Interlude 45: Burning Kamas

"The Emperor protect us."

Captain "Iron Man" Korel of the Kamas Defence Force Second Regiment's First Company murmured to himself.

As he spoke, he was facing an entire burning sky. In his memories, Kamas's sky had always been a beautiful azure blue. He had never imagined that blue might vanish, but reality was reality—the sky had shattered. Enormous explosions of indescribable scale silently erupted above the clouds, searing painful spots of light into his retinas.

Only afterwards came the gale, the rain, and the wreckage of warships. The wind buffeted him so fiercely that he could not move, leaving him to grip the wooden stakes protruding from either side of the trench. Flickering points of light streaked across the horizon at breakneck speed, while thunderous booms forced him to barely open his eyes. He saw countless fighters, gunships, and missiles of every kind.

Kamas's local air-defence forces had all been deployed, yet he had no way of learning the exact situation. He could not even contact the combat command centre.

It had all begun thirty-six minutes earlier. At the time, he had been making pre-battle preparations at the assembly point when a massive fragment falling from the sky destroyed everything.

That thing had likely fallen from the void. It was probably shipwreckage that had broken apart after being struck by the weapon arrays of a warship or space station. Kamas's gravity caught it, and so the fragment happily plunged to the ground, smashing down roughly two kilometres to the right of the Second Regiment's assembly point.

It triggered many horrifying chain reactions, two of which dealt a fatal blow to the entire Second Regiment while it was still assembling.

Simply put, the first was an earthquake, and the second was a communications blackout. The earthquake first crippled the transport lines