Humanity Endures

Part 12 - Bravery and Bloodshed | Chapter 10

As the militia recovered and as the Loyalists began to run out of ammunition, success would become harder to achieve, though Osilarzan, ever-aware of the power of skill, was not concerned about this front: when his enforcers ran out of ammunition, they could use energy-based weapons; when these were destroyed, or their batteries had to recharge using their in-weapon reactor, the enforcers could resort to using their fists and swords, and they would still hold the line against untrained rifle-fodder. The threats were the professional soldiers interspersed amongst the million-strong army, as well as the wavering war for the air — either of these could slay enforcers and lose the battle for Osilarzan, and there was little he could do to help either of them, except win his own engagement against Heralax's bodyguard quicker.

Brandishing four anti-armor cannons, Osilarzan intended to do just that. Being unable to get a good firing angle on his foe from where he stood, Osilarzan kicked his PFS — Personal Flight System — and his gravity nullifiers into action, and soared into the air along with five of his fellows; as he gained a magnificent firing angle on his foe, the gleaming light of the nuclear battle above caught Osilarzan's gilded, blood-stained armor, giving him the appearance of a vengeful god. Aware that the recoil of his weapons would send him tumbling into the nearest building if he, flying with his PFS, didn't brace himself, Osilarzan ordered all those flying nearby to attach themselves to him and prepare their own PFS for simultaneous firing. The next instant, Osilarzan, aiming for less than a second, discharged a thundering barrage of anti-armor fire on those below, while his fellow enforcers struggled to compensate; the rounds pulverized the skulls of three unlucky Traitor enforcers instantly, and his five subordinates then took turns firing their own weapons and compensating for each other's recoil, until over fifty anti-armor rounds had been expended, seventeen Traitor enforcers had been slain, in just over a minute. However, for each second that Osilarzan and his squad held their position in the air, visible to all, they became more of a target; after this, many Nahmatiixian enforcers simultaneously opened up on Osilarzan's ball of soldiers, forcing it to disperse and claiming the lives of four Tehkrian enforcers, though Osilarzan escaped with little more than a flesh wound to his bottom-right shoulder. Having tested his unprecedented tactic personally and on the fly, Osilarzan commanded many of his fellow enforcers to perform similar maneuvers; within moments, hundreds of Loyalist enforcers took to the skies, and though they suffered fierce reprisal and many losses, the rain of munitions that they put into the ground-bound Traitors managed to slay hundreds of foes and wound hundreds more. Osilarzan himself, forming another such ball of enforcers around himself, continued to prosecute the fight in person, as befitted an enforcer-general.

His foes were taking casualties, but above him, the air-battle continued to worsen rapidly for the Loyalists, and his forces' momentum was waning against the one million Nahmatiixers assaulting the other half of his force — Osilarzan had to accelerate the pace of his battle before he lost it, and to do this, he decided to place his superior force into melee combat. Sheathing his uppermost pair of anti-armor cannons and extending the plasma bayonets on the other two such guns, Osilarzan paused to allow his smouldering anti-armor cannons to reload and cool their red-hot barrels, before he altered his flight-path so that it no longer evaded enemy fire, but instead headed straight to its source. At the same moment, he ordered thousands of his fellow enforcers to do the same, hoping to swamp the determined but outnumbered Nahmatiixers and annihilate them with only moderate losses. Charging through the air at his enemy, Osilarzan was followed by thousands of his most loyal and competent soldiers as they fell upon the Nahmatiixian formation; hundreds of Nahmatiixers rose to meet them in aerial combat, many of them charging at Osilarzan specifically, though as they attacked he pulverized some of the exposed ones with ranged fire. When they got closer, Osilarzan, his four fists flying with all the speed of a gauss round, sent his foes tumbling away from him into each other, or eager Loyalist enforcers, and wherever he saw the opportunity to do so, with a few strikes from his tank-like fists, Osilarzan simply reduced the Traitors' hapless heads to gruesome paste: after only minutes of battle, the synthetic blood coating Osilarzan's gilded armor had acquired some very real company. Most traitorous enforcers survived Osilarzan's blows, their lives owed to their incredible, genetically engineered physiology, and exceptional armor, though even those who survived Osilarzan rarely survived those following up behind him. The inevitable Nahmatiixian counterattack was mostly ineffectual, but those who remained on the entrenched hill threw up a wave of ordinance that slew over a thousand descending Loyalists before they had even reached the ground again: the reason why charging into melee was not usually done on the modern battlefield. When these Loyalists landed and finally became engaged in melee combat, they found their foe to be no less determined than when they were fighting in ranged combat, and though the pace of the battle had been accelerated by the bold move, the Nahmatiixers, frustratingly, continued to hold their positions even as Loyalist soldiers rained from above. Heralax Tekran himself was safeguarded at the top of the hill of debris, protected by an almost insurmountable number of Traitors, who served as literal shields for their imperator, as the battle raged around them. Notably, a large number of Anti-Personnel enforcers, wielding MMMs, surrounded Heralax and used their tracking ammunition to shoot down individual bullets which threatened their imperator; against such an impressive defence, an overwhelming offence would be required.

The air was thick with smoke, lead, blood, and battle-cries. Neither side had the thought of surrender on their minds, and neither side viewed the other as human — it had become a vicious engagement among vicious engagements, and the fight that would decide the result of the last day's worth of death was living up to what had come before it. For those unfortunate crew members of the fallen Nahmatiixian cruiser who had decided to join their imperator's defence, yet were woefully unprepared to fight against enforcers, the battle was even more of a slaughter.

Though the engagement continued, casualties, at least in terms of raw numbers, were low for both sides: enforcers, with more redundant organs than many would think possible, and with biological armor nearly as durable as the suits they wore, were slain only with great difficulty. Killing such a soldier was an amazing and rare feat — despite this, Osilarzan achieved this feat repeatedly that day. The battle in the air worsened; shattered, flaming Loyalist fighter craft began to rain down all around the combatants below. Deciding to expedite things again, Osilarzan, rising into the air and plummeting to the ground once more, with hundreds of Loyalist enforcers rushing in behind him, forced open a new front within the enemy lines, and had gained hundreds of meters of ground in the process. As a renewed attack from two sides began to annihilate the now-encircled Nahmatiixers who were trapped between the two Loyalist groups, Osilarzan turned his attention once more to Heralax Tekran, who stood, grim-faced, in the center of his formation as he waited for either his fighters above, his fleet further above, or his militia below, to save him.

Osilarzan, eager to liquidate not just Heralax, but the traitorous enforcers that protected him, drew his anti-armor cannons, his mandibles contorting into a savage grin behind his gilded war-helmet, as he rejoined the fray. It was only on the rubble-strewn, dust-choked, bloodied surface of Nahmatiix, ending the lives of Traitors, where he felt truly alive. Uttering a war cry to the infernal heavens, Osilarzan joined his soldiers in advancing further into the nightmarish clash. Thousands of enforcers, hemmed into a space no larger than a frigate, had been set on slaying each other; the titanic result shook the very earth as engineered behemoths of men and women, surrounded by a fiery maelstrom of dust, standing atop ruins and the corpses of their fellows, leveraged unimaginable force against each other. Across the writhing sea of bulky metal forms, there was not a hint of mercy, nor a hint of restraint — paradoxically, it was in this battlefield where the enforcer truly thrived, even as hundreds of them were cut down, though as the fate of the very galaxy was at stake, none fighting could stop to appreciate the terrible glory of the frenzied clash.