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Everyone else was staggered all over the streets behind reinforced cover, shield walls, and other fortifications.

The melee wings were crouched low and hidden at the frontline flanks, Eva among them. They were itching for a fight, but needed to wait for the right time. Going out there right at the start would only lead to massive casualties on their end.

The artillery, demolitions, e-war, recon, and sniper wings were scattered around both rear and flank, determined to do their damage from further away.

Further beyond the rear was the repair yard and supply depot. Here, the r/r and rescue wings were hunkered down.

And back at HQ, Commander Riddell and his officers stood in the war room, surrounded by monitors, and oversaw the situation.

Every single one of them was still and quiet.

Cadets adjusted their rifles as they bore them downrange, their hearts thundering madly in their chests.

.....

The tension and the silence was deafening and overwhelming, but they all did their best to keep their cool.

Fear slowly crept through their ranks.

The calm before the storm was always a peaceful yet ominous moment. After all, storms were violent events where the world’s detritus would be washed away under streams of wind and rain.

Their storm however, was made of lightning and metal.

And every cadet felt that calm fear as it crept through them.

It was something that swam around in between moments, in between breaths, and grew. It pervaded the soul, shook it, and brought it down to its knees.

Chengli sent Eva a message through her DI. Right now unit comms were completely open, and they could feel each others’ fear and anxiety through the silence.

“Say something,” he messaged.

Eva was never one for words or camaraderie or friendly positivity. She was the kind of person that scoffed at those moments in movies, where the coach or the captain gave their team a rousing pep talk.

They were always passion-filled and galvanized them towards victory.

She thought they were stupid fantasies. Real life wasn’t like that. It was tough and brutal. No amount of words or charisma would ever change that. Positive thoughts had little power against omnitronium-carbide slugs or 25mm diamond-tipped chaingun rounds.

And even if she had wanted to, she simply didn’t know what to say, or do. What could she even say in the first place?

‘Don’t die?’

She didn’t think something like that would inspire people. In fact, she felt it would have done the exact opposite.

In the end all she said was, “Breathe.”

Somehow, it was enough.

That one word rippled through her unit, the word that Sergeant Akim had drilled into them, cycle after cycle, week after week.

“Breathe!” he yelled as they plunged into a 9g descent.

“Breathe!” he screamed as they ran for the fifth hour straight.

“Breathe!” he commanded as they did their mecha drills far beyond their limits.

Everything that they had learned, everything that they had done, everything that they had trained for culminated in this.

No matter how afraid or tense they were, all they needed to do was keep breathing.

Just as their hearts resolved, a tremor rose from the ground.

The rumbling increased in intensity as the moments ticked away.

Their overhead tactical displays showed red targeting markers, row after row of them, down every street. All of them were coming in hot and heavy.

Jets wide open and maxed out.

Armor patched up and solid.

Rifles primed and ready.

All the cadets saw for a while was a cloud of dust as the drones advanced, but the second they were within firing distance of each other, all hell had broken loose.

A torrent of munitions flew in every direction.

Fortifications were dented and warped and sundered.

Mecha were punctured and torn and pulverized.

Brave cadets were brutally slaughtered as enemy drones were terminated coldly.

Infantry fired their rifles and tore through enemy armor. The friendly drones had fired their machine guns nonstop at the oncoming enemies. The barrels of their guns began to glow as they poured hot death downrange.

Beamcannons sliced through the enemy drones’ power plants and caused them to explode. The shrapnel flew in every direction and damaged the other drones.

Artillery launched shell after shell as demolitions fired rocket after rocket into the thick of it. The drones’ rear line erupted with explosions and many were tossed into the air like dolls.

Snipers punched through their armor and pierced their CPUs while recon provided pin-point targeting data to every cadet on the field.

Even e-war had pitched in and fired randomly modulating signals that disrupted drone communications and reduced their response times.

The combined effect was staggering. Countless dozens were outright annihilated, many others were damaged and made vulnerable.

But it didn’t stop their charge. It didn’t even slow them down.

They laid down concentrated fire on various points of the cadets’ frontline defense, and annihilated everything that was there.

Even the doubled up fortifications didn’t last very long, and neither did the friendly drones behind them. They were ripped open and torn to shreds within seconds under the unrelenting bursts of slugs from the heartless enemy drones.

Some of that fire spilled past the front line and struck the fortifications meters behind, and riddled them with severe damage as well.

The drones didn’t even hesitate as they continued their charge and sped past the cadets’ front line, firing the whole way! They formed themselves into a column and squeezed off bursts at all of the cadets they could see.

One of the drones kept on firing at some fortifications until it was nothing but scrap, then continued firing on the cadet that was behind it. It took off large chunks of the mecha, and turned the cadet inside into little more than a red mist and a fine paste.

The drones ceased charging, and simply stood in the middle of the cadets’ lines, and caused utter chaos and devastation.

The cadets fired back as best they could, of course. How could they not? The enemy was right up in their faces! Their fear had risen through and caught them right in the throat. Their only response was to fight until they couldn’t fight any more.

So they held down on their triggers and aimed into the mass of drones in front of them.

Many on both sides were utterly devastated by this assault.

The drones flooded the streets with their numbers and everyone suddenly found themselves firing blindly into the huge swarm of mecha. The drones returned their fire as well, and blasted away at the cadets that were all around.

Some unit leaders and squad leaders were killed during all of this, and all manner of order broke down. Everything quickly spiraled into chaos as cadets charged in and began to physically take down their opponents.

By this time, all of the melee wings waiting in the flanks had charged into the enemy’s rear and absolutely devastated their numbers.

Eva and her wing in particular cut through the enemy lines like a sword through flesh. Their electrolances hummed as they tore through drone after drone and turned them into useless piles of garbage.

The cadets’ targeting displays were covered in red marks all around them, which made them all the more ecstatic.

Eva smashed into a drone and threw it sprawling onto the ground. Then she thrust her lance at it, and pierced through armor and structure with ease. Electricity lashed out and burned out all of the drone’s modules.

Its brief stint with sentience came to an abrupt end.

Sunflower highlighted the two siblings on Eva’s targeting display, which caused her eyes to narrow with predatory focus.

She, along with the rest of her unit, were absolutely determined to turn the siblings into dust.

The two siblings were grouped in a tight squadron of three hundred drones, and were dashing straight for HQ. It seems they slipped through the net while the cadets were busy in their chaotic battle.

“All squadrons in my unit!” she ordered. “Fall back to headquarters and take out any stragglers along your way. Nightraven, with me!”

Her wing then pulled back and dashed down the flank unimpeded. Chengli and his wing grouped up with hers while the other squadrons in her unit made their way back to base.

Eva’s wing was up front with their shields out and their spears low, while Chengli took up the rear with their shields to the side and with gauss rifles at the ready.

She was point, and he was overwatch, just like in Hell Week. Since that first spear charge, they had been reinforced with more cadets by the other squadrons. But they had taken some serious casualties during all this fighting, and were back down to a pitiful 30 cadets.

It felt a bit like old times, if a few weeks could have been considered that.

Regardless, 30 against 300 was suicide. One against ten. It was possible they could do it, but the odds weren’t great. Probably even downright awful.

Eva knew that the fight wasn’t number against number, however. What they needed was to get to the siblings and erase them as quickly as possible. If the two of them were killed, it meant no new orders.

No new orders would mean dismantling their little army would be that much easier.

But they couldn’t just muscle their way to the center of that formation, so Eva quickly sent a ping to Tyrant.

“Need your help,” she said.

Tyrant’s handsome face was stressed, and it was clear that the battle was seriously wearing down on him.

“We’ve got serious problems of our own!” he said. “Literally drowning under enemy fire!”

“Just hear me out, ok? Got these two signals that need deep suppressing, asap!”

.....

She quickly sent the data over to him, who quickly reviewed it as she kept talking.

“It’s the sibling’s simulcast,” she continued, “it looks tough, but if we disrupt it somehow...”

“Say no more,” Tyrant replied.

It only took one look for him to realize what Eva had given him. The drones weren’t naturally networked, and needed their open comms to provide instructions.

If they could suppress their signal, they could pause their drones long enough, or maybe even stop them altogether. The siblings would be easy prey after that.

Tyrant immediately had the e-war wing pull back and work on that problem.

Meanwhile, the 300 had entered the center square and immediately started circling HQ. They fired at it with their gauss rifles, and left dents and pock-marks all over the reinforced walls.

Defensive turrets reinforced with the sergeants in their mecha were in position behind fortifications all around, and fired back as the enemy drones dashed by. They did a little damage and picked off one or two, but the enemy zipped by too fast to do anything serious.

Nightraven came in roughly a hundred meters behind the enemy and nipped at their heels with their beamcannons and gauss rifles.

As the enemy circled around, they switched targets from randomly hitting the building to the turrets instead. They made sure to wreck those before switching their attention to weakening the fortifications.

Of course, they were whittled down by the defenses a little as well.

Almost all of Eva’s unit had also come in wing by wing and regrouped with everyone else. They had all taken some casualties, and many were damaged. But they still made it, and were ready to continue fighting.

They were down to less than 150 total, but their morale was still incredibly high.

The enemy suddenly stopped, got into formation, then devastated HQ’s defenses with their guns. They concentrated fire on one end of the line of fortifications and swept their way to the other end.

And since this was only on one side of the building, the others couldn’t come and help.

The sergeants along that defensive line were slaughtered like sheep.

At the same time, Eva’s unit had gotten into phalanx formation with all the shield wings up front. They charged towards the enemy rear while the gun wings covered them from their flank.

The enemy drones didn’t just sit there and do nothing, of course. Some quickly moved to defend their exposed side and fired into the shield wall, which damaged them to some degree. They attempted to concentrate their fire in order to slow the charge.

But Eva and her shield wings were already in melee before their shields could be shredded. They crashed into the drones and ripped them apart with lances and rifles.

The other squadrons fired their rifles into the fray, making sure not to hit any friendly mecha. Demo was unfortunately all out of rockets, however they still had their grenade launchers. They happily lobbed a few grenades into the middle of the enemy drones.

Drones were thrown around by the grenades, though their armor was only slightly weakened by the blasts. Any grenades that hit directly utterly wrecked whatever was at the point of impact, whether it was an arm, a leg, or part of their armor.

Eva pushed an impaled enemy drone off her lance while she bisected another with her beamcannon. When those two fell in front of her, she dashed towards the next drone and slammed it with her shield.

She reared back to thrust her lance into it, while lightning danced along its shaft as it charged up.

CRACK!

The unmistakable sound of a whip breaking through the sound barrier cut through Eva’s focus.

She suddenly found that she was unable to move her lance, and looked back to see why. There was a serpentine metal whip wrapped around it. On the other end of that whip was one of the siblings, Darius.

He was also in one of the experimental mecha, but was instead armed with two of those whips, one in each hand. His other arm started to move with mesmerizing, mechanical precision. His movements blurred as he sped up, which caused the whip to flick back and forth rapidly and violently.

It caused a series of whip cracks, one after another, almost like he had fired a machine gun! And that volley tore Eva’s electrolance to pieces right before her eyes.

The brother suddenly appeared on Eva’s comms display. His eyes were wild with bloodlust, and it was clear that he was reveling in their bloodshed.

“Squad leader Freya,” he said. “Been waiting for this.”