Counterattack, Part 8
“Here we go!” Channeling her inner Welkin Gunther, Gunduz floored the gas pedal, and Kaveh lurched forward. Although the tank was built using the usual schematics for the M1, she had made some modifications. As she did not have the experience of regular tank crews, she had included modern systems designed to streamline driving and firing, allowing her to do both. The tank could be piloted with as few as two people now. Which was fine. She preferred having a second person to help out and then nobody else to complicate things.
“Ma’am, can you at least quiet down—” Shayan began.
“COME AND GET SOME, MOTHERFRAKKERS!” Gunduz fired the machine guns, wiping out an entire Crusader squad trying to flank her Persians. She pulled a lever, and the automated systems loaded a new round into the cannon. Peering through a scope hidden between armor plates, she aimed at a group of Crusaders preparing rocket launchers. With the pull of the trigger, the cannon boomed, violently jolting the tank back a little. The Crusaders and their rocket launchers exploded, as did the artificial turf underneath them. The cannon clicked and clanged, and an empty shell ejected out the back and onto the turf with a loud hiss and clunk.
“I guess that means football season’s cancelled?” Shayan said. “Shame, I was betting on the Shiraz Gardeners.”
“The Gardeners?” Gunduz sarcastically scoffed, rolling her eyes. “Don’t make me laugh, those idiots never make it to the playoffs. Isfahan Rams all the way!”
“Got to root for the home team, huh?”
“My family’s lived in Isfahan for a thousand years. I don’t have a choice.”
“Even if the Rams are worse than the Gardeners?”
“If I switched teams, it would genuinely cause a civil war.”
Persians take football very
seriously.
Kaveh rolled forward, the Artesh advancing behind it. Slowly, they secured more of the field. The Crusaders began falling back to their side.
“We’ve got them on the ropes!” Gunduz said. “We’re almost there, and then we can help Willie out.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Shayan pointed at the viewscreen.
(Defense Battle - Valkyria Chronicles 1)
A Crusader tank—another M1 like hers—rolled onto the field, and Crusader infantry reinforcements poured in behind it. The infantry took cover behind crates and rubble and fired back at the Persians, stalling their advance. Then the tank fired its machine guns, cutting down any Persians who couldn’t retreat to cover in time.
“Frak, they brought in their own armor?” Gunduz said.
“Ma’am, we’re literally in the enemy base, and our position is extremely tenuous, so of
course they can deploy tanks.”
The enemy tank slowly swiveled its cannon in Kaveh’s direction. “Help me out here!” Gunduz pulled the lever to reload Kaveh’s main cannon. Shayan fired the machine guns, trying to thin the ranks of the newly arrived Crusaders. The cannon whirred and reloaded. A green light flashed, indicating it was ready to fire. Gunduz nudged her controls to the left to line up the sights with the tank.
Much harder than in the game, obviously. Then she pulled the trigger. The cannon boomed, and the vehicle rocked. Kaveh’s shell impacted the enemy tank’s turret and smashed through it like a hammer bashing metal. Although the other tank didn’t explode, its main cannon had been disabled. Its driver seemed to have survived the attack, as the tank immediately rolled backwards, trying to get away. Gunduz pulled the lever again and listened to the reloading mechanism pull out the empty shell and load in a new round. As soon as the light flashed green, she aimed and fired. The next shell hit dead center, and the enemy M1 finally exploded. Gunduz pumped her fist and whooped. “NOW THAT’S WHAT I’M FRAKKING TALKING ABOUT! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! GET FRAKKED, FASCIST SCUM!”
Her exuberance was short-lived when she saw two more Crusader M1s emerging from the entrance.
“Oh come on, they’ve
still got more?” She angrily pounded the controls. “FRAAAAAAAKKK!”
---
While the battle raged on the field below, Gebhard and his squad stalked the back hallways. During a game, these hallways would be filled with players, coaches, and TV crews as they got ready for a game. But they were deserted now. Gebhard heard nothing but the clicking of his squad’s guns and the clacking of their boots, as well as his own breath. The hallway in front of them was dimly lit. The lights were off, but sunlight streamed in from a window.
The crackling of an intercom startled him. “Hello, Crybaby Gebby.”
The soldiers spun around, aiming their guns in all directions. Gebhard remained rooted in place.
He has access to the intercoms. If he knows I’m here, then he must be watching through the cameras. So he knows we’re coming. He’s in security, then. Best to keep him talking. Keep him busy. “Edmund.
Brother.”
“You showed up,” Edmund said, “I didn’t think you would.”
He most certainly has the route to his room trapped. If I want to get to him, I’ve got no choice but to play along. “Couldn't turn down my brother’s invitation.”
“Brother…” Edmund hung on that word. “The sound of you pronouncing that word, and to me…it makes me sick.”
Gebhard waved to his men, and they continued down the hallway. “I believe I know why. You’re still mad about the letter, aren’t you?”
“You’re fifty years late, Gebby,” Edmund said, “At that point, it might as well be intentional.”
Sometimes, it doesn’t feel like it’s been fifty years. I don’t feel like I’m over 70. “You know I never meant it. You know that was pure chance!”
“What does it matter?!” Edmund’s voice rose. “What matters is I was at Chernobyl, and you weren’t! You, the crybaby, who always had everything handed to you, while
I took the brunt! I always suffered for you!”
“And I never asked for that,” Gebhard said.
“Doesn’t matter what you say, your actions tell the truth. Every time I took the blow for you, you cut and ran. You cut and ran to the academy. You cut and ran away from Russia to Constantinople. And you’ve cut and run to Persia now. A true man doesn’t run. He fights. And I have been fighting.”
“What the frak have you done, Edmund?” Gebhard said.
“I’ve led Jerusalem to victory, that’s what,” Edmund said, “I stood firm and weathered everything my enemies threw at me, then broke them. Bremerhaven broke before me. I helped break Russia. And now I will break both you and Persia.”
“You'll try, but you won’t succeed. You think I’m going to run again? No, I won’t.” He aimed his rifle at a camera. “I’m coming right for you, Edmund! You better be ready!” He shot the camera.
They continued further down the hallway until they reached the door to the communications room. One soldier placed a breaching charge against the doorknob. They stepped away, and then the soldier pressed a detonator, blowing the door open. They rushed inside. There, Edmund waited by the far window, where he had been watching—and presumably commanding—the battle outside. He had no Crusaders with him, at least it seemed that way. Probably in hiding somewhere in the room. His brother had completely changed since the last time they met. His beard was now white, and his face was full of scars. He looked even larger, definitely more broad-shouldered, than how Gebhard remembered him. Edmund laughed. “Long time no see, Gebby! I didn’t think you’d be stupid enough to come here!”
“Well, I did,” Gebhard said, “So let’s settle this. You’re clearly outnumbered. Surrender now, and nobody gets hurt.”
Got to lure out those hidden Crusaders.
“You fool.” Edmund smiled. “We
are settling this right now. But not in the way you think.”
He hit a button, and the hidden Crusaders appeared from behind the desks. Before the Persians could react, the Crusaders aimed large gun-like devices at them and fired. The first thing Gebhard noticed was that no bullets were being fired. Before his troops could react, they all doubled over and clutched their heads, dropping their guns. Gebhard’s head felt incredibly warm. Sweat dripped off his brow. Then he felt a painful dizziness between his eyes, which vibrated uncontrollably. A sharp piercing ringing tore through his ears. His stomach felt terrible, almost like he wanted to retch. The pain was unbearable, even if he closed his eyes and covered his ears.
“You like it?” Edmund smiled.
“What…what is this?”
“Microwaves, brother!” Edmund widened his smug grin. “Your body gets melted from the inside out in response to them! I tested them out in Bremerhaven five years ago. A pretty good test run, if I say so myself. Unfortunately, Tesla took most of the military contracts for his own stuff, so I haven’t been able to make that many of these. Still, once I show your cooked body to the committee, I’ll get my contract!”
“Why…why are you doing this?!” Gebhard said.
“You should’ve figured it out by now,” Edmund said, “These weapons mirror Chernobyl!”
“Chernobyl…” Gebhard said. “So you intend to irradiate me, like your men were?”
“You’re slow, Gebby!” Edmund snarled. “You’re
already irradiated! I couldn’t get authorization to drop a nuke, so I settled for the next best thing. I’ve replicated the conditions of 1986 as best as I could.”
“But why?!”
“Why?” Edmund narrowed his eyes. “To remind you of what you did to me! To make you suffer as I did! AHAHAHAHA!”
You’ve lost it, haven’t you, Edmund?
Edmund clenched a fist. “THIS IS MY REVENGE, GEBBY! MADE POSSIBLE BY JERUSALEM! THIS IS PAYBACK FOR SENDING ME TO CHERNOBYL! NO MORE RUNNING FROM YOUR PAST, BECAUSE I AM BRINGING IT STRAIGHT TO YOU!”
The Crusaders turned up their microwave weapons. The ringing in Gebhard’s ears intensified. His eyes felt like they were going to explode. His skin crawled and felt like it was on fire. His stomach churned like a stormy sea. He fell to his knees and screamed.
---
Wilhelmina’s Enonon furiously clashed against Elias’ wrist blades, 11th-century Damascus steel clanging against 21st-century stainless steel. The lost princess tried angling the large energy blade surrounding Enonon’s physical blade to cut something off from the exosuit, but the mad tyrant always managed to pull away before she could make contact. The energy instead slashed through the field, throwing up artificial grass and turf and leaving nasty gashes in the ground. They were roughly evenly matched, somehow. Wilhelmina was a 56-year-old woman whose only combat experience came from several rounds of self-taught training and a few real battles over the last four months, and she was armed with only a 1000-year-old medieval sword. Elias seemed to be about the same age as her, but he had more muscle and bulk, and he was clad in the most advanced military technology Jerusalem could come up with. Despite being weighed down by the heavy armor of the exosuit, he still swept across the field with hardly any difficulty. The size of Enonon’s energy blade also worked against Wilhelmina, making her slashes slower and harder to aim, while Elias could afford to be more agile with his smaller blades. Elias lunged forward to strike her with one blade. She parried the attack with Enonon, then noticed his other arm coming in for the real attack. She flicked her free wrist, and a pulse of energy moved her body out of the way.
“GET A LOAD OF THIS!” Gunduz fired Kaveh’s cannon, taking out a squad of Crusaders rushing the Persian lines. Wilhelmina looked in her direction, seeing the two Crusader tanks flanking Kaveh and the infantry around it. One of the enemy tanks fired, narrowly missing Kaveh. The other tank fired and struck just short of Kaveh, denting its front armor and damaging its left treads. The first tank adjusted its aim and prepared to fire again.
Gunduz! Wilhelmina turned away from Elias and swung out with Enonon in Gunduz’s direction just as the tank fired. She managed to deflect that shell, and then Gunduz destroyed the tank with her next round. Then she felt the cold steel of Elias’ wrist blade slide into her back. First, the cold hit her. Then, she felt something metallic pushing into where it shouldn’t. Then she felt the pain bursting through her body. After Elias pulled the wrist blade out, she felt the cold air brushing against the open wound, while warm blood spurted out. She fell to her knees.
God, that hurt! ARGH, FRAK! Fortunately, it seemed to have missed her spinal cord, because she could still feel her legs. She was about to turn back to face Elias, but the other Crusader tank fired on Kaveh. In the split second she had to analyze its trajectory, Wilhelmina calculated it would land right in the middle of Gunduz’s tank.
NO—OW, THIS HURTS—BUT—NO—I HAVE—TO—PROTECT—GUNDUZ! She slashed out with Enonon to deflect the other shell, and it flew over Kaveh and exploded in the bleachers. A second later, Gunduz fired back and destroyed the tank. Another second later, Elias stabbed her again, this time in the upper back. Wilhelmina gasped for air, but she found it hard to breathe now. Her knees gave way. Did he hit her lungs? Did he get her heart? Her spinal cord? She didn’t want to know. Enonon fell out of her hand, its energy blade dissipating like a fading flame. She fell face first into the ground, her face burying itself into the grass and artificial turf. Red crept in at the edges of her blurring vision as she watched the battle unfounding.
“HA! You can’t fight both me
and my army!” Elias said.
By now, Gunduz had noticed what had happened. “WILLIE! NO!” Kaveh’s machine guns opened fire, but the bullets either missed or pinged off Elias’ armor. Gunduz then swiveled her main cannon straight at Elias, but before she could fire, a rocket struck Kaveh, and an explosion engulfed the upper half of the tank. When the flames evaporated, the charred and twisted remains of Kaveh no longer moved. Wilhelmina no longer heard the hum of its engine.
“…Gunduz…” she gasped. “…No…”
Elias cackled with glee. “That despair, oh how great it feels! Takes me back to the bunker, it does!” He mocked Wilhelmina’s words. “
Gunduz, no! Not my friend! I say good riddance! Yet another world leader dead at my hands!”
Wilhelmina tried crawling away, but it was futile. Elias simply caught up to her by walking. She weakly reached out to Enonon with her right hand, but Elias kicked it away. Then he stomped on Wilhelmina’s fingers. Wilhelmina screamed, feeling her finger bones breaking and more blood spurting out onto the ground.
“Music to my ears!” Elias said. “Oh, how glorious this sounds! Ellie smiles down from heaven right now!” He knelt down and held a blade to Wilhelmina’s neck. “Now, I could make your death swift, like I did with your dear husband and son. But she and my comrades in arms demand justice. So I won’t give you the easy way out. I’m going to make it slow and painful.”
He stomped on Wilhelmina’s arm, the metal boot of the exosuit increasing the pressure applied on her. She heard more bones loudly crunching and snapping, sending another wave of pain through her body. She uncontrollably let out another scream.
“Ellie passed on her dream to me, you know.” Through the redness creeping in at the edges of her vision, Wilhelm could still see that smug smile on Elias’ face. The same smugness everybody with a hand in Jerusalem’s creation had. “It is my dream now. A dream, that one day, we oppressed Christians everywhere will take control of our shared destiny. A land by God, of God, for God, damnit! A nation of action and faith, ruled by force of will and the laws of god, not men. Where the law is absolute, handed down from God. Where justice is in the hands of God and power is where it belongs, in the hands of the strong. Where only those with strength will rule and live, and the weak will submit or perish. Where history is written by the winners. Where every God-fearing man is free to think and act for himself, not limited by petty morality or atheist regulations. Frak all those cowardly lawyers and useless bureaucrats! Frak the constant spew of cancel culture, wokeness, and godlessness eating away at the moral fabric of our society! Frak secularism, frak meritocracy, frak tolerance, frak Romanitas, frak it all! The old Reich was diseased, rotten to the very core, and beyond saving, enthralled to the whims of the equalists we were supposed to destroy fifty years ago. We must pull out the rot by the roots, wipe the slate clean. Tabula Rasa, burn it all down! From the ashes of the old Reich, the Holy Roman Empire of Jerusalem will rise as a phoenix—a holy phoenix. The weak, traitorous, apostates, and heretics will be purged, and the strongest will thrive, free to live as they see fit. We’ll bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth!”
“What…the hell…are you talking about?” Wilhelmina barely heard half of what he said.
“You still don’t get it!” Elias scoffed. “I don’t think you’ll ever get it. You’ve never fought like I did. You were a spoiled brat living in a palace all your life, while people like me died on the other side of the world, just to keep you rich and sheltered.”
Wilhelmina couldn’t say anything more. Her mouth had gone numb.
“Oh well,” Elias said, “I suppose your feeble mind can’t exactly comprehend what I’m saying anymore. I shouldn’t waste my time. Even with all that power, you are still weak. You are no match for me, God’s chosen one! You don’t deserve to live in this world. The world has no need for people like you anymore! This is
my world now! Go join the rest of your family where you all belong, in the dustbin of history!”
Wilhelmina’s body grew numb and cold. Her vision faded away as red and then darkness overtook her sight. The sounds of battle grew further and further away. She felt her consciousness slipping away. And as everything fell away from her, leaving her in nothingness, all she felt was disappointment at herself. She had come all this way, hoping she could save the day. She had survived Jerusalem, Russia, Yavdi, and Persia, but when it came down to the wire, she couldn’t make it out of this. Here she was, bleeding out in the middle of a football field in Isfahan, while her friends and troops were dying around her. She had failed, hadn’t she? Nothing had changed at all, only that Jerusalem was about to do to Persia what it had done to Russia.
“Everyone…please forgive me…” No sounds left her mouth, even though her tongue and lips went through the motions. “I…I am so…so powerless…I failed you all…”
Everything faded into nothingness, and it was all over.
---
Kind of awkward to break the mood here, but a lot of Gunduz’s lines in this chapter come from Valkyria Chronicles 1, specifically “Here we go!”
And yes, I referenced the Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance memes. But Elias’ monologue, in addition to taking a lot from the Armstrong speech, also references bits of Ashnard’s dialogue from Fire Emblem Path of Radiance, along with Ashnard’s mentality.
Wilhelmina’s last words are taken from Elincia’s death quotes.
also a “Holy Phoenix” title drop that will lose its meaning if I change the title again
