The sea fog lifted, and the clear sun shattered down over the ocean.
Wooooong—
The sound of a ship’s horn shook the shoreline.
“Air currents stabilized! Route clear to the sea-control zone!”
“All fleets, ready to set sail!”
At last, preparations for the landing operation were complete. The Empire had mobilized every ounce of its capacity and set out to sea.
And soon, welcome guests arrived.
“Port side, the exiled government fleet is joining us!”
“Admiral William has come.”
Beside the Imperial fleet pushing out into the open sea, the navy of the exiled government from the New Continent joined them safely.
Having completed every preparation, Admiral Rützel, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Fleet, stood on the bridge and looked down through the window.
It was a magnificent sight.
A vast mountain range of steel filling the horizon.
Dozens of massive battleships and cruisers of the allied fleet belched black smoke as they cleaved through the waves. Alongside them, the exiled government ships led by Admiral William joined in, completing a gigantic V-shaped formation.
Wuaaaang—!
Overhead, formations of Imperial fighters fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks crisscrossed through the blue sky.
And at the very center, a transport convoy packed to bursting with tens of thousands of infantrymen and tanks was being protected.
They advanced with absolute confidence.
But on the other side.
It was only natural that the People’s United Republic fell into terror.
“…Is there no way left to stop their landing?”
“The sea and sky are completely under their control.”
“Regrettably… even our vaunted navy is of no great use anymore. They’re nothing but targets for the Imperial bombers.”
Their leadership gathered every day to hold meetings. They were desperate enough to borrow even a cat’s paw if it meant stopping the enemy’s landing. But the contents of those meetings never became a productive debate; rather, as time went on, they devolved into little more than pointless lamentations.
“Well, calling them targets seems far too splendid.”
“Indeed. Live-fire practice with ten-thousand-ton chunks of steel? What is the Empire doing, not thanking us for providing them with such an opportunity?”
“Well, let’s not all think of it so negatively. Isn’t it a good thing in the end? This navy, too, is ultimately a remnant of imperialism… a means of exploiting colonies and the shackles of a filthy past…”
“Now, now, quiet! That’s enough, all of you. Is this the time for jokes?”
Even when they tried to rein in the atmosphere, there were no countermeasures.
Their air force had already been smashed by the Empire, and in naval battles they had been driven back again and again until they were holed up in port. Foreign trade had long since been blockaded, and the internal food situation was growing more disastrous by the day.
To say they would fight on the beaches, in the fields, and on the hills was difficult when they were a newborn republic less than a few months old, and without the aid of the League nations, even their domestic situation was unstable to an extreme.
At this rate, the Imperial Army—called the strongest on the continent—would surely trample Victoria Island underfoot.
What would happen after that was obvious.
“We will all end up like the Elancia Revolutionary Army.”
“Everyone, you’ve heard what happened to Chairman Valery…”
Just as they were beginning to seriously consider whether they should instead seek a path of exile to the League nations,
Prime Minister Galich—no, Supreme Chairman Galich—slammed his hand down hard on the table.
“Be quiet!”
At the razor-sharp aura Galich exuded, silence descended over the conference room for an instant.
“Are you going to tuck your tails and flee just because the Imperial bastards fire a few cannon shells? Are you saying you’ll hand this land over to them and crawl back into those stinking Londinium sewers?”
At his shout, the committee members’ shoulders flinched.
“We are the ones who, even before Parliament’s checks and the royal family’s guns and blades, raised the red flag in the end. The option of weakly surrendering to the boots of imperialists does not exist in our ideology.”
The mood changed completely.
Yes, they all knew.
There was no easy path to the great communist revolution.
As Galich said, they were fighters who had started at the very bottom and ultimately overthrown the United Kingdom.
Warriors who had embodied communist ideology to the marrow of their bones, victors who had held to their will even before the gallows without ever breaking. A miserable option like exile did not exist in their ideology.
The atmosphere in the hall had turned, in an instant, into something cold and ruthless.
Standing at its center, Galich gave a triumphant smile.
“Comrades. I have prepared a move.”
When Galich gestured, the adjutant standing behind him pulled away the covering from a huge operational map.
The Victoria coastal defense line, drawn chaotically with red stars and arrows.
“Comrade Chairman, this is…”
“The Imperial military, no, even our citizens of Londinium, must believe this: that our navy, under bombardment from the Imperial Air Force, has been reduced to targets without even being able to leave port.”
The corners of Galich’s mouth rose.
“That is half right, and half wrong.”
On the map, Galich’s pointer indicated not southern Victoria, but far to the north, where the icy seas surged: the naval ports of the northern fjords.
“For the past several weeks, we have thrown the obsolete ships anchored in port to the Imperial bombers as prey. While they grew arrogant and wasted their precious bombs…”
Galich’s pointer tapped the northern military ports. Tap, tap.
“…Three battleships and several cruisers have been preserved within these northern gorges.”
The committee members’ eyes went wide.
The regular fleet of the United Kingdom of Victoria was still alive?
“To evade the Empire’s eyes, we carried out every kind of deception operation. Camouflage nets and jamming devices, of course, and we even concealed the existence of the fleet itself under the strictest secrecy.”
It was information even the high-ranking committee members were learning for the first time.
Galich drew a line along the coastline of Victoria Island with his pointer.
“The moment the enemy landing is confirmed, our final fleet will head south.”
Galich clenched his fist.
“It is time to show those bloodthirsty bourgeois dogs of the Empire just how hot the flame of revolution burns.”
The political commissars shot up from their seats. Madness glimmered in their eyes.
“Long live the People’s United Republic!”
“Death to the imperialists!”
*
The morning of the landing.
The sky was cursedly clear.
For the defending forces, it was the worst possible condition. There was no fog to conceal them, no rain and wind to obscure visibility. And above all, they were exposed as they were to the enemy’s overwhelming aerial bombardment.
A coastal bunker. One of the defenders’ sentries raised his binoculars. His hands were trembling violently. Not because of the chill morning sea breeze, but because of the Imperial forces that might come at any moment.
“Fuck…”
The radar stations had long since been turned into scrap metal by the Imperial Air Force’s fierce bombing. They had to detect the enemy fleet’s approach by relying solely on binocular lenses and instinct.
“Enemy ships sighted! Offshore from Sector 7!”
And that was extremely inaccurate.
“Th-they’re empty! The transports are empty!”
“This… it looks like nothing but old, worn-out destroyers!”
“Damn it, it’s not the main force!”
The commander of the Sector 7 bunker threw down his binoculars.
What was revealed where the temporary sea fog had cleared was a crude fake fleet.
Canvas and wood had been added to roughly mimic the shapes, and some ships had even already been swept by the waves, leaving only bare frames behind.
“The sound! What in the world are all these roars, then?”
The source of the tank tread noises and the soldiers’ cheers echoing from every direction was a set of large loudspeakers installed on the decks of the fake transports.
On top of that, two or three of the Empire’s aging destroyers on the verge of retirement were belching thick smoke screens. From within them, they scattered shells here and there across the beach with their old naval guns, increasing the confusion.
Literally nothing more than shoddy unmanned transports, smoke screens, and noise.
While the defenders’ command mistook that paltry bait for the true main attack and frantically moved its reserves,
the real hell was unfolding in the south.
A point dozens of miles southwest of Sector 7.
“…Huh?”
Beyond the once-quiet horizon of Sector 3.
The pupils of the sentry gripping his binoculars contracted slightly.
Flash. Flash.
Dozens of pure white flashes embroidered the horizon.
Light is faster than sound. After the flashes burst, several seconds of silence lingered inside the bunker.
And then.
Kwaaaaaang—!
The earth screamed. The overwhelming roar shook the entire coastline.
“Uaaaagh!”
The concrete outer wall of the bunker crumpled like paper. The barbed wire and minefields that had densely covered the shore were washed away without a trace.
The terrain itself had changed. Each time a shell fell, a crater the size of a detached house appeared, and sentries hundreds of meters away were swept up by the shockwave and suffered concussions. An area comparable to a soccer field was obliterated.
The caliber of an Imperial main battleship’s guns was a full fifteen inches. Each shell weighed eight hundred kilograms, comparable to a compact car. Those enormous masses of iron were plunging down at several times the speed of sound.
And it was not only the battleships. Cruisers that had approached close to the shoreline opened their fire nets all at once, pouring down preparatory bombardment.
The command headquarters of the People’s United Republic’s defending forces fell into panic in an instant.
“Sector 7! Landing craft approaching! Support—! No, they’re fake! They’re models!”
“Sector 3 is under bombardment! The bunker’s been blown—Kuhak!”
Bzzzt—!
The analog switchboard in the underground bunker of headquarters began to catch fire. A hail of wireless transmissions, telephone lines severed by shrapnel. The communications soldiers stood stupefied amid the flood of screams and reports of annihilation.
“We must deploy the reserves immediately!”
“Deploy them where? We don’t even know where the main attack is!”
The defenders’ commander shouted with bloodshot eyes. Sector 3 or Sector 7? Or somewhere else entirely? Reports poured in from all along the coast that the enemy was landing. Because of the Imperial forces’ deception tactics and overwhelming firepower, the defenders had to desperately identify which beach was the true main attack.
But one thing was certain.
The boots of the Imperial Army had finally stepped onto the sand of Victoria Island’s mainland.
*
“Brigade Commander! Depth secured! Ten seconds to disembarkation!”
Hanna shouted as she pulled her steel helmet down low, and I had already scanned the landing point thoroughly with the [Minimap].
“You maggot bastards! Are you ready to grind the enemy up and drink them down?”
“Aaaaaaagh—!”
Sergeant Günter and the senior company commander, Captain Walter, bellowed until the veins stood out in their necks, and the soldiers screamed like madmen.
“…It begins at last.”
Serafina bit her lip in nervousness. Elise and the medical unit were aboard the follow-up landing craft, and inside the even larger tank landing craft, Frederica was warming up her tank, waiting only for the moment she could burst out.
Wiiiiing—!
Above my head, dive bombers plunged vertically, dropping high-explosive bombs.
Kwaaaang—!
From the sea, fifteen-inch shells from battleship main guns flew in and reshaped the coastline. And beyond that vast cloud of gun smoke, into the sky over the enemy rear, countless Imperial paratroopers spread white parachutes and poured down like dandelion seeds.
Bang! Splash—!
At last, the landing craft’s ramp slammed down roughly, and cold seawater sprayed up onto the deck.
“I’m back, you United Kingdom sons of bitches.”
The Jaeger Brigade set foot on the shore.