When all you have are bullets

Acerton 21st Emergency Regiment Deployed to secure Sadonia Mantle Foundry from demonspawn horde Beta-66

Ash lay like a silken blanket across the horizon. Behind it snarled and shrieked the deformed bodies of the demonspawn. Their cries tested the resolve of the soldiers as they poured forward. No sound of artillery or tank helped to soothe the nerves when they knew somewhere just beyond that black fog were a hundred fold their number waiting to tear their bodies with claws that could best steel.

They were all conscripts, drawn from the same stricken population that had let the malady befall them. The weapons they held were unfamiliar. Officers led them barked in a foreign accent. But around them they knew the land was their home, perhaps not their own province or city but this was their planet.

Above the Lord Acerton’s Finest pulled away. A single atmospheric cruiser had fired its payload of nuclear pumped graser beams into the ground. Untold numbers of demons had fell to its onslaught. Now, with its munitions expended it went to some other battlefield where another group of desperate soldiers awaited its air support.

There, conscript Vala Kadney, lay prone with her comrades and listened to a hundred weapons load chains of bullets. Tanks rolled up beside. Their electric engines hummed in their ears. Sporadic cannon fire dotted the battlefield. Dull thuds echoed in the distance.

Galactic terrors roamed the Empire, extradimensional gateways could open anywhere and beasts that shrugged steel and fire off its skin imperilled her life. All they had were bullets.