Roger slammed a fresh clip into the Garand and came up firing.
The ridge ahead was a graveyard of half-destroyed defensive works, shattered trench walls, collapsed tunnels, bunker apertures that flickered with muzzle flash like the eyes of something that refused to die. The squad was moving in a loose leapfrog pattern, two men providing fire while two more advanced, then swapping. It wasn't elegant. It was functional, which was all anyone had the energy to aim for.
"Keep moving!" Sergeant Howell's voice carried through the din like it had been specifically engineered to. "You stop, you're a target! Push the line!"
Roger pushed.
He slid into a trench section that already had an occupant: an M1919 Browning heavy machine gun on a fixed tripod, its barrel searing hot, its operator working the spade grips in short, controlled bursts. The weapon was hammering a reinforced concrete bunker at the ridge's next defensive tier, a squat, ugly structure that had survived the naval bombardment with nothing worse than scorch marks. Its firing slits glowed with the pulse of returning fire.
Roger looked at the machine gun. Then at the bunker. Then at the roughly twelve inches of trench wall between him and the gun's position.
He moved those twelve inches away from it immediately and found a different angle.
Heavy machine guns attracted attention the same way lightning rods attracted lightning, by design, efficiently, and with unpleasant results for anything standing nearby. If you weren't the one behind the trigger, the only sensible place to be relative to an active HMG was somewhere else.
He leveled the Garand instead and began working the trench line across from them. The range was close to a hundred metres, well past his current optimal threshold, which sat at seventy-five. His hit rate at this distance was in the high sixties, maybe seventy percent depending on wind and his own steadiness.
Not perfect. Still considerably better than anyone else in this trench.
Bang-bang-bang-bang.
He fired in deliberate pairs, targeting the muzzle flashes. Movement in smoke was unreliable data; muzzle flash was a fixed point, at least for the two seconds it took to acquire and fire. He worked through half a clip before the flashes in that section of trench stopped answering.
Ping. The en bloc ejected. He reloaded without looking at his hands.
Beside him, a Bazooka team had set up behind the trench wall, one man kneeling with the tube on his shoulder, the other feeding the rocket in from the rear with practiced efficiency. Roger watched the process with the detached interest of someone wondering whether his Ballistic Proficiency would extend to rocket ordnance.
Probably not, he decided. Different physics. Different intuition. Don't try it today.
"Firing!"
The rocket left the tube with a concussive thump that Roger felt in his sternum. It crossed the open ground in a flat trajectory and hit the bunker's forward face dead-centre.
The structure didn't so much collapse as come apart, concrete fragmenting outward, the firing slit disappearing in a bloom of orange and grey, the roof section dropping straight down into the ruin of the walls. What had been a fortified position ten seconds ago was now a pile of rubble with smoke coming out of it.
The Federation line cheered. Briefly.
Then the second bunker opened up.
It had been hidden behind the first, positioned so that the destruction of the forward structure would clear its field of fire, not expose it. Whoever had designed this defensive line had done it with the patient malice of someone who understood exactly how assault tactics worked and had planned accordingly. The moment the cheering started, the second bunker's gun spoke.
The M1919 crew took the first burst. Both of them, simultaneously, without time to register what was happening. The gun fell silent. Howell was at the tripod in seconds, physically hauling the bodies clear with the controlled urgency of a man who had done this before and hated that he had.
Roger stayed low and kept firing at the bunker's slit, his rounds weren't going to do much against reinforced concrete, but they might discourage whoever was operating inside from taking careful aim. Suppression was suppression.
Lieutenant Manville appeared in the trench. He was a competent officer having a very bad afternoon, and both of those things were visible on his face simultaneously. His eyes moved across the trench, tallying available assets, and landed on Roger.
"You. Get on that gun. Keep their heads down."
Roger ran a very quick cost-benefit calculation.
The M1919 position was a confirmed priority target for the bunker. Two people had just died in it. Every second he spent behind those spade grips was a second the bunker's operator was trying to solve the same geometry problem with different ammunition. The expected lifespan of the next person behind that gun was, by any reasonable estimate, not encouraging.
On the other side of the ledger: Manville's hand was near his sidearm and his expression had moved past reason into the territory where officers did things they'd later have to file reports about.
"Yes, sir," Roger said.
He pulled the bodies the rest of the way clear - quick, necessary, not something he let himself look at directly, grabbed the spade grips, checked that the belt was properly seated, and put his eye to the iron sights.
The bunker's slit was about a hundred metres out and roughly forty centimetres wide. A standard machine gunner would spray the area around it and hope. Roger was not a standard machine gunner.
He was a man with Ballistic Proficiency at LV3, behind a weapon that fired nearly five hundred rounds per minute, and he had decided that the forty-centimetre aperture was the only relevant geography on this ridge.
Da-da-da-da-da!
He didn't hold the trigger down. He fired in controlled three-to-five round bursts, adjusting between each one, walking his shots into the slit with the methodical patience of someone who understood that a machine gun was not a hose, it was a tool, and tools required technique. The LV3 threshold meant that within seventy-five metres, his accuracy was effectively absolute. Beyond that it degraded, but degraded accuracy with an M1919 still put rounds into a forty-centimetre gap with regularity that would have seemed impossible to anyone watching.
The bunker's return fire stuttered. Paused. Stopped.
The belt ran out. The barrel was smoking badly enough that the heat shimmer off it distorted the view. Roger released the grips and leaned back.
The trench sector ahead of them had gone quiet in a way that felt different from a reload pause. It felt like absence.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Fortified position neutralised - Command asset eliminated.
Scenario Completion Data: +20
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Fire support element eliminated - Tactical objective secured.
Scenario Completion Data: +10
[SKILL PROGRESSION]Ballistic Proficiency: +1
Sergeant Howell was staring at the bunker. Then at Roger. Then back at the bunker.
"Ghoul," he said, after a moment that felt longer than it probably was. "Go. Finish it."
Andy "Ghoul" Walker went over the trench lip without theatrics, moving in a low zigzag between craters toward the ruined bunker. He was fast and he picked his angles well.
The Imperial Guard, to their credit, recovered quickly.
From secondary tunnel exits across the ridge line, reserve operatives began emerging, not in a panicked rush, but in disciplined fire teams, moving to intercept. Their commanders had drilled them for exactly this: the moment after a position falls, move before the enemy can consolidate.
Roger jammed a fresh belt into the M1919. His hands were moving before Howell had finished shouting for covering fire.
He didn't sweep the whole line. Sweeping was for suppression. Roger didn't suppress, he prioritized. He found the mortar crew first, because mortars were the greatest threat to moving infantry and Ghoul was moving infantry. He found the team leader of the flanking fire group next, because removing leadership slowed a disciplined unit down. He found the man carrying the ammunition for the flanking team's automatic weapon, because without ammunition, the weapon was a club.
Every choice was a calculation. Every burst was a verdict.
He was working through the second belt when he heard it, the descending whistle of an inbound mortar round, the sound dropping in pitch as the shell completed its arc. His Sound Localization hadn't unlocked yet, but he'd spent enough of this day on this ridge that he'd learned the sound the hard way.
He judged the impact point instinctively.
It landed near Ghoul, close enough to lift him off his feet and drop him ten metres to the left of where he'd been. The man hit the dirt and didn't get up.
"Roger, cover me!" Smitty's voice, from somewhere to the right, already moving.
Roger swung the M1919 without waiting to locate him visually. If Smitty was going out there, the mortar crew needed to stop existing in the next four seconds. He found them, the telltale shape of a baseplate, the silhouette of the bipod, one man crouching to drop the next shell and gave them his full attention.
The crew dissolved.
Smitty reached Ghoul, grabbed him by the collar, and started dragging.
Then - smooth, almost quiet in the middle of everything, the upgrade notification arrived.
[SKILL PROGRESSION]Ballistic Proficiency: threshold reached.
[SKILL UPGRADE: BALLISTIC PROFICIENCY → LV3]100% hit rate within 75 metres.
Accuracy decreases 5% per 15 metres beyond threshold.
Heavy weapons classification: included.
Roger felt it happen.
Not dramatically. Not like a surge of power or a rush of light behind the eyes. It was quieter than that, more like the moment when you've been straining to read something in bad light and someone finally turns on a lamp. The iron sights of the M1919 stopped being a thing he was using and became a thing he was simply looking through. The distance between his intention and the gun's output collapsed to something that felt less like operating a weapon and more like pointing.
The M1919 was a piece of steel bolted to a tripod. It had no nervous system, no intuition, no capacity for anything beyond mechanical function.
But right now, it was doing exactly what Roger was thinking.
He worked the second belt to its end, methodical and quiet, clearing the approach lanes for Smitty's return. When the last round went downrange and the feed mechanism clicked on empty, he released the grips and took stock.
The ridge ahead was still burning. The Imperial Guard was still out there, regrouping, repositioning, patient as stone. This wasn't over. It was barely the middle.
But the immediate sector had gone from actively trying to kill everyone in the trench to merely threatening to, and that was what passed for progress on Hacksaw Ridge.
Smitty arrived back at the trench lip with Ghoul over one shoulder, moving faster than a man carrying another man had any right to. He dropped into the trench and lowered Ghoul to the ground, checking him with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd done battlefield triage before.
"He's breathing," Smitty announced. "Concussed. Maybe a rib. He'll live."
Howell was already on the radio, calling for a medical runner. Roger relinquished the M1919, the barrel needed to cool anyway, and he had no intention of being behind a fixed weapon longer than necessity demanded and went back to his Garand.
He checked the remaining clips. Then he looked at what was left of the ridge between their current position and whatever came next.
Still a long way up, he thought. And the Guard doesn't retreat. They just find a deeper hole.
He worked a fresh clip into the receiver, let the bolt go forward, and settled back into the trench to wait for Howell's next move.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.