Just as Planned
Just as planned…
The Abysses kept up their assault, swarming the ridgeline in a black, crawling tide. Thousands of them had already been cut down, and still their numbers showed no sign of thinning.
Swift mobile units tried to punch through the defensive line. Hunters moved to stop them. The S-class hunters, above all, made the difference — marking every Abyss that shoved its way through the line so the rest of the force could pour fire without distraction.
"Hyaaah!"
Kyaaaaak!!
Aegyeong, an S-class hunter, took the head clean off an Upper-class Abyss that had driven deep into the formation. The sheer mass of Abysses charging this far was staggering, but the ones that actually dealt real damage were few — the Upper-class specimens. The S-class hunters stationed at every critical point kept them from running wild, though not without cost; even contained, those monsters left a trail of serious wounds among the ranks. So Aegyeong and the other S-class held their focus locked on every Upper-class Abyss, ready to answer the instant one moved.
Hah… that's six of them now? They're a real threat at this scale, no question — but still manageable. Whoever that legendary adjutant is, they set this formation up damn well.
Positions had been assigned by weapon firepower, and the S-class hunters had been placed where they could move freely and hit hardest. The Abysses kept finding the thinner stretches of the fire net and forcing their way through — but those were exactly the points where the S-class had been concentrated from the start. Because the enemy's patterns had been anticipated and the counters laid in advance, the line had been breached more than once and still not a single hunter had died. Wounded, yes. Dead, no.
Hate to say it, but this is almost comfortable. Allies packed in this tight and I still have room to swing. The Upper-class ones keep coming straight at me, so I barely have to watch my flanks.
Under a formation built to wring maximum firepower and efficiency from every hunter's strength, they could put everything into the enemy in front of them without tripping over one another. Relatively speaking, of course. The longer the fight dragged on, the clearer the problem became for a small force holding a vast army at bay — and no one could afford to call this optimistic.
The worst of it was the fatigue no hunter could escape. The enemy, meanwhile, kept dying in droves, which only meant that every fresh face charging up the slope was still at full strength. Casualties stayed non-fatal, but the wounded kept piling up by the minute, and even as they fell the Abysses tore at the fortifications in their death throes, slowly chewing the once-solid line to pieces.
Bit by bit, the damage was stacking. The hunters were just beginning to feel the edge of real crisis when —
"They're here!"
A bright voice cut across the ridge. Light flickered across every hunter's face, and every eye swung toward the fighters streaming in over the far ridge.
The sky filled with them — so many they seemed to blot out the light. At a glance it looked like a single mass, but the hunters on the ground knew better. Each aircraft had come from a different direction, converging only now.
The fighters ignored the black swarm below and made straight for the base. Their bays were empty of bombs; they couldn't deal meaningful damage to the Abysses even if they tried. And still, as the aircraft passed overhead, smiles broke across the hunters' faces.
The reason wasn't in the sky. It was on the ground.
Beyond the ridge, a second black tide was pouring toward them — a flood of dark bodies that on any other day would have sent a chill down every spine. In that moment, the hunters felt only a thrill of pure exhilaration.
"Finally showed up!"
"Let's see how well they do their jobs."
Another vast host of Abysses, racing straight for the ridge. Fresh intelligence put their numbers at roughly twenty thousand, every last one of them already in a berserk frenzy. They tore across the ground at a murderous pace, closing fast on the disciplined Abyss force that had been hammering the base.
Under ordinary circumstances, the arrival of enemy reinforcements would have been cause for dread. Right now, every hunter watching the scene had the same word rising in their minds.
Using the enemy against the enemy.
"Kyaaaaaak!!"
"Karrreuk!!!"
The newcomers turned on their own kind with raw, overwhelming aggression. The Abysses that had been pressing the hunters scrambled to respond — and failed. Until now they had brushed aside every Abyss that got in their way with ease. Part of that was their own peculiar cunning. The larger part had been simple numbers: tens of thousands crushing groups of dozens, hundreds, a thousand at most. Easy work if you paid attention.
This time the "kin" bearing down on them were a host of twenty thousand, nearly their equal. And crucially, the disciplined force wasn't marching in formation — it was mid-assault, fully committed to the hunters in front of it. They had been struck clean in the back of the head. The slick, deceptive movement that had defined them until now simply vanished; confusion took its place.
"Krararaaaaa!!!!"
A great cry rolled across the field. In the next breath, the Abysses assaulting the hunters' line spun about and drained away like a receding tide, deciding that the kin tearing into them from behind were the more urgent threat. The blood-soaked ground where humans and Abysses had been locked in combat transformed, in an instant, into a slaughterhouse of Abyss against Abyss — clawing, biting, rending their own.
"How do I put this… this is the kind of scene that makes you want popcorn."
"Agreed. Never thought I'd live to watch Abysses tear each other apart like that."
The same monsters that had been trying to kill them moments ago were now putting on a blood-soaked show. The hunters eased the taut reins of their tension, took a short breath, and began rechecking the defensive line.
Abysses locked in a mutual bloodbath right in front of them. Two great hosts colliding, both sides bleeding numbers at a ferocious rate — and the adjutants watching couldn't keep the awe out of their voices.
"I can't believe it actually worked like that…"
"I understood the plan when I heard it, but I never thought it would actually be possible."
The operation I had built from endless intelligence gathering. Sortie the fighters. Draw in every ordinary Abyss within reach — not just this sector, but every region in range — and drive them straight into the force already marching on the base.
I had based it on a single fact: on their way here, that force had already been attacked by their own kind. Abyss behavior toward this particular group resolved into two outcomes — hostility or joining ranks. In the wrong case, the plan could have swollen the enemy's numbers instead of cutting them. I hadn't worried about that.
One of the things my experiments had proven: ordinary Abysses went either way at roughly even odds. Abysses already in a berserk state turned hostile toward this group one hundred percent of the time. So I had ordered the hunters ferrying the Abysses in by air to hose them with machine-gun fire at regular intervals and keep them locked in frenzy the whole way.
And the result was this — the picture I had wanted, drawn to perfection.
"Just as planned…"