I write an Isekai about communist revolution until an anime is made out of it

A Red Day

With the red-speckled mob's arrival, we could properly start digging in. Layer upon layer of shallow trenches were gouged out of the loose soil, their contents poured into easily thousands of sacks, and laid along the outer edges of the newly-formed dents in the ground.

Fuck yeah writing dramatically about dirt! I mean it's not too bizarre since there's a whole genre about the horrors of WW1 trench warfare but still pretty funny.

As the grounds were prepared for combat, Hadlon walked reassuring rounds through the troops scattered on the hillsides, Feo scoped out paths of attack and anything vaguely resembling a blind spot, Vay might've been among the troops or halfway to Morgenheim by now, hecklers stalked the lines with any goods they hadn't sold the days before, and I mostly concerned myself with keeping my head on my shoulders. To that end, offline games on my phone served a far better distraction than social interaction with men who lacked the common language to express how soon they expected to die.

Still enjoyable, even with the context of this rectangle as a capsule of the world I've lost. Speaking of, it is - 4:19 AM US Central Time. Completely out of sync with time in this world, but if none of this had ever happened I'd probably be up looking at memes right now. Memes, right, I've been gone for months now, probably some new ones in circulation by - what, "now"? Why should time here pass in-sync with time on Earth, and why should they even be limited by a linear understanding of time in the first place? Oh boy, here we go with this shit for the umpteen-trillionth time. Look, can we (who is me) for once in a lifetime just - uhp, it's not responding. Took two whole months and then some for my phone to break, that's - No, it's flashing tabs around now, aaaand it shut down. Well, shit, uh-

That was an awfully conspicuous time for my phone to start malfunctioning, don't you think?

My eyes had left the black screen for under a second before an increasingly-familiar weight was lifted from my holster, and a few proactive synapses had squeezed the word "assassination" into my head before I turned to see Vay, fully-cloaked and squeezing a round from my revolver into the sky.

"The Butcher is here! Everybody to arms, the Butcher is here!"

Repeated over and over in the local common and Valkheim's tongue, and in the form of an almost-yodeling shout I would've chalked down to anyone else if she wasn't standing right in front of me, for a solid thirty seconds before Hadlon's stream of more practical orders entered earshot.

The hillsides erupted with the shouts and the clamor of soldiers sprinting to position, while a scattering of camp followers raced downhill to the safety of the border. I scoured the horizon for a few seconds before a voice from around called out: there! On a distant treeline opposite the border - a brightly black speck, headed straight towards us! That was my cue to make for the surrounding trenches, rifle in hand, before it came-

Closer. From beyond sandbags the speck had grown into an upright figure, crowned in fiery red atop what looked like a hole to the void, and storming our way at a pace some fleeting subroutine tagged as "faster than men, faster than horses, faster than cars."

This is no time for melodramatic guesses; you have a scope!

I raised my rifle up and onto the sandbags, and -

completely useless

Calling it a blur would take more generosity than I could spare; it lay completely out of focus, and the butcher moved far too quickly for zeroing in.

down to the iron sights then

By now the figure was close enough to make out skin between the red and black blotches.

So, she's really going to kill and (hopefully) die in tiddy armor. spectacular.

Any existential implications of that were interrupted by gunfire; she'd crossed the farthest markers, and was now within range. Gunshots began to ring from the hillsides around me, a symphony of tones and pitches from hand-crafted ammunition; the freestyle of hundreds of manually-loaded rifles punctuated by the steady beat of machine-guns and the recoil-backed crack of my own weapon, with the murmur of soldiers shouting beneath it all. It was a feeling eerily like my time in middle school band class, where the rhythm carried on without the contribution of my one trumpet.

Ah, but this is more gripping, more truly meaningful, than anything my hutt of a band director could even dream of!

On a marginally-related note, the Butcher raced closer through the growing stream of gunfire to - three hundred, two hundred, one hundred meters before a swing of her scythe spewed a growing horizontal steak of heat haze into the air between us. Instinct yanked me into the trench before the congress of my grey matter could approve and my ears rang with a sound like the "chuck" of a spade thrust into earth, but amplified like a whip crack compared to a sniper's bullet.

This went on for several minutes; the Butcher closed in for an attack, and peeled back from the surge of gunfire. Was she recharging? gathering focus? toying with us? It didn't much matter now, when there was nothing to be done but keep firing. While some subroutine pinged around my skull with complaints of how your player character makes operating a bolt-action rifle look easy, the chorus outside dwarfed the noise within. As she circled the hill, I started listening for the gunfire echoing across the hillsides before taking heed to Hadlon's orders and soldier's callouts, before actually seeing the enemy for myself. There was no conversation to offer in those seconds of respite; only checking and servicing weapons, positioning ourselves, and mumbling the occasional hollow prayer that she doesn't bypass the opposite hillside and mince us from the hilltop.

Round after round, pass after pass, those terrors failed to materialize. There were dents where I'd leaned on the trench-side by the time a bullet I refuse to convince myself was my own struck its mark at long last. Whether it was fatal or not, it stopped the Butcher's breakneck dance long enough to pave the way for other hits, and I stopped my own fire only when I'd lined up my sights on a red smear in the scarred grass. 

With the enemy gone, I could notice the throbbing of a too-tight grip in my hands, and trade weary glances with soldiers I recognized mostly by face and none by name.