Ravens of Eternity

35 Synthetic Terror, Pt The dead and wounded were extracted from their mecha and immediately rushed off to the hospital back towards headquarters. The dead far outnumbered the wounded, but even the “lucky” few survivors were on the brink of death themselves.

Some were missing portions of their torso, or even their entire lower half! Blood gushed from their open wounds as they screamed in agony. Terrible pain coursed through their bodies.

The doctors and nurses scrambled to save the lives of their cadets. Everyone was given incredible amounts of painkillers to dull their senses as they were stitched back together. But they barely worked, and their screaming had not abated.

Despite the doctors’ best efforts, almost all of their patients had died. Their trauma was too great, physically and mentally. The pain and suffering that they went through was too much for them to bear.

So, for the most part, they gave up. Their will to live had vanished into the air along with their screams. One by one, they fell into darkness and never came back. Their bodies breathed their last as their blood drained out.

Only one cadet had remained.

Of his brethren, only he had suffered the least amount of damage, where both his legs and one of his arms were torn off.

In his painful yet medicated haze, he thought that people were cruel. They kept wretches like them alive, but why? What was the point? They should have ended their suffering rather than stretched it out.

Those brutal attacks had rendered them incomplete, and they would never be able to go back to how they were, not in a million years.

.....

Why bother with all this? It all felt like a waste of time...

He reached up weakly, and grabbed the arm of the doctor who was helping him. His throat felt raw, and the taste of blood rose up as he spoke.

“Please,” he groaned, “just kill me...”

The doctor flat out refused him.

“No chance in hell!” she exclaimed. “Everyone... everyone’s gone except you! You’re the only one left... We have to save you!”

“Stop,” he said. His voice and body was weak, but his grip held strong. It was as though he was putting everything he had into holding her.

“I’ve got nothing,” he continued. “Even if I make it through, get cybernetics, and live my life, I still won’t be the same, you hear? No-one’s gonna want to be around me, all broken and whatnot.”

His eyes were bloodshot as tears flowed out of them. His face was contorted with pain, both physical and emotional.

“I’m always gonna be in pain – all kinds of it. So tell me, when will life be worth it for me again?”

The doctor’s heart wrenched as she watched him plead. Her solemn duty was to preserve life, but this young man couldn’t bear the agony of it.

His grip tightened further. Whatever strength he had left, he used it to beg for it all to end.

The doctor wept as she tapped on her control pad, and injected him with a lethal dose of painkillers. She put a hand on his and comforted him as best she could.

His pain melted away and he passed into a final euphoria. Eventually, his grip loosened and fell to the side, unmoving and still.

~

Spartan and his squadrons dashed past Eva with fortifications and fresh cadets. They quickly strengthened the new front line and set up defenses. They needed to make sure that their position was solid as fast as possible, before the enemy regrouped and counterattacked.

Spartan was a mix of emotions.

He wanted to curse at everyone, wanted to be angry and kick up a storm. It was because he was certain that Eva’s charge was going to end up painfully. It wasn’t because he didn’t believe they were capable, but it was because he believed life was cruel.

He believed that no matter how hard we struggled to fight, to live, that it would all be taken away.

It had been so all his life.

Everything that mattered had been taken away from him. Every time he had dared to hope or dream, fate intervened and ground them into dust instead.

Eva had presented them with a chance to beat back the insane synths, and he didn’t want to lose it.

He knew that she had superior numbers – over four hundred versus the enemy’s two hundred fifty. It would have been simple enough for her to go in and simply swarm them. Although the unit would have taken casualties, it would have been offset by her drones.

But she didn’t charge in with all her numbers. She felt it would have led to needless casualties. Instead, she had only put four of her squadrons forward and deployed less than 150 units on the front.

He thought she was committing suicide!

Then he saw as she literally took command of the battlefield, how she had swept away the opposition. She only used some of her drones at the last moment and secured her victory. She even took such few casualties that he was shocked into happiness.

His mood was such a whirl of chaos that he couldn’t utter a single awful word.

The cadets in his unit were rather surprised at his mixed mood. Throughout this whole battle, he had been morose and angry. He was under the impression that they were all fated to die, slowly and painfully under the heels of those enemy drones.

But now he had seen hope for all of them, and his overprotectiveness lifted. His cadets realized this, and collectively resolved not to let him down.

While Spartan and his unit’s mood had greatly improved, Eva on the other hand was incredibly sour. Her push had resulted in the deaths of nearly two dozen of her own cadets. Those were losses she found difficult to bear.

It was one thing to see Grizz’ cadets fall, but when she saw the cadets in her wing get turned into gruesome corpses... She couldn’t take it.

It wasn’t as though she was close to everyone, but she did start to get to know a few of them. And that feeling of being part of a group, of something larger than herself... She felt a strength in it.

It was nothing like she had ever felt before. It filled her with warmth and energy, and it radiated from within her, like an inner sun.

Most other people took that feeling for granted. They had lived the majority of their lives socially, and enjoyed many friends and close relationships.

Eva didn’t.

That level of camaraderie was something she had never experienced or enjoyed before. Over the weeks during their relentless training, she had learned to appreciate it.

But those losses had hit her pretty hard. In her old life, she might not have cared as much, but now... She didn’tt want to lose another cadet!

Not only were they important to her, but they were important to each other. Every loss they suffered made the rest weaker. Every cadet that died cracked their armor that much more. She had to do all she could to prevent any more from dying.

Of course, she also knew that was an impossibility. She was certain that many more were going to lose their lives. This was only the beginning.

Out there, somewhere close by, were the two sibling terrorists that had attacked the yard. Their insanity had needlessly caused pain and death to many.

Eva etched their faces into her memory. She promised to make the siblings pay for the lives they had taken.

Eye for an eye.

She quickly ordered her cadets to quickly rearm and repair back at the yard. She wanted them all to get away from the front line, even for a little bit. She felt like she had owed it to them after she had put them through the paces.

Eva also committed their drones to the front line, since the majority of them were pretty much undamaged. There, they reinforced Spartan’s position and closed up all the gaps.

Although, before she split the unit, the machine gun wings swapped loadouts with the drones. They wanted to ensure that the front line had enough firepower to hold it. Those guns were the epitome in laying down suppressing fire.

Both Spartan and Eva’s units also picked up as many operational gauss rifles as they could, and split it equally between them. They ended up with little over a hundred of the guns each, which was an incredible haul.

The only problem was that their ammunition counts were low. Unless they found a way to rearm themselves, they needed to be sparse with their use.

Regardless, even with only a few reloads, those weapons had increased their lethality by a hundredfold.

These guns had proven themselves capable of ripping through the toughest armor on the field.

Firing a single round from it made a serious impact on their lives.

Eva and Chengli’s wings, along with every infantry mecha available, picked up the gauss rifles and set it on their backs. They were determined to use these weapons to dismantle their enemies as best they could.

However, even with superior weapons, the cadets’ mood didn’t improve at all. They had felt the rush of victory, but the feeling quickly subsided to the pain of loss. It left a hollow taste in their mouths.

They had already lost too many during Hell Week, and now they lost even more. And it was only the beginning of their military careers... If they ever saw any fighting again, they would continue to watch more and more of their friends fall in battle.

The reality of war hit them hard that cycle. They realized that their real duty was to fight and die, plain and simple.

Who else were they going to lose before the end? How many of their friends would fall in front of them?

How long would it be until they fell themselves?

As Eva’s unit pondered their existence, Wrench pondered survival in his own way.

He and his wing had gone up to the front line to determine the effectiveness of the repair yard there. What they found shook them to their cores. There were mangled heaps of metal, bloody cores that were torn open, and traumatized cadets sitting in damaged mecha all over the yard.

Various r/r cadets rushed to and fro as they put the damaged mecha back together, and threw the useless parts onto one of the many piles.

Wrench saw everything and decided to do what he did best – fix things. He immediately ordered his wing to carry back all of the scrap metal onsite, and bring them to the foundry near HQ with haste.

These things needed to be melted down and reconstituted cleanly. It wouldn’t do any good if they were just sitting around, doing nothing.

At the foundry, Wrench could simply take the melted parts and separate out each material into raw blocks. They could then turn around and reprint them into the materials they needed most. Although this process took time, it was better that they started now than never at all.

The repair materials were the easiest to recreate. They were sort of like high-tech printer cartridges. Except instead of ink, they were filled with various elements such as omnitronium, tungsten, iron, copper, and carbon.

The next thing he needed to recreate were the gauss rifle slugs. These were a touch more difficult, as the omnitronium-carbide slugs were wrapped within a coil of neodymium. The coil was necessary as it gave the slug its ferromagnetic qualities, which was critical in firing it.

The more magnetic the slug was, the faster it could go. And the faster it went, the more damage it did. Simple as that.

And there was little more magnetic than neodymium. Sure, he could have put together something more powerful than that, but neodymium was relatively easy to create. At least, given their circumstances.

Combined, these two made the perfect gauss rifle ammunition – incredibly tough and incredibly magnetic.

Most critically, Wrench wanted to fabricate new armor plating for the cadets. Their current ceramic plating was decent against regular fire, but couldn’t hold a candle against the slugs.

He was determined to increase their resilience by layering the armor instead. If he placed different alloy layers on top of each other, they would help absorb all sorts of attacks. It was the simple version of reactive armor, which changed its density and elasticity to deal with different damage types.

Here, woven alloy layers that had high elasticity could be sandwiched between solid alloy layers that had high strength. They could cover each others’ weaknesses better than one kind alone. It didn’t mean that they would be able to beat the slugs every time, but it gave them higher chances than not.

Wrench felt relatively powerless in times like these, as he wasn’t the type that went to the front and fought. Instead, he figured out better ways to keep the cadets safe.

Everyone dealt with loss in their own way.

Some like Wrench created better ways to protect others.

.....

Some like Spartan strengthened his cadets’ resolve.

Some like Eva promised cold vengeance.