He was shaken awake by one of the only other people from his village.

“Wuh…? What’s going on?”

He barely got the words out of his mouth when he realized that there was a deep and heavy chill in the air. Snow was falling like autumn leaves before a windstorm and the air was so cold it stung his nasal passages every time he tried to breathe through them. He was glad that he built the little shelter that he did and bundled himself up tight, but even still it was too damn cold! It was far chillier than any winter he had ever endured, and it seemed to grow worse by the moment!

“Has the New Hero arrived to aid us?” he asked through the pain of the bitter cold.

His friend merely shook his head and yelled over the howling winds.

“Full retreat! We have to escape this hell!”

The winds only continued to increase in intensity. If this kept up, then even his shelter would-.

The winds must have latched on to what little there was to grab, and the roof of his shelter flew off into the white nightmare that surrounded him. His friend was still mostly standing and tried to go to the ground and grab on to it for dear life, but the gale-force winds picked him up and tossed him out of view. The whiteness obfuscated all that was more than a few feet away, and now he had no idea where to run, or even if he could.

He closed his eyes and curled into a ball, hoping that the smaller size and the protection he gave to his head and neck would save him from death. He tried to focus his body heat into his extremities to stave off frostbite or hypothermia, but he was fighting a losing battle. Over the howling winds, he thought he heard something he thought was impossible.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

He wasn’t delusional! There were the sounds of someone walking through this icy hell as though they were taking a leisurely stroll! He opened his eyes and strained against the sub-zero temperatures and raging winds to see what made the noise and saw the armored legs of… someone… standing over him.

Still curled into a ball, he tried to tilt his head ever so slightly to see the face of the one so unaffected by the cold. What he saw chilled him far more than the blizzard that buffeted him to intensely.

A half-skeletal face peered down at him through the whipping winds and swirling snow, its empty sockets filled with a terrible and evil glow that seemed to be as filled with malice as they were with apathy. The flesh on the right side of the undead warrior’s face was just not there and what flesh it did have was marked with the scars and wounds of what was certainly one hell of a battle. There was no way that the being before him was a mere zombie, as zombies did not carry weapons in the way that this undead did. Its great sword was held in its left hand and rested on its left shoulder, the musculature of some of its body partially exposed and at points the bone itself was visible through the minimal armor that it wore.

It carried itself like a warrior who had been through hell itself and emerged as a broken man.

He closed his eyes and braced for the deathblow, but instead the sound of the frozen ground being treaded upon filled his ears until it faded into the howling of the blizzard. He thanked his lucky stars and the almighty Goddess for sparing him from death, but then realized that he still was in an apocalyptic snowstorm with no end in sight. He kept himself huddled to the ground and tried to keep himself from freezing, but time wore on and while the blizzard was abating it was doing so at a snail’s pace.

A few hours later and the blizzard had passed over him and was off in the distance. However, he was in no position to move. All that remained of him was a form encased in the results of a mix of freezing rain, massive amounts of snow and copious amounts of hail. His consciousness had faded shortly after Piotr had passed him by, and soon after he had succumbed to the bitter cold and tempestuous winds. An entire army had been both scattered to the winds and utterly destroyed, and all by a single elite from the Darksol Empire.

…

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the border between the People’s Union of Rusk and the Darksol-aligned Greater Teutonian Union State, Kain and the other commanders finished hashing out their plans. Kain could have brought in his own personal armies to help deal with the numbers advantage that the Ruskian forces presented, but he instead wanted to see if his vassals could hold their own. Of course, he was not going to force them to deal with the entire force that the PUR intended to throw at them. He wasn’t going to be that malicious to his own people; he just wanted them to spread their wings and be able to be of use to him further down the line.

His rationale was, “It is better to even the playing field and give his vassals a chance to build up their strength than to let them be crushed, which would make them utterly useless.”

All he was here to do was provide aid to the area that they decided he should be at. Of course, by ‘aid’ he meant ‘the utter destruction of every single living enemy in that particular part of the battlefield.’ The trouble was, both the Teutonians and the necromancers wanted Kain to work his magic in a different place. The Teutonians wanted him to lay waste to a group of rare, highly trained infantry and cavalry that had a very good chance of outflanking their own line. The necromancers wanted Kain to wipe out the right wing of the Ruskian front line that was made almost entirely of poorly equipped serfs.

This put Kain in a dilemma. He could do one, the other or even both, but he also did not want to hold their hands too much. Sure, he could simply deal a terrible blow to both of the desired targets, but where would be the fun in that? Instead, he offered a compromise, and after a bit of contemplation the compromise was accepted.

If artillery was the First God of Modern Warfare, then what was the Second God?

Kain walked out of the tent and summoned a massive monstrosity of bone, decrepit flesh and putrid odors. Leaping up on top of his mount, the beast unfurled its membranous and damaged wings and took off into the sky. Kain had left several tens of small objects behind that were now being passed out to a handful of infantry and cavalry formations. These single-use devices would be well-known to most military and even civilians of modern Earth, and their usage would be well understood by the people of modern Earth as well, but to the soldiers who got them the device was mostly alien in its usage.

Still, they held on to them and made sure to remember the instructions that were given to them about the usage of the devices. From what they knew, the objects were designed to fire a single bright and smoking projectile that did little to no damage. All they knew was that they should never point it towards one of their own or towards an allied formation. If it would ever occur that the odds against them were too great, they were to fire the bright and smoking projectile over the heads of their adversaries at a relatively high angle.

At which point…. Something would happen shortly afterwards. They did not know what would happen, only that shortly after the object was fired something would happen.

Not too sure about the functionality of the new ‘weapon’ they carried, the soldiers of Darksol, both living and dead, took their positions upon the high ground and awaited the oncoming tide of living bodies. Across the vast plain that spread before them, they could make out the shapes of what seemed to be a solid wall of people moving towards them at a steady pace. The line of men and women seemed to stretch to the horizon, and more than a few Teutonians and necromancers were unnerved by the numerical disadvantage they faced. They now felt just as so many of their foes had felt when confronted by the forces at their disposal; the sheer amount of bodies for them to defeat was a terrifying prospect.

They held their ground as the horde got closer. The undead catapults, trebuchets, ballista and even the man-operated cannons fired wildly into the approaching mass of bodies and struck down many a person, but the wave just kept coming closer. Now the mortars began to sound off and even more Ruskians died in vain, but the mob kept advancing. Archers, crossbowmen, riflemen and musketeers unleashed their fire, but even that did not stem the tide.

Finally, one of the men cracked under pressure and, being the one with the special device amongst the whole of his formation, decided to roll the dice and fired a single glowing and smoking projectile over the heads of the Ruskians before him.

Seconds passed, and nothing happened, until…

A single light from high above blossomed into fifteen and fell upon those beneath the smoldering and shining object that was slowly descending to the ground. Soon after those magical bombs struck the Ruskians, the form of a Zombie Dragon could be seen diving towards the ground a bit away from the flare. Before the beast could impact the ground, it swiftly leveled out and as it screamed across the field just a few short meters above everyone’s heads it belched out a foul mix of caustic fluids and balefire. The undead beast flew along a line and left a trail of death and destruction in its wake before climbing back up into the air and circling overhead.

With a single shot from a seemingly useless tool, several formations-worth of Ruskians had been utterly obliterated. And that was not the end of it. The stunned people on both sides watched as the ones who fell to the balefire and acidic spit of the zombie dragon twitched and rose from the dead. The new undead wheeled around and threw themselves at the Ruskian forces, and although they fell rather quickly, they left a lasting effect on those that they attacked.

The corrosive spit was still eating at them as they threw themselves at their former comrades and now that same gunk was eating away at the flesh of the survivors. Worse yet, the areas that had been bombed were still ablaze as the Fire Magic continued to burn those places with a lasting inferno. Both the Darksol-allied forces and the Ruskian forces realized that this battle would be a game changer. No longer would Darksol fight in mainly 2 dimensions (not counting the Fel Bats and Hell Bats). From now on, death from above could come with explosive fury and lethal consequences.

Kain had introduced to this still mostly medieval world the Second God of Modern Warfare; Military Aircraft!