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by Vultesia. . 21 reads.

Vultesian Tales: Southern Nicersdah in Spring

30378336 Fusilier Leotpram ‘Leo’ Afsalter
Flank Company, 3rd/5th Fusiliers, NIKFAN
0748hrs, 28th of March 2021
Southern Nicersdah

South Nicersdah in Spring
A Vultesian Tale

The Model of 2006 Boot (General Combat), comes in twelve different sizes, its construction is a blend of rubber sole and a breathable -Defence Tan- suede body, tied together through a series of polymer eyelets, eighteen in total. The toe of the M06B(GC), is covered with a hardened composite cap, to protect the boot, and its wearer from scuff, stubs, light impacts and innumerable other minor ground level hazards.

It was one such toe cap, eight centimeters across, the Fusilier Leotpram Afsalter was about to become intimately aware of, as it sped towards his unsuspecting ribs.

“Feth!” Leo woke with a start, the expletive coming to him with his first breath and a spike of pain leaping from his side. Corporal Stjepanitt stood over his scrambling form, a broad smile creeping across his anvil heavy features, his broad shoulders seeming to form a false horizon before the pale Nicersdahian dawn.

“That’s quite enough beauty sleep, princess.” the NCO chuckled, his voice a gravely Outlander rasp at odds with hulking physique. "You get any prettier before we rotate back, and I'll give you a reason to shout 'feth', on your feet."

“Aye, corporal.” Spluttered Leo, rubbing the sleep from his eyes with one hand and grasping his side with the other as he found his feet. All around the walled courtyard of the compound, a score of other infanteers were doing the same. The morning was a mild one, the punishing Nicersdahian winter had finally relinquished its grasp on nation's south, taking it's razor cold air and lethal snowdrifts with it, though, however more tolerable, Spring seemed no more accommodating to soldiers of the New Model Army; the snow melt and omnipresent showers had turned near all of roads and pathways into sinking quagmires that grasped greedily at man and machine alike, and all manner of buzzing vampires with far too many legs had begun to spawn from innumerable bogs and storm drains.

Leo shoved his sleeping system into its waterproof sack, and began applying the pungent gel that was his mosquito repellent.

"Full, seven mags" he called out to Sub-Corporal Pietritt, the section's second in command, as he passed, notepad in hand, to check the unit's ammunition state.

The courtyard was a quiet storm of activity. Between the skeletons of a dozen hardy apple trees, the patrol was about it's morning business. Rifles were being stripped and oiled, unspeakable orifices were being freshened with baby-wipes, rations were being hastily wolfed down over the flickering of blue flames. An old window, pottered her hunched self around the space, a tray of steaming tea cups rattling a staccato in her frail hands. It was her compound, or at least, it was now, a dark eyed Nicersdahian corporal with a schoolboy’s smile had told him the night prior. Her elderly husband was one of the thousands of natives to be swallowed up in the flames of the revolution.

He watched the old lady, the weight of the tray seemed poised to overcome at any moment, but without complaint or so much as a comment, she shuffled onwards, presenting a piping hot serving of nettle tea to each of the grateful soldiers in turn, Nicersdahian or Vultesian alike. This, the dark eyed soldier had explained to him whilst a cigarette’s glow lit his bearded face, was her quiet act of defiance in the face of growing insurgent activity, this was her revenge. Looking at her face, wrinkles of determination running grand canyons down her aged visage, he had to conclude the private was right.

"Alright, let's go, pack up and form up." Came the corporal's voice over the rustle of activity. "Same detail as yesterday, Command says hearts and minds are things we need to win, not aim at, so put on your best smiles. The Nic's will be out front, handing out leaflets and sh*t, we're the muscle if things go downhill. The PC informs me local intelligence is pointing to the Sons being sighted in town so don't count on it to go as smoothly as the last few walkabouts, stay switched on, Roger?"

"Corporal!" Came the response as the compounds corrugated tin gate was swung open. Leo let out a steady exhale, Stjepanitt's brief echoing in his mind as he trudged out onto the muddy strip that the Nicersdahians assured him was a road that linked the small commune of agricultural compounds to the nearby town around a kilometer west.

That was the thing about the Sons of the Gods, they walked, talked, dressed and prayed just like every other hairy barbarian that called this place home. Half the locals sympathised with them and the other half were too scared to do anything but whisper snippets of intelligence under the cover of night. Shots of opportunity, improvised explosives, they would never fight on even terms, it was a war fought by a thousand cuts.

In front of Leo half marching, half strolling, ten Nicersdahian National Army riflemen. 'Brave fools' he'd heard Lieutenant Afmödy call them once. At first he'd found it hard to disagree, they lacked discipline, spoke to their officers on first names terms and seemed to eschew any standardised dress save their camouflage fatigues; he'd seen more than one continue choose to go about their daily prayers to their uncountable pantheon of gods over getting to cover when the Sons mortared their patrol bases. Vultesian training programmes had curtailed the worst of their informal attitude, but only just.

Still this was their homeland, and they knew how to fight in it. Their seemingly laid back manner had won over many locals, men and women who remained weary of central authority in the ashes of the toppled regime. They spoke the language, knew the towns and every backroad to them, and they hated the so-called Sons of the Gods more than Leo ever dared try, it was truly a religious hate they held for those insurgents, that invoked a commendable disregard for life, theirs and the enemy's . They were, in their own way he supposed, invaluable.

Within half an hour, they'd reached the small township, it was a route they'd walked half a dozen times before, such was the doctrine of the day, dominate the ground with joint patrols, build a rapport with the civilians, and should the Sons deign to fight, to put them down with extreme prejudice.

“Alright, gents. Hang fire, let the local boys do their thing.” Stjepanitt’s raspy tone sent the personal radio receiver over Leo’s left ear crackling to life. It was the agreed on tactic, hang back from the Nicersdahians, far enough out to not appear to be commanding them, close enough to intervene if their little reassurance mission went awry.

By midday, with the sun, high above, was fighting its way forlornly through yet another spring shower. The downpour ran rivers down the flanks of dilapidated housing complexes, their once vibrant red and blue paint work long faded to the pastel ghosts of scabs and bruises. Sprays of impacts, often stitching their way through scorch marks or suspect stains crisscrossed every other wall, the scars of the recent past still fresh. It was a sorry looking town, but today, standing silent against the rain, it was more dismal than ever.

“Atmospherics are all off” Pietritt chimed as the patrol made its way towards the town’s centre. The usually bustling market square stood near deserted, and the sparse handful of merchants that were peddling their wares began to roll down their shutters and close their blinds the moment the troops came into view.

“Yeah I’m feeling it, stay switched on.” the corporal muttered back over the comms. “Keep eyes on the Nic’s, let them draw out any surprises, they wanted to lead, let them. Slow that pace.”

The Vultesians slowed watching keenly down the lengths of their rifles as the Nicersdahian fireteams worked their way through the silent market, leaflets in hand. They called out jovially in their native tongue, though Leo was sure he could detect the strain of nerves in their hollering.

Snap! The whiplash crack of a round rang out followed by the roar of returning fire.

“Contact!” The call roared down the net from ten mouths into ten radio receivers, a frenzied echo shattering the static. Leo threw himself to the floor and crawled behind a nearby stack of pallets as the net jumped to life.

“Sniper!”

“Whose got eyes!?”

“The Nics have wounded.”

“Get me a bead!”

'Return fire, seek cover, return effective fire. Return fire, seek cove, return effective fire.'

Leo repeated the training mantra as he scanned the vicinity, his breath heavy and his heart thumping as a rush of adrenaline smashed like a chemical sledgehammer into his bloodstream; since rotating to southern Nicersdah he’d faced rockets, the ever present mortars, he’d even seen armour struck by roadside bombs, but never had he faced the murderous intent of a sniper...the sniper!

Another wicked snap tore through the air, screaming over the head of the squad’s machine gunner by a finger’s width. This time Leo could sighted the source, a flicker of movement in behind a shattered window ahead. He called out louder than he knew he could, his voice almost cracking as he gave an indication.

“Two hundred meters! Tyre shop! Second floor, left window! Left fething window!”

As one the Vultesian section responded, rifle and machine gun fire tearing through the rain at Leo’s order. Panes of glass were blown to crystalline dust and brick and breezeblock were pulverised by the storm of lead. The noise was cacophonous, an ululating howl of automatic fire that seemed to last for an eternity, punctuated only by the final dull thump of a rifle grenade sent sailing through the window turned gaping wound in the building. Silence descended as smoke and dust rolled from the wrecked tyre shop. For the slightest fraction of a second, Leo heard nothing but the war drum of his pulse hammering into his ears, it would not last.

Alternating waves of nausea and excitement pummeled Leo’s mind, to a chorus of car alarms and distant shouts, so distant they were almost musical. A gentle warmth, kissed his face...so like the July sun on Saltstil Promenade with Aelia’s hand in his . The thudding impact of a bear paw hand upon his shoulder brought the young man crashing back to reality.

“Let’s move, Fusilier!” It was the corporal, with all the whiplash force of a drunken car crash Leo’s introspection was shattered. Flames, angry tongues of fire and a cloying wall of choking black smoke now streamed as an acrid, burning barrage from the carcass of the sniper’s vantage point turned crematorium. Twenty feet before them, half a dozen of the Nicersdahian troops were scrambling towards the Vultesian’s impromptu base line, two of their comrades being dragged along with them. One of the dark green clad natives was screaming the screams of the damned, and Leo could see that both he and the two men it was taking to keep him mobile were stained near black with soaking vital fluids, seeping out from some unseen wound; effort writ large upon his squadmates’ faces as he bucked and hollered, calling out for his gods and his mother. The second casualty put up no such resistance, being dragged unceremoniously by his webbing, pale and silent.

Sub Corporal Pietritt pointed towards the beleaguered native soldiers, as they fell back from the would-be kill zone,

“Halitt, Afsalter, Gusz, give them a hand, they’re slowing us down.”

There was the slightest moment of hesitation among the Fusiliers. As the National Army survivors and wounded caught up to their allies, Fusilier Gusz gave voice to their concerns.

“They’re bleeding, Corporal. We were always told not to let foreign blo…’

“Gusz I’m sure that if you’re not planning on kissing that unfortunate bastard, the Princeps won’t mind. Now help them move their wounded before it’s Vultesian blood you have to worry about!”

With that, the three young soldiers nodded in unison and moved to assist the panting Nicersdahians, their gear clattering as the cloying smoke billowed outwards in great sable blossoms. Relief as well as a measure of uncertainty and confusion was evident across the Nicersdahians' faces as the Fusiliers came to relieve them. Leo helped to shoulder the more vocal of the two native wounded. With a scream, the man’s weight was transferred to leo, accompanied with sprays of blood and odious bile.

It was the first casualty Fusilier Leotpram Afsalter had ever had to bear. It would not be the last.

To be continued...

Vultesia

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