Under the blazing artificial starlight, Elena glances her eyes out of her helm's visor to observe the developing situation around the battlefield.
She continuously smiles in satisfaction, the balance of power pivots more and more into her favor as her cavalry effortlessly crush the enemy that's currently routing in panic, amidst the desolated sea of bloodied and maimed bodies. But as time goes on, she notices something strange starting to happen.
The corpses of enemies she just killed slowly raise themselves up from death and shamble like puppets whose strings are loose and messy, their skin drained of blood, now pale and cold, while their eyes glow with an unnatural neon green light.
"What in the actual fuck." Elena murmurs in confusion. She has seen many things in her time as the Condottiero, but the dead rising up as undead? This is her first time. She only ever heard of it as a ghost story around the campfire and not as a reality which was currently unfolding before her eyes.
Her cavalry got confused, yet, due to being conditioned and trained to expect literally every batshit insane unexpected situation possible since the army had fought a literal eldritch monstrosity before at 'Vertenville'.
Elena shouts a command with her echoing voice, signaling her horde of mounted warriors to reassemble into a marching formation and end their fruitless pursuit of the fleeing enemy. For now, the enemy shifts to a horde of reanimated undead, shambling all around the field toward them.
Blades and lances pierce through the flesh of those who died, yet the dead do not stop their advance, hundreds... no, thousands upon thousands of moving corpses slowly yet steadily shambling their way toward the bracing cavalry.
As their lines crash, Elena notices something which makes her skin crawl in anxiety. Those living corpses that they've slain for the second time, as their bodies hit the ground, spring right back up once again to continue their relentless attack. Even with their limbs severed and heart pierced, the tide of corpses does not subside, as they instead use their maws to gnaw the flesh of the living.
The scene of the battlefield quickly shifts to the unending horde of the dreaded undead, throwing themselves at both steed and men alike, even pulling some down with sheer endless numbers and lifeless endurance. How could one kill an enemy who can't die?
The answer is plain and simple as always, "Gun", and if it doesn't work, "Just use more Gun".
"Retreat back to the line!" she shouts, as her underlings do the same to relay her command.
In such an unbelievably short amount of time, all of the cavalry quickly retreat back to the gap in the trench line at the same position from which they rushed out, including Elena herself.
The reason for the retreat is easy, they must learn how to kill the dead permanently first. Engaging in melee against an enemy who can just resurrect themselves after being killed is quite a foolish thing to do.
Unfortunately, a few of them, around twenty to thirty, mostly light cavalry, lost their lives to the attacking undying undead horde amidst the chaos of the "orderly" tactical retreat, which was honestly lower than expected.
And as Elena and her cavalry came back from their mission earlier than expected, and also not in triumph but in a semi-panic state, it caused the soldiers down in the trench to get confused. "Aren't they already fleeing?" they asked.
Elena doesn't waste time and quickly commands the troops back to their fighting positions and readies them for what she calls "Attack of the Dead Men".
Then she turns toward the signaler. "Send the message to our commander, that we've been attacked by the undead and also..." She then explains everything she saw, so that he could come up with some kind of plan to solve the problem.
-----
"What in the actual fuck." Supreme Commander Victor, aka me, murmured in confusion as I sat in my tent, commanding through a signaler using Morse code.
According to the report, my cavalry is being chased off by... zombies?
I wasn't surprised that they existed since we have fought against supernatural beings before, I was just confused about how it happened here without any warning.
It seems like everyone in the enemy force has risen from the dead as undead after being killed.
And according to Elena, they're resilient as hell. Even if all their limbs are torn off, their hearts pierced, or even chopped in half by a big ass sword, they still surge forward like a tide of the dead, swarming her force.
So, according to the information I have, I recommend something really plain and simple.
Shoot their heads to destroy the brain, a common knowledge which I learned from hundreds of zombie-themed movies and series. And now, all I have left to do is go to the front myself to observe the situation with my own two curious eyes.
-----
At the frontline, in the trench where Stahl and his 'First Rifle Battalion' were holding their guns tight, sweat dripped from their brows.
They weren't concerned about fighting the living corpses since they had faith in their weapons, which had already proven themselves effective against literally everything with a material body, corpses included.
But their concern stemmed from the fact that Victor, their commander, was currently standing inside the trench beside them, binoculars in hand, gazing outward. Beside him were all his confidants, all present alongside him, excluding John, who's still stuck commanding the artillery.
"They're really zombies... did any of your soldiers who got bitten turn into one yet?" Victor turns to ask Elena, who is currently standing beside him.
"Umm... no? They just treated their wounds with medical alcohol, just the way you've taught them." she answers, her beautiful face morphing into one filled with deep concern.
"Okay, okay, just drop that matter, it's just a joke." Victor says with a plain smile.
Elena just sighs deeply in response.
"My brother always said stressed women always end up ugly when they're old." Arina, who is standing on a height-increasing wooden stool, says out of the blue as she gazes out of the trench with binoculars in her hand. Yet she's smiling smugly and giggling over Elena's dramatic reaction.
"Just so you know, I won't adhere to an advice from a dead man." Elena responds.
And once more, the tension between them rises, since the one who killed Arina's brother is... well, Elena...
"Hey! Here they come, the zombies or whatever!" Valeria shouts aloud, pointing her finger at the crater-ridden grass field ahead, which is still illuminated by a constant barrage of star shells. Her gestures are overly dramatic, not for the sake of reminding them of the danger, but to shift the attention of both Arina and Elena from one another.
Upon the scarred earth, the horde of the dead shambles its way straight at us like a tidal wave of thousands of soulless corpses surging like a rising tide.
Victor, meanwhile, simply turns his head toward the horde of corpses and declares with plain words, "Now open fire, don't forget to aim at their heads though." he says.
As permission to fire is given, the symphony of blazing fire and blasting bullets zipping through the air crescendos into violence, tearing down the marching tide of undead like rows of rotten wheat being reaped.
Turns out, the head really was their weakness, just like in those movies from Earth. The scene currently unfolding makes Victor smile like a child, just like those zombie defense-themed strategy games that's he have played before as Vincent. It's really easy when you have a lot of machine gun nests to stem down the shambling horde.
But unbeknownst to him, that's not the only horde of the dead which were heading his way.