Those with guns attracted fire and shot back from a long range. Those with crossbows ambushed enemies that walked past them. Those with bows were able to maneuver to a close range with the enemy. It was a slow, gruelling process of attracting enemy fire, suppressing enemy positions, and getting around stubborn defenses. The air of combat intensified with the entrance of faraway gunfire. The joint Azerkali-Parasol forces must have launched an intense attack. This should keep the pressure off the southern perimeter.

They had to leave corpses at the foot of every other tree, but thankfully, they had already managed beforehand to get close to the encampment before they were spotted. After 30 minutes of bravery, they managed to push all the way up to the edge of the encampment proper. There, sandbags lined the sides of each tent and bivouac, and so each housing quarter was, in itself, a fighting position. Even as the nomads' arrows whistled past the edge of the camp, the combat engineers hastily piled on sandbags blocking off the inroads of the encampment. Cheap and reliable, no one sane would think that arrows could do much damage to anyone hidden behind sandbags. On the other hand, neither would anyone sane make a perpetual enemy of an entire clan of Nomads.

A combat engineer ducked his head down, raised his gun over the sandbags, and shot wildly into the darkness. He had his back against the sandbags, and next thing he knew, there was an arrow sticking out from his gut. The pain came later, somewhat numbed and made unreal by the adrenaline. The flashlights of his reinforcements thankfully arrived and blared on him, and he reached out to the lights. "Help me!" he cried. His reinforcements couldn't believe that an arrow could pin a sandbag to a man. The medic took too long to register the arrow coming out of the wound, and he was peppered by gunfire and arrows.

From those who learned of the fact firsthand, word quickly spread throughout the rest of the base: "Arrows can pass through sandbags!" In those few words, the paranoia of getting impaled through the walls spread with contagion. With crossbowmen lying in wait around every corner, squads' movements were hampered by fear, and those with more courage opted to pre-emptively shoot at cloaked corners and wherever else shadows favored to wait, wasting bullets and occasionally hitting their own friends.

* * *

Amidst the confusion, Jack and Singer went around looking for Neruz in every tent. The rush of combat prevented them from ruminating over the bodies left in the advancing battle's wake. They had searched whatever tents they could, but there wasn't even a peep of him anywhere.

The thundering of frighteningly quick cannonfire ripped the air. Singer tackled Jack to the ground, and over them, sand exploded in quick, concerted beats, splashing around like water while something whizzed past them. Looking up, half the height of the sandbag wall was gone.

"What the hell was that!" Jack shouted.

"S'a fucken' gun cart! They got a gun cart!"

The pair scrambled to their feet. "We're leggin' it outta 'ere!"

They made a run for the edge of the camp. Every time that gun ripped through the air, even Jack didn't have to think, they'd dive and eat dirt if they had to. Just one of those bullets would explode several sandbags at once.

The whistles of escape blew. They encountered some nomads trying to escape, but the gun ripped through them, too. Jack tried to save one of them, but the man simply gave him a locket. Singer pulled him off, and the pair kept running.

They reached the edge of the camp, only to be greeted by an encirclement and a little suggestion: "Hands in the air!"

* * *

Frill and her clansmen pushed all the way to the middle of the base. Even if their arrows negated the enemy's sandbags, it only meant that more and more of the enemy learned to avoid staying too long behind them. They'd pop up, take a few shots, and disappear around the corner. It was troublesome, but the nomads were unconcerned. Not once did Frill question her clansmen's self-sacrificing intent—"Me, decoy" "Stay here, shoot when they shoot me". She didn't mind it at all, if only for the sake of reaching one target: Major Ravager himself.

The central area was an open field bonfire, with the command tent in the middle engulfed in flames. Grenades fell behind the sandbags, and explosions wracked the nomads—men could be heard crying for their mothers afterwards. Ravager's men stayed well away, and had set up shooting galleries to trap the nomads in a maze of killzones. The gunfire became more frequent, and it was then that the nomads' offensive came to a standstill. No matter how much blood they shed, Frill came to believe more and more that they didn't have enough of it.

The shouts of Ravager's men echoed each other in succession. Shadows scurried away, clearing the path for something.

From far away, it seemed like a box cart. "There!" Frill shouted. The clansmen directed their attention at the box cart and shot arrows at it, which glanced off. Some of the gunners fired at it, but they were answered by the pinging of metal against metal. The ricketing of its wheels became louder and louder, until it stopped. The enemy shouted, "Field, clear!" "Left post, set!" "Right post, set!" "Fire mission confirmed! Fire at will!"

There wasn't just one of them, but three of them, whose thunderous gunfire gored the clansmen. Sandbags offered no cover against the terrible breath of three times' heavy machine gun fire. One of the clansmen pushed Frill down, but that man himself could not reach tomorrow. Just as his body flew and hit the ground, the barrage stopped, and from the ground, Frill saw the dim cherry-red glow of the gun's barrel. "Needs cooling? Can't shoot!" she concluded. She wasn't the only one who thought the same. The other clansmen attempted to retaliate, but no matter their war cries, arrows, and gunfire, the cart's armor was too thick. Frill got up and tried to sprint around the side—a cart that size could only have strong armor to the front, otherwise they wouldn't be able to move its weight around in this jungle. Betting on the cooldown time, she was confident that they could somehow get past this new enemy and hit it from the back.

"Barrel change!" the enemy shouted.

Not in five seconds, the steaming red barrel was ejected, and a new one was slid into place. All the while, the crew also replaced the emptied ammunition box. "New box in!" "Box loaded!" "Let 'em have it!"

Frill made a dive for the dirt. The horror resumed. She crawled and wiggled across the floor, hoping that, by a miracle, she would at least be able to find and kill Ravager. Getting out alive wasn't anymore realistic. Each bullet that landed near her blew off basketball-sized chunks of earth. Falling arcs of sand and dirt obscured the path forward, sometimes lit up by the torso-sized fireballs that flashed from the muzzles of those war-rending guns. With this barrage, she was sure that there weren't anymore enough clansmen to even make a dignified last stand. Kill Ravager—that's all they had to do. Even at the cost of the entire war party, if they could just get him…

The barrage stopped. "Barrel change!" they once again shouted. She, however, could not get up. Was she too shaken? She crawled over dead clansmen and Ravager's men alike. Was that the image of someone too shaken to stand? Even with her strength sapped from her mind, the inertia of her spirit pushed her on, and her body, satisfied with mindless auto-pilot.

Boots shook the earth, though strangely, she couldn't actually hear them. A squad had trooped over to where she was. She couldn't even lift her head to see their faces. Maybe they were saying something. It was all muffled, though. They weren't yet bayonetting her, so maybe they still had a use for her. She reached out to the leg of the one standing in front of her. Maybe it was Ravager's leg. She pulled out a poison-soaked stiletto, and weakly stabbed it into the leg. It glanced off—Armor? My luck bad like Jack.

Her vision went black, but she retained her other senses—ah, they bagged her head. They bound her hands, pulled her up, and pushed her to walk. Her hearing got a little better. She could hear the sharp clanking of chains. There were footsteps that she recognized amidst the ones of the enemy, then they bound her to the same chain. She felt its weight drag against her ankles. It was bound to someone in front of her as well, she could tell. "Walk!" a sergeant ordered.

* * *

In the morning after the attack, the bag on Jack's head was taken off. The rush of light hurt his eyes. In the central area of the base, there was a heap of ashes, two platoons of soldiers in formation on either side of it, and an important-looking villain standing on the platform of a gun cart, towering over the crowd of prisoners whose feet threaded on the ashes. The gun cart that faced them was just about the size of the back of a pickup truck. A huge snowplow-like frontal shield protected the crew as long as they crouched down. Peeking over the top was a huge machine gun that bordered on being a cannon. It had a semicircular shield and an angled roof with a periscope. The wheels were thick, reinforced by steel. Thick leaf springs mediated between the body of the cart and the wheels—a measure that looked more to protect the cart from the recoil of the gun rather than to give the crew a pleasant time.

Jack was at the very back of the mob of prisoners. All of them were bound with their hands behind them. In a glance, he couldn't find Singer nor Neruz. Hopefully, they had escaped. The rest of the mob were all clansmen who had participated in last night's attack. At the front of the mob, there was a lone woman, who stood in the shadow of the lead villain. The two seemed to be having a passionate exchange, the woman craning her head up to challenge his gaze.

"Never!" the woman loudly declared. The commander nodded in disappointment. He looked at one of his subordinates, raised his thumb to his neck, and drew it across. The subordinate nodded.

"Ready!" he ordered. Immediately, Jack was dragged away from the back of the mob, and brought to the front. He was made to stand beside the woman from earlier, and they, in turn, were made to stand beside the gun cart, out of the way of its line of fire. There, a crew of three manned the gun, remaining frozen in position, full-knowing what they were about to do.

The moment Jack's eyes looked forward to the clansmen, the order was given. The gun thundered for four seconds. Under that ear-splitting sound, they were close enough to the gun to hear the brass casings hit the floor. The smoke and dust kicked up under the gun's muzzle partially obscured its falling victims from Jack's sight. For a moment in those four seconds, he turned his eyes away from the tragedy unfolding before him. In that moment, his eyes landed on the woman beside him—Frill. She continued to look on as her people's lives were flushed into oblivion. She was frozen—not because of sadness, nor anger, but just surprise. People were too easy to kill. Just one little metal slug like that—just one—was enough, and if it passed through more than one person, then a higher efficiency was achievable. There was efficiency to be found in killing—a terrifying concept, and to think she would be watching it firsthand. There was no honor to be found in a weapon as fearsome as a gun.

Above all, she wondered, "Why was I left to watch?"