[TAS] Volume 2 - Intermission 106.X - Breach

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

RR has received Chapter 103 - Windows today with no major changes.

For the Wolf Lords, this chapter has seen no changes.

And also: Please do not read the chapters here on Patreon, but go for the googledoc, .pdf or .epub instead. Patreon butchers all forms of formatting and you're missing out on easier and more enjoyable reading experiences.

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We're going into a few Intermissions here, following some of Rachel's actions as she prepared for the Challenges.

Not sure how many Intermissions this will be, so the titles will simply increment on the number of "x"s until I know.

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I'm looking forward to hearing your first impressions and opinions on this chapter. \o/

I hope you will enjoy it!

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Here is the link to the chapter:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a1s6y4ZkUV9YAwDWPE3jOwgwiDVHmm44giHcOxHMtyY/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Intermission 106.X - Breach

CITIZEN! 

DO YOU KNOW WHO DECIDES YOUR ENEMY'S NEXT MOVE?

IT IS NOBODY. 

AND EVERYBODY.

THE FACTS:

In the Stellar Republic, every citizen receives exactly one vote for their elections.

The scientist who spent forty years mastering Void-theory? One vote.

The man who believes the Void is a hoax, merely invented to raise taxes? Also one vote.

The strategist who could save ten thousand lives with a single doctrine reform? One vote.

The loudest fool on her hab-block, who has never once read past a headline’s outrageously designed title? One vote. 

The very same weight across all.

They call this freedom, citizen.

We call it what it is: Governance by the average.

MERIT MEANS NOTHING THERE

In the UHF, your worth is measured by what you do. 

Your service. Your unique skills. Your contribution to humanity's survival as a whole. 

The capable rise, and the wise lead—because that is the most logical choice, for when survival is on the very brink; when the Galactic War knocks at our door.

In the Stellar Republic? 

Ideas do not ever become reality by being right—ideas become reality by being easy to sell. 

Their doctrine is not what is best—it is what can be explained to the most people in the fewest words before they stop listening.

Ask yourself this, citizen: Would you board a ship whose overarching course was set by the very janitors scrubbing the decks, the haulers bringing in cargo, or the shell-shocked Soldier on their fifth rotation, none of whom have ever stepped foot on a bridge?

Their Soldiers do. Every day.

THE "INDIVIDUALS" WHO AREN'T

The Republic preaches the sanctity of the individual—one person, one voice, one vote. 

Yet their own technologies let every Soldier become more than one person. 

Duplicates. Copies. Echoes of a self, marching in ranks. 

One person. Many bodies. One vote?

When a single Freak can be a crowd, citizen, what exactly is their "individual" worth? 

They undermined their founding ideal the very moment it becomes convenient—and yet they call us the ones with perverse principles.

WHY WE WIN

Their finest commanders cannot reform a single doctrine without selling it first to the bottom half of their electorate. Propaganda thrives in that soil. Lies outruns truth in every election. 

Their brightest minds spend their genius not on making the best decisions for winning the war, but on marketing them to the dumbest people of their Faction.

This is not a weakness we created, citizen.

It is a weakness they chose.

For centuries, it has kept them exactly where they belong: Beneath us.

REMEMBER THIS

Could you imagine it, citizen? A world where the most credulous soul you have ever met—the one who believes every lie sight-unseen—holds precisely as much power over your future as the most gifted person alive? Possibly even more, for their friends as just as gullible and they hold great sway over them as a result?

You do not have to imagine it.

For that reality has a flag. It has a fleet. And it is pointed at your home to make you just like them. To take your hard-earned merit and throw it into the darkest Void. To make your individuality nothing but a shackle around your ankles.

Merit guides us. The average governs them.

THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE THAT WINS THIS WAR.

[Excerpt From “Bulletin Series 17: ‘Know The Enemy,’” — UHF Office of Public Understanding,  PFC 910]

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POV: Rachel Veronica Masters

Rachel repositioned her Bulwark with a practiced shove, slamming the shield's base into the pockmarked dirt and engaging the grav-lock again, the familiar thud-and-hum of the locking mechanism ringing out as the shield anchored itself into absolute immovability.

The continuous rattle of enemy fire prattled against it in response—dozens of impacts per second, a hailstorm of metal and laser-fire drumming against the shield's face in a rhythm that had long since stopped registering as individual hits and had simply become background noise to her and her squad.

She knelt down behind it and began reloading her light machine gun.

The sixth reload, by her count, since the Stellar Republic's assault had begun.

Her hands moved through the procedure on their own—ejecting the spent belt, letting it clatter onto the growing pile beside her, hauling the fresh one out of the rack bolted to the pillbox wall, seating it, slapping the feed tray closed—while her eyes scanned the pillbox around her for any important developments.

Her squad was holding.

Urimi was directing fire from the central viewing slit, calling out targets.

The twins—Vasska and Verren—were working their marksman rifles in alternating rhythm from the left firing ports, one shooting while the other repositioned, which had proven to be surprisingly effective against the Stellar Republic’s torrential counterfire. 

Emberly, meanwhile, was firing off her autocannon on the right flank, stripped to her undersuit from the waist up—as her Light-type Armour would do no good for her in this situation anyway—sweat sheeting off her as she heaved bass-thumping shot after shot into the approaching enemy lines. 

And little Holden, their Medic, was crouched low along the back wall, moving between ammunition crates and dragging supplies to whoever's stocks ran thinnest.

Amicable work, all of it. Adequate roles, adequately fulfilled.

'Good… The locker room decisions paid off, then,' she noted with a flicker of contentment, slapping the feed locking lever down. 'A serviceable selection, considering the available material… Though Emberly is going to be a right pain in my ass with that Light Armour. Why would she go for heavy weaponry and then choose the least effective armour possible? What in the Emperor's name was she thinking when she made that build?!' 

"Rachel, we're probably going to have to fall back soon," Urimi informed her then from the side, not turning away from the viewing slit as she said it.

“Heard,” Rachel grunted as acknowledgement.

Rachel.

It still felt a bit strange, even now—being addressed on a first-name basis by what was, in every way that mattered, effectively a nobody. A third-generation, station-born nobody from some Inner-World orbital she'd never bothered to remember the name of, speaking to her like a peer—nay, a superior.

But Urimi was her squad leader for this Digital Mission. 

Proper chain of command applied. There was nothing that could be done about it.

Not to mention—it was Rachel's own fault anyway.

She had not used her Legacy name. She'd simply introduced herself as Rachel, as had become her habit from the very moment the Digital Missions had opened to the Recruits aboard the Sovereign.

After the humiliation that was the Awards Ceremony… 

After the fight against the Itoku girl that had followed it…

'You do not get to wear the name right now,' she reminded herself, the words worn smooth from repetition. 'You dragged it through the mud in front of the entire Drive, Rachel. Every officer. Every Legacy observer. Six generations of Masters, and you are the one who made the name synonymous with those shameful displays in less than a month.'

It hurt, not being a Masters.

It hurt every single time some commoner squadmate chirped her bare first name across a trench line like they were familiar. Like they were equals. 

The name was hers—earned by her family across three centuries, drilled into her bones alongside everything else that was there—and its absence sat against her skin like a missing limb. But that was the price she had to pay for her mistakes. 

Nobody had taken the name from her, of course. Not that anybody really could. 

Instead, she had set it down herself—deliberately—and she would not pick it back up until she'd earned the right to carry it without flinching at the memories.

And she would earn it back. Very soon.

The Challenges were fast approaching—and with them, her rightful place in Alpha Squad, waiting at the end of a formal, sanctioned, un-refusable process. 

No annoying politics to navigate. No public-facing goodwill to squander. 

Just combat, adjudicated by the System itself as well as impartial UHF observers, which all cared nothing for prior reputations and everything for raw results.

And results, she could provide.

'Take the seat. Regain the name on the way. One clean line, Rachel… Just have to walk it.'

Finishing the reload, she heaved the machine gun up with her right hand, the weapon's mass swinging into position with the easy familiarity of hundreds of hours of training. 

Then she unlocked the Bulwark, tilted it into a deliberate slant, and re-engaged the grav-lock—transforming the shield into an angled firing brace that simultaneously covered everything of her below the collarbone.

She peered out over the shield's rim.

Annoyance flashed through her at the sight beyond.

The killing field between the second trench line and the smoking ruin of the first was carpeted in Stellar Republic dead—hundreds upon thousands of tattered-cloth armoured corpses stacked in drifts and mounds where the UHF's interlocking fire had caught them. 

And through that carpet of their own dead, utterly unbothered, marched more.

A veritable sea of them. A never-ending flood that no amount of ammunition seemed capable of making budge—rank after rank after rank emerging from the treeline at the field's far edge, walking forward at that same measured, mechanical pace, as though the concept of hesitation or self-preservation had simply never been introduced to them in the first place.

They had already fallen back from the first line of trenches around twenty minutes ago. They had held that line for around thirty—they were collapsing at an accelerating rate.

They were now, evidently, about to lose the second.

And there was simply nothing that could be done about it.

This was just how fights against the Stellar Republic went.

With a deep breath to focus her thoughts, Rachel settled the machine gun's body against the Bulwark's rim, nestled the stock into the reinforced pocket of her shoulder plates, and started squeezing the trigger.

The machine gun came to life with a roaring staccato, once more blanketing the pillbox in noise and the UHF's enemies in hand-sized bullets.

The effect downrange was, as always, obscene.

Her opening burst caught a clustered fire-team at a hundred meters and simply deleted it—the heavy rounds ripping through their armour like it was purely ceremonial, punching through breastplates and out through backplates, through the soldier behind, tearing arms from shoulders and heads from necks in sprays of red mist and spinning composite. 

A second burst walked left, sawing through a rank at the waist, and for one short moment an entire section of the advance came apart into component pieces—flesh, bone and armour panels scattering across the mud in swathes.

Twenty-two dead in a single burst… Perhaps Twenty-five, if she was being generous. 

And it meant absolutely nothing.

Before the last of the bodies had even fully finished falling, effectively simultaneous copies stepped through the gaps—identical Soldiers in identical armour moving at the identical pace, boots coming down on their predecessors' remains without so much as a downward glance. 

The line she'd just erased simply reconstituted itself, as it always did.

That was the thing about fighting the Stellar Republic, in particular.

It wasn't that they were in any way skilled. Individually, they were mediocre at best—slow to react, rigid in doctrine, wasteful with their lives to a degree that would have gotten a UHF commander shot by their own troops on the first day.

It was that they were always so Emperor-damned inevitable. 

Killing them accomplished nothing except the expenditure of ammunition. 

Every corpse was merely an invoice of minor amounts of Merit, not a victory. 

One did not defeat a Stellar Republic assault—one merely negotiated the price of ground, paid in barrels, bullets and time, and they always, always had more currency than you did.

She serviced the line methodically regardless—short, disciplined bursts, center of mass, sweeping the entire sector with the same, unhurried action economy her tutors had beaten into her before she could even read. 

Around her, she kept close attention on the rest of the pillbox between bursts, cataloguing everything.

Her squad was struggling. 

Not in terms of injuries or morale, but rather getting any meaningful work done.

Vasska and Verren were getting perhaps one clean shot each per exposure before the enemy’s counterfire forced them back down, the twin snap of their rifles increasingly drowned beneath the swelling roar of incoming rounds chewing at their firing ports. 

The Stellar Republic's advancing ranks fired as they walked—poorly aimed and individually laughable as they were—but multiplied across thousands of rifles, it congealed into a rolling pressure-front of metal and lasers that made every second of exposure an extremely dangerous gamble. 

Emberly's autocannon position was taking the worst of it, the weapon's prominent muzzle drawing concentrated return fire that had already gouged the surrounding ferrocrete into a crumbling ruin, forcing her to fire in shrinking windows between duck-and-cover cycles.

That was the other half of the Stellar Republic experience, and Rachel knew it intimately from the opposite side: Their counterfire was, as always, extremely difficult to power through without Heavy-type Armour. 

Her squadmates' Medium and Light rigs could, on good days, survive a stray hit, perhaps two—which meant every shot they took had to be stolen, snatched from between the waves of suppression, their effective output dwindling continuously while the enemy's stayed consistent despite their best efforts.

She, meanwhile, knelt behind an immovable wall in full Heavy plate, and fired without pause.

'Which is exactly why you built the loadout this way, Rachel. Someone in this box has to be the constant reaper or we’ll get overrun in no time.'

The call for the fallback rang out soon after.

"Fall back! Third line, staggered order! Move, move!"

Rachel immediately followed it—as much as she would have preferred to stay and continue firing. According to her own calculations, they easily had another four to five minutes before moving would become mandatory. 

The ammunition stocks supported it, the enemy's rate of advance supported it, and every additional minute of fire from this position meant a few hundred fewer enemy Soldiers arriving at the third line.

But she also didn't have the strategic view on things that Urimi had at this stage. Perhaps a flank had collapsed. Perhaps the neighbouring sectors were already pulling out which meant the collapse would hasten…

'Chain of command exists for this very reason.'

So, instead, she unlocked the Bulwark, slung the standard-issue light machine gun over her shoulder, and grabbed both the Glassbane leaning against the nearby trench wall and her custom Hydrus-Pattern "Cyclone" next to it—slinging the Glassbane into its holster at her right side and cradling the revolver-shotgun in her free hand.

"Emberly, stay close," she ordered, making sure the—now once again lightly armoured—woman with the oversized weapon stayed inside her reach at all times. 

Emberly would not survive the sheer volume of firepower the Stellar Republic was throwing around without Rachel's protection, and losing the squad's single heaviest gun to a stray burst was simply not an acceptable outcome.

The rest of the squad lined up behind her, and Rachel started leading them through the trench tunnels toward the nearest pathway to the third line.

She kept a perceptive eye on everything around her as they moved.

One squad hustling past with two members supported between their fellows, one missing a gauntlet along with most of the hand inside it. A weapons team hauling a tripod-mounted lascannon with visibly cracked focusing housing—degraded output, if it fired at all. 

A squad of six where there should have been eight. 

Another at full strength but carrying almost exclusively mid-range kits like the Twins, useless for the close-in trench fighting that was coming. Then various stragglers in ones and twos—units were already coming apart at the seams, it seemed. 

Slowly a more and more coherent picture of the Battlefield at large assembled itself in Rachel’s head, and it was not a flattering one: The second line hadn't been abandoned as part of some elegant elastic defence. Urimi's fallback call had simply been early enough to make their piece of the collapse look orderly.

They were finally about to reach the main connecting trench toward the third line when the world abruptly exploded in front of them.

A massive detonation ripped a large chunk of the trench system clean out of the earth, the shockwave slamming through Rachel's armour and punching straight into her body. 

The half-force squad of Marines directly in front of them was flung skyward in pieces—out of the trench entirely, scattered across the churned dirt above in fragments that no Medic would ever be reassembling.

Where they had been standing, a massive, gaping hole now yawned in the trench network's flank. A breach, wide open, with clean sightlines from the Stellar Republic's advance—an open invitation to simply shoot, jump in, and pour straight through toward the third trench line beyond.

'Fuck!'

Rachel immediately dashed toward the breach, barking orders behind her as she went.

"Emberly, focus fire on whatever just did this! Twins, help her find them! Holden, Urimi, get your guns out—we're going to have to hold this until we can get an Engineer here!"

She wasn't the squad leader, of course. 

But Urimi and her had come to an inherent understanding back during the fighting at the first trench already: Strategy was Urimi's. Tactics—when shit went down, in the seconds where deliberation meant death—were Rachel's, until Urimi could come up with a better gameplan.

That was, in essence, an unspoken rule when it came to Defensive Heavies in general: The ones with the shields and the heaviest armour, standing between the enemy and the squad, got to make the second-to-second decisions—because they'd know first-hand how bad it really was in that moment.

Rachel slammed the Bulwark centrally into the breach, leaving roughly a meter uncovered to either side of it but blocking the vast majority of the gap, then grav-locked it and braced the shield herself, shoulder set against its inner face.

'This'll be extremely fucking draining on the capacitors… Damnit!’

Briefly peeking around the shield's edge to get a grasp on the situation, she couldn't help but feel a slight chill run down her spine.

Practically the entire flood of enemies had already been redirected toward the location of the breach.

The sea of bodies had developed a raging current—thousands of Soldiers wheeling toward the breach in eerie unison, converging on the single point of failure in a dead-sprint like water finding the crack in a dam.

She ducked her head back behind the Bulwark just as the first beginnings of the torrent arrived. The previous counterfire from the Stellar Republic had been an absolute joke compared to this.

Impacts hammered the shield in a continuous, unbroken roar—not a drumbeat anymore but a single sustained, physical pressure, hundreds of rounds per second converging on one two-meter rectangle of reinforced System-alloy. 

She felt her muscles strain heavily as she put her everything into helping the Bulwark's grav-lock stay upright, boots carving furrows into the dirt, her entire skeleton turned into supplementary bracing for a piece of equipment that was absolutely not rated for this.

Then the explosions started chunking the capacitors and breaking the furthest-most parts off of the Bulwark with jagged cracks.

Rocket after rocket detonated against the shield's face, each one a hammerblow that whited out her hearing and sent the grav-lock's status indicators stuttering toward red—bit by bit chewing away at her ability to hold the breach.

"Twins, kill the fucking rockets!" she yelled over the cacophony into her comms, entirely unsure whether they could even hear her.

The noise was beyond deafening even through the fully sealed helmet of her armour. 

She did feel Emberly's autocannon thumping deep inside her chest, at the very least, each concussive beat arriving through the ground and her armour and her bones. 

Which meant her squad was still fighting with her. 

Still working on a solution.

'Hold! Just fucking hold, Rachel! Every second is a second the Engineers get to fix this shit.'

Around a minute after Rachel had placed herself in the breach, however, the grav-lock started to sputter under the barrage, despite her squad’s semi-successful efforts in taking out the rocketeers.

The steady anchoring purple-ish hue turned irregular—hitching, skipping, the shield shuddering minutely against her shoulder as the failing capacitors dropped in and out of their duty cycle.

'It's about to give!'

Realising it, Rachel went down on one knee and braced her entire body behind the shield—shoulder, forearm, thigh, boot, every load-bearing line of her frame stacked behind the Bulwark's mass. So that when the lock failed, she could hopefully keep the shield up longer through nothing but flesh, armour, and leverage. 

Even if only for a few moments.

The Marines inside the trenches needed every second they could get to plug this hole before the Stellar Republic's troops reached it and swarmed into the trenchlines beyond.

In the next moment, the grav-lock failed.

The Bulwark slammed into Rachel's body with the force of a thousand bullets impacting it—every round that the lock had previously been shrugging off suddenly transferring straight through the alloy and into her braced frame, a wall of kinetic violence that almost sent her careening to the ground.

Almost.

Because just before it failed, Rachel had activated one of her Abilities.

'[Pro-reactive Movement]'

The world dilated into almost standstill—one brief, crystalline moment in which her own next movements laid themselves out before her for consideration, cause and consequence rendered in perfect clarity.

She knew how to fix this.

A slight angling of her body, hips rotating two degrees, shoulder dropping, forearm tilting the shield's lower edge downward—and the majority of the incoming force redirected along the new line, driving the Bulwark's base into the ground beneath her instead of into her balance. The shield's edge bored itself into the dirt, perpendicular to the enemy, the earth itself now helping to carry what her body alone could not.

The crystalline moment ended.

The world erupted back into gunfire immediately—the full, roaring pressure of it crashing over her all at once, and the Bulwark drove painfully into her frame despite her best efforts, its inner face grinding against her pauldron with every fresh impact, hammering her collarbone through the armour beneath.

Sweat was pouring down Rachel's body in streams almost immediately, pooling on her face, stinging her eyes. 

She gritted her teeth hard enough to almost chip them, every fibre of her straining against physics itself—against the simple, patient arithmetic of thousands of rounds per minute versus one kneeling woman, trying to keep the shield from simply crushing her underneath it.

Her muscles started shaking with the sheer effort.

She had no idea how long she was standing that breach for. 

It felt like an eternity—an endless, grinding forever of noise, pain and pressure. 

But she knew, instinctively, just how thoroughly messed up the internal chronometer became during combat. It was one of the first things she’d ever learnt back on Vespera.

Time dilated under fire. 

Being in a situation like this did things to your psychology and physiology that were hard to truly quantify without having intimate, first-hand experience with it.

She'd likely only been there for a minute.

'Really? This is how my fucking DM ends? A Freak explosion forcing me to get crushed to death by my own shield? This is bullshit…'

She watched the grav-lock capacitor gauge slowly ticking upward along the shield's inner rim, trying to gauge how long she'd actually been there by how much they'd refilled…

And then chuckled at herself—a ragged, breathless little sound, lost instantly in the cacophony of noise around her.

'Hey, that's… almost two entire minutes since they went out. That's actually… not bad at all, Rache. Holding a breach like this for that long, with basically no support? … Father would be proud.'

She continued straining against the shield, even as her vision started to swim at the edges, dark spots blooming and fading with every heartbeat.

She felt impacts starting to land on her armour now, here and there—stray rounds finding their way through where the Bulwark's face had broken apart, spalled sections and cracks revealing slivers of the body braced behind it. 

Each hit rang her plate like a struck bell, hammering bruises into the flesh beneath—likely even penetrating here or there, yet she could not feel anything but the sheer strain and exhaustion.

She held onto the shield anyway, continuing to prop it up in front of herself, working against the crushing physics of the incoming torrent, one shuddering breath at a time. 

Her breath came hot and heavy inside her helmet, drool and sweat mixing on her face from sheer exhaustion, her arms two appendages of pure, white fire—

—when finally, her comms crackled to life.

Like through a far-away tunnel, she could barely make out Urimi's voice, shredded to fragments by the noise.

"…back, Rachel! Engineers… done…"

She hesitated for a moment, unsure of what the message had actually said.

Then she took an educated guess: Urimi would not needlessly fill her comms with sentimental drivel or useless status updates mid-battle. 

The woman was a well-trained leader, as much as she was a bit of a nobody.

If she was transmitting anything to her in this situation, it was actionable—probably.

'They better be fucking done, Urimi, or I swear to the damned Emperor himself, I will shove my Cyclone so far up your ass that you'll taste the fucking powder residue of the barrel…'

With those thoughts empowering her briefly, Rachel pushed the Bulwark upward with all her remaining strength one last time—a full-body heave that tore something in both of her shoulders—then engaged the grav-lock and ran.

With everything her legs could still give, she sprinted back toward the trenches behind her, leaving the Bulwark standing where it was, alone in the breach, held upright solely by the meagerly recharged grav-lock capacitors.

She let out a sigh of relief when the trenches came into view.

The breach behind the connecting line was almost entirely sealed already—plugged with what looked like the very dirt around them, compacted earth rising in dense, layered walls that hadn't been there two minutes ago.

'Some geomancy-based Abilities? Very nice… Should have gotten that guy for our Squad.'

The moment she crossed into the trenches, she reached her open hand back toward the Bulwark behind her and mentally intoned:

'[Recall]’

Just as the grav-lock failed—the shield tipping, about to drop unceremoniously into the dirt beyond—the Bulwark caught itself mid-fall. It lifted, spun, and flew toward her open hand, slamming into her palm with an all-too-familiar, yet decidedly far too light, weight.

'…And you are going to need quite the visit to the armoury, aren't you?'

The next moment, she watched as the breach was closed off completely—a veritable mound of dirt heaving itself up and moving between her and the approaching Stellar Republic soldiers, swallowing the gap, the sightline, and the torrent of incoming fire all at once.

Then her vision went black as she felt herself fall…

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