The Felsburg Army—once so confident, almost arrogantly certain of their absolute victory—was now forced to confront a bitter reality they had never anticipated. From the very beginning of the campaign, they had advanced with astounding speed, crushing fortress after fortress, driving Noirval to the edge of annihilation. Victory, they believed, was only a matter of time—a question of days, perhaps even hours.
But that confidence shattered as swiftly as a storm descending from a clear sky.
Just as they stood at the gates of Luciarde, the dragon's maw gaping before the last city still standing, a devastating blow came from the south—sudden, unanticipated. The Aberian Federation and the Portoval Confederacy, two major powers that had lingered quietly on the fringes of the war, leapt into the fray. Without warning, they declared their involvement—and more than that, they struck immediately.
The blitz struck the southern flank of Felsburg's Second Army with brutal force. Artillery fire rained down on fields that had already been secured. Enemy infantry emerged like phantoms from the morning fog. The Felsburg forces reeled. They had never prepared for a two-front war—especially not while their focus remained fixed on crushing Noirval's final resistance.
In a moment of panic, Felsburg's high command issued an emergency order. Their forces were split: the Main Army would remain in the north to continue pressing Noirval, while a significant portion of the Second Army was rerouted to the south to hold off the twin offensives from Aberia and Portoval.
But that decision—though it made sense on paper—proved to be a fatal miscalculation.
In their rushed redeployment, Felsburg's forces failed to realize they had left behind a gap—wide and exposed—stretching nearly 29 kilometers between the First and Second Armies. A rift gaping like an open wound in the body of their military formation. Worse still, it wasn't just a physical gap—it was a chasm in command and communication. Their two principal armies now moved without coordination. Supply lines unraveled. Messages went undelivered. Orders vanished into the chaos. And amid the confusion, one truth began to settle: they were no longer in control.
And across the field, Noirval saw it all—and did not stand idle.
Under immense pressure, with supply lines barely holding and troops scattered across the front, something extraordinary happened at the heart of that dying nation. Not from the war rooms. Not from military headquarters. But from the very streets of Luciarde itself.
The people of Noirval—long silent witnesses to the war ravaging their homeland—rose at last. Hundreds of taxi drivers, without orders, without formal plans, made their own decision. They parked their cars outside military barracks and shouted a phrase that had never appeared in any tactical manual:
"Get in! We'll take you to the front!"
Civilian vehicles became impromptu military transports. Elderly drivers and reckless youths alike sped down shattered roads and mine-strewn fields. They didn't care. They knew only one thing: if the troops didn't arrive in time, Noirval would vanish from the map.
And then, a miracle happened.
Reinforcements that should have taken days to arrive now reached the front lines in mere hours. And they did not come to hold the line.
They came to attack.
When Noirval's soldiers reached the breach left behind by Felsburg, they knew the moment had come. Without giving the enemy time to grasp their mistake, Noirval launched a vicious counteroffensive—precise, coordinated, and lethal. They drove straight into the heart of the enemy's disunity.
Felsburg was caught off guard. They had lost coordination, lost structure, and—worst of all—they had lost the initiative. They had arrived as attackers, but were now forced into defense without having prepared any. No bunkers, no trenches, no fallback strategies. They believed Noirval was defeated. That belief was their greatest mistake.
Noirval's assault struck the weak point like a warhammer shattering glass. Within hours, communication between the northern and southern fronts collapsed. Field commanders no longer knew who was holding or who had fallen. Messages clashed or vanished entirely. And in the fog of that chaos, fear began to creep in—slowly, like the chill of early morning mist rolling across the battlefield.
One by one, their defensive lines crumbled—not only from the force of Noirval's guns, but from the disarray within. Morale plummeted. In the looming shadow of collapse, many began to retreat—not by command, but by instinct.
What had once been a near-perfect military campaign had unraveled into complete disorder.
Disaster. Defeat. A turning point.
This was the moment that shifted the tide of war.
Felsburg was no longer the aggressor. They were the hunted. Cornered. Fractured. And standing before them were three united enemies, bound by a single purpose:
To bring down the arrogant giant.
And for the first time since the war began, Felsburg began to feel something they had never admitted before:
Fear.
* * *
Everything was in disarray. The front line—if it could even be called that anymore—had completely collapsed into chaos. It was so disastrous that Paul, for a moment, forgot he had once stood at the precipice of triumph, mere kilometers from the gates of Luciarde, the heart of Noirval. Victory had seemed inevitable, almost guaranteed.
Now, that illusion lay in ruins, trampled beneath the boots of fleeing soldiers and drowned in the noise of panicked retreat.
And it all began with a single, fatal miscalculation.
The field generals, in their arrogance and haste, had split the army without sufficient planning or caution—leaving behind a yawning gap wide enough for Noirval to drive a dagger straight through their ranks. It was a tactical oversight so glaring that even a junior officer might have raised alarm—had anyone been listening.
Yes, Aberia and Portoval had attacked from the south, and yes, their involvement had added a new dimension to the war. But even so, both Army Groups—north and south—should have maintained tight coordination. They didn't. Somewhere in the chain of command, the wires had crossed.
Generalfeldmarschall von Kurt, commanding the southern forces, had assumed the First Army would step in to reinforce the exposed corridor. Meanwhile, Generalfeldmarschall Herrmann Hahnke, leading the First Army, believed the responsibility lay with von Kurt's Second Army. Neither acted. Neither communicated.
And so, the rift widened—29 kilometers of undefended territory that split the Felsburg front like a wound, gaping and raw.
It was through this wound that Noirval struck.
The chaos that followed was not born of enemy strength alone, but of Felsburg's own negligence. They had underestimated Aberia and Portoval, believing their entry into the war to be symbolic at best. They had convinced themselves Noirval was already on its knees. And in doing so, they mirrored the very hubris they had once mocked.
Now, the hunter had become the hunted.
Paul could hardly believe it. Just days ago, they were marching in formation, morale high, watching cities fall one by one. Now, he saw soldiers—his comrades—running, scattered, lost. Orders were shouted and ignored. Maps were useless. Radios silent or sputtering with static. No one knew who was in charge anymore.
This—this would be studied. Scrutinized. Debated. The early stages of the war, once considered a brilliant campaign, would become a cautionary tale told in military academies and dusty war memoirs.
Paul imagined the historians, decades from now, poring over maps, pointing at that fatal gap between the First and Second Armies. They would speak of pride. Of overreach. Of strategic blindness. They would ask how a force so close to victory could crumble so completely.
And he would know the answer.
Because he had lived it.
"The start of this war... will be the punchline of historians in the years to come," Paul thought bitterly, his gaze fixed on the open field before him—soon to be a killing ground.
"Tom, is the defensive line ready?" Paul asked, his voice low but firm.
"Reporting in! All platoons in our unit have constructed defenses to the best of their ability, though time was painfully short!" replied Tom, his young lieutenant, his face streaked with mud and exhaustion.
"Good. We'll use whatever we've got."
Paul knew the truth: they weren't holding this position to win. They were holding it to buy time.
When the high command had finally decided to withdraw the main force to avoid being overwhelmed by the allied counteroffensive, that decision came with a terrible cost. Withdrawing under fire meant exposing one's back to the enemy—and in war, that was an open invitation to slaughter.
So a bitter solution was chosen: a rearguard unit. A force that would remain at the front line, fighting just long enough to slow the enemy's advance and ensure the main army could retreat safely.
And Paul's company—because of their proximity to the breach, and their reputation as a hardened unit—was selected for the task and merged with another companies.
They weren't given much time. In mere hours, they had to construct emergency fortifications from whatever was at hand: haphazardly stacked sandbags, hastily laid barbed wire, and foxholes barely halfway dug. Some positions were marked only by the wreckage of destroyed vehicles and crates of empty ammunition.
Paul knew their defenses were far from perfect. But perfection wasn't the goal. They weren't there to stop the enemy. They were there to slow them down.
Behind the half-finished trenches, his soldiers made their final preparations. Young faces, too exhausted to feel fear. They all knew the odds of survival were slim. But they also knew that behind them, thousands of their fellow soldiers were in retreat, trying to escape. And if they could hold the line for an hour—two, if luck was on their side—then their sacrifice would mean something.
Paul took a deep breath. The air was thick with dust and the stinging tang of gunpowder carried on the wind.
But in his eyes, there was a fire. Not the fire of hope for victory—but the fire of resolve. If they were going to fall, then they would fall with honor—standing tall, weapons in hand, giving their nation the time it needed to survive.
The sky turned red as dusk crept across the battlefield, casting the terrain in an eerie, apocalyptic glow. Thin plumes of smoke rose from burning fields in the distance, and the thud of enemy artillery began again—closer, now.
Paul stood behind the emergency line, his eyes sweeping across unfinished trenches, haphazard barricades, and tangled wire left half-deployed.
His soldiers—once buoyant with the fire of early victories—now looked hollow-eyed and weary, but their grips were tight on their rifles, their gazes sharp. They were ready to fight to the last drop of blood. They understood there would be no reinforcements. No escape routes. They were the final wall between the enemy and the retreating Felsburg army.
"First and Second Platoons, double-check the minefields. Make sure every perimeter is linked to a central detonation point," Paul ordered, his voice calm but unwavering. "Third Platoon, suppressive fire begins only on the red flag signal. Not before."
"Understood, Herr Hauptmann!" barked a sergeant.
At that moment, Tom jogged up to him with the latest report.
"The main force has moved three kilometers back. They'll need at least two full hours to reach the logistics line," he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. "We need to hold at least until the sun is fully down."
Paul gave a slow nod, then turned his eyes to the horizon—far ahead, the silhouettes of enemy movement began to emerge. The first wave of infantry was forming a thin line, crawling forward like a wound spreading across the earth.
In his heart, Paul knew their defenses wouldn't hold for long. But that wasn't their mission. Their mission was to buy time. Time for the main army to survive. Time for Felsburg to regroup—and, if fortune allowed, counterattack.
"Prepare the smoke grenades and decoy flares. Let's make them think we have more men than we actually do," he murmured, almost to himself.
A few of the younger soldiers glanced his way, their eyes anxious.
Paul drew in a deep breath, then shouted,
"Today isn't about winning or losing! Today is about those who believe we'll hold this line! If we fall here, they die back there! And I won't let that happen!"
A quiet cheer rippled through the trenches. Rifles were gripped tighter. Bayonets clicked into place. Clips slammed into bolt-action chambers.
And at the crimson edge of the battlefield, the enemy began to march.