Underspire: A Forgotten Ruin War Journal

Book : Related to: Forgotten Ruin

by Jason Anspach, Nick Cole, Walt Robillard

Genres: War & Military; Space Marines

Synopsis

Dig Deep! The Rangers Are About to Set It Off!

What starts as a mission to control a key area of a city under siege becomes a relentless race against the clock for Ranger Team Leader Louis Campbell. One minute Lou and his team are fighting Saur infantry looking to stab them in the face, and the next he’s saddled with a bunch of dwarven sappers looking to breach the city's catacombs--or risk losing the city of Sûstagul to a tidal wave of undead.

The Under Roads are no simple tunnels, but these are no simple dwarves. Dispatched by the dwarven king and led by a dwarf known as the Ax Rider, they come prepared with cunning, modern weapons, and a bit of dwarven know-how. Aided by Lou's Ranger Team, they must negotiate the alien underground landscape to destroy their target: an engine of malevolent power known as the Underspire.

In the war for the Ruin, some battles must be fought in the dark!

This stand-alone novel is set between the events of Forgotten Ruin Books 6 & 7, but can be enjoyed without having read them. The Siege on Underspire takes you beneath the streets, to fight the battles you didn’t see coming. Grab your rifle and unsheathe your ax to join Louis and the dwarves in their bid to shatter the Underspire before it’s too late!

 

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Release date: March 19, 2023

Publisher: WarGate Books

Print pages: 342

Sample

I’ve had men of all types try to run a blade up on my grill.
Ya feel me?
All types. Ain’t no lying about it when you been to as many places as Rangers have. For decades we were on “the pump,” meaning a constant rotation out there, all up in the world’s business because as it was our business to be. Scout, track, and raid, hit and fade, until we plain wore out hard and put away wet whatever operators we’d soaked over a certain period of time. Then, train a new batch as feral as the last and turn ’em loose in the general direction of the chaos you want to cause and watch Ranger magic happen. Which brings me back to my original point. In the doing of said Ranger business, I’ve had all colors, creeds, and cultures at my throat with a knife, looking to do me harm.
Par for the course, some rich dude might say somewhere on a long walk ruined. Or what others call “golf.”
I’ve seen things that would turn your hair white if I were to tell you the half of it. But nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the day we, as a company, flew out through a portal to another time from none other than Area-51. Yeah, bro, that Area-51. But then again, who am I kidding? Who reading this will even know what that place is?
People think, but they don’t know. Write that large over everything anyone says. Unless you’ve been there, done that, and gotten the scars to get you a drink at the EM club, then kindly shut your piehole, attend and know wisdom. If you have, let me buy you a drink, brother. I bet you got some real-deal “so, there I was…” stories to tell.
Still, the Old Man, our CO, said that writing all this down was important for those who take up the trigger after us. I’ve read our boy Talker’s journals, and they’re alright. Dude didn’t mention me once in all that scrawl he done wrote all over every scrap of paper he could find. He even put a chapter or two on a shield. It was funny to watch him re-scribe that junk from the surface of the thing onto paper.
That’s dedication.
So while I’m getting the hang of all this pencil-and-paper thing, I wrote that first bit to see how I’d do, getting it down. Now that I spent the last forty-five minutes writing this and crossing off that, I think I can scribble without sounding like a lunatic. So, some ground rules.
Rule One. I ain’t gonna write like some scholar PFC “Flavor of the Deployment” Talker. That boy is so far up the SMAJ’s ass, he can probably see daylight past the man’s tonsils. And if you’re reading this, Sergeant Major Stone, please don’t kill me.
Rule Two. I ain’t gonna write everything as it happens. My job is to see the mission done and give a fair and accurate assessment of the events. But in the doing of my duty to my brothers, tapping the trigger comes first, followed by all this report writing stuff.
Rule Three. The trigger is king.
Coming on this roll through the gate has led to some infinite possibilities for all of us. No social pressure. No debts or regrets. We came here and found the universe pulled the rug out from our feet only to find a clean slate under it all. No government looking to do us dirty when they pull their brand of evil. No people claiming to live for America only to find they live for themselves. And thankfully, no more fake-ass people on social media pretending it’s real life.
Here, it was all about real opportunity.
You may want to take a moment and imagine the beauty of the clean slate. There is a certain freedom, and terror, in that. But, I tell you straight… this is the way I wanna live, and I’ll smoke a demon to make sure this is the standard.
Task, meet purpose.
So what I’m trying to say is, after this mission for the old man, I’m going to take a page out of Sergeant Thor’s playbook and roll this place for everything I can. Anyone who stops me from making that happen is going to get a very violent lesson in taking it to the street. For those that don’t habla, I’ll take this to Talker Town: I plan to kill anyone or anything keeping me from reporting I am mission complete to the old man so I can go about my Ranger business.
This brings us back around to my original point. When we deployed from Area-51, we were supposed to go forward in time by a hot minute and land on the other side to reestablish America. What we found was the tunnel we went through shot us ten thousand years into the future into some Lord of the Things craziness you just can’t believe. Some primeval force had taken our world and turned it mythological Bronze Age. Like, straight out of some blockbuster movie with a crazy big budget and big movie stars for days.
I don’t like those movies. I like martial arts movies. But only so I can criticize how much they get wrong. Call it a passion. Call me Bruce. Also, I just like ’em. They’re fun and the sound effects for broken bones are usually pretty much on point.
I’m a connoisseur. How’s my driving?
Which is why I ain’t jumping to Hey-I’m-not-Talker-telling-you-about-coffee-and-some-probably-smokin’-hot chick-named-Sidra-that-had-a-Porsche-and-Ranger-this-and-Ranger-that.
So… there I was, a lizard man trying to stab a dagger with a crazy carved handle into my throat. Bro, if you had told me about all this mythology stuff tripping out into the real world trying to kill us, I would’ve called you out. Ya feel me? But no joke, there was a lizard man straight up trying to gouge out my throat with the funkiest dagger I’d ever seen.
It was like if you took two knives and slotted them so they fit together like a plus sign or an X. That handle, though. Here’s me, being crushed by two hundred and fifty pounds of corded muscle with a scaly head something between asp and alligator, and all I can focus on was the knife. Meanwhile, Lizard-Almighty’s hovering over me, pressing down with those slime-soaked scales—say that three times fast—threatening to cut up the last intact Crye Precision shirt I had left. Not that it wasn’t ruined already from the bucket of drool sifting through a mess o’ gator teeth.
The handle had this thing like you see in those old Egyptian pics. The knife sported a beetle at the crossguard but with bird wings. Below where the bug formed the guard, someone carved this shapely señorita down the length of the handle, reaching all seductively toward the beetle bird part of the knife.
I know. I know. Funky thing to think about when the tip of the ice pick dagger is an inch from my eye, but here we are… thinking about it. Hey, life comes at ya fast. Sometimes even with a weird Egyptian dagger that turns ya to stone or makes you love the noodles-and-balls MREs.
Sucks to be you.
For real, though. This thing crashed through a wall while we were sending rounds down the street to halt the enemy advance. Some lizard man leader must have been like, “I can’t get a foothold into that alley. Alligator commandos, post!” And post he did! He slammed through the adobe walls like they were tissue paper and he was the Kool-Aide man like we used to watch on Saturday morning cartoons when I was coming up.
“OH YEAAAHHHHH!”
Corporal Dagher caught the guy coming in and the thing pulled this freaky belly dancer dagger and stabbed him in the shoulder strap for his plate carrier. The blade bounced and dug into the meat of his arm something fierce, even as Dagher plucked his own gator-sticker from his gear and proceeded to sewing needle this monster in the ribs.
I should keep an eye on him in case he suddenly starts asking around for the noodles-and-balls MRE. Then we’ll get Chief Rapp to voodoo his curse. Or whatever the green beanie did.
Ol’ boy lizard man wasn’t having any of this ferocity and palmed our guy like a basketball. With one arm, he threw the corporal into the ceiling. For some reason, everything Reptile King Tut did reminded me of stuff from when I was a kid.
Remember those Super Balls? No? They were these tiny rubber balls, and with just a bit of strength, you could rocket those things from the floor to the ceiling and back again. Man, we got into some trouble back in the day with the stuff we broke playing with those things.
So, Reptilian Tut snatched a handful of Dagher’s gear and launched him into the ceiling, where said corporal promptly bounced off it and throttled into the floor. Dude didn’t even PLF. Lack of motivation. Recycle. Judging the seven-foot-tall lizard dude to my rear was a bigger threat than anything we were catching from down the street, I rolled back to drop some lead into that fool when he charged me. I got my MK-18 just high enough to put a round in his thigh during the rush. The freedom seed tore his leg up something fierce, but not enough to keep him from crashing into me.
I took the hit and leveled some serious hurt into where I hoped were a set of ribs. I had on my Oakley duster gloves, with the hard carbon fiber knuckles. I sailed some shots into this dude when he dropped me into the table we were using for laying out mags, where the kid we’d found was loading ’em up for us. The damn thing—the table, not the kid—broke under our weight, and I landed flat on my back with two hands on this monster’s wrist so he wouldn’t drop the dagger in my eye. So I got a real good look at the poetry that was this knife.
Just off to my flank, the kid was pressed as tight as he could get into the corner. He reminded me of all the kids that used to come out and play with us when we were in Afghanistan. He was dusky with long, loose fitting clothing to keep from being tortured by the sun. And just like when the shooting in the other place would kick off, this kid had lost his way and was found by a squad of Rangers tasked with funneling the enemy forces away from this road. Poor little dude was terrified.
Shoot at me all you want, bro, but don’t mess with no kids. Ain’t no way I’m gonna let it play out like that.
I juked my head to the side and let Colossosaurus-Rex drive the knife into part of the broken table where it got all sorts of stuck. The next bit was keeping his head, with all the teeth he was putting on display, away from my grill and neck. I yanked him into my guard, wrapping my arms around his skull so he couldn’t whip his giant alligator mouth around to do me dirty. I wasn’t going out like that.
“Kip! Vent this guy!” I shouted to one of my guys.
There wasn’t even a breath between when I called it out and Kip sent it in. He straight-up half-turned and blew the inside of Lizardicus’s head all over the floor. Bits of cranium littered the room in swaths of bloody gray as our enemy skirmisher slumped to the floor. Which was just in time for another lizard dude to come in behind him.
“Vented!” Kip shouted as he went back to feeding Coleman on the MK-48 we were using to spray down the alley, so the reptiles would choose somewhere else as a cut through.
From my not-so-cozy spot on the ruined wooden table, I recovered my rifle on its sling and sent two rounds into this poor imitation of our original attacker. No cool knife. No initiative to rush us through the wall. He was just going to retread the same ground as his poor dead buddy on the floor so he could suffer the same result.
Lizard guys. Long on muscle, short on brains.
As the back half of this gun team, it was my responsibility to keep them from becoming the little spoon for a platoon-sized element of hostile, overgrown geckos. I got to my knees, ready to do my Ranger business on the next numbskull pushing his way through the door, or the hole in the wall made by the dead lizard commando stinking up the side of my fighting position. At this point, you’d think I locked in for whatever trouble came at me. You’d be wrong. Ain’t no way I woulda pegged the next tango for a twitchy, spasmatic lizard man pouring through the breach while slapping himself.
I also wasn’t ready for the creature to make it two steps into the room, with an over-muscled midget riding its back, dangling from his hold on two ax handles. Muscle guy had buried one of the axes into the reptilian’s heavily muscled, serpentine collarbone, and was using it like a handle to keep himself on top. He had his other hand choked up on the other weapon and punched the ax head like a set of brass knuckles, pounding and lacerating the lizard man trying his darndest to buck or slam him off.
The animalistic warrior stumbled about the room as the last hammer blows of the little man’s ax against his other ax nearly severed his opponent’s head. It dropped, and he rode it down to the floor with a sickening crack. Pulling that buried ax free from the reptile’s neck made the same squish your boot makes when you step in deep mud and try to walk out. The sucking slurp echoed through the room and I almost lost all the calories I’d gained as my MRE from that morning threatened to come back up on me.
Little guy got to his feet and whistled toward the door he’d just haphazardly rode a lizard guy through and nodded to me as though reporting his mission was complete. As if I was the guy he was supposed to report to. C’mon, bro! I’ve got enough to handle with my own fire team; I shouldn’t have to babysit homicidal Minecraft oompa-loompas to boot.
More of the armored dwarves stalked through the door, crusted in mud and blood, and slapping each other across the armor hard enough to make the plates clack. Lizard-riding dude got the most hype from his fan club as they stacked against the back half of the room.
“You talk this?” he asked me as he loaded up a bolt into a crossbow.
“Bro! I’m surprised you talk this!” I laughed. I walked through them toward the door, and pied the corner to an empty alley leading towards a building, creating an L-shaped corridor and directing the street away from our position. “You cleared us out from the back? That’s solid.”
Rider guy must have liked my commentary on their tactics because he held up his fist as a sort of salute. I could almost hear the leather and armor creaking in his hand as he squeezed. “We are here for support, to help you. Sergeant Chris sent us to keep the alley. We’ll keep the alley clear if you watch our back when it’s time.”
“Shoot. If Sarn’t Chris sent you guys down here, I’m all about it. Thanks for the help, brah,” I said.
A simple nod was all I got, and all I ever need when back-briefing incoming troops. We worked with the locals on several different pumps before I’d ever heard of a Tachyon Singularity Tunnel. Those other guys—the indigs?—man, they couldn’t back-brief if you paid ’em. Getting info out of them when they showed up was like haggling with a car dealer. They had a game to run, and until the rules were met, there was no intel coming our way. Eventually, we told them to either clue us in or find their way out. But not the dwarves. These cats were all business, ya know? They came in and got to it. Real pro.
Ax Rider Guy stepped his foot into the crossbow and yanked back on the string. The metal-banded bow attached to the stock creaked like Sergeant Major’s back when you ask him to get up from his camp stool. The dwarf soldier was wearing plate armor like a plate carrier, with their version of cargoes leading into shin plates over thick-soled boots. His left arm was wrapped in a sort of wristband, but his right was covered in an ornate plate attached to the wrapping. Even in all that gear, I could see muscle. This guy was ripped like my man Monroe. If there was a gym for these guys, my homie was the high priest.
“Tell your man not to shoot me, please,” Ax Rider said.
I gave Coleman a tug on his drag handle. “Give the little piggie a break. Use the time to switch barrels and lock in new links. Our guy here has something up his gauntlet.”
Coleman turned to find half a dozen dwarves behind him. “Whoa, Big Lou! When did these guys show up? And what’s with the dead handbags?”
Coleman’s girl was one of those you see at some of the barbecues when the families get together. Sergeant Joe was always hosting a party or hang out to make those stuck in the barracks feel like they had more than just a room and a wall locker to their name. Cole’s girl—Serena, I think—was this gold digger townie who loved to show off the latest things, barely covering what the good Lord gave her. But man, if she wasn’t into spending his money on the latest handbag made by some guy with all sorts of labels, you can call me the president.
Anyways, Coleman had taken to calling the lizard people “handbags,” like if we skinned ’em and put a Ranger scroll on it, we could corner the handbag market here in the Ruin. Imagine us going from the world’s premier raider force to hosting a corner store at some bazaar while we snapped our fingers at passersby to get them to look.
“Hey, mistah! Ranger brand. Authentic Saur skin. You won’t find any better in the Ruin.”
Man, I just reread that, and it was funny because it’s what the hajis back in the day used to say. I guess you had to be there, but it also made me realize I might have missed a few things starting out. So, let me back up a bit, ’cause there ain’t no way I’m erasing any of this scribble. I could have recited this on a talk-to-text with my battle board, but the captain wanted it all real, Rite-in-the-Rain, with pencil.
At the end of the world, the powers-that-be hatched a plan to send us forward one hundred years to act as a security element for whatever power brokers were going to step through and restart civilization. Multiple planes went through, and we were scattered through time. The place we ended up, the main man, unit historian Talker, called it “the Ruin,” because it’s what he says everyone here calls it. As for our unit, we were a company-strength element of the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment with some straps added in, but this place has not been kind to us. We’ve lost some folks. Right now, we’re involved in some heavy fighting in a city called Sustagul in our attempt to knock out a people called the Saur, the handbags, before they can wipe humanity from the map.
Now that you’re all caught up—back in the room we were using as a corner bunker to keep the street clear of Saur infantry trying to roll past us and shoot our people in the pooper, I answered my man’s question. “They slipped in through the corner alley. No idea why the demo didn’t go off.”
“We were fighting to you,” Ax Rider interrupted. “We paused your traps. All is okay now, Ranger.”
“I was going to make fun of Kip for his tripwire skills, but if our guy here says all is okay…?” Coleman said in that annoying way he did where he let the back half of his question hang.
Ax Rider calmly walked past my machine gunner and leaned from the window, crossbow and all. Ahead of him, the Saur infantry poured from the buildings in a mad rush to take the street now that our magic thunder stick was no longer thundering. Another dwarf joined him at the window, and let me tell you, this guy was weird. He had a weird way of walking and a helmet with a chain mail veil so thin, I swore it was a mix of metal and silk. The newcomer with the metal mask whispered over the Ax Rider Guy’s weapon and tapped a finger on it, before hurriedly backing up.
So, the other thing about the Ruin—magic is real. And in most cases, deadly real. We have one guy who’s trying to get clued into it, but he’s just getting his feet under him with learning it all. So every once in a while, this place feels it necessary to remind us there’s more to war than bang and bullets around here.
Whatever whisper the dwarf said over the arrow hung in the air. It was joined by another voice, then another, until the whisper became a chant. Within seconds, hundreds of voices echoed the chant until I swore the whole city could hear it. Then the drums started with that guttural growl, like the song in the video game everyone was playing for a while. You know, where the guy said he couldn’t adventure anymore because he took an arrow to the knee? But this song was everywhere and it was so powerful, I felt it in my bones, as if I was a part of it. Part of them and their clan. And somewhere in the back of my mind, and I didn’t know why, I knew the first words.
“Join, rise, fight!”
Our Ax Rider buddy was chanting in time with it, as did the rest of the dwarves in the room. He vaulted the windowsill and landed in the street facing the rushing horde of Saur infantry ready to paste us because we’d stopped shooting. They were close in feet, not yards now, and it was only a mad minute before these guys rushed over us in a bloody tide.
I almost questioned my judgment, but the chant held me back. Held me up. I’d seen inspirational stuff before, the kind that would have even the most cracked-out anti-American hauling up Old Glory, but this was next level. This was more than just the charisma of the moment. This was magic.
Ax Rider set his foot back like he was going to fire the Karl G and pulled the long metal trigger to set off the crossbow bolt. The shock wave from the dart leaving the weapon blew Ax Rider into a stumble that nearly tripped him off his feet.
But for the rest of us, time slowed. The single bolt hung in the air just ahead of the crossbow, trailing this ghostly smoke as it crawled through the space. And I’m going to admit this here because I wasn’t ready to then. That’s when I saw them. Dwarven ghost soldiers, clad in armor like Ax Rider, some even rolling in full King Arthur kit, materialized in the alley, aiming their own weapons. In that frozen moment, I either had to believe the entire street just filled with phantom infantry, or it was time to buy a condo smack-dab in the middle of crazy town. The undead dwarven king—and somehow I knew who he was—nodded to me like he approved.
The ghosts all pulled the triggers on their crossbows and time resumed.
Time flashed at full speed again, the single bolt becoming scores, hundreds, thousands. They sailed away even as Ax Rider stumbled in the other direction from the force of the magic being released. The front rank of the charging Saur collapsed under the onslaught of the bolts whistling through their bodies as though launched rather than loosed. High pings off of abandoned wagon carts and open windows echoed through the alley and smashed into brick and mortar.
I stepped into the alley with my MK-18, ready to kill any Saur that even looked at my man, Ax Rider, the wrong way. There was nothing. The handbags were laid out in the street a hundred deep, primed to be skinned for Coleman’s line of designer purses. Usually in a heavy fire incident like this, there was someone who made it or got covered by a body who’d be groaning right now from getting that arrow to the knee. But there was nothing. Just silence. They were all dead.
Behind me, Ax Rider was on one knee, leaning against the crossbow. His body smoked like he’d just worked Cardiac Hill around the old airfield on Benning on a cold morning. You probably wouldn’t figure me for a history buff, but I love the old stuff. I talk like a thug sometimes because of where I grew up, but hard-core history is right where I liked to spend my mental currency. And this cat was some kind of knight, if not a Knight Templar, straight from the pages.
“They saw you,” Ax Rider said.
“Who saw me?” I responded while I tripped over to him. “C’mon, man. We gotta get back in the house. We don’t know what other buckets of crazy these cats are gonna pour from. Like, they’re throwing all the evil today, like octo-bird artillery or slithering hoochie assassins. We gotta roll, bro.”
He took my wrist, like I’d seen the dwarves do when they’re hanging with Sergeants Kurtz or Chris. “Yes, brother. Let us retire to building. You must guard us now for the next. For the plan.”
“Wait a sec, bro. Who saw me, and what plan?” I said, keeping his grip.
Those fingers turned into a vice around my wrist and, no joke, I thought he could break my back through a handshake right there. “The old kings saw you and they approve. We need a guide to the Underspire and you, Louis Campbell, are it.”