[ OT ] Sunday Free Write : Happy Holidays Edition !

Commissar Val Radetzky charged up the storm ladder, his black leather boots taking the rungs two at a time. His laspistol was in one hand, his family's ancestral sword in the other. Its silver blade seemed to catch afire in the light, dazzling as he held it high overhead. His black longcoat stirred in the hot breeze of Trebizond IV's storm winds, ash and yellow dust billowing around his leather boots. He gestured towards the enemy's lines, his voice proud and clear. 
 
 `` Forwards, Illyrians! Forwards unto victory!'' 
 
 Corporal Aric Veers threw himself up and out of the narrow assault trench, his haversack and gas mask canister bouncing on his hip. He, along with the rest of 3rd Platoon, D Company, surged from their defense-works like a swarm of ripper-fish out of their coral lairs. The officers' whistles shrieked their frantic orders through the yellowed air as two thousand men rose shouting battle cries and curses. 
 
 Their tan fatigues and flak armor made them look like dust demons and sand devils, raw specters rising from the earth with heavy grains of sand still spilling off their tunics and helmets. Behind them roared the big guns of the Imperial Army, the Earthshakers and Medusa siege cannons booming with visible shockwaves. Their massive shells shrieked over the heads of the Illyrians like freight trains, each detonating in a cloud of ash and fire somewhere ahead of them. 
 
 Corporal Veers had made it a scant ten paces from the trenchworks when the ochre haze erupted into fire. Hidden bunkers and machine gun emplacements unleashed a storm of lead and las, the air turning thick with the ruby bolts and azure tracers of heavy stubbers. The whip-crack of a lasbolt flashed past Veers' ear, causing the Illyrian guardsman to duck. He heard the dense, wet smack of flesh being struck, and the cry of a comrade being hit. Veers did n't look back, did n't falter as he ran forwards as fast as he could. To his left and right Guardsmen died or were wounded, falling to the dusty earth as if scythed by some great invisible blade. Not one stopped to help the wounded, instead they continued towards the guns, raining bitter curses at their unseen foe. 
 
 In the corner of his eye Veers saw Private Haris `` Holy'' Terradoc surge ahead, bayonet fixed to the muzzle of his lascarbine. A few near misses rained a shower of soil and sand down upon him, but Terradoc ignored it all, his arms pumping like bellows as he gained a lead on the rest of 3rd platoon. A burst of stubber fire almost bisected him, but the stream of emerald tracers and invisible lead somehow sputtered, a half-second difference between life and death. 
 
 `` Move up! I'll rape the corpse of the first kekking bastard who stops for cover!'' 
 
 Sergeant Lucian Drant's threat was hardly required; the entire field might as well been flatter than a regicide board, so featureless was its surface. The sergeant had chainsword and laspistol in hand, his rank chevrons pinned to the collar of his fatigues. Following at his heels were Privates Karrick and Carver, a tank of gurgling promethium fuel on the back of the latter. Carver was the squad's flame-trooper by dint of drawing the short straw during the founding. He lamented that fact, calling himself,'Sniper-bait.' 
 
 Veers passed the body of an Illyrian who'd died in the failed attack a week prior, his body already bloating. He was missing his head, or most of it at least. Veers could see the shattered remains of the man's lower jaw, the teeth still white and the tongue green with decay. 
 
 Ostwold Beaton cried out as he was hit, impacting against the ferrocrete-hard soil as his knee vanished in a bloody mist. Tulper leaped over him, snorting like a bull with the weight of the mortar on his back. Jak Ralter followed the mortarman, half-hidden underneath boxes of mortar shells. `` Poor bastard...'' he muttered. 
 
 Somewhere to the North, Colonel Artimer Herrik would be directing the attack, no doubt demanding that the commanders of the artillery batteries continue to support the assault in that stern, calm voice of his. He did not lead from the front, save for those rare occasions which demanded it. Instead he led with quiet competence, seeing to it that the companies and their officers were ready for whatever the regiment was to undertake. 
 
 Another burst of machine gun fire ripped overhead, and Veers ducked again. Three hundred yards. That was the distance between the opposing trenches lines. As he passed another fallen Illyrian, he was wondering just how close he'd get to the enemy's lines.
