Austronesia Empire, Imperial Majapahit, New Guinea, Alpha Wall
1st Year of God, Saturday, 3rd Week, 3rd Month of Abraham
Eurylochus dozed off with his head resting against his helmet, slouched in the corner of the bunker walls. He was having a good dream about having a buffet feast, gorging himself with the free flow crustaceans and shellfish, drinking wine and champagne.
"Lance Corporal Eurylochus!" A voice cut through the haze of his dream, yanking him back to reality. He jolted awake, instinctively grabbing his AF-1 Magic Rifle with a sharp gaze.
"What?" He squinted at the dark figure crouched beside him. "Damn, I was just about to get into that lobster." he groaned as he wiped the drool from his chin.
"Huh?" The soldier blinked at him, clearly confused.
"Never mind," Eurylochus grunted, stretching his stiff limbs. "What's going on?"
"We heard something coming from the slopes," the soldier whispered urgently. "Shhh, there it is again!"
Eurylochus pressed his ear against the firing slit and listened hard, but he couldn't really hear anything. He looked at the intent of his fellow recruit soldier, and wondered if he has an elf ear as their ears can hear at a higher frequency than humans. "I got nothing, can't see or hear shit."
"Shhh!" the recruit insisted, pointing into the inky darkness. "There! Sounds like... like scratching. Lots of hands, scratching."
Eurylochus focused harder, finally picking up a faint scraping sound, like rocks tumbling across the slope.
"Hold on." He activated his comms. "Thunderchief, this is Apache Three. Do you copy over?"
[Thunderchief, send.]
"Possible night probe at our location. Standby, over."
[Roger, standby.]
Eurylochus turned back to the outside view, "Eh, think we better close our eyes first," And just as he said that two stabbing beams of white light cut through the darkness, illuminating the terrain in front of the wall.
"Ow." Eurylochus flinched as the bright lights killed his night vision.
"OH MY GOD!" The soldier beside him gasped in terror.
Eurylochus blinked hard, trying to clear his vision, and then he saw them, shadows slithering up the slopes, limbs contorted in unnatural angles. Some of them clung to the near-vertical cliffs with skeletal fingers.
"Fuck me," he muttered. "What the hell are those?"
"Fucking zombies!" The soldier shouted, his eyes looked unnaturally large in the reflected light as he watched the figures claw their way forward.
The spotlights swept downward, flooding the ground in front of the wall with harsh white light, revealing more crawling shambling figures with disjointed broken bodies, missing limbs, and exposed bones.
And soon after, a loud and shrill whistle cut through the air.
"Contact!" Eurylochus finally shouted, snapping out of his daze. He keyed his comms and yelled into the radio, "Wake the hell up, everyone! We are now in Zombie Mode of this bullshit!"
Shoving his AF-1 Magelock rifle through the firing slit, he leveled the scope on a moving corpse and took a breath.
"Remember. Go for headshots!"
A distant whistle pierced the early morning air, followed by the sharp crackle of red tracer rounds streaming from Magic Guns along the defensive lines as the soldiers prepared to defend against the new threat while their eyes trained on the creeping shadows ahead, as the night wind whisked away the smoke from their weapons, clearing the field for rapid fire.
Eurylochus fired his customized Magic Rifle as fast and accurately as best as he could, feeling the familiar kick of the recoil slamming into his bruised shoulder. Despite that, he couldn't help but find a twisted enjoyment in the rhythm of it, the snap of the trigger, the hammering thud against his body.
His rifle, outfitted with a 2x magnified red dot sight he'd personally installed and built into the frame of his gun, allowed him to pick off the undead with ease. He lined up the red dot on the chin of a slow walking rotting corpse and squeezed the trigger, feeling the recoil hammering against his shoulder.
His bullet blasted through the upper jaw of the dead Orc, shattering teeth and bone, before blowing out the upper spinal cervical, dropping the Orc like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
"Headshot!" he muttered with a grim satisfaction rising in his chest.
"Aim for the heads!" Eurylochus shouted to the other soldiers as he noticed their scattered, ineffective fire. "Come on, you're the Liberation Army! You can shoot better than that!" He punctuated his words with another headshot, dropping a zombie cleanly. "They're practically as slow as your grandma! How can you miss it?!"
At this point, more spotlights had lit up, turning the battlefield as bright as day. The undead appeared in many kinds, from fresh Orc corpses to rattling skeletons. Even dead animals could be seen in the mix. The fresher corpses moved faster as their decaying muscles seemed to still hold some strength while the older rotted skeleton ones moved slower, and a bullet in the head ended all life regardless if it was living or dead.
"How many are there?!" someone shouted over the din.
Despite the jerky, lumbering movement of the undead, the defenders were not killing them fast enough. Normally, a bullet wound would incapacitate anyone and stop them dead in their tracks, maybe not an Orc, but close. These creatures, however, shrugged off anything that didn't obliterate their brains as they dragged themselves forward in their determined relentless approach to the walls.
Eurylochus fired again, cursing under his breath as the undead continued to swarm. "Damn it, there's too many. Focus on the heads, or they might climb each other up like that one scene in the World War Zombie book!"
But to his relief, when the undead hit the walls, they found no way to enter nor climb. The concrete walls were angled 25 degrees outwards with the tops of the walls rounded and lined with barbed wire, making it impossible for their rotting fingers and bony hands to find any purchase on the smooth surface.
Frustrated, they hammered their rotting fists and bony hands against the armored cargo doors in a vain effort to break the gate. Those still with functioning vocal cords growled and moaned, while the skeletons rattled their loose jaws.
The defenders could hear the clamor, but none of it threatened to breach the fortress.
[Thunderchief to all units, cease fire! Cease fire!] The command crackled over the comms.
"Cease fire! Cease fire!" Eurylochus relayed, and the soldiers, grateful for the break, stopped shooting.
They rubbed their bruised shoulders and checked their magazines, most of them running low after days of near-constant engagements. The smarter ones had already padded their rifle butts with scraps of cloth or hide to lessen the impact from the recoil, but even that hadn't stopped the deep blue-black bruises blooming across their shoulders from the impacts of the constant firing.
"What now, Corporal?" one of the men asked, eyeing the growing horde at the base of the walls.
Eurylochus took off his helmet and scratched at the soot on his face. "No point wasting ammo on those things since they can't get in." He leaned over the firing slit and watched the mass of undead below as their arms reached upwards in vain. He spat down, muttering, "Headshot."
Suddenly, he held up a hand, silencing the men as a new message came through his comms.
"Wait…" His expression shifted, and a grin crept across his face. "Oooh, this is gonna be fun."
He turned to his squad. "Alright, everyone, go to your pouch and pull out a bullet with a red tip. We're switching to Fire Magic Rounds."
The men exchanged glances, then shrugged as they dug through their gear, each pulling out the specially marked ammunition and loading it into their Magic Rifles.
Moments later, a series of fiery explosions ripped through the writhing mass of undead, setting them ablaze. One by one, the Fire Magic bullets detonated, igniting the horde and turning them into smoldering piles of ash.
"Damn," Eurylochus muttered with a satisfied grin, "I do love magi-tech."
The fire spread quickly as the magical flames ruthlessly tore through the undead. In minutes, the majority of the horde was nothing more than burnt remains, while the few still intact turned and fled back into the night, retreating from the inferno.
Eurylochus surveyed the carnage below, slinging his rifle over his shoulder with a sigh of relief.
"That's how you deal with zombies. Now, who's up for some breakfast?"
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"Well, that was new and unexpected," Master Sergeant Dice puffed out his cheeks, shaking his head slightly. "I totally wasn't expecting that."
"Me neither," Lieutenant Colonel Ciaphas Cahyono replied with a mix of fatigue and disbelief in his tone.
Both men stood next to the tactical table, while their eyes fixed on the displays in the command center, where the screens showed the aftermath of the fiery onslaught outside.
"Damn, are they really undead? Like, actual zombies and skeletons?" Dice asked, still trying to wrap his head around the sight of the mass of charred bodies.
"Every time my brain adjusts to the shit this planet has, it throws me another curveball," Ciaphas sighed heavily. "Honestly, I'd love to have someone like Odysseus here to consult on all this... voodoo and occult shit."
"Same," Dice nodded, exhaling as if that thought somehow soothed the absurdity. "This whole place definitely is straight out of some fantasy game. And yeah, we definitely need Odysseus' expertise."
"Good idea," Ciaphas turned to one of the communications operators stationed nearby. "Get Odysseus on the line and bring him here ASAP. We need someone who knows what we're dealing with."
The operator immediately set to work, patching the request through. Dice, meanwhile, leaned over another operator's shoulder.
"Should we call the Elf Queen for some insight on this?" he asked.
Cahyono shook his head. "Nope. We're already leaning way too much on outside help, even literal Gods bailing us out. We humans can still handle this, and we should."
Dice gave a grunt of agreement and turned back to the screen. "Fair enough. How's the new task force holding up?"
"Looking good from the screens," Ciaphas responded as he focused on a feed from the Wall's frontline. "The undead are getting nice and crispy. Good work with those Fire Magic rounds."
"And the rest are retreating." Dice pointed at the few undead staggering away from the light of the spotlights. "It's almost like they're being controlled. Whoever, or whatever, is behind this, they're pulling the strings."
"Or something," Ciaphas muttered, narrowing his eyes. "What's that thing called? Negi-something?"
"A necromancer, sir," one of the operators chimed in, not missing a beat. "That's what you're thinking of."
"Yeah, that's it," Pice snapped his fingers. "A necromancer. Read about that in one of those lore books the government's been forcing everyone in the country to read. Something called Dragons and Dungeons? Apparently, it's part of the new curriculum now in schools."
"Hmmm, if there is a necromancer, as you say, this could turn into a serious problem," Cahyono muttered with a frown as he leaned over the map spread across the table. "Look here, this is the place where we occupied."
He pointed to several places such as populated cities, military bases, and defensive outposts.
"And here's where we estimate the enemy is concentrated."
His finger traced a path to a marked area in the rugged mountain ranges of New Guinea.
"The New Guinea Highlands. Historically, it's the same area where the Australians, Americans, and local forces fought against the Imperial Japanese during World War II. The New Guinea Highland Campaign."
Dice nodded, watching Cahyono's finger trace the route. "So you're saying they've reanimated old corpses, possibly even from the campaign?"
Cahyono crossed his arms with a serious expression. "That's exactly what I'm thinking. I don't know how they are reanimating their dead, but if they're pulling corpses from that far back, along with their own recent dead, then we've got a massive problem. This means they can reanimate the dead from any time frame. Every casualty in this area, from years or even centuries ago, could potentially join their army, which the numbers will favor them greatly. And those we've just shot down today? They'll be back at our walls by nightfall."
"Look at this," Dice interrupted, nodding toward Screen Six. The display showed a clearly dead carcass of some sort of Tree-Kangaroo creature, who is half rotten with its eyes missing but body moving. "They're not just raising humans and Orcs. They're bringing back animals too."
"Oh fuck," Cahyono cursed under his breath. "This is going to be like the Battle of Aceh during the New Year Tragedy. Wait, what about the dead Orcs we already shot?"
Dice waved a hand, reminding him, "We retrieved most of the bodies, remember? Beheaded them just to make sure they weren't playing possum. Beheading seems to stop the reanimation process. But yeah, the eggheads are going to have a field day when they see all those headless bodies."
Cahyono chuckled darkly, rubbing his temple. "Good call. Seems like the trick is either destroying the head or burning them completely. Flamethrowers, napalm, whatever we've got that can reduce them to ashes. The key is making sure they can't come back."
"Problem is," Dice added, "We're fighting an endless army. New Guinea's jungles are full of forgotten deceased bodies of soldiers hidden in the jungles ready to raise to the living. The necromancer, or whoever's behind this, has an almost limitless supply of soldiers. We'll need to use the new task force to focus on the undead. No point in wasting regular ammunition."
"Exactly. Fortunately, we've got over nine hundred thousand rounds of Magic Rifle ammo in storage." Dice said as he checked off their supplies. "That should be enough to cover our defenses for a while."
"Good." Cahyono nodded as he went deep in thought. "Stick to the daily rotations. Let the relief team take over in the morning and make sure they're briefed on this undead threat. And once the undead start clustering, we'll have Omega-191 drop the hammer on them. Why waste ammo on the minions when we can save it for the main boss?"
Dice grinned. "Agreed. We'll get the post-combat recovery teams to behead and burn all corpses, starting now. No more risks."
"And we'll need Odysseus to figure out how to stop this reanimation magic," Cahyono added, turning toward the operator handling the comms. "Contact him as soon as possible. We can't afford to keep shooting our way through wave after wave."
"One more thing," Dice leaned in as his voice lowered slightly. "Whose magic do you think this is? The d
Demons or the Orcs?"