A scorched Armored Personnel Carrier lurched slowly onto the bullet-riddled battlefield.
The red-robed Martian Technician stood fearlessly at the machine-gun mount, firing at The Trinity's fortified firing positions with the refitted Heavy Explosive Round rack. The driver pulled the trigger as well, and the twin-barreled Heavy Explosive Rounds at the front of the vehicle began spitting half-meter tongues of flame and supersonic bullets. The sturdy barricades made of sandbags and fifty-millimeter homogeneous steel plate were as fragile as sandcastles under .75-caliber Heavy Explosive Rounds. Dust and sparks from exploding warheads filled the sky. Supiluliumas let out a long breath. At last, he could temporarily stop guarding the Queen of Paititi and join the real battle.
Enuratu crouched behind the prefabricated defensive emplacement, tears streaming down her face. She clenched her fist and pounded Supiluliumas's leg armor, shredding the skin of her palm bloody against the roaring faces and lightning carved into it. This battle had exceeded her expectations from the very beginning. She had watched tribal warriors get struck by the colonizers' weapons—the native term for The Trinity—while high-speed metal tore through flesh and bone, shattering them before they collapsed in mangled heaps like rag dolls. Bullets ricocheted wildly through the cramped battlefield.
If not for the Praetorian Guard's protection and the "outsiders"—the natives' name for Camila's team—bringing over the "shields," gray prefabricated barricade panels as tall as a person with firing slits, she and the remaining tribal warriors would have been torn apart by the colonizers' army. What shocked her even more was the battle between a black Iron Bird—an Apache attack helicopter—and a golden Iron Bird—the Sacred Guard's hovering gunboat. Though they were roughly the same size, the latter was far more maneuverable than the former.
With a thunderous boom, the black Iron Bird became a blazing mass