Human Soldiers Are Constantly Mistaken for Demons

High Commander Hrishtac was standing over the map display looking at the red, green and purple markers scattered across the defensive formations around their war-base on this hell planet.

Over the last four days, too many of the purple, green and orange markers had changed to red, with the last orange vanishing into crimson last night. Along with all those markers, he knew that more of his troopers and mechanical assets were no longer capable of fighting in one way or another.

Way too many of them were simply dead. They were the lucky ones because they no longer had to wait in fear and terror for a whisper in the night and then pain blossoming as a ballistic weapon hits, a knife appears from the shadows or even something as simple as sticks are turned into a trap capable of killing or wounding troopers.

This assault on the small planet 2284-S34, IV, was supposed to be simple and fast. They drop on the planet, establish a war-base, then send out raiding forces to wipe out the human settlements within 183km of the base.

The plan was simple because the humans hadn’t spread out yet and were al concentrated in such a small area, thus not requiring multiple war-bases and units to accomplish their mission.

Yeah. Simple.

It started going wrong almost as soon as their ships had entered orbit. High energy readings were detected on the planet’s surface and then fast streaks of light were seen to rise out of the atmosphere and then target the destroyers and cruiser protecting the troops transports.

Whatever the weapons were they left the ships hit dead in orbit with massive holes torn completely through them. Investigations of the launch sites found nothing but melted metals and long tunnels burrowed into the mountains far from the human settlements.

By the time they had reacted to the attacks and sent dropships down to finish constructing the war-base, the humans had vanished from their settlements. Scouting units had determined that they left all their settlements within 4 hours of our ships being destroyed.

We withdr5ew back to the war-base and sent out scouting units to try and track the humans but they found nothing. No trace of the humans besides their abandoned settlements with food left out, showing they left in a hurry.

And then we lost contact with some of our scouting forces. They simply stopped reporting, and we even had one unit vanish while they were sending their report. A startled shout and then nothing.

We lost 42 troopers in a matter of 2 hours. And that was the start.

Further scouting units vanish in greater numbers.

So we sent out drones for overwatch and then we lost the drones then the troopers.

We reinforced the scouting units and they didn’t vanish but while they were wandering around looking for ghosts, the ghosts visited our war-base and killed troopers in their bunkers without anyone seeing who did it.

At this the troopers started to talk about the demons.

We called back all units and fortified the war-base even more.

It didn’t do anything but give us false hope.

Our ships were sabotaged almost as soon as the humans got to us. We can no longer leave this planet.

So here we wait, hoping for our salvation to come in the next fleet.

And while we wait the demons continue to nibble at our bones and minds.

We will hold out for the glor... [slash]