Summary: Blood for the blood...no! Don't summon it!

  Chapter 126: Purge the Xenos!

  Setsuna smirked viciously as she watched through her binocurs as a rockslide, created by the Trap Team, wiped out a team of two dozen Bugbears. She keyed her comm crystal, one of the most important developments for the Guild by their support people. It used no electricity at all, instead using QE and a bunch of ‘crystal-harmonic-frequences’ or some such that had flown way over her own head when they’d tried to expin it. All she knew was that, while they were retively short ranged, they could reach most pces inside a single Rift Bubble. Which solved one of their biggest problems. With coordination possible between teams, they could do things like…

  “Strike Team, targets are down. Get in there and hammer that forward deployment point. Heavy Assault, you know what to do.”

  At her order, Strike Team, previously hidden by Mist Me who’d been borrowed by the Trap Team, unched themselves down the slope and toward the ‘mountain pass’ that secured the Watchpost the Bugbears had sallied out from. The Bugbears had been pursuing Rocketti and Nejire-chan after they’d taken advantage of the pse in air cover over the mountain to rain hell down on the Watchpost there, positioned to secure the pass that led to this Rift Bubble’s Fortress.

  Those same Bugbears had been the true heavies of said Watchpost, with the Gnolls and Goblins that remained not being even close to up to the task of handling Strike Team as they came charging out of Mist Me’s covering illusion. Dynamight used one of his gauntlets to blow the hell out of the Gate and the entirety of Strike Team, minus Nejire-chan of course, flowed into the outpost and started sughtering the Gnolls and Goblins almost before they could lift weapons.

  Of course, this was one of the most critical Watchposts for the rge Rift Bubble they’d been assaulting for three days. It was the single rgest such bubble they’d yet been tasked with closing. A true test of the UA Guild’s mettle, as it normally would have been handled by the now-expanded Endeavor or Gang Orca Agencies. Those two agencies, recruited up to be over triple their original pre-Invasion size, then farther bolstered by two full 100-man companies of JSDF each, had been handling the bulk of the rger Rift Bubbles in Japan.

  The UA Guild was only twenty members strong, with a single 50-man JSDF company in support. Mind you, that company had trained specifically with them from day one, and barely resembled JSDF any longer. Instead, they’d been retrained to handle the specialty hardware that secured the Guild Base Came, including the Base Camp Shield(BCS). After Strike and Assault cleared a beachhead into any given Rift Bubble, the Base Team, as the company has started calling themselves all on their own, began a systematic deployment.

  The BCS was the first thing through” pro’ected by teams using rolling physical shields and the very first four Power Armors that the support teams had created for the Guild. Those had been something that was provided half by UA, and half by Aegis Inc. The two teams had ended up splitting the project between them when it became obvious that the Rift Bubbles were going to demand a way to bolster regur troops for at least Defensive purposes. The Power Armors, which could only be properly powered up after they made it through the Rift Wall, were equipped with a heavy gatling gun and a polearm. The gatling gun ate ammo like crazy, which kept her from deploying them offensively very often, but they were perfect for keeping the field clear while the BCS was deployed. Particurly with Strike and Assault handling any Elites that tried to retake the beachhead.

  Once the Camp Shield was deployed, the rest of the camp equipment began to move in with an organized efficiency that Setsuna had to admit came from the Base Team’s previous JSDF training. The Power Armors were supplemented with purely mechanical turrets, built into deployable Guard Towers that lifted their Sumitomo H4 Dual Heavy Machine Guns up into an elevated and covered nest. Between the Power Armors, the Turrets, and the Base Camp Shield, there had never yet been a case where the enemy managed to breach their Base Camp. Quite a few enemy leaders had led assaults to attempt it, but none had succeeded. Something the Base Team took pride in.

  Of course, the Base Camp was there for a reason. Besides offering shelter and logistical support for assaulting farther into a Bubble, the standard camp setups they used all had room for at least one, and if they got lucky up to four, Hatsume-Kazuya Artillery Pieces. The HK-A1 was a piece of equipment that Setsuna was sufficiently in love with that she might have propositioned a blushing Kazuya over it after they’d first deployed them. Pity the older student hadn’t taken her up on the offer. She’d only been half-joking and he was honestly sort of cute.

  Well, whatever.

  The HK-A1 was something between a mortar and a true artillery piece. It provided a lot of BOOM, and came with guided smart munitions that were still, somehow, not electronic-based. Which was sort of important, since Rift Bubbles didn’t have massively tall ceilings, and regur mortars or artillery wouldn’t have been of much use. Even most MLRS systems were designed to fire up, and would have smashed into the 20-30m ceilings that were the airspace limit of most Rift Bubbles. The teams using the HK-A1 could, by means that Setsuna considered mostly bck magic, rig their mutations to stay within that ceiling while still reaching out to touch targets all over the Rift Bubble.

  The Enemy was slowly learning to fear fighting in open areas, which is why more and more Rift Bubbles were appearing with mountain-style terrain than before. The Bubbles were sort of warped to still only give roughly the same air ceiling as you climbed the mountains, and the incline gave the Monsters ways to shelter from the fire of the HK-A1s. Which usually meant building one main ‘fort’ to hide the Harvest Stone each Bubble used for power, with the fort farther protected by ‘mountain’ passes with Watchposts like the one Strike was currently hitting.

  Of course, that brought her back on point. The enemy weren’t idiots and were already responding to Strike, who wouldn’t be able to hold the point against the reinforcements from the Fortress. But that was okay. Even as she watched those reinforcements rush down the pass, she heard a confirmation come over that Assault Team was hitting its own target. No trickery there. She’d reinforced them with two of the Power Armors, temporarily weakening the defenses of the Base Camp, but making damn sure that Assault would take their own Watchpost on the other side of the mountain without too much trouble.

  That Watchpost wouldn’t be getting reinforcements, since the enemy had sent what they could spare to the one Strike was hitting. Which means the support squads behind Assault would have time to throw up their own defenses facing inwards from what would become their new forward base to attack the Fortress from. So far, so good. Despite this being their rgest Rift Bubble so far, with an estimated 700 Monsters present, Setsuna was confident they were going to pull it off. Which would be another feather in the cap for the UA Guild, showing that their force mix and methodology was the new way forward.

  After all, the Gang Orca or Endeavor agencies would have needed twice the number of heroes and four times the number of JSDF soldiers to pull off the same thing. And that was even if Endeavor or Gang Orca had gotten involved personally. Attacking fortified positions, be they mountain fortress like this one, or more mundane fortified camps on open pins, was never something to take lightly…

  ... ... ...

  “Blood for the blood god!”

  Corporal Ayumi sighed and triggered her comm crystal with a chin switch.

  “Knock it off, Hideki! With the luck Earth’s been having, you’ll find out Khrone is real and attract his attention!”

  Ignoring the cut off, surprised squawk from her idiot minion about her knowing Warhammer lore, Ayumi rotated to track on a new target and squeezed off another 50-round burst at…some sort of raptor thing? That was a new one, she thought, but it died like most things did under a steady diet of .50 caliber rounds. Not everything did. Which was still a little terrifying. But it was also why the naginata that was strapped to her back had a system for super heating the bde with QE. Not quite a chainsword, which would have been just a little cooler, but good enough to get the job done.

  After all, they hadn’t yet run into anything yet that was immune to both. Which, sadly, didn’t mean they wouldn’t eventually. But such was the reality they were stuck with and she’d much rather be stuck with it while controlling Power Armor than with just a battle rifle. Which, much like her current occupation of monster sying, wasn’t really a sentence she’d ever expected to even think. Power Armor was the sort of thing you saw on tech-based Heroes, and Ayumi was Quirkless.

  She was a damn good solider, which was one of the reasons she’d been forwarded into UA’s Guild program. But she was Quirkless and sure as hell not smart enough to build Power Armor like this on her own. Joining the JSDF, where Quirks were barely considered and generally the only ones that got special consideration were utility Quirks, had been Ayumi’s escape from a Japan that was increasingly hostile to the Quirkless. The fact that it had still let her do some good for her fellow citizens, despite how prejudiced they were becoming, was only a bonus.

  Stepping back from the blow of an Orc that had tried to ambush her, Ayumi’s Power Armored arm swung up to catch the bastard in the throat, her amplified strength crushing the monster’s windpipe. Coldly stepping back, she mercy-killed it with a few rounds, before surveying the battle as a whole. The battle for the southern Watchpost was one of the few offensive actions she’d taken part in so far, but it looked like it was going to be a clean victory.

  Which was damn impressive for a bunch of nineteen-year-old college students and two twenty-year-old JSDF noncoms. It was something to be proud of, for sure, making her gd that this earliest version of the Power Armor had required someone to have a pretty slim frame. Hideki was the only one of their four Power Armor troopers that was male, and he was a skinny shrimp who Ayumi could probably throw with one arm. Or, well, he had been. He was still small and slim, but he’d put on a lot of wiry muscle working with the Power Armor. The suits only enhanced what was already there, after all. They did so by a factor of eight, which had made even original-model-Hideki able to pick up and toss a 200kg monster. But, since you still used your own muscle as a base, they also gave you a hell of a full body workout that would quickly build tone on anyone that strapped one on regurly.

  By now, Ayumi felt she could punch out one of those Cave Troll things, if she got a chance. Which, given they were assaulting a Mountain Fortress, she just might. Sometimes, she thought as she serenely mowed down another trio of Orcs, life was good…even if she didn’t have a chainsword.

  Yet…