Side Chapter 4 – Catastrophic Miscalculations

“What do you mean, she ran away, Lydia? Weren’t the teachers watching her?” Light sternly questioned his wife over the phone. She’d just told him something terrible.

[“No! That’s not it. She didn’t run away from her teachers, Honey. From what they told me, they just started rounding up everyone over 18 with a duel disk, and sent away the rest of the tour.”]

“Wait, what tour?! Wasn’t she in school?”

Silence rained on the other side of the phone.

A brief interval elapsed before a horrendous idea occurred to Light. “YOU LET HER GO ON THE TOUR!??!?! The one to the military base? Lydia, please tell me…”

…….

[“I didn’t know, okay? I didn’t know a war was coming! How could I, Light!? You don’t tell me anything!”]

Light’s heart sank. Even with his skill at mental gymnastics, he couldn’t deny this was 100% his fault. This wouldn’t even be the first time Lydia had let their daughter go on a trip after he denied it.

[“Honey? Are you there?”] Lydia stammered out the question in a quivering voice.

Light hesitated momentarily, and murmured “… Yes… Yes, I am.”

[“Good, how are you going to get her back?”] She asked, her voice tinged with apprehension.

“Love… I don’t think you understand.” He didn’t know what else to say.

“INCOMING!” A soldier warned of an incoming shell.

*Vrrrmmm*

The shell exploded, but its shrapnel got disintegrated into the solid vision barrier surrounding the camp, with the crimson flames of the explosion surrounding the barrier and casting a bright light into the encampment, which for a moment blinded anyone not looking at the ground.

Soldiers turned to the main building of the makeshift camp. A pillar of bluish particles rising through the air, forming a 50 meter diameter sphere around it, soaking up the many shells. This was one of the camps around the front line of the Union counteroffensive in the north, a big bet by Union high command to grab Cy City back from the Protectorate while the Cy City navy still held them off at sea.

A week had passed since the war between the Zargesian Protectorate, which occupied a third of the western part of the earth’s major continent (the north-eastern territories, to be precise) and the Lotheas Union, which occupied another third, had started.

Both the Union and Protectorate have had border clashes and skirmishes before, leading up to a non-aggression pact between the two quasi-nations. An agreement that the Union would be happy to remind anyone was broken by the Protectorate.

Even in times of peace, there was conflict between the two. Yet, their ideologies couldn’t be more familiar. Both were made up of many city states that managed their populations independently, but contributed resources for large mega-structures both earth-side and in space, not to mention the combined army and shared stock-market, which inter-weaved their economies together.

Their main ideology split was government interference. The cities in the Lotheas Union believed the state shouldn’t be in control of any industry, save for ones they directly built, and that a true free market free of supervision should exist, while Protectorate and its member cities loathed the idea of letting such rampant capitalism run wild, and argued some industries needed to be public and supported by taxes from the wealthier citizens, like healthcare, education and transportation. But were also mostly capitalistic.

Citizens in both states benefited from a great deal of freedom in their own unique ways. The Protectorate held freedom of speech and demonstration as a human right, while the Lothians were just too opposed to government intervention to even consider censorship.

Now, these two ideologies clashed in an open conflict of a scale not seen in centuries, the after effects already being felt by the populace in shortages and recruitment. The latter just in Union cities, as the Protectorate didn’t have conscription of any kind, even for duelists.

Back on the battlefield, shells soared above the Union encampment while the solid vision barrier stopped direct damage. Energy was required to keep it up, joined by a capable duelist who could defend the barrier against solid vision attacks by other duelists.

There was close to nothing a normal combatant could do against a duelist. Any solid vision barrier would absorb any kinetic or thermal energy of conventional weaponry. On the contrary, the barrier would use the energy to recharge the power storage on the disk, which worked as the only limitation for this technology.

Duel disks used a lot of power, and outside of a wireless grid, keeping a single solid vision monster up would use the battery on a standard military issue duel disk in barely half an hour or five minutes in case of five monsters and some spells or traps. And military duel disks focused on having large batteries.

But there was a catch. Barriers could only soak up so much energy in a short time frame before their energy conversion subsystem became saturated. Using a projected external conversion system could free up some of the strain, but ultimately, the space needed for the contraption and heat dissipated would start becoming a limitation. It was a death spiral.

Speaking of deathspiral, the squad holding this side of the camp was about to go into one.

“I can’t hold this much longer! It’s going to break!” shouted a duelist currently attached to this squad. She had platinum blond white hair and was shorter than the other soldiers, also wearing a simple jumpsuit that lacked any of the body armor and camouflage of the rest of the squad.

The primary squad lead rebutted. “What you can do doesn’t matter here, private! This barrier has to hold!” being a Sargent relying on a private fresh out of duelist basic greatly hurt his pride, but there was a shortage of willing duelists in the Union and he counted himself lucky not having a conscript to wrangle.

The duelist ground her teeth and pressed a button on the interface in front of her. “Yes, sir! It’s going to get hot!”

Clacking and grinding metallic sounds reverberated around the barrier. The meter wide sphere in the center of the force-field opened, revealing a white hot metallic interior. Molten metal formed into a tall tower and fanned into multiple wide blades before solidifying. The tower started spinning when the blades became just red hot, dissipating the heat into the surrounding space.

A wave of heat assaulted the soldiers inside the barrier, which remained isolated from the outside save for minimal and controlled exchanges to keep it as stealthy as possible.

From above, no soldier could be seen below. In fact, this entire battlefield looked barren. Visual camouflage was easy for solid vision, thermal imaging was the problem.

As the heat dissipated, things looked to be getting better, save for the sweating soldiers being exposed to almost 40 degree temperatures.

*SWIIIIII*

Another shell wised by the barrier and exploded close to the encampment.

*SWIIIIII* *BZZZZZZZZZZZZ*

Yet another shell, but this one a direct hit.

The duelist palled in horror as she saw the shell embedding itself into the barrier instead of exploding. “It’s a saturator! Sir, we’ll overheat if I keep this up!”

With a light green hue, the shell spun faster and faster, forcing the barrier to absorb its energy. Consequently, the fan like apparatus inside the barrier glimmered bright red, dissipating the energy into the surrounding space.

The soldiers inside the barrier started falling one by one, overwhelmed by the intense temperature that now exceeded 50 degrees.

Overwhelmed by the heat, the Sargent ordered. “We’re moving back! OPEN UP ON MY SIGNAL!”

“YES, SIR!” the white-haired duelist acknowledged.

Every soldier who remained conscious moved to the other side of the barrier, anxiously tip-toeing around the white-hot energy converter in the middle.

When everyone was ready to evacuate, the squad lead gave the signal. “GO! GO! GO!”

Also running away from the center, the duelist pressed a button which set off an intense series of events.

The blue barrier shrunk to surround just the apparatus, which also started shrinking in size, getting hotter and hotter each centimeter that disappeared from the fan above it. Concentrating into a dense ball of white hot metal.

The saturator shell finally stopped spinning and embedded itself into the ground. Completing its mission of taking the barrier down.

Finally, the remaining barrier around the white-hot ball opened up at the top, shooting a spire of molten metal off into the sky to be seen by any thermal surveillance satellite. Union or Protectorate.

With the energy dissipating into the environment, the duelist finally could turn off her duel disk. If she had done that before, all this energy would’ve fed back into the projector, turning it into molten slurry. What would’ve happened to her? Well, it’s best not to think about it.

These were the type of energies at play when a duelist was involved.

The squad dispersed, running towards the backup line a kilometers back.

“Well, Pvt. Haswell. That was a shitshow.” Commented the squad lead, staying close to the duelist with a now disabled duel disk.

“Yes It was sir.” She acknowledged it.

Union High command would soon realize this push might’ve been too enthusiastic as brigade after brigade retreated from the front lines.

This push had cost the Union a division’s worth of personnel and equipment, with only useless flatland's to show for it. Undefendable positions in the long term.

“We have seriously underestimated the Protectorate’s capabilities.” Observed General Chacon, currently responsible for the Northen Union Offensive Army Group. He looked over a holographic map, already having ordered the cancellation of the offensive, and a general retreat to more defensible positions, giving back all the ground that tens of thousands of Union soldiers had given their lives for.

“It seems a shortage of capable duelists remains our weak point, Dragoon City duelist conscripts and some Kova Elite SV Infantry make up most of our capable offensive force. Most Trained SV soldiers from cities are being used up in logistics.” One of the many advisors close to the general commented.

“The Dragoon City academies are refusing to cooperate. They cite lack of training and resource exhaustion with the ‘Blind Rat’ Counter-Intelligence campaign. No ETA yet on when they’ll send elite reinforcements.”

“We have five-hundred thousand Duel Disks ready and no personnel to take them. How come the Protectorate isn’t having this problem? From front line reports, they attach a duelist to every squad while we’re here struggling to get 2 to each platoon.”

Hearing the last advisor’s figure’s General Chacon couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow. “How many duels did SV forces report?”

The men surrounding the desk raced to find this answer, with a medium-framed woman with a black ponytail being the first one to respond. “788 duels, Sir… And only 38 defeats... Strange…”

Now that was damming.

So damming in fact that the other advisors immediately tried to correct her, yet their displays also showed the same figures.

When General Chacon heard this, he couldn’t help frown. “Then why did this retreat happen? You all saw the same figures I did.”

It was then that one advisor theorized. “Are they sending common soldiers equipped with duel disks?”

This strategy was bonkers, it would only work if the other side was being conservative with their trained SV forces… Like the Union was because of their lack of recruits.

No more words were exchanged between the men and women around the table, yet everyone knew at that exact moment what had foiled this operation. It was a critical mistake which cost them tens of thousands of similar men and women and millions of @’s in equipment.

General Chacon muttered a single sentence in a heavy tone of voice. “Gather every duelist we can. I don’t care from where! Just get them… This MISTAKE will not be repeated.”

Following those words, the General walked out of the room. He was about to deliver a report which might cost him his career.