"Gas! The pigs are using gas!"
The screams tore through the murky haze that crept over the position like a poisonous green-yellow veil.David jolted awake, ripped from his brief sleep. Before his mind could catch up, his hands were already moving. Instinctively. Drilled. Automatic.
He snatched up his gas mask and pulled it over his head, the motions mechanical and detached — exactly as the militia had beaten into them.
All around him, his comrades did the same. But some were too slow.Those who failed to don the protective talisman in time collapsed to the ground, convulsing, gagging. Bloody foam poured from their mouths and noses, their eyes reddening like ruptured vessels.
Their skin began to blister, to burn — as if invisible knives were peeling it away.The chemistry did its merciless work:
The gas tore a hydrogen atom from the moisture in their mucous membranes, recombined — hydrochloric acid.And it devoured.
It devoured lungs.It devoured eyes.It devoured flesh.
"Chlorine gas!" the sergeant bellowed over the din. "Check seals! Check the rubber lips — now!"
As ordered, everyone pressed their gloved hands firmly over the filter intakes.One breath.Was air leaking in?
No.
Sealed.
David felt the mask cling to his face.All he could hear was the pounding of his pulse inside the helmet, the distorted screams of the dying — and the distant, steadily approaching rattle of enemy machine guns.
Chlorine gas.He remembered history class.This abomination of the First World War had once been meant to end pointless slaughter — and instead became yet another chapter in industrialized death. The Eastern State was not using it for the first time. Someone had handed them the blueprints of lost humanity, along with all its cruelties.
Fritz Bosch — chemist, father of artificial fertilizer, creator of the most efficient killing tools of his age.A man who forged food for billions and poison for millions with the same precision.A man whose science was creative, life-giving — and utterly merciless.
How does someone live with such a legacy?How do you sleep knowing your inventions still corrode, maim, and kill people generations later?Was he a monster?Or merely a misunderstood genius in a monstrous age?
A hand tore David from his thoughts.Gabriel stared at him through the fogged lenses of his mask.David understood. In one motion, he took position and raised his rifle.
The sergeant screamed into the field phone as if he could hold the world together by force of voice alone:
"THEY'RE USING GAS! SEAL THE GATES! ALL BULKHEADS CLOSED! FILTERS ON!REINFORCEMENTS THROUGH THE MAINTENANCE TUNNEL — NOW!"
His voice cracked through copper lines like a mechanical lightning strike, indifferent to the boiling gas cloud creeping toward the position.
Medics rushed to the dying — the burned, the lung-ruptured.Those who hadn't managed to don their masks lay writhing, vomiting foam and blood-tinged fluid.Their skin sloughed off in slick, burned sheets as the air in their lungs turned into acid.
The medics dragged them over sandbags and barricades into a side tunnel — into the deeper darkness beyond the line — clinging to the faint hope of reaching the infirmary.Many wouldn't make it.
For a moment, amid all the chaos, an unnatural calm settled in.Only the distant, meditative crackling of the sea of fire remained.
But the war kept crawling forward.Relentless. Like rust eating steel.
"Searchlights! Now!" the commander shouted, his voice rasping — the chlorine had already begun to gnaw at his lungs."All to positions!"
A coughing fit nearly knocked him over.
"Flamethrowers and MGs, man your posts! Establish a fire line! Do not let them through!"He gasped."We are the shield and sword of humanity. We will break these gen-fanatics on our lines! For the Consul!"
The soldiers pressed low behind the sandbags, faces buried against the cold steel of their weapons.With an electric crack, four searchlights ignited, each slicing one of the parallel tunnels with a harsh, blinding beam.
"Shit…" David muttered beside his only friend. "This stuff was banned under the Seven Shepherds Accord."
"As if they'd care," Gabriel growled. "They wipe their asses with treaties."
"Shut up and focus!" the political officer barked.
Silence fell instantly.
Before them raged a hellish symphony:barking jets of flame, the distant chatter of MG nests, the echo of dying voices.Yellow-green wisps of smoke slithered from the darkness, dancing in the light before dissolving.
With a dull, mechanical clack-clack, the MG crews chambered rounds.One in the chamber.Hundreds more on the belt.
Each was a small, polished messenger of death — ready to tear the enemy apart and drive them back into the fog.
"There they are! They've got—"A crack split the sentence in half.The soldier collapsed without a sound, as if his soul had been ripped out. His body hit the concrete heavily; the helmet clattered beside him.
What had he seen?
Beyond the line — behind the barricade, behind the silver tangle of barbed wire and welded tank traps — the enemy lay in the vibrating darkness of the tunnel.But something was wrong.
"They're coming! Target them! One shot, one kill!"The political commissar repeated the last words like a broken litany.Conservation no longer mattered. Survival was everything.
Then they emerged: black silhouettes, metallic weapons gleaming in the searchlight glare.From all four tunnels they poured forward — an endless, surging mass.The penal regiment that had held the line before them had been wiped out. Surprised, suffocated, dissolved by the toxic veil the Eastern State so fondly called "Tactical Cleansing."
"Shit… we're not surviving this!"
A single shot cracked — not from the enemy.From behind.
David spun around.The scarred political commissar stood there, pistol still smoking, over the body of one of their own.
"We have strict orders to hold this sector — at any cost!" he rasped, the gas eating his voice away."Unauthorized withdrawal constitutes desertion and will be punished by death under the Revolutionary Military Tribunal!"
"Between hammer and anvil," David thought.The Eastern State ahead.The tribunal behind.
They would die either way.In the Blood Channel — like his father.Like his brother.
"Open fire!" the commissar shouted, as if he'd already forgotten he'd just executed a comrade.
The flamethrowers roared as one.Yellow pillars of fire burst forth, licking steel, flesh, and cloth.A piercingly sweet stench filled the air — burning tissue, clinging and sticky, seeping into every crevice.
The tunnels flooded in violent surges of burning liquid.Every crack and junction blazed with light.Metal surfaces glowed like the breath of mechanical dragons.
The tactic was simple:Any enemy advancing through the tunnels would be incinerated.Fifteen minutes of fuel — then fate returned to the infantry.
Chemical and thermochemical weapons like white phosphorus had been outlawed even before the Third World War and reaffirmed after the Great War. But the Eastern State had never signed the accord. And so the Union saw no reason to restrain itself against such an inhuman enemy. After all, the Union used incendiaries — not poison gas. The ideals of Realists and Utopians demanded humane warfare, but once the enemy broke the accord, as the Southern League had, the Union saw no reason to limit itself further.
The stench intensified.
"Do you smell that?" Gabriel asked, risking a glance despite his firing stance.
"Yeah… we're grilling them. Properly."
"You get used to it. Now they finally feel why it would've been better to sign that damned treaty. Burn, you pure-bloods… burn."
In the beams of the flamethrowers, charred bodies performed a grotesque, horrifyingly beautiful dance — a dance of death without music, without mercy.
Dozens fell to the defenders' flaming hatred. An entire assault wave vanished into the inferno, swallowed by boiling tongues of heat and agony. Minute by minute, the spectacle repeated, until the fire streams weakened.
"Commissar!" one flamethrower trooper shouted."We're out of ethanol! Only a few minutes left!"
The commissar nodded. His face remained unmoved.
"Infantry — fix bayonets!"
A metallic rasp rippled through the line as blades locked beneath barrels.The tunnel grew quieter. Only the dying hiss of the flamethrowers remained — the Greek fire that had shielded them fading away.
"Wait… let them come closer."The commissar raised his arm, fist clenched.
Then he opened his hand.
Grinning, the bearded MG gunner yanked the barrel up. With a thunderous roar that shook the concrete, he opened fire.Volley after volley tore through the tunnel. Plaster rained from the ceiling as if it might collapse at any moment.
David followed suit. Aim. Fire. Fire again. Every shape in the light fell — yet more kept coming.For every one that dropped, two more rose from the fog.
A hard click spoke unmistakably.
"Shit…" David hissed, dropping the empty magazine and slamming in a fresh one.
Ricochets screamed over the sandbags, rounds chewing into concrete and steel.
"Gabriel!"
"What?!"
"Is it just me — or are they barely shooting back?"
"What?!"
"They're hardly firing! Just sporadic shots!"
"Doesn't matter! Keep firing!"
An eternity of slaughter passed. Bodies tangled in the metal growth of barbed wire, impaled and woven into a blood-soaked tapestry of war.Charred corpses paved the killing lane.The stench of burned flesh, acidic gas, and gunpowder residue weighed on the air like lead.
If there was a god of blood and murder, he would have smiled at this offering.
"Fall back! Cease fire!" the commissar shouted.
Was it really over?
David scanned the battlefield. Blood trickled into the tunnel, vanishing into the darkness.They were all dead.
Then why did no one advance?
Why deploy gas if you didn't exploit the advantage?
"Come on," Gabriel gasped. "Let's search no-man's-land. Last thing we need is one of those pigs pulling a grenade with his dying breath."
Before David could answer, Gabriel was already asking the commissar.
A heavy nod.
They left the line, bayonets forward. The mist shimmered in the rear glow of the searchlights. At first they tried to step around the bodies — impossible. Boots sank into soft flesh, tearing skin from bone. Every step was wet and obscene.
One fighter still lived — or what remained of him, fused to his burned uniform. Gabriel drove the bayonet through his throat to end it.
"Look," he panted. "Six fingers."
Only then did David truly see it: extra limbs, missing fingers, swollen growths. One corpse even bore a small second head.
"Shit… mutants…"
Their weapons were crude scrap constructs. Rags soaked in urine hung over mouths and noses. They didn't even have gas masks.
Cold dread seized David.
"We need to leave. Now."
"What?"
A howl echoed in the distance. Mechanical. Loud. Unnatural.The walls vibrated.
A flash.Then the impact.
Something tore into Gabriel like a hammer blow. A fist-sized hole opened in his abdomen. He collapsed.
David dragged him back under fire, pressing a bandage into the wound.
"Don't shoot!" he screamed. "Password!"
Silence.
Gabriel's legs tangled in the wire.
"Password or we turn you into Swiss cheese!"
"Falcon! Damn it, it's us! Get medics!"
"What's out there?!"
Gabriel's voice was barely there.
"There's… there's a—"
David felt it before he saw it.The weight.The vibration in the concrete.
"TANK!"
Yes.
Panzer shock.
The mutants had been bait.
The real attack had only just begun.