The OP Lich is a Returnee, Chapter 56 (Patreon)

Chapter 56 – Tea

Brigadier Stanley Brown frowned as he read the documents. It was bad enough that the proper running of his base had been thrown into disarray by the influx of soldiers from across the Armed Forces. Bad enough that he had what older generations wouldn’t hesitate to call unholy abominations walking about, commanding some of HIS troops!

He could handle all of that. He was a soldier, come up through the ranks, and had just been accepted to the SAS when the Awakening happened. He’d accepted promotion when he aged out of his old team so that he could ensure that the men had the support that they needed. He knew about orders, and following them, even when he didn’t like them. And these orders had come from the King himself. There was no arguing against them.

No, that wasn’t what currently had his blood curdling. That honor went to the reports on his desk. The undead that were currently leading the training regime for new troops had been taking up range time at night, learning and fully familiarizing themselves with the weapons that the British Army had access to. He’d allowed it, for the simple reason that someone ‘outside the system’ might see weaknesses in their tactical doctrine, and areas where they could improve. These kinds of studies were done all the time, to try and keep ahead of problems, rather than finding out about them in the field, when it mattered.

Right now, however, he felt like someone who had asked for a car to pick them up, and had an entire convoy come through the side of his house. The Sergeant Major that was commanding the training team had collected his troops’ findings, and basically tore apart the existing arsenal of handheld and crew-served weapons. This wasn’t a case of finding a new weapon system to replace one that had aged badly, or to cover a gap that had opened. This was so much worse.

According to the Sergeant Major, without some magic fuckery called ‘enchantment’ or ‘imbuement’, anything less than the anti-materiel rifles would just tickle any of the troops that the Lich Queen brought back with her from the other world. The rifles, at least, could likely still kill one of the newest troops in a single hit, but even they would take multiple shots to take down a single officer in her army! The snipers of the world were going to get a rude awakening, unless they started getting enchanted gear. Like this was some kind of Dungeons and Dragons game.

The Sergeant Major and his people weren’t artillerymen, and they didn’t have artillery pieces at this base, regardless, so they hadn’t tested anything more powerful, but the trajectory was clear. Any weapons that the Army had been using to this point would need substantial redesigns in order to be properly effective against the kinds of troops that the Lich Queen had. And her training methods were already spreading, not just to his troops, but also in Japan and China.

If anything, he should be thanking the Sergeant Major. The report was definitely not what he would have wanted to hear, but it was what he needed to hear, what the Army needed to hear. It would take years to get the training spread throughout the Army, and longer for their allies and enemies to catch up, but that just meant that they had time to fix the problem with their weapons before it actually became a problem.

What the Sergeant Major had proposed was, essentially, stepping away from the industrialized mass-production of war, especially when it came to weapons. It included a shift in focus from automatic weapons with high rates of fire that focused on sending lots of bullets downrange to burst-fire or even single-shot weapons. Emphasizing quality of the weapon and impact on the target, rather than rate of fire.

There was still a role for the machine gun, according to the Sergeant Major: tearing through untrained levies that are used as fodder. That didn’t surprise him much. This was basically the use that they’d had since they were first introduced. However, not being able to use the machine guns to more than annoy or inconvenience main line troops charging at the position was not a concept that warmed his heart.

The problem with their current weapons, according to the Sergeant Major, was that you consumed too much ammunition to make enchantment or imbuement of individual rounds viable at even the squad level, to say nothing of a brigade or army level. Individual weapons could be enchanted, but that was time consuming, and really not something that was practical, except for special forces or other specialized elite units. The answer the other world had was making gear in such a way that it allowed the user to use magic through it. And there simply wasn’t enough time to imbue the rounds if they were firing on full-auto.

Instead, the Sergeant Major recommended an emphasis on shotguns and bolt-action rifles for line troops, enchanted pistols for officers, and a reintroduction of melee weapons as a primary means of attack! He was literally suggesting the use of shield walls, swords, and spears, on the modern battlefield! It would be laughable, if they didn’t have data to back it up.

The test he’d seen personally involved one of the ‘death knights’ armed with a one-handed sword, targeting a sheet of armor plate that would normally be used on a main battle tank. The death knight used some kind of magic ability to make her sword glow green. Then, she slashed the piece of metal in two, with a single strike! When he looked at the piece a moment later, the edges of the cut were melted, like they’d been exposed to a powerful acid.

To further highlight the insanity of the world they were living in, that same strike had then been blocked by a shield another death knight had carried, as it glowed with magic. Magic fuckery to stop magic fuckery. It meant that, going forward, the teams were going to have to change and adapt to this new reality.

The men in the training group were not all taking that new reality well. The special forces guys were grumbling about the need for retraining. The Air Force pilots were in their own little worlds, talking about whether they could make their planes shoot ‘magic missiles’, and figuring out just to what extremes they’d be able to push their planes when they could take twenty G acceleration like it was a jog. Actually, the ones with the most issues were the Royal Guards. The idea of them needing something other than their traditional uniforms to be effective at their jobs was galling to them, but some of them were (privately) joking about raiding the British Museum for some of the ’old fashioned’ armor sets. He had one of the NCOs go and remind those troopers to not joke too loudly about such things, or in mixed company.

“Sir, we may have a problem.”

“Just the one? The day must be getting better.”

The lieutenant who had entered shook his head. “Sorry, sir. A new problem. The guards have noticed some suspicious activity around the perimeter, and we’ve had reports from town of some ‘tourists’ who all have American accents.”

“Tourists? That’s shite, and you know it. There are no tourist destinations anywhere near here. What do those Yanks think they’re playing at?”

“Most likely, sir? They want to ‘cheat off our homework’, like Intelligence suggested they would. They haven’t approached the Lich Queen directly, and she hasn’t done anything that they can try and squeeze her on. It isn’t like they can apply economic pressure to her, after all, and, by all accounts, her compound in the mountains there in Japan could hold off a division.”

“Oh, my. It must be so difficult for the Americans to have found someone that has something they want, and they can’t just make them sell, or ‘freedom’ it out of their clutches. Such a shame.”

“Quite right, sir,” the lieutenant smiled. “Do you wish to send a response?”

“Yes, find out where these Americans are staying, and have some tea sent over, with a note telling them to drink it instead of throwing it in the harbor. You better include instructions on how to properly make tea. The poor sods still think you can microwave it!”

“Very good, sir.”

“Oh, and Hughes?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Send a copy of everything to the Sergeant Major running the training camp. And ask them to at least let us know ahead of time if they’re going to do anything off the base. If someone manages to penetrate the security of this base, then what happens is on their head, but off base, I would at least like to begin damage control before the reporters find out.”

“Of course, sir. I’ll get on that right away.”

(Elsewhere)

“What the hell is this, Jackson?”

“It looks like tea, sir.”

Special Agent in Charge Bradley Reynolds just glared at Agent Emilia Jackson. “I know that it is tea, Jackson. I want to know why a case of fifty boxes of tea was delivered to our safehouse. The secret safehouse that no one is supposed to know about, and certainly isn’t supposed to have deliveries coming up to it, with the courier saying it was addressed to ‘American Spies’!”

Emilia sighed, and said, “To be fair, sir, this is the SAS’s home turf. It isn’t out of the ordinary for them to have sources in town. Someone probably rumbled to us when the team was out trying to install the surveillance equipment around the base.”

The case of tea had shown up exactly at 3:30 pm. Included in the package was a letter addressed to ‘American Spies’, which had instructions on how to properly make tea, along with the pros and cons of cucumber versus egg and cress sandwiches. The final straw was the admonishment not to throw this batch in the harbor.

As pranks went, it wasn’t that bad. There were some far more vicious pranks pulled at Langley, after all. But those were not from a foreign (and allied) military, that they were supposed to be spying on!

He sighed, as he turned away from the tea in disgust. This whole mission was a bad deal. Trying to spy on an allied government was distasteful, but it was sometimes necessary, to keep everyone honest. Trying to spy on a military base got tricky, since the security was more intense. And this was the home of the SAS, so even the janitors had years of background checks and security clearances, making the traditional means of getting an operative on base or turning one of the people on base into an asset weren’t going to work.

Trying to interfere directly with the so-called Lich Queen’s business had backfired extraordinarily, with the team getting delivered to the Ambassador, in broad daylight, by the Yakuza! And the team were basically braindead. No chance of recovery.

He knew Tom, one of the agents on that team, for years. They went to Princeton together, had started at Langley the same year after graduation. He’d been best man at Tom and Sheila’s wedding. And he had to be there when Sheila told the doctors to end it.

He wanted to get some payback for them, but that wasn’t his mission. Not this time. He needed to get information on the training that the damn undead bitch was giving the Brits, since the damned Limey bastards weren’t sharing. Some allies they were.

But their surveillance had been spotted, and they had been tracked back to the safehouse. Apparently, going with the tourism angle had not been the disguise that Operations thought it would be. Sure, there were a lot of American tourists in the UK. But they didn’t come to this part of the UK, which just made them stick out.

He wanted to abort, but, if he called off an operation just because someone delivered tea to the safehouse? His career would be over, and he’d never get a chance to make those undead abominations pay. He needed to at least get some results before pulling the team out.

“Is the safehouse under observation?”

“There’s a truck that has been at the end of the street since the tea was delivered.”

Right, so they were under nominal observation. But they could slip one vehicle. They could still get something to show for their efforts.

“We scope out base security yet?”

Emilia nodded. “Yes, sir. We haven’t spotted any additional protections, and the special gear from Langley should allow us to get around the current security.”

“Right. We’ll wait for nightfall, and then sneak in, steal some of the training materials, and get out. That way, we can at least have something to show for all this as we go home.”