Dresden , European Federation — February 2035

Before the war, you'd never guess someone like Tomasz Müller might one day be finishing his master's degree in Physics, with a focus on fluid dynamics and plasma behavior in low-gravity environments. He had been a machine gunner in a motorized infantry squad during the later stages of the war. Tomasz had simply shown up at his local German Affairs office near Lyon—the city where his family had been relocated during the war—on his eighteenth birthday. Not out of a sense of patriotism, revanchism, or suicidal idealism. He confided to me that he showed up the day before his 18th birthday, a day before he was supposed to legally simply because he mixed up the dates.

By then, the only fluid dynamics Tomasz cared about was how quickly he could swap out the barrel of his PKM before it overheated, how plasma behaved when a crab's acid blood splattered on hot metal, and how to keep pace with his squad, carrying double the weight of a C7 rifle in his arms, while another wave threatened to break them.

Now, he spends his nights running simulations of liquid helium flows through prototype spacecraft cooling systems, juggling emails with ESA about an internship, or trying to meet deadlines for his pre-doctoral assgnments. But, this one night where he doesn't have to work, study, juggle his girlfriend and family, we spend it here in his favorite local bar, sitting outside uncaring for the wind or rain hitting the roof above us.

"The lieutenant decided to make us disembark too far from the city itself—Pasewalk, in the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern region. The guy was scared out of his mind. The city was about a quarter of the way between the coast to the north and Berlin to the south. Things had gotten almost too good since we disembarked from the ships in Świnoujście. The Poles pushed east, and we moved west. We made up the bulk of the force, while the Americans, Koreans, Nigerians, and Brits took care of the few remaining pockets of resistance. And I really do mean pockets."

Jarmen and Neubrandenburg had been wiped off the face of the earth by nuclear strikes earlier that week. Satellites, then aircraft and drones, had spotted huge hatcheries and massing crabs before they could move east toward us. The brass didn't need any more convincing after that.

Our offensive south toward Berlin had been delayed by a day because of some unforeseen EMP effects on the heavier equipment.

The day of delay didn't break us, but it didn't help either. Mostly it just meant more foot patrols, more men posted at intersections with binoculars instead of sensors, and a lot of bitching. Some of the APC crews got so bored they started playing cards on the armor plates. A few of the more serious officers organized drills, but you could tell it was just busywork—most of it to look good to their bosses.

When the engineers finally patched up the worst of the EMP damage, there was almost a sense of relief. Engines coughed back to life, radios crackled with static before clearing, and the heavy gear started rolling again. We'd lost a day, sure—but we still had momentum. And in this war, momentum meant everything.

Gone were the days of sitting in trenches, waiting for the crabs to crash down on us like a tidal wave. I was reminded of that as I struggled to keep pace with the rest of the guys, all of us jogging forward with our weapons trained on the city ahead. BMP-1s rumbled behind us. The gross of the crabs were still trying to push south into france, austria and the front near the black sea.

Our sister company, attacking from the north, had Marders and French AMXs. We—OSTBLOCK, as they called us—had BMP-1s. There were a few real East Germans mixed in, but that was mostly propaganda. Most of our vehicles had been bought for cents on the euro from Arab and Asian states—scraps of metal that somehow still ran.

The field opened up in front of us, a sea of green and yellow under a sky so blue it almost felt wrong. The sun beat down on our helmets, making the sweat trickle under our collars. It would've been a beautiful day, if not for the fact we were jogging full speed with our rifles up and bayonets fixed, expecting something to come at us from the treeline.

Our new uniforms were still stiff, straight from the factories of the Neue Bundeswehr—new army, same flag, same old tired faces under the helmets. They'd brought back the old East German rain pattern camouflage. Supposedly the crabs had trouble seeing it, the vertical lines messing with whatever passed for their eyes. None of us were biologists, but nobody complained. You clung to whatever edge you could get.

Bayonets on the ARs caught the sunlight with each step. Some guys ahead had RPGs out, already armed, running with that awkward, half-limping sprint you used when you were carrying something that could level a truck if you tripped. BMPs clattered behind us, their old engines coughing up dust and smoke. But out here, in the open, under that perfect sky, we were still the ones moving forward. Still the ones with a plan. Still the ones in control—for now.

The sergeant spotted something. He started shouting: "Contact! Hold your fire! Marius, get your ass over here!"

I saw it too—a child, probably abandoned by its older crabs. I suppose the sergeant was terrified we'd open up with everything we had, wasting half our ammo on some orphan.

Marius caught up to him, gasping for air, his heavy breathing mixing with the growl of the engines. For a moment, it was all we heard.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

As if rehearsed, Squad Leader Julian grabbed the bipod of Marius' scoped G3 and set it on his own shoulder — a makeshift firing platform in the middle of the field.

"One shot, don't want to waste my hearing for this!" he barked.

"Stop nagging, you're throwing off my aim," Marius shot back, eyes still locked down the sights.

Everything went quiet for a few seconds as he adjusted.

"Tomasz, whistle for me," he said calmly.

I did as I was told, dropping the PKM onto the grass as I put two fingers in my mouth and whistled sharp. I guess the kid looked up, because that's when Julian fired. One shot — clean — before he lifted his head to confirm it was down.

"Squad advance!" Julian called, calm as ever, and we were on our feet again, jogging in line toward the small city ahead.

Capturing it was easy. Brass had expected twenty percent casualties — we ended up with five injured, maybe a dozen starving crabs, and that was it.

Holding it was another pain entirely. Brass expected the crabs to counterattack from the south. But Julian, Marius, and all the guys with real experience knew better. They'd hit us from the northeast, from the marshy forest that sat like a rotten sponge just beyond town.

Even the tank company — tasked with flanking any southern attack — knew better. They ignored the order and repositioned themselves northwest without waiting for permission.

And, right on cue, they hit us at sundown.

We saw them first from the church tower, ghostly shapes sprinting across open fields on the thermals. Four kilometers of flat ground between us and them. Perfect for us. BMP-1s and the heavy machine guns opened up, cutting swathes through their lines.

When the crabs started to falter, the T-64s struck. I watched them light up the fields, firing coaxial machine guns and HE shells into the retreating crabs, hammering them back toward the tree line.

Right when we thought the work was done, the Jaguars came in — low and slow — dropping napalm shells onto the marshy forest. The trees lit up like a goddamn bonfire.

The fires in the distance grew fast — too fast to be anything natural. Napalm burned hotter than hell itself, and the whole treeline twisted and buckled under the heat. You could see it even from the church tower: walls of flame rolling across the marsh, thick black smoke punching into the sky like storm clouds. The forest, already half-rotten from years of rain and cold, went up like dry paper.

We watched as figures tried to break out of the fire line — crabs, sprinting and skittering, desperate to escape. But the army had gotten smart about this by now. Units were already in place, dug in around the perimeter. Heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, even a few mortars — anything that could pin them back into the inferno. It wasn't about killing them cleanly. It was about keeping them trapped long enough for the fire to do the real work.

That's how you beat them. You didn't wait for them to crash into your lines. You didn't let them dig into the earth and breed another hive. You boxed them in, you burned their nests to ash, and you left the fields smoking behind you.

Even from where we stood, you could hear the distant cracks of gunfire and the roar of trees collapsing, sometimes we didn't know if it was trees cracking or their eggs popping like popcorn. We loved to imagine it was the latter. Every once in a while, a crab would make it too close to the cordon — and then you'd see a burst of tracer fire hammer it down before it could take another step.

I didn't feel sorry for them. Not anymore. Not after what they'd done. We just smiled, the fire lighting up our faces as hundreds of those crabs burned alive a few kilometers away.

People often say geography was as important as manpower during that war — that the Carpathian Mountains, the Russian steppes, the North Sea saved a lot of lives. But no one ever talks about forests. And they should have.

If you looked at aerial photos of Germany, France, Poland, or the Czech Republic, you'd see it: perfect squares, rectangles, cleanly cut patches of forest surrounded by farmland. Nothing natural about it. Before humans got their hands on it, Central Europe was one endless ocean of green — oak forests, beech forests, thick mixed woods, stretching horizon to horizon. Natural forests don't end cleanly. They fade into grasslands, swamps, or mountain slopes. But a thousand years of farming, villages, and later cities forced the forests into neat cages. Clean edges. Clear boundaries.

And those boundaries turned into perfect killing fields.

Crabs loved forests. They weren't city creatures, not really. Some tried living in rthe ruinns and abandoned houses by smearing their shit on the walls, sure, but the real colonies outside of the hatcheries were always in marshes or woods — picking berries, digging tunnels, doing whatever it is crabs do. We learned how to find them. And once we did, we thanked Dow Chemical for the napalm tanks and whatever medieval king decided to draw a border around a forest just so.

Because it made our job a hell of a lot easier. We'd just sit there, holding our sector, cigarettes dangling from our mouths, watching them burn. Didn't matter who it was — the red-painted elites, the worker drones and warpigs bred just to die on the other end our machine guns, the engineer caste carrying their kids on their backs like chimpanzees. Napalm didn't care. It stuck to them all the same, clinging to shell and flesh alike, burning through armor, burrowing into joints, lighting up the night.

Didn't use CBRN weapons often do, that was mostly in heavy besieged and attacked cities. But we also couldn't be bothered to call in nerve agent strikes — Sarin, VX, whatever leftovers NATO still had sitting in old bunkers — because it meant dragging out the CBRN suits. And no one wanted to sit sweating inside a rubber oven while the real work got done. No, napalm was simple. Honest, in a way. You saw where it hit. You saw it work. And you didn't have to second-guess if the job was finished.

Sometimes, when the wind shifted just right, you'd catch the stench — burning crab flesh, wet soil, charred bark. It was a smell that stayed with you. Some guys said it smelled like pork roasting. Some said it was sweeter. I just thought it smelled like victory — and a bit like something you should never, ever taste.

A few times, they'd manage to slip past the kill boxes. Someone on watch would spot them, and the rest of us would rouse ourselves and head over. It was usually the engineer's kids who made it through — until we caught sight of them and cornered them. They'd panic, sprinting on their five legs and arms until they were too exhausted to move. Some guys had firecrackers for moments like that. They'd toss one near the kid, and the thing would sprint again, thinking we were shooting at it. Always had that funny, frantic look on its face. Even with those strange, round black eyes, you could tell they knew it was over the second you lifted your rifle at them or fixed your bayonet, especially when you didn't want to waste ammo or bother waking up the guys who were still asleep.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.