The Eastern Theater Command had extensive experience dealing with swarm-type jin beasts.

Fan-scan radar guided automated weapon stations to systematically eliminate the ratmen charging forward in waves, while precision snipers picked off mid-tier and high-tier ratmen with rifle fire. The rat knights riding their rat-beasts were a different problem — bullets weren't the answer. The rat-beasts' thick pelts deflected small-arms fire without difficulty, and the pelt garments worn by the rat knights offered similar protection.

The rat knight and rat-beast combinations worked in unsettling coordination. Despite their size, the rat-beasts were fast and absolutely fearless. They could direct the low-, mid-, and high-tier ratmen around them as expendable screening forces, using waves of lesser ratmen to absorb fire and cover their own approach.

Burning through ordinary ratmen as the price of admission, a cluster of rat knights closed on the armored vehicles. Their weapons caught the light — bone implements, silver-bright, the Activity cores of some unknown jin beast stripped out and fashioned into blades and spearheads. The craftsmanship was crude, but the material was real.

These were core armaments. In the hands of rats.

Crack.

A bone spear drove into an armored vehicle's plating. The rat-beast underneath the knight simultaneously raked the hull with its Activity-core claws — fast strikes, relentless frequency.

From inside the attacked vehicle, several precisely-made core lances extended and drove into the rat-beast's body, punching holes that sprayed blood. Then the six-barrel rotary cannon opened up, pouring rounds into the gaps the lances had made.

The rat-beast went down making a sound like a whine. The rat knight was cut apart in the concentrated fire.

The whole exchange had an almost anticlimactic quality. The rat-beast and rat knight, for all their apparent intelligence and ferocity, died quickly when the kill zone closed on them.

On a large enough battlefield, individual advantage could be averaged out of existence.

But there was never just one. In the crashing tide of ratmen, there were always more rat-beasts and rat knights finding angles on the armored vehicles — pressing in, doing damage, dying. The suicide-charge pattern ground forward relentlessly,…