The steady chatter of machine gun fire drowned out the usual sounds of the swamp. Both of the .50 calibers mounted on their landing craft’s prows swept back and forth across the island, trying to clear enough space of the Orakh for the rest of the team to disembark. Occasionally, the staccato thump of a suit’s arm-mounted fifty caliber repeater marked one of the soldiers gunning down a submerged opponent before they could board a boat.
More than anything, the swimming Orakh were what worried Dan. Filling the boats with heavy battle armor made them ride much lower in the water than he’d like. Even though the Orakh wouldn’t have anything to push off of, enough of them could potentially capsize one of the vessels, spilling all of them into the water.
It wouldn’t be catastrophic. The suits were airtight and waterproof after all, but it wouldn’t be great. The Orakh were optimized to fight in the water, their webbed limbs giving them a strange sort of fluid grace that they lacked on land. Worse, the murky water robbed most firearms of their effectiveness after a couple feet. Clearing the bayou was daunting enough without having to fight their seemingly endless enemies where they held the advantage.
Dan’s mouth settled into a grim line as he took in the fairly constant stream of Orakh swarming over the island. If this kept up, running out of ammunition was a certainty. Their team didn’t even know how much farther they had to go; aerial reports only came back with vague reports, such as, “you’re a bit over halfway.”
“System,” he said softly, not wanting to distract the others. “Send a message to Group ‘Battlegroup.’ Text ‘stop firing at the island on a five count.’ Include a five-second timer.”
With a musical ding, the message was sent. Many of the soldiers either flinched or stopped what they were doing for a second as they processed it. Dan shook his head. Once this was over, he would need to find someplace isolated and drill them. Their lack of discipline and training was more than a little worrying.
At precisely five seconds, Dan mentally crossed his fingers that his team could follow a simple order and activated Gravitational Easing. Then, with a pulse of mana to his strength runes, he jumped. Behind him, the boat rocked from him kicking off, but Dan didn’t have an opportunity to truly worry.
In the air above the Orakh, he flung a Fireball into their midst, activating his spellshield as he landed. The heat from the explosion washed over him. Just outside the Fireball’s impact crater, Orakh kept charging. Dan flowed forward, slipping between their clumsy attacks and removing limbs with the nonchalance of an arborist pruning a tree.
Behind him, both ships used the gap he’d created to land on the island, disgorging their soldiers in a matter of seconds. Quickly, Jennifer slipped next to him and began her own dance through the enemy forces. Without speaking, they fell into an easy rhythm, quickly clearing their area of the island while Dan periodically dropped spells on any cluster of Orakh that looked likely to overwhelm anyone else from the team.
Abe had the recruits fighting in pairs, one using melee weapons to conserve ammunition while the other strategically gunned down Orakh to keep their partner from being overwhelmed. One-by-one, the tandem groups worked their way up toward where Dan and Jennifer fought. William and Abe ran freely, using short swords to pick off any Orakh that broke through the first part of each pair.
After about ten minutes, William called for a switch, allowing the front row of power-armored soldiers to step back and let their partner take over. The former front line took a quick break, breathing heavily. Dan smirked slightly to himself. All the cardio Sam put him through back at the Thoth Foundation was worth something. At this point, he could fight for another half hour or so before he even started to slow down.
They fought for almost another fifteen minutes before the first shaman showed himself. As soon as Dan saw him, he let out a grateful lungful of air. The fight was going well. The team’s gunners were mostly resting to save ammunition while their melee members staved off the Orakh onslaught, but Dan had noticed an unforeseen issue. The bodies of the Orakh had piled up to the point that the melee soldiers were beginning to have problems with their footing. A low berm of bodies literally led up to the battle line, stacked almost waist deep. Sooner or later, Dan would have had to act anyway.
The shaman introduced himself with a shower of acid over the front line, dousing raider and Orakh alike. The acid did little more than remove the paint from the powered armor and slide off Dan’s spellshield after Jennifer jumped behind him, but the Orakh fighting them almost uniformly fell to the ground, clawing at their skin and eyes. Apparently, the acid vaporized on contact, creating a cloud of acidic mist around the targets struck with it.
Darting over the unfortunate Orakh, Dan flashed ahead. The shaman spotted him, its narrow yellow eyes swelling as it frantically tried to cast another spell. Earth mana gathered around the Orakh when Dan’s Forcebolt slammed into its spellshield, spilling the creature onto its back.
Dan followed the magic, slamming his sword down with enough force to drain the spellshield before following up with a Lightning Stroke. The Orakh spasmed, body twitching and frothing slightly at the mouth. He plunged his sword and sawed to the side. A second later, the light left its eyes, and Dan sighed slightly.
He looked back at the rest of his team. Jennifer was just finishing off her own shaman while Abe and William almost toyed with another. Apparently, the three creatures had tried to spring an ambush on their team while they were occupied with the rest of the horde. The average recruits were just finishing off the last of their enemies before mopping up the injured and regenerating Orakh.
Abe walked up to Dan. Just as he approached, the facemask on his armor split down the center, bisecting itself to expose his concerned face. Abe briefly glanced over the still-steaming Orakh bodies before clearing his throat.
“There are a lot of Orakh out here, Dan,” Abe said blandly.
“Yeah,” Dan replied, pulling out a bottle of water and trying to replace the sweat he’d just lost in the sweltering fight. “Every time we knock over one nest, it seems like there’s another warren of the things just itching to give us a hard time.”
“I’m pretty sure that fight was roughly two hundred and fifty of those things.” Abe paused for a second, eyes going blank as he stared off in the distance. “If this keeps up, we’re going to be out of fuel in three fights and out of ammo in four.”
“And that’s only at the present rate.” Abe fixed his grim glare back on Dan. “Maybe you and Jennifer can step up a little more, but it only looks like it’s getting worse. Each fight brings more of the grunts. Hell, this is the first fight we’ve seen with more than one shaman. It’s like they’re banding together, and that really can’t be a good sign.”
“No,” Dan replied, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a frown written across his face. “We barely know anything about Orakh society, other than that it’s ‘bad,’ but none of this looks like a good sign. I’m worried about how the rest of the army is doing, if we’re hitting resistance this stiff. I’d take enough rifles against Orakh grunts, but none of them fought in Brazil. I’m not sure if they’ll be ready to deal with magic and spellshields.”
“Just a friendly word to his commander from a long-suffering soldier.” Abe flashed a dark grin at Dan. “Check in with command. If we push too far ahead, we’re going to end up surrounded, and the Orakh will be able to slip through our line. We’ll be fucked, and the militia behind us will be surprised and then fucked. I’d rather not be stuck out in a swamp overextended while waves of monsters try to kill us, and our supplies run low.”
Dan shrugged, fishing out his walkie talkie. They really weren’t struggling that much yet, but it didn’t hurt to give the troops a short period to catch their breath while he touched in with home base. Plus, they would need some of the militia to run a resupply out to them sooner rather than later. Even if he didn’t have to call now, he was only putting off the inevitable.
“This is Thrush, calling for New Orleans Command, over.” He waited for a couple seconds while fishing out his laminated map of the swamp and checking his position’s coordinates. “This is Thrush to command, is anyone there? Over.”
“Thrush?” An unfamiliar voice asked back, the speaker’s gender and voice a bit difficult to make out through the walkie talkie’s static. “What unit are you with, and where are you located? I can’t seem to find you on our org chart, over.”
“We’re the mercenaries. We’ve stopped to rest, and we’d like to request a resupply before we push on,” Dan replied, trying to massage the frustration out of his temples before reciting his coordinates to the confused soldier.
“Mercenaries?” Dan could barely make out the voice’s confusion as the machine’s static ate everything else. “Wait, where did you say you were? That’s almost three quarters of a mile ahead of the line! Confirm your location, over.”
“What do you mean?” Dan tried his hardest to keep his voice calm, hoping that the static would supplement his poor acting skills. “We’re on schedule per the timetable. Surely, someone would have let us know if the operation was bogged down. Given that everyone is fighting out of sight of the other units, there’s no way we would have known we’d gotten ahead of everyone else. Did you try to contact us? Over.”
Abe shot Dan an “I told you so” smirk that dug under his skin as they waited almost fifteen seconds for the communication officer on the other end to respond.
“Well, uh,” the voice on the walkie talkie stuttered for a second. “Your unit isn’t on any of the Army org charts. None of us knew to reach out to you. Plus, you must’ve been slowed down by the swarm of toads, too. There are hundreds of them on each island. How in the hell have you remained on schedule?”
Dan waited for about ten seconds, glancing back to Abe, whose grin had faded into a frown. Consciously, he unclenched his jaw and struggled to regulate his breathing.
“Uh, over, sorry about that,” the voice filled in sheepishly. Before the other person could cut the connection, another voice burst out in the background.
“Captain Anderson,” Dan could barely make them out through the static. “I think we’ve got them on the ropes. At least half of the forces in every engagement between Cypress Ridge and Lamonte’s Channel are disengaging. We’re pretty sure they’re about to go into a fighting retreat, if we–”
The voice cut off as Anderson stopped transmitting. Dan frowned; something about that exchange didn’t sit right with him. Whatever their faults, the Orakh weren’t cowards. They didn’t retreat. The only thing he could think of was that they were heading toward more appetizing prey.
“Uh, Boss,” Dan couldn’t see even a hint of a smile on Abe’s face as the soldier handed him a map. “I think you need to see this.”
Dan’s frown deepened as he saw where Cypress Ridge and Lamonte’s Channel were located. The two locations were just over a half-mile apart. In the exact center of those two points, fair ahead of their support, sat Dan’s team.
“Anderson, you little shit!” he shouted into the walkie talkie. “They aren’t retreating, they’re attacking us en masse because you were too busy taking a smoke break to check up on my unit! Get me some fucking support, and get it to me now!”
“Uh…” Even through the static, the Captain’s unadulterated panic rang out loud and clear. “I’ll uh… The General has to make that decision. I’ll have to, uhm… I”ll have to talk to him. No one will be manning my post while I get him. Goodbye, over.”
Dan stared at the walkie talkie in disbelief as it went dead. Abe elbowed him. On the three islands surrounding theirs, the Orakh were silently gathering. He began trying to count them but quickly gave up. A hulking Orakh, just shy of 10 feet tall, pulled his attention away. It pushed the others out of the way and took position at the crest of the low ridge that made up its island. The massive creature planted an axe the size of a man in the soft earth and stared down at them, arrogance and challenge in his beady yellow eyes.
