This battle was not going the way Jack and the others thought it would. None of them predicted a wall of fire, I guess because it wasn’t something they had ever encountered before. The enemy elementals had harnessed the flames from the mortars, mixed it with their synthetic nanite fire, into something terrifying. “Fucking Elemental Augments is right!” Keg swore, he was almost inaudible over the roar of the fire and the snapping, cracking and splintering of a hundred trees at once. The fire sapped the surrounding moisture and the forces bent the tree trunks and limbs to their will. “Wait. Look down our lines!” Jack called. I peaked over the top of the fox hole. Men and women were standing at their posts, all sharing the same pose with their hands extended in front of them, many with glinting metal in the red light. Their faces contorted in a concentrated effort. My hair was whipped aside as a powerful gust of wind moved in from the campus, and I followed it with my eyes, toward the towering wall of fire. The flames advance was being slowed to a desperate crawl. In its path, the trees and mud churned ground were crusting over with frost. Our Elementals were fighting it. They pushed back to take control of the flames while others pressed it with wind and slowed the burning forest with frost and ice. All we could do was watch, wait and hope our elementals can stop us from being burnt alive. At least I thought. As I watched the flexing wall of fire, a small hole opened in front of us. A crack. A weakness. A window through to the other side, where one of their elementals was visible. Just like all of ours, he was standing with his arms held out in front of him. My rifle snapped up and I had my sights centred on his face. His eyes were already widening in fear as though a voice in his mind spoke of imminent danger. I must not have been the only one to notice the crack in the fire wall, because before I could even pull the trigger a barrage of rifles went off around me. The man fell back with a cough of blood as his body was pounded to death by bullets. Before the gap in the fire closed. Fuck! I thought. I had to be faster if I wanted to take those opportunities. When the next crack appeared I was already resting on the wall of the fox hole and aiming down the sight. I fired two rounds into the person that appeared before, he was hammered to death by those around me. All down our lines sporadic fire was erupting while the elemental augment users battled silently with their furrowed brows. Slowly the frequency increased as there were more and more breaks in the flame. Eventually, and abruptly it disappeared into nothing but distorted hot, air and smouldering flora. Then all hell broke loose. The amount of gunfire was deafening to my ears, as both sides opened up on each other. My heart pounded in my chest making the sight of my rifle bounce with every beat. I switched from one target to another as the enemy surged forward, a mass of bodies rushing through the freshly scorched air. Each person took at least ten bullets before they dropped, then ten more before they were dead and I switched targets. I could feel their return fire from the treeline as it hissed and zipped around us making my eyes twitch in anticipation every time. I waited for the sniper shot or the random bullet that would knock me back from my perch in the fox hole. I got lucky, but Keg did not. His wider frame presented more of a target and I heard the unmistakable thud of a high calibre bullet cracking against the inside of his skull. I felt the blood mist coat my face as he fell back, his right eye no more than pulp in its socket. I twisted the dial in my mind, slowing time as much as I could without passing out while I replayed the motion of his falling body in my mind, the direction his head was thrown back. I feathered my perception of time as I moved my rifle to the right, scanning the tree line. Until I found the shooter. Her four arms were grasping a large rifle as she knelt in the shadows and underbrush, aiming straight at us. I slowed my perception again, squeezing one round off and watching it as it sailed into her forehead. Too high, I swore to myself, It had missed her left eye by more than a centimetre as her body moved with her breathing. Her head was still knocked back from the force and I squeezed off another shot, this one glancing off the eyesocket. It ricocheted into her skull to bounce around and turn her brain to mush. People were dropping on both sides amid the violent fire and I attempted to wrap my head around their battle strategy. Was this how every larger scale battle went in The Dream? I wondered. It seemed so plain and archaic. They were throwing in some flame manipulation, and if my tussling hair was any indication they were trying to throw off our aim with the heavy winds. Rushing us seemed too simple. The anti-air on the roof, along with whatever radar, satellite imagery and drone scanning made it both impossible to drop in or to surprise attack us from the flanks. So I guessed, the only viable tactic left was a straightforward attack up an uncomfortably steep hill. What they wanted, and frankly I would have prefered, was to push through no man's land and be in blade range. But due to their greater numbers, we would be fighting them tooth and nail for every inch. Our best bet was to strip their number before they reached us. They tried everything to gain ground, from throwing hundreds of smoke grenades that were blown away by controlled gusts of wind, to pushing large sheet shields which were simply bullet magnets. It soon dawned on me that they were just as inexperienced as we were. With the technology constraining standard tactics, they were testing the waters, finding ways to move in on an entrenched force. In the end, only one thing worked. They blew more holes in the earth to trench their way to the front. Slowly, very slowly they moved up until they made it to the first of the deep shell holes. Twenty minutes later they had finally set up a second front. Moving fighters to engage and dragging the dead back so those respawning would be able to collect their gear. My heart continued to pound in my chest and my forearm ached from endless trigger pulls. my hands were numb from the white-knuckled grip on my rifle. The sounds of endless grenades shook the earth. The hissing of flames, rattling of ice shards and the zip of bullets had drained away into a dull white noise and persistent headache. The fear of being shot had disappeared as I was now resigned to wondering when it would happen, not if it. While the battle raged, Keg had returned. He pulled his gear from his own corpse, picked his rifle back up only to be shot dead again two minutes later. The creators must have been pissed at him for that bad luck. The enemy had pushed to within twenty meters when the atmosphere dramatically changed. Their casters were too close, hidden in their mortar holes. The wind was fierce from both sides, skimming the ground and slamming together in the narrow no man's land. It pressed up into the air like two colliding tidal waves taking dust, mud and water with it. Bullets were pushed wide of their intended targets. People were blurred outlines and all grenades thrown from either side, were being blown sky-high to explode harmlessly above us. The gunfire slowed to a light sprinkling as people realised the futility. This was no longer a ranged battle, it was a battle of the elements and I was growing reckless being out of the fray. With the enemy so close I threw caution to the wind. “Jack!” I yelled over the howling wind and dropped my rifle in the mud, pulling grenades from my chest. “What!” he screamed back, then blinked. His eyes flicked from my face to the rifle then the grenades and back to my face, “No! You moron.” I almost laughed at the sight of his dusted, blood showered face and the memory of our childhood that popped into my mind. When we were kids we had always raced to the jumping rock at the local lake, screaming at the other to keep up before we jumped and took the plunge, Right then I stared at him, smiled and called. “Keep up, cunt!” I stepped from the edge of our fox hole and leap as high and as far as I could. I felt Jack, Mia and Sam scramble against the dirt and mud, staring at my back. Without the wind, I could easily have covered the distance to the enemy, but with it, I was blown high. I sailed through the air and my body peaked out from the column of air as I shot upwards. That was all I needed. My arm arched in front of me into clean air and three small metal spheres dropped down each and into the nearest mortar craters. Each grenade was already activated and they exploded in blue light and electricity, stunning the people around them and disabling their augments. Just for a few seconds. In those precious seconds, I felt the wind around me slacken, losing its ridged nature and power as the nanites failed to be controlled. Letting me plunge back towards the ground like a stone. I whipped my last two pulse grenades from my vest, drawing a line with my thumbs on each and tossing them into the nearest craters before I hit the ground. Hard. I rolled through the churned dirt, knives sinking into legs as I passed. The weakness with most augment users and especially the elemental kind, was their heavy reliance on their mechanical limbs, organs and assistants. Before they even came back online all five of the fighters in the hole lay either dead or gasping through crushed windpipes, and the stream of air behind me shattered. Bullets whipped through the air over my head, and I hunkered behind the walls of the crater, tossing every grenade I had, one after another down the enemy's line. Covered by a smoke grenade Mia Jack and Sam soon skidded beside me. Throughout the battle, the wind slacked. We weren’t the only team to breach the wall of air, just the first. Soon a flood of fighters was dropping from above or sprinting through the weakened defences. Hundreds would have died to the hail of bullets but it was a small price to pay. Every time an enemy fighter needed to reload, someone made it into their midst. For every crater breached, those around it weakened. This is more like it, I thought as we tussled with fighters rushing from the lower hill. A straight, bladed fight. The roar of wind and bullets was replaced with the clattering of nanite sharpened steel as people battered and ripped into each other. Mia’s and Sam’s spears skewered fighters as they slid down the slopes of our crater and failed to find firm footing in the dirt. The last of my throwing knives were a distraction as I cut down those that made it past. The battle that had been drawn out for the better part of a day ended in less than ten minutes as the enemy was overwhelmed by our aggressive assault. I waited for more fighters to rush us but when there were none, against Jack advice, I crested the edge of the crater to look down upon the rest of the battlefield below us. It was a rampant cluster fuck. Pools of our fighters had spilt out from the higher trenches, draining down into the ones below and now they were pressing the fight, cutting down the retreating army and racing into the treeline to destroy their encampment. I dropped down to my ass, wiped my blades on my pant legs and watched as it all unfolded. Behind me, I felt a familiar presence at the edge of my EM sense. I turned my head, expecting to see Daron coming over to us. I would never have expected him to be in the thick of the fighting, but instead of moving down now while the enemy retreated, he was jogging along behind our lines, leading a pack of far more aggressive-looking scaled men and woman. They weren’t chasing him, they were following. “Where the fuck is Daron going,” I muttered, watching the small man as he retreated. At least I thought he was retreating, but as I watched I realised he wasn’t heading towards the campus, but down the edge of the battlefield to cut into the treeline. I picked myself up and began trudging around the holes in the field. “Where are you going?” Mia called after me. “I’m just going to go see what Daron is up to, he might need a hand,” I called back. Those men following him didn’t look the kind to take orders from a smaller man like Daron. He might have been in some kind of trouble. “Keep an eye on things here, I’ll be back in a minute,” “Fuck that, I’m coming with. Sam, keep an eye on things.” She said, before rushing to catch up with me.