Phantoms in the Rear
He was definitely looking at a phantom.
Republic 2nd Corps Headquarters, the Soissons City Hall.
"Has the Bern River sector responded yet?"
"Not yet, sir. The signalmen went out to inspect the lines, but they're late returning."
"Lazy bastards."
Henri clicked his tongue. That was when it happened.
BANG—!
The office door burst open with a violent crash. Henri frowned at the discourtesy and lifted his head.
"Who the hell dares barge in without—!"
But the curse died in his throat.
What stood in the doorway was not a man, but a monster of a creature caked in mud, soot, and dried blood. Through the tattered uniform, burn scars were clearly visible.
"S-Sir…!"
"You—what in God's name…?!"
As he fumbled for words, Henri recognized the insignia on the officer's shoulder.
"The Bern River garrison? What in hell happened to you!"
The officer staggered forward and collapsed onto the carpet. Looking up at Henri with the last of his strength, he rasped:
"Th-they broke through…!"
"What?"
"The river… they broke through the river! It's the Imperial Army! Their tanks… their tanks crossed the Bern!"
The wine glass slipped from Henri's hand and shattered on the floor. Crash. Red liquid spread across the white carpet, but no one paid it the slightest attention.
"Tanks? How could Imperial tanks cross the Bern River? What about the Ashen Forest?!"
"They came through the forest—they smashed right through it! Those things… they're monsters! Their 88mm guns blew our bunkers apart in a flat trajectory, and—AAAAGH!"
The liaison officer clutched his head and screamed, like a man whose PTSD had finally seized him.
The atmosphere in the office turned grave. Henri's mind began to race.
A tank force? Impossible. Unless they'd mapped the forest through and through, it would take days just to push through it.
By everything he knew, the numbers simply didn't add up. But judging by the state of the officer in front of him, this was no lie.
"…Scale? How large a force?"
"I-I don't know! The smoke was too thick… at least battalion strength… no, maybe more than that…"
In that instant, the aerial reconnaissance photos he'd received earlier flashed through Henri's mind. The large-scale armored force reportedly spotted in the Ashen Forest.
But he quickly shook his head. The officer's estimate—battalion strength or above—was probably wrong.
A raiding force. A small-scale strike unit. Commandos who crossed over prepared to die, to throw our rear into chaos. That's what this has to be.
No large formation could have traversed that impassable terrain in so little time. Which meant the answer was obvious: a small elite force, engineered to sow maximum confusion. The officer before him had fallen for the deception—but the corps commander himself would not.
"Calm down. A few rats slipped across, that's all."
Henri began issuing rapid orders. He was the Republic's spearhead, commander of the 2nd Corps.
"Get me the provost commander. And order the reserve armored company and infantry battalion stationed outside the city to deploy immediately."
His command staff came down hard on the map on the wall—at the midpoint of Route 4, the highway linking Soissons and the Bern River.
"We stop them on Route 4 with the minimum force necessary."
Henri's judgment was perfectly rational.
"Y-yes, sir! I'll dispatch them at once!"
Of course, the enemy had no idea what common sense was.
2:15 p.m.
The midpoint of Route 4 that Henri had spoken of.
"Don't stop."
I gripped the radio in the command vehicle and gave the order.
[Roger. Maintaining top speed.]
The Battlegroup's momentum was an unstoppable avalanche.
We were deep in the enemy's rear, churning through their very home ground. The enemies here were less soldiers under arms than civilians lulled fat by peacetime.
[Crackle— Two kilometers ahead, the entrance to Lœrre Village. Do we push through the town?]
Major Frederica's transmission. I pulled up the Minimap.
A modest country village. A main road cutting through its center. And blocking that road, a barricade and a handful of sentries.
We could punch through in five minutes flat, but if even one tank threw a track during those five minutes, the cost wasn't worth it.
"Negative. We detour. There's a culvert over the waterway—take the farm track the tractors use."
Grrrrrumble!
The lead tank wheeled sharply. Abandoning the smooth paved road, the great slabs of steel plunged into a field of sunflowers in full yellow bloom.
Crunch-crunch-crunch!
Sunflowers taller than a man were mercilessly snapped down by the tanks' wedge formation. An armored column tearing through a flurry of scattered petals.
The Republic sentries manning the checkpoint barricade at the village entrance were paralyzed by the thunderous roar splitting their village's flank.
"Wh-what the hell is that?!"
"Tanks?! Are they ours?"
"Hey! They're wrecking the whole field! You lunatics!"
One of the sentries blew his whistle and ran out waving his arms.
From atop the armored car, I returned his wave with a crisp salute.
"Keep up the good work."
"Yeah, you too… huh?"
The sentry instinctively saluted back—then belatedly realized that the color of my uniform wasn't the Republic's dark green, but a deep field gray.
"I-Imperial…!"
By the time he tried to swing his rifle off his shoulder, we were already cresting the hill behind the village.
We ran like the wind.
When we came upon a collapsed bridge, we forded at the shallows I'd located with the Minimap.
When a Republic communications relay came into view, a single tank shell snapped its antenna off, and we rolled on past.
KRA-BOOM—!
Leaving the toppled steel tower behind us, we drove on.
Twenty kilometers to Soissons.
2:30 p.m.
Soissons City Hall, the corps commander's office.
Riinng-riiing!
Lieutenant General Henri de Dubois snatched up the telephone, nerves frayed.
"This is the 2nd Corps Commander. Report."
[S-Sir! This is the 4th Supply Depot! An enemy armored column just drove past our front gates!]
"The supply depot? Isn't that right on the highway? Then where are they headed?"
[W-West! They drove straight past our front gate and are heading west!]
"West? Wait—if they're going west, that's toward Soissons."
Henri clicked his tongue and hung up.
"Chief of Staff! Did the armored company deploy?"
"Yes, sir! They just cleared the city outskirts and entered the highway. They'll make contact within thirty minutes."
"Good. They're nothing but a small raiding force. Meet them head-on and they'll piss themselves."
Henri picked up his coffee cup again.
But five minutes later.
Riinng-riiing!
"Now what?!"
[Sir! This is the 12th Signal Company! The field telephone network along the highway has gone down! Last confirmed enemy position…]
"Where?"
[L-Lœrre Village!]
"Lœrre Village?!"
Henri shot to his feet. Lœrre Village was a full ten kilometers deeper in than the 4th Supply Depot.
"Listen to yourselves—the depot report came in less than ten minutes ago! What tank on this earth covers ten kilometers in ten minutes? Are you people insane? Can't you file a report properly?!"
[B-but a runner saw it with his own eyes! He said the black tanks didn't even touch the village—they just blew straight through it…!]
"Idiots, the lot of you!"
Henri slammed the receiver down as if throwing it.
"It's panic, nothing more. Their front line broke, and now they're so spooked they're reporting phantoms."
He pressed his hand against the map.
The speed was flatly impossible by any sane measure. Factoring in the top speed of Imperial tanks, road conditions, and the intervals needed to keep a column together, the numbers simply could not exist.
"They've halted somewhere around here, near the supply depot. Whatever showed up at Lœrre was a few scout motorcycles, nothing more."
Henri forced himself to trust his own common sense. War was fought with numbers—and numbers never lied.
2:50 p.m.
Five kilometers outside Soissons.
The lead tank of the Jäger Battlegroup, 1st Armored Division.
"Colonel. Enemy armor sighted, front."
With Hannah's calm voice, red dots bloomed across the Minimap.
The Republic's hastily dispatched reserve armored company. Five René medium tanks, parked square across the middle of the highway, guns leveled at us.
"A damn nuisance."
I clicked my tongue.
The René IV—the sloped-armor beast the Republic loved to brag about. With our Imperial main battle tanks' short-barreled guns, punching through that thick angled glacis head-on would be a struggle.
"Major Frederica."
[Yes, Colonel. Enemy presumed to be waiting beyond the bend ahead. Shall I send the scouts first?]
I studied the Minimap's 3D terrain. Beyond the corner where the enemy lurked, a line of gentle hills rolled out beside the highway.
At a glance, it was choked with scrub and looked impossible for tanks to traverse—but as I narrowed my eyes, I saw something else. Firm, dry ground lay beneath the brush.
"Changing tactics. Prepare smoke rounds."
[…Smoke, Colonel?]
Frederica echoed back in mild confusion—understandable, since the far side of the bend was completely hidden from view.
"There's an enemy there, plain as day. We respond preemptively."
There was no time to explain every detail. I issued the order with a plausible-sounding excuse.
"First platoon, halt just short of the bend and deploy smoke. Then rev the engines to idle—make them hear us like we're sitting right there."
[…U-understood! First platoon, smoke rounds ready! All remaining tanks, break right!]
Grrrrum!
The Battlegroup split apart. Three lead tanks halted on the road and fired their smoke dischargers.
Pop! Whoosh-whoosh!
Pale gray smoke swallowed the highway bend. At the same moment, the drivers stamped on their throttles, howling their engines loud enough to wake the dead.
Meanwhile, my main force crept into the scrub forest on the right with the noise kept to a bare minimum.
But the enemy turrets were already locked, every one of them, on the smoke-shrouded road ahead. They were waiting for us to burst out, hull guns pre-angled for the kill.
My deception had worked exactly as intended.
Not there, you idiots.
Creak. Snap.
The main force crushed the scrub underfoot and crested the hill at the two o'clock position—precisely where the enemy least expected us.
[Crackle— Colonel, there's really a path over here?! The slope's way too steep! We can't get a firing angle!]
Frederica's voice was tight with anxiety, but the lead tank burst through the brush and reached the crest of the hill in seconds.
[……!]
Over the radio, I heard Frederica's breath catch.
Looking down, there they were: five René medium tanks, the pride of the Republic Army, lined up in the middle of the highway. And their gun barrels, in all their idiocy, were fixed on the smoking road ahead.
[N-no way… they're actually there! Five René medium tanks!]
[Position, range, angle of deflection—all of it… how is this possible?]
[My God, they haven't spotted us at all!]
The tank commanders began reporting in a rush.
"Good luck on our part—it just happened to line up perfectly."
I replied without much interest.
"Open fire. Target their flank grilles."
[All tanks! Fire on the flank weak points!]
KRA-KA-BOOOM—!
The hilltop erupted in a torrent of gunfire. The range was a mere three hundred meters. For the Republic's tank crews, it was a bolt from the blue.
CLANG! KA-BOOM!
"AAAGH! Where'd it come from?!"
"R-right side! The flank!"
An armor-piercing round slammed into the engine compartment of the rearmost René. The thin side armor punched through like paper, the fuel tank ignited, and a pillar of fire roared skyward.
"Swing your turrets! They're on the right!"
The Republic tank commanders cranked their handwheels like madmen. But the René's chronic weakness—its glacially slow turret traverse—betrayed them.
Grind… squeeeeal…
While their barrels turned like tortoises, our loaders had already rammed home the next round.
Clack.
"Off you go."
KA-BOOM! WHUMP!
The second salvo.
The flanks of the Renés, their turrets barely past the halfway mark, were savagely torn open. Internal explosions popped turrets from their rings; tracks snapped and spun uselessly in the air.
[Crackle— All five enemy tanks confirmed silenced!]
Cheers erupted over the radio.
[My God, those armor-plated René tanks… shredded like wet paper!]
[Insane… if we'd met them head-on, our own guns wouldn't have left a dent on those things!]
[Are you sure we fired AP rounds? They're folding up like training-range targets!]
Tanks that would have given us a brutal fight in a slugging match collapsed like scarecrows before the twin blades of information dominance and tactical maneuver.
"No need for finishing shots. Push the burning wrecks off the road and clear the way."
I checked my watch.
Three minutes from first shot to last. The delay was barely worth mentioning.
And once again, what I had to say was the same as always.
"On to Soissons."
We shoved the burning Renés onto the shoulder of the road and accelerated once more.
Soissons was within arm's reach.