Thunder Reforged
Copyright© 2026 by FozzieBare
Chapter 1: Moving Day
Adrian “ThunderRoad” Mercer was having a difficult time of it in his latest World of WarMachines Arena fight. He was outnumbered, outgunned, out armored, and, if he wasn’t careful, about to be outflanked.
What he refused to be was outthought or outfought.
That was the whole point.
He had deliberately configured the Arena’s settings for a two-against-one match. His opponents only had to keep one WarMAC functional to win. Adrian had to put both of theirs down.
He’d wanted a challenge. Apparently, he’d gotten one.
At the moment, his chosen WarMachine was disappearing behind a hill after dumping a barrage of minimissiles into one of his opponents.
Just like the ancient tactic it was named after, the Parthian was not built to stand and brawl. It was built around the Parthian Shot: stop just long enough to fire the chest-mounted missile racks, then get moving again before the missiles had even reached the target.
There was a not-so-technical term for Parthians that stayed in one place long enough to admire their work.
Scrap metal.
It was very difficult to win a fight like this. Adrian had to stay in motion almost constantly, but movement alone wasn’t enough. The problem was attention.
Focus too much on one opponent and the other would work its way around into his rear arc. Bad times would follow.
So most of Adrian’s maneuvering wasn’t even about getting a better firing angle. It was about making the other two get in each other’s way. Cross their targeting paths. Break line of sight. Force one WarMAC to move before the other could fire. Turn two opponents into one opponent and an inconveniently mobile piece of cover.
Six minutes into the fight, Adrian was fairly certain that even if he lost, neither pilot was going to be eager for a rematch.
What had probably looked like an easy victory when they accepted the match had turned into six straight minutes of chasing a Parthian around the Arena while barrage after barrage stripped armor from their machines.
The worst part, from their perspective, had to be that Adrian simply refused to stand still and fight.
Adrian was fairly sure he could have stretched the fight out three times as long, maybe more, if the Arena didn’t deliberately compress combat into a tighter-than-normal battlefield.
On one of Universe at War’s countless planets, he could have disengaged almost at will, broken contact, circled around, and come back to harass them again from another direction.
He wasn’t the sort to brag over Arena chat. But as the saying goes, he could do this all day. More importantly, they couldn’t make him stop.
But Adrian could only fight on the battlefield he had, not the one he wanted.
His opponents were angry now. Angry enough, he thought, that neither of them would expect something completely foolhardy. Which was good, because if they did expect it, he was probably going to become a smoking crater.
Probably. He’d gotten out of worse scrapes.
They were charging from both sides now, trying to finally box him in.
Enemy to the left. Enemy to the right. Hill behind him. Arena boundary ahead. Every useful direction was closed.
Adrian remembered the famous line attributed to French General Ferdinand Foch during the First World War.
My centre is yielding. My right is retreating. Situation excellent. I am attacking.
Adrian grinned.
Time to attack.
They had him boxed in every direction that mattered.
Except one.
Up.
He charged directly at the nearest enemy, jinking left and right just enough to spoil the aim of both the WarMAC ahead of him and the one now trying to chew into his rear armor.
He waited.
And waited.
The enemy ahead held course, clearly expecting Adrian to blink first. At the last possible moment, the other pilot veered away from the collision. Adrian slammed both foot pedals to the floor.
The Parthian’s jump boosters ignited.
It vaulted over the turning WarMAC with maybe twelve centimeters to spare. Maybe less.
Close enough that the other pilot could probably have roasted marshmallows in the exhaust plume, had the fight not been virtual.
Adrian was already twisting the Parthian before it touched down.
And grinning.
It had worked even better than Adrian expected.
The pursuing WarMAC had fired a full salvo into what had been Adrian’s exposed rear armor just before the Parthian jumped. The pilot didn’t abort in time.
Adrian cleared the WarMAC in front of him. The salvo did not.
Instead, it slammed directly into the other pilot.
WARNING: TEAMKILLING
Adrian would have pumped a fist at the message if he hadn’t already been busy adding insult to injury.
Or, in this case, injury to injury.
Finishing the landing and completing his turn, Adrian gambled.
He loosed a full flight of missiles, dropping his remaining ammunition to dangerously low levels. The range was almost too short. He could only hope the missiles had enough time to arm before they slammed into the rear of the WarMAC he had just jumped over.
They did.
Explosions walked across the enemy’s back, devouring what remained of its rear armor before moving on to feast upon all the delicate, essential bits and pieces that made up a WarMAC’s internal structure.
Adrian could have named them all. Coolant lines. Reactor components. Control systems. Actuators. At the moment, though, he was more interested in enjoying the pretty explosions. Especially when all the little explosions finally became one very large explosion.
Fire reached something critical and touched off a massive sympathetic detonation. Limbs, armor plating, structural members and other formerly useful pieces of WarMAC scattered across the ground where the machine had been standing a moment before.
As one final bit of karmic revenge, the blast even damaged the teammate who had accidentally shot it just seconds earlier.
1v2 down to 1v1, and it’s almost over, Adrian thought, before a hand landed on his shoulder.
Only the fact that the jump boosters had recently been discharged and were empty kept the Parthian from launching itself back into the air when Adrian was startled by the unexpected contact and jammed both feet back onto the pedals.
“Hey, Mac? You done yet? You said two minutes five minutes ago. Mr Hale won’t want to pay us overtime, you know!”
“Um ... okay. Thirty seconds. Then you can pack up everything.”
He really wanted to extend the fight, see if the last remaining enemy could pull a trick to get back in the battle. Two more missile salvos in rapid succession emptied out the ammo bins of the Parthian completely, but it reduced the other enemy WarMAC to scrap. He only had time to type a hurried “GG” and start the log off process, with his enemy demanding to know who the hell he was and how the hell he had pulled off that stunt.
Adrian didn’t have time to tell him to watch the VOD after the battle, the countdown to logoff had already hit single digits.
He shut down his machine and rolled back his chair. “All yours, sir,” he said to the mover.
“One of them video game nuts, huh? My son keeps asking me to get him a WarMAC figurine. Any you recommend?”
“What does he like? Big machines, fast machines?”
“Um. He’s nine. He just likes ones that look cool, ya know?”
“Then get him a WarMaster. It’s the coolest one out there.”
The mover didn’t look convinced. “Really? You sure about that?”
“It’s my personal favorite.”
“Huh. Okay. I’ll tell him that the guy I moved was a big WarMAC nut and he recommended it. What’s with this job anyway? I looked at the address where we’re taking this stuff ... it used to be an office building, right? You do work for some computer firm or something?”
Adrian grinned. “In a manner of speaking.”
Explaining that he was moving into a building being converted into a guild headquarters for the same game he had just been playing would probably require follow-up questions. Explaining that his agent wanted him to help build that guild from scratch, compete in the semi-professional Universe at War scene, and maybe eventually go further than that would require considerably more. The mover would probably just shake his head and mutter something about kids these days.
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