Far Eastern Frontline: A World on Fire Cinder

The Barrel's Hindquarters

Summary: K-9's baptism by deathly fire ensues.

432/04/17 (April 17th, AC 432)

1355 Far Eastern Federal Time

Gulf of Anadyr, Southeastern Magadan | Core Territory of the Pacific Federation

-Half an Hour after the Bering Showdown-

Subject: Aqua 5 | Jolene Downer

"They're right on our tail!"

"Burn everything you got, we'll feet-crash on Core clay if we have to!"

I, Aqua 5, one of the supposed Chair Forces of the Cascadian Loyalist Guard – so goes their designation – am pissed.

I ramped up the 'burners to gate, blew through the Mother-forsaken mercenaries that went by me. An F/E-4...while I'm in a Dust-taken MG-29? Give me a fucking break.

We were wrong.

Dust above, were we so wrong.

The op was supposed to be a lot simple: Get our boys in blue and stars out of my country, wait for them to regroup, train the Far Easterners to fight, and then we'd win this war in short order.

We just lost the Solana Array not a week ago to a drill-Sorry, a fire-cursed raid by those Round Table huggers.

Mercenaries.

Damn Lord-sucking sheep led astray by the promise of fame, money, and power – all through blood.

The emblem of a band of fat cats that had been nothing but dust in the wind for years beyond the counting of both my hands.

Fifteen.

//

15 years ago...war broke out.

Now, this sounds like nothing special, this is just another little conflict...but it's anything but.

They tried to make their own nation – one where warriors and money rule, where the true righteous of the world are painted as blackhearted, where morality is rotten down to the base elements. One...of an Elysium beyond borders.

They had a lot more where that came from; the whole damn Oceanian Primacy itself – every facet of society and even its military – was infested with that cancer called "Mercenary Cabal."

Them.

A deep-cover quasi-religious extremist group that thinks it has the right to decide who's free and who isn't – who gets to rule over with silver and who gets to get the receiving end of a lead-spewer.

Or in my own words: A vile communion of devils who have renounced the Lady of All Cosmos – the Mother of Dust, hallowed be Her and any name assignable. I was an Oceania vet – got great joy in helping stop their mad goals.

Commination is Ours, so uttered the Dust - but nothing says we can't get a taste of that – so we did 15 years ago.

So much wealth to rival entire countries. An unabated thirst for power and glory. Once upon a time, they hand a grip on the most important industries of the entire world.

Their agents surveyed and sabotaged entire alternative geothermal energy grids – projects that we helped the desperate Federation to develop for countries outside the core in a bid to scramble to find substitutes for cordium.

The result? Economies going down the drain, the Periphery left in more chaos than ever, and the decline of one village too many, they had to be migrated and relocated...a lot to the disgusting "comfortable dystopia" of the Core.