Ironclad Origins

Victor finally reached the trenches, he was greeted with the image of muddy Frenchmen leaning against the walls scooping whatever pitiful mush they had out of their meal tins. One guy was popping a squat over a hole next to a box of grenades they used to hold their toilet paper. The faces of the men he saw here were faces of the haunted, men who saw too much and could not turn back. Between the sounds of shots firing, he could hear the sound of dying soldiers moaning and crying in the medic holes.
Victor went and took a small peak over the mound of mud just at the edge of the trench between a couple of the resting soldiers. He was curious as to what the battlefield looked like. He strode over, used a stray helmet as a step stool and lifted up. His head didn’t get an inch over the line before he was slammed down to the soggy wood walkway by the soldiers who had just been resting as a bullet whizzed through the air landing in the ground just above the wall opposite to where he had just been.
The soldiers who yanked him from the wall cursed at him in French, only a few words he understood, such as “dumbass”, “idiot”, and something to do with making love to a pig or someone’s mother, either way, he understood all he needed to.
“What in blazes are you doing boy?” The General was red in the face.
“I was just trynna get a lay of the land!” Victor’s eyes widened as he tried to dust the mud off him to give a proper salute.
“At ease, dumbass! I catch you doing anything so stupid like that without me telling you to, you’re gonna be burying shit in these toilet holes for a month you hear me private?”
“Sir, yes Sir!” Victor couldn’t hide the tremble in his voice or his hand.
“Now grab your gun and peek over that wall again, but 150 paces that way!” he pointed over to the left where there were far less soldiers, and far more craters made by mortar shells and grenades.
“Sir, yes Sir!” Victor scrambled to grab his gun from the rack and made his way through the mud to the exact spot his General commanded. He checked the chamber and the scope before aiming over the wall. He held his eye up to the scope as images of his head exploding or a bomb dropping flashed through his mind every second he was over that barrier. He scanned the battlefield, between various oil fires, clouds of gas, dead bodies, and various traps and piles of barbed wire, he saw almost nothing. It took him a while to find the other trench, but once he found it he never took his eye off it.
It had been an hour before he saw any movement, by then his arms were aching and the insides of his nostrils had gone sour from the mix of shit and gunpowder. He fired a few warning shots whenever anyone got daring enough to rise above ground level causing them to retreat for a while.
This ain’t so bad, Victor thought.
Until he saw a full head rise up out of the trench and start scrambling out to sprint across the battlefield straight towards him. Victor perked up and felt his hand slip while getting his gun ready, he’d never actually shot someone before. He tried firing a few close warning shots to see if the guy would turn around, but the man was determined to get to him and he was almost halfway to the middle already. Victor saw his face get clearer and realized just how close to his own age this enemy was. He saw not just anger but fear and adrenaline in the eyes of this teenager rushing his position. The kid pulled out a grenade, pulled the pin and started to wind up as he sprinted straight toward Victor. It was now or never, Victor had to take the shot or he would be blown to smithereens along with the one other guy who had been positioned next to him.
His finger hugged the trigger, his breath stopped, his heart raced.
BZZZOOOM.
Victor dropped his rifle. Dirt flung into his eyes, the acidity of it sizzled inside his eyelids. His let out a childish whimper as he struggled to grab his canteen. He poured it out over his eyes and looked back through the scope only to see the boy’s boots with only his shins left in them. Behind that the sky had opened up with multitudes of reds and yellows raining down upon the earth. Machines materialized beneath the clouds and flashes of green struck the earth as the trenches erupted in gun fire. Sirens were blaring, men were shouting, hoofs were stomping. Left and right men were being evaporated by green rays from the heavens.
Victor was paralyzed, his mind couldn’t process what was happening. Out of the machines came a bunch of smaller ones flying in tight formations picking up bodies and supplies from the trenches. It wasn’t long before Victor noticed that a swarm had been released right above where he was and his throat clamped shut, his knees buckled and instead of falling to the floor he was yanked up by some unseen force into one of the flying machines.
Is this the end?
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