Chapter 4: “Gorilla” Warfare, Part One

The first wave of the Crusade concentrated its forces on two worlds.

The first barely had any defenders.

A battalion of Blades forces went thundering across the planet looking for people to shoot.

They mostly came up dry.

Here and there they found scouts or some kind of light WarMAC chassis, but even those did little more than confirm contact with a hostile force before either rapidly disengaging or rapidly dying.

The second planet, Tarkin’s Roost, was a slightly different kettle of fish.

Having heard what happened on the first world, the <TenMillionBlades> forces decided to mass a company at their landing zone, then send it out in a rapid spiral search pattern.

The logic was sound.

Any Reforged scouts who weren’t expecting the contact would have to run directly away from the advancing force. If they tried to circle around, sooner or later they would run into another Blade element.

Reforged, however, knew exactly where the Blades were.

And they had decided to welcome them to Reforged space with a tactic they called the Reforged Howdy-Doo.

Three artillery WarMACs waited until it looked like as much of the Blade force as possible had entered the preselected splash zone.

Then they fired full salvos.

Unlike the Maximum Boom artillery saturation Reforged had used previously, this wasn’t enough firepower to turn the entire area into an explosive hellscape.

It didn’t need to be.

Two WarMACs were destroyed outright.

Four more took damage.

That was the Howdy.

The Blades immediately went after the artillery units.

They were almost in range of the fleeing WarMACs when two more Reforged artillery machines opened fire from another position.

The second barrage was unsighted and largely unaimed. It destroyed only one WarMAC and badly damaged two more.

Only.

That was the Doo.

The Blade commander broke off pursuit.

It was the right decision.

For all they knew, Reforged had another artillery position waiting beyond that one, and another beyond that. They had no intention of spending the afternoon stumbling through prepared ambushes while chasing artillery across unfamiliar terrain.

Those Reforged sons of bitches were tricky.

Better to break contact.

Get back to the landing zone.

Establish a perimeter.

Bring everyone down.

Then start hunting.

The hunting turned out to be rather sparse.

But morale was quickly returning to the Blades.

Despite the losses, the landings had confirmed their biases.

Reforged had taken its shot at the former homeworlds and hoped it would be enough to make the Blades turn back to recover what they had lost.

Now that the Crusade had actually arrived?

Reforged wasn’t going to fight.

They were exactly what leadership had said they were.

Spineless little pussies.

The Blades didn’t even care that the mines and factories had been cleaned out just before the landings, almost as if Reforged had known exactly when they were scheduled to arrive.

Soon enough, those mines and factories would be producing again.

Feeding the Blades. Replacing what they had lost.

They finally had the initiative again.

And this time, they were going to keep it.

Give them a day or two to fill their supply ships with raw materials, establish a proper supply chain, and move on.

Sooner or later, Reforged had to fight somewhere.

They slept well that night, dreaming the dreams of mighty conquerors.

But when they woke up, most of it had slipped through their fingers like sand through an hourglass.

In the strange dead hours of the night, the hours inhabited mostly by the terminally online and the circadian-challenged, Reforged had taken back roughly three-quarters of the Blades’ conquests.

Platoons had appeared from God knew where, fanned out across the map, and overwhelmed the scattered night owls still setting up bases and logistics for the occupation.

When the Blades came back online, cursing loudly about what the fuck was going on and how the fuck Reforged had pulled this off, they recaptured most of the bases within hours.

At every site, they found the same virtual note attached to the property.

One of the game’s standard icons.

A gorilla.

Beneath it: