Annihilation of the Aikamad Tribe (2)
Razing cities, burning homes, and committing massacres—that was one of the Aikamad tribe’s specialties.
Their way of war was simple: plant overwhelming terror so that plunder came easy. Innocent lives never entered their calculations. Murder was nothing more than a tool for sowing fear, and so emotion never got in the way.
They were used to the sight of a city on fire.
…Though no one among them had ever imagined it would be their own settlement burning.
A sharp whistle cut the air, and a tent exploded. Moments earlier, human shapes had still been moving inside it. No one wanted to picture what end its occupants had met. They were too busy trying to save their own skins.
“Fight back! Stand still and you’ll only die faster—argh!”
Boom!
The man who had been standing in place, shouting, was blown apart where he stood. In a place where shells fell every few seconds, remaining still was death itself.
“The warriors went out to fight. If it’s them…”
Some still clung to empty hope. That hope died almost at once. The moment the warriors bravely left the settlement, a fearful thunder rolled, and screams filled the air. The tribespeople chose not to imagine what end had befallen warriors who had never even received a shaman’s aid. They simply fled.
“Abandon the settlement and run! Surviving is all that matters right now!”
The history of the steppe had always been a cycle of taking and being taken. There was never a permanent conqueror; land seized once could always be reclaimed with time. That was how the Aikamad tribe had survived the Empire’s steppe conquest wars.
As long as they lived, hope remained. The enemy’s strength could not be infinite. One day their main force would withdraw, and then the tribe could reclaim its place. First priority was to warn the other tribes and let them prepare.
With that thought, a large body of cavalry rode out through the rear gate.
What they did not know was that dozens of military trucks, heavy-armored infantry, and Royal Guard foot soldiers were already waiting there. The men who had machine guns mounted on the trucks flicked on their headlights the instant they confirmed the fleeing enemy.
“Enemy confirmed. Engaging.”
And on the open steppe there was not a single obstacle that could hinder a truck.
The headlights turned night into day, and the machine guns opened fire as one.
For the Aikamad tribespeople it was pure hell.
“Aaaagh!”
Eyes adapted to pitch darkness were suddenly flooded with blinding white light. The moment the riders flung up their hands to shield their faces, the bullets poured in.
Against 7.62 mm rounds, cavalry was helpless. Even when they wheeled their mounts and tried desperately to get beyond effective range, it made no difference.
“Twenty enemy horsemen flanking. In pursuit.”
The engines of the military trucks, powered by magical engineering, delivered anywhere from twenty to fifty horsepower of overwhelming force. A mere horse had no hope of outrunning them.
When the gunner on a truck squeezed the trigger, a sound like a chainsaw ripped the dark, and scarlet tracers carved the night apart.
Hiiiii!
Horses that had never in their lives faced a firearm lost their minds. Ignoring their riders, they bolted in every direction—and were swallowed by the kill zone almost at once.
“Flanking force suppressed.”
Thud.
A heavy-armored infantryman leapt from a truck, landed amid the field of corpses, and leveled the machine gun in his right hand.
“Commencing confirmation kills.”
He pulled the trigger. Bodies jerked and danced under the impacts. Among them were a few enemies who had been playing dead beneath the corpses.
“Uwaaah!”
They charged the heavy infantry with short swords or short spears. It meant nothing. Against a walking human tank, edged weapons were useless.
“Confirmation kills complete.”
The same scene repeated everywhere. Whenever the barbarians tried to scatter in any direction, the machine-gun trucks herded them into a single kill pocket and cut them down. The method was grimly familiar to the Aikamad; it was the same drive-hunt they themselves had used so often when raiding the West.
“Are we really wiping them all out?”
“His Grace said there was no other way. Those barbarians can never be civilized.”
If the Aikamad had shown even a shred of restraint—if they had accepted enemy surrenders and not butchered the western territories—none of this would have been necessary.
But they had rejected every mercy the Empire offered and crossed far too many lines. Anyone capable of true repentance would already have taken one of the countless hands the Empire had extended.
“If we hesitate here, the next people to suffer this will be our own families in the Empire.”
The Aikamad tribe was crushed beneath the weight of its own karma, destroyed by the very methods it had once wielded against the Imperial army. Of all the tribespeople who fled through the rear gate, not one escaped alive.
The Royal Guard troopers looked at one another, then turned their eyes toward the settlement’s rear gate.
“Once the bombardment stops, we go in.”
Their work finished for the moment, they simply stood and waited.
“Cease fire.”
Nearly thirty minutes had passed since the indiscriminate bombardment began. Each gun had fired close to a hundred rounds. Even with the somewhat underpowered 76 mm pieces mixed in, the sheer volume of fire had done its work.
No structure remained standing inside the settlement. The larger stone buildings had been deliberate concentration targets for the artillery; stables and armories had been pulverized.
The felt tents characteristic of nomadic peoples had been blasted flat and then burned to nothing by the fires that followed. Not a single building was left intact. What little wreckage still stood merely served as kindling, lighting the dark night sky.
“Illumination rounds are dying. Shall we fire more?”
“No need.”
It had taken less than thirty minutes to annihilate the Aikamad tribe that had once terrorized the West. Now it was time to finish the job.
“Our army’s objective is the swift conclusion of this war.”
On the steppe, victory alone was never enough. What mattered was the rapid dismantling of a hostile tribe and the occupation of its territory. Therefore no one could be allowed to know what had happened here. This was not an age of telephones, and the barbarians possessed none of the Empire’s magical communication orbs.
“So leave no survivors.”
The 1st and 2nd Divisions advanced toward the settlement that was already a wasteland. Veterans who had fought many times under his direct command, they simply carried out the roles assigned to them in silence.
The infantry divisions entered the settlement to finish any enemies the artillery had failed to kill. At the same moment the Royal Guard began pushing in from the opposite side.
“Give them exactly what they did to the westerners.”
Even after every organized fight had ended, the rifle fire continued under that order. And so, at half past five in the morning, as the thick curtain of night over the steppe began to lift, the final shot rang out. Dawn started to brighten the sky.
“No more life signs detected.”
“The mages’ detection spells?”
“Nothing registers.”
“Good. Withdraw.”
Far to the east the sky was turning blue. Where the smoke thinned, a scorched steppe remained—an ashen settlement stripped of every trace of green, a plain soaked in blood, and grass still burning that water-mages were even now trying to extinguish. The aftermath of artillery and battle was nothing short of nightmarish.
“The westerners who revere the steppe like a mother would lose their minds if they saw this.”
For a moment he had hesitated. Nomads regarded the steppe as a mother. Seeing that mother burned and ruined would not leave popular sentiment untouched. If they rose in protest, it would be a nuisance…
No. If they dare protest, so much the better.
Anyone who could look upon this horror with their own eyes and still think of resistance was an enemy who could never be absorbed into the West. Such an enemy had to be crushed without mercy. In that sense, this very scene might serve as an excellent warning.
“Leave the site as it is. No cleanup.”
“Sir? But… the steppe tribes will react violently.”
“React? Let them, if they want to.”
Until now the Empire had lacked the power to dominate the steppe—lacked the strength, the forces, and the technology to overwhelm its enemies. That was why the Empire had been forced to placate the tribes. But they were different. Their army possessed the ability to sweep the steppe clean.
“If anyone can still protest after seeing this place, that is.”
He turned his gaze westward, toward the remaining two great tribes that still opposed the Empire: the Borkan and the Serelkis.
“Let the 1st and 2nd Divisions rest. Move the coalition forces that have been resting in the rear.”
They had demonstrated their power once. Now it was the western army’s turn to fight with their own hands. Only by wielding that technological might themselves on the battlefield would they fully grasp its weight.
After witnessing the firepower of the machine guns, the western troops would never again entertain thoughts of betrayal. The moment they became the enemy, they would understand, they would stand exactly where the barbarians they had just slaughtered now lay.
“This time we give the western army the chance to fight for themselves.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Teach them—barbarian or westerner alike—that any enemy who opposes the Empire burns.”