The Human art of war

The battle for Raxil-4 had been going poorly. The enemy, a coalition of Heskari warbands and mercenary shock troopers, had pushed deep into the city ruins, cutting off entire platoons. Lieutenant Commander David "Mack" McAllister and his squad had been pinned down in the wreckage of a collapsed orbital relay station for nearly three hours. Plasma bolts and kinetic rounds screamed past their makeshift barricades, and the air was thick with smoke, dust, and the acrid stench of burning metal.

Nearby, Lieutenant Vel'thax, a towering, chitin-armored Xal’vakar, hunched behind a broken wall, clutching his particle rifle with all four of his clawed hands. His bioluminescent eyes darted from cover to cover, assessing their dire situation. His mandibles clicked with nervous energy.

"Sir," Vel'thax rasped, voice tinged with barely contained panic. "We’re surrounded!"

Mack grinned, adjusting his battered helmet and slamming a fresh mag into his rifle. "Out-friggin-standing! We can fire in any direction and be certain to hit the enemy!"

Vel’thax hesitated. His people had fought wars before, but never had he encountered a species that viewed being encircled as a strategic advantage.

"Sir... that is not a good thing," the alien insisted.

Mack slapped Vel’thax on the shoulder with a reassuring chuckle. "Nah, buddy, it’s a fantastic thing. Think about it—no wasted ammo looking for targets, no worrying about getting flanked—we are the flank now!"

Before Vel’thax could respond, Mack activated his comms. "This is McAllister to all surviving units in Grid Echo-Seven. I don’t care how beat up you are—we’re not done yet. The enemy thinks they’ve got us boxed in, but joke’s on them. We’re about to introduce ‘em to the good ol’ human pastime of desperate, vicouse last stands"

Vel’thax felt a creeping sensation in his gut. He had read about human military history. Their kind had a strange obsession with fights where the odds were hopeless—Spartans at Thermopylae, the Siege of Bastogne, the Battle of New Thermopylae on Mars. They loved turning unwinnable scenarios into bloody, legendary defiance.

And they often won.

Mack raised his rifle, his squad following suit. He grinned like a predator ready to pounce. "Alright, boys and girls! Let’s make this ugly for ‘em! Suppressive fire, frag out, and if they get close—introduce ’em to your best knife tricks!"

Vel’thax exhaled sharply. There was no reasoning with humans when they were like this.

A plasma bolt streaked overhead.

Mack kicked over a piece of rubble and opened fire, the counterattack began and the battlefield erupted in fire and fury.

Mack's squad poured suppressive fire into the surrounding enemy positions, using the wreckage as cover. Explosions rattled the ruined cityscape, sending plumes of dust and smoke into the air. The Heskari warbands—seven-foot-tall reptilian marauders—shrieked and ducked for cover, their crude but deadly scatter cannons blasting chunks out of the rubble. The mercenary troopers, clad in high-tech polymer armor, responded with disciplined precision, laying down volleys of plasma bolts.

But Mack and his people? They fought like cornered animals—with ruthless aggression and sheer audacity.

Vel’thax had seen human soldiers fight before, but never like this. Most species, when surrounded, panicked. They tried to break out or surrender. Humans, on the other hand, dug in and got mean.

Mack ducked behind a shattered concrete pillar, switching his rifle to full-auto. “Harper, Ortega! Flank left, lob some frags! Niles, keep that suppressive fire up! Vel’thax—” He turned to his alien lieutenant, who was still partially frozen in disbelief. “—start thinking like a human and shoot something!”

Vel’thax gritted his mandibles, tightened his grip on his rifle, and took a deep breath. If these mad primates were fighting their way out, then so was he. He sprang up from cover and unleashed a rapid burst of particle fire, catching a Heskari mid-charge. The hulking reptile collapsed with a wet gurgle.

Maybe these humans were onto something.

Ortega and Harper flanked as ordered, hurling grenades into an enemy position behind a toppled transport. The blasts sent shockwaves through the streets, scattering mercenaries like ragdolls. Smoke and flame curled into the air. The enemy's careful encirclement was already unraveling.

Mack grinned. “You see that, Vel’thax? They thought they had us, and now they’re the ones scrambling.” He fired another burst, dropping an armored merc to the ground.

“Classic human warfare baby!”

Vel’thax ducked as return fire peppered their position. “Sir, this is still a dire situation!”

“Yeah, but it’s a fun one.”

Before Vel’thax could protest, Mack activated his comms again. “Command, this is McAllister. We’re holding for now, but we could use some love from the skies. Any chance for an airstrike?”

The comms crackled. A weary but familiar voice responded: “Negative, McAllister. Air support is tied up in another sector. You’re on your own, but we'll send an evac shuttle as soon as possible. Just hold out McAllister.”

Mack exhaled, nodding. “Figures.”

Vel’thax’s bioluminescent eyes widened. “Sir, we do not have an escape route! How do you intend for us to survive?”

Mack checked his ammo count, shook his head, and grinned. “Easy. We kill ’em all before they kill us.”

Vel’thax hesitated again, then let out a resigned sigh. Humans.

The enemy, sensing the humans' refusal to break, started pushing in harder, advancing with a fresh wave of reinforcements.

Mack reloaded. “Alright, people! They wanna go another round? Let’s make ’em regret it!”

The battle raged on, and the humans, outnumbered and outgunned, fought with a fury that would be spoken of in war stories for generations. Because humans?

They didn’t lose when they were surrounded.

They became the storm.

The battlefield was a nightmare of smoke, fire, and bodies. The enemy kept coming, wave after wave, determined to wipe out Mack and his squad. But they weren’t giving up.

Vel’thax’s chitinous armor was scorched, his rifle nearly overheated. Harper had a bleeding gash across her forehead, Ortega’s left arm was limp from a plasma burn, and Niles was down to his last mag. Mack himself had taken a glancing shot to the shoulder but was still grinning like a lunatic.

They couldn’t hold forever. But they didn’t need to.

Vel’thax ducked behind cover, reloading. “Sir! Our position is deteriorating! Rapidly!”

Mack checked his wrist-mounted tac-map, eyes darting to a blinking red marker—something he'd noticed earlier but hadn’t had the time to mention. A half-buried, damaged fusion reactor, leftover from the orbital relay station they were using as cover.

A reactor that could be… persuaded to explode.

Mack’s grin widened. “Oh, I just had a really dumb idea.”

Vel’thax clicked his mandibles. “Those are your only kind of ideas.”

Mack laughed, slamming a fresh mag into his rifle. “Damn right.” He switched his comms to the squad frequency. “Alright, listen up! We can’t win a straight fight, but we can make sure these bastards don’t win either.” He pointed toward the half-buried reactor. “We’re sitting on a fuel bomb the size of a city block. We light it up, and boom, no more enemy force.”

Harper wiped blood from her forehead. “Uh, sir? That explosion would take us out too.”

“Not if we run really fast.”

Vel’thax stared at Mack like he’d lost his mind. “This is madness.”

Mack smirked. “This is human ingenuity.”

The squad took a half-second to process their commander’s plan. Then, almost as one, they muttered a collective sigh of why the hell not?

Mack turned to Vel’thax. “Think you can reroute the reactor’s failsafe?”

Vel’thax clenched his mandibles. “I can. But I’ll need cover.”

“Done. The rest of us will buy you time.”

Vel’thax sprinted to the reactor, claws scrambling over twisted metal. As he worked, Mack and the others unloaded everything they had. Grenades. Magazines. Even throwing knives. The enemy had no idea what the humans were planning, but they were beginning to hesitate.

Then Vel’thax shouted, “I have set the overload!”

Mack’s comm crackled with an incoming transmission—one he really wanted to hear. “McAllister, this is Command! We’ve got a fast-extraction dropship inbound! Get to high ground—now!”

Mack’s grin turned feral.

He grabbed Vel’thax by the arm. “Time to run, big guy!”

The squad sprinted through the ruins, dodging gunfire, leaping over debris. Behind them, the reactor was already groaning with unstable energy, a deep whump-whump vibration filling the air. The enemy, realizing too late what was happening, started retreating—frantically scrambling to escape the impending catastrophe.

Mack and his squad reached the top of a collapsed tower just as the dropship roared in, side doors sliding open. A gunner inside yelled, “Move it, move it!”

One by one, the squad leapt aboard. Mack was the last to jump, grabbing the outstretched hand of a crewman before they flew as fast as the ships engines could take it. The shockwave hit like a titan’s punch as the explosion erupted behind them, their dropship barely escaping the blast radius.

The reactor imploded before detonating outwards in a cataclysmic fireball. The blast wave flattened everything in a two-mile radius—buildings, enemy troops, even armored vehicles. The sky turned orange as debris rocketed into the upper atmosphere. The dropship bucked wildly, alarms blaring as it fought to stay airborne.

Vel’thax clutched a stabilizing bar, staring at the devastation below in awe. “By the void…”

Mack, sprawled on the floor of the dropship, panting, let out a weak chuckle. “Told ya… out-friggin-standing.”

Harper groaned. “Next time, less explosions, please.”

Mack grinned. “Where’s the fun in that?”

As the dropship sped away, leaving the burning wreckage behind, Vel’thax had one thoughts dominate his mind, a new understood. Something fundamental about humans.

They weren’t fearless. They were just too damn stubborn to acknowledge fear. And that? That made them the most terrifying warriors in the galaxy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey everyone and sorry for the delay in posting, I haven't had the motivation to write until recently. But i'm back with with a post based of a prompt I saw somewhere (My memory has failed me and I have no idea where I originally saw it) I hope you all enjoyed this read and, as always, leave any notes/feedback in the comments and if you have anything specific you want for me to write then send me a message!