Should active warfare ever feel routine? Monotonous?

  Part of Ranthia strongly felt that it should not. That the act of ending lives should always have profound weight. These were no mere monsters or dangerous animals, they were living, thinking beings. Even the shimagu themselves within the hosts were sapient beings in their own right.

  There had been multiple skirmishes since the battle with the large force, and Ranthia had decided that she truly took pride in freeing beings from being puppets enslaved by the parasites. After all, she would undoubtedly prefer to be killed—living like that, trapped inside of her own body while another being used her to commit atrocities, sounded plainly unacceptable. It was no wonder that those that lucked into reaching a class up hid within themselves for the rest of their days. As such, she had no guilt over killing them, aside from that weird bit of inconsistent guilt over not feeling guilty enough. Minds were weird.

  But as days turned into months, warfare had—despite her best mental efforts—become routine. There weren’t battles to be fought every day. In fact, most days were quiet and boring (often punctuated by a false call of alarm from those on wall duty). On those days, she and the legionaries would just sit around and chat. They were still awkward around her, but she adamantly refused to live as an outsider for a year—so she worked her social charms, such as they were (she adamantly refused to drop any of her Skills just for a largely redundant social Skill).

  Food was a frequent topic of conversation when they talked. Sure, Doctius—Doc as he preferred to be called—kept them remarkably well-fed for the front lines. The man had used the seeds that were delivered alongside Ranthia to triple the size of the base’s gardens and there were a variety of vegetables and roots and greens for them to eat. He even grew a few simple spices and herbs. But outside of the occasional dinosaur carcass (unless they lost their minds and decided to try to sup upon ogre) that they could harvest before it went off, they were on a vegan diet. Though, depending on who she spoke to, many argued that the greater problem was the utter lack of wine or beer.

  As such, food was a common conversation. Dishes they missed. Ranthia’s fancy meals that she had enjoyed before she deployed were a frequent request. People just wanted to hear details about what was in them, how they tasted, their textures, and the aromas. Ranthia hadn’t exactly expected war to develop her skills in describing culinary experiences—she even got offered an actual Skill for vividly remembering flavors, not that she took it—but it was one of the more popular topics around the nameless base. It was harmless, unlike many other potential topics.

  Nobody much liked to talk about family; even the people with kids out there got superstitious about it. Plans for after they returned to Remus were similarly taboo, though some of them joked about not being sure if they could go back to living in the Dead Zone. Privately, Ranthia suspected many of them weren’t joking—it was a thought that echoed in her own mind sometimes.

  Yet the largest taboo around the base, bizarrely, turned out to be sex. Sure, lurid conversations about attractive men or women they had seen or prior experiences they had enjoyed were sometimes discussed, but Ranthia had never expected the act of sex to ever be taboo. Any time two—or more—people in the base tried to get intimate, inevitably someone overheard and then the collective of soldiers shamed and ostracized those that had been involved. A bizarre peer-pressure-enforced abstinence had been widely adopted—even among the romantic partners deployed together. Ranthia had no idea why, though she vaguely speculated that the lack of camp followers had a lot to do with it. A desire to avoid pregnant legionaries (it wasn’t like they could find silphium in the wasteland around them and it was notoriously challenging to grow intentionally) that had been twisted into something entirely awful.

  The base had been there for a few years before Ranthia got there—many of its cultural quirks predated almost everyone stationed there by that point. New batches of troops were indoctrinated in the policies—no matter how baffling and bizarre they were—and carried them forward to the next group. It wasn’t like Ranthia was eyeing up any of the women there anyway—sure, some of them were attractive, but Ranthia hadn’t let herself get thrown into war so she could find love. If lust was off the menu too, fine enough. Even if it left some of the longer quiet periods obnoxiously dull.

  Not that Ranthia got along with everyone. The base’s Commander still just seemed gruff and unapproachable in Ranthia’s eyes. Doc was someone she went out of her way to avoid; it was difficult to say more than one or two words to him without being drawn into an extremely long lecture about proper nutrition and/or his garden. Then there was the base’s lead [Healer], who was just called Healer by most; the man was just a judgmental asshole who had a chip on his shoulder about women being in combat. Even most of the men avoided him.

  And Ranthia wasn’t sure anyone got along with their nameless dwarf. The extremely bald man (seriously, eyelashes were important!) was plainly disinterested in speaking to anyone beyond the minimum that was necessary. When Ranthia had discovered that yes, his knives deteriorated far faster than conjured material was supposed to, the man had just told her that he was [Forsworn], as if that explained a single bloody thing. While she was waiting for the Legion armorers to finish repairing her armor she wasted more than a little time trying to get an explanation, then finally instead just pitched an idea she had for a system for managing the knives—which was accepted with a grunt. The others that shared the tent with the gruff dwarf were giving her looks by the time she was done—that or they were jealous of how much arcanite she carried—but at least her knife troubles were handled.

  Her idea was to keep four crates at her tent. One crate for freshly conjured knives, one crate for not-quite-freshly conjured knives, one crate—the crate she would use first—for knives that were closest to his bizarrely early failure rate, and then one crate for knives that might have minor degradation—for emergencies. Once the knives got too ‘old’ she would bring the crate for the oldest knives to him and exchange it for a new freshly conjured knives crate. Realistically, the system was needlessly convoluted—with how short a time his knives lasted, three crates made more sense—but she wanted to be sure she never ran out in a crisis. The dwarf was also responsible for keeping the base’s archers in arrowheads and probably had other conjuration duties, so she refused to count on him having the mana on hand for another crate on demand.

  The next big attack had arrived. The force was roughly half the size of the previous, but they had two massive dinosaurs—each nearly the size of the tarbosaurus—that identified as [Therizinosaurus – Wind]. The first was level 583, the second was level 621. They were clear threats, yet they held back as their force of (mostly) ogres (with strangely few mid-sized dinosaurs in the group) attacked the base.

  Ranthia was held in reserve for a time, ready to counter the dinosaurs—not that Ranthia at all looked forward to doing so—but finally the Commander sent word that she was free to engage with the main force. If the dinosaurs were going to stay back and watch, so be it.

  Once again Ranthia fell into the rhythm of war, flanked by four of her images. Through [Void Edge], knives were exchanged for kill notifications, brutal injuries, or the erasure of enemy weapons. Ranthia was trying to do her best to not to take any further damage to her armor—she had lost some of the arcanite from it in the last big battle and she had no intention of losing another stone. The armor could be mended, but the arcanite was irreplaceable.

  Even if it was weird and more than a little backwards to fight to protect her armor, but against the clumsy, Skill-less puppets of the shimagu, it was possible. So long as she was careful.

  [*ding!* You have slain an ogre [Rock Breaker] (Earth, level 256), [Desperate Farmer] (Verdant, level 256)//shimagu [Silent Antagonist] (Ooze, level 399), [Lazy Guard] (Earth, level 381)!]

  [*ding!* You have slain an ogre [Sewage Specialist] (Poison, level 149), [Snack Pilferer] (Dark, level 201)//shimagu [Sweet Promises, Bitter Results] (Ooze, level 257), [Aspiring Politician] (Sound, level 200)!]

  [*ding!* You have slain an ogre [Loyal Laborer] (Fire, level 384), [Baker of Cookies and Nothing Else You Ingrates] (Fire, level 251)//shimagu [Friendly Words] (Ooze, level 420), [Melodic Merchant] (Metal, level 312)!]

  Wait, how had she gotten three kill notifications from a single attack with each of her—

  It was funny how some lessons in life continually repeated time-and-time again. Ranthia had learned, more times than she could count, the dangers of getting overly focused on the moment. Hunting’s lessons had likely largely been directed at making her more aware of the world. Yet the first time she learned of the therizinosaurus’ approach hadn’t been the regular tremoring of the ground—in hindsight, too steady to be a [Mage]’s bombardment. Nor had it been the shouts from the wall, or even the Subcommander’s desperate call to focus fire—noise that had, in retrospect, intensified beyond the normal shouts that dominated warfare.

  Instead, she first learned of the danger when [Combat Awareness] screamed a warning and [Rhythmic Grace] carried her dance’s momentum into a sudden attempt to evade the claws that aimed to skewer her heart. The claws of the therizinosaurus had looked massive from afar, but Ranthia had never expected the reach of the beasts to be so ridiculous. The dinosaur wasn’t even within her sphere of combat, yet its claws still pierced through the laminar at her back—low enough that it wasn’t immediately fatal, thank Xaoc.

  Ranthia released her channel, even as she slashed a knife through the claws, pirouetting as she was freed to ensure she cleaved through them all. A heartbeat later, she seamlessly transferred to one of her intact images—she was down to two thanks to her senses focusing inward on the moment of crisis—and drove her other knife through the throat of an ogre. She needed to establish a zone of control.

  [*ding!* You have slain an ogre [Community Childcare Expert] (Light, level 419), [Fashion Dreamer] (Mirage, level 119)//shimagu [The Best Friend You’ll Never Have] (Ooze, level 451), [Math Fanatic] (Water, level 388)!]

  The therizinosaurus charged at her other image with a high-pitched, unholy shriek of rage. Ranthia was about to charge at the beast, but she forced herself to stop and take stock of the broader situation. There was a second dinosaur out there, and she really didn’t want to make the same mistake yet again on the heels of the first.

  A solution provided itself. When she checked the situation on the nearest wall of their base, Ranthia’s eyes met one of the artillery [Mage]’s—a man that specialized in a potent beam of Arcanite energy—and a plan coalesced. Ranthia flashed a few hand signs his way and— …Godsdamnit, she didn’t even know if the Legions were trained in hand signs like Rangers were and there was no time to try to remember if any of the ex-Legion members of her Ranger Academy years had been present in those courses! She just had to hope the man either understood or at least recognized that he was waiting for her signal.

  The distraction had cost her the last image she had up, but she didn’t need it. The other therizinosaurus hadn’t approached yet, at least, which made life easier. Ranthia closed in on the beast, though she was twice forced to pivot a bit to allow arrows from a nearby ogre to glance off her armor’s laminar vest. Other ogres were trying to close in behind her, but she was faster. Stats only multiplied a being’s natural capabilities and, thankfully, ogres weren’t really any faster than humans naturally. They were certainly stronger—individuals far beneath her level had rivaled or surpassed her own strength (not that it was a focus of hers)—but never faster.

  The dinosaur lashed out with its intact claws, only for Ranthia to cleave through those massive claws just as she had the first time, even as she pressed her charge. At the last moment, Ranthia leapt into the air and delivered the most powerful kick she could to the beast. The therizinosaurus was almost certainly stronger than her, but it was in mid-run and clearly hadn’t anticipated the blow. It staggered backwards, getting precious distance from the wall.

  Ranthia lunged at the ogres that had been chasing her, a moment before a brilliant beam of power tore through the air and smashed into—and, a few moments later, through—the therizinosaurus.

  The other therizinosaurus wisely fled without trying to engage them.

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  As the days passed, the Legion soldiers seemed to gradually come to terms with her presence. After all, familiarity eroded the reputation she was afforded as a Ranger—War or otherwise—personally delivered by a Sentinel. It was hard to treat someone like a being out of legend after you’ve squatted next to them over the latrine. With the mysticism stripped away, people finally were getting more and more comfortable treating her like another legionary. At about the same time as Ranthia began to find broader acceptance, the Subcommander started to join in on social events too.

  Ranthia gradually got used to the unique rhythms of the base. Every eight days a unit of sixty-four soldiers (plus Ranthia, usually) were deployed for scouting, just as she experienced during her first morning in the base. Also every eight days (namely the day after their scouting mission) a messenger bird was exchanged with the main alliance base—the one Statia was stationed at—to report the base’s status and updates on shimagu movements in their area. If there was little to report—roughly once a month or so, in practice—Ranthia was usually able to get permission to use a corner of the tiny scroll to write a few words to her fellow War Ranger. Fortunately, her dexterity and the natural grace from [She who Dances with Chaos] had refined her handwriting and she was capable of a remarkably tiny, neat script.

  Most battles were small skirmishes that were handled fairly swiftly. They were probes meant to test their defenses and readiness. Larger forces of shimagu and their victims were uncommon, and only came once or thrice a season, it seemed. Yet each large force necessitated days of fighting and constant bloodshed. Yet the base always endured and Ranthia always personally killed a number of sentient beings that probably should have unnerved her, and then the surviving shimagu ultimately retreated. Very few groups fought to the bitter end.

  Fallen allies were retrieved—though some bodies ominously went missing—and were given proper funeral pyres. Dead enemies were handled by a pair of fire [Mages] (Ooze/Inferno and Fire/Pyronox) stationed at the base and were torched where they fell. Leaving bodies to rot was a terrible idea for many reasons, not the least of which was the danger of attracting an ornithocheirus flock.

  Not that anyone was entirely sure if Remus’ dreaded aerial predators even lived out in that wasteland.

  Months crept by, as Ranthia fell into the routine of the frontlines. Her levels continued to creep up, with the exception of her [Covenant]. Once it reached level 100, it largely stopped—unless she did something wildly chaotic on the battlefield that usually resulted in another argument with the Commander.

  As if it was her fault that the artillery [Mage] had panicked when she danced into his [Barrage of Shards]—she had been fine, she got into the attack on purpose to lure the shimagu in!

  Yet no matter how many shimagu they killed, no matter how many hosts they liberated into the talons of Black Crow, not a single trace of the shimagu’s notorious twins appeared. Many legionaries began to question if such powerful threats even existed, though Ranthia knew better. Hylla had been murdered by one, after all.

  To her, it was clear that their base was too unimportant for the twins to bother with. It made sense, Ranthia knew they were just one base—a small one at that—out of at least 12, with plans for a full 16. They were close to shimagu territory, but they also weren’t especially important—there was nothing in their area, after all. The base was probably just positioned where it was because some now-absent classer had been able to punch a reliable well there.

  The dreaded twins had better targets to counter.

  The idea of the war becoming routine was dangerous, and the obvious terrible consequence followed. Battlefields were always in flux, on a scale beyond the perception of their tiny, nameless base. ‘Routine’ established expectations, and expectations existed only to be broken.

  Which was why Ranthia was wildly unsurprised when she was woken up by their base’s horn (the ones the shimagu used had a very different sound, theirs were shriller). The pattern was brief, but clear: imminent disaster.

  She slept in her armor, so she only took a moment to put on her belt, slip on her bandolier of additional knives, and check the straps. Once she was done, she poked her head out of the tent and put an image at her customary position at the wall—next to where the Subcommander usually stood—and shifted to it.

  And found herself standing next to a grim-faced Commander. The woman was holding some sort of brass tube over her eye and looked like she had just been forced to swallow a plainly diseased rodent.

  “What’s the problem?” Ranthia asked.

  The woman just handed Ranthia the device and pointed in a direction. Ranthia had no idea what the device was, but when she held it to her face as the Commander had done, the answer presented itself. The tube, somehow, let her see even further than she already could, even if it made everything a bit blurry.

  Blurry or not, it painted a bleak picture.

  “That looks… much larger than usual.” Ranthia whispered.

  A large force, until that night, had been eight thousand—give or take—shimagu hosts. In most battles their estimations were somewhat rough since past a certain point it made little difference whether there were an extra 1024 individuals or not. Their legionaries had better things to do than count numbers while they were under attack, after all.

  Many, many times the normal numbers of a ‘large’ force swarmed around the base. Over a hundred and twenty-eight thousand was the best guess any of them could make. Yet they had little better to do than to try to speculate. A handful of the shimagu forces traded long-range attacks with the base, through bows or flung stones. But mostly they just… kept moving.

  Ranthia had learned that their base was one of the deepest ones the alliance possessed. It had been intended as a forward base for… well, not much as it turned out. As the Commander had explained it, the main purpose of their base was to skirmish with the shimagu forces, which took pressure off the rest of the alliance.

  But these hostiles had no interest in them. Given the direction, they were after the main alliance base. And there was little to nothing that Ranthia and the other legionaries could do to change their mind.

  [Warriors] fired arrows. [Mages] emptied their mana. Some of the shimagu fought back. Not enough to matter. The vast majority of the endless sea of their forces just slipped past their base. The kills they harvested as they were ignored didn’t even put a true dent in the army.

  Ranthia dove down and struck their forces in a desperate, graceful fury. Almost immediately, bolts of Lightning that melted the stone around her forced her to retreat to the wall. And yet the ogre [Mage] ceased his attacks the instant Ranthia was back on the wall. [Mage – Lightning] level 610, [Mage – Brilliance] level 501, [Mage – Metal] level 327. He was almost certainly a twin, yet he just watched her and the other defenders atop the wall.

  The Commander ordered them to stand down and cease attacking, after which the ogre immediately moved on. No one dared to go against the Commander’s orders and press the attack afterwards. Even Ranthia had to grudgingly admit that the contemptible woman had made the right call—they couldn’t possibly win if they became a problem. The only reason they were being left alone was that they were too far beneath the scale of the army. Only a small portion of it was even passing by their base. The enemy didn’t care enough to waste the time crushing them, and there was nothing they could do to stop or even stem such an endless tide.

  Just before the army had reached them, the Commander had tried to send every bird they had at once, each carrying an identical message about the situation. Their best archer [Warrior] swore one bird made it through and got past the shimagu scouts. Ranthia and the Commander had both seen the truth: a flying dinosaur had caught that bird at the edge of a cloud. Neither of them said anything.

  With their efforts to stop the army ceased, it was best to let the troops have hope.

  From there, they just had to hope the alliance’s main base was strong enough to do what they could not. Ranthia fretted though, that twin could have killed her—and likely everyone in their base—with ease. If there were others like him in that force…

  There was a real risk that the war was in its final days.

  Things changed after the horde of shimagu passed them by.

  Supplies had always been irregular—which was, if anything, an overly generous choice of words—at their base. They seemed to be an afterthought to both the alliance’s commanders and their own generals. Before the shimagu struck towards the main alliance base their nameless little base only received a crate or two of supplies every so often. Usually, it was an armored convoy that was making its way to each of the bases in turn—Ranthia had only seen the [Starship] overhead once since she arrived at the base. Naturally, the supplies were often not what they requested or truly needed.

  Even that had stopped.

  Despite the flat terrain, there were enough rock formations and towering mesas—and enough raw distance—that there was no hope of laying eyes on the other alliance bases. Even if a base burned, they would never see the smoke where they were, and it would have taken days for even their fastest legionaries to see even that much—not that any of the runners that the Commander had dispatched ever returned.

  This meant that they had no idea if the alliance had been driven off or if the alliance had just assumed they had been crushed by the vast force that instead ignored them.

  Back when Ranthia was new to the nameless base, one of the veteran legionaries that had seen the beginning of the war had mentioned that he was certain that the shimagu dramatically outnumbered Remus’ Legions. She had never believed the man, at least until she saw that vast force.

  Scouting efforts had also concluded, since they swiftly learned that, just because that force had ignored them, they plainly hadn’t been forgotten by the rest of their enemies. Shimagu forces still came from the west regularly to attack them. Worse, it became more common than it used to be. They were under siege more often than they weren’t and the days where they were able to stand down completely had become rare in the extreme.

  A new type of routine settled over the camp. A dreadful one. For Ranthia, it took the form of two full days of fighting, aside from four irregularly timed meal breaks, followed by six hours of sleep, then it repeated.

  The routine repeated over and over. An especially hateful taste of order that no amount of chaos could overturn. Never before had Ranthia felt so inadequate as an agent of Xaoc. No matter how she fought, how brutally she culled her foes, she was unable to turn the tides of war.

  Insultingly, the quality of the shimagu sent against them had dropped even further—Ranthia out-leveled nearly everything that attacked their base. Killing had become easier than ever, but their enemies were both persistent and consistent.

  Yet as winter solidified its grip on the land—a far crueler, colder grasp than Remus had ever felt—hope endured. Ranthia was scheduled to be retrieved by the time summer arrived. The Legions had plainly failed their nameless base, but many legionaries were adamant that the Sentinels would never abandon a Ranger.

  “Supplies are getting dire.” The Commander began their meeting with a simple pronouncement.

  Ranthia was in the command tent with that abrasive woman, the Subcommander, the [Analysts], Doc, one of the armorers, and the base’s quartermaster. Their meetings were infrequent—they were scheduled based on the flow of the enemy forces, rather than mundane things like the passage of time—but they were important. No matter how Ranthia hated them.

  “We don’t have enough wood to last through winter at this rate. Salvaging equipment that the shimagu leave behind helps, but not enough. We need to stop using fires for warmth, if you want to have arrows.” The quartermaster spoke into the silence left in the wake of the Commander’s words.

  “Morale’s bad enough, and it’s getting cold. If you ask people to freeze even when they’re off-duty…” Ranthia left the warning hanging, she didn’t need to say it.

  “They… have enough vitality to survive.” The Subcommander muttered hesitantly.

  “We’re low on leather too. Primus is trying to learn a way to securely bind the overly dry hide the ogres usually use for armor to our padding—the stuff tears from our normal stitching—but it’s going to be a problem.” The representative of the armorers chimed in.

  The only thing they weren’t running out of was metal. Their nameless, beardless dwarf was their best lifeline. He provided them with an almost endless supply of metal. Yes, it was lower in quality than something properly forged, and it degraded freakishly fast, even for conjured material. But it was available. It was even customized to their needs. The dwarf with seemingly endless ability to conjure steel and iron was their saving grace.

  “Anyone know what we can do about fletching once we run out?” One of the others asked.

  They had a thousand and twenty-four problems to solve, and few to no ideas.

  Morale continued to hang on by a thread. Their thin hope based on Ranthia’s presence carried them through the bitter winter.

  The shimagu continued their mind games. Attacks continued unabated, even when the weather turned foul. Between every battle the legionaries mustered even as the shimagu retreated to salvage everything that they could.

  It didn’t take the shimagu long to learn that they retrieved the bodies of dinosaurs and their own that fell over the wall. The shimagu began to retrieve those bodies when they withdrew. Inevitably the shimagu survivors would set up a camp—usually upwind of them—and roast and eat the bodies. Ogre, human, dinosaur, it didn’t matter to the shimagu.

  Spring arrived. Their supplies were more scavenged than not. Injuries went wholly untreated until a [Healer] could help. They had no material to spare for bandages. Every loss weakened them further.

  Their numbers were slowly bleeding down. Nearly constant fighting took its toll, and Black Crow visited them all too often.

  Ranthia’s 26th birthday passed as she culled more lives. Few opponents were even level 256 anymore, yet bodies continued to be thrown at them. Not that any of them believed they were making true progress, most likely there were just better uses for the shimagu’s higher level forces.

  Summer had plainly arrived. The day that Ranthia should have been retrieved came and went. And with it, morale truly crumbled. With each day that passed, hope died in yet another heart.

  They were alone, isolated deep behind enemy lines. Whether the alliance had fallen or whether it still held strong was, in many terrible ways, irrelevant. For all they knew the shimagu had pushed through into Remus itself. But no matter the explanation…

  Their little nameless base had been forgotten by all except those that wished them dead.

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  Nozomi Matsuoka.

  Sarah "Neila" Elkins.