Breaking Blades
Copyright© 2026 by FozzieBare
Chapter 10: Blades. Broken
Darren woke up the next morning with a headache the size of an Ultra-weight class WarMAC and no new answers. Sprawled out in his bed, he stared at the ceiling with his eyes open as little as possible.
He made a decision.
We have to hold. Play for time. Hope they get overaggressive. Get enough of a victory that he can at least get them out with something positive from it. Find a place to rebuild. Then maybe he’d hand over the guild to someone. Who? Dunno. Don’t care. They’re not good enough to run something like the Blades. It was perhaps hubris to say that only Darren could run the Blades, but on top of the bed sheets, he couldn’t pretend that most of his potential candidates would probably be worse than he had been.
He snorted.
Well, at least there was that for his pride.
But he had to ask the Blades for one more fight. Something for them to be proud of. He forced himself not to get up and check the guild roster in game. Mostly because he didn’t want to move for at least another two and a half hours.
But he thought that if he saw how many names were missing, he wouldn’t be able to go any further.
He snorted.
“All the righteous Crusade and its great leader.”
Then he winced again.
Christ, the lights were bright.
Three hours later, he felt vaguely human-ish enough to sit at the computer and start typing.
His primary thoughts were, “They need something, but no bombast, and no bullshit. I’ll probably be told to go to hell, but I have to try.”
His fingers paused over the keys.
“Alright. Time to be real with everyone. It’s obvious that this hasn’t gone well for anyone involved. There’ll be no recriminations. No yelling. No saying ‘He’s to blame,’ or ‘you’re to blame,’ or ‘I’m to blame.’ I think you guys know the status of the Blades mentally, due to recent events. We’re on the verge of falling apart. Of losing the entirety of what we’ve built over years.
We need to hold on Galensview. Even after all this, I think we’re better pilots than they are. We hold. Nothing fancy. No moralist talk about how the Crusade demands a victory.
But we hold. We can’t do anything else for the moment. We leave, we might as well sign our guild’s death warrant right then and there, because other guilds will see easy prey wherever we go. It’s what we’d do.
So ... we hold. One more fight. One more chance to prove why we were a top guild. One more chance to show Kelto they were right to invite us to the Showdown.
I may or may not have the right to ask this of you. But that’s what the Blades need right now. One. More. Fight.
A chance to show everyone that the Blades are still what we said we were...
Please give leadership that one more fight. Afterwards, we’ll talk with the guild about what our plans are for after all this.
He sipped at the Gatorade.
“One more fight,” he said to himself.
Then he realized he was almost sorry he’d thrown away the empty Jack Daniels bottle.
Staring at it would probably feel better than this.
Darren would have sunk even further into despair if he knew Reforged was reading his message less than half an hour after he sent it.
Morale in TenMillionBlades was that bad.
Members of the Blades found a way to get it to their mortal enemies. They were telling their enemies exactly where they intended to stand and what they intended to do.
Elias looked at Amy and Adrian. “He’s gotta be planning something. This is ... This is not the maniac we’ve been dealing with all campaign.”
Adrian shut that down. “Elias, I think this is him realizing he can no longer get high off his own supply. We’ve broken them. Broken him. Maybe we should go to Black Hold next, give them...”
Amy interrupted. “No. We go to Galensview. This needs to end, guys. This is not Angry Amy speaking.”
She considered that for a moment.
“Well, mostly not Angry Amy. But even if Darren goes away, the Blades are still a problem if they hang around. Any new leader will look at us and maybe think, ‘I can do what the idiot couldn’t.’ We’ll be dealing with that for months. I’m tired of this. You’re tired of this.”
“We break them. Deliberately. We find their biggest remaining force and we break it. After that, anything left is cleanup.”
She looked at Darren’s message again.
“If somebody else takes over the Blades later, I don’t want them thinking they can restart this because Darren was the problem and they’ll do better. Galensview ends that idea too.”
She walked out of the room. She hoped they hadn’t noticed her fists were clenched.
Amy thought about what she said. It was right. But she wasn’t a saint. She wanted to reject the vulgarities the Blades had sent through this whole thing even before Darren’s threat. She wanted a clean answer. An in-game version of “No one thinks they can say something like that and not face consequences.”
She then sighed and went to sit at the table. Drink a coffee.
And hope like hell that by beating that arrogant, sexist asshole into the ground, she could quiet the part of her that wanted to gloat. Wanted to exult in how thoroughly they had been destroyed.
She sighed again.
Get them away from us ... from me. It’s not good for our sanity.
And I don’t mean in our usual fun-loving chaos-goblin Kevin kind of way.
Ask Adrian for some fun arena time after all this. I need to fight someone who doesn’t consider my existence in general and in game as a moral offense. I need to compete against someone for fun. For nothing more than bragging rights or who pays for the next convenience store run. I need that right now.
So, without any further grand speeches or promises of Crusades or vengeance, the time came for the Reforged task force to land on Galensview. They didn’t start immediately looking for the Blades. They instead formed up. Platoon after platoon. Company after company. They didn’t broadcast threats or promises of the devastation to come. They didn’t need to.
On the other side, the Blades logged on, formed up at their bases, and saw that Reforged wasn’t going to attack piecemeal but instead put together an enormous hammer, and formed one big bloc of their own.
A couple of the Blades argued with Hugo and Trav about whether they should form a flanking force. Wait till Reforged hit, then roll up on their side.
Hugo considered the idea. Then he shook his head. With the numbers that Reforged was bringing, by the time they could hit a flank, the main line could be broken. Hugo also thought, but didn’t quite say, that the two platoons who proposed the idea were looking more to NOT take part in the main clash and to run away without taking damage when, no, IF, he corrected himself, Reforged broke the lines.
Trav just told the folks who suggested it to get back in line. “We’re going to hold the line, and that’s it.”
Amy took the lead. Adrian, Elias and Abigail formed the first row behind her. The various platoons fanned out further left and right. By the time all platoons had assumed their proper formation in a giant arrowhead pointed directly at the Blades, they were only a klick or two away. They waited until they were just outside visual range and stopped for one brief moment.
On a hilltop nearly four kilometers away sat one Blades machine. His presence there wasn’t tactical. It wasn’t even strategic. It was because the man piloting it didn’t want to participate in the battle. Darren knew it would have been unbelievable to the person he was before this whole thing started, but it was better if he wasn’t in the lines at all. It would actually be a detriment to his guild’s morale.
Darren, Hugo and Trav had discussed it. They tactfully agreed that Darren might enrage Reforged enough to come hunt him, and that might have been useful. But no, for once, it probably would not be to the Blades’ benefit to know that their leader was amongst them.
Darren had figured the whole thing out. Hugo and Trav were fighting over the top spot when he left the Blades, be it after temporary victory or final defeat. They were treating this battle as their command audition. They were being proto-Darrens because they needed someone to lead after this ended, and hell, why not them?
So why was Darren online at all?
Mostly because he figured he needed to be there at the end of the “Crusade.” No matter what, this battle would probably be the last one. This was solely to determine if the Blades could claim anything from their incursion in Reforged Space. A win would leave them enough salvage and perhaps enough material to make starting fresh somewhere else a little less of a pain. A loss?
Well. There wouldn’t be much to worry about at that point, would there be?
Amy felt her fingers tighten. She just wanted to see the enemy. She tabbed around all the various Blades MACs, hoping to find some hidden fact that would point out whether the Blades guild leader had shown up. If there was, she failed to find it. She figured that while it was a game, it would be a little too on the nose to have her MAC’s targeting system point out a target and say, “Sexist asshole found. Permission to annihilate? Y/N?”
She figured she had to say something.
Not something grand.
That wasn’t her style.
This didn’t call for that anyway. She had said it properly beforehand. This wasn’t a grand battle. It was taking an annoying guest, throwing them out the door, hopefully watching them bounce once or twice before landing in a heap, and then making sure they never darkened your doorstep again. Pest control.
She instead toggled her mic and spoke for all Reforged to hear.
“Ok, folks. You know the rules here. Blades in front of us? We destroy. Blades running? Don’t chase. Take them out if you can, but let them run until they either leave or turn around and fight, at which point we take them down again. Those who drop the Blades tag? Who move toward the shuttles to get them off our planets? Watch, but don’t attack.
They want us angry. We’re angry. They also want us sloppy. Don’t give them that. Remember the plan, and even if for some god-forsaken reason we go down, stick to the plan.”
She licked her lips. Not in a predatory way, but more of a “Christ, my lips are dry with stress” manner.
“And most importantly, Reforged?”
She smiled.
“Try to keep up with me. If you can.”
She took a few steps forward slowly, waited until everyone behind her had started on the same rhythm, then set a comfortable speed she knew even the heavier units in the arrowhead could keep up.
“Let’s do this.”
Hugo rolled his eyes a bit. This proved the girl was commanding. Mercer probably would have thirteen different stratagems, make them believe five impossible things, and then somehow magically summon a company of WarMACs in their backline. He smiled, a low, bitter smile. “She thinks she’s a blacksmith, just like their damn logo. She can’t even lift the damned hammer. Time to teach her the Anvil can hit back.”
Trav didn’t like it. He thought that if Williamson was commanding, she’d be angry, aggressive, pell-mell, hell bent for leather, and may the devil take the hindmost. This was taking your most powerful fist, balling it up, and trying to punch your way through. One big knockout shot. He started going back over the mental backup plans he had made ever since this battle became unavoidable.
He didn’t even think about the fact that his WarMAC turned towards the hilltop where Darren was watching. It was an involuntary twitch of the fingers, that’s all.
Darren saw Trav’s video screen change slightly. He snorted.
That was the OTHER reason I agreed to stay this far away, Trav, you fucking twerp. Too much risk you’d drop the guild tag, then blast me in the back without even giving me a chance to say, “Et tu, Trav?” Then one of his guild allies would immediately bring him back in and start proclaiming him the new guild leader, like he was fucking Caesar or something.
Then he looked at the sensor feed he had received.
No one’s breaking yet. Good.
Still shows the Blades have good steel. Even after ... everything ... they’re not running until the fight goes against them.
He hoped it was enough.
He knew it probably wouldn’t.
It only took him about a minute after combat began to confirm that fact.
The Blades held, at least to start. But their enemies had momentum. Numbers, and morale on their side.
They ruthlessly exploited all three.
Reforged had set up some guidelines for this attack. Instead of breaking down into a wild melee or a series of “heroic” one-on-one duels, they used a tactic of maximum force and impact. Platoon leaders called out a target for their platoon. The platoon would focus fire on it. Sure, they might take some damage from the target’s opportunistic allies, but they never let them get into their vulnerable rear arc. Six MACs focusing on one did not end well for the one. Then, instead of celebration, the platoon leader would call out their next victim. Rinse and repeat.
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