VR WARS Volume II - Coalition Army

OPPOSING END

Stunned at the bravery display unfolding before their eyes, what remained of the IF infantry on-site ceased their advance onto the enemy tank when they spotted the crew abandoning their vehicle to fight toe-to-toe with them. One member climbed to the top hatch to man the MG resting there, unleashing a hail of furious lead in all directions, quickly moaning down three Iberian students caught out in the open ground with no cover to hide from the unending juggernaut.

What had started as a bad day for lieutenant Bella and her company now turned into a nightmare. The unending fury unleashed by their enemies had conquered defensive line after defensive line, destroyed unit after unit, with such speed it made Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 pale in comparison. Out of her regiment of three-thousand strong, only a handful remained—locked in bitter fighting on that dreadful hill that had drained her both mentally and physically. Her physical appearance was only a specter of her former self. Her deep jade green eyes spoke of the beautiful soul trapped deep inside of her, and her movements told of a need for nurture, but then how could someone so beautiful on the inside be such a grotesque sight on the outside? The tears on her flesh were broad and deep as if they were the ones coming off her face; an intense red covered half her mangled expression of her cheeks and left eyebrow. Despite that, all her hitpoints refrained from dropping below the twenties; it was her will to see this ordeal through to the end. She wanted to go out with her head high, knowing that they had done everything to hold out for as long as they could, so no matter the outcome.

Having gotten the news from the HQ in Kursk that backup had already been dispatched to the area, Bella and her company decided to dig in and delay the taking of Hill 253.5 for as long as possible while inflicting as much damage as she possibly could on the Portuguese forces. But only witnessing with her very own eyes now, the resilience and determination of a single wounded and isolated crew in cheating death and prolonging only the inevitable did she realize the futility of her actions. Even after killing the crewmember manning the MG, the only one who posed the greatest danger, their spirits were still undoubted as they fought with almost bare hands, all the while shouting insults and cursing Bella’s homeland.

But deep down in her heart resided a bitter feeling.

A sense that injustice had befallen her and her fellow students. Even before the match had begun, the nation cheered them off to the virtual world like heroes. It was almost a creed that they were better than their neighboring country, which had done the impossible and retained its independence after all the other regions had fallen under the Federation's control. But the moment they set foot on the warring world, they were stripped of all their strongest beliefs by a prevalent notion known precisely to the small independent country they had been trying to annex for decades. Everything the IF so patriotic defended, every political view at that moment, was rendered irrelevant and, worse, erroneous.

“f**k you, IF scum!” Someone shouted and came at her with a knife in one hand and an empty pistol in the other. It didn’t take much for Bella to press her sub-machine gun's trigger and fill the enemy student full of holes.

All the while, she still refused to believe that the only thing they shared in common in a battle of that magnitude was disdain for each other. She did her best to put the thought behind her, but the deep flames of the enraging fire blurred her vision and transformed her and the others into obsessed bloodthirsty creatures, seeking justice for the others that had fallen. She couldn’t breathe under all that pressure exerted from the fighting, nor even hear the simplicity of her heart sobbing in her chest. What was once a kind-hearted and beautiful soul wilted and cracked under the ferocity of the flames, turning to ash and dust.

“…Warmongering maniacs…look at what you’ve done!”

Hatred was all that remained in her enemies…

“You bombed cities…You bombed hospitals…You bombed schools! Burn in hell IF bastards!”

Hatred was all that remained in her and her students as well…

“Slaughter these pigs! Glory to the Iberian Federation!”

“Send these IF fuckers to kingdom come!”

“Kill the Portuguese scum!”

“No quarter!”

“Unification at all costs!”

In that confrontation where past and present were wickedly bumping heads for some shallow sense of righteousness, an outcome that would benefit only the ego of their population and bring nothing else that could appease the loathing bequeathed on both nations, how could there possibly be any chance of achieving a common ground for the unification Bella and her comrades so unreservedly believed? “

The answer was in the eyes of the people killing their own, not in some number of projections, political agenda, or statistics from the last war: unification wouldn't come, not while such a ferocious fighting spirit lived on.

“Ke-kee…keep fighting,” she barely got the words out of her mouth when that small skirmish was about to reach its climax.

On the other hand, with only three crew members remaining in a poor state, offering little to no resistance, inevitability was merely a short walk away. Without bullets, José’s crew turned to grenades to keep the IF at bay. Undeniably, that only proved to be a momentary respite when, at last, those ran out as well.

With nothing left to give except for a few rounds from their side-arms, José met face to face with the coming he so desperately tried to postpone. First, a tingling sensation came from his insides; then it hit him in the arm and another one in his shoulder, then another, and it was only when most of his torso was rendered paralyzed that he came to the realization he had been shot, multiple times.

“Capt—argh! Th-they…got…Jos—”

Laying down helpless on the ground, the proud UL captain looked to left then right, and in each direction he faced, he saw people eyeballing him. They had the eyes of dead fish, staring right through him like he wasn’t even there. Whether they were dead or alive, friend or foe mattered not to him; he welcomed their company, for he didn’t want to be alone in his dying moment.

A countdown in bright red suddenly flashed on his visor, with digits dropping down one after another. How loathsome, he thought, when grasping that his calling towards another world came in the form of numbers. When death comes for me, I hope it will be as painless as this…wouldn't that be a sight for sore eyes, ha-haa. Before his conscience departed that hell on earth, the perpetrator of his demise came to light. A young woman, scared not only at a physical level but most likely at a deeper level, also given her painful expression.

The woman’s eyes were dripping with tears. A few droplets rained down her cheeks, failing to wash away the blood coming out of the incision along her eyebrow. Her vulnerability came from the pit of hell they had been thrown into; while they received no pain to their real bodies, their minds made every struggle as real as it could get. Simultaneously, the system intercepted any painful reaction from their avatars to their real mind, but the more they interacted with that game of death, the more mentally unstable they became. It differed for everyone, with some people embracing the level of authenticity, while others failed to withstand the emersion power the PXF conveyed. And the latter seemed more accurate for that particular woman.

“How atrocious it is that we’re destined to become mortal enemies,” she poetically shared her feelings, staring at him as if staring into oblivion, with no conviction on either side winning. “If that is truly so, then at the very least, I can offer your lives for the sake of our cause.”

In the heat of the moment, when the mortally wounded José was staring down at the barrel of her weapon, the woman fell to her knees. Her mouth twitched almost mechanically when something impacted her forehead. Blood spasmed from her skull, covering both her and José in a slippery bright red color.

"Cap-captain Bella's been hit!" An enemy cry was faintly heard amidst the crackle of gunfire before everything turned quiet.

What flames remained of Bella's life were snatched away at a moment's notice before her expected reinforcements even reached her. And as luck would have it, so too did her enemies’. The Terras Unit captain would soon join her, just as the Mirabilis infantry traversed the nearest slope, rushing to avenge the slain tank crew.

Feeling his energy fading quicker than he could muster the strength to resist the urge to depart that land, the temptation to close his eyes proved more potent than José's resistance attempts to evade the irrefutable outcome.

Finally, when a shadowy figure approached him to aid his wounds, big red letters came into view, the words he despised the most, ‘You are dead.’