Smitty didn't hesitate.
The moment Roger's covering fire pinned the secondary bunker's aperture, Smitty was already moving - low, fast, threading between craters with the BAR slung across his back and a satchel charge in his right hand. He reached the bunker's blind side, yanked the fuse cord, and pitched the smoking canvas bag through the narrow firing slit with the casual precision of someone who had done much more difficult things today.
Inside, someone had enough time to understand what had just landed at their feet. Not enough time to do anything about it.
BOOM.
The pressure wave was a physical thing, a wall of compressed air that Roger felt in his chest even from forty metres away. Flames pushed out of every aperture simultaneously. The bunker's roof lifted, sagged, and dropped back down into the ruin of its own walls. What remained was a grey cloud of pulverised concrete and smoke.
Silence, briefly.
Then Sergeant Howell was up, M3 Grease Gun raised, voice carrying across the entire ridge. "Charge! Take the line! Move!"
Roger reached for the M1919's mounting bolts, thinking briefly about stripping it from the tripod and bringing it forward.
Then the sound reached him.
Not a whistle exactly, more of a descending moan, the kind of sound that the air makes when something very heavy is falling through it at high speed. He'd heard it twice today already, and both times the lesson had been the same.
He let go of the machine gun and threw himself sideways out of the trench.
BOOM.
The shell hit the exact coordinates he'd been standing in. The Browning ceased to exist as a coherent object. The trench section buckled. Two soldiers who hadn't moved fast enough were thrown laterally into the walls with the boneless, terrible looseness of men who'd been picked up and set down by something indifferent to their continued operation.
Roger hit the dirt outside the trench, rolled, and came up with his ears producing a high, sustained note that had nothing to do with the battlefield around him. His vision strobed. Grit was in his teeth. He had no memory of his jaw closing.
He stayed down for three seconds. Assessed what he could still do - which was most things, minus hearing. Found the Garand where it had ended up when he threw himself clear. Picked it up.
Still in it, he told himself. Move.
Howell had punched a gap in the Imperial Guard's frontline and was exploiting it with everything the Federation had left on its feet. The charge hit the Imperial trench system like a tide coming in — messy, multi-directional, impossible to stop all at once.
The problem was what waited inside the trenches.
The Imperial Guard's bolt-action rifles were a disadvantage in open ground against the Federation's semi-automatics. In a trench system, tight angles, close distances, no room to aim properly — the rifle became secondary. What mattered in a trench was the bayonet, and the Imperial Guard had been training with bayonets since before most of the Federation soldiers had learned to shave.
They were fast. They were disciplined. And they had absolutely no interest in surrendering a single metre of ground without making the Federation pay for it in the most personal way available.
Roger took one look at his CQC Fundamentals sitting at LV1 and made a command decision.
He was not going to duel anyone with a bayonet today.
He moved through the chaos instead, using the Garand the way the weapon was designed to be used- at range, with accuracy, against targets that didn't know he was there yet. He stayed two to three steps behind the front of the melee, where he had enough distance to acquire a target properly and enough angle to fire without hitting his own people.
Bang. An operative coming around a trench corner with a bayonet leveled at a Federation soldier's back.
Bang-bang. Two more emerging from a side tunnel, trying to flank the push.
Bang. A man with a grenade, arm drawn back. Roger hit him before the arm came forward. The grenade dropped into the trench and dealt with itself.
He came around a collapsed section of wall and nearly walked into Hollywood.
The man was upright. Rifle in hand. Not curled at the bottom of a crater. These were all improvements over his earlier form. He was also currently being strangled against the trench wall by an Imperial Guard operative who had the size advantage and was using it.
Roger put one round into the operative's torso. Clean, decisive, close range. The grip on Hollywood's throat released.
Hollywood slid down the wall, coughing, one hand at his neck. He looked up at Roger with the expression of a man who was genuinely surprised to still be breathing.
"Again?" Roger said.
"I'm- " Hollywood coughed. "Working on it."
"Work faster." Roger stepped over the operative and kept moving. "And stop letting them get behind you."
Behind him, the sound of Hollywood pulling himself back upright. Alive. Functional. That would have to be enough for now.
The Imperial Guard's frontline broke twenty minutes later.
Not a rout, nothing as clean as a rout. It was more like a tide going out: one section of the line folded, then another, operatives pulling back in disciplined fire-and-retreat patterns toward the ridge's interior network of tunnels and deep caves. They weren't running. They were relocating. The difference mattered.
Roger didn't pursue. He watched the last of the khaki uniforms disappear into the tunnel mouths and forced himself to stay where he was.
Every instinct built from a lifetime of watching action films told him that this was the moment you charged through the breach and finished it. That instinct was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, because he'd also watched enough films where that decision got people killed in very creative ways.
The Imperial Guard used their tunnel network the way a spider used a web. The moment you followed them in, you were on their terms, in their architecture, with their sight lines. The retreat was an invitation. He wasn't going to accept it.
He found a piece of broken trench wall that still had enough height to lean against and let himself stop moving for the first time since the morning. His legs had opinions about this that they'd been keeping to themselves until now.
The sun was low. The ridge was still burning in patches, thin columns of smoke rising into a sky that had gone the colour of old brass. Somewhere below, the sea would be doing something peaceful that had nothing to do with any of this.
Cleanup was the word for what followed. Small units moving through the wreckage, clearing holdouts from pillboxes and sealed positions. Grenades went in first. Flamethrowers handled the rest.
Roger heard the flamethrower work near a pillbox to the south. He understood what it meant, what it sounded like, what Universal Language made it possible for him to understand more specifically than he wanted to. He filed that understanding in the same place he filed everything else from today, somewhere he'd have to deal with eventually, but not now.
He counted his remaining ammunition instead. It was more productive.
By the time Captain Glover called a halt, the ridge had settled into the specific quiet of a place that had been very loud for a very long time and was exhausted from it.
"We hold this position tonight," Glover said, moving between the men. His voice was level. Whatever he was carrying, he wasn't putting it down here. "Tomorrow we clear the rest. Get some rest. Stay sharp."
Howell did the practical version of the same speech: cover, shifts, two hours on rotation, the usual threat assessment summary for anyone the bombardment had rattled loose from their training.
He got to the end of his circuit and stopped.
Doss was walking toward the perimeter's edge, medic bag over his shoulder, face set with the particular expression that meant he'd already decided and was past the point of discussing it.
"Where," Howell said flatly, "do you think you're going."
"There are men still out there, Sergeant." Doss didn't slow down. "I can hear them."
Howell looked at him. He'd spent the whole day watching this unarmed man walk into fire and walk back out carrying people. His expression was complicated in a way that didn't have a clean word for it.
He didn't stop him.
Smitty was already on his feet, BAR in hand, shaking his head at the ceiling of the sky as though expecting it to comment. He looked over at Roger, who was sitting against the trench wall with a cigarette burning down between his fingers, staring at nothing in particular.
"Doss is going back out," Smitty said. "You in?"
Roger took a long drag. Exhaled.
He was tired in a way that had stopped feeling like tiredness and started feeling like a physical property of the air around him. Every muscle from his shoulders down had submitted a formal complaint. His ears were still producing a faint background hum.
He stood up.
"Yeah," he said. "Let's go."
They moved into the dark in a loose triangle, Smitty on the left, Doss in the centre moving toward the sounds only he seemed able to locate with any reliability, Roger on the right where he could cover the broadest arc.
The ridge at night was a different place. The same geography, but the smoke and the dark flattened everything into shapes and suggestions. What had been a clear field of fire six hours ago was now a maze of shadows that might be rubble or might be a man waiting for you to walk close enough.
Roger's vision was ordinary then, just eyes, doing what eyes do in insufficient light. He filed a mental note about the limitation and worked around it the way he always worked around limitations: carefully, slowly, with more attention to sound than sight.
Every few minutes, Doss would find someone. A voice in the dark, or a sound that wasn't the wind, or some instinct Roger didn't have and couldn't explain. He'd go to them, assess, stabilise or carry depending on what they needed.
Every few minutes, Roger would find something else.
Not the living. The ones who weren't quite what they appeared. Men lying still whose breathing had a pattern to it - too controlled, too deliberate. The particular arrangement of a hand near a concealed object. He'd learned the signs today the way you learn anything on a battlefield: because the alternative was worse.
Bang.
A shape that had been still for too long was still again, for different reasons.
Bang-bang.
Another. Then the flat, destructive thump of a grenade going off at a distance that suggested it had been intended for someone else and hadn't reached them.
The three of them worked the dark in silence, Doss pulling people out of it and Roger ensuring that what was left behind stayed down.
He didn't think about the arithmetic of it. There was no version of tonight where the arithmetic was comfortable, and he was too tired for discomfort to reach him properly anyway. He just moved, and checked, and made decisions, and kept Doss alive to keep doing what Doss did.
Then the notification came.
Not the small, incremental kind he'd been accumulating all day. Something different — wider, like a door opening in a wall he hadn't known was there.
[ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ]
Data threshold reached.User Level: 1 → 2Skill Point awarded: 1
Activation conditions met.THE OMNI-SYSTEM IS NOW FULLY ONLINE.
Roger stopped walking.
He stood in the dark on a ridge that smelled of smoke and spent brass, Doss twenty metres ahead of him helping a man he'd found at the bottom of a crater, Smitty somewhere to his left maintaining a perimeter that was more instinct than formation at this point.
The interface that opened in his mind was nothing like the tactical overlay he'd been working with. That had been a heads-up display - sparse, functional, information-delivery. This was a structure. A vast, branching architecture of nodes and connections that extended in every direction he tried to look at it, most of it dark, most of it locked, most of it waiting for things he hadn't done yet.
But at the base of it, small and lit and real: what he'd already built today.
Skills he'd earned. A level that meant something. And one point to spend on whatever came next.
So, Roger thought, staring at the structure that now lived permanently behind his left eye. That's what I've been working toward.
He took a breath of air that tasted like a warzone and went back to work.
The real shape of things was just starting to become clear.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.