"No one survives a bombardment like that," someone muttered behind Roger, staring up at the inferno still churning across the summit. The naval artillery had turned the ridge into its own weather system, black smoke boiling upward, lit orange from beneath.
"Don't count on it." A veteran from the 96th, barrel-chested and unhurried, didn't bother looking at the man who'd spoken. "The Imperial Guard digs in before we even know we're coming. You could drop the entire fleet's payload on that hill and they'd walk out of their tunnels afterward and light a cigarette."
Nobody argued with him. The men who'd been on the ridge before didn't argue. The men who hadn't were quietly reconsidering several assumptions they'd made about the day ahead.
The naval guns fell silent.
In the sudden absence of sound, the whistle of a commanding officer was almost gentle.
"All units - move out! Attack!"
"Federation!" Sergeant Howell's voice had a quality that cut through anything - smoke, fear, the ringing in your ears after artillery. It wasn't loud so much as unavoidable."Move! Up the nets! Now!"
Roger was already moving.
He didn't overthink it. The meat-grinder was inevitable, he'd known that before he set boot on this island and hesitating at the bottom of a cliff wasn't going to make the top of it any safer. He hit the ropes ahead of most of the squad, grabbed the coarse hemp with both hands, and started hauling.
The Garand across his back weighed a kilogram more with every meter of climb. His helmet shifted. The rope bit into his palms. Above him, smoke poured over the cliff edge in slow, greasy curtains.
Keep moving, he told himself. Momentum is armor.
Then - quiet as a breath - a chime sounded in his mind.
[NOTIFICATION: REPETITIVE ACTION DETECTED ]
Skill Acquired - CLIMBING (LV1) - Agility +10% during vertical ascent. Passive resistance to fatigue-based grip failure.
The effect wasn't dramatic. There was no surge of energy, no movie-hero swell of music. It was subtler than that, like the moment your eyes adjust in a dark room and you realise you can see more than you thought. His grip found the rope's rhythm. The weight across his back settled into something manageable. His arms stopped arguing with him.
Climbing Proficiency +1...Climbing Proficiency +1...
The progress notifications flickered at the edge of his vision, quiet and consistent, like a metronome. Roger filed them away and kept climbing.
So that's how it works, he thought, pulling himself over the lip of the cliff and rolling behind the nearest chunk of rock large enough to stop a bullet. Effort feeds the System. The System refines the effort. Simple enough.
He crouched, caught two breaths, and took in the summit.
He'd known it would be bad. He hadn't quite accounted for this bad.
Hacksaw Ridge, the plateau at the top, had been shelled, re-shelled, and shelled again over the course of multiple assaults. What was left wasn't a landscape anymore. It was a geological argument. Craters overlapped craters. Shattered defensive works jutted from the mud like the ribs of something vast that had died here and never been buried. The rope nets were anchored to boulders and the blackened stumps of trees that had been reduced to charcoal weeks ago, the only reason Federation troops could sustain repeated assaults on this cliff face was the abundance of cover at its very top, where the stone was still broken enough to hide behind.
Bodies everywhere. Olive drab and khaki both, folded into craters and stretched across rubble with the indifferent arrangement of men dropped where they stood. The smoke was thick enough that fifty meters felt like fifty feet.
Roger scanned it all through narrowed eyes and saw nothing moving.
Which, as it turned out, was the problem.
Captain Glover didn't rush them forward. He waited, crouched behind a boulder, until enough of the squad had crested the nets to form something resembling a line. Then he caught Sergeant Howell's eye and gave one short nod.
Howell stood. The squad spread into the ruins.
Roger moved in a low crouch, rifle up and tight to his shoulder, eyes tracking across the smoke. Beside him, a little behind, he could feel more than see Desmond Doss - unarmed, unhurried, face set with an expression that didn't have a name exactly, but sat somewhere between serenity and stubbornness. Doss wasn't scanning for threats. He was scanning for people who needed him.
Different objectives, Roger noted. Both necessary.
He didn't stop to talk. He knew the broad shape of how Doss's day was going to go - the man was, in the original script, one of the very few people guaranteed to walk off this ridge alive. But Roger wasn't in the original script. And in a world where a bullet couldn't read the credits, the only guarantee he had was the one he earned himself.
He had to be precise. He had to be perfect.
The battlefield held its breath.
Boots on gravel. The hollow clack of a loose helmet rolling across stone. Somewhere ahead, a piece of ruined timber settled with a groan.
Then - to Roger's right - a soldier stopped walking.
The man had found a corpse. Nothing unusual about that; there were dozens. But this one was lying face-up with its hands twisted toward the sky, fingers curled like talons, and something about it had snagged the soldier's attention in the particular, paralysing way that wrong things sometimes do. He stood there, staring. Then, nerves, morbid curiosity, Roger would never know, he reached out and touched the body's arm.
The corpse opened its eyes.
It didn't sit up slowly. It snapped upright, eyes wide, mouth stretched in a silent, ragged scream, driven by whatever last surge of adrenaline or pure animal terror was still running in the man's system. The Federation soldier beside it shrieked, a sound that had nothing dignified about it, just the raw output of a brain that had been handed more than it could process.
The silence of the plateau shattered like glass.
Bang.
A single shot from somewhere in the smoke. The Imperial Guard operative took it at the base of the skull and went still. The Federation soldier stood there for one frozen second, covered in blood that wasn't his, making no sound at all.
"Get down!" Roger was already moving, already shouting, already knowing it was too late.
It was too late.
The ridge came alive. From spider holes and shallow trenches hidden under decades of patient engineering, the Imperial Guard opened fire. They hadn't been hiding because the bombardment had stunned them. They'd been hiding because they'd been waiting, waiting for exactly this, a line of men caught in the open, attention fractured, no clear threat to fix on.
Seven men dropped in the first three seconds. Maybe eight. The numbers were hard to track in the chaos of smoke and screaming.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Grenades followed the rifle fire, lobbed from positions Roger couldn't see into positions he could, tossing earth and worse things into the air.
He was behind a splintered tree trunk before the second grenade detonated. Not thinking, moving. The System had wired the instinct in, and for the first time since arriving on this ridge, Roger was genuinely grateful for it.
He pressed his back against the wood and forced himself to stop.
Don't fire blind. A muzzle flash in this visibility was a navigation beacon for every sharpshooter on the plateau. He needed a target he could actually see, not just a direction he could spray lead into and hope.
Movement. There - the silhouette of Smitty-Rick, twenty meters out, a dark shape against the smoke. Smitty had assessed his cover options and, apparently finding them insufficient, had arrived at a solution that was either tactically inspired or completely deranged. He'd grabbed the upper half of a fallen soldier with his left hand, using the body as an improvised shield, and was leveling his M1918A2 Browning with his right.
Roger had a brief, horrified moment of pure admiration.
"Cover me!" Smitty grunted, and charged.
Roger swung out from the tree trunk.
Tat-tat-tat-tat!
Smitty's BAR hammered a line of Imperial Guard operatives as they climbed out of a concealed trench, cutting them down before they'd fully committed to the open. Roger caught the ones Smitty's arc hadn't reached, the stragglers, the ones ducking sideways, the one trying to reposition to a better angle.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The M1 Garand had a character to it that Roger hadn't expected. He'd known the mechanics, eight-round en bloc clip, semi-automatic, .30-06 Springfield, the weapon that a certain American general had called the greatest battle implement ever devised. What the technical specs hadn't communicated was the feel of it: the recoil predictable as a handshake, the trigger pull clean, the sights settling naturally like they were part of his own vision rather than a piece of hardware bolted to a piece of hardware.
The System's Ballistic Proficiency hadn't given him skill. It had given him the body of someone who'd built the skill over years, and dropped Roger into the driving seat.
He emptied the clip.
Ping!
The en bloc ejected with its famous metallic ring, a sound that had probably saved lives in a previous war by telling a soldier without looking that he needed to reload. Roger ducked below the tree trunk, drove the fresh clip against his helmet to seat the rounds, and jammed it home. The bolt slapped forward.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED ]Threat neutralised - Tactical objective secured.
Scenario Completion Data: +5
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED ]Unit commander neutralised - Command structure disrupted.Scenario Completion Data: +15
Roger registered the notifications the way you register a speedometer reading, noted, filed, moved on. He was back up and scanning before the second message finished displaying.
He swept left. A shape moved in the smoke at the edge of his vision, khaki-coloured, and his Garand came up without conscious instruction.
Bang.
He swept right. Two Federation soldiers bolted from cover twenty meters ahead, sprinting for a crater. One of them made it. The other took two rounds to the chest from a direction Roger couldn't pinpoint and went down hard into the mud.
"Dino!" The surviving soldier spun, reaching back, grabbing for his squadmate's arm.
Three Imperial Guard operatives rose from the rim of the same crater, bayonets fixed, choosing the worst possible moment from the Federation soldier's perspective and the most tactically sound one from their own.
Roger was already moving his sights.
He centered the front post on the lead operative, the one closest, the most immediate threat and pressed the trigger.
Bang.
The figure dropped. Roger was already adjusting for the second.
The assault hadn't been running for ten minutes and the ridge already looked like it had been running for ten hours. That was the thing about the Imperial Guard's defensive doctrine — it didn't try to stop you at the wire. It let you in, let you think you were making progress, and then it tried to take you apart from every direction at once while you were busy being pleased with yourself.
Roger had no intention of being pleased with himself.
He moved forward, kept low, kept firing, and tried very hard not to think about how many spider holes he couldn't see.
There were a lot of spider holes he couldn't see.
He found a moment of near-cover behind a collapsed section of trench wall and used it to reload and breathe and count his remaining clips. The tally wasn't panicking yet, but it was getting there.
Across the smoke, Smitty-Rick was still a force of nature, his BAR chattering in controlled bursts, his improvised shield long since discarded, moving through the ruins like he'd built them himself and was now remodelling. He dropped two operatives from a trench without breaking stride, reached for a grenade, and completely failed to notice the khaki-clad figure climbing silently out of a spider hole directly behind his left shoulder.
The operative had a fixed bayonet and a very clear angle and approximately two seconds of opportunity.
Roger had the Garand up before he'd consciously decided to raise it.
Bang.
One shot. The operative folded.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]High-value threat neutralised - Ally protected.
Scenario Completion Data: +15
Roger noted, without particular surprise, that protecting an ally seemed to register higher than a standard engagement. The System rewards outcomes, not just actions, he thought. Good to know.
"Thanks, Roger!" Smitty called back, glancing at the shape that had collapsed two feet behind him. He processed what he was looking at for a moment, and his jaw tightened slightly, the only outward sign that the near-miss had registered. Then it was gone. "Close one."
"Little bit," Roger agreed, already moving toward the next position. "And Rick, don't get out ahead of the line. You push too far forward in this smoke and you'll find yourself having a very personal conversation with the whole Imperial Guard."
Smitty rolled his shoulder and grinned. "Let 'em come. I've got enough lead for introductions."
Roger shook his head and kept moving. He's going to be the death of me, he thought, not for the last time.
He found Hollywood in a shell crater.
The man was built like a classical sculpture, broad shoulders, strong jaw, the kind of physical specimen that made recruiters happy and battlefields indifferent. He was curled at the bottom of the crater with his rifle clutched to his chest, his eyes fixed on the rim above him as though the smoke were a living thing that might reach down and take him.
Roger stopped at the crater's edge. He didn't have time for a therapy session, but he also had a pragmatic interest in Hollywood not dying here, every man still upright was fire he didn't have to provide himself.
"Hollywood." The man's eyes snapped to him. "That crater is not cover. It's a grave with good sightlines. You stay in it, you're a stationary target for the first grenade that finds it. Get up."
"I-"
"Get up."
Roger didn't wait to see if the instruction landed. He turned, leveled his rifle, and began firing into the smoke ahead - bang-bang-bang-bang - four rounds, methodical, targeting the muzzle flashes that kept strobing through the haze. The M1's semi-automatic fire laid down a tempo that the Guard's bolt-actions couldn't match. By the time they'd cycled for a second shot, Roger had already sent three.
An Imperial Guard operative clambered from a hole fifteen meters ahead, a primed grenade in his hand, arm already drawing back for the throw. Roger put a round into him before the arm came forward. The man collapsed, and the grenade went with him, back into the hole he'd come from.
BOOM.
The ground shook. Dirt rained over Roger's helmet.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Active threat neutralised - Explosive hazard eliminated.
Scenario Completion Data: +5
Behind him, he heard the scramble of boots on crater-side dirt. Hollywood had gotten up. His rifle was still shaking slightly, but it was pointing forward.
Good enough, Roger thought. Progress.
They pushed further into the ruins, moving between craters as the smoke shifted in the sea wind. Roger's lungs were burning, the air up here was a cocktail of cordite, burning wood, and something acrid he didn't want to identify but his legs were still moving and his Garand was still loaded, and in the current economy of the ridge, that put him ahead.
He found a shallow trench and went into it at a controlled slide, rifle up, checking both directions before his boots hit the mud.
Empty. For now.
A heavy thud to his right: Smitty, dropping into the trench beside him with the BAR already swinging to bear on the far side. A moment later, quieter, a leaner figure slipped in on Smitty's other side.
Doss. Covered head to toe in mud and blood, none of it apparently his own. He'd been moving across the plateau since the assault began, Roger had caught glimpses of him in the smoke, low and fast, appearing at someone's side and disappearing again. How he hadn't been shot yet was a question Roger didn't have an answer for and wasn't going to waste time on.
The trench held the three of them in uneasy quiet for a moment, the ridge thundering around them.
Then, from somewhere out in the smoke ahead - thin, ragged, unmistakable:
"Medic... help. Help me-"
Roger looked over the lip of the trench. A Federation soldier was pinned down in the open, forty meters out, bullets stitching the dirt around him in a patient, deliberate pattern. The Imperial Guard snipers weren't trying to finish him quickly. They were presenting him as an offer, come and get him and waiting to see who was stupid enough to accept.
Doss had already assessed the geometry.
"If they can't see us, we can't see them either," he said. It wasn't a question. It wasn't really a statement. It was Doss doing math out loud, arriving at a conclusion Roger wasn't going to like.
"Doss-"
Doss went over the rim.
Smitty stared after him. Then he looked at Roger with an expression of profound disbelief. "Is he-"
Roger was already moving.
He wasn't going out there for the wounded man specifically. He was going out there because he knew what was about to happen: the moment Doss exposed himself, every Imperial Guard operative with a sightline was going to reveal their position to take the shot. Which meant Roger was about to get a very clear picture of where every threat on this sector of the plateau was located.
It was, underneath the insanity, actually a reasonable tactical opportunity.
I'm telling myself that, he noted internally, and I'm going to keep telling myself that.
"Damn it," Smitty said, behind him, with the resignation of a man who has accepted his fate. Roger heard the BAR's bipod scrape the trench wall as Smitty came over too.
"Are they all crazy?" Andy "Ghoul" Walker's voice floated back from somewhere in the trench, watching the three of them dissolve into the fog.
Doss reached the wounded man at a low run and dropped to his knees beside him. His hands were already working, finding the wound, assessing, beginning to manage and his eyes were entirely on the man in front of him. He had the focus of someone who had made a decision about what mattered and had no bandwidth left for anything else.
"I've got you," he said quietly. "Frank. Where are you hit?"
He didn't see the three Imperial Guard operatives rising from the dust forty meters ahead. They'd been patient. They'd waited for exactly this. Their rifles came up in a coordinated line, all of them centred on the medic's back.
Roger arrived.
Bang-bang-bang-bang.
Four shots. Four positions on the front sight. The .30-06 rounds crossed forty meters before the operatives had finished their trigger pull, and the three rifles dropped without firing.
Roger stood over Doss, scanning the smoke for the next threat, his breathing controlled and his hands steady, trying not to think too hard about the fact that three people had just been aiming at a man kneeling in the dirt trying to save someone's life.
He filed that away instead, in a place he'd have to deal with later, and kept his eyes moving.
[SCENARIO DATA UPDATED]Ally protected - Imminent threat neutralised.
Scenario Completion Data: +5
[SKILL PROGRESSION]Ballistic Proficiency: +1
The notifications arrived. Roger noted them distantly, the way you note the kilometres ticking over on a long drive.
Then the crevice to his left opened up and an Imperial Guard operative came out of it at close range with a fixed bayonet, moving fast and low, and there was no time to bring the Garand around.
The steel was four inches from Roger's chest when the BAR spoke.
Tat-tat-tat.
Three rounds, tight grouping. The operative dropped at Roger's feet, so close that the man's momentum carried him forward and his shoulder clipped Roger's boot.
Roger looked down at the body. Then up at Smitty, who was already lowering the BAR's barrel, smoke drifting from the muzzle.
Smitty gave him a look that was partly a wink and partly I told you I've got enough lead.
"Thanks, Rick," Roger said.
"No problem." Smitty checked his magazine with practiced efficiency. "Now we're even."
Roger looked at the body at his feet for one more moment - young, he registered, younger than he'd expected; they were always younger than he'd expected and then he looked up at the smoke-filled plateau and kept moving.
There was still a lot of ridge left to clear.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.