52. Target: “Trailer Park”

Target: “Trailer Park”

More tests followed with more soldiers.

Many soldiers displayed, to varying degrees, major enhancements to weapon performance. Similar to the first test, some leaned toward accuracy, some toward firepower, and some caused ammunition counts to increase, replenish themselves, or last longer.

Repeated testing showed that, for most soldiers, if they changed to a different model of weapon, the effect dropped sharply.

With the same type of weapon, the effect mostly remained stable. But if they used the same individual weapon they had recently used in combat and repeated the firing again and again, the effect improved very slowly.

The tests continued.

Most soldiers were extremely fatigued, stressed, sleep-deprived, demoralized, and sometimes injured, but no one complained.

Everyone understood that gathering more data about this new anomaly was absolutely vital. And survivors of the army’s most recent defeat were more willing than most to keep being tested.

Among the several hundred survivors who displayed abnormal abilities, most were fairly similar in what they could do and in the effects they produced.

But some were different.

A young black-haired female volunteer from a mobile emergency response support unit could only be described as timid.

She picked up a pistol that looked as if it had been made from rainbow crystal.

When she pulled the trigger, a vivid red tracer-like streak hit the first target, which immediately caught fire.

Since ballistic gel was ninety percent water, that was rather surprising.

The second target was struck by a bright orange tracer-like streak… and then exploded as if a small grenade had gone off inside it.

After the third target was hit by an orange streak, it immediately began to hiss and rapidly melted into a foul-smelling puddle.

A green magical bullet caused the next target to blacken and cave in until it became a dark brown powder one-tenth of its original volume.

The target struck by a blue bullet froze almost instantly and shattered, while the indigo bullet turned its target into a sheep—though it still died from the physical bullet wound.

The violet bullet was the brightest, more a beam than a tracer, and it made the ballistic gel vanish without a trace.

This woman was the most unusual case so far, but by no means the only unique one.

Some soldiers could enlarge their bullets to inflict greater damage, or multiply them to strike multiple targets.

Some snipers could make bullets automatically track targets like tiny missiles, or magnify penetration and overall damage manyfold.

One old veteran fired rounds that turned into small, dense clouds of locusts, which ate through multiple ballistic-gel targets in less than a minute before vanishing.

One platoon leader could make every weapon fire a stream of flame like a flamethrower, with size and range scaling according to the weapon’s caliber.

The platoon leader’s partner could make weapons fire bubbles. The bubbles expanded, engulfed her targets, and proved harder to shoot or cut through than infantry ballistic plates.

As the enemy inside the occupied city brought forth more legions of unnatural creatures and triggered supernatural weather, the American military rushed to understand how the enemy fought—and to turn the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses to its own advantage.

Mott, consul of the Mavis domains, waved a hand.

Another mass of clay and soil the size of a large room turned whiter than the purest snow, then sublimated into raw magic.

Before the twenty-meter-wide gap in the soil and bedrock could collapse from the sudden transformation, two dark masons stepped forward.

The first maintained magical repairs to keep the new section of tunnel stable. The other conjured steel-stone plates to reinforce it, if not permanently, then at least until the campaign ended.

Once this was done, the group of three advanced sixty meters and repeated the minute-long process, just as they had been doing for the…