The first shot is just a shot. Wood against shoulder, finger on trigger, the familiar jolt traveling up his arm like an old friend. The round leaves the barrel and crosses two hundred yards of broken earth and finds nothing worth mentioning. A miss. Or not a miss the target was already dead, maybe, fallen in some previous exchange he wasn't here for. The sound of it is small against the artillery.
Guss works the bolt. The casing ejects, clinks against wet timber somewhere to his left. He chambers the next round without looking down. His hands remember this even if the rifle doesn't. The wood is slick, metal cold. Everything smells like mud and cordite and the particular rot of things that stopped being alive a long time ago.
The glow surrounding him has settled but not gone. From something that turned the trench gold to something that lives just under his skin, a thin lining of light that follows the contours of his veins when he flexes his hand. He can feel it there, it kind of felt like warm air blowing out a vent at home in the dead of winter.
And because it's settled, the men around him can finally look around again.
He feels it before he sees it, the shift in the air, the particular quality of silence that comes when people are trying not to make noise while staring. He keeps his eyes on the parapet. Doesn't turn, for he had no reason to.
But he knows what they're seeing.
A man who shouldn't be standing. A chest wound that's stopped bleeding but hasn't closed, the edges of it raw and angry against skin that carries a faint golden sheen even in this light. Shoulders too broad for the trench. Height that forces him to crouch even when he's trying not to. Sandy hair matted with things he doesn't want to name.
One of them—young, face still holding some shape that hasn't been hammered flat by war yet—reaches for his rifle and then doesn't pick it up. His hand hangs there. His eyes don't leave Guss's back.
Another shells his mouth open like he's going to say something. Closes it, opens it again yet nothing comes out.
A third just backs up until his shoulders hit the revetment, timber groaning from the sudden weight.
They're giving him room. Not the respectful kind, but the kind you give something that might turn back against you at any moment.
Guss doesn't blame them. If he'd watched some seven-foot glowing thing tear the head off a demon and then drop into his trench for a chat with God, he'd give it room too.
Time has caught up. The world is moving at speed again. Shells land with their proper violence. Gunfire cracks from both trenches in uneven volleys. The air between them is thick with smoke and the sound of things breaking. Men shout. Men die. The ones who don't die keep shooting. Standard procedure for a Tuesday in 1914, or whatever the hell day it is. Guss stopped keeping track somewhere between dying in Iraq and being reborn with a chest wound and a divine glow.
He chambers another round.
No Man's Land stretches ahead, two hundred yards of crater and wire and the particular desolation that comes from ground that's been fought over for so long it's forgotten what actual plant life looks like. The enemy trench is a dark line cut into the far slope. Between here and there, figures move.
The Wretched come first, always the Wretched. Twisted bodies in rusted scraps, bird-cage masks leaking steam, limbs bent at angles that shouldn't hold weight but do. They push forward across open ground with the mindless persistence of things that have nowhere else to go. Behind them, something more.
Heretic Troopers.
Guss spots three, maybe four. Their armor is dark, scorched in places. Gas masks cover their faces, nightmarish things, specialized, sealed tight against whatever passes for air in Hell's deeper circles. Their silhouettes are lean. Dark trench coats, no bulk. Just armor and weapon and the particular economy of movement that comes from bodies that have been reduced down to what works.
One of them carries a submachine gun. The others have bolt-actions similar to Guss's, though theirs are darker, etched with symbols he can't read from here and doesn't want to.
They move with purpose. Not the Wretched's desperate charge. Something measured and tactical. They're using the Wretched as cover, letting the slave-soldiers eat the first volley while they position for something cleaner.
Guss picks the one with the submachine gun.
Not because he's the biggest threat but because he's the farthest back, which means he thinks he's safe, and Guss has always enjoyed disabusing people of that particular notion.
He settles the stock against his shoulder. The wood is warm now where his cheek rests against it. His breathing slows. Four counts in, four counts out. An old habit that lives deeper than muscle memory.
The target is two hundred and twenty yards out. Moving laterally, using a shell crater for cover. The submachine gun swings low at his hip. His gas mask is tilted up slightly, one hand adjusting something at the seal.
Guss exhales halfway and holds.
His finger finds the trigger.
The glow responds before he does.
He didn't will it himself, it was more instinctual than anything. It responds the way blood responds to a cut—instinctively. The light that lives under his skin pulses once, hard, and runs down his arm into the wood of the rifle stock.
The wood doesn't burn. It accepts leading the metal of the barrel to take the light and hold it, compresses it, turns it into something that wasn't in the cartridge when he chambered it.
He pulls the trigger.
The result is wrong.
It should have been a crack. Instead, a roar bellow out, low and resonant, the kind of sound that doesn't just hit your ears but can be felt in the bones. The rifle kicks harder than any bolt-action has a right to. The stock drives into his shoulder with enough force to bruise bone.
The round leaves the barrel trailing gold.
Not metaphorically, actually gold. A streak of light that cuts through the smoke and the gray dawn and the particular misery of No Man's Land like something that doesn't belong here. It crosses two hundred yards in the time it takes Guss to blink.
The Heretic Trooper sees it coming. Guss watches his body try to react. The shoulder dropping, the head turning, the submachine gun swinging up in a gesture that's half-defense and half-instinct. None of it matters. The round hits him center-mass and does not stop.
It goes through him the way a hot knife goes through wet paper. There's a moment although brief, where the trooper is still whole, still standing, still wearing the expression of someone who's realized what's happening a half-second too late. Then the light expands.
It happens inside him first. His chest cavity fills with gold. The armor doesn't stop it. The flesh beneath the armor doesn't stop it. Something that was built to withstand Hell's fires meets something built to erase Hell's works entirely, and the armor loses. The light finds every hollow, every cavity, every space where something vital used to live, and fills it with the particular radiance that Guss now carries in his veins.
Then it finds the edges.
The trooper comes apart. Not in pieces but in a form of light. The expansion is outward, radial, a shockwave of gold that rolls through his body and keeps going. His limbs separate. His torso ruptures along seams that weren't seams a second ago. The gas mask holds for a fraction of a second longer than the rest of him, the glass lenses filling with light until they shatter inward, and then it's gone too.
The shockwave hits the two troopers flanking him.
They're ten feet to either side. Not close enough to catch shrapnel from a normal round, yet they were close enough for this.
The light takes them the same way. One drops where he stands, his rifle clattering to the mud before his body does. The other manages half a step backward, his hand coming up in a gesture that might be warding or might be surrender or might be nothing at all, just the last useless motion of a body that knows it's finished. Then the light finds him. His armor blackens where it touches. His skin cracks. Something inside him—something that wasn't entirely human anymore—burns with a sound like wet wood catching.
Three men, one shot.
The golden light fades. What's left settles into the mud of No Man's Land and doesn't move again, but unnoticed by everyone was the small sapling growing from the remains.
In the trench behind Guss, someone drops a rifle.
The sound is small. Metal on wet wood. A clatter, then silence.
He doesn't turn. Doesn't need to. He can feel the weight of their stares thickening the air around him. Can feel the particular quality of fear that comes when people realize the thing standing next to them isn't just strange, but highly more dangerous than previously thought.
One of them backs into the revetment hard enough to shake loose a shower of dirt.
Another makes a sound from the throat, a low grunt almost as if he is questioning what he shoud do.
The young one. The one with the hand still hanging near his unfired rifle. Finally finds his voice. It comes out cracked, stripped raw by cordite and fear.
"What are you?"
Guss works the bolt. The spent casing ejects. He chambers the next round without looking away from the parapet.
"Same thing you are," he says. "Human."
It's not the right answer. He knows it before the words leave his mouth. They want something grand. Something that makes sense of the light and the wound and the fact that he's standing here after tearing the head off something that shouldn't have ever existed.
He doesn't have one to give them.
Guss flexes his hand around the rifle stock. The glow pulses once, softly, a heartbeat of light that runs from his palm to his fingertips and back.
He doesn't try to push it. Doesn't try to shape it. Tries, instead, to listen to what it's telling him. Which is nothing useful. Just presence or weight.
Another shell lands. Closer. The blast wave hits the trench and the world goes sideways for half a second. Dirt rains. Someone shouts. Someone else doesn't.
Guss chambers another round.
The Wretched are still coming. The Heretic Troopers behind them have shifted formation, pulled back, putting more distance between each other. 'Smart, they've seen what one shot did, they're adapting faster than I thought.'
He won't get another like that, not yet. The power is settling again, withdrawing to whatever quiet place it goes between demands. He can feel it there.
That's fine. He doesn't need miracles for every shot. Just for the ones that count.
He settles the stock against his shoulder. Finds a target. A Wretched, twenty yards out, moving through wire with the particular determination of something that has nothing left to lose. Bird-cage mask and rusted blade. Body that's been broken and put back together wrong so many times it's forgotten what right looks like.
Guss exhales, and holds before he pulls the trigger.
The shot is just a shot. Wood against shoulder. The familiar jolt. The round crosses the distance and finds its mark. The Wretched drops. No light, or expansion. Just a body meeting the ground the way bodies have been meeting the ground on this field for eight hundred years.
One of the Yeomen behind him let out a sigh of relief, maybe, or disappointment. Hard to tell.
Guss works the bolt. Chambers another.
The glow pulses once, softly, under his skin.
He takes aim again before firing once again.
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Well I decided to send out one more. Just showing some snippets on what his power can do with a weapon.
If you enjoyed leave a comment and some power stones.