Ravens of Eternity

33 Synthetic Terror, Pt Eva sighed as she and her unit dashed eastwards towards the front line. Her mind was filled with thoughts about the synthetic cadets, and of terrorism itself.

People using violent means against each other wasn’t anything new. Homicide. War. Genocide. Ethnic Cleansing. Terrorism.

In her old life, terrorism had been around for hundreds of years, if not thousands. The term itself appeared during the French Revolution, when Fran?ois-No?l Babeuf first coined it. He used it as a derogatory term against the anti-royalist rebels (spoiler alert: they won). It existed in some form before then, and certainly existed for centuries after.

In fact, although it evolved over the years, the core of it always remained – terrorists were people who performed politically-charged violence against others.

Eva had experienced it all her life, and to see it here surprised her a little bit. Wasn’t this galaxy supposed to be a human utopia? All of humanity’s energy needs were met, the people were secure and happy, and no-one seemed to lack for anything.

Humans lived with abundance. Wasn’t that enough to stop the fighting?

Then again, humans had always been savage creatures, and no amount of technological advancement would have removed that from their DNA.

Hell, even when DNA was “scrubbed clean,” the human predisposition for violence and carnage still existed. The synthetics were living proof.

Violence was deeply embedded into human nature.

.....

Eva didn’t necessarily blame the two siblings for lashing out. In some ways she could even understand. Being downtrodden, bullied, harassed, violated, or beaten just for who you were was something she was familiar with.

She had lived it.

And if she was in their shoes, where the people she loved were persecuted to death, she might have chosen to do something similar. Such as struck out against their oppressors. Brutally.

But to blindly destroy? That was no longer something she could agree with. It was one thing to bring justice to someone who had done wrong, but to lash out and kill the many for the sins of the few... The very concept of it felt hypocritical.

Acts like those pulverized whatever moral high ground they stood on.

So without needing to be ordered, she resolved to end the siblings’ attack. Hopefully, they didn’t have to end it all in blood. But she knew that was just wishful thinking.

After they had reviewed the manifesto, everyone went over the numbers. Eva’s force of 460, having been reinforced by drones, was by far the largest. Technically, she had the least with only 203 cadets.

Every unit leader had a maximum of six squadrons, which totaled 300 cadets. However, dropouts and casualties had reduced unit effectiveness significantly.

Everyone’s numbers varied. Spartan, having taken the brunt of the attacks, was down to 232 cadets. Meanwhile, Wrench’s unit was the highest, with 268 cadets. It was because they were specialized in r/r, and so rarely saw the front line.

At the start of the battle, the six units had numbered a mere 1,618 cadets. Since then, they had suffered over 90 casualties, with 23 of them fatal. They were down to a force of 1,525.

They were quickly getting ground up by the enemy, whose force was 2,204 strong.

Eva’s arrival had bolstered them to 1,985 cadets, and greatly evened up the odds.

Before they could even talk strategy, she quickly suggested that she reinforce Spartan’s position. They would triple the numbers there, and help ease the burden he had suffered. It would also allow his cadets to recuperate more easily.

Most importantly, it gave them all more time to craft an attack strategy. Everyone quickly agreed, so Eva quickly got back to her unit and sped off towards the front line.

She and the other squad leaders opened up comms with Spartan, to get briefed on the situation.

He was hotheaded, but incredibly grateful. He had been fighting at the front with his unit pretty much by himself for the past few hours. His unit had taken too many casualties, and all of them were worn out by the fighting.

The others had been fighting on the flanks, where the fighting was lighter to a degree. Regardless, any relief they could find would seriously boost their morale.

Spartan quickly transferred what intel had over to them, which they all reviewed as they sped over to his position. They immediately split into a number of columns as they formulated their attack plan.

Of course one of the columns was spearheaded by Eva herself. The rest were headed up by the other tower shield infantry.

Thanks to the armored mecha, they all had B-ranked shields, which was their key to survival. They wouldn’t last long otherwise, at least not with a frontal assault.

The unit quickly came up on the battle at the front line – it just wasn’t too far from HQ. In fact, some of the squad leaders felt it was far too close to the center square. If the enemy took the square, it would have been pretty much over for all of them.

They zipped past the main encampment where a couple of wings were idling in their mecha. They looked like they had just gone through a round of repairs, had rearmed themselves, and were resting up for the next skirmish.

Weapon racks and ammunition lockers were off to the sides, though they were mostly bare. It was clear that they were running low on everything.

Eva ordered the r/r wing to reinforce the repair yard as they passed it.

They quickly swooped off and entered the yard, where roughly a dozen mecha were in various states of repair. Many were in terrible condition, with their armor blown open and their structure warped.

A few had cores that were torn open, and their interiors were awash with blood.

According to Spartan’s intel, the enemy drones were equipped with B-ranked slugburst gauss rifles. They made quick work of their training mecha, and treated their C-ranked armor like it didn’t even exist.

Further forward, Spartan and roughly half of his unit were behind cover. They were engaged with a unit of enemy drones roughly eighty meters away. All of the buildings in the vicinity were shattered into rubble, and the only things left standing were the reinforced foundations, and the unit’s armored fortifications.

Every square inch of cover around every cadet was dented by bullets, blackened by soot, or filled with shrapnel.

A cadet peeked out from behind his fortification and fired his rifle at an enemy drone. His bullets ripped into its armor and shredded some of its modules into scrap. The enemy drone stumbled slightly as its energy drained, then fell in a heap when its power plant failed completely.

It was quickly dragged away from the front, which allowed another enemy drone to take its place. The replacement drone aimed its gauss rifle at the cadet, who fell back behind cover in a flash.

He had seen what kind of damage those things did, and he wasn’t going to risk getting shot at!

But the drone wasn’t deterred. It instead scanned the fortification the cadet had hid behind, and checked its structural integrity. The fortification had been hammered so much that there were a few weak points, one of which had the cadet behind it.

It brought its gauss rifle up to bear and aimed at that point. The rifle whined as it charged up, then fired a burst of five slugs. Within a fraction of a second, the slugs tore through the fortification’s weak point.

The last slug struck the mech’s left shoulder, and completely annihilated it. The left section of its chest as well as its left upper arm were disintegrated from the force of the impact alone.

The cadet was thrown to the ground by the impact, and his lower left arm had been flung some distance away. Spartan was next to the cadet when his mecha was torn to shreds, so he quickly pulled him away and stood him up.

“Get your ass to the repair yard!” he yelled at him. “And don’t forget your gun, idiot!”

The cadet was about to hop off, but quickly snagged his weapon when Spartan chided him. Everyone knew how grumpy he got when he was stressed out, but they paid it no mind. He was typically kinder and much more patient all other times.

They also knew that he cared about them greatly, so getting called a few names wasn’t that big of a deal. They felt it had helped them toughen up mentally. It worked for the most part. That cadet was a bit shaken after taking a huge hit, but he still had his shit together. Mostly, anyway.

Even though Spartan’s unit was the most mentally hardened, some of the other unit leaders believed he could tone down the verbal abuse a bit.

While this was happening, Eva took a moment to scan the enemy numbers and their positions. Her sensors had revealed that there were roughly 211 units on the field, separated into two lines. Another 52 were being repaired behind those lines.

They were all roughly 200 meters apart from each other. Easy pickings.

“Let’s do this!” she cried out. “Shields forward!”

“Yes, unit leader!” her cadets responded.

Every wing with a tower shield quickly dashed forward into a few open streets, and filled every gap between the reinforced buildings or the fortifications. They held their shields high, and their maces low.

“Shield wall!” ordered Eva.

Everyone quickly squeezed together and interlocked themselves to create a nearly-impenetrable wall of tower shields. It was an imposing sight that would have given any other enemy pause.

The drones were undeterred, however, and fired bursts of heavy slugs into the shield walls.

The tower shields were severely dented and pock-marked with each hit, and resisted being torn apart. The force of each burst was so powerful that the cadets had a little trouble keeping their shields solid and steady.

They were truly devastating weapons! Even these thick and powerful shields wouldn’t last long under a continued barrage.

When the drones ceased fire to reload, the front-most shield mecha gave way to the ones behind them, and retreated to the rear of their formation. There, they activated their nanorepair modules and slowly fixed their shields back to full.

Meanwhile, the front of the column was blocked up by undamaged shields!

This simple tactic allowed the wings to maintain a superb defense for a protracted amount of time. If the enemy drones could feel any emotions at all, they would have felt fear and awe at the sight.

“Djinn!” yelled Eva. “You’re up!”

“Immediately, unit leader,” Djinn replied.

She and her wing quickly came up behind the shield mecha in small groups and spaced themselves widely from each other. And although they couldn’t physically see their enemies due to the throng of shields in front of them, their targeting computers had zero problems doing so.

Each of them quickly pin-pointed the enemy mecha, and made sure that each one was going to be the subject of a brutal barrage.

Their grins grew wider as the long boxy rocket pods on their shoulders opened up. The front of each pod slid open, which revealed row after row of gleaming rockets. Their tips were painted a glossy red to denote they were ‘live’ and deadly.

“Fire!” yelled Djinn.

Her wing launched their rockets – streams of vapor trailed behind each one as they flew high into the air. They flew up in arcs row by row until they hit their peak. Then as they descended towards their targets, their guidance systems kicked in.

The enemy drones were pretty much defenseless. They didn’t have any weapons that had high ammunition counts, and couldn’t spray the sky with bullets. Their chassis were also lacking other defensive measures, such as chaff, and so couldn’t fool their targeting. All they could do was try to dodge, but how could one dodge guided missiles?

Eva’s unit had collectively decided to use that weakness to their advantage. Why try to shred them normally when they could just bomb them to bits first? That was much safer for their cadets, too.

Djinn literally rained down fire as the rockets came down on the drones. Explosions erupted as they struck their targets.

They did their best to evade, but the rockets were so numerous that there really wasn’t anywhere to run. The force of the blasts threw the enemy drones around like dolls, and tore off their armor in chunks.

Columns of fire and smoke rose from the enemy front line as Djinn’s wing pulled back to rearm.

Although the enemy drones were hit pretty hard, many of them were still operational. Their armor was cracked and damaged, and their structures had warped slightly. They tried to recover quickly and moved back into position, but were still unstable from the barrage.

“Charge!” Eva ordered.

All of the shield wings quickly moved into a loose formation again, and raised their maces to strike. They dashed towards the enemy drones, who were wholly unprepared.

Eva herself was at the head of the charge, which was a thrill she had felt like no other. Her tower shield stood resolutely while her electrolance vibrated with power. Her jets propelled her forward with unstoppable speed.

She veered towards her target – one of the many enemy drones still recovering from the rocket attack. Its armor was damaged and torn in some places, and it was having trouble standing stably.

Eva tipped the lance at her enemy, and aimed straight for its core. It hummed with power as it charged up. Tendrils of electricity arced up and down its length.

She felt the rush of speed and power as she bore down on her enemy.

.....

When her lance ripped through the drone, the charged electricity also erupted. This weapon did physical and energy damage at the same time.

What wonderful carnage!

She barely felt any resistance as she struck the drone, and it seemed like she had hit soft clay rather than tons of hardened metal.

These lances were designed to penetrate armor with ease, and it showed. The drone was ripped open as electricity coursed through its systems. The devastated modules powered down one by one as they were overloaded with energy.

The entire mecha fell with its midsection torn asunder. By the time it struck the ground, its processing functions were no more.

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