The Ghost of Rosenheim
Three days.
Three days had passed since the Republican army encircled Rosenheim and began pounding it with everything they had. The arrival of Christmas Eve, of all things, only made our predicament feel that much more miserable.
"Hk, hk…."
I leaned my back against the wall, coughing up something dry and ragged. When I blew my nose, a clump of bloody mucus came pouring out, thick with blackened ash dust.
Material Conversion.
Skill Material Conversion (Lv. 2) has been activated.
I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat. Beneath my palm, a shattered slab of pavement trembled, then transformed into a cold lump of 7.92mm cartridges. If I hadn't leveled up Material Conversion, I wouldn't have been holding on at all.
Chime.
Skill Strong Mind is suppressing physical pain.
Chime.
Skill Strong Mind is forcibly maintaining consciousness.
The skill Strong Mind had been firing off warnings with unusual frequency. But I couldn't stop. If I stopped, this rat-trap stopped working.
"Kurt."
"Yes, sir! Captain…."
I looked for Kurt, the man standing on the other side of the wall. His eyes were sunken deep, his gaze unfocused.
Status Analysis.
"The men?"
"……Not a single one of them is in his right mind, sir. They're all chewing stimulants like gum just to stay upright. Give them one quiet minute and they're asleep on their feet, every last one. There are even men drooling in their sleep right next to an exploding shell…."
It wasn't just my company, either. The enemy rotated fresh troops in around the clock, pumping new meat into the grinder every hour, while we hadn't slept a wink for three days and nights. I wasn't speaking in metaphor — we were, quite literally, zombies.
"Relief… when do the reinforcements get here?"
Kurt asked in a trembling voice.
"They'll come. Assuming the Imperial bastards have any face left to save."
I answered flatly and checked my Minimap. The 2D map in the corner of my vision was drowned in a sea of crimson dots.
It was Brigadier General Dietrich, screaming. The dignified old gentleman with the splendid mustache was gone; all that remained was a terrified old man.
"…What a drama queen."
Red dots were crashing down around the headquarters bunker like a tidal wave. Their movements were disciplined and orderly — clearly a substantial force of elite troops. No wonder the brigadier was losing his mind.
Still, the odds of the bunker actually falling were low.
Boom. Boom. Boom!
From a distance came the unmistakable, irregular bark of the 88mm anti-aircraft guns, overlaid with the sound of hundreds of rifles crackling like frying beans.
The red dots couldn't push within a certain distance.
Right — the brigade's main force had the flak batteries, and the stragglers from the 3rd Corps had gathered there too.
But the 7th Infantry Brigade wasn't in good shape everywhere.
"Hannah, what about the eleven o'clock sector?"
At my question, Hannah — who had appeared at my side without my noticing — closed her eyes and furrowed her brow.
"…It's precarious. There's an enormous mana source… It feels like she's barely holding the line around herself. Major Seraphina, I mean."
I looked at the eleven o'clock position on my Minimap — the ground where the cathedral had once stood.
Sure enough, the green dots had thinned by about thirty percent compared to the opening of the battle. The ones that remained had abandoned any wide defensive perimeter, instead clustering tightly around a single point at the center.
That would be Seraphina, then.
…She's overextending herself.
She was probably using the underground crypt as a fortress, luring the enemy inside. Pouring mana bullets down the narrow corridors, no doubt. But I could see the green dots going out one by one, like dying embers.
Precarious — but not collapsing just yet. It hadn't been intentional, but thank God I'd given her the full Bio-Resonance Attunement Method treatment in the car from the capital before she was deployed.
As long as the Renault tanks were handled by the 88s, everything else was prey for her mana bullets.
"The factory district at three o'clock…."
I didn't even need to ask Hannah about that one. The zone held by the artillery battalion and the 2nd Battalion was a complete war zone.
Red and green dots were so hopelessly entangled that friend couldn't be told from foe. A hand-to-hand bloodbath at ranges so close that grenades were being thrown back and forth across a single wall.
The dots overlapped, flickered, and vanished.
Crackle.
Screams and unhinged shouting spilled through the radio.
The factory district's defensive line had collapsed long ago. The soldiers there were locked in a brawl, grabbing each other by the collar across rusted machinery and shattered concrete floors.
A dogfight in the purest sense of the word.
If there was any consolation, it was that the green dots weren't disappearing one-sidedly — they kept mingling with the red, ugly and stubborn. Proof that our men were still clinging to the enemy's ankles like water ghosts, refusing to let go.
But.
My gaze drifted to the seven o'clock sector of the Minimap. The zone where the engineers and the 3rd Battalion had been positioned.
……Silence.
There were no more green dots there. Only a large mass of red ones had dug in, with the occasional few wandering about as if on patrol.
Not on the radio. Not on the minimap. Not even through Hannah's Mana Sense. No trace of our own men could be found in that sector.
Annihilation. One wing of the brigade had already been broken off.
"Captain…!"
That was when it happened. Hannah abruptly turned to look at me.
She had caught the red dots on the Minimap closing in on our position.
"Ha…."
Watching it, a hollow laugh rose up in me all on its own.
When is this hell going to end?
I forced my blurring vision back into focus.
Skill Strong Mind is suppressing physical pain.
Dammit. I just want to muster out already.
Survive, and they'll make you a hero?
Bullshit. I'd drop dead of overwork long before any hero's welcome.
Same hour. The outskirts of Rosenheim — the Republican Army's provisional command post.
SLAM—!
"Why in God's name won't it fall!"
Lieutenant General Henri de Dubois, commander of the Republic's 2nd Corps, drove his baton down into the desk. The expensive oak tabletop split with a crack.
His staff officers held their breath and lowered their heads.
"Three days. Three days since we threw our elite armored and infantry divisions at a city held by a single infantry brigade — not to mention an artillery brigade and air force support…! Three days, and we have nothing to show for all of it!"
Lieutenant General Henri's face was mottled red and blue with fury.
The plan had been elegant: seize Rosenheim, the strategic hub, then race down the highway straight into the Empire's interior. To crush the boulevards of the capital, Eisenburg, beneath tank treads before the enemy could even reform their lines — that was the scenario the Republic had drawn up.
But reality was a shambles. The entire front's timetable had come undone, snagged on a single small dot on the map called Rosenheim.
"Report. What's their condition?"
"Th-that is… you won't believe me, sir… but their firepower has not diminished. Not one bit."
"What?"
"We completed the encirclement and cut their supply lines entirely. In theory, they should have run out of ammunition yesterday. And yet…."
The intelligence officer swallowed dryly.
"According to frontline reports that just came in, they're pouring out bullets as if they had an ammunition factory set up inside the city. They're even firing 88mm flak shells with reckless abandon."
"Spending ammunition without supply? Are they practicing magic, now?"
"And… their manner of resistance is bizarre. It's as if they don't fear death at all. They don't hesitate for a second at bayonet combat, and they appear through unidentified side passages as though they held a thread running through the entire city. We have killed them past any reasonable count, and still they crawl out of somewhere like zombies and open fire again."
"Nonsense!"
Lieutenant General Henri roared.
"You're telling me the Imperial bastards have resorted to black magic? Or that they had some secret weapon hidden under Rosenheim all along?"
He glared down at the map. Rosenheim. He had scored it with red X's countless times, and still a blue flag — the symbol of the Imperial Army — stood planted in its heart.
"The Ghost Brigade…."
A word muttered by someone drifted through the command post.
On paper, in the intelligence bureau's files, they had been an unremarkable second-tier infantry brigade. Lucky greenhorns whose greatest accomplishment was clubbing backward orc tribes in the Ashen Forest. The glittering triumphal parade and medal ceremony in the capital had been dismissed as nothing more than a political show for Imperial propaganda.
But when the lid came off, what lay waiting inside were the monsters of hell. A black hole that devoured everything fed into it.
"Ghost? Shut your mouth! Are you saying the Imperial Army has summoned actual specters?"
Lieutenant General Henri hadn't finished venting his anger. But even his roar carried a faint tremor beneath it.
"But, General… there are even rumors circulating that the corpses themselves are rising and firing rifles. In zones we buried under bombardment in broad daylight, the bullets come flying the moment night falls."
"And those bullets… no one knows where they come from, but they never run dry. It's not that their supply has been severed — it's as if they're mining ammunition straight out of the ground."
It was an absurd metaphor, but no description fit the terror spreading along the front any better.
An enemy that kept vomiting firepower for three days and nights with its supply lines completely severed, that appeared from God knew where no matter how many you killed, gnawing away at our troops.
To the Republican Army, the conduct of the 7th Infantry Brigade had already ceased to be ordinary military activity and hardened into something closer to an apparition — a haunting.
"General, we must halt the offensive."
The chief of staff screwed up his courage and spoke.
"The 4th Armored Division's tank loss rate has exceeded forty percent. And above all… the infantry are refusing to go in. Even with officers waving pistols in their faces, they say they cannot enter that meat grinder."
He added, his face a mask of grief:
"The bombardment three days ago was a total misjudgment. The roads are wrecked — we can't bring tanks up anymore — and in that ocean of rubble, there's no telling where the enemy will spring from next."
This was the same Lieutenant General Henri who had ordered the offensive in the first place, scoffing that there was no conceivable way he could lose to a mere brigade.
"…Halt the offensive."
But for this one moment, he had no choice but to make a different decision.
"Pushing in more men is suicide. We must regroup before the Imperial main force arrives."
He swallowed the humiliation churning up from his gut.
"All forces: cease your advance and hold your current positions. Maintain the encirclement — nothing more."
The moment the order went down, his staff withdrew at speed, and Henri, left alone, hurled his baton down in irritation and sank deep into his chair.
"Dammit all…."
He glowered at Rosenheim on the map and growled low in his throat.
"What kind of madman is in there… the commander inside that city…."