Forty-five seconds after his feet hit the dirt, Roland had run out of ammo. He’d managed to do a tremendous amount of damage in that short span of time, decimating their mortar batteries with cluster rockets and clearing the Martyrs away from their field guns with a mix of gas and fragmentation grenades. He’d emptied his machine gun in three long bursts, mostly aimed at the infantry who’d been clustered behind the APC barricades when he landed. Then he’d taken to scavenging rifles from the dead and emptying those into targets of opportunity.

By the one-minute mark, Roland’s hindbrain estimated he’d killed or wounded close to a thousand men. The sheer ferocity of his initial assault sent the Kingdom’s forces reeling and cleared a roughly two-hundred meter circle around him. Roland finished gunning down the crew of a Patriot battery and ran for an abandoned anti-tank rifle lying next to a pile of bodies.

Bullets smacked into him from all sides: diversionary fire, meant to distract him from the up-armored Mattis APC that suddenly gunned its engine and barreled toward him. They think they can run me over, Roland realized with something like glee. So he slowed down, reducing his sprint to something like a normal human running speed while the vehicle closed the gap between them.

He jumped at the last moment, landed on the APC’s roof, and punched a hole through the top armor with both of his fists. Then he gripped the ragged metal at the sides of the hole and tore the APC open–

–the smell of fear hit his nose as he tore through the concrete wall. The room held a dozen men, a mix of guards and officers. One man in the middle wore the stars of a general in the United States Army. Some of the soldiers screamed. A few opened fire. But the general just stood there while Roland killed. He didn’t even blink. No fear poured off him.

“It’s our fault,” the general said, once they were the only men left alive in the room. “This is all our fault, Roland. I’m–”

A bullet hit his face and Roland snapped back to reality. The men in the APC below him were dead; it looked as if he’d shredded them with his bare hands. But while he’d been lost in a memory, two more APCs had roared up and disgorged a dozen power-armored soldiers.

They shot him with big guns, weapons meant to hurt monsters. He avoided some of their rounds, but not most. Roland lost the better part of his right hand, a chunk of his skull, and his left knee. It hurt, but that didn’t stop him. He leapt off the Mattis and soon he was among them, ripping off armored plates and shattering bones with his bare hands.