Impero-Alisonian Border
155km from the Vaeborian city of Sicasus
305km from the Alisonian city of Nevirnum
2nd Lieutenant Vittore Gabrielli – Alisonian People’s Army
January 22nd, 1935
Vittore Gabrielli stood atop a hill with a pair of binoculars overlooking the uncharacteristic hilly brush and forestry of southern Imperium. Further south the hills turned into the silver mountains along the border with Usea, a veritable fortress reinforced with literal fortresses along the passes on both sides, a sad fact of life in the post-revolutionary world. The line across in the distance wasn’t much different, though it was an artificial wall that contrasted the natural one sharply. Low rising, bristling with heavy gun turrets and carved out, reinforced trench lines that would be neigh impossible to surpass; which he supposed, was the point. By contrast the only defenses along the Alisonian half of the border were the trees themselves. “Sergeant.” Gabrielli turned to his senior NCO, Amerigo Alinari and handed him the binoculars. “Right over there, by that tree line. Is that fellow… coming toward us?”
Sergeant Alinari hefted the binoculars to his eyes and looked to his four o’clock where a figure was indeed moving just beyond the treeline. “Bit far from the gates.” Alinari ruminated as he examined the treeline itself. “He’s not the only one, either.” The sergeant handed the binoculars back, pointing to just within the trees.
“That’s unfortunate, I was hoping today would be quiet.” Lieutenant Gabrielli lamented as he called for a runner and started relaying orders to the man in order to gather his forces. “Probing force, you think?” The officer wasn’t a veteran of many battles and leaned on his NCO more than his men would ever know.
“That seems likely.” Sergeant Alinari agreed as he laid down on the rigid of the hill they were atop. Alisonia and the Empire had been prodding one another for over a year now in quiet instances of naked violence that both governments officially denied as border patrols clashed with often lethal results; both of them were none the too quietly gathering armaments and increasing the size and training of their armed forces for what men on the ground and in the towers rightly perceived as a coming war.
The sergeant levied his rifle, setting his gaze down the telescopic sight on it to make sure he wasn’t shooting at fleeing civilians as the lieutenant took a knee beside him, still observing as well. “I count eighteen.” Alinari said after a second of quick head counting that Gabrielli confirmed. “Definitely Imperial Army, as well.”
“So it seems.” The sergeant went quiet as he sucked in a breath to steady his aim, around them the remainder of the lieutenant’s men set up from vantage points along the hilltops. The crack of the sergeant’s rifle broke an uneasy, partial silence of rustling leaves, moving men and heralded all hell breaking loose. Rifle fire erupted along the Alisonian line and after the first volley the Imperial party’s advance answered in a more broken manner as they sought cover and concealment from their counterparts. “Left, fifty meters.” Lieutenant Gabirelli very calmly called out targets for his sergeant, who acknowledged with sharp rifle fire. The skirmish lasted under ten minutes, with what was left of the Imperials retreating in good order, leaving their dead for the time being; Gabrielli didn’t dare to send anyone after the wounded, God only knew if there were more of the innumerable Imperial horde hiding nearby, though he doubted it. “That’s done, let’s go do the paperwork for it.”
“Sir.”
Impero-Alisonian Border
245km from the Vaeborian city of Kydamis
300km from the Alisonian city of Regium Lepidi
Lieutenant Luciano Cremonesi – Alisonian People’s Army
June 11, 1940
“That is one hell of a wall.” The observation of the obvious was given by Sergeant Tommaso Salvi as he stepped up beside Lieutenant Cremonesi who was overlooking the so called Iron Wall, a whimsical boast by the former Empress of the Empire, Zoi the Minstrel, who was too busy patronizing the arts and musicians to bother with things like war or statecraft. The so called wall stretched from Vaeboria’s border with the Aegean Sea down to Thracia’s border with the Kemetic Sea.
“Never let it be said they don’t know how to hide.” Lieutenant Cremonesi replied simply as he scanned the horizon. Behind the two men were the assembled forms of nearly ten thousand ironclads ranging from smaller models to the ponderous bodies of imposing man-made mountains that were heavy land ironclads, the forces were the uniformed rank and file of the Alisonian People’s Army, the tip of a proverbial and very literal spear that would soon be pounding away at the vaunted Iron Wall when their units received the order to begin the advance against the vaunted defenses of the Iron Wall, which had not been idle over the last months and weeks; spies embedded in the governments of the Empire had reported a steady stream of Imperial soldiers that had been funneled into the kingdoms of Thracia and Vaeboria to augment the small royal militias that the richer kingdoms could afford to maintain. Along the Imperial border were innumerable machine gun emplacements, howitzer and mortar pits and of course, the battleship grade guns that sat atop heavily reinforced concrete towers. It was an infantryman’s nightmare made flesh from powdered rock and water.
“So-”
“No, we’re not charging across the distance while they lay into us.” The Lieutenant cut off his sergeant before he got a chance to finish the thought with a knowing smile. “The battlemagi of the 12th Magic Corps and the 33rd Artillery are going to roll up and give them a taste of blasting fire and the national animal of Lian.” The LT chuckled and waved a hand behind them towards bulbous racks of metal filled to the brim with rockets mounted in the beds of lorries.
“They the signal, then?” Sergeant Salvi questioned, his lieutenant shrugging in response.
“Central’s keeping ‘sensitive information’ close to the chest, afraid of Imperialist infiltrators.” Both men snorted at the thought of an Imperial spy, they outright didn’t exist.
A figure moving behind them caused the two men to turn towards the source, a young woman with the chevron of a private on her shoulder who saluted sharply, which caused both the lieutenant and his sergeant to wince sharply.
“Get out of that habit, I’m fond of my head.” Cremonesi said sharply. “Report.”
“Colonel Bello sends word that the assaults are to begin within the hour, sir. In addition, Captain Amadei is looking for you; your unit is in the vanguard.” The corporal spoke clearly, concisely and quickly; most if not all the traits necessary in a message runner.
“Thank you for the information, Corporal.” The lieutenant rambled off his own set of instructions to be given in countenance for a reply that he’d heard before he dismissed the girl. The junior officer and his NCO walked down the low rise of the hill they were standing on and began meandering through the forward positions of the 3rd Army Corps; their formations were due to strike at the northern ‘half’ of the wall, while elements of the 5th and 7th Army Corps hit the southern half on the border with Thracia.
They passed through rows of tents, loosely arranged material; anti-air batteries pointed skyward and other things before the two men split off in opposite directions; the lieutenant headed towards the officer’s tents, his sergeant heading towards where the enlisted men were encamped to get them in motion. There wasn’t a great degree of separation such as in more traditional military bodies; Alisonian officers were within a stone’s throw of their men, and were not kept separate from them, at all. They were often literally neighbors and friends, much to the chagrin of more traditional military theorists who held steadfast belief that even if the enlisted men weren’t scum, their betters should almost never associate with them; something that as with most things, the fiercely communal Alisonians took personal issue with. You didn’t send men to die unless you went with and in front of them, it was that simple. Hell, even the Imperials understood that, the godless heathens…
Impero-Alisonian Border
245km from the Vaeborian city of Kydamis
300km from the Alisonian city of Regium Lepidi
Alisonian People’s Army
June 11, 1940
According to a watch it was noon in southern Alisonia when it happened; the first shot of the war. The Sun was high, insurmountable, the fierce burning of the light a testament to the strength of a god herself; and then she was gone. Much like those uncounted years before, but also worse, for she could with great effort, pierce the fog that Anemoi had set upon the world long ago. This was not such a case. The combination of more than a thousand muttering voices hearkening to power unfathomable to the likes of modern men was unleashed in the most subtle of ways; as in the next second, before anyone who had not been paying the closest of attention to the sky, the sun was back, bright and guarding, an illusion.
A beam of light the color of straw shot down from the sky in the distance before it faded swiftly losing all trace of color. Only the gods could deduce from where it had come…
In the distance the sound of thunder struck across the air many times louder and longer than the greatest natural lightning bolt in history. The sound was that of the audible groaning of a hundred million tons of stone, iron, sweat and blood of the iron wall as it began to melt, collapsing in on itself under its own weight without apparent provocation. Which was not the worst of things. As the concrete disintegrated there were no words in the languages of man or flen that could describe what was happening to the garrison. Some had the decent luck to simply drop and die; others appeared to sicken rapidly from causes as common as exsanguination and as exotic as advanced stages of red plague in a matter of seconds at the longest as reality itself struggled to comprehend exactly what it was that was unfolding within its grasp as the consensus was overridden with both ease and horrifying execution. Others still, there really were no words for what happened to them. The spell, the ritual really, and it was evident after the first few horrifying seconds, it was indeed a spell, an incredibly complex one at that, lasted for minutes, and the minutes gave way to an hour before the storm clouds parted and left naught but a clear blue sky and in its wake, what had formerly been a series of proud, indomitable structures were left as little more than piles of literal sickly colored gray ash.
The symphony of noise that followed was in comparison, trite and inconsequential as thousands upon thousands of rockets screeched through the sky like a macabre organ playing the funerary dirge of its predecessor; in concert with the secondary bombardment units lurched forward from their resting positions, engines spooling up and the stamp of boots echoing through what was now an eerily silent place compared to not a half a day before…
Impero-Alisonian Border
175km from the Vaeborian city of Kydamis
Private Lucia de Palma – Alisonian People’s Army
June 11, 1940
It felt wrong. Her boots crushed more prints into the finely ground ash that had been stone, iron or man and it felt wrong, not just morally, but somewhere deeper, much deeper, that normal people couldn’t see or touch. She couldn’t begin to imagine what the Flendrehel not a few feet from her, doubled over vomiting, was feeling. They were so much closer to God than she was… It was wider than she expected, too, a field of indescribable gray nothing that extended out from an epicenter for what looked like miles, though at the barely perceptible edges, hues of green and brown could be seen on the near horizon. More than a few had deigned to equip their gas masks in an effort to keep the smell of ash out of their nostrils, and God knew what sort of magical ailments borne of the unnatural ash itself; it didn’t take her much thinking to do the same, her vision of the world constricting rapidly once the protective mask was secured. Both isolating and intelligently, no one spoke, leading to a pseudo-silence interrupted by the churning of engines that disturbed the ash fields, flurrying the material into the air in the form of gray clouds that settled back down on absolutely everything.
This continued for several minutes, silent marching interspersed by being covered in snowing ash before the ash field ended abruptly with the reemergence of emerald fields of grasses. The flurrying died down more slowly as the vehicles trawled through; sprinkling the healthier ground with the destitute remnants of what had preceded the advance. The gas masks came off almost immediately, desperate breaths for fresher air becoming the predominate sound among the infantrymen advancing whilst vehicles and their attached infantry elements began to split off into convoys and formations down the roads. Lucia turned back the way they’d come where the cavalry detachments had dismounted and were coaxing their horses over the ashen field with the assistance of several very uncomfortable looking Flens who were speaking in soft tones to the clearly frightened beasts that shined with sweat.
Lucia muttered passages from the Litany as she turned back towards her unit, falling into formation in a skirmish line as much of the advancing cohorts had done, God did not allow such things, yet her eyes and burning nostrils certainly disagreed, whether God allowed it or not, did not seem to stop men from doing it. The fields and roads they advanced along were empty of soldiers not their own. Hours passed as they marched, the Sun shifting position in the sky from high to low. Those walking had nearly reached the point of exhaustion before they were exchanged with fresh troops from the rear and loaded onto lorries for some form of rest. Lucia’s legs screamed in objection as she sat ragged for the first time in nearly a day.
“Where the hell are they?” Someone, she looked over to see a friend of hers from childhood and fellow Private Casimir Fortunato speaking, the others of their squad, Private. Roberta Amatore, Rossa Alamanni and Corporal Ines Bagni shrugged, no one was above the pay grade necessary to have half an inkling of such things, a minute or two passed before Cpl. Bagni gave his thoughts very plainly. “They were all back there, we walked over them.” The young man, only 25 and freshly a man, shuddered at the thought.
“That wasn’t the entire Imperial Army, surely.” Amatore suggested as she sucked a lengthy puff off of a lit cigarette. These sorts of informal conversations happened a lot at the smallest level of the army, five or six people gathered around proverbial or literal campfires exchanging ideas and thoughts on the situation they were in.
“I doubt it.” Lucia said, her tone softer and understandably glum. “The Empress’s legions are almost innumerable. We got less than a fraction, probably.”
“They’re not innumerable, they’re just unlucky enough to be forced to fight for their overlords.” Private Alamanni spoke up a certain venom in their voice, everyone shrugged again as they opened a few tins of assorted foodstuffs and ate it cold. The tinned meat spread well over exceptionally dry crackers was likely going to be the best meal they had for a few days until the logistical corps caught up with the advance. “Sleep, God knows when we’ start getting shot at.” Corporal Bagni said as they approached the end of their impromptu meal, Lucia leaned back as much as she could and shut her eyes, maybe that was a nightmare, maybe…
Impero-Alisonian Border
100km from the Vaeborian city of Kydamis
Private Lucia de Palma – Alisonian People’s Army
June 12, 1940
When Lucia was jostled awake it was at least several hours later. A feeling confirmed when she checked her watch a few seconds later. The sky was pitch black, and there were a combination of torches, flashlights and mage-lights floating among the columns when she poked her head out of the back of the canvas covered truck bed. The immediate area was relatively well lit, with outlaying areas beyond a circumference of about fifty yards once more yielding to darkness. “Come on, out of the lorry.” Corporal Bagni was the first one on the ground, followed by the others before Lucia piled out last. “Weapons check.” A quick once-over of their rifles, yet to be fired, and ammunition. “Fan out and stay in the light.” The Corporal hissed in no uncertain argumentative terms. God only knew what dwelt out there in the shadow, be it man or something else entirely. Lucia nodded and took up a position on the squad’s far western flank, near to the outer edge of the ring of torches etc, peering into the murky night beyond on the look out for Imperial scouts, in reality the attention was more for wolves and similar predators; night advances seldom saw open battle, least of all against Imperials, her father had told her that much from his service in the Revolution. Alisonians were Imperials as well and fighting at night didn’t sit with them, advancing though? They could do that…
The first shot rang through the vanguard five minutes after Lucia started her screening advance. A single shot that caught the point man of the platoon that was fanned out over about half a mile in diameter in the throat, that fellow fell without a shout and died choking in short order. The machine gun fire rattled after that, the open field provided little in defense, and curses be unto the fucking gunner who had a night-eye spell. “Drop!” The word didn’t need saying, but said it was, muscle memory and training kicked in and Lucia, among others, dropped to the grass covered floor. “Where the fuck are they!?” Someone shouted, then the tracer fire screamed in, catching one of the soft-bellied trucks in the cabin, a spray of red covering the shattered windshield as it ground to a halt. Vehicle crews dismounted haphazardly, clutching carbines and sidearms as they joined the riflemen on the ground.
A bright light erupted over the heads of the soldiers a second later, much brighter than a normal flare could have been it was most certainly the result of magic that produced a soft off-white with the intense regularity of moonlight, not quite bright enough to see for miles; but enough to illuminate their counterparts. Some hundred yards to their direct north, as well as on their flanks was a line of machine gun nests, as well as riflemen who were dug in, though not entrenched, defensively. Several of the Imperials had reeled back away from their stations, blinded by the sudden change in luminosity. Those not blinded did not cease their fire, also finding it easier to locate targets in the saturated environment of the Alisonians’ formations.
“Silence those guns!” That roar came from Sergeant Loris Grosso, a salted man in his mid-thirties who’d fought the Imperials in the revolution and was the leader of Lucia’s section. Lucia herself was busy acquiring and firing on targets along the Imperial line, the recoil in her semiautomatic rifle an odd sort of therapy to the fight-or-flight response in her genes. A mage a few yards a way threw some God forbidden sphere at one of the machine guns which caused it to erupt in a column of flame, fireballs were as basic as magic got as Lucia understood it and God forbidden or not, she couldn’t deny their effectiveness as the men manning the gun were reduced to screaming immolates. Further down the line, a more mundane approach of shooting the machine gunner solved the problem long enough for another man to throw a few grenades; while on the flanks a combination of magic and bullets was used to deal with it. The skirmish lasted less than five minutes, but left several dozen, if not more, wounded, and God knew how many dead. When the shooting died down, medics and healers got to work as Lucia reloaded her rifle for the third time.
In addition to the spread out shapes of bodies that became more indistinguishable from the ground as the flare spell faded, several lorries lay disabled, either through the elimination of their crews or 7mm machine gun fire through their engine blocs. The whinnies of horses made it known what had happened to a few of the equine beasts. She sighed deeply and closed her eyes, offering prayers to the Lady for her comrades and her enemies; “May they find themselves in your court, Highest, guard them from the Enemy… Praise, praise.”
The Private shook again, adrenaline coursing through her as she tentatively stood from her position as others around her did the same, moving to collect and comfort the wounded. She counted off those nearest to her and thanked God again that no one she knew had been among those more unlucky than they had been. A frown formed at the corners of her mouth as she thought on it, yet. The small nature of the unit they’d encountered made her think of delaying tactics, and larger battles were certainly in the future, for now though, they were mostly alive...
Athenian Sea – AS San Marco
Admiral Alessandro Montanari – Alisonian People’s Navy
48 nautical miles from shore, nearest Alisonian city – Roma
June 12, 1940
Thousands of miles away from the trials of Lucia de Palma, sixty-seven year old Alessandro Montanari quaffed a cup of tea while it was still piping hot in an effort to wake himself more quickly. At his age, ideally he would’ve been retired; and prior to two weeks ago he was retired, living out his days in the idyllic coastal town of Pisa. He’d been recalled by the General Staff Office of the Navy to serve as the flag officer of the 3rd Fleet, a position he’d previously held from 1924 – 1930 when he was a slightly younger man. Apparently they were unwilling to accept that his successor was a competent, if not younger, officer. The Admiral made his way from his quarters to the bridge of the ship with a practiced ease of someone who had the footfalls and niches of the ship memorized. Over the years a lot of blood of his had gone into the beams and bulkheads, both proverbial and literal.
He’d fought in the Imperial Navy as a young man, and had found himself in the Alisonian People’s Navy in the aftermath of the revolution in which he, like many of his generation, had taken part. Back then, the new Alisonian Navy was a motley collection of ships taken from the Imperials at gun point, and what ever had been seized in harbor. A collection of cruisers, often protected or light, as well as destroyers. The San Marco was one of three exceptions, an honest to the Gods battleship, albeit, an old one. First laid down as the Imperio in 1903 the San Marco was one of the Artemis style battleships, center-firing etc. The ship had been refit twice, once in 1918, and again in 1929 which increased her battery from 12” to “16, though her armor remained that of a pre-1920 battleship.
The Admiral arrived at the bridge of his ship finding it in working order, no orders were needed to be given, he checked quickly with the night watchman and after ascertaining that everything was as in order as obviousness pointed to, took up his station silently. The San Marco, along with its task force of three cruisers, the Varese, the Vittoria and the Juliana along with six destroyers, the Austro, Strale, Dido, Dardo/i], [i]Nembo and Espero were a small vanguard for a much larger force to follow them headed by the aircraft carrier Aquila.
The task force’s primary mission was to act as forward scouts for the larger force, providing early screening against possible Estainian fleet movements as they went further out to sea. In addition they would, once they arrived off of Estainia’s coast, attempt to engage the coastal defenses there in an effort to open up the Aegean Sea to external fleet actions by the APN while the Aquila and its contingent engaged further out along the Estainian-Phearaean coast, though they had to be careful not to cross into Nordleng waters or airspace but that could be dealt with when the time came. It was not an especially good plan, and Admiral Montanari did not sign off on it. While he was not afraid of the Imperial Navy, he was the Imperial Navy once, he knew them, how they fought, thought and broke. The matter was simple; Imperials did not break, a stereotype among Imperials, their foolhardy stubbornness, was a true fact in the Imperial Navy. Famously disciplined and rigidly adherent to their protocols and guns he was not shamed to say they were the finest navy on the planet. Of course, the Admiral smiled ruefully as he stirred in his thoughts; the Alisonian Navy read the same manuals, trained along the same lines, mostly, conflicts between them were going to be… amusing at best.
The Imperial Fourth Fleet, stationed at Larissa, would probably be their most likely opponents, and the office of maritime intelligence hadn’t reported any fleet changes at Larissa’s naval base in over three years when the fourth fleet was exchanged with the seventh. Montanari vaguely recalled from reports that the fourth fleet was primarily cruiser based, a claim he heavily doubted, as they were charged with the defense of Estainia itself, whatever the Empire might call itself, whatever they might speak in Lianese, Estainia was the heart of the Empire; it would not be lightly defended by mere cruisers.
“Unknown vessels, this is the Imperial Navy, you are intruding on Imperial territorial waters, heave to by thirty degrees, we will escort you to international waters.”
Fuck.
“GENERAL QUARTERS, ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS!” Alarms were blaring as the Admiral bellowed, the ships erupting in life as the main guns of the San Marco began moving towards the horizon, whilst the cruiser Vittoria outright opened fire on the Imperial ship from the head of the formation, a distance between them of roughly eleven kilometers. The Imperial ship did not flinch, as expected; instead they themselves heaved to engage the Vittoria while their radio started squawking for aid.
Admiral Montanari sighed as his ship swung in the water, the forward turret opening fire with a deafening symphony that muted the raging guns of the smaller ships, the 16” shells slamming through the Imperial vessel, exploding well on the other side, the damage done by sheer inertia.
So much for doing it quietly…
