Expeditionary Procedures [ PMT | Maint. | Closed | Mature ]

[Aldarminia]

---

A National Maintenance Thread
by
Aldarminia

---

Table of Contents
0. Companion Texts:
Ascension | A Beast Awakens | A Draugr Walks |Titanomachy | The Meek Will Inherit Ash | Never the twain shall meet | Links in the Chain
I. The Acquisition:
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five
II. Tales from the Forgotten Dark:
III. Black Rose Diaries:
IV. March of the Hammer:

All events are subject to revision but you get the gist. More will be added to the prologues, and there are several different timelines throughout this maintenance, but this thread is to be considered the most reliable source--the closest thing to canon. More threads will be added for maintenance's sake as time progresses. Names are heavily under revision. In fact, a lot is, but again, you get the gist. Also, some mature content can be expected, so please read with discretion or, if need be, supervision. Enjoy.

[Aldarminia]

The Acquisition
Part One

---

Every block of Dyrkizla was a new challenge, and Josephus ap Vergar ao Vergar, Lord of Dyrgrad, was about to make each of those challenges much more intensive. Vultures screeched and circled above somewhere, and the metal of blood lingered heavily in the air. The bodies piled up, dead and alive, throughout Vergar’s palace. And his resistance to the invasion was finally dwindling to its last embers. Bastions of smoke circled the palace and crept their way in behind craters of artillery fire. Until Erid himself would come down from heaven to tell Josephus, he remained unbeaten in the mind, which is all the rest of the ethnic Scandin needed to keep fighting. Their petty king still sat on his throne to the supreme displeasure of the new rulers and new gods of the Yugostrana.

Especially to Massion Lynartos’s.

The Belianim was a nation sprawling out from the accumulating ashes of the fallen Dyrgrad under the supervision of its new guardian, the Aldarminian Empire, whose acquisition of the Yugostrana the Gothic Lords had conceded to allow for political bargaining. Massion Lynartos had built the Belianim from the early days of his insurrection as the Belianim Salvation Front. Vergar had built his Dyrgrad on the backs of the Sacerdotal, Freekish, and the Yugostrannik--the dres’nalar. The Aldarminians would build the Yugostrana over both if either got in its way.

Vergar’s palace, city, and practically his whole country were embroiled in a war he was losing to now not only an insurgency but also to a much more powerful empire coming to graze upon what blades were left on the Yugostrana’s plains of power. He was surrounded. Outnumbered. Outgunned. But one card remained up his sleeve and played appropriately, he believed, it could win the war. The cracking of small arms fire lurking in the auditory background, Vergar’s voice boomed throughout Dyrkizla with the cacophony of a staggering transmission.

“...and so I hereby proclaim the faith installed. Dres’Erid! Battle the dres’nalarad to the last!”

And the city burned for it. Dyrgrad’s forces had been emboldened by Vergar’s words, and so they fought with a new vigor against the Aldarminian invasion and the Belianimic insurgency. A new vigor to the extreme discomfort of Lynartos’s attack on the palace. The Aldarminian spies spread like flies across the Yugostrana and sprinkled throughout the battlefields--some evacuating and some advising and some observing--had promised that Vergar was Lynartos’s to handle with Aldarminian support, but that support was on the condition of efficacy. Massion’s failure to capture Vergar so far had been to the displeasure of his foreign allies, and now Massion’s forces were being repelled from the palace as armored vehicles hidden in bunker emplacements wheeled out to greet the light infantry charging through the grounds with total animosity.

Blood may as well have been water for the grass and weeds, and bodies the fertilizer. Lynartos only had one card left up his sleeve before he had to call the Aldarminians for more support, and heavy fire bore down on his position more and more as he tried to hold his lines together to keep the palace surrounded. Routine Aldarminian close-air support buckled some of the Dyrgradian second wind, but not enough, and the Aldarminians lost the superiority over the air of the palace with one fell swoop of poor tactical decision-making. A Gothfighter struck down by a mobile SAM, revealed after Vergar proclaimed the installation of the faith, briefly spiraled out of control overhead in the smoke-blackening sky before nose-diving into a column of reinforcements for the palace. Lynartos watched the column survive the crash and break through the rear of his lines. There was only one thing left to do and dwindling time for it to work.

When Massion gave the order, Aldarminian commanders cursed the day they came to Yugostrana. To the words, “For the Mother! Against the Flames! To Avaris!” thousands of Belianim charged with explosives strapped to their bodies and overran as many Dyrgradian positions as possible, detonating their suicidal payloads when they had made it as far as they could. However, nothing could stop Vergar’s tide of equally-fervent dres’Erid, and though the palace fell to the Belianim by the end of the day, Vergar remained Lord of Dyrgrad, and Dyrkizla remained a battleground. There was still work to be done, and expeditionary procedure dictated that the fight go on, so the day turned to night and a new foe entered play.

The air atop the ridgeline overlooking the palace still held the humidity of the Yugostrana, but a cold front washed over creating cooling sea breezes that played at the locks of the two commanders as they made their way out of a circle of armored vehicles acting as headquarters for the night operations. Tired and somewhat injured, either by the insult of failure or danger of assault, the two were retiring until the morning. The leader of the Belianim spoke first with a tint of shame in his words, “I did what had to be done, and it still was not enough.”

The Hammer bit his tongue until the two could sit down in his trailer and rest their legs. A couple of drinks were poured and drank in silence to the tune of gulps and the occasional flick of a lighter for a joint or cigarette in Dalikharl II’s mouth. Finally, the dead air revitalized, “I thought my people told you to never pull that fucking shit again, Lynartos.”

Massion spat, “The Scandin were beating us back because they realized their god was involved, so I invoked my own faith. Did it--”

“No, it did not,” interrupted with raised hand the Aldarminian Grand Emperor, “It did not accomplish the mission, and you are the second person today to tell me they nearly got me or my men killed because it was the right thing to do. Can you guess who it is that is right in this circumstance, Lynartos?”

The Beliani groaned, “I was not expecting a lecture.”

“Well, you’re going to get it. From me or someone else eventually, and right now, it is me,” said the Hammer with a fist to his chest in a lazy Gothic salute.

Massion returned the salute, but with solemnity, “Do you know what it is like to watch your brother burn alive, Hammer?”
The Hammer did not stutter his Common here as he finished another drink, “No. But I know what it is like to watch your brother die when you’re not right there next to him.”

Lynartos shrugged, “It’s a bit different from watching them die i-i-in… It’s different, comrade. You don’t under--”

“Enough!” slammed the fist.

The Hammer continued in spite of Lynartos’s offended grimace, “Enough is enough, and I have seen it enough. I know enough to know the pain. I have done enough to know the pain. I have lost enough, Beliani, to know that your struggle is righteous in its goals, but your methods and the sort of men you pander to when you engage with such tactics… They sacrifice everything you fight for, losing it before it is even really gained. You want freedom, Lynartos, yes? You want freedom for your people?”

“What I want,” replied Lynartos with an expression of passion, “Is for my family to be able to live freely in the country I was born in with the nation I built, apparently, for you to come and take from me, Your Majesty.”

“Don’t give me that ‘Your Majesty’ bullshit right now. You know as well I do that if Dyrgrad could have fallen to you, it would have by now, but it hasn’t and it won’t without someone bigger and badder coming to topple it, and it appears fate has granted me its favor, but if you get in my way, Supreme Liberator Lynartos, by ordering your men to give up the freedom of their lives to die for a cause they could then never see to fruition, inflaming a holy war that you and Vergar started and I have come to quell--”

“The Scandin started it when they immolated my family to decimation. When they enslaved us,” spoke Massion with venom seething.

“You’re right, but you chose to fight the war, and so the conflict’s initiation and completion is as much your responsibility as it is Vergar’s. You could have relinquished yourself to vile servitude, but you didn’t, which I respect, but with the great power your insurgent freedom brought you to, you have an even greater responsibility to make sure you are not leading your people to their own depravity damn it.”

The last note struck a chord somewhere, but the reverberation was a calm silence between the two leaders before finally being broken. T’was the Hammer that broke it with a pleading for one additional assurance, “So you and your people are certain he has gone west?”

Nodding, “Yes. Vergar’s going west to his compounds in the Northwestern mountains. We will have to march across the entire bloody country to get to him now.”

Mishearing a Common word, the Hammer chuckled, “Well, you and your people are in good hands then because marching across bloodied countries is what Aldarminians do best.”

[Aldarminia]

The Acquisition
Part Two

---

It would have been beautiful. The sky purpled from the early morning sun over the forward observation rota, and behind them, the morning horizon locked edges perpendicularly with the flow of the river. The surface of the water would have been a smooth-flowing reflection of the sky, sunrise, and the flanking treelines along pristine, otherwise untouched riverbanks.

It could have once been beautiful, but the banks were jagged and scorch-marred from bombardment; the surrounding vegetation, a green that should have been, was either not there or leveled as if chopped by giants and marked with small fires still burning from when the first shells fell. Dismembered parts of either wildlife or enemy floated east down the river past the rota, and the surface was caked with the debris of battle from upstream. Smoke and fire darkened the air in an obsidian haze, but up above, the glow of the sun still cast violet as the day of violence wore on into late morning and marked its first breaking toll. Five contacts. Four successful engagements. Nine confirmed.

The objective remained unacquired.

Procedure dictated the continuance of engagement-seeking.

So after a short rest, they marched on uncaring of the movement of the things in the water to their flank. The enemy, as they knew it, being still so fresh to the Yugostrana, was landward anyway.

Thachus had always found these brief rests ultimately unsatisfying, and the heat of the sun still bore down on him like some all-encircling force drawing every last bleeding drop of sweat and water from his body. It was not that he minded the moment to catch a breath; he had just always figured days would pass quicker and safer in motion than in the stillness that came in the pauses between the fighting.

And something beyond the Scandin lurking in the jungle bothered the officer’s brain with the instinct to run far away. The quietude of everything that came downriver, including the enemy seemed to conceal the presence of a hidden, more terrifying force than the warfares abounding the basin. Some force of nature forgotten to the primacy of mankind in even his most brutal element but remembered and feared by the clever little monkey in the canopy of the gutsy mind. Something, Thachus knew, beyond his own reasoning, lurked below the crests of water he could swear he saw in the corner of his eye.

Darkness came sooner than expected as storm clouds swept over the landscape and the river lurched upward with the rain, and the din of battle faded to below the crackling of thunder. Camp was made, and the enemy approached but did not strike, unbeknownst to anyone but the old foe. While distant embers of man’s war struck out against the shadow of night, discipline and goggles of green hue kept the rota shrouded. Their only mark of presence now quiet to a soft hum unheard under the weather. The mumbling murmur of their idle chatter was hidden to all but a quieter shadow of a few whose eyes glimmered ever faintly under the gaze of nightly visions, and so one predator’s objective was acquired while an old prey tried to remember the old way.

And the hunt began, and like dragons of old, in the morning, the horde came swooping or crawling down onto the camp from the nearby shoreline and treeline, seeking to bathe in the breath of the hot sun Thachus so despised, even moreso now as he awoke to the screams of the sentries and the crunch of alloy and polymer against bone and flesh. Gunfire and gnashing rang out and into tightly-resounding thumps into the scales of the battling dragons, their duels more ancient than time memorable. The jaws that nearly clutched Thachus from his sleep struck forward again, but this time Thachus rolled over onto the side of his hole where his armor lay. Fumbling into the exoskeletal frame of the power armor, he felt an intense pinch across his body as the pinchsuit shrunk to conform to the curves of his body and synchronize with it. The pseudomusculature tightened, and like the jaws before, snapped shut, encasing him in the armor of his own sort of draconic scales.

Ready to do battle now, Thachus retreated from his hole where three of the crocodiles would have had him encircled. As quickly as he could, he scanned his surroundings to assess the situation. The rota’s encampment was overrun with the beasts, but no one appeared lost. Thachus reckoned he must have slept through the initial moments of the onslaught. The bodies of some of the animals lay strewn across the bank, now climbed over by their still-living fellow reptiles. The crocodiles were all-too-numerous and ferocious though. They must have gotten used to the sound of gunfire due to the nearby battles because all-too-few, to Thachus’s hopes, were shirking away from the attempt to reclaim their sun-bathing spot. What was worse was that his unit was scattered and cut off from each other. The spaces between their fox holes were flooded with scales.

While those from the treelines seemed to have been repelled or exhausted to their tiniest reserves, the river seemed to only give birth to more and more, their obsidian scaled bodies seemingly taking shape from the battle-blackened surface of the water.

The three that had assaulted Thachus’s position now lunged at him simultaneously in a ravenous frenzy. They crashed against each other and began to snap at each other before returning their attentions to the retreating Thachus. A comfortable distance away from them and any other crocodiles nearby, Thachus calmed himself and breathed in. His aim fixed itself onto one of the crocodile’s eyes and fired, splattering its hardening skull and flesh across the sand of the bank. The other two lunged again, snapping their jaws in the air as they did. Thachus evaded one but at the cost of running into the other who bounced off of his armor from the force of the collision. The other one behind him now, he turned to face it but not before it launched itself into the air again to latch onto his weapon as its butt turned to parry. Thachus’s weapon was lost to the bite.

He tried to draw his sidearm but the crocodile that he had bumped earlier was now on him. The creature’s jaws opened, and before Thachus could realize what was happening, the same jaws closed onto his leg with a horrendous crunching sound that sounded more like it was an automobile collision than an animal’s bite. That was due to the Thachus’s power armor whose metal now grated against the flesh of the crocodile’s jaws, but the beast did not release its grip. Rather it started trying to drag Thachus toward the water, pulling him to the ground. His leg may have been saved from being ripped off his body, but he could still feel the pain of the pressure of the metal and plastic being crushed into his calf and shin. His pseudomusculature and the frame it was attached to screeched in resistance to the pull of the beast, but to no avail due to lack of leverage.

On the sand of the riverbank, the pools and streams of blood between and in the foxholes became more apparent to Thachus, who could now see that his rota was regrouping without him in the chaos of the reptilian invasion of their position. And behind him at the shore, Thachus could see two of his men’s bodies limp and being dragged deeper into the water through death spins that had already done their job. He fumbled for his sidearm again, but again he was interrupted by the approach of the crocodile that had found his rifle distasteful. It lunged at his face, intending to tug-of-war him with the other, but he acted quickly. Lurching his body upward with as much force as his exoskeleton would provide, Thachus came down on top of the lunging crocodile with his power-armored elbow, shattering its skull and sending a carmine spray across his armor.

The splash of blood against his visor and having to wipe it off must have provided him clarity because just as the crocodile was about to reach the shallow where it could spin, Thachus’s free leg sprang toward his chest and then outward toward the maw of the beast. The sheer force of the powered heel mangled the upper jaw of the creature, contorting the bone, muscle, and flesh into a pulp of black-green-pocked red-and-white. Thachus kicked again, but this time his body was in a sitting pose and he brought the free heel down directly on top of the crocodilian’s cranium. The beast’s whole body went limp after that, but its bite remained firm, so Thachus had to pry the jaws apart with his powered arms. A gang of more crocodiles were upon him though, and now he was close to the river, far away from his unit.

Shots rang out around him, sending more bursting gushes of blood and meat his way, but the latest attackers of his were dispatched, and further into his field of vision around him, Thachus saw and heard the explosions of grenades. Behind him, loud footsteps of volume more powerful than human machination approached, and sooner than he could grasp, Thachus was being pulled further into shore, back toward his men. In front of him the mass of black, reptilian hordes that had been congealing from the surface of the water slowly began to disintegrate into exploding splashes as his ears quaked from the successive changes in pressure. The rota was now on the offensive. Fanning out from the ridge where the treeline was, the Aldarminians pushed their invaders back toward the river. They fired upon what came toward them and meleed with exoskeletal strength what strayed too close.

There were others strafing their fire around him with the Aldarminians, though, Thachus could now see, his leg and sight free of crocodilian grip. He crawled toward one of these others, dressed in rags more than gear, who, accompanied by a couple more, appeared to be the commander of the situation if not Thachus’s rescuer outright. The man matched the photo and description of the commander of the Belianim that Mylovich had been briefed with. Whatever beast approached the Aldarminian lieutenant was gunned to a scaled swiss before it could get within striking distance, and soon enough, the two commanders were practically on top of each other as a medic saw to Thachus’s leg. The day would end with a handshake and an airlift.

Thachus Mylovich would walk with a limp for the rest of his life after being transferred to the Strategic Planning and Coordination Command for his role in the Expeditionary Procedural Operations in the Yugostrana. His rota would go on to fight in the largest battle of the war that would become known as the Second Hammer’s War. Expeditionary procedure dictated that hotspots of aggressive fauna be located and secured, and Thachus and his men had done the odd job of the campaign, and they had done it well enough to survive minus two. Objective captured.