Their comms lit up as countless soldiers requested support through a dozen different channels as they moved through the alleys to find a holdout point. Kilo was practically dragged along through his daze until they finally found safe grounds.
"GET UP. YOU'RE COMING WITH US TO CLEAR ONE OF THE SKYSCRAPERS!" Kilo snapped back as an older soldier practically screamed in his ear, much to Kilo's dismay his helmet didnt block it out.
Six soldiers including Kilo darted across alleys before storming into the lobby of a skyscraper housing enemy forces. They didn't encounter any resistance until the thirteenth floor, they were pinned down on the only stairwell in the skyscraper. Kilo's arm had stopped bleeding but the pain was only getting worse as he tried his best to fire accurately. He was pulled back as one of the soldiers yelled for him to cover their rear instead of firing head on. It felt like an eternity before they were able to move up further through the doorway but it wasn't without casualties, the few lifeless bodies slumped in the stairwell were haunting but he moved on.
Kilo continued to cover their rear while the rest of the small squad cleared that floor, they returned with one less. They cleared the rest of the skyscraper without finding anymore hostiles, unfortunately the same could not be said for the soldiers in the other skyscrapers. Just as Kilo's squad began to move out of the building deafening blasts shook every skyscraper like an earthquake. The frigates had finally opened fire after receiving the exact coordinates of where they needed to strike.
The convoy below made it difficult but the precision from the cannons was unparalleled minimising the debris hitting the convoy. The precision of the strikes forced the skyscrapers to tumble over into one another in a domino effect. Kilo's small squad were sprinting down the stairwell as shells struck the side of the building they were in, they were licky to make it back to the holdout point before they were crushed by debris.
With the booming of shells striking their targets becoming less frequent many of the scattered groups from the convoy formed back with what was left. The SDF proved vital in driving the enemy out of that city, the remain convoy and soldiers soon made it the the Eklan with most of the supplies they needed. Kilo spent the rest of his deployment on that god forsaken war torn planet, he watched countless friends and what he considered family be killed.
He left that planet with severe PTSD just like everyone else but the difference between Kilo and the rest was that Kilo had dealt with that level of death before. His diagnosis after the deployment showed his mental state hadn't changed much given all that happened, the only normal thing they found was his reoccurring nightmares but they too disappeared after only a few months.
That war was now blended with the countless deployments into war zones he had been in. Dozens of systems, hundreds of planets, trillions of lives, it all seemed so small to him.