Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo, Part 7 of 17

The Steel Sergeant, pride of the Soviet Union and inspiration to millions of desperate fighters, first took up her armor during the brutal Siege of Leningrad. As her story is revealed, Hercules Chen and Fast Freddie reunite with old enemies and make all new ones.

This is Part 7 of Hercules Chen, Zero Hunter: Toroka VS Mecha-Tsuyo. If you’d like to avoid spoilers, read Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 first.

Content warnings: violence, gun violence, death, gore, mild swearing, sexuality, tobacco use, alcohol use, creeps, Nazis.

The Steel Sergeant.

TUESDAY NIGHT, NOVEMBER 10, 1942
PANZERRITTER KORPS BARRACKS, PETROVSKAYA
LENINGRAD OBBLAST, U.S.S.R.

//Translated from Russian.//

Lera slipped out of the snoring Nazi’s bed, careful not to make a sound. The storm outside shook the entire building. She looked at the door. All she had to do was leave.

But she was tired of half-measures.

All she’d had to do was keep her mouth shut when they’d needed volunteers for the Road of Life. But they had called her ‘Little Lera’ again.

‘She’s as big as a mule, make her work like one,’ they’d said. She let them get under her skin, just like when she was a child.

She could have kept a better lookout for Nazi ambushes. She could have just let herself sink when the ice broke beneath them. She could have fought and made them shoot her. She could have tried to escape before they passed her off to an officer. She could have denied the Nazi’s advances.

Then he’d called her an ox. She had made him want her.

She could have snuck out into the night once he’d fallen asleep, once he was done with her. She didn’t.

Instead, she locked the door from the inside and choked the sleeping Nazi to death with her bare hands.

She could have left after that, but she found the Nazi’s necklace wrapped around her fingers. A car key was dangling between his dog tags.

That’s when she snuck out of the room, down the stairs, through the wind and snow to the detached garage. She had expected to find a kubelwagen inside, maybe a motorcycle.

She had nearly screamed when she opened the door. Twelve silhouettes stared her down. She fell back, scuttling through the snow on her bare rear. She stood when she realized they weren’t men but two rows of empty armor posed on stands.

Lera had never seen their like before. The armor was run through with pistons and tubing and each set towered over even her. The dead Nazi’s key popped open the fourth set in the first row.

Standing there, nude, slick with steaming blood, studying the dead man's gleaming armor, something called to her. Its shoulders were built for a broad frame, its legs for a wide stance. She had always had a sturdy frame, with wide shoulders and thick thighs perfect for loading trucks after the men left for the front.

The suit fit her perfectly, as if designed around her body. She buttoned up the leather inner layer, pinned the chain mail, zippered shut the rubber wrap, and latched the interlocking armor plates over top. It was a puzzle that she could not have solved before she’d been conscripted into the Red Army’s motor corps.

As soon as the last piece was in place, she donned the helmet. The mask itself was flat, a steel plate with only two narrow slits for her eyes. She could barely see, but she could see enough.

As soon as she lifted her knee to take her first step, she felt an engine rumble to life on her back. Suddenly she was almost floating, her every movement mimed by the pistons and engines within it. Her first steps were awkward, and she plowed through the garage door like she was walking through paper.

Lera looked up at the barracks. She had killed one Nazi with nothing. With the armor, she could kill them all.

It only took a small tug on each empty armor’s engine to tear it free. In turn, they were reduced from weapons to iron maidens.

When she finished her trek up the stairs to the top floor, she found the commanding officer first. She hadn't enough practice with the suit or with killing to do anything other than make his death hesitant, messy, and loud.

The Nazi commander had captured a flag and had pinned it to his wall. She pulled it down and draped it over her shoulder pauldrons. If the fabric had not been red already, it would have been by the time she was done.

The Nazi commander’s screams, brief as they were, woke the entire barracks. Lera let the other women run, it was not their fault that they were there. It was survival. She wouldn’t ruin that for them.

She stopped the Nazis. Some had time to put up a fight.

Her punches put them through walls. Some tripped and her stomps nearly burst through the floor. Their bullets were louder than they were painful. They might as well have thrown acorns at her.

The few that escaped ran for their own armor suits in the garage. They were yelling at each other, trying to repair the damage she had done, when she rushed the door.

They broke to pieces before her. Even heavier, larger, she moved faster than them. She cut down those who tried to run. Some picked up tools and tried to sneak around her. She caught each one. Even her lightest hits nearly decapitated them.

Lera snatched up the last living Nazi by the throat. His combat knife clattered foolishly against her chest and face. She squeezed until he dropped the knife. He fell in half on either side of it.

The walk to Leningrad was slow, but for once she did not mind the snow. The rubber suit and diesel engine on her back kept her warm.

When she trudged onto the front lines, Nazi blood hanging in crimson icicles from her gauntlets, the hammer and sickle flying golden across her back, they never called her ‘Little Lera’ again. She was welcomed with cheers and salutes.

General Ryazonova and the commissariat arrived two days later. They brought a portrait artist and a plan. Her likeness was to be plastered across the Union from Vladivostok to Archangel, white ice to Black Sea. They wold make her an icon.

Every Russian battling through the Great Patriotic War would know her real name. Every man, woman, and child would know the exploits of Valeriya Vinogradova and her crimson armor.

The Zero Hunter.

SUNDAY EVENING, JULY 11, 1943
TAA KEI, REFUGEE DISTRICT
PROVINCE OF MACAU

“These generous men knew a bit of my history when I began incurring debt with them,” Leatherfell whispered to Blue. He popped out of his seat and beamed wide, smiling like a clown at the newly arrived pirate. He raised his voice like the killers were beloved relatives who had been away too long. “Good to see you, Venju, and your mates. My friends, this is Penurious Venju, my generous host since my arrival in Macau.”

“A pleasure,” Oxford said, though his irrepressible manners could not hide the trepidation in his voice.

Penurious Venju studied the officials without speaking for a long moment. He twisted the end of his thickest braid while he contemplated the scene before him. He looked past the foreigners and addressed Leatherfell as if they couldn’t hear him.

“I make you new deal, Tuskie,” he giggled. Venju grinned, showing off his meager collection of teeth under a sparse mustache. “Japanese pay very good money for whites. You give me those two and the Hindi, we are even.”

“Not a chance,” Hercules growled. His kunai and fillet knife appeared in his hands.

Venju began laughing hysterically. The troop of glowering men behind him stayed silent. Hercules recognized the two sailors he had shoved earlier, waiting in the back. Venju eventually calmed himself, letting his howls of laughter die off into bubbling snorts.

“Chinese, we have too many. I kill yours for free,” Venju purred to Leatherfell. He glanced lecherously at Hye. “And I keep her.”

“Who in the blazes are these devils you are mixed up with?” Oxford growled at Leatherfell. Venju's attention snapped to Oxford.

“I am sailor, but your war took away my sea, Hindi,” Venju snapped. He yelled something back at his men in Filipino. “Now we do what we have to.”

“Don't be so modest, Venju,” Leatherfell said. “You were a pirate.”

“The best pirate!” Penurious Venju screeched. His men cheered. The Moro pirates had been plundering the seas around the Philippines for hundreds of years.

There was a commotion behind him, and Venju turned to face the door. The gang parted for a small girl clutching a large leather sack against her chest.

Hercules used the distraction to hiss at the other officials:

“Whatever happens, do not start shooting unless they do. We do not want the yajirushi on us, too.”

“Or to start an international incident with Portugal,” Oxford added.

“Yeah, not that either,” Hercules grumbled. He rolled his shoulders and stretched his back, ready for a brawl.

Before them, Venju had drawn a serpentine kris short sword out of the bag and was admiring its wavy edge. The pirates around him had also pulled their own weapons from it, from heavy rods to hatchets and machetes. Venju smiled and patted the weapon-toting child on the head. She beamed back, a mirror of his deranged grin in miniature, then scampered out the door.

“My niece,” Venju explained. “She likes to help her uncle.”

“She would be very disappointed if something happened to you,” Hercules observed, matching him manic grin for manic grin.

Venju studied Hercules' blades, and then the officials behind him. Oxford revealed that his walking stick had concealed a rapier blade, which he held out before him. His time on the Oxford fencing team would make him formidable. Oakley held her shotgun cane like a baseball bat. Just because she could not shoot did not mean that she would not crack a few heads. Hye had assumed her taekkyeon fighting stance, and Blue had produced a foot-long lead pipe from under his coat.

“My niece would much more disappointed if her uncle did not come home with yen-heavy pockets,” Venju replied. He stood on his gnarled bare toes and looked over Hercules' head. “New new deal, Tuskie. Those three for the Japanese, the Chinese dead, the girl for me, and a free ride to Sydney. Much better than ten corpses. What do you say, Tuskie?”

Hercules and the officials turned to look at their drunken colleague. Leatherfell was standing dead still, one hand on his knife, the other on his pistol.

“Well there, Venju, that is a banger of a deal. And it was only nine stiffs,” Leatherfell said. He snapped his thick fingers until the scotch bottle appeared on his hand. The bartender ducked back down as quickly as he reappeared. “A ride out of this hole, free as a jaybird, done with this damn war...”

“Or a second chance, and the greatest hunt men have ever encountered,” Blue said. Leatherfell chuckled and swirled the scotch around in the bottle.

“A doozie, I tell you,” Leatherfell said to himself. He took a big swig of the bootleg scotch and considered his options.

“Are you yanking my chain?” Hercules snarled. He wasn't one for patience. Or for compromise.

“I'm thinking, mate,” Leatherfell snapped. He slammed the bottle down on the bar, shocking the unconscious woman awake. She sat up, rubbing her bleary eyes. The woman was Chinese, middle-aged, and thoroughly disheveled, with her makeup smeared everywhere and hair that looked like it had been through a tsunami.

“Tuskie?” she asked, squinting even in the low, flickering light. Hercules could smell the stale booze on her breath from halfway across the room.

“Yes, darling?” Leatherfell answered innocently. He smoothed down a mat in her hair. Some of Venju's men snickered.

The hungover woman transformed from a sleepy cat waking up in a sunbeam into a howling banshee. She slapped the smirk off Leatherfell's face and began screaming in Cantonese. As far as Hercules could tell, it was a dispute over splitting a bar tab.

“Jia! Darling!” he was yelling, but she kept smacking him. Leatherfell ducked away, stumbling into Blue's back. Veniu's men rolled with laughter. Jia finally realized how many people were watching her, which only made her madder. She snatched the scotch bottle off the bar.

“Darling!” Leatherfell yelped, but the bottle was already airborne. He ducked under it, and the thick bottle soared right into Venju's forehead, breaking into shards and splitting his leathery skin open.

“Ah ah ah!” he hissed as the brown liquor burned in his open cut. He patted his bleeding head wound in an effort to alleviate the pain while he hopped up and down.

Jia gasped. The realization of what she had done, and who she had hit, struck her like a lightning bolt. Penurious Venju was notorious in her city. Leatherfell wasted no time. He grabbed Jia by her slender wrist and shoved Blue and Oakley out of the way.

“Looks like the lady made up my mind for me, let's rack off!” he shouted. He swatted one of the lamps off the table, right into Venju's chest. The booze-soaked pirate's long hair went up like a lightning-struck oil derrick.

Venju screamed and shoved his men out of the way on a mad dash out the door. His filthy braids crackled and filled the room with acrid smoke. The pirates stared at each other in confusion for a long second, then piled out of the bar, chasing after their leader and yelling.

“Let's go, mates!” Leatherfell shouted. He barreled through the officials, shoved past Hercules, and dragged the dazed Jia out of the door.

Hercules was close on his heels and charged up the narrow staircase, only to run into Leatherfell's back. Oxford and Blue piled up behind him, and Oakley and Hye were stuck on the stairs.

“What in the devil is it?” Oxford asked as he extricated himself from the dog pile.

Then he saw the sunset.

The entire block had gone silent, from the busy shopkeepers and mischievous children to the pirates, to Penurious Venju himself, dripping and steaming after dunking his head in a rain barrel. They were all standing still, looking west.

The sky bled crimson, not the warm goodnight of an ending day but an angry arson blaze. The color reached up from beyond the horizon, leaking into the sky until it infected the blue. Nothing in nature had ever created a fiery wasteland in the sky such as that they were witnessing.

It looked like the world was burning.

A woman screamed, and the street burst in chaos.

Civilians began running, scooping up their wayward children and hurrying home. Penurious Venju shook the dirty water off his face and spun on his heel to face Tusker Leatherfell. He pointed his curving kris at the mesmerized officials while screaming orders at his men in Filipino.

The pirates regained their senses and turned on the group of officials. They were angry, distracted, and hungry. Hercules shook his head, then sheathed his knives. These were desperate men, not trained killers like the Girudo.

“Hye,” he called, “Let’s clear the way. Blue, get everyone out of here.”

“Sure thing, Boxer,” Blue said. “Let's move, Tusker. Oxford, watch him, Oakley cover our tails.”

“Yeah, yeah, what are we waiting for?” Leatherfell asked. He threw Jia over his shoulder.

“She's not coming!” Blue protested.

“She just set one of the most dangerous men in Macau on fire, she can't stay,” Leatherfell shot back. “He's a bit of a stickler.”

“I chop you all!” Penurious Venju screamed with rage.

“See?” Tusker huffed.

The pirates charged.

Hercules and Hye met them at speed. Hercules dodged past a swung ax and gave its wielder a punishing spinning backhand fist to the side of his bald head. He slipped past another three pirates and their machetes before burying a foot in a tattooed man's stomach. The man dropped his iron rod and doubled over to find Hercules using his back as a spring board. The Shaolin pilot flipped into the air and extended, finding one pirate with a hammering punch, another with a mantis kick. It was the pair he had shoved back in the alley, and they fell unconscious after his strikes.

Hercules landed in a crouch and whipped his leg out in a spinning sweep, wiping out yet another charging pirate.

Hye had not slacked behind him, reaving through the men Hercules had slipped past with a flurry of hits, locks, and throws that took out anyone who opposed her in seconds. She dashed over the men she had broken and engaged another pirate, snatching the oak truncheon out of his hand and breaking it and his wrist in a single strike. She paused only to knock the wailing man out before surging ahead and tossing a snarling pirate through a boarded-up window.

With that, Penurious Venju was alone. To the burnt pirate's credit, he stood his ground before the two whirlwind martial artists who had just thrashed his men. He whipped the kris around to hold them off.

“You will never set foot in Macau again, Tuskie!” he howled over Hercules' head.

“That's ripper with me!” Leatherfell shouted. He followed Blue past, Jia still struggling on his shoulder and with Oxford and Oakley in tow.

“You, Chinaman, we will find you,” Venju swore between sword slashes. “There are Moro in every city in China. If you or your Korean witch ever set foot in this country, watch for me behind you.”

“Let me make it easy for you, Venju,” Hercules growled. “When this war is over, find me in Shanghai.”

He charged the madly swinging pirate, ducked his desperate slash, then broke the wavy blade with a single bare-handed strike. Before he could land the knockout punch, Hye leaped over his shoulder and connected a flying hook kick with Venju's bloody forehead. The pirate went down in a pile of charred hair, leathery elbows, and faded tattoo ink.

Hye landed gracefully, then smiled and winked at Hercules before he could object, saying:

“He threatened me, too.”

“Don't get hung up with the ladies, Chen!” Leatherfell called back. Jia was pounding on his broad back and shrieking.

“You are one to talk, ‘Tuskie'!’” Hercules called back, then took off after his team with Hye.

“Arun! Arun!” Blue was shouting. The young guide was nowhere to be found.

“Forget it, head west!” Oakley shouted. They put the freakish sunset ahead of them and ran through the snaking alleys and cracked streets, knocking the dazzled masses out of their desperate path. Enraged shouts followed in their wake.

The Moro pirates were massing behind them.

A revolver cracked a couple blocks back, hissing a bullet past Hercules to pop an overripe melon. Juice showered him and Hye as they ducked and weaved into a street crammed with makeshift produce stalls. The shoppers, formerly entranced by the blaze on the horizon, broke into chaotic panic, clogging the thoroughfare. Three more shots sounded out, though the bullets flew high. Puffs of brick dust and plaster marked their trajectories.

A high-pitched voice pealed above the scampering crowd's ruckus. Penurious Venju had recovered quickly, and he sounded mad. Hercules risked a look back.

Venju was standing on top of a freshly overturned cart, oblivious to the malnourished ducks escaping from the broken cages. Blood poured from the forehead wound Hye had widened for him, staining his face and chest crimson.

His forces surged around him, charging on cue to every swing of his broken kris. He clutched an ancient revolver in his other hand. The pirates split into three prongs to attack and flank the sprinting officials. A maniacal laugh escaped his split lips as he leveled the revolver and fired. The shot peppered Hercules' calves with sharp pebbles and shattered lead.

“They are trying to cut us off!” Hercules shouted ahead.

“Good luck with that!” Blue called back. “I don't even know where we're headed!”

“Bollocks,” Oxford cursed, an occurrence so rare that Oakley almost tripped over her own boots in shock.

The crowds before them had had time to clear out, leaving the desperate officials room to run. Leatherfell was huffing, sweating through his linen shirt and through his still-struggling paramour’s green dress. Over the big Australian's wheezes, a brassy, reverberating sound rumbled up the block, bounced off the ramshackle buildings, and echoed back down the street.

“What is that?” Blue wondered aloud.

“Gongs,” Hye replied.

“They're mobilizing everyone,” Leatherfell gasped.

“Everyone?” Hercules asked.

“Venju's just one captain out of a whole fleet of stranded pirates here,” Leatherfell answered. “They run the big smokey.”

“They have adapted admirably to terrestrial criminality,” Oxford muttered.

The ringing alarm was joined by others, until the sound came from every direction. The civilians knew the gongs all too well, and they abandoned the streets within moments. Even the bloody sunset couldn't distract them into facing the pirates. Everyone left outside intended violence.

Clamoring men poked their heads out of windows in every building the officials ran past, sometimes following up with a heaved knife or bottle, and always with a blistering Filipino curse. Pirates poured out of doorways all around, stumbling with throbbing hangovers or opium-induced clumsiness. They clutched cleavers and machetes, bricks and hammers and chains and hacksaws. One man even struggled to hold onto the reins of a snarling tusked hog that had burst out of the front doors of a flophouse.

“Move, move, move!” Hercules was yelling. He deflected a flung butcher knife with his gleaming butterfly daggers then kicked a support out from a precariously-built balcony. The brittle structure came crashing down behind him to block the street and bought them precious seconds of respite from their pursuers.

Hercules could see throngs of armed pirates running on the streets parallel to their route whenever they passed an alley. Gongs sounded up ahead. They would be surrounded in minutes. A new plan was needed: flight had failed them.

“Stop, stop, stop!” Hercules yelled. The five officials and a hefted Jia halted in a cluttered intersection. Angry shouts sounded ahead of them. They were cut off.

“They have got us in a pincer, it is time to stand our ground,” Hercules said. The overturned tables and forgotten carts that were littered in the intersection would provide the best cover the officials would find. The others nodded, recognizing the value of cover as quickly as Hercules had.

“Guns out, boys,” Oakley said. She flipped her faux-cane around, ready to blast the first pirate she saw with buckshot.

“Stay calm, official,” Hercules said.

“Bugger that,” Leatherfell growled. He grasped at his holster and seemed surprised to find it empty. Jia smoothed out her dress, then slipped a tiny PPK out of some unseen pocket. She cocked the hammer back. Leatherfell crooned: “That's my girl.”

“What did I say about shooting?” Hercules objected.

“Captain Venju was not particularly reluctant to cause a stink,” Oxford replied, pulling a Luger from his waistband.

“They fired first,” Blue pointed out. He had slapped a sawed-off shotgun together from the pieces he had smuggled off the ship.

“Am I the only one without a gun?” Hercules asked.

“No,” Hye replied. She pulled a pair of Baby Nambu pistols out of her wide sleeves and handed one to him.

“Eyes up,” Oxford growled. He nodded toward the west. A mob of pirates had turned the corner. Three more gangs appeared, cutting off their escape routes. Fighting through was the only option.

“They may have us out-manned,” Leatherfell said, “But Venju's the only one of the bastards what carries a heater. That's their deal with the police: keep the city calm, and no guns.”

“There are police here?” Oakley asked. “Where the hell are they?”

“I hope we don't have to find out,” Leatherfell answered.

“The police here have turned themselves into an army. they have been preparing to hold off the Japanese for years,” Oxford said. “They will not react well to foreign agents starting a war on their streets.”

The rumbling mobs were closing in. The group approaching from the west was lead by Venju himself, dripping blood and shaking with rage. The gongs had gone silent.

“So that loon is the only one packing?” Blue asked.

“Far as I have seen,” Leatherfell replied.

“Thunder Crash Slam?” Blue considered aloud.

“Thunder Crash Slam,” Hercules confirmed.

“Agreed,” said Oxford. Oakley nodded.

“What?” Leatherfell demanded.

“Pop off a shot or two at the flanks, enough to make them hesitant, then concentrate fire and rush the strongest point,” Oakley explained. “We're hitting them in the forehead.”

“Again,” Blue added.

“Best plan I've heard all day,” Leatherfell said.

“On three, officials,” Hercules growled. A half-dozen hammers clicked back.

“One,” he said.

“Tuskie!” Venju screamed. He was barely a block away. “Deal is off! I take you all!”

“Two,” Hercules growled.

The pirates were closing in. The ravenous hog squealed with delight and gnashed its yellow tusks. Men clanged their rusty blades together. Desperately-emptied bottles crashed to the ground. The stink of a hundred murderous pirates added to the odor of the over-crowded city.

A shrieking whistle cut through the din. The pirates froze in place, silent.

“Double bugger,” Leatherfell whispered.

Venju spun on his heel. His mob split in half to allow a dozen men to stroll through.

The Portuguese police officers were clad in paramilitary uniforms, khaki and leather with armored throat guards and red steel helmets. Each carried a long gun on its strap, and a wooden truncheon on his hip.

“Doninha!” Venju howled. A small officer stepped forward at his call. Venju began berating the man in Cantonese. Doninha listened calmly to the pirate's spitting barks, nodding gently. He was short but sturdy, like an Iberian bulldog. He stroked his thin black mustache, then put up a white-gloved hand in Venju's face.

The pirate captain reared back, only for the smaller man to break his nose open with a single strike from his oak club. Venju collapsed to the ground. Doninha spit a jet of brown tobacco juice onto the fallen pirate.

Before Venju's crew could react, another police officer fired a rattling salvo of shots into the air from a fully-automatic PPSh-41. Each of the dozen cops shouldered his firearm, quickly picking individual targets out of the crowd of tattooed killers. The Russian sub-machine gun roared again, scattering the assembled pirates. Venju whimpered and dragged himself away after them.

The hard-eyed police officers watched the pirates melt away before they turned their attention to the besieged officials. The leader wiped Venju's blood off his club onto the leg of his pants. The fresh red mark joined a dozen other faded orange stains that he had collected.

“Foreigners,” he said, smiling through cracked brown teeth, “You are under arrest.”

The Steel Sergeant.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, DECEMBER 4, 1942
CENTRAL SQUARE, DUBROVKA
LENINGRAD OBLAST, U.S.S.R.

//Translated from Russian.//

The bullets colliding with Valeriya Vinogradova’s face sounded like a bag of marbles being dropped on a platter. She could tell by the sound that they were no larger caliber than nine-millimeter, so she ignored them and trudged forward. Her boots crunched through ice, fallen bricks, and scattered brass with each step.

The Germans were hiding from her, firing from rooftops and shadows. They had learned to fear her hammer, and her gun.

Valeriya took the six remaining steps to the appointed spot in the center of the intersection, then turned. She raised her sledgehammer in her left hand and her DP machine gun in her right, posing for the film crew that trailed her through the snow. The crumbling skyline of the occupied city was splayed out behind her, smoke rising in columns, black against the bleak winter sky.

“Onward, comrades, for the...” she boomed, her voice projected by the suit to careen off the blown-out buildings around her. But she trailed off, her lines whisked out of her mind like gunsmoke in the wind.

The political officer stood from his cover, ice glistening in his beard, waving his script as he shouted:

“'Onward, comrades, take back your Motherland!' It is not hard to remember!”

She grunted while the exasperated man fumed.

She wasn't a public speaker, much less a film star. Until the commissariat had taken notice of her, Valeriya had tried her best to never speak at all. She sighed, took a deep breath, then raised her weapons again in the pose she'd practiced, the pose that graced a million posters pasted across walls in every Soviet city.

“Onward - !” she tried, only for a swarm of lead to plink off the top of her helmet.

She rotated back around to face south and leveled her machine gun at the third floor of a scorched apartment building. Two Nazis were up there, firing their little machine pistols at her. Rounds skipped off her chest and shoulders. She steadied her machine gun and squeezed the trigger, letting off rattling salvo. The men shied back as her bullets tore away at their cover. The grenades dangling from her belt were close and eager. She snatched one of them free, pulled the pin, and launched it with all of her hydraulic strength. It sailed through the Nazis' open window.

She turned to face the camera again, smoking gun in the air, just as the grenade burst. shattered concrete and shredded fascist bodies cascading out of the building behind her.

“Onward, my friends - !” she roared, only for the political officer to stand up again, his face red where it wasn't blue.

“'Onward, comrades!'” he shrieked.

“Yes, commissar!” she shouted back.

She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. The man, the shitty little man, had tasked her to advance the Party's war efforts. She would do her duty. Besides, she had a lifetime of dealing with shitty little men. The political officer was no different.

She could not believe that Major General Ryazonova had left her to him. She had thought her Office above such pettiness. In the end, though, both Vinogradova and Ryanzonova were Russian. Even they must acquiesce to the will of the Party.

Fresh rubble and twisted corpses scattered around her while smoke billowed into the air. She was growing as impatient as the man from Moscow, but one word from him could get her armor, her name, taken away. Once she lost her name, she had nothing else.

Her cool demeanor and dedication to her task did little to sate the commissar's impatience. He charged out of cover, the script rolled up, as if he wished to swat her with it. Steam was blowing out of his flared nostrils.

“I swear, you cow, you have the brain of a - !” he howled, only to be interrupted himself, this time by a rifle round splitting his forehead right in half. His own pig brains dyed the snow behind him, as well as his stoic camera crew.

She ducked down, pistons hissing as she forced the German armor to twist and bend. Of all the horrors she faced in this damned city, snipers were the worst. She knew the panzerritter armor could stop their bullets, but they sought its gaps at her eyes, neck, armpits. She curled into a ball like a hedgehog. A bullet splintered off the high collar at the back of her neck, centimeters from the gap at her jawline.

“Do you see him?” she shouted at the cameramen. The blood-spattered pair stayed silent, tucked behind their lens, huddled under rubble. She grunted. Her voice was already deep, and it grew feral with stress. Even barked at, the commissar's men proved useless.

She risked a peek under her arm, only for a bullet to skip off her shoulder, too close to her eyes. The kraut was brave at a distance. He fired again. The round left a bright scar on her steel-clad forearm.

The scored metal was as good as a pointing arrow. The Nazi had holed up in the leaning bell tower of a shelled church.

She stood and loosed the rest of her DP machine gun's drum, peppering the entire face of the old steeple. Anyone with half a brain would be forced to take cover from her barrage. She did not know what saint the old building had been dedicated to; she was not from Dubrovka and any sign of what god the building once hosted had been burned away during the Nazi advance.

The camera crew continued roll; there was no one left to order them to cut.

Vinogradova charged while the sniper was still cowering, lowering her shoulder and blasting the splintered doors off what remained of its hinges. The fractured building shuddered from the impact, then she was inside.

Winter light cascaded through the church's bombed-out roof. Cracks ran through its thick walls. The pews had been chopped up for firewood. She found the steep stairs leading up the bell tower. She could hear Germans cursing above her.

She took the stairs two at a time, letting the hydraulic supports encasing her legs carry her toward her enemy. They were ready for her when she crashed through the door. They had their rifles loaded and bayonets fixed.

The Germans had names for her, she was known to them.

“Dieb!” one yelled.

“Nutte!” the other screamed.

“That is not my name,” she grunted, but her voice was muffled by their rifle fire.

Their bullets careened off of her, leaving scrapes in the fresh crimson paint covering her chest and shoulders. Their bayonets dragged across her plating, leaving their own jagged silver scars. The Nazis stumbled backward, unsure of what to do with a titan standing over them, unaffected by their most violent efforts.

“You will teach the others what to call me,” she promised.

They were wearing tattered great coats over their soiled uniforms, stolen off the bodies of her comrades. These offered no protection against her. The men collapsed under her assault, folding over the rolled steel head of her sledgehammer. One splattered against the stone wall, the other was catapulted through the very window he had been firing from. As quick as she had entered the room, her business was done there.

She took the time to shatter the Nazi weapons over her knee, scattering the pieces across the floor, then strolled out of the tower room. The cavity which once held the grand bells stood empty. They had been melted down for their brass during the last war, and the Party had not seen fit to expend such resources to restore obsolete institutions.

She sauntered down the stairs, taking her time.

Back home, in Vyborg, they had called her 'Ox' and 'Sow.' They called her 'Little Lera' because she towered over even the older boys. No one spoke to her except to make their little jokes. She had been thick of body and neck even during the hungry times, and her face had always been worse than plain. When Churchill took power in England, they began to call her 'Bulldog.' But in the war, she had earned a new name, a new life.

She exited the church, back into the howling cold. The cameramen were waiting, still turning film. They grinned when they saw her, splitting her blue lips.

“That was amazing, Valeriya,” they said. “Now the line.”

She smiled behind her faceplate. She was not 'Ox,' no 'Sow,' no 'Little Lera,' not anymore, not ever again.

They called her by her name, Valeriya Vinogradova, Hero of the Neva, Red Queen of Leningrad, the Steel Sergeant. She lifted her hammer high over her head. The kraut she'd launched from the bell tower lay crumpled at her feet, belly-up like a dead spider. She settled her heavy boot on his chest and posed over her prey.

The camera chattered as it took in the grandiose scene.

Her voice boomed in the frigid air, loud enough to raise the hearts and spirits of an entire nation:

“Onward, comrades, to... your... Motherland? Dura!”

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.