The first clash didn’t begin as a roar, but like the rising chorus of cannons from the north-east. Steam rose in blurring lines from the Nov Yanosk artillery, answered by Gulschak ordnance flung from their crawling metal beasts. It was a skirmish reserved for the non-Blessed, their spears, bolts, and contraptions. The two armies prodded at one another like two starving beasts caught in a pit. When morning came, supplies were moved and lines were hastily redrawn. Only on the third day, when the suns began to set, did the first Blessed take the stage.
On a battlement stood a hunched figure draped in a veil, only partially obscuring fur-clad arms that almost reached the ground and a tail whipping behind the figure.
Wretch drew a deep breath and raised his arms, a sigh escaping him.
“You’s happy?” Waddles said from the trench behind him.
“Yes,” Wretch answered, looking over the battlefield. Miles of trenches and frozen mud were before them. At the edge of the perimeter, smoke rose from unceasing blasts.
“You know, dying and being resurrected have changed my outlook on things,” another voice said. Fingers, the Inbetween, pulled a furred coat tighter to stave off the biting air. “It taught me I’m way in over my head here.”
Waddles munched on a chewed piece of jerky, the veil covering his head marked by saliva and hanging to the side.
“Wus what dying like? Did you meet the Saint?”
Fingers cleared their throat and glanced over the trench toward the heart of Voska, as if the fortress carved into the sunken bridge might decide to take their life on a whim. The jutting architecture looked small in the distance, revealing the scale of the battlefield.
“It was strange,” Fingers began with a shake of their head. “I was standing by a set of stairs leading into the darkness.”
“Waddles don’t like the dark,” the giant answered absentmindedly.
“Did you feel it then?” Wretch asked, eyes glued to the edge of the battle. “The presence waiting to embrace you at the end of the stairs before…”
Fingers turned their head toward Wretch, standing with a fluttering veil on the battlement.
“Before I faded into nothing… wait, how did you know that?”
“Maybe he’s been dead too?” Waddles said, finishing the jerky and casting a glance at a soldier a few paces away. The uniformed individual promptly took a step away.
“Something like that,” Wretch answered. “Though what does it matter now. Both of us got another chance at life. And I’m right where I want to be.”
“You’re crazy, both of you,” Fingers said. “I’m surviving this, no matter what. If only the General’s vows had disappeared on death, I’d already be out of here.”
A loud whistle broke the flow of conversation and the trio turned. From further back toward the fortress, a firework of some kind rocketed toward the sky. With a bang, it burst into a red cloud.
“It’s red,” Fingers said with a sigh. “That’s our call for attack until a blue one is lit.”
Wretch stretched his long arms and cracked his neck.
“Let’s move.”
They moved north-west toward the battle at the edge of Voska’s perimeter. They’d been waiting for hours before the call to attack, and their stiffened joints moved toward their goal.
Kill the Blessed in your sector, or don’t return at all.
They passed with hurried steps through the trenches, soldiers and officers alike giving them way with fearful glares. How could they not.
There was only one group who carried such veils on a battlefield, and if one was unaware, Wretch was still taller than any man, with inhuman legs and clawed hands bristling with fur. And he wasn’t the strangest among the trio. Waddles was a giant whose head peeked out of the trenches and whose impressive girth almost blocked the dirt-packed pathway.
The tremors of battle grew closer with each step. Finally, a whistle came from the air.
“Waddles, hold your head down,” Wretch said.
The giant did as instructed, and a moment later something smashed into the trench next to them in a fiery blast. A chorus of screams came from the impact. Whatever artillery the Gulschaks used, it burned as fiercely as kerosene, blanketing the battlement in flaming liquid that stung one’s nose.
Wretch peeked over the trench, spotting a brutalized wooden wall in the distance. Already the Gulschaks had pushed through the outer defense, but Voska wasn’t built to be impenetrable, it was built to outlast.
“We’re here,” Wretch said, licking his malformed lips.
Shouted orders and roaring cannons answered the Gulschak offense as the two war machines picked up steam.
They pushed deeper, turning a corner in the trench. That particular section seemed to have been hit with some kind of ordnance, for sections of the walls had caved and parts of the wood still burned.
Before him, half a dozen soldiers were hurriedly trying to repair a steam cannon. Wretch had seen this kind of imagery before. The desperation of cornered men.
“Lieutenant Alik, the boiler is working again,” a grease-marked soldier said, tending to a metal furnace half buried into the earth.
Another explosion rattled close by, drenching the mud-filled flat before them in fire.
“Blasted junk,” an officer with a soot-stained mustache said, pushing himself forward to the machine. “The barrel is bent, is useless, we’ll have to—”
“Alik,” Wretch growled as he approached through the mud and falling embers.
The officer turned in surprise, and the expression only became more exaggerated at the sight of the three veiled figures, even if Fingers was hiding behind Waddles’ leg.
“The General’s dogs, finally.”
Wretch walked up to the machine without breaking his gaze with the officer, gripping the crooked barrel of steel with his two clawed hands.
“Where is the enemy Blessed… lieutenant,” Wretch said as his muscles flexed beneath the veil. His regular form strained against the metal, and when that strength wasn’t enough, he burned his flame to brandish more features of the massive hound to whom the form belonged. Vishnii, his deadliest prey. For a few moments, the skin of his exposed forearms squirmed and enlarged toward Vishnii’s true size.
With a screech, the metal straightened under his strength.
“Lieutenant,” Wretch said, who never looked away from the awestruck soldier. “There are Gulschaks to be slain.”
The man shook his head.
“Sorry. Thank the Saint you’re here. Something is bombarding us from behind their lines. We’re getting ground to dust.”
“Direction?”
The officer flinched as another bang shook the air but pointed a tremorous finger across the massacred defenses turned into a burning no-man’s land.
“That way. We’ll cover you.”
Wretch gestured with his head toward Waddles and Fingers to climb the barricade as he did the same.
“Good, give us a few minutes and the bombardment will stop.”
With that, the three veiled figures moved into the burning remnants of defenses lost. The soldiers were frozen with open mouths until another bang shook them awake.
Fingers coughed under their veil, clutching a hand over their mouth as the trio moved into the burning haze.
“Stay close,” Wretch growled. “Keep your head down.”
Corpses littered the ground, and the heat from the battle had thawed the earth, turning it all into slippery mud. Wretch opted to move on all four, something that actually suited his long arms and hound-like legs far better.
Another salvo rattled against the ground a hundred paces to their left with a wave of heat. They took cover in a trench, occupied only by a nameless soldier burned to a blackened crisp.
Waddles reached for it.
“Don’t,” Wretch said harshly as he peeked over the edge of the defenses.
His sensitive ears could sift through the continuous rumbling, picking up the shouts and shuffling of men in the next trench over. The smoke and haze obscured their surroundings, but still he saw it, something large moving between the trenches, secured by a wave of unblessed. A thump came from the figure’s back and something whistled through the air, bursting into flames behind the trio.
“I don’t like this,” Fingers said. “Not one bit.”
Wretch sneered.
“They’re protecting the one shooting the artillery. That’s our target.”
“Mind if I just stay here?” Fingers asked in jest.
“Not really your utmost for the war effort, is it?” Wretch retorted. “Your heart will explode, then Waddles will eat you.”
The giant chuckled, turning his massive head toward the smaller Blessed.
A loud whistle broke their conversation. All along the front, figures hopped out over the trenches, rushing over the burning mud flats toward the next hideout, their hideout.
“Here they come. I’ll charge straight through, pull their attention, then you smash them,” Wretch said, giving a glance to the giant, who seemed occupied picking at the charred corpse. “Waddles, just listen to Fingers.”
The thuds of boots grew closer.
“Actually…” Fingers began, but Wretch launched over the lip of the trench, leaving the duo behind.
The Gulschak plan was well thought through, the fiery artillery blasting the Nov Yanosk defenses as much as it obscured their own advancement. But it also obscured any counterattack.
The line of Gulschaks rushed forward through no-man’s land in wheezing masks, each soldier gripping a spear. A few stray cannons roared, one shot evaporating a soldier into red mist, then a shadow with fiery eyes launched through the haze.
The first soldier barely had time to raise his spear. A swipe of claws, and a head, wide eyes still staring through the lenses of the gas mask, spun through the air.
Another managed a lunge toward the barreling monster in the haze. The beast dodged with little effort, continuing past the soldier in a blur. A moment later, deep gashes bloomed over the chest. Another body hit the wet ground.
Wretch continued past the line.
Two ringing whistles followed by a voice echoed through the battlefield.
“Retreat, protect Vlad at all cost.”
Vlad… Wretch thought as he rushed forward on all four, jumping over fallen trenches with little effort. In the distance, a silhouette grew steadier, a hulking figure surrounded by others that barely reached the brute’s hip.
“An assassin. Spears in front, crossbows at the ready.”
Wretch found the owner of the voice, a face hiding deep in the group. Only then did he project his full killing intent. He’d felt much pain in his short life, died and returned, robbed and broken only to pull himself together. That had turned him into what he was now, a shadow of a man with only one goal in mind. To hunt the prey before him.
A name washed over the shattered grounds.
Wretch, Collector of Wounds, had entered the war.
“Fire!” the voice screamed.
Wretch burst to the side of the group, a hail of bolts slapping into the ground, others bouncing against his hardened skin. The flesh stolen from a third tier monster wasn’t something cut by the mundane.
“We retreat!” called the man in charge. “Leave the others.”
But Wretch wouldn’t let them. He circled around the group before he came to a stop, blocking their escape. His breath was hard from the burst of movement, but he had barely touched his reserves of flame.
Finally, he got a look at his opposition. The Blessed they had been sent to kill.
Soldiers in masks whose lenses reflected the burning surroundings as if they too were Blessed, all surrounding a hulking brute hauling a machine on its back. The source of the artillery, powered by some engine of ticking gears to lob ordnance along an intricate barrel.
Not a steam engine, so a Blessed weapon then?
Wretch scanned the group, his bestial eyes falling on a young man with mechanical tools strapped to his chest, the same man yelling panicked orders. He was the Blessed that manipulated the contraption, he could sense it. But that wasn’t his biggest revelation.
His eyes turned back to the brute hauling the weapon. A man stitched with wire from many different parts, only some of which were humanoid. Now the figure stood docile and motionless, long dark hair covering its head and face.
But those kinds of stitches Wretch could recognize anywhere. Only one man was demented enough to create such a creature. Beneath his veil grew a hound-like smile.
“Little Gulschak, you’ll tell me all about that thing, and where I can find the man who made it.”
“Blasted,” yelled the Gulschak Blessed in response. He blew twice on a whistle. “Where is the charge? I already signaled the retreat.”
From the Nov Yanosk side of the battlefield, a man fell out of the haze, broken spear in hand.
A much larger silhouette came into view, crouching down and ripping the screaming man into pieces the way a child inspected a twig.
Fingers was hanging onto Waddles’ shoulder as the giant ripped a hand from the dying man, a scream muffled by the gas mask as the giant handed the arm to Fingers, who began to gnaw on the digits.
“Look at that big one, Waddles. Bet you’d look good if you took some of his form.”
The Gulschak officer looked around. The General’s dogs had them surrounded in the obscuring fire of their own bombardment. Twelve soldiers, a Blessed Gulschak, and a stitched beast against the veiled trio.
A killing intent leaked into the air.
Vladimir of Burning Gears.
“Project 7,” the Blessed screamed suddenly. “Aim for the fast one!” The stitched beast fell to all four, the barrel aimed at Wretch. A moment later, Vladimir placed a hand on the machine. A pressure wave shook the air as something catapulted towards him.
It was a terrifying weapon, still, Wretch felt only joy.