Old Glory Chapter 4

PFC Doggit had just enough time to brace before the brute hit him like a meteor, the impact slamming into his combat shield with bone-jarring force. His exoskeleton shrieked in protest, servos grinding as it fought to keep him upright. The brute was a tower of filth and fury, swathed in rotted fur and layered with muscle so dense it seemed carved from stone. One hand gripped a bulbous, iron-headed club, awkward and crude, but deadly, while the other clawed viciously at Doggit’s shield, yellow fangs gnashing just inches from his visor. The monster snarled as it raked at him again, each blow sending tremors up his spine, the shield bowing with every relentless push.

Doggit roared, shoving upward to create a sliver of space between them. His breath fogged the inside of his helmet as he shoved the brute back a half-step. It surged forward again, talons gouging bright trails through his shield's surface. He answered by ramming his shotgun tight into its abdomen and firing. The blast hit home, a punishing spray of tungsten darts shredding fur and flesh. Blood sprayed across both of them, sizzling where it struck armor. The brute howled but didn't fall. Its club swung down again, a ponderous arc that Doggit barely blocked, the strike skidding off the reinforced plating and sending him staggering sideways.

They grappled in the muck, shield locked against claw as they fought for dominance. The brute’s weight bore down like a hydraulic press, snarling through fangs slick with blood. Its club dropped again and again, crashing against the shield and hammering Doggit to one knee. His HUD flickered with damage reports, alerts chiming in his ears. He ground his teeth and surged upward, exoskeleton groaning as he shoved the barrel of his shotgun under the beast’s snarling jaw. Talons raked across his helmet, scoring deep, and his vision filled with blood, but he held the angle.

With a guttural shout, Doggit pulled the trigger. The second blast was point-blank into the creature’s throat, and the effect was immediate. The brute’s neck exploded in a geyser of meat and bone, a choking snarl dying on the wind. Its bulk collapsed onto the shield with a final convulsion, limbs twitching as hot gore soaked into the swampy earth. He shoved it off, panting hard, the monster’s ruin left sprawled like a shattered statue in the mud.

Corporal Silph held her ground just a pace to the side, visor flickering with motion-tracking highlights as two smaller rat-things came skittering through the chaos. Gunfire stitched through the fog, explosions thumped behind her, and Doggit’s bellow of rage thundered in her comms as she zeroed in on their erratic approach. Both carried twisted blades, rust-flaked metal shaped more by violence than craft, and they swung with manic speed. One blade scraped across her left pauldron with a shower of sparks. The other rebounded off her chest plate, a ringing blow that made her grunt and brace. Muck sloshed around her boots, thick with blood and the churned remains of battle.

She moved on instinct. Her carbine came up fast, the recoil sharp against her shoulder as it spat tungsten into the closer one. The burst cored the rat-thing’s chest, sending it spinning backward in a convulsion of gore. The second ducked low and charged again, claws swiping for her leg. Silph sidestepped, twisting hard, and drove her boot into its gut, lifting it off the ground and into a rotting tree trunk. As it sagged, wheezing through broken ribs, she fired again, once, twice, and a third, the rounds punching through its ribcage and painting the bark red.

More followed, unheeded, uncaring and driven. She turned as another trio broke through the mist, their shapes lit by firelight and tracer rounds. Her reticle snapped to the lead one and she fired three sharp bursts. Its head vanished in a crimson mist. The others faltered, stumbled, tried to split off. She pivoted, adjusting by muscle memory, and dropped them both with clinical precision. Their bodies skidded across the ruddy ground to stop at her feet, forgotten as the next wave appeared right on their tails.

The carnage was unrelenting. Her breath rasped in her helmet, HUD dancing with movement vectors and threat markers. All around her, Valkyrie-5 fought to hold the line, but in this moment, it was Silph who stood like a wall of steel, her carbine rising and falling, barking death with calm, deadly rhythm. Blood slicked her boots, fragments of bone crunched underfoot, and still she moved, her weapon running hot as she sought out the next target.

Hotchkiss’ grenade launcher barked in the distance, a sharp, concussive retort followed by the vicious crack of a 25mm warhead detonating. The shot arced in high from behind the tree line, finding its mark amidst a cluster of rat-men huddled around a pair of robed spellcasters. The chanting ceased the moment the explosive hit, the resulting fireball erupting in a greasy orange plume. Limbs and weapons alike were vaporized or flung skyward in flaming fragments. The ritual circle they had been standing in was obliterated, a ring of glowing runes blackened and half-erased by the force of the blast.

Hotchkiss didn’t pause. His HUD flickered with fresh targets and he keyed a second shot, letting the launcher thump again. Another grenade screamed down into the left flank, colliding with a knot of armored brutes. The explosion rocked the sodden ground, sending a shockwave through the bog and into the feet of the squad. Roaring flames painted the dusk red and orange, illuminating the shredded bodies and the oil-streaked waters that pooled around the scorched crater. As he reloaded, he glanced toward the edge of the swamp where their Pandion transport lay in ruins.

The aircraft’s skeleton burned like a funeral pyre, its sleek lines twisted and torn. In its prime, it had been a gleaming beast of steel, four vectoring engines flaring with graceful power. Now, it was a carcass of cracked fuselage and flame, black smoke climbing toward the canopy above. One of the wings had crumpled in the crash, dragging a trench through the muck, while the other hung limp and sparking, shattered by the impact and the arcane bolt that had ripped into it. The fire danced across its broken shell, each flicker a cruel reminder of the pilots who never made it out.

The Doberman crouched low, its heavy suppression weapon roaring as its advanced targeting routines locked onto the clusters of writhing, diseased monsters. It spat controlled bursts of hot tungsten into the breach in the earth where Heimdall-9 had died. Rat-men poured out of it in waves, charging with howls and guttural cries, only to be cut apart as the heavy slugs smashed into their ranks. Wooden shields splintered into shards, and crude armor pulped under the relentless hail of fire, spraying fragments of bone and flesh across the churned mud. It barely helped, as the creatures seemed unaffected by the rain of death, or the piles of their own fallen.

Hulking brutes pushed among them, trying to shoulder through the storm, but even they staggered under the withering barrage. Flesh tore, steel bent, and the advance slowed as the Doberman’s fire traced precise arcs through the chaos. Each burst drove the line back by inches, flesh and steel colliding in a cacophony of screams, gunfire, and tearing metal as the squad fought to hold their ground.

On the ridge above, the Jaynes crouched low behind shattered stone, their carbines crackling as they poured fire into a line of archers. The enemy loosed volley after volley, stubby crossbows snapping with hateful force. Bolts hissed through the air like iron hornets, hammering against carapace plating hard enough to stagger them even with exoskeletons braced. Sparks flashed as steel tips skidded across the hardened surfaces. The twins moved like mirrored specters, shifting positions with uncanny synchronicity, anticipating each other's next action with reflexes honed beyond thought. When one reloaded, the other covered; when one advanced, the other fell back just far enough to lock their angles tight.

Their bursts were short, sharp, and perfectly timed. One rat-creature after another fell, riddled with precision fire, their grotesque forms tumbling through the haze. The conversation between the two was clipped, barely more than one word sentences that spoke volumes as they moved from target to target. The ridge around them was a morass of bolts and broken shafts and twitching corpses sprawled across the incline, but the rats just kept coming. They crawled over the bodies of their dead without an ounce of care or concern, beady eyes and slavering jaws wide as they swung their stubby, crude weapons with a lunatic glee.

Below their position, Powell’s LMG erupted as another squad of archers began their ascent, loosing bolts with wild abandon. He swept the squad support weapon in broad, furious arcs, the tungsten hail slashing through hide and sinew, carving wet trenches through the mass of rat-men. Bodies convulsed under the torrent, ripped apart mid-sprint or hurled backwards into the swamp in pieces. The recoil bucked hard against his braced stance, but Powell didn’t yield, his rage pushing him to empty belt after belt into the encroaching swarm. Dozens scattered, diving for cover or tripping over the mounds of their dead comrades as he laid down an unbroken curtain of death.

Then a scream cut through the chaos. A bolt, thicker and heavier than the rest, punched into the crease at his thigh, slipping past armor plating and tearing through muscle with a sickening crunch. Powell collapsed to one knee with a howl of agony, blood spurting from the breach, his leg spasming as the exosuit struggled to compensate. But even through the haze of pain, he lifted the LMG and sighted down the scope. His eyes locked on the sniper, a hunched figure with a jagged crossbow perched behind a weathered and broken tree. With a roar, Powell opened fire again, a burst of vengeance that shredded the cover and pulped the archer in a red mist. The corpse slammed back against a rock, twitching as it slid down, bolts clattering uselessly from its lifeless fingers.

Sergeant Albrect cut down another rat-man with a short burst, the carbine jerking in his grip as darts punched through wet ribs and out the other side. His breath steamed the visor. He pressed two fingers to his comm bead and shouted, "Command, this is Valkyrie-5 Actual, we are under assault, I repeat, under heavy contact! Requesting immediate reinforcement or evac, do you read?!"

Nothing but static replied.

He tried again, louder, desperation leaking into the edges of his voice. "Command, say again, do you read?! Pandion is down! I repeat, Pandion is down! We need support now!" The reply was more hissing silence, broken only by the occasional crackle of interference. "Damn it! Come on, come on!" Albrect barked, pounding his fist against his helmet.

Only Powell's ragged screams and the roar of weapons answered. He could hear the Doberman on full auto, the synced fire of the Jaynes, the chaos bleeding in around him. His lips peeled back in a snarl, and he pivoted, sending two sharp bursts into a pair of rat-men flanking his position. The bodies crumpled in the reeds, twitching. "Shit..." he muttered, eyes narrowing. "Valkyrie-5! Fighting retreat back to Bravo-Delta-Bravo!"

Hotchkiss fired again, another grenade thumping from his launcher and carving a divot through the horde. The bodies tore apart in a wet spray, smoke and dirt filling the air. Still, more came, crawling, leaping, surging over the corpses of their kin. The electric crackle of the Mark 9s filled the air as the squad fought to hold the line.

Then came the roar. It split the air with a sound like metal tearing in half. The ground itself shook underfoot, swamp water rippling as the vibration tore through it. Trees snapped, trunks cracking in the distance as something immense forced its way forward. The mist thinned under the pressure wave. From the black water and broken wood rose a creature unlike the rest. It dwarfed the hulks, standing twenty feet in the air, its body a grotesque knot of muscle and armored flesh. Its pig‑snouted face was stretched over bone, tusks jutting like ivory knives, and its bloodshot eyes gleamed with sadistic malice. A string of severed heads dangled from its belt- Heimdall‑9’s soldiers, their lifeless faces swinging like a grisly banner. In its hands it carried a weapon that could only be called a sword in shape, a slab of iron like a barn door mounted on a shaft, crusted with old blood and gleaming with wicked promise.

The battlefield stilled. The rat-men froze in place. Even the brutes hesitated, squealing low as the behemoth stepped into view. Its bloodshot eyes burned with fury as it raised the titanic blade. Then, with a bellow that made the trees quake, the monster charged straight for Valkyrie-5.