[TAS] Volume 2 - Intermission 106.XX - Experience

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------------------- Start of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) -------------------
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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

RR has received Interlude 103.5 - Access 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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More Rachel adventures!

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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-------------------- End of Pre-Chapter Author Note (Patreon-only) ------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the link to the chapter:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IEP4AxPedX2WxhPPKDy1rnOTuUVVBy-1VfLHImt7CYQ/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Intermission 106.XX - Experience

The training hall of their main estate on Vespera had no windows.

That was the first thing she noticed as she stepped inside, the first time the great doors opened for her on her fourth birthday. Every other room in the estate had windows—tall ones, arched ones, entire walls of glass overlooking the gardens…

"Why are there no windows?" she asked.

Instructor Waltz looked down at her. 

His answer was cold and factual, like everything he would utter in the years to come.

"Outside is the garden. Rewards are earned in this hall, and you have earned nothing yet. That is why there are no windows."

Then he handed her the shield.

A training shield, technically—no edge—but still as tall as her entire body, deliberately weighted. Heavy enough that she could barely drag it upright, light enough that "barely" was still possible. 

She got her arm through the straps. She lifted it on the second attempt.

Four years old, teeth gritted, holding it a few centimeters off the floor entirely without support.

She remembers it still—the feeling of being proud.

Then Instructor Waltz hit the shield.

She did not see him move. 

The full weight of it slammed backward through her tiny frame—her forearm snapping between the straps, the rim smashing into her face, her nose breaking, teeth leaving her mouth that she would later find scattered across the stone like dropped pearls.

She was four, and so she did what four-year-olds do when they are hurt, confused, and scared.

Even that had a time limit—the exact length it took the medic to appear. 

An injection knitted the bone while she screamed at the sensation, which proved far worse than the break itself. Her nose was set with two fingers and professional indifference.

Then Instructor Waltz picked up the shield, held it out, and waited for her to take it.

The session ran four more hours. 

It was not the last injection she received that day.

—

At age five, the structure formalized. 

The first hour of every session—without exception, without mercy for illness or the previous day's damage—was the Shield Hold. 

There was no target duration, for a target could be reached.

Failure simply arrived when her body gave out, and until then she stood there, arms trembling, while Instructor Waltz recited the words that by now played in her skull without his help:

"A Masters shield never falters.
A Masters shield never wavers.
A Masters dies before it drops."

Those were the words. 

Reality was that her shield always dropped—every day, every hold, because she was five and the shield was designed to defeat her. That was its entire purpose. He let her hold until she collapsed, noted the duration in silence, then ordered her to switch arms and do it again.

Every day. Of every week. Of every year.

—

At age seven, they added full-contact sparring. 

The broken bone, spilled blood, and bile she left inside that windowless hall could have filled it floor-to-ceiling, several times over. 

Contractors were paid and instructed, in writing, not to hold back against a child. 

The mend-injections kept pace—broken at breakfast, whole by dinner. 

"Pain," Instructor Waltz explained once, "is the only free instructor in the galaxy, and no Major Legacy would waste such excellent, free instruction."

—

At age eight came the simulations and Build-theory—four more hours carved from her day, taken from the last of her free time.

Except free time, like the garden, could be earned. 

It was granted for excellence only—and the grading was on a curve whose reference point was herself. Every triumph recalibrated the threshold. Excellence became the baseline, and the baseline earned nothing. 

Her life was a staircase that grew as she climbed it, every single time.

But that was okay.

Because on Saturdays—whenever her parents' important work allowed—there was family dinner, in the east dining room with its large, arching windows. In the weeks she had excelled, her father would look at her with the full weight of his attention and call her his heir. 

"The best thing I have ever created." 

Her mother's warmth arrived on the same schedule and with similar warmth.

In the weeks she didn't excel—the conversation simply moved past her. 

Her parents were not cold. She’d never thought so. 

They were merely efficient in showing their love—when it was earned.

It was fine, she told herself, at four, at eight, at twelve. 

It was fine that excellence kept getting harder to achieve.

After all, she was the Masters Legacy's heir, and a Masters bent excellence to their will—never the other way around…

—

[Shortened Excerpt from, Memory Excerpt: “Excellence”, PFC943]

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PoV: Rachel Veronica Masters

Awareness returned to Rachel sometime later, and with it, before her eyes had even begun to open, her childhood training immediately kicked in.

‘Assess where you are and what is going on. Do not make it apparent that you are awake.’

She had experienced this exact scenario many, many times before—waking somewhere she hadn't fallen asleep, disoriented, completely information-starved. 

Her tutors had engineered it deliberately throughout her youth at random intervals.

Sedatives in the evening tea, waking up in an unfamiliar wing of the estate, in a shuttle mid-transit to a different planet, and once—memorably—in a tundra-forest on Vespera three hundred kilometers from home. 

‘A Masters gathers information before she moves, before she speaks, before she even so much as breathes.’

The lesson had been drilled into her so thoroughly that it now ran ahead of conscious thought entirely.

Her carefully lidded eyes tracked the area around her methodically without her head moving an inch.

Reinforced dirt walls—compacted earth threaded through with support lattices—and a low ceiling of the same make. Rows of cots arranged with military precision—which was to say, haphazardly strewn about the place—occupied by Marines in various states of consciousness: Some sitting up and talking quietly, some bandaged and unconscious, again others encased to the chin in a full-body regeneration rig.

'Field hospital, then… Good.'

Through the floor and walls came uneven, semi-random tremors—’artillery impacts and heavy weapons discharge, probably’—close enough to feel but not close enough to shake dust loose from the ceiling.

'So I’m not far from the frontlines, either… Which means the lines still exist.'

She checked both findings off with genuine satisfaction.

She had really hoped she hadn't just blown a major portion of the three-day Digital Mission in basically the second hour of engagement. Waking up in the respawn queue with a revive spent on falling over after already being back inside cover would have been a properly humiliating start to the mission.

Checks complete, Rachel rapidly got up from the cod.

Her body reported in with as accurate an assessment as it could give as she rose—running down the checklist she'd learned as a child for gauging combat readiness—deep bruising across the collarbone and shoulder, a bone-deep ache along both forearms, as well as the tell-tale tightness of freshly regenerated tissue over her ribs. 

All of it, ultimately, ignorable and non-critical.

She found the nearest Medic within seconds—a harried-looking man moving between cots with a diagnostic pad in hand—and planted herself directly in his path.

"Medic. I'm discharging. Clear me."

The man blinked at her, his hands pausing movement over the pad mid-air. "You—hold on, you came in unconscious three hours ago with several gunshot wounds and severe compression trauma across half your entire body! You need at least—"

"I need to be discharged and my equipment ASAP, in that order. The trauma's regenerated, the bruising is cosmetic at best, and my squad is short their Defensive Heavy while the Stellar Republic is actively pushing us." She held out her arm, wrist up. "Scan me. If your readout shows anything disqualifying, I'll lie back down without another word. If it doesn't, you sign me out and we both stop wasting each other's time."

The Medic stared at her for a moment longer, visibly considering whether he should pull the Medic-card—which would condemn Rachel to the cot for the foreseeable future, no doubt—but ultimately decided against it and ran the pad over her arm instead, glanced at the readout with tightening eyes, and let out a short breath through his nose.

"…Cleared for duty, I guess… Emperor's sake. Storage is through there; your equip is tagged under your intake number."

"Appreciated, Medic. Keep up the good work," she replied with a light bow of gratitude, the Medic not having made her life difficult for no reason.

She collected the Glassbane, the Cyclone, and the standard-issue machine gun from the medbay storage area, signing the release slate with a bare, unadorned Rachel that still felt like a splinter every single time she wrote it—then headed straight for the nearest supply depot. Because there was no version of this DM in which her sorry excuses for leftover Armour and Bulwark survived contact with the enemy again. 

The shield that had saved her life was, quite frankly, complete scrap—its face spalled and cracked through in a dozen places, having broken-off and lost around an eighth of its size entirely, the grav-lock capacitor housing half-slagged. 

Her plate was little better, with dents and stress-fractures running along every line that had braced the breach, as well as around a dozen holes from where the enemy’s gunfire had managed to pierce through the lesser-armoured joints. 

Neither would stand up to a stiff breeze, let alone the remainder of a three-day engagement.

Thankfully, the depot's industrial printers quickly hummed through the reprint while she waited. She used the time to methodically strip, inspect, and re-stow the weapons that had survived—noting that all of them were in top shape, which wasn't particularly surprising, given that she'd only used the machine gun so far, and even that one not anywhere excessively. 

By the time she walked out—fresh Bulwark on her arm, fresh plate sealed entirely around her, the familiar weights distributed across familiar hardpoints—she felt like an actual proper Marine again.

Then she checked the squad link… And with more than just a little surprise, found five green status indicators looking back at her.

Her entire squad was somehow still alive.

'Huh. They all survived without me there to babysit them? Did not have that on my list of expected outcomes…'

She tilted her head slightly, conceding the point to herself.

'Then again—they're proper T1 Marines, not Recruits. And I chose them in the locker room. Means they have to be at least somewhat superior to my current squad back on the Sovereign…’ 

She briskly headed over to their location, following the HUD's indicators through the maze of the line—passing by trench junctions, ammunition trains and stretcher teams moving the other way—until the markers led her to a reinforced alcove built into the trenchline proper.

Urimi saw her first, and her eyebrows climbed behind the transparent visor. "Rachel?! You're—should you even be up right now? You absolutely folded—"

"Ahhh! Compression trauma like that doesn't just—" Holden started simultaneously, already reaching for his diagnostic kit, slight panic visible in his movements.

"A Mast—" ‘—ers never stays down!’ "—I'm fine. I can handle it," she said instead, the near-slip sliding past unnoticed under her level tone. "The Medics cleared me. Scan's on the profile if you want to audit it, Holden. Now—update. What did I miss?"

Urimi held her gaze for a beat, then nodded and signalled Holden back to his duties with a flick of two fingers.

"You've been out for around three hours. In that time—we lost lines three, four, and five." She said flatly. "The withdrawals were rather bloody but controlled. Thankfully no more breaches so far. We've finally stabilised the defence against their offensive here on the sixth for the past hour, which is where you're standing. Fighting's still fierce, as expected—they're probing constantly, and artillery hasn't let up once. And…" 

She hesitated briefly, a heavy sigh leaving her. "First news of Zeroes started coming in around fifteen minutes ago. People are running out of their revives already."

Rachel clicked her tongue at the news, though she couldn't exactly be mad at it, either. 

This DM allowed two revives per Marine—she remembered that from the pre-DM briefing—and facing the Stellar Republic without people Zeroing was practically impossible. 

It didn't matter how good the fortifications were, how careful someone was, how flawless their positioning and discipline... The Stellar Republic's approach to warfare was fundamentally statistical in nature: Throw enough bodies, explosives, bullets, and lasers downrange, and the random variables eventually catch everyone. 

A lucky shot through a firing slit here, a random rocket with your name poorly scribbled on it there, or maybe a completely unlikely breach at the exact wrong moment right in your path… She had personally experienced exactly how that felt just three hours ago.

"Understood," she said simply, once Urimi finished the rundown. "Let's hold them here then."

She took up her position at the front of the pillbox again, muscling herself to the left side of the Twins and to the right of Emberly, setting the Cyclone and the Glassbane down against the wall within arm's reach—clearing her holsters so she could more easily maneuver the Bulwark and machine gun into position, opting for the same angled-brace configuration as before.

Then she looked out over the no-man's-land.

The killing field between the fifth line and her current location was, at first glance, exactly what one would expect: A churned expanse of shell craters, wire, and countless Stellar Republic dead, the bodies scattered in the usual drifts where defensive fire had caught each wave.

… At first glance.

Because the distribution wasn't actually uniform at all—and Rachel caught the statistical anomaly immediately, having done several tens-of-thousands of "what is important about this picture of the Battlefield" trainings on Vespera, analysing thousands of different images, Battlefields and exact layouts to catch even the most minute of anomalies. 

One sector, perhaps twenty meters wide and running at a slight diagonal toward the trench junction four pillboxes down from her position, carried a visibly increased percentage of the bodies. 

It wasn’t a dramatic increase. Perhaps an eighth more than the surrounding field at most, the kind of variance an untrained eye would dismiss as mere noise.

But Rachel knew better than to dismiss statistical outliers when facing the Stellar Republic.

Their greatest strength was simultaneously their biggest weakness in terms of strategic and tactical tells: The law of large numbers.

If there were only a few hundred, maybe a thousand bodies total in a given sector, then statistical anomalies were easy to hide. The difference between six bodies and twelve was a single squad's worth. That could happen easily, in any combat situation.

But the Stellar Republic dealt in numbers orders of magnitude greater.

Fifteen squads' worth of bodies compared to twenty-five squads' worth? That wasn't merely random chance anymore. One didn’t “misplace” ten squads worth of Merit on a failed push.

They were deliberately funnelling a slightly disproportionate share of their waves through that corridor—letting them die there instead of anywhere else.

Every wave added another layer of corpses to the lane. And corpses, stacked densely enough, became terrain: Soft cover that soaked up bullets, visual clutter that broke target silhouettes, elevation changes that shielded crawling infantry from grazing fire.

If she gave it another few dozen waves, that corridor would become a shallow, meat-walled approach trench running most of the way to the UHF wire—letting their infantry cross the final stretch of no-man's-land with a fraction of the casualties, concentrated at a single junction point.

‘A damn corridor of bodies… One of the Freak’s favourite human-wave tactics when it comes to cracking our entrenched defensive doctrine—using our own kill efficiency as the building material. Disgusting.’

The counter, fortunately, was straightforward—as long as one caught the lanes early enough: Deny the corridor its density advantage. 

Enfilading fire along its length, rather than across it, kept the lane's occupants suppressed and shredded the accumulating cover faster than fresh bodies could replace it—but that required a weapon with sustained volume positioned at the precisely correct angle.

Her current firing port was wrong for it by about ten meters.

The Twins' position on the far-side of the pillbox, on the other hand, was just barely well-enough aligned with the corridor's long axis to potentially work out.

"Vasska, Verren—switch positions with me," she called over, already unlocking the Bulwark. "Your rifles are wasted there. I need it."

Into the squad link she gave her report at the same time as she moved over to the Twins, "SL—they're building a corpse corridor, bearing two-two-five, terminating at the junction by pillbox seventeen. Around twenty meters wide, twelve, maybe thirteen waves deep already. I'm repositioning to enfilade it before it matures further. Recommend flagging it to the sector command feed, we could use extra firepower on it—and if they're building one here, they're probably trying it somewhere else as well."

Urimi replied almost immediately. "Good catch, Rachel."

Rachel flinched internally at the name.

"If they're building one here… Give me a second."

Urimi pulled out a folded map—some kind of matte, weather-proofed synth-fabric, creased into precise sixteenths—and set it down on the ground, kneeling over it.

Rachel's eyes flickered to it briefly.

She had known, of course, that physical maps existed. 

They had been part of her training, many, many times. 

She could read and navigate by one as well as—if not better than—any digital equivalent; her tutors had made damn sure of that. But this was the first time she'd ever actually seen one used during a real deployment.

The Assessment had not required it and her other DM’s SLs had never bothered before.

They were biometrically keyed to the squad leader and their direct replacement, so that any enemy coming across one couldn't simply pick it up and read all the critical information off of it—the fabric's surface rendering as meaningless grey noise to anyone else. 

Although data-retrievers and otherwise tech-inclined personnel on all sides of the Galactic conflict had long since found ways around that particular protection, of course. 

Everything could be cracked, given time, the right specialist and the right Abilities.

Urimi began working through her calculations, fingertip tracing invisible lines across the fabric. Rachel, meanwhile, returned her attention downrange and started firing into the no-man's-land beyond.

Her first burst walked straight down the corridor's long axis—the new angle transforming the mound of corpses from cover for the enemy Soldiers into a trap. 

The heavy rounds bored through the lane lengthwise, punching through three, four bodies at a time before finding the living Soldiers crawling in the dead ground behind them. She watched a Stellar Republic Soldier come apart at the shoulder as a round exited the corpse-wall he was sheltering against, watched the man behind him take the same round through the visor, exploding his head and helmet alike. 

Her second burst chewed into the corridor's raised flank, hand-sized bullets bursting the stacked dead apart in wet, heavy chunks—actively demolishing the accumulated cover, collapsing a full meter of their morbid construction back into scattered, useless meat-liquid.

The enemy, however, noticed her intervention almost immediately.

The uptick in return fire on their position was pronounced—the pillbox's ferrocrete lip beginning to crackle and pop under concentrated fire, rounds shrieking through the firing slit in twos and threes, forcing her—and everyone in her squad—into tighter, quicker exposure windows. 

Somewhere out there, a commander had just watched their patient, wave-by-wave investment start dissolving under enfilading fire, and had decided she needed to die.

'Good… Very good! Anger is costly... Spend it all on me, Freaks!'

Urimi, meanwhile, finally finished her calculations, folded the map away into its pouch, and keyed her comms to the command channel.

Rachel overheard it all during a lull in her firing, with great interest.

"Command, Sixth-Line Thirteen-Actual. Confirmed corpse-corridor construction in my sector, terminating at the junction by pillbox seventeen—requesting additional fire support to keep it suppressed. Be advised: Assess high probability of further corridor construction targeting pillboxes twelve through fourteen, twenty-one through twenty-three, and twenty-nine through thirty-one. Recommend sector-wide observation tasking on those approaches before they mature. Assumed enemy Command-position around sector twenty-two to twenty-six. Thirteen-Actual out."

She then simply returned to the firing line behind Rachel, took up her position, and resumed putting rounds into the ever-approaching Soldiers as though she hadn't just casually predicted the future of half the sector, including the enemy’s damn command location.

Rachel held the question in for all of three seconds.

"How do you know?"

Urimi fired off three quick, aimed shots before answering.

"Learned it from a Legate Command-Ace, during a deployment a few years back." Another shot cracked through the pillbox. "No average commander is capable of trusting their subordinates fully. Especially on the Stellar Republic's side, where individual prowess isn't as pronounced as with us. Command-Aces won't make this mistake. But the run-of-the-mill commanders, on a Battlefield like this? There's a high chance they will."

She'd never heard about any of this in her training… And given that her squad leader had just identified several key locations of the Battlefield's future off the back of it, that seemed like rather important information to learn.

"… What mistake?" Rachel asked after a few moments of thought, turning the statement over and failing to properly look behind its true meaning.

"The commander will position themselves somewhat centrally to the decisions being made," Urimi said, cycling a fresh magazine. "They can't help it. They don't trust the waves to execute without direct oversight, so they stay close to what matters most to them. Now—we already know their command isn't going to be sitting central to our transitory trenches between the lines—too risky for a counter-offensive—so they won't be anywhere near the low-letters or low-numbers. 

“You finding a corridor aimed at seventeen makes further ones toward the low-double-digits fairly unlikely—the pattern almost always goes up from there, not down. Which puts this particular commander somewhere behind their side of sectors twenty-two through twenty-six, give or take. They want direct and immediate access to the corridors being built, so they can respond to anything we try in order to prevent them." 

She fired twice more, before ducking behind cover again and continuing. "After that, I just checked the map to confirm the terrain was conducive to the tactic in those stretches—and then spaced the corridors the way I'd imagine the enemy spacing them. Nothing more to it."

Rachel took that information in, with complete silence, firing several more disciplined bursts into the slowly dissolving corridor.

'That sounds so simple and obvious in hindsight…'

She turned it over, prodding at the edges of it, trying to work out why she'd never thought of it herself—why it had never once come up across two decades of the finest tactical education money and lineage could source… Then she corrected herself.

'Because there's no way to actually learn that without extensive first-hand experience against this exact enemy, Rachel. That's not simple doctrine that can necessarily be taught. SL—Urimi even said so herself, she guessed, partially. Based on experience and feeling.’ 

Her next burst tore another crawling fire-team out of the corridor's shadow. 'Not to mention, a Masters isn't a Strategic or Command Ace anyway. Higher-level formation reading never was and never will be part of the curriculum.'

Still…

"Where did you say you were from again, Urimi?" Rachel asked.

"Kessarine Orbital," Urimi replied easily between shots, not looking over. "Waypoint station, Toralis system. Don't blame you for not remembering or knowing it—nobody does, really."

She laughed self-deprecatingly at that last part.

Rachel, meanwhile, filed the name away into memory.

She’d make sure to know Kessarine Orbital by the time the next Assessment rolled around…

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