When the shell landed, Rivane had no time to react.
She heard a shriek, sharp enough to split eardrums, growing from distant to deafening, and in the next instant the slope less than twenty meters ahead simply erupted upward.
Nothing like the slow-motion fireballs of cinema. This was cruder, more physical, and more real: dirt, rubble, shards of metal, and some viscous organic residue carrying the stench of scorched flesh, all flung together into a black fountain that came crashing down on her without mercy.
The shockwave hit her chest like an invisible wall.
Rivane grunted and was hurled backward, landing hard in the muddy water at the bottom of the trench. Her ears were left with nothing but a piercing whine. Her vision went dark. Her organs trembled with the impact. She could even taste iron on her tongue, though whether that was the game's simulated sensation or her body's genuine stress response, she couldn't tell.
Soul leaving body.
That phrase was all her mind had left. Not metaphor. She genuinely felt, for one suspended moment, that the concussion had shaken her consciousness loose.
A hand seized her shoulder and dragged her into a deeper hollow in the trench. Almost simultaneously, another explosion went off near where she had been standing, and dirt rained down in curtains.
"Snap out of it! Move, unless you want to be blown into paste!" The voice of Lin Qingluo, "Daniel" in the game, bellowed in her ear, cutting through the fading roar of the blast and the ringing in her head.
Rivane gasped and forced her vision into focus. Daniel's face was right in front of her, eyes beneath the helmet sharp as a blade, carrying none of a novice's panic, only a near-ruthless concentration.
"The rebels... they have artillery?" Her voice shook slightly. This had exceeded every expectation she'd brought into the "game."
"The rebels have fixed artillery positions in several districts on the outer perimeter of the core zone." Daniel spoke quickly, scanning over the trench lip while he explained. "It's a mechanic on this map. We fight through it district by district, and every one we take down knocks out one of their fire positions. By the time we push into the valley, they'll be the ones eating shells."
He said it the way someone might describe a commute. Completely matter-of-fact.
Rivane steadied herself and wiped the mud from her face. She looked at the laser rifle in her hands, then out at the battlefield ahead, thick with smoke and laced with gunfire.
"I... I don't know how to use this," she admitted. Fencing's precision came from total control: the opponent, the distance, her own body's alignment. Out here, everything was chaos, randomness, and wide-area saturation. The close-quarters skill and split-second judgment she prided herself on felt impossibly small against the scale of lasers and artillery.
Daniel studied her for a moment, as if something clicked into place. He opened the squad channel. "If you can't run a frontal assault, go support. Do you know how to play Scout?"
"What do you mean?"
"Redeploy. Switch to Scout, take a long-range laser sniper rifle." He pointed to a relatively elevated pile of rubble along the flank. "Get up there, find a high ground position, and watch my flanks and the area ahead for heavy weapon operators and officers. Wherever I push, you clear the threats."
Rivane understood immediately. It was like distance management and timing in fencing, only the foil had become a sniper rifle and the few meters of a piste had become several hundred meters of open battlefield.
"Done." No hesitation.
[Rivane: Choosing to redeploy.]
[Class changed: Assault Trooper -> Scout.]
[Weapon changed: Laser Rifle -> Long-Range Laser Sniper Rifle.]
Her vision blinked, and she found herself already crouching on a broken slab halfway up the rubble pile. Her uniform had shifted to a grey-brown camouflage suited for concealment. Face paint obscured her features. The heavy sniper rifle in her hands was cold and substantial to the touch.
She lay flat, brought the rifle up, and looked out through the high-powered scope.
The chaos in front of her was instantly pulled close and sorted. She found Daniel crawling forward. She found the muzzle flash behind the rebel sandbag positions ahead of him. She found the faint movement of a figure shifting in a distant window.
She breathed in deep, exhaled halfway, then held.
The crosshairs in the scope drifted steadily until they settled over a rebel soldier who had just leaned out from behind cover, a rocket launcher braced on his shoulder.
She pulled the trigger.
No sharp crack, just a low, solid hum, and a thin beam of intense red light crossed four hundred meters in the same instant.
A cauterized, penetrating hole appeared in the rebel's chest. He swayed. The rocket launcher slipped from his hands. He went down backward.
[Rebel infantry eliminated. +50 points.]
The system notification surfaced, perfectly calm.
Rivane stared. Not fear. Something stranger: a kind of dissociation. That far away, that effortlessly, and a "life" was simply gone. No ring of steel, no ragged breath of a falling opponent. Just a soft hum and a pixel dropping.
But there was no time to sit with it.
"Good shot. Keep going." Daniel's voice came through the channel, carrying something close to approval. He had already taken the opening, bringing several AI soldiers forward in a rush toward the sandbag position.
Rivane shook her head and cleared it. She fell back into the rhythm: find target, calculate range and lead, hold breath, pull trigger.
Hum.
Hum.
Each faint vibration, another threat removed. She picked selectively: heavy weapon operators, mobile squads trying to swing around Daniel's flanks, non-commissioned officers directing fire from behind cover.
With her precise long-range clearing, Daniel's frontal advance moved with unusual ease. He didn't have to worry much about flanking fire or ambush, letting him focus on directing AI soldiers to suppress, throw grenades, and rush the gaps left by each explosion.
Between the two of them, something odd and functional formed.
Daniel was the sharp point of the spear: the one drawing fire, setting the tactical tempo.
Rivane was the hidden eye, the scissors cutting away hidden dangers, the one holding the safety margin.
Nothing like partnered fencing drills, yet it demanded the same level of focus, trust, and intuitive reading of each other's intentions.
The Northern District, the most critical of the rebel outer strongpoints, had its defensive line torn apart under the combined effort of these two, a real-life pair of friends and a pairing of veteran and newcomer.
When Daniel sent the last rebel machine-gun pillbox skyward with a thermite charge, the will to resist in the entire Northern District seemed to collapse.
"For the Emperor! Forward!"
A thunderous shout rolled across the battlefield over a loudspeaker. Not Daniel's voice. It came from further back along the line: an Imperial Commissar in a crisply pressed uniform and a peaked cap, wielding a chainsword, standing atop a battered armored transport and pointing the blade at the retreating rebels.
The next moment brought something Rivane knew she would never forget.
From trenches, from ruins, from behind cover, every living soldier of the Imperial Guard, whether player-controlled or AI-simulated, seemed to be plucked by the same string. Together, they let out a roar that shook the ground:
"FOR THE EMPEROR!!!"
Not a clean chant. Tens of thousands of voices tangled together in a howl soaked in blood and fervor.
And then they charged.
No hesitation. No flinching. Soldiers leapt from cover, bayonets leveled, treading the bodies of their comrades and their enemies alike, a yellow tide surging over what remained of the rebel positions. Bullets punched through bodies. Artillery burst at their feet. Men kept falling. But the tide of the charge did not slow. If anything, it swelled.
Through her sniper scope, Rivane saw faces: twisted, smeared with blood and grime, and burning with something close to madness. They screamed the Emperor's name as they ran toward what was, for most of them, certain death.
The finger resting on her trigger trembled slightly.
This made no sense.
This was not... "normal."
For a virtual, possibly nonexistent "Emperor," they were launching an assault of this scale, pouring lives into it without a second thought. It had gone past the realm of satisfying war-game gameplay into something else entirely, something she couldn't quite understand, something that sent a chill creeping up her spine.
A cult of personality? Religious fanaticism? Something even older and darker than those?
Daniel's voice broke through the channel, calm to the point of indifference:
"Don't freeze up, Tizihe. The charge has started, so the rebel positions will be in chaos. Perfect time to pick off their commanders and comms operators. Give those troops some breathing room."
Rivane snapped back.
She pushed down the shock and the unease and forced herself back into the sniper's state. The scope swept again and locked onto a rebel officer waving his pistol, trying to rally the routing men around him.
Hum.
The officer went down.
She moved to the next target. One after another.
But deep inside, the question had already taken root like a seed in cold soil.
What kind of world was this "game" depicting? And the players immersed in it, players like Daniel who had grown "used" to all of this: did they truly understand what they were experiencing and endorsing?
The Northern District fell completely. The banner of the Imperial Guard was planted on the highest point of the shattered water tower.
A temporary quiet settled over the battlefield. Soldiers began clearing the field, reinforcing positions, preparing to push toward the next district.
The pace slowed.
Rivane climbed down from her sniper position and found Daniel checking his ammunition and supply status.
"Back there..." She started to speak, then couldn't find the words.
Daniel looked up. He seemed to know exactly what she was reaching for.
"First time seeing a mass charge with a Commissar driving it from behind, the discomfort is completely normal." He wiped down his weapon, his tone level.
"But in this world, this is just the routine. For the Emperor, for humanity, for the vague and desperate hope of survival. The Imperium in Warhammer 40k is built on sacrifices exactly like those."
He paused, eyes turning toward the massive silhouette of the core energy array in the distance.
"Insane? Not worth it? I thought so too, the first time. When I was in that tournament and saw a group of Krieg lunatics charge an enemy they had absolutely no chance of defeating, and they did it in silence, no expressions, no emotions in their eyes.
Well, I was lying: I couldn't see their faces behind the gas masks. But later I understood. In that world, there is no choice. Loyalty is breath. The only options are to fight and die for the Imperium of Man, or to simply die right now."
Rivane said nothing.
She thought of the words from the opening cinematic: "Seek hope in the darkness."
Perhaps that heedless charge, at its core, was precisely that: a sliver of flame in the dark, faint but searingly bright.
Even if what it burned was the lives of countless people.
"Next district." Daniel got to his feet and checked his weapon one last time. "The rebels have light vehicles and heavier fixed positions there. We'll need to be more careful. Are you all right?"
Rivane drew a slow breath and tightened her grip on the sniper rifle.
"Yeah." She nodded.