Arty had taken the Captain’s bait and given him both the mission he proposed and the reinforcements he’d drawn up with Zora. It took a week to get everything in order, which was lightning fast for military procurement, but ultimately the mission to reclaim Yevhen’s old Hellhound was going to move forward. The week of downtime was much needed, as several soldiers had to be rotated out, others had to get their wounds (mental and physical) tended to by the staff at the base, and Kaz needed time to process the giant lump of repressed trauma she’d taken through her bond with Yevhen during the battle.

  She’d left it out of her report for the most part. She knew it was wrong, and against regs, but she didn’t know how you were supposed to spill your guts out on a bureaucratic form. There wasn’t exactly a box to check for “I felt my pet vampire bite through a man’s throat and crack his spinal column like it was a potato chip through a psychic link” and she didn’t feel like trying to explain it in the “other comments” box. When this was all over, she’d need some intense counseling but until then, she’d just have to keep shoving it away in a box in her mind labeled “warning - explosive”.

  The break also gave Kaz time to practice on her newly assigned Briz. She’d piloted them in her initial training and on her earliest deployments; every pilot got a few rotations on them as they were the most modern equipment in some of the highest supply. The ones they had been issued looked secondhand, and she figured it was assembled from spare parts donated by the Union or the Neomericans. The fact they’d scraped together four on such short notice was a miracle, and Kaz was thankful for it. She was even more thankful for the Arcadian goulash the boys in the kitchen had packed away for her when she had asked them extra nicely on the day of their departure.

  ~ ~ ~

  Kaz was striding across the uneven, dead terrain of southern Arcadia at dusk in her Briz, eyes on the sensors and Yevhen inhabiting some dark nook or cranny of the mech, when her eyes saw something on the map. It was the official demarcation of the front lines; one step beyond it and she would find herself in enemy territory. It struck her with grief to see just how far north the line was these days. She’d lived south of it as a kid, along the coast and her parents' place was now deep in Mithrian held territory. She’d never be able to visit her old school (even assuming it hadn’t been bombed into oblivion), visit the graves of her grandparents, or see the stupid mini-golf course she’d spent way too much time at as a kid. She wasn’t going to cry over putt-putt golf, but it was still a gut punch that she dwelt on more than she should have. Despite this, during their long trip, her mind kept drifting to the little package of goulash packed away under her seat. She remembered thinking that she’d eat good that night... if she survived.

  “Head on a swivel, everyone. We’re crossing into contested territory. No reports of enemies in the area, but you know how poor our intel is in this area,” the Captain reported over the unit’s comm channel. The unit had a dearth of drones, commanded by Zora from within the Captain’s Briz and some from the infantry's HOG, that were stretched too thin to really provide a solid picture. Command had done a pass over this area a day ago to provide the unit with some reasonably up-to-date intel, but they didn’t have enough to provide active cover.

  “The boys from the 5th are doing a probing attack to cover us, so let’s buy them a round when we get back. Should have started an hour ago.” They were radio silent with command to avoid detection, and they all knew the op, but Reynolds was giving a recap to keep their spirits up. They had to remember how much was riding on this, and that Arcadia had given them every chance to succeed. Well... every chance to succeed that their nation could afford.

  The unit’s composition hadn’t changed that much. Same people, same roles, but their Mackays had been reinforced by two others, and two hotshot pilots from central command had been issued along with the Brisbanes they’d been reinforced with. That brought their count of mechs up to 12, though they were probably still more lightly armed in total than when they just had the 6 Mackays and the two Perths, due to all the firepower the heavy mechs had provided. They’d forfeited Zora’s support vehicle in favor of distributing her crew to the two HOGs and putting her in the Captain’s auxiliary cockpit. The plan was for her to run the electronic warfare package that they’d elected to give Reynolds’ Briz, as he’d have to take up a more general command role.

  It didn’t take more than 20 minutes for the lack of recent intel to bite them in the ass. The unit was speeding along on the uneven terrain, avoiding major roads, but using the bombed-out lesser roads that they could pick their way through at 60 KPH. Kaz saw tracer rounds flash past her in the darkening night from a low hill a few thousand meters away. The drones they had running close support took frantic evasive maneuvers and climbed.

  “Looks like our intel is shit, sir,” Kaz said darkly as the metallic thud-bark of her 120mm cannon launched a high explosive round into the gun emplacement. Reynolds didn’t say anything but Kaz could almost hear his mind mulling it over. This was far earlier than he’d expected to get tagged by enemy observers and that meant the Mithrians must have spotted their unit a while back to have opened fire at this point. It also meant the Mithrians thought they could win...

  Kaz pumped two more shots into the armored position before it went silent. One of the beautiful things about a Briz was that it was amazingly stable, even while moving at top speed. They could balance an egg on the top of the tank-turret head as it ran like some kind of crazy mechanical ostrich.The trade-off was in its armor, which is why that enemy had thought they could take the Arcadian unit out, but Kaz’s sharpshooting had the Mithrian pigs pinned.

  “Stop talking and keep shooting!” the Captain replied from his command variant in the back of their formation. One of the hotshots from central, Lieutenant Olena Shevchenko, was taking point in a standard Briz like Kaz’s, and Lieutenant Melnyk was rocking the anti-infantry variant they’d asked for next to Kaz. They weren’t veteran pilots, but anyone who could survive more than a few months as a mech pilot in this losing war had more than earned their stripes just by virtue of being alive. Kaz didn’t mind being called a “Lieutenant” anymore if people with less time than her got the title too.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Picking up two Dostoevskys to the south east. About 2 klicks,” Lieutenant Jordan reported. Dostoevskys were mid-range Mithrian spider mechs, mostly used for raids and scouting in force. They served much the same role as an Arcadian Mackay but had a nasty heavy turret that could ping targets at a long range while the Mackays were more missile-focused. “They just activated.” Jordan said as the Mackay unit under his command broke into two four-mech squads. One of their squads was tailing the Brisbanes while the others were with Jordan scouting farther to the east of their main formation.

  “Engage, Jordan,” Reynolds reported and a moment later Kaz could see trails of smoke from the missiles they expended on the two Mithris spider-mechs. The drones were giving good data on their location now that they had switched to long-range observation mode.

  “Splash two!” came Jordan’s reply at the same moment Kaz saw the trails and she smirked.

  Going better than I thought. Those Mithris pigs don’t -

  Direct fire impacted the ground around them and her Briz was kicked sideways by an earth churning explosion, the spindly mech falling over and Kaz’s head slamming into the side console. When Kaz was able to clear her head, she felt the familiar trickle of blood as she felt around under her helmet on instinct. The helmet had taken most of the force of the impact but the twisting motion of the fall ripped out some hair, and she wouldn’t be sleeping tonight with a concussion like this.

  The first thing she saw after getting her eyes to focus was a Pushkin - an old WWIII Mithris mech. They’d missed it somehow and it’d taken the opportunity to launch a barrage of fire. It was a big armored six-legged bastard with a pipe organ’s worth of cannons providing indirect fire; it was the closest thing they had to a Perth, but it was a few generations out of date. Still, shells were shells and you didn’t need the latest sensor suit to punch holes in lightly armored mechs.

  “Kaz! Still with us?” barked Reynolds as Kaz’s bipedal mech flared its stabilizing boosters and retracted its legs close to its torso to get back upright. She could smell the goulash, which meant it had probably spilled a bit.

  “Yeah, yeah. Just a bit rattled up is all.” All her systems checked out, nothing too heavily damaged. She was gonna kill those pigs extra hard for spilling her stew...

  “I can smell your blood, my master...” There was the normal dark bemusement in Yevhen’s spirit voice but there was some kind of subtext, something breathy and expectant... she thought back to the blood orgy and abruptly pushed it out of her mind.

  “Fuck off, Yevhen. If you’re hungry there are plenty of pigs over there to drink from,” Kaz growled, trying not to think of the spilled goulash she was smelling.

  Like a dog let off its leash, he tore from a crevice in the Briz, liquid black lightning somehow still visible against the darkness of the night. He slipped past tracer rounds, danced among the trees, and slid over hills like silken death. Where he went, guns fell silent, rocket emplacements no longer fired, and enemies slumped like they had fallen asleep. He steered clear of some of the reinforcing mechs and at times she could feel rounds bite into his flesh, causing him to slow and shudder against the wounds. The platoon laid down fire and gave him the distraction he needed to do his dirty work, but it was ultimately he who claimed the biggest prize.

  The Pushkin, far back as it was, was the last to fall. Its guns thundered onwards, blowing apart the Mackays and disrupting their formations until Yevhen, the profane Angel of Death, swept across it as well and the great behemoth, a relic from the last war, also fell into eternal sleep.

  Kaz felt him sucking the exposed crew. She felt him drinking them from her position far away.

  She felt his ecstasy and shuddered. She knew he was sharing it to entice her, to lure her, to seduce her to his dark ways … and she let him. He was a pig. She hated him. She knew one day he’d offer her the chance to join him, to be damned by him, and he was grooming her to say “yes”.

  Kaz hated him for it. It was like letting a kid take a hit off a crack pipe and then smiling and saying “no more until you’re older”. He could make her a junky for life, and he was sugarcoating the first hit as it went straight into her veins. The fact that she knew he was manipulating her did little to allow her to resist it.

  Reynolds' voice brought her back to reality. “Getting reports we lost two Mackays. Bodies are going in the coffin on the HOG...” His commander’s bravado was gone, at least for the moment, and his voice was ice cold. “Or what’s left of them...”

  Kaz swallowed hard. They’d have to do something while Yevhen needed to rest in there during the day but, for now, it felt right to store them there. He was injured, though not critically. She heard, rather than saw, the detonations of the Mackays to deny them to the enemy. This had always been the plan but it didn’t feel real until right now. That this mission could result in the death of people other than those Mithris pigs hadn’t felt real to her until the call came. And she felt shitty. She didn’t even know them. They’d been thrown together a day or so ago and she hadn’t bothered to even learn their names. It wasn’t Lieutenant Jordan, so what the hell did she care? She felt awful.

  She was breathing heavily and had to shake her head. People took meds for this and she needed meds, but the Arcadian military was stretched far too thin. Arcadia had a shortage of pain relievers and antibiotics, so things like the lexapro she’d taken before the war were basically out of the question. She’d been on it for years, but when the Mithris invasion had turned sour, she had gone off them. Kaz wished she could have shook her head and “made it all go away” but that wasn’t how it worked. That wasn’t how mental health worked. It was a chemical imbalance that sent you down a dark spiral and it could be corrected by chemicals. You wouldn’t tell a gut wound to stop bleeding because it wasn’t convenient, you couldn’t will a fever to go away, and a broken bone wasn’t due to “a lack of enthusiasm”. Still, Kaz pushed it down the best she could and said she’d get help later. Maybe she’d talk to someone, maybe Reynolds, maybe Zora, maybe Jordan… but certainly not Yevhen.

  The “armor war”, as it is sometimes called, was a race to “up-armor” personnel during WWIII due to the omniprevalence of cheap mass drones and mini-missile barrages. The idea was that when long-range, accurate, self-guided munitions were cheap and easy to mass-produce, the side that could weather the barrages better would be the victor. In many ways WWIII was a war that was decided by who had better defenses (air defenses, cyber defence, ECM, armor, etc.).

  The constant drone strikes and long-range harassing fire got so bad that WWIII troops were all but required to travel in mechanized formations. While in hostile territory, they only really disengaged from their vehicles to do their jobs, when they had some kind of solid cover, or had no other options. So the use of tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, and even up-armored trucks became the norm. Later in the war HOGs, or “High-survivability Operational Ground-vehicles”, emerged as the norm: fast, all-terrain, wheeled, armored troop transports, with mini-CIWS and a small battery of mini-missiles to hit other hard targets. Their maneuverability made them practical while their defense made them viable in a war where the sky could be thick with drones at a moment’s notice.

  Automated defenses, the so-called “mini-CIWS” (or "miniature close-in weapon system”), evolved to combat cheap drone swarms and began to be installed atop transports and ships. These early ones were effectively self-guided heavy machine guns. Most cheap ones skipped the shells entirely and just went with a heavy spray of .50 BMG rounds. Large ammo drums were affixed and took up significant space and weight, but it was better than suffering a drone strike. They came in a lot of variants, some for harder or faster targets like missiles, but eventually they settled on the .50 BMGs for most common targets.

  With the advent of heavier armor for infantry and the constant low-cost drone and missile swarm barrages, the niche mecha became the breakout technology of the war. They served to armor infantry (a kind of one-man tank or APC originally), allowed them to carry mini-CIWS to deal with drones and missiles, and they could be used to crack other hard-targets like tanks, IFVs, APCs, etc., with their heavier weapons. Mech technology changed throughout the war and many specialist variants and options were made and explored, but that was the role they eventually came to dominate.