Dust Devils - A Girls Und Panzer Story

Chapter 92

Cold. It was so very cold.

Then there was the wind. Howling and cruel. It blew with an unmatched ferocity that plummeted the air temperature to frigid, near inhuman levels. The snow that blanketed the Earth stretched to as far as the eye could see and was knee-deep. Overhead, the sky was overcast. It dulled everything down into something depressing. The world here was nothing but a mix of white from the snow, black from the exposed rocks, and gray from the clouds.

This was what Valarie experienced, a hellish polarscape at its most raw. She was in the middle of it all, equipped only with the cold weather gear that was doing its job decently enough.

As she walked the land, the crunch of the snow from her boots and the screams of the wind were the only things to be heard. Valarie trekked in a northerly direction for no reason other than some unspoken force that compelled her. The wind, already a force to be reckoned with, strengthened to extremes Valarie had never before experienced. It had manifested into a terrible storm that brought visibility down to a minimum.

In the middle of this blizzard, she thought little else other than to soldier on. The cold weather gear she wore was doing its job decently enough. She was uncomfortable, yes. But not miserable. The cold was putting up one hell of a fight, but one it would not win. But only just.

Then, something caused her to stop dead in her tracks. Amid the roaring wind and swirling snow was the far-off sound of the thud of a cannon. From the deep reverberations, she judged it was some heavy gun at least 75mm in caliber. Valarie roughly knew the direction of where it originated and, perhaps against better wisdom, opted to walk toward where that cannon fired. No more were ten steps taken when a burst of machine gun fire rang throughout the area, this one sounding closer than the cannon. Another burst followed right after, this time from a different direction.

What happened next was complete and utter pandemonium.

The ground shook as an explosion ripped apart the Earth, digging deep enough to throw up rock and dirt into the air. The force of it compelled Valarie to throw herself into the snow to get as low as possible. She did not dare to get up as the air above her then became full of scores upon scores of whizzing bullets.

From seeming out of nowhere, Valarie was smack dab in the middle of what looked like a tankery match. Without a tank of her own, there was no worse place on Earth to be. Moving in a stilted fashion, she slowly crawled forward. The explosions now were more frequent, and every now and again, she would be showered with debris. Roaring engines and the clacking of speeding tracks were heard all around her. This battle, whatever it was, wasn't two sides engaging one another from great distances. No, these were tanks locked in what was tantamount to a brutal melee.

Valarie couldn't dwell on why this match she was in the middle was so brutal when the ground began to rumble once more. She braced herself for another explosion, but this was different. The rumbling was sustained and steadily grew in noise. Only then did she realize what was happening. She risked looking up and ahead of herself to see, coming out from the blizzard, the silhouette of a tank heading right for her. Moving at speed, it was on top of her before she could even move a muscle. Most fortunately, she was right beneath the machine.

It parked right above her. The sounds of battle became muffled as the dominant noises now came from the tank. Valarie could intimately feel the vibrations of the engine as it lay idle. The next moment, the tank's turret traversed in a slow and methodical motion. Instinctively, Valarie covered her ears, and her intuition served her well as the war machine let loose a shot. The power of its cannon shook her soul, but what shocked her more was the familiarity of the gun. It was a 100mm cannon. The T-44's 100mm. It was her tank.