Thea focused hard on analysing the behaviour of the mass of enemies in her scope over the next few minutes, trying to pick out traits that might be common among the duplicates.
Pressure kept building as time passed.
Every second she spent watching instead of shooting made her itch to drop the idea entirely and go back to thinning out the enemies rushing up the hill.
Even so, she managed to stay mostly level-headed.
The rational part of her mind told her she wouldn’t be doing much good by firing blindly.
Compared to most of the other UHF Marines around her, her weapon simply wasn’t meant for mowing down crowds. It was a designated marksman rifle for a reason.
Accuracy mattered more than fire rate or area denial.
‘If I could duplicate myself… where would I be? What would I do here…?’ she thought, trying to map her own instincts onto the enemy.
Her scope drifted across the mass of soldiers, who were starting to look less and less like individual people and more like a moving horde.
The Stellar Republic’s advance had stalled after breaching the first trench line.
They were struggling to gain ground between the first and second trenches, unable to just run over each other anymore.
Stuck inside the captured trench, they had to climb out before pushing forward.
Whenever someone died on the trench wall, it blocked the way for those behind them.
Bodies began piling up in and around the trenches, with more being dragged in by duplicates every second.
It looked like they were trying to fill the trench completely, building a crude and horrifying bridge from the flat ground in front to the hill behind it.
The duplicates weren’t just dumping corpses at random either, Thea noticed quickly.
They were placing them carefully, reinforcing the “structure” piece by piece.
Watching that level of care being applied, Thea realised something else.
‘Whoever is controlling these duplicates has to be pouring an insane amount of focus into it, aren’t they…? There’s no shot that all of this could be done with a simple set-and-forget command like you’d give to a drone, right?’
She didn’t know what commanding duplicates actually involved of course, but she was fairly sure it didn’t rely on normal avenues of communication. She’d been watching the enemy for a while now and hadn’t seen a single comms unit in use.
Working off that assumption, she shifted her focus and started looking for soldiers who didn’t seem to be doing anything useful.
It didn’t take long.
In her sights was a small group of soldiers who looked identical to the ones building the corpse bridge.
The difference however, was in their behaviour.
They were pacing around near the back, glancing up and down the trench line further downhill, roughly eighty metres away from where the rest were working.
They weren’t helping. They weren’t even looking at the bridge.
She watched them a little longer, letting the pattern settle.
The longer she observed, the more certain she became that something about them was distinctly off.
Four of them clearly stood out.
The remaining three were even stranger, wandering downright aimlessly without paying attention to the trenches at all.
She didn’t yet know what their role was—but she knew she’d spent enough time on this.
She lined up on the first group of four.
With ruthless speed and precision, she dropped all four in under two seconds.
If they’d realised what was happening, they didn’t have time to react.
She zoomed out to widen her view of the battlefield—and felt a surge of triumph.
More than three dozen soldiers near the corpse bridge collapsed where they stood, dropping lifelessly to the ground.
She’d hit the originals.
“Yes! Finally, some fucking progress,” she muttered, already sweeping her scope across the field for the next targets.
This time, it wasn’t as easy.
Without an obvious task group to compare against, finding the next set of originals was going to take far more careful observation.
She was forced to slow down and carefully watch each squad, looking for the odd one out wherever she could.
About a minute of focused searching later, she found her next target.
‘There!’
Behind a group of enemy soldiers trading fire with the UHF lines near the second trench—taking cover behind a heap of bodies—stood a lone soldier who hadn’t fired a single shot in quite a while.
The Stellar Republic woman was clearly trying to stay hidden, while a steady, slow stream of identical soldiers kept popping out from behind the corpse pile to fire at the UHF fortifications before ducking back down.
If not for her elevated and slightly off-set position on the far western side, Thea would never have spotted the hiding soldier at all.
‘That’s the real danger of that damn ability, isn’t it?’ she realised then. ‘The UHF can’t spare people to hunt the originals. Anyone who tries gets swarmed before they can really make a dent. But if we don’t find them, killing the duplicates is just burning ammo and tiring us out…’
She pushed those thoughts aside for later, lined up her shot, and fired at the woman hiding behind the corpse pile.
The result was immediate.
Half a dozen identical soldiers dropped where they stood, their fire cutting out all at once.
“Five down… a couple thousand to go…” she muttered, half pleased, half overwhelmed.
She took a steady breath and went back to scanning, finally feeling like she’d found a way to matter in this fight—one shot at a time…
Looking over the battlefield once again in search of additional duplicators, Thea absently flicked her gaze to the timer in the top-right corner of her vision.
A wave of dread washed over her as she realised that less than half an hour had passed since the assault had begun. It felt like she’d been fighting for half a day already—shooting, scanning, thinking, killing—yet the timer didn’t lie.
“Fuck me… I’m supposed to keep this up for another seven hours…?” she muttered under her breath, half desperate.
The Old Man had always said that true combat was far more exhausting than she could possibly imagine.
She finally started to truly understand what he had meant back then.
She wasn’t new to violence, of course.
Even at her relatively young age, the Undercity had thrown her into more than a few ugly situations. Thanks to the Old Man’s rigorous training and her stronger build, she’d survived most of them—but not without scars.
He’d stitched her up more than once, physically and otherwise.
The Undercity hadn’t allowed her to be soft.
Even with all the advantages she’d had under his wing, the Old Man had always made one thing clear: Rely on him too much, and he’d drop her back on the streets without hesitation.
She’d never truly believed he would—but she’d also never dared test it either.
So she’d built herself a shell of forced maturity:
She tried to do everything on her own. She refused help, even from the few friends she’d had—and subsequently lost track of—over the years, afraid it would make her look weak.
She’d even started asking Thomas for Credits after working at the arcade, just to bring some money home and prove she wasn’t dead weight.
To her, that had been proof enough that she could stand on her own.
The Old Man had always laughed at that, saying she didn’t really understand what independence meant—just like she didn’t truly understand the exhaustion of constant and prolonged battle either; that a back-alley brawl could never measure up to a real battlefield.
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Now, with her arms heavy and her mind starting to fray at the seams, she felt the second lesson slowly settle in.
And that made her fear the first one might be true as well, as she started refocusing on the task at hand, wrangling her errant thoughts back into a semblance of usefulness.
The battlefield had undergone an equally tumultuous transition as her own thoughts in the meantime.
The first two hundred metres of the UHF trench lines were barely recognisable compared to the semi-pristine state she had seen when she first arrived at the western front.
Corpses were strewn everywhere, with hardly a patch of red-brown dirt visible beneath them. Many had been stacked into crude cover for the advancing Stellar Republic soldiers, but there were simply too many bodies—whole or torn apart—for anyone to realistically clear the field afterward, no matter how much manpower they threw at it.
The sharp smell of burned ozone from countless laser weapons mixed with the heavy stench of scorched flesh, slowly overwhelmed her helmet’s air filters.
The change had been gradual enough that it was bearable, but over the last few minutes she had needed to actively ignore it just to stay focused.
She was thankful her mind hadn’t fully caught up with the reality in front of her.
She wasn’t sure how she’d react if it did.
‘Just the number of bodies used to fill the first trenchline alone already vastly outnumbers the total number of people I’ve seen in my entire life back in the Undercity…’
Pushing those thoughts aside as best she could—to protect herself as much as to stay effective—Thea returned her full attention to the battlefield.
It didn’t take long to find new targets.
A small group of enemy soldiers had taken cover behind another pile of corpses roughly sixty metres in front of the second trench line.
Much like the duplicates she had seen earlier, around three dozen soldiers were repeatedly peeking out to fire at the UHF Marines. Many were cut down by return fire, only to be replaced almost immediately by more identical figures pushing in from behind the corpse pile.
From her angle, Thea picked out six individuals that didn’t quite fit.
She didn’t have the luxury of carefully analysing every single soldier—every second spent judging was a second she wasn’t helping—but those six stood out enough to raise her internal alarms.
Just as she lined up a shot on the one she believed to be the furthest original, she felt a sudden twinge inside her chest.
Startled, she froze mid-motion.
“What…?” she muttered, turning her focus inward to figure out what had just happened.
Much as she tried, she couldn’t figure out what had caused the strange feeling.
It had felt like a brief tightening in her chest—just for an instant—and not in a hostile way, if she had to somehow describe it.
Afraid of losing her chance to take out the group of original bodies, she aimed at the same soldier again.
As she was about to pull the trigger, the feeling came back.
“What is happening here!?” she hissed in frustration.
It felt like something was physically stopping her from taking the shot… just like before.
‘Is… Is the simulation helping me again…? Is something bad going to happen if I shoot that particular soldier, like with the GOG-launchers?’ She frantically thought. ‘If so, why?! Isn’t this supposed to be a damn challenge? Why is it helping me so much?!’
Whatever the reason, she quickly decided to trust the feeling, given that it had saved her life several times already, and shifted her aim to another marked target instead.
Steadying herself, she squeezed the trigger, half-expecting the feeling to stop her again.
It didn’t.
The bright red laser from her Mjollnir punched straight through the soldier’s head, vaporising most of his brain in an instant.
Somewhat startled by the shot actually going off, she almost forgot there were more targets.
She snapped her focus back, lining up the next shot as the strange sensation lingered at the edge of her awareness.
Two more shots followed in quick succession, dropping another two original bodies and causing over a dozen nearby soldiers to collapse where they stood.
Then one of the remaining targets—the closest one, the one she had deliberately left for last—looked in her direction and broke into a run for cover.
“Shit!” she cursed, tracking him through her scope.
Just before he vanished behind the pile of corpses, she fired.
The searing laser caught him in the back of the head mid-stride. His body crumpled and slid across the dirt, coming to rest just out of her sight—barely a fraction of a second too late.
She let out a shaky sigh and relaxed her body a little, then her thoughts snapped right back to the problem at hand.
‘That was way too close. What the fuck is going on with that stupid feeling?’
She zoomed back in with her scope, lining it up on the last soldier she had marked as an original. Only then did she realise something was severely off.
He still hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d been standing before.
“…He’s not an original,” she muttered, eyes widening.
Now that she had time to properly observe him, the mistake became obvious.
The other originals had constantly shifted, glanced around, or peeked over cover to direct their duplicates. This one, however, was almost perfectly still. Aside from a slight shift of weight from one leg to the other, he hadn’t done anything since she’d started shooting.
“Is this feeling pointing out the originals…? Is that what it is?” she whispered to herself. “Is the simulation telling me how to do this?”
She didn’t have enough information to be sure, and that frustrated her, but instead of freezing up, she decided to test it.
Over the next few minutes, she rapidly marked and engaged more targets. Where she’d spent nearly a minute judging each one before, she now needed only a few seconds.
Out of seventeen marked soldiers, the strange feeling stopped her from firing on four.
Later, she confirmed that none of those four had been originals.
Every target she had shot turned out to be one.
“This is it,” she breathed, a grin spreading across her face. “It’s helping me find them. I can actually do this…!”
Fueled by that realisation, she settled in and started reaping enemy soldiers by the dozen all across the battlefield with near supernatural precision and efficiency…
Around ten minutes later, as she rapidly thinned out the original bodies in her field of view, the momentum on the battlefield finally started to shift.
The area she was covering actually began to hold back the Stellar Republic’s advance.
She guessed she’d taken out around a hundred originals by now.
That alone was a massive blow, since each original usually spawned four or five soldiers at a time in a steady stream. If she counted all the duplicates that had dropped because of that, she was probably pushing five hundred kills or more.
Her work clearly didn’t go unnoticed by the enemy either, however.
Just as she lined up another set of targets, they suddenly ducked into cover, away from her position. At the same time, a flood of projectiles and lasers came screaming straight at her.
For the first time since the battle began, she was under direct fire.
Caught off guard by the sudden change, she dropped into her foxhole as rounds tore through the dirt above her head.
“Well… it was good while it lasted,” she muttered, resigned.
There was no way she could keep sniping with her position blown like this.
Her comms crackled to life.
“Private, you still alive? What the fuck just happened over there?” Kellerman’s confused voice came through.
“Ah… good to hear from you again, SL,” she replied, a bit too casually. “I figured out a way to spot the originals. Took out like a hundred of ’em, give or take. Seems they’re not too happy about that. I’m pinned down now—gonna need to relocate. Any chance you can give a girl a hand?”
Only then did she realise how much the fight had been wearing her down.
Just hearing Kellerman’s voice made her shoulders loosen, her body finally relaxing for the first time in a while.
“You figured out what?!” he snapped. “…Ah, never mind, we’ll talk about that later. I’ll have my squad cover you for ten seconds. Start running when you hear the shots.”
Around thirty seconds later, Thea heard a deluge of gunfire crack across the battle lines in front of her. Carefully peeking out of her foxhole, she saw that Kellerman’s squad had shifted closer to her position inside their trench and opened fire on the soldiers suppressing her, cutting down dozens and forcing the rest to duck for cover.
She grabbed her backpack—now refilled with the grenades and energy cells she’d spread around her foxhole—as well as her rifle, and vaulted out.
With a running start, she sprinted toward Kellerman’s squad, roughly thirty metres away.
Out in the open like that, she was an easy target for the Stellar Republic’s line.
Less than a second into her run, shots streaked past her from the occupied first trenches.
Luckily, the duplicates weren’t great shots, and the first salvo missed her completely.
Her heart hammered in her throat as adrenaline flooded her system at the near miss.
“Fuck… fuck fuck fuck… fuck!” she yelled, forcing her legs to move even faster toward the safety of the trenches.
The next salvo was less forgiving.
Two projectile rounds slammed into her side, making her stumble and nearly faceplant.
Her armour held, stopping the low-tech rounds, but she knew that if those shots had come from UHF weapons, she’d likely already be dead.
With a sharp sense of her own mortality, she finally tumbled into the trench beside Kellerman’s squad after what felt like an eternity. In reality, the sprint had taken barely four seconds—blisteringly fast—but in combat, four seconds was a damn lifetime.
“Glad to see you in one piece, Private. You hurt?” Kellerman asked without looking at her, still laying down automatic fire toward the enemy lines.
She took a second to check herself before answering. “Looks like I got lucky. A bit bruised from a couple hits, but I’m fine. Thanks for the bailout, guys. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
As she got back on her feet inside the trench, she tried to figure out what to do next—but Kellerman cut in before she could think.
“So… you said something about spotting originals. What’s that all about?”
She shook her head slightly, trying to clear it.
She had said that earlier, but now that she was here… how, exactly, was she supposed to explain it?
“I… uh… I’ve got a gut feeling. I know it sounds stupid, but it’sworking. I can’t really explain how or why—just that it does. If you don’t believe me, you can watch me do it,” she said, doing her best to not sound like she was making things up as she went.
Kellerman turned to face her, studying the helmet that hid her expression for a long moment.
“...A gut feeling isn’t much to go on,” he said slowly. “But you’ve done good work so far, and I’ve got no reason to doubt you. If taking out the originals helps stop these freaks, then that’s what we’ll do. What do you need from us?”
She let out a quiet breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding.
‘What can they do to help me…?’
She couldn’t explain what she was doing, and she definitely couldn’t expect it to work for anyone else. The simulation was helping her somehow—guiding her—and there was no way to say that out loud without sounding utterly insane.
Realising he was still waiting, she gave a small shrug.
“I honestly don’t know. I can’t explain how I pick targets, and I can’t really mark them either—I only know for sure when I take the shot. I guess… just keep me safe?”
Kellerman immediately nodded once, then turned to his squad and barked an order.
“You heard her. Protect the Private. Keep her sightlines clear and don’t let the freaks get to her. Anyone responsible for her dying gets punishment detail for a month.”
The squad reacted instantly—half of them snapping to attention, the other half groaning.
“A whole month?! I just got out of that, boss…” one of them complained, shifting closer to her position. “Don’t you dare die on me, girl.”
Behind her visor, Thea grinned.
She raised her rifle, stepped up to the trench line, and turned her focus back to the grim harvest ahead…