The Failed Front (Semi-Open;Attn:Stok;PT)

[Stoklomolvi]

Kagetorian Defence Line
1350 hours

Having fought for over an hour, the Stoklomolvi chased the Kagetorians across their trench systems until the entirety of the first few trench lines were firmly under Stoklomolvi control. The tar fire had been extinguished as the tar was denser than the water, allowing the water to sit on top and extinguish the flames. Prisoners of war were taken by the hundred, and as the Stoklomolvi military advanced the fort to the north was left alone by infantry and bombarded by artillery that had been dragged over the the hill to the west. Eventually the entirety of the fort would be surrounded, and the only remaining objective would be to push across the Kagetorian lines to reach the city of Sapporo.

In the wake of the advance, scores of tanks littered the battlefield disabled or destroyed, with thousands more wounded or dead. In the east, the Stoklomolvi advance into the second trench line was faltering. As the Kagetorians had been using whatever they could, the blitz and shock of the initial Stoklomolvi bombardment and attack was lost. However, the Stoklomolvi maintained a firm numerical advantage that could not be lost; even if every Kagetorian soldier killed ten men before dying, the Stoklomolvi advance could not be stopped. Sooner or later the Kagetorians would crumble, for there was no such thing as a hero in this kind of trench warfare.

[Kagetora]

The first lines of defense for the Kagetorians, were in a word, disgraceful. Several hundred thousand were decimated in a single day. Though what was notable was that Suribachi remained Kagetorian, and would become a hellhole very quickly for any Stoklomolvi to try and assault. The worst for the Stoklomolvi was yet to come. As they advanced closer to Sapporo, resistance would increase, as Kagetorians were not only fighting the Shogun, but would begin fighting for their families, for their homes, for their friends. But the soldiers would not be the only enemy that the enemy would have to fight.

The fanatic and extremely nationalistic population of Kagetorians would prove to be more and more violent.

For now however, the infantry continued to fight in the bamboo forests, many makeshift pieces of cover created simply by stacking bamboo stalks on top of each other.

Back in Sapporo, the vast majority of the soldiers stationed there were ordered to begin to move into the jungles behind the second defense line and the expansive tunnel system. They were tasked with creating as many boobytraps above ground as they could come up with. Even when the second defense line fell, the fight would still really be beginning.

[Stoklomolvi]

Fields east of Stoklomolvi lines
2150 hours

With the Kagetorian resistance increasing with each advance, the Stoklomolvi men began to resort to more drastic measures to defeat the enemy forces in the region. Civilians were to be shot on sight, and anyone not wearing a Stoklomolvi uniform was to be given no quarter. After several instances of POW rebellions in the trucks, soldiers were forced to execute Kagetorians en masse and dump them into huge open pits filled with rotting corpses, skeletons, and shoes. Due to the bamboo cover the Kagetorians were using, Stoklomolvi soldiers started igniting huge patches of forest using simple petroleum as the fuel. Dumping oil at the bases of the forests and relying on the easterly winds to spread the flames, the soldiers waited for the conflagrations to grow into self-sustaining firestorms, and ran away once the fires started spreading. Miscalculations inflicted several thousand deaths in friendly fire, and several thousand more had been killed in the earlier skirmishes, but few cared as the fires grew.

Meanwhile, to the rather barren northern area, Stoklomolvi troops dug in and patrolled a trench line in front of the artillery, which numbered around three thousand pieces. Once the line was secured, the incessant bombardment began. Every second, an artillery shell hit the Kagetorian positions, and every three minutes seventy would hit at once. The only reason the bombardment could sustain itself for such intensity was due to the superior Stoklomolvi supply line; after the first Kagetorian line was breached, a never-ending stream of supply trucks sped in and out of the front-lines, and since Kagetorian air superiority was broken morale remained high. Some five thousand artillery pieces in the southern area simply waited behind lines of Stoklomolvi troops, waiting for the fires to die, and waiting for the Kagetorians to fall one by one.

In total, only forty thousand casualties had been sustained in the blitz following the puncturing of the first defence line.

[Kagetora]

2200

The sun had set several hours before, and still, the battle raged on. Although the majority of the Kagetorian forces between the first and second defense lines had either retreated into the Suribachi mountain-fortress or dead, the naval forces of the Shogunate had not had their say in the battle so far.

In Suribachi, the artillery emplacements pulled down their camo-nets, and sentry positions were taken up. There was little left they could do before morning, and apart from the sentries, the soldiers within returned to their sleeping caves.

To the south of Beihaidaoshufu, a massive battlefleet was assembled, with over 20 carriers and 40 battleships present, and over 200 smaller warships attached to the fleet. In the coming assault, 540 B5N bombers were being sent out, 360 A5M escorts, and an equal amount of D3A divebombers, with a total of over a thousand aircraft being sent out.

However, unlike the attack on Zhongnanhai, this assault would happen all at once, with the Zeroes leading the way.

[Stoklomolvi]

Southern Beihaidao
2205 hours

The Kagetorian sudden assault was met by floating sheets of pack ice that seasonally appeared around the area. Because of the extremely low temperatures in the region, naval traffic typically resorted to using land-based bridges that would be erected and torn down every winter to the west of the island, and the ports of southern Beihaidao were left unused. Unfortunately for the Kagetorians, they likely did not know how thick the ice was, and an observer standing on a sheet of ice saw a relatively small warship strike one and sink beneath the ice pack, with little figures scrambling off the warship and jumping into the ocean. He could see people literally dying the moment they hit the water due to the extreme temperature change, but after around an hour he left to report to command. As he ran, however, he saw the first of the aircraft take off from the carriers, and he never made it back to base before getting punctured by some twenty bullets.

Radar, however, detected the aircraft early. The Stoklomolvi air force presence in Beihaidaoshoufu had been grounded due to damage, and thus the only weapons the Stoklomolvi had left were thousands upon thousands of anti-aircraft machine guns and flak cannons. All guns pointed south, and the order was given to hold fire until the first aircraft could be seen over the city. City air raid sirens blared into the air, sending civilians scrambling for safety in their bomb shelters as the Kagetorians were spotted over the horizon. Even if less than a day had passed, the war was progressing extremely quickly, though the slowdown and grinding of opposing forces until one completely crumbled would take six years.

New Stoklomolvi forward front
2205 hours

At around the same time that the Kagetorians attacked the city of Beihaidaoshoufu, the Stoklomolvi began pounding the fortress in the north and the Kagetorian lines in the south-east. The permission to advance was refused, as too many casualties would be sustained that way and it would be simply easier to turn the former lands Kagetora occupied into complete wastes. No activity was reported, however, as the Kagetorians had retreated into their caves without Stoklomolvi knowledge. The artillery continued their barrages.