Scarlet Shadows [VERY SLOW UD]

???: Knife in a Gunfight

He again fumbled his reload for the nth time, still flinching from the 7.62 mm live-ammo rounds spraying inches above his helmeted head. After a couple of seconds, he managed to slow down the shaking of his hands long enough for him to stick the long but slim 48-round magazine into the slot on the side of his weapon and slap it towards himself, swinging the magazine into the side of the rifle and locking it in. "These guys need--", he was startled by a short, loud whirr from the gun, as he isn't used to the strange sound yet. This is his first time using it and the battle started only twenty or so minutes ago. And with the magazine size, he doesn't really need to reload that often.

He paused for few seconds, taking a close examination of the gun for the first time since handling it. The damn thing looks like it's from the future!

It has a sleek, shiny, gunmetal gray color. Despite looking smooth and shiny to the eye, it actually has a patterned surface, whose pattern is identical to the one on his gloves. The small ridges on the patterns line up and slide onto each other, helping secure his grip.

It has a small, slow-rotating cylinder at the center, which he assumed was the one that made the whirring sound earlier. It has these weird shallow lines and a small, strange... circuit, perhaps, that seems to be laminated onto the surface on the lower part of the gun, just below the cylinder, with a line running along both sides of the lower half of the forestock, ending about two-thirds of the way to the muzzle. He can't feel the real texture of the neon blue circuit lines beneath his gloves, but it looks to be smooth.

The small magazine secured, the gun automatically chambered a faintly blue-glowing, strange 5.56x78 round-- a strange round indeed, almost like a flechette. He whipped around, crouching up from his previous position, kneeling behind the steel shield and facing the enemy lines in one fluid motion. The hardened steel they salvaged was fairly intact, although the repeated hammering of high-caliber automatic rounds and even higher caliber sniper rounds certainly is doing a slow but steady job of disintegrating the front layer of his shield.

Sliding his magitech rifle onto the pivoting mount on the shield, he aimed towards the enemy's sandbags and let loose a three-round burst, remembering to set the rifle to burst mode and hold down the trigger, instead of pulling the trigger thrice, as he did a few minutes ago.

The sandbags exploded, sending up a shower of sand upon the suddenly exposed enemies. Before he could take his shot, the two were already gunned down by another man from his team.

A feeling of cold lucidity settled in, and he looked around and behind him.

On their side were two small magitech Spruce tanks, both lightly armored and each sporting an automatic 20 mm chain gun turret, a manual 40 mm autocannon, and a 100 mm main gun. The automatic turret and autocannon fire regular rounds. The autocannon fires a special, enchanted light round every fourth shot, and the main gun fires enchanted magitech-alloy shells.

There were three gatling guns on tripods. Each manned by a pair, they fire around 3000 regular 30 mm rounds per minute. Reloading every two minutes. The teams perform reloads in such a way that there will always be atleast two gatling guns active whenever one was reloading.

Even though they were holding their ground, it wasn't without casualties. Several of their men were scattered across their side, some dead, some unstoppably dying. The injured but will survive were brought to the backlines, lined up in two rows behind the tanks in front of the hastily assembled tents.

Well, they outgun their enemies, even though they're outnumbered. However, they're only trainees and recruits, with just a few... "soldiers". All of them had no actual battle experience, and so they do not fare that well against their enemy's numbers and coordination.

The emergency US-EU joint military operation codenamed "Otherworlders" certainly is making this invasion such a hassle.