A Song Of Guts And Steel: The Unburdened, Queen-From-Beyond-The-Wall | Chapter 1 (Patreon)

The sky over the shattered, louds rolled with thunder and lightning, winds picked up as smoke drifted in low bands over the ruined treeline, broken by the strobing flashes of muzzle fire and the hot, violent bloom of magical discharge. Tanya Degurechaff hovered above the battlefield with the taut. Her teeth grinding together is frustration. Her boots glowed faintly with the repulsive force of the computation orb mounted at her chest, keeping her aloft even as artillery detonations rippled across the ground beneath her. The air was dense with soot and frost and the copper tang of blood. It was a massacre on a level she had never seen before. The battlefield that had long ago ceased to resemble anything civilized, a place where strategy had been reduced to the simple, merciless arithmetic of survival.

“Fall back,” Tanya snapped into the command channel, her voice sharp enough to cut through the static. “All units, withdraw to the secondary line. Do not engage. Repeat: do not—”

The order dissolved in a burst of interference and gunfire. Her squad was still there, still obeying in fragments, still trying to survive inspite of it all.

Below her, the enemy line surged forward with a terrible, almost devotional fury. And then Tanya saw her.

Fucking, Mary Sue.

For one suspended instant, everything around Tanya seemed to narrow until the entire world became that single figure rising through the smoke. Mary’s brown hair whipped around her face in a halo of wildfire, her eyes bright with a feverish light that did not belong to any sane human being. She moved with impossible confidence, the expression on her face less that of a soldier than an executioner stepping into a holy rite. Her magical rounds tore through the air with ruthless precision, and every round she unleashed seemed to carry with it an ecstatic, self-righteous fervor that made Tanya’s skin crawl.

No, Tanya thought with a sudden, sick certainty. Not again.

One by one, her men began to fall.

A sudden crack of light split the sky, and one of Tanya’s lieutenants jerked backward as a round punched through his chest. Another scream cut off abruptly when a blast took off a good portion of his device and sent him spinning into the smoke below. Tanya’s breath caught. She called their names, once, then again, her voice rising into something raw and ugly that she would never have allowed herself in any other circumstance.

“Schmidt! Keller! Move, damn it, move!”

The answer came only in static and the shrieking rush of incoming fire. A burst of magical rounds exploded near a cluster of retreating troops, scattering them like leaves in a storm. Tanya’s eyes snapped toward the shattered line where Vista was attempting to regroup the surviving soldiers. She was shouting orders, her expression taut with strain, trying to buy precious seconds for the withdrawal. Tanya’s mind, usually so disciplined it bordered on the mechanical, went cold with a single, panicked imperative: save her.

She dove.

The world became wind and tracer fire. Tanya’s computation orb sang under the strain as she pushed herself into a violent descent, angling toward Vista with every ounce of magical output she could spare. She heard Mary laughing somewhere above and behind her, a bright, horrid sound that carried no joy at all. Tanya turned for a half second and raised her rifle, firing twice, and watched both shots flare uselessly against a barrier of light. Mary was already moving again, and the next instant Tanya’s attention was torn away by a flash of motion at the edge of her vision.

Too late.

A bullet tore through Vista’s head with clinical finality. There was no dramatic flourish, no lingering collapse, only one terrible red spray and then the body dropping in limp astonishment as if even death had struck it by surprise. Tanya’s throat locked. For a heartbeat she could not breathe. Then something inside her shattered cleanly and quietly, and the sound of it was worse than any scream.

She landed hard enough to crater the scorched earth beneath her boots, her rifle coming up instinctively as though her body could continue to function on fury alone. Her vision tunneled. Her hands trembled once, then steadied. Around her, the battlefield seemed to recede. There was only the body of Vista, only the falling ash, only Mary Sue’s silhouette drifting down through the smoke like a vengeful angel with a murderer’s grin.

Tanya hated her. She hated the stupid, shining certainty in her eyes. She hated the fact that Mary moved through the world with false divine favor. And beneath that, deeper and more poisonous, Tanya hated Being X with a devotion equal to any prayer, if not more. The so-called god who meddled, who watched, who imposed his petty moral theater upon human lives and then dared to call it justice. If this was his grand design, then the design was obscene.

Mary fired again. Tanya twisted aside, a line of heat grazing her shoulder. The reply came almost without conscious thought. Her own magical rounds screamed back into the air, meeting Mary’s with violent bursts of light. The sky lit up around them in a fan of gold and white, each impact snapping like thunder. Far below, the front lines had ceased to matter. The war had narrowed to two women suspended in a ruined sky, trying to annihilate one another with metal, magic, and sheer hatred.

They traded position and fire in a dizzying spiral. Tanya moved, counting angles, and trajectories with a clarity sharpened by rage. Mary, by contrast, fought like a zealot in the middle of revelation, every gesture flamboyant with conviction. Her bright green eyes spoke of certainty as a bullet grazed her cheek.

A shell burst somewhere to Tanya’s left, and the shockwave shoved her sideways. She corrected instantly, but Mary was already closing in. Their bayonets flashed in the dim light, steel biting against steel with a shriek that made Tanya’s teeth ache. The clash jarred her arms to the elbows. Mary pressed forward, eyes wild, her face contorted in a fierce, rapturous sneer.

“It is God’s grace that brought me here,” Mary shouted, breath steaming in the cold. “To slay the Devil!”

Tanya laughed then, though it was not humor and bore no resemblance to anything sane. It came out thin and savage. “The Grace of your make-believe God is nothing more than a his inflating his own ego. You’re nothing but a puppet.” She drove her shoulder forward and forced Mary back half a step, the impact sending sparks skittering between their blades. “A flea-ridden mongrel with no individuality of your own. You are NOTHING!!”

Mary’s expression twisted, fury rising through the sanctimonious calm like a crack through glass. “I am chosen.”

“No,” Tanya snarled. “You’re nothing more than slave.”

The words hit. Tanya saw it, just for an instant, the flare of real anger under Mary’s sanctified mask, raw and personal and human. It was the closest thing to honesty Tanya had seen from her. Then Mary screamed, and light burst from her body in a blinding surge that washed the battlefield in white.

The force of it struck Tanya like a hammer. Her ears rang. Pain lanced through her side, and she barely registered the bite of a round that tore through her thigh until the shock forced a hoarse gasp from her throat. Her leg buckled, but she caught herself in the air with a desperate surge of magic and refused to fall. Refused. Falling was for the dead, and Tanya was still very much alive.

Or at least she was angry enough to qualify.

The wound burned with every movement, but she lunged anyway, closing the distance with a ferocity that ignored prudence entirely. Her mouth had gone dry, then foul with blood and foam. She could feel the heat of her own output rising dangerously inside the orb, the device straining under the brutal demand she placed upon it. All around her the air hummed with unstable power. Somewhere at the edge of her vision, black smoke and embers swirled through the sky like a storm of cinders.

And then she saw it.

A crow.

It cut through the smoke, almost mockingly calm, its wings beating slow and black against the firelit haze. Tanya’s eyes snapped to it. Three eyes.

She had no time to wonder whether the third was real or imagined, omen or hallucination, because right now she needed to drop this bitch out of the air.

Mary surged again, light pouring from her as she raised her weapon. “Die,” Tanya spat, releasing a hail of gunfire that tore into Mary but the girl seemed not to register any of oncoming damage.

"Shit..." Tanya cursed, barely moving as a bullet tore into her side. The orb at Tanya’s chest flared. She focused as much as possible, forcing it beyond its limits.

Magic roared through the device in a violent feedback loop, too much power, too quickly, a catastrophic overload held together for a fraction of a second by sheer will. Tanya’s eyes sparkled with murderous glee as the world around her began to distort. The air bent inward. The light around Mary collapsed toward a blinding point. The crow vanished in the glare.

Time dragged, stretched, and thinned like molten glass.

Tanya felt a voice in the impossible stillness, slick and familiar with contempt.

"Thy will stands firm and strong in the face of oblivion; speak upon the shepherd and allow hands to shield you from all that wish to harm you."

"All you must do is. PRAY."

Being X.

The voice carried amusement, smug and patient, as though he were offering a child a sweet bargain before the executioner’s axe fell. He spoke as if he granted mercy for so little. But look at how such gifts had done, turning a girl into a mindless berseker who ravaged the lands. The words were poison wrapped in mercy, and Tanya understood instantly what kind of trap this was. He wanted surrender. Not victory, but abasement. He wanted her on her knees.

Something feral and incandescent rose in Tanya at that, a rage so pure it almost became clarity.

She cursed him with language so vile, so inventive, so blisteringly obscene that even the most degenerate dockside sailor would have recoiled. She insulted his divinity, his anatomy, his intellect, his entire fraudulent cosmology, and every awful premise by which he imagined himself worthy of worship. She told him exactly what he could do with his offer, his grace, his heaven, and every sanctimonious lie he had ever used to torment her life.

Silence.

For one exquisite moment, Being X said nothing.

Then time resumed.

The sky exploded.

Her computation orb, without her mind present it had reached critical.

The orb detonated with violence that erased sound, light, and distance all at once. Tanya felt the blast consume her from the center outward, a sun born at point-blank range. The sensation was not pain, not at first, but an overwhelming annihilation of the distinction between body and air. Mary’s shape blurred beside her, caught in the same inferno. Steel melted. Flesh burned. The world became white, then gold, then a roaring blackness. Tanya’s last coherent thought was not fear, but a bitter, triumphant refusal to kneel.

When the light finally receded, there was nothing left of the battlefield but a charred wasteland stretched beneath a sky thick with smoke. The earth had been blackened into glassy ruin. Trees stood as skeletal trunks, their branches reduced to ash. Not a single intact formation remained where the two armies had once clung to life. The wind moved over the cratered ground with a low, mournful hiss, carrying embers like dying stars.

And in the distance, far beyond the scorched horizon, something roared.