[TAS] Volume 2 - Intermission 106.XXYX - Subterfuge

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Hello everyone, LunaWolve here!

RR has received Chapter 105 - The Talk II 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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NEXT WEEK IS ADMIN WEEK FOR SEPTEMBER.

That means the next scheduled chapter is on Tuesday 22nd Sept.

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Should be 1 more chapter after this.

Potentially 2 if I feel like writing a lot, but I'd give it a 30%.

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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/1ZEcAzpnQp7JFxBO-UllxQX-17BL5FtAlsSZ5Pu0VaM8/edit?usp=sharing

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Volume 2 - Intermission 106.XXYX - Subterfuge

The scenario was called Warden's Gauntlet, and by the time she was ten years old, she quickly learned to hate it more than any other option in the simulation catalogue.

The premise was simple: Six blue markers scattered across a collapsing plaza—mandatory defensive targets, each one a life she was not permitted to lose. Waves of enemy infantry pressing from three sides. And, threaded through those waves, high-priority, red targets: Officers, heavy gunners, a sapper with a demolition charge—threats that, when left alive, would escalate until the whole scenario tipped past saving. 

She could not simply turtle. 

A perfect shield that protected six people while the sapper armed his charge was rapidly turned into a shield-shaped monument standing over six corpses. 

And she could not simply attack. 

A dead officer meant nothing if she'd left a flank open and a blue marker went dark while she chased the kill.

Defense to offense. Offense to defense. 

That transition, again and again, was the whole point of the test.

Attempt one. 

She anchored on the blue markers, shield high, and held the line beautifully for ninety seconds—right up until the sapper reached the plaza's edge and detonated his charge against the eastern wall. 

The blast didn't touch her, but it had never needed to.

It brought down the wall onto two of her blue markers, and the scenario froze.

"You held," said the tutor—a woman named Tessa, whose monotone voice never betrayed even a hint of her true emotions. "You held perfectly, and two people died anyway. On a real Battlefield, you would have filed a flawless defensive report over nothing but a mass grave. A shield that cannot decide when to stop being a shield is nothing but a wall. Fix it."

Attempt two. 

She fixed it. 

She broke from the line the instant she flagged the sapper, crossed the plaza in a hard sprint, and put him down before the charge armed—a clean kill, textbook even, just like she’d learnt. 

She turned, triumphant, to find that in the six seconds her back had been to the western approach, a heavy gunner had walked his fire across two unshielded blue markers.

The scenario froze.

"You solved the last failure and walked directly into its mirror," Tessa said. "You proved you can leave the line, but you did not prove you can leave it at the right time. You went to the one obvious threat like it was the only thing in the room. Fix it."

Attempt three. 

She stopped sprinting in blind. 

She moved with her shield tracking her flank as she crossed, angling it to cover the western blue marker even as she closed on the sapper—and the divided attention cost her the kill timing. 

The charge armed anyway. 

She got the shield up, saved the marker from the blast, but the detonation still cratered the plaza floor and swallowed another marker she hadn't accounted for in the north.

"You kept your defense alive while you attacked… But you tried to do both at half-strength and achieved neither. Half a shield and half a strike does not a Masters make. That is simply two failures. There are no compromises on the Battlefield. Fix it."

Attempt four. 

She committed fully to the kill this time—full offense—and reached the sapper a fraction faster by trusting the western blue marker to a chokepoint she'd spotted in the last run, funneling the gunner's approach through rubble. 

It worked—almost. 

She killed the sapper, wheeled back, reached the chokepoint in time—and an officer she'd deprioritized had spent those seconds rallying a squad into a coordinated push she no longer had the positioning to break. 

She got overwhelmed seconds later and the scenario froze again.

"You managed the two threats you were watching, while forgetting that a threat you ignore does not ignore you in turn. Fix it."

Attempt five. 

Officer first. Gunner and sapper were too much to handle afterwards.

Six. 

Gunner and sapper in sequence, blue markers ceded ground she couldn't hold. 

Seven. 

Positioning that solved everything except her own stamina, her ten-year-old arms failing on the shield in the scenario's final third. 

Eight. Nine. Ten.

Each time, a different failure. 

That was the only rule she truly understood by now, drilled deeper than any doctrine: To fail the same way twice was the only real way to fail Warden's Gauntlet. 

That, or to let her body give out first—to become too exhausted to lift the shield anymore.

This scenario was built to exhaust. 

She had trained in a hundred cruel simulations by ten, but nothing came close to this—the marathon of it all, defense to offense to defense, sprint and anchor and sprint again, hour after hour after hour, every run demanding she solve a new problem while her muscles screamed answers she'd already learned were useless.

Attempt seventeen. 

Her arms were shaking on the guard position before the first wave even arrived.

She raised her shield anyway because…

A Masters shield did not falter.

[Excerpt from, Memory Excerpt: “Endurance”, PFC943]

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PoV: Rachel Veronica Masters

"—which is why he will be coming with us tonight," Urimi finished, gesturing to the man standing beside her. "Everyone, this is Dislen. Trench Engineer, Fortis Squad. Specifically—one of the Trench Engineers who helped build the section we'll be navigating tonight."

It was around 0330 now, and the world beyond the trench lip was pitch-black—a deep, moonless dark that swallowed depth perception whole, broken only by the handful of floodlights both sides kept burning to watch over the no-man's-land between the two armies as the occasional bright flare of artillery fire illuminating the dark briefly. 

The squad had gathered in the alcove in various states of freshly-woken alertness. 

Emberly was still blinking herself functional while chewing down on a ration bar, as the Twins stood in their usual unsettling mirror-symmetry and Holden quietly triple-checked his kit.

Dislen himself, meanwhile, was a compact, wiry man with forearms like braided durasteel cables and dirt worked so deeply into the creases of his knuckles that Rachel almost suspected he’d never seen a shower in his life before—or ever heard of gloves. 

He gave the squad a single nod by way of greeting—and then did not waste any time on pleasantries, which Rachel immediately noted as a positive attribute.

"Basics first, 'cause most of ye line inf'ntry n’ver g't told this stuff," he began, crouching and sketching in the dirt floor with one finger.

Rachel's brow twitched minutely at the sound of him.

The accent was rough—vowels flattened and dragged, consonants chewed halfway to nothingness and sometimes even entire syllables simply discarded entirely. 

Rimward gutter-cant of some flavour, if she’d had to guess. 

Her elocution matrons would have needed a sedative at hearing that—or five. 

She caught herself instinctively cataloguing it as a mark against him—then forced herself to drop it entirely. The man was here to lead them behind enemy lines, somehow.

He was clearly experienced in ways that none of them were—Rachel included. 

As long as he managed that, he could talk however he damn well pleased, in her eyes.

"Ev'ry UHF trenchline's built in sev'ral diff'rent layers—provided there's 'nough time to do it proper, ya feel me? There’s the usual layers like the supply stations, command bunk’rs, medbays, all the logistical an' strategic infrastructure stuff, dug b’low an' behind the fightin' trenches. They double as ‘xtra pathways too, for when the main tunnels inev’tably start collapsin' under artillery fire. Standard doctrine stuff, so far."

His finger kept moving, adding lines beneath the lines.

"But when there's 'nough time for a prop’r in-depth setup? We engin’rs love te build hidden tunnels. Doz’ns of 'em, per line, even." He tapped the sketch. "Some lead nowh’re—dead ends, d’coys, traps for anyone findin' one who really shouldn't have. Some conn’ct diff'rent areas of the same line. An' some…" 

His finger dragged a long, slow line forward, toward the enemy side of his dirt-map.

"Some lead to other lines ‘ntirely. Like from this one—to the fifth."

He did not give anyone time to really digest this bombshell of a revelation—tunnels that led between each line, underneath their feet this entire time?!

"Which is ‘xactly why I'm gettin' attached to ye lot for this assault busin’ss. ‘Am one of maybe four people still breathin' on this Battlefield who knows where the hidden tunnels actually run, how to access 'em without settin' off the tons of failsafes inside—an' how to prop’rly navigate a squad through to the far side without anyone dyin' stupid. I get ye behind their lines, into the fifth. Anythin’ happenin’ after, that's yer busin’ss."

'Priority adjustment,' Rachel thought, her internal protection hierarchy reshuffling itself immediately. 'He’s the single most important member of this squad now. He goes down, the mission dies with him—possibly the entire assault's opening… He does not get hit tonight. Whatever it costs.'

She placed him accordingly, one slot above Holden, who was right above Urimi.

What had genuinely surprised her about all this, though, was that all of this was new information to her. She'd never even heard of this specific nuance to the UHF trench system—not a single whisper of it.

But then again… she was never really taught in-depth on the logistics or command side of things. Much less on trench engineering, barring the general "how to dig a trench without engineers nearby, and make it secure enough until they arrive and take over" module—which had then also been reinforced once more during the two years of Basic before Integration, same as for everyone else. 

Very little of her actual Legacy training had gone into the design or creation of trenches. The curriculum's focus had always been on how to efficiently navigate them, clear them, and fight within them.

'Front-line excellence,' she noted, with the observation having a slightly different taste now than it would have had a couple of hours ago. 'I was built as a Masters, nothing else. Not as a general, nor an engineer… Specializations I don’t have, but others evidently do. Second entry on that particular list in one day, Rachel...'

—

With Dislen as their guide, they rapidly got to work.

They weren't alone, either—six other squads were staging in parallel across the line, each with their own Engineer guide, all of them tasked with the same objective: Sneak in behind enemy lines and sow as much chaos as physically possible for the rest of the UHF's assault, which was currently amassing in the shadows of the trenches behind them, rank upon silent rank, waiting to retake the fifth trenchline the moment the infiltrators lit it up from within.

Dislen led them along the sixth line at a brisk, quiet pace—past sandbagged junctions and sleeping Marines, down a branching tunnel toward one of the line's supply stations—and then abruptly stopped at a compacted dirt wall.

It looked precisely like any other stretch of wall in the entire network, Rachel made sure to check. It had the exact same compression marks, same lattice-shadows, same nothing giving away that there was anything there at all.

Yet when Dislen touched it, it simply fell away.

The entire face of it sloughed downward and folded into the floor in one smooth motion—Rachel was certain he'd used some kind of Class Ability for that stunt—revealing a narrow, pitch-black tunnel beyond. 

It was barely wider than her pauldrons and with a ceiling low enough that she'd be stooping the whole way, almost too narrow for her equipment—almost.

The squad collectively stared into it.

"I'll go first," Rachel said after a moment, hoisting her Bulwark centrally in front of her and stepping into the tunnel before anyone could argue the point. 

If something was waiting in there, or on the other side of it, it would meet two meters of shield and a Defensive Heavy before it met anything softer.

"Yer gonna need ta listen to my orders ‘xactly and immediat’ly," Dislen reminded her from behind, his voice dropping to something low and serious. "In ‘ere, initiative will get ya kill’d."

Rachel grunted an acknowledgement, waited for the rest of the squad to assemble behind her in single-file, and started forward.

She immediately realized that the trek through the tunnels was going to be beyond confusing—and that felt thoroughly, deeply strange to her.

She could vividly remember entire blocks of her training dealing with narrow-tunnel and trench navigation. 

Unknown layouts, hostile layouts, low-light and no-light environments—she'd been placed unconscious into an unknown location, then had to run through pitch-dark maze complexes on Vespera while instructors flooded sections behind her, and yet she'd kept her bearings the whole way through. 

Dead reckoning was a reflex for her. 

Step count, turn count, incline tracking, running mental map…

So why was she getting so thoroughly, dizzyingly lost trying to track their progress in here, barely two minutes in? Her mental map had already degraded into complete nonsense by the time they turned for the third time.

Her step count insisted they'd walked four hundred meters, yet her gut insisted ninety. She'd logged three left turns and yet could have sworn on the Emperor's name that the tunnel had visually curved right the entire time. Meanwhile, the incline visually read as downward while her ears kept popping as though they were climbing—and quite significantly at that.

"Stop."

Dislen's voice came from behind her, and she stopped mid-step—foot hovering above the ground, still as a statue, weight frozen across her planted leg without so much as a plate-joint creaking.

Silence reigned for a few seconds… Then he tapped her shoulder twice.  

The universal sign for “keep going.”

The same spiel happened several more times—almost a dozen in total. 

Stop. Wait. Tap. Continue. 

Interspersed between them, Dislen fed her directions in a low murmur, "Left here." "Right." "Straight through the wide s’ction, hug the left wall tight. None o’ ye’s touch the right side 'ere." 

Each time, Rachel obeyed exactly and immediately, initiative surrendered in full, while her sense of direction spun uselessly like an instrument in a magnetic storm.

'I would be hopelessly lost down here,' she thought, again and again, the admission grinding against everything she knew about her own capabilities. 'How? Why? … It must be some kind of illusion-based Ability woven into the construction itself… Part of the Trench Engineer Class, maybe? Spatial distortion, sense-scrambling, something baked into the very walls when they're compacted into whatever this tunnel is…'

She spent a good few minutes of the trek trying to devise counters to the tunnels' strange, dizzying effects. She’d tried tracking the faint air currents with her armour’s sensors, logging the texture changes underneath her boots and even attempting to anchor her map to her own heartbeat count instead of her steps.

Yet despite her best efforts, every single method dissolved into the same directionless fog.

'Trench Engineers are fucking dangerous,' was her ultimate, begrudging conclusion.

They could build entire labyrinthine networks beneath everyone's feet and even if Rachel somehow discovered one of these tunnels by accident, she'd be entirely unable to do anything meaningful about them except collapse it. 

Following one to its source, clearing it, mapping it for her own gains? Utterly impossible. 

She'd never be able to track through them on her own. 

Not as she was right now, at least.

'I need to take some Skill Classes on trench and tunnel design… There has to be some way to beat this,' she mentally earmarked, filing it into the growing post-Challenge queue. 

Something to look up after she'd taken her seat in Alpha Squad—hopefully before the next Assessment, even… Although it likely wouldn't come into play during said Assessment anyway, given the very high chance the next one would be Zero-G based.

During her ruminations, however, they finally reached the end as Dislen quietly motioned her to stop—no longer talking at all now, communication reduced entirely to hand signs.

Within just a few moments, the space around her and him widened slightly—the Trench Engineer seemingly carving out the compacted dirt with his bare hands, the material simply ceasing to exist wherever his palms passed, like his hands were vaporisation-shovels. 

He excavated just enough room for the two of them to switch positions in silence, him now standing at the front. He then created a small hole in the wall before him—a finger-width channel at most—and peeked out.

Several long moments of silence followed. 

The only sounds came drifting back through the tiny opening: Distant, muffled voices, the occasional clatter of equipment and rarely, boots slowly moving on packed dirt. 

Not a particularly busy area, by the sound of it.

Yet they kept waiting anyway.

Rachel kept an eye on her HUD's clock. 

One minute… Three… Five. 

The squad stood frozen in the dark behind her, breathing shallow, nobody shifting so much as a plate.

After seven whole minutes, Dislen finally nodded to himself. 

He put both of his hands flat against the wall in front of him—and the wall once again dissolved, exactly like the one back at the sixth line had done, folding away into the floor.

"Quickly," he urged Rachel forward in a whisper.

She stepped out of the tunnel—and found herself in a very familiar-feeling trenchline, shield half-raised and ready to intercept anyone and anything, though she kept her weapons undrawn.

Part of the plan relied on subterfuge, after all. 

They had draped several retrieved pieces of Stellar Republic heraldry over their armour—unit banners, rank sashes, the Stellar Republic's angular sigil-plates zip-tied over their UHF markings. Coupled with the sheer amount of dirt caking every square centimeter of them after the tunnel crawl, the minuscule differences between their armour patterns and the Freaks' would be genuinely hard to spot for anybody not paying extremely close attention.

The whole squad filed out behind her into the empty trench tunnel, one by one, spreading into loose, casual spacing—Marines trying very hard to look like Soldiers who belonged.

Dislen gave them all one last nod.

"Good luck," he whispered—and then the wall sealed itself shut in front of him, compacted dirt flowing back into perfect, seamless anonymity, and he was gone. Back toward the sixth line through the secret tunnels, his part of the mission now complete.

Which left them all but alone behind enemy lines. 

Back inside the fifth trenchline they had evacuated from just around ten hours ago.

Rachel took point without a word, leading the rest of the squad further into the trench tunnels. 

She didn't need a guide for this part—this was UHF construction, built to UHF standard layouts, and navigating those had been drilled into her since childhood. 

She followed that knowledge toward the closest supply station.

Which proved to be not very far away at all.

'Hidden tunnels lead from and to supply stations, huh?' she noted. 'Sensible—constant foot traffic to mask access, pre-positioned material, defensible chokepoints… Or is it just coincidence, for this one?'

She left the question unanswered for now and filed it into the growing pile of things she’d have to research in the near future.

The squad behind her was nervous. She could tell without looking—the spacing drifting slightly too tight, steps landing slightly too carefully, the silence a shade too disciplined for a squad of tired Soldiers wandering their own lines.

She was too, if she was being honest with herself. 

Infiltration wasn't exactly her forte—her entire methodology was built around being the most visible thing on any Battlefield, not the least. 

But they were all professionals at the end of the day.

"Hey!"

The sound of a man yelling made Holden flinch visibly behind her and Rachel immediately stepped toward the origin of the noise, planting herself in the sightline to hopefully cover the blunder with two meters of dirt-caked Heavy plate.

The source was a lone Stellar Republic Soldier leaning against the trench wall near a junction, helmet off, rifle slung lazy across his chest. 

He looked them up and down with open amusement.

"You lot look like absolute shit," he declared. "What in the Emperor’s sweaty ballsack happened to you guys?"

"Artillery," Rachel replied, letting her voice drop into something flat and worn. The cover story came out smooth—she'd built it during the tunnel crawl to not go insane, used the time to sand every edge of it. "The damn Undead walked a barrage right onto our box. Whole fuckin’ thing came down on top of us. We barely crawled out the back before the follow-up hit… Got lucky." 

She rolled her shoulders with a grimace that needed no acting at all. "What we could really use is a shower, though. You offerin’? I swear the fuckin’ dirt gets straight through the armour somehow… Right up ma crack."

Internally, she winced at the sheer vulgarity and tone of it all—the matrons' voices shrieking in distant, generational horror at what she'd just said out loud, to a stranger—and she hated having to stoop to this level of banter.

But she also knew, from that very same Legacy training, two years of Basic and every day since: Vulgarity was the single easiest path to getting Marines to ease up around you. 

And, as she’d been taught, Soldiers were fundamentally built no different.

The man barked a laugh, nodding profusely. "Oh, I fucking get that. I get that completely. I'd damn right kill for a shower… Kill twice, even. Once before, once after!"

Rachel stepped up closer, and conspiratorially slung an armoured arm around his shoulders, drawing him in.

"Hey—where's the nearest command post?" she asked, very quietly now. "We got turned around pretty bad in the tumble back there, and we've got some major intel to report. Barrage that buried us? The explosion revealed some kind of hidden tunnel under our position… Could lead to the Undead's other lines or somethin’."

She watched his eyes widen—courtesy of the missing helmet, every micro-expression on free display. He glanced left, then right, making sure nobody else could overhear.

"Down tunnel J-5," he whispered. "But hey—I—I want in on any infiltration, when it happens, yeah? You remember me!"

"I'll remember you," Rachel promised with a wink, deploying every gram of the charm the matrons had beaten into her across a decade of social conditioning. "Name?"

He told her. 

She did not listen to a single syllable of it.

Then she gave him a close-range Stellar Republic salute—markedly different from the UHF's, index and middle finger touched to the chest, then to the temple—and he returned it, smiling stupidly the entire time.

'…We got lucky, running into such an imbecile,' she couldn't help but think as they disengaged. 'But then again—maybe that's just how all Freaks are?'

As if the universe had heard her thoughts and taken them as a challenge, a group of three more Freaks walked around the corner, meeting all of their eyes at once.

"What the fuck kind of dust-monster did you lot crawl out of?" the first one said.

Rachel gave the same explanation she'd given before, once again eliciting a knowing round of nods and laughter.

"If that ain't the fucking truth… A shower would fucking kill right now," one of them agreed, hooking a thumb toward no-man's-land. "Emperor knows the Undead never take any. They just get a new body instead, eh?"

The other two chuckled. Rachel produced a chiming laugh.

"Anyway—think we need ta get movin’. Find ourselves a new box before someone volunteers us for grave-digging or somethin’," she said with a chuckle, already angling her body to disengage, the squad shifting with her—

—when gunfire suddenly echoed through the tunnels.

Distant, but utterly unmistakable… Inside the trench network.

Everyone had heard it. And everyone had subsequently frozen, just for a brief moment—her squad, the three Freaks, the imbecile—the entire junction locking up into one collective held breath, because nobody was sure what to do, but gunfire inside the tunnels was a very bad sign for absolutely everyone present.

One of the other six squads had just been made.

Rachel's eyes met Urimi's for a split second, and she signalled her with a quick raise of her eyebrows: “Subterfuge is over.”

Then she flexed the arm still slung around the first Soldier's neck.

The crack of his upper-spine breaking cleanly in two was almost as loud as the distant gunfire had been. She was already moving before he began to fully drop—pulling the Cyclone from its holster in one fluid motion, shield swinging up and forward—the man's body still folding toward the ground as the revolver-shotgun's muzzle came level.

To the Freaks' credit, they reacted just as quickly—all three diving apart for cover, hands ripping at slung rifles, training overriding shock in a fraction of a second.

But the Cyclone was simply unbeatable in close quarters like this.

Three quick, deafening bellows of the shotgun rang out, one per target, the muzzle flash strobing the tunnel white. 

The buckshot ripped straight through the Freaks' armour like it was nothing but paper—punching through breastplates, unmaking everything—spraying blood and organ pieces against the tunnel walls beyond, which immediately and greedily soaked up the liquid.

"Move!" Rachel barked, and the squad moved.

They dashed through the tunnels in a tight, rolling column—Rachel at the tip, Bulwark forward, the rest stacked behind her—and the gunfire ahead kept getting louder the closer they got. 

Sustained exchanges now, punctuated by grenade thumps that shivered dust loose from the tunnel ceilings.

'Good… Means someone's still alive to be shot at.'

The first Republic squad came around a junction twenty meters ahead—six of them, rifles up, already alerted and hunting for any infiltrators.

Rachel didn't slow down to give them time to identify them. She accelerated instead.

Their opening volley slammed into the Bulwark as she charged, rounds sparking and shrieking off its face—then she was already inside of them.

She slammed the shield's base down at full sprint, grav-lock engaging on impact, converting the Bulwark into an instant anchored wall splitting the junction cleanly in half—three Freaks on the wrong side of it, three exposed to her.

The Cyclone bellowed twice, point-blank. 

The two nearest Soldiers came apart at the torso, buckshot painting the wall behind them in one continuous sheet. 

The third managed to swing his rifle toward her helmet—she unlocked the shield mid-motion, shoulder-checked it forward into him with her whole mass behind it, and the man simply stopped existing as a combat variable, crushed between alloy and trench wall with a sound like eggshells bursting.

The remaining three, previously briefly cut off from the junction behind her own shield's line, were just about to fire—when the rifles of the Twins barked out, putting four rounds through three visors.

"Through!" Rachel jogged on without breaking stride, reloading the Cyclone by feel.

The second contact was worse for them.

They hit a long connecting gallery—forty meters of straight tunnel, a supply alcove at the far end—and a full squad of Freaks was already set up inside it, crates dragged into a barricade, a bipod-mounted gun levelled straight down the throat of the corridor.

The machine gun opened up the instant Rachel's silhouette filled the tunnel mouth.

"Cover!" she roared—and then did the opposite herself, planting the Bulwark mid-corridor and grav-locking it as the burst arrived, the impacts hammering through her bracing arm.

Behind her, the squad flattened into the walls—except Emberly, who was caught mid-stride in the open courtesy of her heavy weapon making tight-movements harder, three steps too slow, directly in the path of one of the gunners walking his fire around the locked shield's edge—

Rachel let go of the Bulwark—left it standing locked in the corridor—and dashed sideways into the line of fire, her own armoured bulk arriving between gun and lightly-armoured autocannoneer half a heartbeat before the rounds did. 

Three impacts rang her backplate like a bell and she felt something crack underneath them, staggering her a step forward.

'Light Armour, heavy weapon... Emperor's sake, Emberly!'

"Emberly—shield, now!" she snapped through clenched teeth, and the small woman scrambled behind the locked Bulwark, swung the autocannon over its rim, braced on the alloy Rachel had left standing there for exactly this purpose—

—and the corridor inverted. 

The autocannon's thudding reports filled the gallery, briefly deafening everyone nearby despite their helmets best efforts, each shell erasing a section of the crate barricade along with anyone behind it, the enemy machine gun falling silent inside the first shot.

Rachel, meanwhile, was already moving up the corridor's flank, taking advantage of the gunner who’d fired at Emberly and her diving for cover—Cyclone in her right hand, and with her left, drawing the Glassbane from its holster for the first time tonight.

Dual-wielded, shieldless, she hit what remained of the barricade at a run.

The Cyclone's shells went into one of the Soldiers rising from behind the leftmost crates at a run, not bothering to conserve ammunition—fired one-handed, the recoil wrenching against her wrist, the target folding backward in ruin. 

'Dry. Switch.'

She didn't holster the shotgun, instead simply letting it fall on its retention sling and put both hands on the Glassbane.

The one-and-a-half-handed Warhammer came around in a flat, compact arc, and the first lunging Soldier's helmet crumpled around its head like foil, the body cartwheeling into the alcove wall. 

The next swing came down vertically on a Freak still trying to shoulder his rifle at her—through the pauldron, through the collarbone, through most of what was underneath. 

The tight corridor that made rifles awkward made the hammer perfect: Short arcs, full mass, and absolutely nowhere for anyone to retreat to.

The last defender, who she identified as the gunner who had shot at Emberly earlier, broke and ran for the alcove's rear exit.

Rachel took two accelerating steps, putting her whole Strength into each one, then hopped, and brought the Glassbane down two-handed between his shoulder blades. 

The tunnel floor received him with a crunching, squishy finality.

She immediately turned and jogged back, scooped the Bulwark up out of its grav-lock mid-stride—'Capacitors at sixty percent. Fine.'—and waved the column forward. "Reloading on the move! Holden, count?"

"All up! Verren caught frag in the arm—sealed, functional! Urimi took a ricochet—functional!"

"Then we keep moving!"

The third time they ran into enemies almost went bad right away.

The tunnels had begun branching as they closed on J-5—the gunfire loud enough now that individual weapons were distinguishable, UHF service rifles among them—and a Stellar Republic squad came boiling out of a side passage on their flank, rifles already levelled at Holden and the Twins from less than eight meters away.

Rachel was the first to see them—or at least first to react.

She spun out of the column's head and hurled herself back along its length—one massive, explosive stride kicking up dirt underneath her—and slammed the Bulwark down grav-locked in the side passage's mouth just as the Freaks' volley arrived, the entire burst chewing into alloy instead of into her squadmates' backs. 

Her ears caught the individual sounds of the barking guns, a decade of ingrained training kicking in, analysing each one to figure out its calibre and maximum penetrative capabilities…

'No heavy weapons,' she concluded after two seconds, a big grin stretching over her face. 'No high-pen rounds in the entire squad, either? Bad choice.'

So she simply stepped around her own locked shield, into the passage, Glassbane now in both hands.

The lead Soldier fired into her chestplate twice from two meters—she took both hits with a grunt, once again feeling something crack underneath the plate—but it held—and swung through him, the hammer's head driving his breastplate into his sternum and his sternum into everything behind it with a serious of sickening crunches. 

She backhanded the next with her free forearm's plate, spun the Glassbane's haft, and put its head through a third attacker's knee, then his helmet, in one continuous falling rhythm. 

The Twins arrived over the Bulwark a breath later, firing past her in disciplined pairs, and the passage went quiet.

Rachel stood in the middle of it, breathing hard, feeling several bouts of sharp, stinging pains in her chest, gore sliding off her pauldrons in thick ropes.

"Anyone hit?" she called, already walking back to rip the Bulwark free of its lock.

"Negative!"—"Negative."—"I'm—no, I'm good," Holden managed, voice about half an octave high.

"Moving," Rachel simply ordered, settling the shield back onto her arm and thumbing fresh shells into the Cyclone's cylinder as she moved. "We’re two junctions out. That's UHF fire in the mix ahead, so somebody's still breathing. If we can link up—”

An unmistakable, cracking staccato rang out from the direction they were heading in—a mechanical, metronome-perfect burst unlike anything an infantry weapon could produce.

Everyone stopped dead in their tracks as an ice-cold shudder ran down Rachel’s spine.

She had immediately raised the Bulwark higher, hiding herself behind it completely before she even consciously knew what was happening—her body reacting purely on long-trained, primal instinct.

'Fuck,' was the first conscious thought she had after hearing that sound.

"That… That was an auto-turret," Urimi quietly confirmed with a wavering voice, what Rachel—and everyone else—had also heard.

The worst part, however, wasn't even the sound itself. The worst part was that the burst had lasted around a full second… and a full second was an extremely long time for an auto-turret to fire.

There was now no longer any shooting coming from J-5's direction.

None at all…

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