I was sent back to the top of the hill to get more 7.62. The sergeant major was running the ammo redistribution and there wasn’t much left to go around. It was midnight. Just after. Zero and change. The wounded lay inside an inner ring of defenses on the narrow hilltop. The snipers were forward along the top of the hill and firing at distant targets down there among the ruined trees and blasted and burning landscape now that the chlorine gas had dissipated. The orc horde and other monsters were coming up for us again. I turned and flipped back to my NVGs to see how much I could see down there. With my mind on the state of our ammo I almost wished for a second I hadn’t looked.
The entire island was swarming with orcs and other strange and misshapen creatures. The strangest were a group of what even I recognized as centaurs. Half man, half horse. Firing longbows from the river. The arrows they fired came up at us individually as the horse-men rode back and forth along the shallows, covering behind large rocks and fallen logs. It was the enemy’s version of designated marksmen. Good shooters. And their arrows detonated in explosive gaseous balls of green fire. Most of their shots came down around the mortar pits, where one of the indirect fire teams was being seen to by Chief Rapp. He was treating them for exposure to chemical agents of some sort and trying to flush their eyes and open their air passages. But some arrows missed the hill and landed harmlessly off down in the river on the other side.
Of course all the other unearthly creatures were still down there too. The orcs were swarming like busy ants and moving forward with trolls and ogres and lumbering giants like the ones we’d taken out the other night. There was no uniformity. Every creature was distinctly weird and different with scars and gear that indicated stories well beyond these three nights of battle. I saw a giant with two heads. It dragged a massive ironbound war club the size of an SUV. And this next wave of giants was mostly using large shields, though really they looked more like the sides of houses that had been ripped away and set to block anything coming at their carriers. The trolls and ogres covered behind trees and hurled large boulders up at us whenever they could, but all the while they were getting closer and closer,
taking more of the hill as we pulled back nearer to the top. The ascent would be no problem for the giants and other behemoths. But it would be for us.
A new worry developed. Things this strong really wouldn’t have any problem carrying away the Forge. We needed to put them all down before that could happen.
One of the Rangers in the fighting positions used a Carl Gustaf and sent it into a giant just reaching the big rock at the bottom of the hill. The round used was an HEDP. High explosive dual purpose. It punched straight through the giant and exploded in a ball of fire, showering flaming guts all over the orcs supporting its attack. At the same time, a bright line of tracer fire from the heavy weapons section on the western side raked a menacing troll who’d been lobbing stones like rockets up at us. Someone fired an 81mm round over there and tore off the troll’s leg, the round exploding in the dirt behind it and probably decimating another twenty orcs and those dragon-dog things moving forward under the support of two mobile ballistae pounding the lower positions along the hill. The two-forty on that side of the battle ripped into the downed troll again, tearing it to shreds, and the monster nightmare twitched and flopped around like a python made of tree trunks, trying to cover itself with its flailing claws as rounds landed all across its dark bulk.
“That was the last one!” shouted the first sergeant to the sergeant major. Meaning we were out of Carl Gustaf munitions. And that was bad news because I could count at least ten to fifteen giants down there and coming forward at us among the ruined trees.
Lightning lanced out from somewhere back near the C-17 and slammed into the two-forty position on the western side of the hill. The gun fell ominously silent and I could hear the chatter of wounded needing help over the comm.
“Get these cans back down to Sergeant Kurtz, Talker,” said the sergeant major who then yelled at PFC Kennedy to come and take two more and follow me back to what was now the forwardmost fighting position on our eastern flank.
“Oh, and Talker…” boomed the sergeant major over the din of the battle that was all around and everywhere along the tiny hill. “Your ruck and gear are over there.” He pointed where. He’d brought my gear up from
the plane. “Take ’em because we might need to di di mao at any moment.”
I didn’t speak Vietnamese, but the term was common enough in the Army. It meant Get Out of Dodge. Beat feet. Run for your life.
That was the situation.
I set the drums of 7.62 down and got my ruck on. The staff we’d taken off the high-value-target sorcerer was still tied to it with 55O cord.
Drums in each hand, PFC Kennedy followed me back down the trench that led to Sergeant Kurtz’s weapons team. We were halfway there, lugging as much ammunition as we could carry, when the entire cacophony and light show of the battle was instantly overwhelmed by a sudden snap of violent electricity down below on the island proper. Out in the field where our plane had set down. Purple light flared and illuminated the low-hanging clouds, washing over the enemy and all of us on the hill. Like a sudden old- time camera flash, but all in electric purple.
There was a moment where—this is going to be hard to describe but I’ll do it the best I can—there was this moment where it felt like everything that was near, was suddenly very far away. And at the same time everything far away, was suddenly near. I could, and I found out later that we all heard the same thing, but I could hear something echoing and portentous, similar to a warehouse door, one of those big industrial doors you might hear in a shipping facility, rolling open like a freight train suddenly appearing out of nowhere at an unguarded crossing in the night on a lonely country road. Or maybe that was how my mind interpreted what exactly I was hearing. Some… door… opening… out there in the universe. The sound of heavy chains suddenly rolling out. Except the sound was both ethereal and more present than the actual battle and all its clamor being fought around us. The chains were like the sound of an anchor being let down into the darkest depths of an ocean that didn’t have a bottom. Or a bottom you were better off not thinking about if you didn’t want to go absolutely insane.
It was both a sensation and a sick feeling. And at the same time… I knew it was really none of those things. But that was how my mind made sense of it. The light. The noise of the door. The rolling chains. The sense that a door was opening here, and in some other faraway place. An anchor being dropped, and the near becoming far, and the far suddenly becoming near. As though the foreground and the horizon had suddenly changed places in the universe. Like that was actually a thing that was possible here
in weird Fantasmo World where monsters tried to kill you and sorcerers could become invisible. And horrors from the outer dark could look like people you knew.
I remembered the ring. The ring that had turned me invisible right in front of the sergeant major. If things got bad… it was the ultimate di di mao. Get out of Dodge. The last bus to Escapistan.
Except the ticket for that bus was a ticket for one. And in the same moment I had the thought, I was ashamed that I’d had it at all. Because it was the opposite of what Sergeant Kang had done back down there in the gully when things got real bleak and Mercer was hit.
“Rangers don’t leave anyone behind.”
The ring was a ticket for one.
That sudden purple flash, like the light from a nuclear weapon blasting through each and every one of us on that battlefield…
… It was in that flash that I saw everything, all the outcomes, heard all the noises, and realized I’d never use that ring to get myself out of trouble as long as I was here with the Rangers. If I was gonna Ranger… I’d Ranger all the way to death alongside them.
I saw that.
I saw everything.
Every heaving orc. Every angry giant. Every evil troll. Every raging ogre. The little dog dragon things that were constant harriers. The wicked centaurs firing their poison arrows. The shadow riders in black, with probably nothing more than bones beneath those ragged shrouds and shadowy hoods. A creature down there that was like a small misshapen human. Large nose, needle-sharp teeth. It and those of its kind carried small swords and poison spears.
There were bipedal giant frogs the size of men that had been down in the river the whole time. Under the water and waiting along the bottoms in the deep places. They were still down there, staring up at us from just below the surface of the dark water, and I could feel their intense hunger and their desire to take us down to those deep dark places beneath the black waters like crocodiles do when their prey is between their jaws. To hide us and wait until our bodies have bloated and rotted. Then the feasting would be good. The frog-things were chanting dark bubbly sayings that seemed to hang in the sound of the rolling chains I heard dropping down into the deep
wells of the universe’s forgotten places. Places we were never meant to go. Places no one was ever meant to see.
There was a snake man down there in the trees. Just a giant snake with a human torso and arms and a flat, broad-bladed scimitar that seemed like something out of 1001 Arabian Nights. He had golden arm bracelets that were items of great protection. A flicking tongue that darted between fangs dripping with deadly poison. He was directing the troops all around him. Sappers. Hunching homunculi that looked like crosses between misshapen dwarfs and something far more demonic. Something from those deep dark wells in the universe no one was ever supposed to find.
There were other strange sorcerers down there. Workers of dark magics from all across this ruin of a world everyone had forgotten long ago. They chanted and muttered mutant languages and phrases not meant for human ears down among the charred trees. Firing their fireballs and lightnings up at us when they could. Arrows of acid and flame. Glamours of dancing lights and invisible blankets of hypnotic sleep. Their unseen servants questing and reporting. Back and forth during much of the battle. No two alike. None of them looking like that first sorcerer in the Chinese peasant’s hat hiding out in the copse on the other side of the river.
It was a photographer’s flash and it captured everything in my mind’s eye. And for just a second, I could hear all of their thoughts. Each and every one. And if it had continued for more than a second…
If it had gone on one moment longer…
… I would have gone stark raving mad.
It was a chorus of a thousand languages I’d never speak. Except there was nothing choral about it. It was chaos and madness and discordant destruction. It was five thousand or more self-serving psychotics working together for a common evil if only because they were more afraid of something far greater than themselves. Something that promised them fates far worse than death.
Something worse than King Triton.
There was a center to that snapshot blast of magic flash. That purple explosion of light and universe that appeared from inside the C-17.
And then that imaginary anchor chain I’d heard reeling in… it drew away from there. Those warehouse doors slammed ominously shut. And the purple light was sucked from the dark atmosphere over the battle.
We’d all heard it. All seen it. Some probably never processed it. Others did, and didn’t know what to make of it. What to do with it.
The dark and chaos of the battle resumed like it couldn’t even remember it had been interrupted just seconds before, and I heard all their murder thoughts fading from my mind. Fading to be replaced by the sonic booms of Mjölnir smashing giants’ skulls one massive fifty-caliber round at a time. Sergeant Kurtz shouting to pull back to the next trench as the bellowing ogres assaulted and swarmed in at his team, firing massive arrows from their huge great bows and thundering their insane roars as if blasting sonic booms of promised murder right into the faces of those Rangers hellbent on killing them with everything they could get their hands on. Someone shouting, “Eat this!” and tossing a grenade right into their midst.
It was Tanner.
I heard their promises disappear in the sudden explosion of the grenade. I heard the rest of their vast horde assuring us death now that the true work was done. Now that the pleasantries had been gotten out of the way. They were released from some dire and dark blood oath that had bound them to this attack. They were free to come and murder us all to death now.
That was their reward for their service to the thing that controlled the purple light and worked the great magics at its core.
We were their prize.
This was the real battle now. And it was on.
