The construct hummed beneath me, a vibration that lived in my bones rather than my ears, and the wind off the Belgian countryside tugged at my cloak as we cut through the high air at a thousand metres. I'd flown this kind of patrol perhaps two hundred times in my career and the sensation never quite stopped being strange — the absence of an engine's roar, the silence of something that should by every natural law be loud, replaced instead by that low resonant hum and the whisper of wind through woven aether.
I am Hans Muller. Thirty-five years old, captain in the Empire's mage battalion, with enough scars across my hands and face to make junior officers stop asking how I got them. My company was small for this patrol — five of us, gliding in loose formation, our machines catching the grey morning light along wings that weren't feathers or canvas but something closer to frozen lightning, alloy and rune-work bent into a shape that flew because we told it to.
Sergeant Klaus held formation off my right wing, radio pack bulky against his back, the antenna humming faintly with stored charge. Below us the western front unrolled like a map someone had taken a knife to — fields churned to mud, villages reduced to the geometric outlines of foundations, smoke smudging the horizon in three or four directions at once. Belgians. A country that hadn't asked for any of this, now simply the ground other people's war happened to be using.
"There," I said, the crystal lens strapped over my right eye sharpening the image below into hard detail. A company of French and Belgian troops, perhaps a hundred and fifty men, digging into a low ridge — shovels flashing, parapets rising, a machine gun being wrestled into position by four men straining against its weight. They hadn't looked up. Why would they. We made no sound that travelled that far, and they had no reason yet to imagine death arriving from directly above them.
Klaus was already on the radio. "Command, this is Eagle One. Enemy entrenching, grid Delta-Four. Mixed French and Belgian force. Request permission to engage."
The reply came through static, flat and immediate. "Eagle One, green light. Neutralise and report."
I felt the old, practiced calm settle over me — the thing that lets a man do this work without his hands shaking. "Form up. Explosive yield. Fire on my mark."
---
We dropped in unison, the constructs tilting into the dive with a grace that still, after all these years, struck me as obscene given what it was built to deliver. I channelled mana down through my arms into the rifle slung against the construct's housing, runes along the barrel waking into a dull red glow, and the rounds that left it carried something more than lead and powder.
The first one struck the trench line directly.
I watched it happen with the clarity the lens afforded — a man straightening from his shovel work just as the round arrived, the detonation opening beneath him in a bloom of fire that didn't just kill him but unmade him, the blast wave taking him apart at every joint simultaneously so that what came out of the fireball afterward, thrown skyward in a ragged arc, was no longer recognisable as having been assembled in the shape of a person. A piece of him — I genuinely could not have told you which piece — came down nearly fifty metres from where he'd been standing.
The trench dissolved into fire and panic in the same instant. A second round caught a cluster of three men attempting to scatter, the explosive yield detonating low and close to the ground, and the overpressure alone did things to men's chests that I have stopped being able to describe without my hand wanting to shake on the page even now, years removed from it — a kind of catastrophic internal collapse that left them standing for half a second afterward, already dead, before their legs understood and folded.
One soldier — French, by the look of his kit — simply vanished. The round took him centre-mass and the detonation was total enough that there was, in the place where a man had been crouching a half-second before, nothing. A red haze settling slowly over scorched earth. His scream, if there had been one, was swallowed entirely by the blast that ended it.
The survivors broke and ran, which was the worst decision available to them, though I understand why men make it. Tracking rounds don't care how fast you run; they correct, mid-flight, with a small wrongness in their trajectory that no instinct prepares a man to anticipate. I watched one bend through the air — an adjustment so unnatural that it looked, from altitude, almost lazy — and catch a fleeing soldier square in the lower back. The detonation went off inside him before he'd even registered the impact, and what the explosive force did from within, with no exit wound large enough to vent it cleanly, was to open him from the inside in a wet, sudden unfolding that ended with him face-down in the mud, steam rising gently off what was no longer fully contained within his own body.
Another round found a man mid-stride and took his leg entirely off at the hip, the bone visible for a fraction of a second white against the red before he hit the ground screaming in a register I have heard from a great many men since and never once gotten used to.
A handful made it to a shell crater and stayed there, pressed flat, alive but — I could see even from this height — finished as soldiers. Men whose fortifications were now smoking rubble and whose company had been reduced, in under two minutes, to a scattering of pieces across two hundred metres of churned Belgian farmland. I heard their voices carry up to us, thin and high, French curses and what might have been prayers, indistinguishable at this remove into a single register of human terror.
"Target neutralised," Klaus reported into the radio, his voice entirely level, the way mine would have been at his age too. "Minimal survivors."
We banked away and climbed, and below us the smoke rose to mark where the trench had been, and I felt — I want to be honest about this — almost nothing. That is its own kind of horror, the kind that doesn't announce itself with screaming. It simply accumulates, quietly, in places you don't notice until much later.
---
Base was five kilometres back from the line, tents arranged around tall rune-etched obelisks that hummed with the particular ward-magic that kept enemy spellfire from finding us in the dark, mechanised walkers standing sentinel at the perimeter like idle iron giants waiting to be needed. Our constructs dissolved back into wisps of aether as we touched down and dismounted, the magic releasing with a sound like a long exhale.
I gave my report to the colonel in the hillside bunker that served as headquarters — positions mapped, threat eliminated, casualties on their side total, casualties on ours none. He nodded the way men nod at routine good news. "Good work, Muller. The ground push rolls through unhindered now."
I went to my tent with the particular hollow exhaustion that follows a strike — not physical tiredness so much as something used up in a different part of the self — and collapsed onto my cot with my boots still on, letting the adrenaline finish draining out of me in a slow, unpleasant fade.
The flap rustled before I'd been still for five minutes. Battalion Leader Vogel, uniform somehow still pristine despite everything Belgium's mud could throw at a man, runes tattooed along both forearms for enhanced casting.
"Muller. A word."
I sat up.
"New recruit for your company. Fresh from the academy, top of her class." He stepped aside, and she came in behind him.
She was tall, sharp-featured, cropped blonde hair under a cap set at a precisely regulation angle, and her eyes had the particular brightness of someone who has trained extensively for something and has not yet been required to actually do it. The runes on her sleeves caught the lamplight, faint and new.
"Captain Muller!" Her salute could have drawn blood. "Lena Schmitt, reporting for duty, sir. Ready for any mission to crush the Republic and its allies!"
I looked at her for a long moment. Twenty years old. Fierce in the specific, uncomplicated way that hadn't yet met its first counter-argument.
"At ease, Schmitt." I let some of the exhaustion show in my voice on purpose. "Welcome to hell. Gear check, standby. No heroics yet."
Vogel was already moving toward the flap, satisfied. "She's yours now. New orders, by the way — scout Brussels, next ground objective. Flatten any visible defences you find. Full company strength." He paused at the entrance. "Dismissed."
He left. Lena remained, practically vibrating with the kind of energy I remembered having once, a long time and several hundred dead men ago.
"Sir, I'm honoured. I've trained for this. The Empire will prevail."
"Save the fire for the enemy," I said. "Rest while you can."
She didn't, of course. Nobody does, the first few times.
---
We rallied twenty strong for Brussels, Lena among them, her construct summoned with a precision that told me the academy had at least taught her the mechanics properly, whatever it hadn't taught her about the rest of it. She mounted with wide, careful eyes, hands steady on the controls in a way I noted and approved of even as I wondered how long the steadiness would survive contact with what we actually did.
"I'll watch the ground, sir," she said, positioning herself toward the rear of the formation. Sensible. I said nothing to discourage it.
The flight in was tense in the particular way these flights always were — the landscape below telling its own quiet story in burned farmhouses, refugee trails threading across fields like the marks of something dragged, distant skirmishes flashing and dying like fireflies that had learned to kill. Lena called out sightings dutifully — a supply wagon, a small patrol — nothing that warranted the expense of a strike, and I let her practice the calling-out without correction, because that part, at least, she was getting right.
Brussels rose ahead of us, spires and rooftops arranged into something between a city and a fortress now, the outskirts bristling with anti-aircraft positions — machine guns wrenched onto improvised mounts and angled skyward, crews scrambling into position as our shapes resolved against the cloud cover.
"Engage."
We dropped together, runes flaring along five barrels at once. The first gun position took a direct hit and came apart in a single violent flowering of fire — the gun itself twisted and flung sideways, the crew that had been serving it simply gone, the position itself reduced in under two seconds from a functioning emplacement to a smoking ruin with a few scattered, unrecognisable remnants of the men who'd been operating it a moment before.
A second battery returned fire, tracers reaching up toward us in long futile arcs that our constructs slid past without effort, the geometry of the dive making us nearly impossible to track at that angle and speed. I put a tracking round into the gun crew directly. It found the gunner first — corrected mid-air around the gun shield he'd ducked behind, a small ugly adjustment in its flight — and detonated against his chest, the blast taking the two loaders standing close behind him as well, all three of them gone in the same flash, what remained of them indistinguishable from the wreckage of their own weapon.
We swept the visible defences in long methodical passes. Barricades that had taken days to build came apart in seconds. A trench line collapsed under a string of tracking shots that burrowed before detonating, burying the men sheltering in it under their own earthworks — I watched the ground heave and settle, knowing what was now beneath it, knowing that some of what was beneath it had still been breathing when the earth came down.
The screams reached us even at altitude, carried up on currents of smoke and superheated air, and the city itself seemed to flinch under each new detonation, windows shattering in buildings nowhere near the actual strikes, the simple concussive weight of our work pressing outward in waves that the whole of Brussels could apparently feel.
I glanced back once at Lena. She was watching the ground exactly as ordered, and her face had lost some of its brightness already, the academy's certainty meeting, for the first time, the thing it had been training her to deliver.
I didn't say anything to her. There wasn't anything useful to say. She would either keep the brightness or lose it, the way all of us eventually did, and no warning I could offer would change which.