Stray Cat Strut - Volume Nine - A Young Lady's Vacation Next Door - Prologue (Patreon)

Prologue

He liked to imagine Sisyphus happy. 

Libre walked down one of the many corridors dug into the earth of his home, cement walls and concrete ceilings, with lights at even intervals and the occasional busy soldier along the path. He had his helmet tucked under one arm, his other hand held up before him so that he could read the display built into his inner arm. 

“This will be a quick sortie,” he said, just loud enough for the assistants keeping up with him to hear. “We can’t allow the Antithesis to burrow all the way to the walls of the city. I’ll be flying through quadrants A73 all the way through G43. Our AA should be aware enough not to flag me as a foe.”

“Noted,” one of his assistants said. “I’ve sent a message out to all of our teams already, they should be aware.”

He nodded. That had been an early mistake, one he wasn’t going to repeat. “In the meantime, I need a  debrief on our overall situation.”

“Yes sir,” another said. “Supplies are holding steady across the entire wall. We conducted the weekly audit of ammunition and gear yesterday and found fewer discrepancies. We’re still rationing food, however.”

“That’s fine,” he replied.

“Volunteer numbers are slightly down.”

“Why?” he asked.

“There... are only so many people in the city willing to volunteer,” the assistant said simply after just a small pause. “Though we are beginning to receive assistance from outside the city. The army is sending in two battalions in preparation for the arrival of a full regiment of reinforcements by the end of the month.”

That would be a good number of additional guns on the wall. And a good number of new officers to break in as well. Troublesome, but if their volunteer numbers were down, then he’d have to take it. 

“Morale is rather low, however,” the same assistant said. “Our rate of dissertation and retirement is--”

“Tell people to stop with this whole desertion stuff. We have no time for cowards,” he said. “And what does morale have to do with anything?” 

Did they not see that they were holding? According to his projections, another month, two at most, and they’d be able to turn the tides. 

“Noted, sir,” the assistant said. “On that note, however. Some of us were curious about Samurai reinforcements?”

He scoffed. “We have all we need here,” he said. They’d lost a couple, and that was a shame, but this wasn’t the kind of career that came with coddling. The stronger samurai would survive, and thrive. He wasn’t sure if that new girl, Crisis Mode, was going to make it in the long term, but she at least had potential. 

“Of course, sir,” the assistant said. “Good luck out there?”

“I won’t need it,” Libre replied. They had made it to the one the branching corridors. A set of stairs led up to a space with hip-high sandbag walls and a pair of gun emplacements pointing to a door at the end of a passage. That door led right outside. It was inch-thick steel, opened by hydraulics and guarded around the clock. It was one of the necessary weak points in the wall protecting the city.

He grabbed hs helmet, flipped it around, then shoved it on. His HUD activated in a blink and he eyed the amount of fuel and ammunition he had. It was all in the green.

Walking over to the door, he signaled for it to be opened, and a few militia people came up and worked the system while others prepared to fire out, in case the Antithesis took this opportunity to try and breach.

The wall had been breached a few times already. Every time because of carelessness, and every time it had cost lives to seal the breach up again. Now they were far more cautious. 

The door opened with a squeal. The men and women around him raised rifles to shoulders, tension filling the room even as cold, outside air rushed in. Bright, natural light slowly filled the entrance, but other than a few natural weeds by the sides, there were no plant monsters waiting for them.

“I’ll be back within the hour,” he said before stepping out.

It was strange, going from within the walls to out. There was a certain oppressiveness that weighed down on his shoulders when he was within the great wall, the knowledge that there was a million tons of reinforced concrete above him wasn’t something he could escape so easily. With the wall behind him and nothing ahead, however, he felt strangely vulnerable.

It wasn’t something he enjoyed.

With a flex of his knees, he kicked up and into the air, the thrusters on his boots going off and letting him shoot upwards to follow along the length of the wall. Soon enough he rocketed past the upper edge, then he slowly spun around in the air, taking it all in.

Quebec was behind him. Protected. Safe. As long as he held the wall from the Antithesis, the millions living there had nothing to fear.

The wall was below him. A great work. A barrier against the encroaching foe. Humanity’s last line of defence, bristling with artillery and anti-air guns and filled with volunteers and paid soldiers alike. 

And before him, the countryside of his city. The fields and forests, the open plains and mountainous hills.

These were the territory of the enemy. Shells were raining down even now, bombarding a part of the countryside where the Antithesis had stuck their heads out of the ground.

As peaceful as it all seemed otherwise, even with old, smoking craters dotting the landscape, he knew that just under the surface were a million or more aliens, all waiting for their time to break out of their underground hives and charge across to the wall.

They’d try. They’d fail. 

He would keep his city free. 

***