Officer Corpse - Wrapture

His job was two fold, and two fold difficult.

Wrapture--Cadet Officer Wrapture to his subordinates who were smart enough to speak--was the mummy in charge of the militia.

It was a simple and yet thankless job, especially in these times.

In times of peace, his work would be easy. Ridiculously so. In the first days after his appointment as officer in charge of the Yu Xiang militia, he’d met with Captain Seventeen and outlined a manual dictating the needs of the militia.

It was to be an armed force of volunteers. Men and women both. They were to be trained and assessed and pushed into positions where they could assist the city. Some of these were military duties, such as manning and guarding the walls and watch towers around the city, but other parts were less militarised.

The militia included the city fire department. There were, at the moment, three private fire-fighting groups within the city, but the militia was meant to step in regardless. They wouldn’t be as fast, or as well-equipped, but they were meant to be trained to carry buckets and save people in case of a fire.

There was more, of course. The militia paid its members, had simple but free housing, and included some community outreach. A homeless person wouldn’t remain so in Yu Xiang, not when they could be put to work for the good of the city.

The militia was made up of the living and the undead. The undead being... less helpful sorts. Skeletal warriors that weren’t good warriors and who were frequently missing some odds and ends. Undead animals that the army had no use for. Ghosts that weren’t quite smart enough to serve as spies and scouts.

He had his pick, but only from the detritus pile.

He had imagined that this would be an honourable role, initially. He’d help young men and womean find their place and help their community, and he’d put people’s minds at ease about the undead by having some provide necessary and helpful services.

None of these things worked out as he’d imagined.

Well, not quite.

One initiative he took on early in his attempts to get something to work did function. Using undead to clean the streets was a clever idea, if he did say so himself, and the people of Yu Xiang appreciated streets with no litter and a twice daily garbage pick-up.

Otherwise, nothing worked.

The problem was that the people of Yu Xiang saw his skeletons and zombies and ghosts, and they saw monsters. They didn’t see people. They didn’t see his people.

No one volunteered, despite the benefits.

The people who did  join his militia were people who weren’t given the choice, which really put a strain on the ‘Volunteer’ part of his volunteer militia.

He had criminals, vagrants, a few rebellious youngsters, and some old retired soldiers who wanted to relive the glory days without doing any of the work.

The criminals he had weren’t the hardened sort either. He had people who evaded taxes, a few petty thieves, one man who’d stabbed a neighbour (nonlethally) in a dispute, and a young woman who was a serial public urinator that the city guard had caught one time too many.

In an ideal world, putting all these people to work would help them sort themselves out. The money they earned could go towards buying amenities, and the lessons they learned would help them be productive, tax-paying, non-public urinating civilians.

Instead, it seemed like filling a pair of large bunkhouses full to the brim with lowly criminals had the reverseaverse effect.

They were encouraging each other. The tax evaders had formed a small clique and spent more time thinking and plotting ways to evade the taxman than actually doing any of the paperwork he had assigned them. The petty thieves kept nicking things out of the armoury. The neighbour-stabber got into a fist fight with another militiaman on his second day, and Wrapture had crossed at least one suspicious puddle so far.

He suspected that not only was he getting the defective undead, he was ending up with all of the defective humans too.

In any case, he had to do something about this. Or rather, do something with  this, because there was an army marching on the city and the militia might very well be called upon to act.

So bright and early in the morning he had them all gathered outside. Half of them were late. More than half weren’t wearing their uniforms.

Wrapture almost considered turning around and returning to Captain Seventeen to announce that he was incapable of doing this work after all, but the humiliation of failure weighed too much for him.

He stood there, at the front of the assembly, his arms clasped behind his back, and waited.

And waited.

It was mid-morning before his subordinate officers had managed to assemble the militia and get them all in order. They were finally all in uniform (their uniform being a simple off-white dress shirt with a small sash around the waist over pocketed pants) they had their armour (little more than a cuirass made of thickly padded cloth with some hardened leather that covered the chest and a boiled leather cap) and every member had their weapons in hand (simple short spears with sharpened metal points).

The uniform and gear were utilitarian, simple, and very replaceable. Just like his troops.

He was going to have them practice drills, and then run them through their paces.

It would be simple and easy.

They were the militia. They didn't have to be good.

Just good enough.

It rankled and stung his pride to an impossible degree. He didn’t want troops that were barely good enough, he wanted soldiers capable of doing their best.

It wasn't the sort of thing the militia could hope to achieve.

“Soldiers, we will now begin your training,” Wrapture said, his voice deep and powerful. He wasn't a loud man, but he'd learned the art of commanding the attention of those around him.  “I expect you to take this seriously. This is not a game. Your training may very well be the difference between life and death when the enemy comes.”

There was no reply from the assembled troops. They were staring ahead, most of them blank faced. A few were looking around, clearly bored and distracted.

He cleared his throat and repeated himself. “This is not a game, soldiers. You are here to learn and to prepare. Spears up!”

They raised their spears. They weren't all the right way up. Fortunately, his militia was trained enough to know which end was supposed to be up, and so those who’d pointed the wrong end into the sky acted to correct themselves.

Unfortunately, they often did this by twisting their spears around.

He had to put the training to a slight halt when one militia man in the back row almost joined the undead part of the militia.

“Good, soldiers,” he said, though he knew it was anything but. “We will now practice marching. Forward march!”

The first two ranks stepped forward, and then the third. Then the fourth. Then the fifth.

By the time the sixth had stepped forward, the first had fallen out of formation, and the others had started to fall apart.

It was a disaster.

He had to have the entire squad march up and down the parade ground five times before they stopped stepping on each other's feet, and another three before they stopped stepping on their own toes.

Once they could march without tripping or stumbling, they began marching in a straight line.

Or, rather, a curved line, as they couldn't quite keep the same distance from the soldier in front of them.

He didn't stop them. If they were marching in a curving line, at least they weren't walking into each other.

He'd give them this: they were trying.

He would try too. That was, he would try very hard to convince Captain Seventeen that the militia could help in the upcoming war in ... other ways. Maybe they could dig a trench? It wouldn’t be straight, or deep, but it would be a trench. Or they could carry things? Some of them would disappear an item or two, but most of it would get where it was meant to be.

Oh! They could stand still along the wall. Yes. That would work. The least his militia could do was stand still and not look incompetent from afar.

He watched as one of them tripped mid-turn. His spear flicked out, smacking another in the shin, and soon an entire line of militiamen collapsed in an undignified heap.

Wrapture held back the urge to go out there and start strangling some order into his troops.

“Pick yourselves up! We’re training until each and every one of you has at least some amount of dignity!”

Maybe they could trade the spears for sticks? The enemy wouldn’t be able to tell from afar, and it would be just as impressive looking.

***

Officer Corpse - Rotney

His job was easy. That’s why he liked it, and it was the only reason he’d accepted Captain Seventeen’s promotion

This whole invasion thing?

Not easy. And for that reason, he was very much looking forward to it being done. If the invaders could just... wake up and figure out that this was all a pointless exercise and go back home, then he could go back to lackadaisical days of light training and days spent reading in secret while he was supposed to be working.

Or maybe he could spend another day enticing some of the city strays close enough for him to pet? That had been a nice afternoon.

Rotney yawned, then made a guttural groan as his jaw clunked off his chestplate and thumped onto the sandy ground. He knelt down, picked it up, and slit it back into place. Just as he finished standing back up, an arrow lodged itself into his neck.

Had he been a little slower picking up his jaw off the ground he might have avoided that one, but alas it wasn’t to be.

At the moment he was standing on the outer edge of a battlefield.

A small one, admittedly, but a battlefield nonetheless. His forces included three hundred zombies with mixed arms. Poles, a few swords, some shields, and plenty of weapons that they’d cobbled together from what they found laying around.

That meant a lot of shields made from doors and clubs made from table legs.

All in all, his army was far from impressive, but what they lacked in equipment they also lacked in manpower and overall strength.

The living human army clashing ahead of them was ripping through his soldiers with ease. They had long polearms with wicked axeheads on the end, or narrow, pointy spears that could easily punch through their makeshift shields.

Rotney sighed. “Seventy-second rank, pull back,” he said. “Seventy-third rank, brace!”

This battle had started at sun-up.

The army had crested a hill, still a day’s walk from Yu Xiang, and had discovered a line of a hundred zombies standing in their path.

A cultivator had leapt ahead and decimated them.

Then a second rank of zombies rose from the ground ten necrometres back and charged in. Hidden amongst the zombies were a few surprises, of course. Some wights and skeletal warriors, a few abominations buried in the sandier parts of the ground.

Enough that weaker cultivators turned into dead cultivators.

And so the army had stepped up and took matters into their own well-organised hands. Men with spears formed ranks and poked his undead compatriots to re-death. The bodies were pulled aside and tossed onto fire pits that were quickly dug and lit.

Then the army advanced, took out the next rank, then the next, then the next. Then... the next. It took until mid morning for the army to run out of fuel for their pits. For them to start dismembering the undead instead, then for them to give up on that entirely and just toss the bodies aside.

Laziness.

Rotney had been counting on it, because he had crews of sneakier undead, as well as a few undead sand worms, ferrying zombie remains out from behind the army and all the way around to a field medic tent of sorts where they were reassembled.

For every hundred zombies lost since the early afternoon, they gained enough parts to recreate ninety.

Yes, that meant a great deal of attrition, but zombies were the lesser of all undead. Those that had burned in those firepits? Well, they’d have the good fortune of being raised as skeletons later. Some of those were already being mixed into the ranks.

“Rank Seventy-Three, fall back!” he ordered.

He was some hundred necrometres away from the front line, sitting on the back of a cart pulled by a pair of undead mules. The cart was covered in stray arrows and ever a single spear that had gotten stuck into the wood.

The enemy knew that he was a commander of some sort. They’d sent some outer-disciple cultivators at him already.

They’d joined the ranks of zombie warriors soon after, and he was now waiting for someone to decide that he was worthy of being killed by an innner disciple.

Or maybe they’d leave him alone? So far he was simply giving retreat and regroup orders.

Rotney glanced up. The sky was turning that particular shade of purple that came when the sun was well and truly on its way to setting.

A full day of this and the enemy losses barely added up to the triple digits. Serpen Tine’s traps all along the route had cost the enemy army more than his ranks on ranks of zombies. But that was okay.

Rotney’s job wasn’t to kill the enemy. Just as it wasn’t Serpen’s job to kill them either.

Serpen’s task was to keep them awake and stressed. Rotney’s task was to keep them tired .

Those almost-a-hundred losses the enemy had suffered? They’d mostly occurred in the last few hours. The troops at the front stabbing into his zombies were sweaty messes. They were being rotated, of course, but only once an hour or so.

He imagined that those being spears of theirs must be feeling pretty heavy right about now.

It would be so much easier to just not swing as hard, to allow the soldier next to them to do a bit more effort to take care of the monster ahead.

Laziness was the bane of many an army. Rotney knew it, and he counted on it too.

Tonight the army would make camp. They’d post watches, but those same watchmen would be the men who’d spent the entire day fighting an army of the undead that seemed endless.

They weren’t going to be given a restful night’s sleep. The sun dipped lower, casting long shadows across the road-turned-battlefield. Rotney sighed, then stood up straighter, grabbed the side of his mule-pulled cart, and lifted himself up onto the back of it so that he could see from a slightly better vantage.

Ranks Seventy-Three had pulled back and folded into Rank Seventy-Five. “Seventy-Four, pull back!” he ordered.

This was shifting the tempo of the battle. Rank Seventy-Four had barely been reached by the living army and they were already pulling back.

He waited until his troops had formed a much thicker line than usual. So far they’d been keeping about four ranks going, with a fifth constantly forming from a trickle of undead. Whenever a cultivator deigned to leave the centre of the formation to wipe them out, they’d just reform four more ranks a hundred necrometres away and start it all over.

Now...

“Rank Seventy-Five.... Hold.”

The humans were exhausted, and yet they hadn’t been ordered to stop for the night just yet. It wouldn’t make sense for them to. At the moment, they were at the bottom of a slight dip in the terrain. Their visibility wasn’t ideal. But the road rose up just ahead, and from atop that hill they’d be able to see the faint lights of Yu Xiang in the distance and have a commanding view of the area as well. It would be the perfect place to camp out for the night. Had they not been harassed by Rotney, the army would be at the top of that hill already. Trenches dug, latrine pits filling, tents erected before the sun dipped below the horizon.

Now, they were pulling out torches all along the formation to better see the encroaching darkness.

“Yeah, this’ll do,” Rotney decided. A last hoo-rah before he could finally slink back into the city and say that his part was done. “Rank Seventy-Six... charge!”

A new order, one that hadn’t come yet.

The seventy-sixth rank, still a little rag-tag and disorganised, jumped to it. Zombies shambled ahead, the slight incline in the terrain giving them a bit of a boost before they slipped through the Seventy-Fifth rank. By then, they were in an all-out sprint, or as much of a sprint as a zombie could manage.

It was enough. The army saw them coming, barely, and raised spears to skewer the undead, but some slipped past as soldiers struggled to raise heavy spears after a long day of exertion. The Seventy-Sixth rank crashed into the front of the living formation, grinding their slow and constant advance to a halt.

The rows of soldiers behind, unable to see into the dark, ended up bunched together while sergeants and officers shouted for order.

Rotney started to yawn, but this time he held his jaw in place. Oh... he’d forgotten about that arrow lodged in his neck. He tugged it outown and tossed it onto the cart.

“Seventy-Seven... retreat,” he said simply, and the last rank of his zombies started to shamble away.

The moment his cart crested the hill, he turned and waved ahead. The wave was carried on by a staggered line of wights  and ghosts to the city in the distance.

Rotney squinted as the distant crack-choom of trebuchets firing carried out across the empty plains. A boulder larger than he was hummed past overhead then came crashing down. It missed the army by about a hundred necrometres. They were way off.

The next missed by half as much.

The third came crashing down near the front ranks, and soldiers pulled back, screaming.

Yeah, the army wouldn’t be resting on the hilltop. Not tonight. In fact, the army wouldn’t be resting tonight at all.

***