in the deep sky's Abyss

_8_

Solutions(8)

T/W: depiction of a gory scene.
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"the light at the end of the tunnel is trecherous" Solomon remarked. "it'll blind you and just force you back into the dark"

"and what is that supposed to mean?" Alex questioned. He was still training his aim with the armorer, getting better every day.

"just a thought i had" (S)

"you seem to have many thoughts" Alex stated, grinning. "i finally hit something"

The communication station guy ran over to the ship.

A search party had managed to steal communicatios equipment from some sleeping soldiers. Some of them had died in the search of it. They had managed to learn that one Marshal commander Greeves had been appointed to a special operation on the planet. That had made Solomon sweatier than usual, which many didn't notice.

The dead bat-thing layed on the ground, and Alex added it to the pile of ones to be flayed by the armorer.

"and it was a moving target. You're getting better already" Solomon said as he cut of the bat-things wings.

"can we even eat those?" (A)

"this is still more appetizing than the pea sludge the guys looted from the soldier camp, isn't it?"(S)

"i guess" Alex stood awkwardly on his feet.
"what do you know about the imperium?"

"enough to not join their army" (S) "now come here and give me a hand, would you"

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The roots of the trees were a problem when digging into the ground. Now that Greeves was put in lead, Callum knew for a fact that the planet was of personal interest to the emperor. Greeves was the second of his name working his position.

Small amount of them were normal in the army, but the sheer number of inquisitionary forces was chilling, even for such a large operation.

Burning the jungle hadn't worked, it was simply too wet. The attempts had only caused some leaves to fall, blanketing the bodies on the ground.

"we must have been delirious to ever volunteer to get sent here" Callum muttered. "why did i ever enlist?, the food is shit and theres no pay, and the eorking conditions are quite unsafe..."

He was brought out of his despair by getting hit in the head by shrapnel from an explosion. 'thank the gods for my helmet' he thought.

"of you don't have any better things to do than catching strays with your teeth, the commander wishes to meet with you." a passing strike trooper informed him.

"i'll be with him in a second" he answered into the now eerily silent air. His ears were still ringing.

The walk trough the trenches was depressing. The reminder of a heavy cost was the dead bodies, which were stripoed of gear and just burned or used as makeshift sandbags.

There was a half dead strike-trooper on the ground. Her guts were hanging out of her body, her helmet had been vielontly cracked by something. The three medics attending to her injuries looked pale, they probably were new to the reality of war.

"mother..... I cant' come yet...... I must keep fighting..." the trooper whispered quietly.

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"this is the place we get into because of nepotism." the commander stated to Callum.

"is there a reason you called me here, sir?" (Ca)

"yes, you are to take twelve men to investigate the disappearence of some of our reinforcements"

"twelve is a smaller number than would be usual, but i can get it done" (Ca)

"that is what we are trained for; solving problems and getting killed." the commander spoke "you are free to go"

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Alex just wanted to breath the open air. Social anxiety was bad enough, but the moist feeling of suffocating that came from wearing the mask was unbearable.

After looking directly at the flaming star in the sky he was seeing spots, even after several hours. Even in the darkness of the cave it was hard to see anything but the spots.

The rain didn't make the sun of the planet any less unbearable, infact all the rain did was the exact opposite of what he would have thinked. Also, the smugglers had done a no-show on them. Perfect, just perfect.

"the fire looks cool" Max stated. They were sitting togheter around a fire in the cave. "there's just something beautiful about it"

In that cave, alone and cold they felt closer than ever staring at eachothers feet from opposing sides of the fire. Guard duty was mostly that.

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Callum was not imoresses with the intellegence of the 14 year old soldiers.

Stepping on a landmine is not a good way to see if it's armed. Two soldiers dead already. Shit was gonna get ugly in the future, now that they were out of the trenches.

"if i had to guess why we are going on this mission, i'd say that the commander wants some fancy bottle of alcohol sent to him by one of the senators" one of the child soldiers remarked.

They came out of the trees to see a field with a pile of bodies. Everyone quieted down, like thay had died.

Sand colour armor, soldiers. Some other persons body, by the looks of it he had been ripped apart in efforts of torture, propably a pirate crewman.

That certainly was interesting.

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A/N:
I no longer have Covid-19 , yay :D

This one took a shamefully long time

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