumping of both pneumatic launchers. The Dread Knight charged from behind her, was met with a kneeling movement from the Chayot, who punched a mortar shell directly into his chest from one of the two rails on the shoulders.
The top half of the Dread Knight disintegrated, his cutlass embedding itself in a nearby Berserker. The two Harlequins came apart where the flesh failed, in pieces. The remains of windows and walls ejected outwards.
Jessi was close. Too close. The body of the Berserker fell beside her, cutlass lodged vertically.
She huddled behind the row of sandbags, clutching her gun with white knuckles.
Risked a peek.
A mistake.
A canister whumped into the sandbags, which cascaded out in a spray alongside Jessi’s body as the canister exploded. She hit the concrete with a loud crunch, could feel the blood pouring from the back of her head as the world swam around her. Cold autumn air came from the open air along the former wall and windows.
A Seraph joined the Chayot, his plasma rifle firing in bursts of white-hot plasma bolts. He used the Chayot almost as cover, as Jessi had done with the Harlequins.
Spyders and Berserkers both tried to climb to the summit of the stairs where the two G.O.D. defenders valiantly held the peak. Each push was thwarted as more defenders descended from the building floors above to reinforce their specialists.
Jessi grunted, tried rolling over.
Could feel the blood pouring down the back of her neck.
Felt the back of her skull, and touched something soft.
Screamed then, at her own futility, as others sprinted past her crumpled form.
Ripped open one of her pants pockets with her scavenged dagger, pulled out an injectable.
Slammed it into her thigh, then snatched up the baggie of white powder next to it, shoving her entire face into it and snorting equal amounts of caking white powder and her own blood.
Felt both drugs kick in.
Felt the fear disappear.
“FOR XEX!”
Clambered to her feet, coated in blood like something out of a horror sim.
Pulled her machete free from ragged sheath, and charged.
The Chayot had turned to send another canister into an oncoming Attack Skiff outside in the plaza with a heavy whumping sound. The skiff exploded into flames below. The Seraph was gunning down the last few Berserkers in front of her.
But it made The Chayot too slow in spinning, as Jessi limped up the last few steps, gun ablaze and machete raised. Her arm was aching from the kickback of the rifle.
She saw the small dancing blue ignitor flare orange, and then coat her body with flame.
The pain was excruciating at first, but then everything went numb.
Could feel the skin on her body peeling and cracking, but only a modicum of the anguish thanks to the stimulants surging through her.
The Chayot spun the roaring cone of flame to the right, to catch another Spyder mid thruster-jump upwards from the plaza below.
And that was when Jessi pulled the handle from her pants, ignited it with a flash of blue.
Swept it at the Chayot’s neck, whilst still ablaze.
Felt the plasma blade stop at first against the heavy armoring, then begin to melt through.
The Chayot sputtered, his flames catching his own scrolls and pennants scattered across his power armor as he tried to sweep the flamethrower on his forearm up to finish Jessi off.
They were an inferno of blue and orange, as the Chayot finally toppled, his Seraph comrade turning in surprise.
Jessi’s vision was already gone. Her eyes hollows – burned down to the retinas.
But she felt the boot that kicked her to the ground.
And the bayonet on the Seraph’s plasma rifle as it sunk through her torso and clinked into the concrete beneath her, metal against stone.
“FOR THE GOD-EMPEROR!”
Another brutal thrust.
“PRAISE HIM!”
The last of the full screams escaped from pierced lungs, her cries becoming bloody gurgles.
And then she was gone.
