“So Major, what’s the plan?” Rain Dancer asked as we stood in the armory strapping on our various pieces of tan, green or black colored armor amidst the bedlam of everypony else doing the same. “The Lieutenant Colonel have any secret plans for how we’re gonna outshine Alpha this time? You said it yourself, he likes us more than them but the other brass won't see it.”

Huckleberry shot me a pained look as she donned her reinforced leather duster and I was forced to break the news to the rest of Beta Squad. I knew it was going to have to happen, but I had secretly hopped I could have been given at least a few days to reflect on the implications and changes in leadership that were going to happen because of it. With how the Desert Rangers were set up being the oldest of the official Equestrian Armed Forces, we had our own internal hierarchy of ranks and our own tactics and organization that stood outside those used by the General Army or the Steel Rangers. Ranger recruits were pulled from the best of the GA or special civic collaboration volunteers who became Rangers in full after three years of quality service and training. Veterans, after the rules of war were changed because of the escalation of combat with the Empire, were those who served and survived for longer than five years. The ones who had proven their lives worthy of the impressive expense paid towards armoring and arming them as some of the best the Armed Forces had to offer. However, with Desert Rangers being proven experts in the art of war, it was deemed prudent for Rangers and Veterans alike to have an official\unofficial rank befitting their skill level and accolades in the GA using their terms and imagery. This was done to expedite our orders on the field seeing as we were denoted as 'experts' in our fields for a reason. It saved the brass a lot of paperwork to just refer to us as Captains or Lieutenants with all the associated privileges of command yet allowed us to operate mostly within the confines of our own Corps. In short...the life of a Ranger had changed since the early years and more and more we were being used as stand-in officers for the General Army as attrition gnawed away at us. It was always a possibility that you could be pulled away from the Squad you had spent months with and knew well to go and lead a group of no-name Privates whose Sergeant took an early dirt nap.

“There is no Alpha Squad…” I declared as loudly over the din as I could muster without calling attention to us in particular, the thought of the Ministry officials not even two rooms over interrogating Alpha making me quiver with fear. “Or…should I say, we are Alpha Squad now. Ministry of Morale showed up not even a half hour ago to detain them and more than likely take them to Canterlot immediately. Took the Colonel by surprise just as much as anyone else it seems...”

Their stunned silence was to be expected at my revelation. The fear of us or any of our friends in the Desert Rangers being potentially under the suspicion of being Zebra sympathizers was a very real threat. I myself knew what they would do to ponies…they had Unicorns who were specially trained in the art of mind-rape meaning they’d dig around your head for memories that they could use to convict you of the charge they had brought against you. I use the term ‘mind-rape’ rather aptly as nothing else can quite describe how notoriously brutal their memory probes are...and most ponies never come out of it with their minds entirely intact. It was terrifying to think they had the broad authority to enforce this kind of invasive interrogation that bordered on all-out torture...but...them's the times as they said. Not much anypony could do about it but live according to every social code ever written or spoken and pray the eye of M.O.M passed you by.

“So…that’s it then?” Penny’s Worth asked in her sugary sweet tones. “We’re top dog just like that? Sweet Celestia...”

I nodded. Though no one said it, I knew we were all thinking the same thing. It was a wonderful feeling to finally be called Alpha Squad…but it felt like an empty victory we hadn’t truly earned. Of course we trained hard and tried everything we could think of to beat Alpha fair and square at their own game but now that they had been disqualified for the race to the top, we all seemed to feel cheated out of our victory. It was like getting a participation award that said ‘At Least You Tried’ written in gold leaf surrounded by little balloons and confetti. If there were pity cake to go along with the sarcasm then I might be less bitter about swallowing it all down.

“I know what you’re all feeling,” I said finally, looking up from the bracer I had been trying to strap on over my sleeve for over a minute. “And trust me, I feel it too. We got jipped the fuck out by the M.O.M and have what’s basically a fucking participation award. But we’re still fucking Beta Squad! We’ve kicked everyone’s asses to get to the second top spot with the Vets. Alpha may be gone but we still gotta earn that patch of theirs. Maybe this is a blessing for us. A chance to shine like Celestia’s fiery hot ass and burn those motherfuckers who think Equestria is their place to kick back and enslave the populace. So Beta…what we gonna do? Sit on our asses and mope about how we got ripped off? Or are we gonna go out there and kick some stripped Imperial ass out of our country?”

“Kill all sons of bitches ma’am!” Came their rallying cry like music to my ears, before me the four most badass mares and stallions (and one Griffin) who ever stalked the Badlands.

“Damn straight! What are we?”

“Beta Squad!”

“And what do we do?”

“Kick ass and spit fire!”

With that revelation off my chest, it instantly became easier to fall into muscle memory without getting the jitters. The din of fellow badasses nearby all jockeying about and engaging in playful roughhousing was the sound of home to me now. I had been in a number of barracks and posts over my career but Macintosh was always my true home. The noise was louder; always full of barked orders, choruses of Songs from the Pitts, in and outbound caravans both airborne and on hoof...the sounds of a thriving militopolis as I liked to think of it as. A paradise of war and her deadly practices attended by the priests and priestesses of death.

It was during massive mobilizations like this where the sheer size of Macintosh's armory came in handy and where tactical nerd in me got some quality hobbyist time. With so many Squads of equal or lesser rank crammed into one facility it was easy to glance left or right and come away with over a dozen various combinations of loadouts and specialist gear spread throughout the ranks. Squads formed as a new Recruit were encouraged and celebrated for staying whole throughout their promotions as familiarity and loyalty helped ensure the most cohesive teams. There were always the inevitable rotations that came...a member of your family getting gunned down or otherwise taken out of the action for good. But, in the rare circumstance where everyone is particularly safe, cohesive and unbelievably lucky, you might have a Squad like Alpha or Beta. The only teams where all members had the same dogtag timestamps left in the upper echelons of the entire Corps.

Some Squads, nicknamed Shufflers featured multiple dedicated snipers accompanied by only one demolition expert and a heavy machine-gunner with at least two members being equally talented at something else letting them 'shuffle' their role about as needed. Others like Snake Eyes Squads had none but shotgunners who doubled as flamethrower powerbitches, a reference to how they were bad luck for enemies and always specialized in at least two of the heaviest hitting weapon classes. Others, like my own, went with the old Jack of Aces technique. That is, filling every spot on your team with someone who was damned good at one skill and/or weapon class in particular but is capable of using others to a satisfactory degree. There is a case to be made towards the efficacy of all these variations and others but ultimately what determined it was if the team was cohesive, competent and effective while the brass using them like pieces on a board know when and where to use them. On the Southern Front...the conditions determining these factors were unfavorable but unavoidable it seemed.

Something that was favorable and unavoidable all the same was the welcome expansion of weapons deemed permissible for Ranger Squads. With every passing year it seemed like bigger and badder weapons were being greenlit for our common use rather than as tactical necessities only given out as part of particular mission parameters as had once been the case. With the introduction of enhanced BattleSaddles as part of a side project of the Ministry of War, the use of lightweight power-servos reinforcing the underbarding allowed for heavier armament without compromising agility. Thanks to the fancy new tech, anypony with a PipBuck 2000 model or above was now capable of lugging something as large as a 40mm autocannon and its accompanying ammunition canisters alongside their armor and duster with no problems. While this was a major boon to the expansion of our roles, it didn't change the weapons that had made us famous. AMR/APRs, our largest and most common heavy rifles for example, had always been made for all species to use comfortably regardless of they had magic, hooves, talons, paws or what have you. Rangers didn't discriminate if there was genuine talent in the soldier. If he or she were useful and would become even more useful when given the right training and tools to excel than if anything it was a crime to ignore said talent, as burgeoning as it may be.

There was a great flapping of many wings as the central airstrip of Camp Macintosh was filled with dozens of armored troop carriers; all hitched up to teams of four heavily armored Pegusi given a weaker form of terrestrial power armor designed for airborne units. In the early days, teams pulling these carriers had around eight to ten Pegusi hitched up to drag the older models considerable weight into the air. However...due to 'unforeseen circumstances related to casualty rates', there were fewer and fewer strapping bucks to yoink the airships along. There was a certain bitter irony to be found in this as science and magic would not have been given so much attention or funding had the falling Pegusi numbers not started to make national headlines after the first two years of war. We thought air superiority was more than enough to counter the earthbound Zebras...forgetting they ruled an Empire and wielded the might of many nations, all of whom swore fealty to the same Kaizar. Those damned Crowned Eagles were bigger than biology texts suggested and they pierced early armor prototypes like a tin can, especially the lighter armored Pegusi who needed all the agility they could get. Such a goddamn fast bird that even S.A.T.S was only marginally more accurate than blind luck and just as likely to fail. To date, the only ones known to go hoof to talon and win the majority of the time were an elite of elites amongst fliers known not as traditional Aces but as Thunderbolts. A tribute to the Wonderbolts of old and as a statement to their speed, precision and deadliness to the worst foes of the skies. There was always the occasional Feral Dragon brought in or the charmed flying ultra-conda but the Crowns were the marks of legend for being far more common in the skies.

That all being said...these wingy boys and girls before me weren't Thunderbolts. Not only was the shiny gold lightning bolt armor paint missing but so was the trademark staggering confidence as they waited anxiously in place while the many groups of Rangers boarded their crafts. Though it was proving to be my sixteenth tour in the Badlands in the last ten years, my ninth with the Rangers, I had never seen the entire Desert Ranger Corps get called upon at once for a deployment to the battlefield. Although each tour only lasted six-to-twelve weeks, the ratio of caskets coming north was starting to feel overwhelming compared to the thinning lines marching south month after month. There were (more or less) at least two Brigades of about ten thousand Rangers out in the field already which left the remaining three Brigades (roughly fifteen thousand strong, including myself) back on call at Camp Macintosh, Camp Boulder or on leave. Twenty-five thousand Rangers sounded nice when written in a newspaper or spoken during a PR campaign but the truth wasn't quite so magnanimous to those who did the heavy lifting and knew the weight of the national meatgrinder. It wasn't just us, the other Corps experienced the same slow realization of...well, reality. First it started with lists of KiAs being edited to MiAs before being brought to the media for mass circulation. They had a right to know of course as so many were serving...but it was an easy ruse to save face with and it only kept getting worse when it got good results out of the populace. After that it was a shift to excessive MiAs being relabeled as Verified Captured, a subtle show of the air of confidence the brass tried to program civilians to snort down. With nationalism on another steady rise, the story changed once again to the good ol' hero's death story tacked onto the PoW story. Of course, nothing of what I just said is my official opinion. Who knew how easily a Non-Disclosure Agreement can be snuck into the piles of red tape you need to hack through to join the Army's officer corps?

The standing and waiting was making me antsy. Not nerves as those had to be sacrificed long before now but the kind more akin to stage fright jitters. It was like going on stage after a season of rest and polishing. The dance was muscle memory incarnate but there was always a bit of nervous thought beating on your nerves like a snare drum and repeating all the steps needed to avoid the show crashing for everyone. Considering the scope of the operation that I had seen on the Colonel’s maps, Codenamed Operation: Enduring Sunlight, it seemed the whole damn Equestrian Army was being put into active service together for a massive assault on all fronts. Something like that hadn’t happened since the Manehattan Offensive when the Zebras first invaded mainland Equestria all along the east coast. Just another testament to the obvious. Since that invasion we had been able to pull enough troops off the front lines to allow them to rotate in and out of their respective Camps for much needed R&R. But to need so many models on the Equestrian side of the map fanned out in a thick border around the country...I mean who could ask for a stronger fucking supporting argument?

“Ah! Alpha Squad! Common’ ova here real fast eh?” the Lieutenant Colonel called out to us across the way, rousing me from yet another train of thought passing the time.

We trotted over like good little soldiers and each shook his hoof as he congratulated us on our promotion to the top of the ranks as well as apologizing that we wouldn’t be able to hold the special promotional ceremony until after everything was over. I don’t think any of us minded the fact we were going to skip the hubbub since it was in the field we intended to earn that promotion and we all quickly thanked him for his mentorship. The old stallion was definitely from a different era of Rangers but it was thanks to his studious documentation of the old ways we all were worthy of respect. His upbringing as a farmer had given him an intimate touch with the earth that helped him expand and refine the survival techniques then taught to the younger Rangers facing much more danger than his day. A charming addendum to his work was a section on home farming techniques if caught behind enemy lines with ample seclusion or in PoW camps. Though I had yet to need that section myself...it didn't stop Hucks or I from rereading it occasionally just in case we suddenly needed it. Or, more likely, started a garden of our own once everything was over. The moment we were done speaking we were ushered to the front of a line of rowdy soldiers waiting to board a troop carrier labeled with a large black ‘1’ on the armored chassis. The gilded limousine of the Rangers. Nothing special about it except she was the first to mark green to drop, a factor that was mandatory as the first hooves on the ground get the easiest kills...or so the legend went.

The troop carriers (affectionately called ‘Shaggin’ Waggons’) were about as comfy to sit in as a can of pickled carrots is to eat. It sat similar to a standard bus (though could carry three times as many passengers) with small seats lining down the length of the craft while the center aisles were packed with ordinance, supplies and other random shit we may or may not need in the field. Most of the stuff was meant for the poor bastards who were already fighting and dying in those godforsaken trenches, but overall it was all the property of the Equestrian Armed Forces and all its many branches, of which I was but a tiny leaf on the Ranger branch. That being said, I was one sexy leaf! (Or at least I thought I was. There were plenty of other mares who were damn fine themselves scattered around the Army.)

The seating arrangement, though pre-arranged by ponies higher on the pay grade than myself, was rearranged a tad so Huckleberry and I could sit side by side and enjoy each other’s company. It didn’t take long for the other four in Beta Squad to realize she and I were a pair when we first came together as a team nearly five years ago. We were subtle enough in our affection for each other to go by mostly unnoticed by superior officers and ponies who weren’t around us as much but months of bunking, fighting and living with the same five people forms bonds of friendship that can only be found in the Army. When they finally asked about it, we were both shocked that not only were they not going to turn us in (as was Camp protocol) but also wanted to support us in our secret love life saying it was ‘cute that two kick ass mares had found love in this shithole’. Since then, they had covered for both our asses time and time again going out of their way to make sure we had some proper ‘alone time’ each week in a random closet or empty office they had staked out for us. It was acts like that, plus their insanely good talents in the field, that made me love my brothers and sisters of Beta (now Alpha) Squad and trust them with my life anywhere I went. We never went anywhere or did anything without each other except in the rarest of circumstances and were arguably the most vocal proponents of granting leave to all Squad members at once. Bunkering down in the mud and gore or sprawled across the floor and couches in one of our respective civie homes, we just couldn't stand to be apart from each other for longer than a week it felt.

“Alright everypony, channel three and seal up. I want to talk with y'all.” I said, turning my helmet’s radio to our private channel and shutting off my external speaker so we could speak and be heard only amongst the five of us.

“Ma’am? Before we begin I just wanna say…damn girl, you cut it close this time.” Came the amused chuckles of Buck Beak, our one and only Griffin who preferred to blow shit up with his signature ‘Little Big Cannon’, a multi-barreled rocket launcher he had special ordered from the military weapon depots.

I blushed hard, grateful that my helmet kept my embarrassment from the prying eyes of the basic Rangers around us. Naturally, Huckleberry and I both informed everyone about our near miss with the Colonel and how he almost caught me literally with my pants down and Huckleberry’s head between my thighs. They all had already shared a laugh over it as well as a few nervous chuckles but I knew they weren’t going to let us forget about it anytime soon. And to be honest, I didn’t blame them. In retrospect it was a great story, one I hoped to cherish with my mare once we were retired from the Rangers living in a nice small home somewhere away from the front lines and the prying eyes of the M.O.M, which cursed homosexuality as an Imperialist ploy to destroy the nation.

On that note, I disliked Zebras just as much as the next pony. I had seen the horrible lengths they had gone to to win this fucking War, but it wasn’t like Equestria was much better. Zebras had just as strong a sense of national pride as we did and had their own views on sex and family that I had learned little by little by studying their books on philosophy. I knew full well if those books were found by the Ministry I could kiss my career, my mare, my Squad and my ass goodbye…but I couldn’t help but learn more about my enemy. A nation, an Empire such as theirs was a fascinating study in history for any self-respecting hobbyist like myself with as many bizarre twists and turns in their tale as anyone else. In my mother's day and especially prior, interspecies marriage, same-sex romance, mixed-species adoptions and the occasional polygamist arrangements amongst other social categories were all relatively commonplace. However...something changed sometime in my early childhood that saw those things scrutinized, railed against and then finally completely banned by M.O.M who held the power over what was deemed socially acceptable.

Were it permissible to do so, I'm sure there would be speculation as to what exactly happened that brought about these changes and I had my own list of potential suspects. First of course was the population scarcity from a killer epidemic of a particularly virulent form of the clop which spread like wildfire in the casual love lifestyles of yesteryear when sex was as easy to come by as Sparkle Cola was now. Second there was the growing international squabbles in the west with nationalism being a commodity not exclusively to just Equestria. Places like Griffinstone, Trottingham and even the Crystal Empire all bickered ever more vehemently over their relative importance on the global stage. Wasn't long before bad blood festered enough to incubate a new culture of suspicion and unease between once friendly neighbors. Third...there was a rumor the once infamously pansexual, anything-goes Ministry Mare Pinkie Pie had long ago been rejected by a mare she loved like no other and the heartache from the experience led to her sudden embodiment of the Anti movement. Of course, nopony could prove the rumor true nor false, but its mere existence was enough to lend some clarity to her campaign to transform Equestria under her ever watchful gaze. I suppose the only lesson to take away from it was to never fuck with the heart of a girl who would essentially become the new face of the entire fucking government.

“Heh…well, thank you for your support Buck.” I responded, trying to think through the haze of embarrassment and lingering libido to what I had originally called them together to discuss. “Ah fuck, that's right. Sooooo...I’ll be honest with all of you and tell ya straight up. I have no fucking clue what we’re doing or what we’re getting into. All the Colonel told me was that we are flying into the thick of things and pulling a Bird From Hell over the L.Z to support any fire teams below and further instructions are anticipated pending Olive's directive. Other than that I don’t know anything.”

“Hmmm…well, if I were to hazard a guess, the situation down there seems so fucked that they probably don’t even know where they need us to be. My bits are on them telling us what they need a month after we first touch sand.” Pennies Worth chimed in. “You know, like Shattered Hoof? Or am I the only one who hasn't yet forgotten that shitshow?”

I bobbed my head in agreement until Rain Dancer commented, “I heard a rumor in the showers we’ll be working with the Tin Heads and that they’re being flown in from Manehattan by the dozens. No clue if it holds any weight but it ain't something the guys would joke about.”

Great, now we had to share the battlefield with the Steel Rangers? I knew war was unpredictable and fucked shit up across the board for almost everyone involved but…common. We were snipers, hoof-to-hoof experts and didn’t cause tons of friendly fire incidents with fucking tri-barreled automatic 40mm grenade launchers; all traits desirable in the trenches of the South. Tin Heads had rule of the east coast for what felt like a decade now, a place where the wide open plains, light hills and dense infrastructure lent itself much more readily to the T-45 and its strength as a walking death machine. The Badlands on the other hoof had become nothing but miles and miles of trenches, homemade bunkers and makeshift camps all carved into the orange/red earth with hoof, explosion and shovel. Whatever olive, apricot and almond trees that had made the region agriculturally famous had disappeared years ago in the chaos and bloodshed and I wondered if the area would ever be fertile enough to plant after all the magical fire, shrapnel and bullet casings that had been blasted into it.

“Well, if that’s true then we’ll just have to work with it.” I finally replied after my thoughts had finished wandering and had come back home. “They may be a bunch of Tin Heads, but they’re fellow Equestrians which means we gotta at least pretend to be friends out there so leave your dicks in your pants. You can measure them later once we’re flying home with another successful tour under our belts. Let's just do what we always do and before ya know it we'll be right back here in eight weeks time headed back north.”

There was a myriad of giggles and snickers from the rest of them until Pennies Worth giggled, “The day one of you grows a dick is the day I want to watch you two go at it.”

Snickers turned to full hearted laughs as the red flooded my face once more with a vengeance making my helmet a little stifling. After turning on my helmet’s built in air conditioner and giving myself a few moments to stop blushing so damn hard that my cheeks felt like they’d explode did I finally come back to the conversation they were having about what they would do to outshine the Steel Rangers. The overall plan was to just do what we did best: snipe bitches before they even saw the Tin Heads coming and steal their kills right in front of em. It pissed them off to no end and that tactic is where every Ranger shone through time and time again. The perfect plan indeed.

The flight from Camp Macintosh to the Badlands took only a few hours, most of that time spent in near darkness as they seemed to forget to replace or just turn on the lights in the troop carrier leaving Huckleberry and I plenty of time to hoof each other through our pants. As the bay door finally opened to the howling wind outside, causing everypony wearing a coat or loose piece of fabric to start flapping violently, I was hoping nopony would see me and wonder if I had pissed myself in fear or something. What even was I going to say? Yeah, me and Huckleberry came over six times each while sitting next to each other just randomly? Heh, no. My only hope was that the drop into the L.Z was enough to air-dry the wet spot reaching down my thighs to my hooves without anypony noticing.

“Alpha! Prepare for the green light!” Came the barking voice of the Drop Boss, the Pegasus whose only job was to yell at ponies and tell them when to dive out of the back of a moving vehicle ten thousand feet in the air.

Everypony dutifully stood and checked each other’s weapon and armor straps so we wouldn’t lose anything important on the way down before proceeding to the bay door, each step making our coats flap faster and more violently in the gale. As we stood near the door, a large set of lights came to life like clockwork on either side of the door jam, the big red one brightly illuminated for all to see. This would mark my sixteenth tour and my sixtieth jump into combat…and even after all that time, I still fucking hated flying. Vertigo is a bitch I never managed to subdue.

The green light came to life with a bright glow causing the Drop Boss to needlessly bark out, “Green means go you pansies! Sixty seconds down!” and I was tempted to pull him out with me and hope the Unicorns down below would catch him.

Parachutes had been around for ages but with all the gear we carried, not to mention the weight of Steel Rangers who dropped like blocks of solid tungsten, the chutes just couldn’t fit with everything on our backs let alone have room to deploy. So instead, there were a dedicated taskforce of Unicorns with advanced telekinetic powers who’d stand by at every L.Z to catch those of us stupid enough to jump out of a troop carrier without a parachute. Which was everypony. All in all, the results had spoke for themselves and parachutes became almost the exclusive property of cargo drops and Tin Heads. Long as the strict timetable and communication standards were adhered to, everything made it down safely every damn time without fail.

The adrenaline kicked in the moment my hooves started galloping down the sunlit bay door towards the great blue expanse beyond filled with fluffy white clouds all basked in the warmth of the sun above. The instinctual urge to stop myself from running and jumping at ten thousand feet up was just as strong as the first time I had been forced to do so but this time my resolve to shine as the new face of Alpha was so fierce that I was more than happy to dive headfirst into a warzone.

As my hooves left the relative safety of the transport, the full scale of the battle raging beneath me unfolded to my view. Even from so high up, it wasn’t hard to spot the bright flashes of muzzle blasts or the sparkling green or red trails of energy rifles flying around everywhere below, every now and again a much brighter and bigger explosion punctuating the conflict as a missile or artillery shell detonated here and there. The closer I got to the ground breaking through the scattered clouds, the more friendly blue ticks and the more angry red enemy ticks appeared on my E.F.S and the thought popped into my head that the number of red seemed uncomfortably more than the somewhat sporadic blue I was seeing on my visor.

“Uhhh, Ma’am?!” Rain Dancer cried out fearfully. “Where the fuck are the Uni’s?!”

I focused my attention on the L.Z where we were more or less dropping towards and squinted, my helmet’s built in magnification following my unspoken commands and giving me a rather clear view of the completely empty L.Z site that should have had at least ten Unicorns present plus their armed escort to catch us. Looking closer (a task helped by how fast we were all dropping) I finally found what remained of the Drop Crew seemingly flung around everywhere as bloodied piles of mush around a crater that was too big for any standard rocket to achieve. Indeed it was a crater to match a very large artillery shell but...last I had been informed, we had destroyed their artillery support weeks ago. Right...?

“Shit! L.Z’s wiped out!” I called out through my radio to my Squad mates who were further up than I was. “Pass the word and fucking think!”

The dusky red earth hurtled closer with every passing second as I frantically tore through my brain for any feasible idea on how to catch not only myself but the ten thousand other Rangers who were or were going to be right on my tail. I was fairly talented in telekinesis, able to lift and aim multiple weapons at once while on the move and under fire, but I was never trained as a Drop-Uni let alone how to even self-levitate, so my magic was as good as useless from up here. With nothing better to do and no ideas getting passed back to me about how we were to survive this (I could see the headlines…‘Alpha Squashed: Desert Rangers’ Finest Lose a Bet with Gravity!’) I slipped my AMR from my back and started firing at every stripped fuck I could get a good sight on. It was indescribably gratifying to see five of their heads pop like gory balloons or their bodies tear in pieces by the sheer power of the 25mm round and when I finally clicked on empty I was too close to the ground to reload and fire again.

With a final sigh of embarrassment I closed my eyes against the inevitable gory impact with the ground and said across our Squad channel for all to hear, “Just FYI Hucks? You still owe me that rim job I gave you last week.”

“Yeah…make sure you wash yours better this time.” She responded with a giggle.

Next Chapter: Chapter Five: Bones and Memories Estimated time remaining: 30 Hours, 31 Minutes