The flare-ups

(This is something I came up with lying in bed trying to sleep, I was gonna send it to my brother since he's my unofficial notes app but it was too long and I didn't want to type it on a phone.)

A click, then silence for a few seconds

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Noise

Tiny soft noise as the cassette begins to record the ambience. Then the sound of metallic sliding is heard in a horrible quality and footsteps enter the room. One set of heavy footsteps that sound like a gorilla in platform boots and another lighter pair with nothing of note about them aside from a longer than average stride. A youthful chuckle from the figures followed by the loud ejection of phlegm from a deep and raspy throat.

"You're smart to wear that mask, I couldn't see a damn thing out there.", A deep breathy voice with a southern accent broke the semi-silence. 

The cassette struggled slightly to record in a decent enough quality as the weak metal structure the recorder was placed inside vibrated with the bass of man's loud voice.

A younger voice replied.

"I didn't want to, they just threw it in with the rest of the crap in the box. I thought it was mandatory since it was the only one."

"How good is the breathing on it?"

"A lot better than whatever you had I assume"

"That's why I ask I didn't have anything, I forgot this bandana was decorative and grabbed the wrong one"

"You keep your gear with your decorations?"

"I just let it drop where it falls, never been an issue before now"

More snorting and more coughing comes through the cassette as the large man attempts to clear their airway out. Then light footsteps ending with creaking noises as the partner sits down on some piece of wooden furniture.

"Yo, I have a question"

"Shoot"

"If you can take out their vehicles that easily why don't you just sweep the entire area with a small team and stop dealing with them altogether"

"We're not "dealing" with them, they're not a threat. It was the only one on that dam they tried to save."

"Alright...so does trying to save one vehicle mean it was important?"

"They had a pretty simple tell. Four vehicles, two Batteries and two generators, why would they move a small truck with a laser shield when they could move one with over 300 missiles capable of shredding our flak"

"They're clones, they're meant to be shredable but the generators block longer range stuff, that's Diane's specialty she's the one commanding"

"Yes, but she was given cob launchers. They don't care about generators they specialize on emplacements."

"But wouldn't they want to save a generator for the people who hadn't made it onto the planes?

"Generators are no good when you've got that many foot soldiers walking through them. A battery would've been more useful...if not for this"

A heavy thud falls onto the wooden floor, it sounds metallic but mainly just sounds heavy

"So even if they didn't intend to save the generator the dam waters would've flowed in our direction and they didn't want to risk losing this"

"So why did they carry it in a generator truck?"

"They needed to justify their presence in the area so they planned an evacuation, low level stuff, and they used that to carry it out of the bunker and into a plane headed towards morocco"

"I guess that makes sense"

"Yeah because the bigger of an attempt they make at protecting something the more valuable it seems so they tried to hide it in a low level mission that-"

"That we couldn't care about yeah I get it"

"I found it weird that you came along"

"Me too, I didn't know why I was assigned until I saw the truck being saved"

"So again, why didn't you just rush the vehicles and wipe them out?"

"Didn't want to be seen, I assumed they didn't expect me. Diane and I don't tag team often anymore, not since the mess in the jungle"

"Did you used to work together often?"

"Oh yeah all the time"

"You guys compliment each other pretty well."

"We had to, battlefield was a different place back them. Everyone used to be on the field"

"Everyone?"

"Yes sir"

"Why did we stop doing that? The combined might of the devils could wipe their capitals quickly"

"If we could have we would have done it. You're still pretty green but we aren't the only ones to mess around with "Commander" troops."

"They have Devils too?"

"They call them some other shit but yeah. The battlefield used to be a different place you'd have around 20 different people just going at it. For every Devil there'd be a direct counter, then there'd be a counter to the counter and so on"

The large figure moves again and sits down on something that squeaks loudly like a couch or a bed before making a very large thunk as it broke.

"We were young kids having fun on the battlefield, we'd completely forgot we were in a war."

"So what happened?"

"His name was Sarge, his entire thing was a soldier carrying hundreds of pounds of explosives and weaponry. He was a direct counter to this one german guy who could do magic and stuff, pretty cool power. One day the german guy was on the move so we sent out Sarge and they did their thing."

"Is-is magic really real?"

"Yeah but it's pretty fucky, theres a spirit magic that you have to convince to work with you and a whole bunch of other stuff, it's pretty contradictory. But that day Sarge had gotten him pinned down and was trying to finish him off before they sent in this asshole who's got the ability to clone himself... but, he couldn't so i was sent in early to stop the cloner guy. I climbed over a small ridge and saw Sarge about to feed the guy a grenade when it happened. A small soldier with his rifle aimed at Sarge and pulled the trigger. He didn't care that Sarge was eight feet tall and could bench a bus."

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"The bullet went straight through and left a hole the side of a pill bottle on the other side. We'd spent so long trying to counter a specific soldier that we completely forgot to focus on the rest of the fight, those magic-cancelling sigils and all his talismans didn't do shit against the most basic of their soldiers' guns. When we realized our mistakes the soldiers started firing on us and they were no longer scared. It was a massacre as hundreds of gimmicky supersoldiers and mythical warriors were culled by standard issue peashooters."

"Is that how you lost your leg?"

"What? Oh. No I lost that to my dad a bunch of years ago. But the word got out pretty quickly and the hundreds of deaths turned to thousands within a week. In the end only about 32 are left. There's been an attempt to bring back those kind of soldiers but with how specialized they are it's pretty difficult to justify them, you're only here because you got lucky and landed a really good power."

"Oh, so is there still a counter to you? A soldier who specializes in taking you out?"

"In a way, but rather than exploiting my weaknesses she specializes in them and keeps me from getting squashed by some lucky punk like Sarge did."

"Was Sarge anyone to you?"

"No but he was someone to the big guy, ended up trying to bring him back with some voodoo magic or whatever and made a corpse possessed by it's own tormented soul. We just call him spike now"

"So the thing with the bag that smells like egg armpits and moldy dog is Sarge?"

"What's left of him"

"So why did he try bringing him back? Was there a sentimental reason?

"Kind of, they're related but West only wanted to bring him back because his body was the only dead one who could take it. The other corpses he tried were too weak to handle it so they'd dissolve or they'd come out weak. Those had wings strapped to them and were turned into vultures"

"Why didn't he do that with the the rest of the Devils that died?"

"Because sarge had his magic blockers his soul was mostly intact in his body. Since they were mostly religious in nature"

"So there's a real religion?"

"Kinda, but it's a whole thing"

"Wait, why didn't everyone else wear them? The magic blockers?"

"They burn if you have enough to be useful and he was the last of a weird anti-religous race that we though died out in 300 bte so they don't burn him"

"What?"

"The books in your quarters aren't decorative"

"Mine are"

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"Hey the sun is going down, you want to move when it's dark?"

"Nah I feel like i've done all I was sent here to do. Besides I want to take a nap"

"Alright, I'm just gonna chill here I guess"

Silence filled the rooms for the last few minutes of the cassette. Nothing more was said as the cassette ran out of minutes and automatically clicked off.

"They should've heard it after it finished recording, the click on those things was pretty loud back in the day." A woman spoke, three people were seated at a table in a small dark room with a cassette player, a short slender woman with a orange hair sat to the side, an older gentleman with grey hair who was supposed to leave work an hour ago, a soldier in white armor standing by the door, and another soldier in the same armor covered in mounds of dirt and blood sitting opposite the other two. The old man spoke up. "They didn't need to erase or destroy it, even if they found it, they only confirmed our suspicions that we lost another medallion and revealed that their soldiers run around in costumes. This is of very little use to us". The old man stood up and walked out of the room quietly.

If you found any issues or the story lacking too bad I probably won't care enough to fix it but still feel free to speak your mind I'd still like to talk about it. This entire thing is also rushed because I had to pee halfway through.