The Alps tore into us like a thousand jagged knives. I, Mario Rossi, twenty-two years old and still tasting the olive groves of Veneto on my tongue, marched with the rest of my division through the narrow, icy passes. Boots slipped on frozen rock and loose scree, each step sending small avalanches of stone rattling down the slopes. Snow dusted the peaks above us, and the wind howled down the valleys like it wanted every last one of us dead. Our breath steamed in the thin air, rifles heavy on numb shoulders, packs cutting into our backs. We were pushing toward Cordina—a city deep in Germano-Hungry territory where most of the people still spoke Italian, prayed in Italian churches, and hated the Austrians as much as we did. One more push, the officers kept shouting over the wind, and the city would rise with us. Italy would take back what was ours.
We paused at dusk in a wide, bowl-shaped valley between two sheer ridges to set up camp. Tents went up fast, fires crackled to life, men boiled snow for bitter coffee and cursed the cold that bit straight through our wool coats. I was sharpening my bayonet on a whetstone, the scrape of steel loud in the thin mountain air, when the sky changed.
They came without warning—Empire mages on those glowing flying machines, wings of pure arcane light slicing through the twilight like blades of fire. Six of them, diving low and fast like hunting hawks. Their rifles flashed.
Enchanted bullets rained down, curving in mid-air like living serpents, exploding the instant they touched anything.
The first blast tore through the supply tent. Canvas shredded in a fireball; the six men inside vanished in a spray of red mist and flying limbs—arms and legs cartwheeling through the air, torsos ripped open so their guts uncoiled across the snow in steaming pink ropes. A second round punched straight into a group cooking by the fire. Bodies burst apart like overripe fruit: one man's head simply disappeared in a crimson cloud of bone and brain matter, his headless corpse staggering two steps before collapsing; another had his stomach blown wide open, intestines spilling out in slippery loops while he screamed and tried to stuff them back inside with bloody hands. Screams rose everywhere—raw, animal howls of agony that echoed off the mountains.
I grabbed my rifle and dove behind the nearest boulder, heart slamming against my ribs so hard I thought they would crack. Bullets cracked against the rock inches above my head, showering me with sharp splinters that cut my cheek. One mage swooped lower, laughing faintly on the wind; his shot detonated right in front of a squad trying to form up. Men vanished in fire and blood—legs blown off at the hip, blood fountaining from the stumps; faces melted by the heat into blackened, bubbling masks; one poor bastard had his entire lower half shredded, upper body flopping in the snow while his spine jutted out like white branches.
I pressed my face into the frozen ground and prayed to every saint I knew. The mages circled once more, their glowing machines leaving trails of light, then banked away toward their lines, leaving us in a smoking, screaming ruin.
When the last glow of their constructs disappeared over the ridge, the officers started shouting orders. "Re-form! Re-form! Count the dead later—we move tonight!" My battalion—now barely three hundred men instead of six hundred—was patched together in the dark. The wounded who couldn't walk were left where they lay, moaning in the snow. We buried no one. We just shouldered our packs, fixed bayonets with shaking hands, and started marching again toward Cordina, stepping over the mangled corpses of our own friends.
Halfway there the sky betrayed us again.
This time it was planes—Italian and Commonwealth biplanes roaring low over the ridges like angry hornets. Bombs fell in long, whistling strings. The mountains themselves came apart. Whole cliffs sheared off in thunderous crashes, tons of rock and snow avalanching down onto the trail in white, crushing waves. Men disappeared under the landslides—screams cut short as boulders the size of houses slammed down, flattening bodies into red paste that squirted out from underneath like jam. One soldier was crushed from the waist down; his upper half kept screaming for a full minute while his legs were nothing but a bloody smear under the rock.
Then the Germano-Hungry soldiers opened fire.
Machine guns on both sides of the pass—ours on the lower slopes, theirs higher up—chattered down at everything that moved. Bullets zipped across the narrow valley in deadly crossfire, hitting Italians and Austrians alike. Men dropped in mid-stride—chests punched open in wet red explosions, faces torn away in sprays of blood and teeth, spines shattered so they collapsed like broken puppets. The ground shook as more bombs fell, fresh avalanches burying whole platoons under snow and rubble. Bodies were everywhere—some half-buried with arms still twitching; others sprawled in spreading red snow, guts steaming in the cold mountain air.
The worst came when the order finally rang out over the chaos: "Charge the hill! Take that ridge or we all die here!"
We surged forward screaming, bayonets fixed, boots slipping on bloody ice and loose rock. Machine guns from the Germano-Hungry positions above cut us down in waves. Men fell by the dozen—bodies jerking as rounds tore through stomachs, spines, throats; one soldier next to me took a burst across the face and spun away, his head half gone in a spray of bone and brain. I saw my friend Luca take three bullets across the chest; he spun, coughed a thick gout of frothy blood, and dropped like a sack of meat.
I kept running, rifle barking from the hip, boots pounding. Bullets cracked past my ears. I shot an Austrian who leaned out to fire—my round punched through his eye and out the back of his skull in a red-gray spray. Somehow I reached the top of the ridge alive, lungs on fire, bayonet dripping.
The Germano-Hungry soldiers were right there—faces twisted with rage, eyes wild in the snow. I slammed into the first one, bayonet driving up under his ribs. He gasped, hot blood pouring over my hands in rhythmic pulses as his guts slid out in slippery loops. Another swung a rifle butt at my head; I ducked and rammed my steel into his throat, feeling the blade grate against bone before I twisted it free in a fountain of arterial blood that painted the snow crimson.
Hand-to-hand combat swallowed the ridge—men stabbing, clubbing, screaming, dying in the snow.