#Afrika's Dusk
###By Avalanche ###Status: Semi-Canon
Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel grimly wiped at the sweat beading his brow, adding another slick of grime across his forehead. Overhead, the dim electric light stuttered for a moment, abandoning him to the darkness of midnight for an instant in North Afrikan desert.
The flatbed transport truck he rode in jolted and a errant bead of sweat dripped down, lightly smudging the ink of his dairy. Around him, his surviving aides organized reports and annotated maps, squashed hip to hip in the cramped conditions, strained their ears to listen in on static washed radio reports under the flickering electric light. They were sweating just like he was, even though none were wearing their disused dress uniforms. The desert was a harsh place, a place of dualities, burning in the day, freezing at night. Or so it should have been, but those new weapons of the Neuroi, the hellfire, set the night itself alight.
Another gust of warm air blew into the flatbed truck that served as the last command center of the Afrikakorps, blowing past the tattered canvas covering and teasing the edges of splayed out maps, held down by sidearms and empty ration cans. With it, came the smell of diesel, metal and ash. The ashes of burning cities, the stench of free burning fuel, the tang of vaporised metal and distantly beneath it all, the tantalizing scent of cooked meat, the smell of his soldiers trapped within their tanks cooked alive by the liquid lightning of the Neuroi.
Swallowing down the nausea, Rommel blotted the drops of sweat that dotted his journal page, leaving smudges of black on the pages, and flipped back.
How had it gone so bad, so fast?
Cairo then Alexandria within a single week in the West, Baghdad, Basara and Al Riyad in the East. A shattering offensive that washed across the Seuz canal, extending as far South as Aswan and Jiddah.
A force that had stood on the defensive for so long suddenly lashing out. Rommel personally did not like Patton as a person, much too much focus upon ascetics for Rommels comfort, but as a fellow commander they had brought their forces together against the Neuroi with a synergy that Rommel rarely found. Then within a single month, that combined force that had held through thick and thin had its back broken in twain, Patton dead, and he himself forced to retreat to Tobruk.
Humanity staggered in shock at the attacks. Rommel's own Afrikakorps were hit especially hard as news arrived that all the other forces of Karlsland had fallen in a blaze of glory against the Neuroi at Berlin. Then, fists were clenched, teeth gritted and reinforcements flowed in to every front.
Rommel gave a silent salute to all his fellow soldiers of Karlsland, to Patton, then dusted off older maps, rolled up his sleeves, and swore to retake the oil fields of Egypt by the end of the year, the Seuz canal, the lifeline of Europe, the year after that.
Rallying his grimly determined veterans and the incensed Liberion forces which had broke off with his Afrikakorps after Patton's death, Rommel marched East from Tobruk with his reinforcements, whom trained on the move to allow them to perform the manoeuvre warfare which he favoured. In the hardest fought battle of his life, Rommels dislodged the Neuroi from both Matruh and Siwa within a single month, his newly bolstered and triumphant forces marching into the cities to the cheers of the civilians whom had miraculously survived.
That night at Matruh, Rommel looked East, hoping to gain a glimpse of the ancient walls of humanities oldest standing city.
He could see hope again. He could see the road to Cairo.
It was never to be.
As quickly as the Afrikakorps arrived, they were forced to retreat as another great tide of Neuroi charged at him, even as another fresh round of reinforcements arrived at Tobruk. Bitterly falling back again to the coastal fort, Rommel marshaled those new reserves, whom had barely managed to finish their drills to standard, forming a fresh army out to meet the Neuroi head on.
He could have won, he should have won. Prodigious use of artillery that had strained his supply lines to the limit and concentrated pushes from his elite armoured divisions pinned the Neuroi ground forces against the coast, where support from the Ottoman, Orussion and Britannian fleets should have allowed him to smash the offensive to pieces. The air should have been clear, Rommel had received reports that the Neuroi forces of the Suez canal had utterly exhausted their air forces in a charge through Ostmark.
Indeed, as the battle intensified with human bombers dropping their payloads with impunity from beyond laser range, the great guns of battleships beginning to speak out and witches near contemptuously dodging ground fire, the beginning of a tremendous counter attack to sweep the Neuroi all the way back to the Suez canal appeared to take shape.
Then, Neuroi air forces, along with a second wave of ground forces, emerged en mass, having set out and burrowed under the desert sands in the dead of the night. Rommel was outflanked, his spearhead suddenly finding itself enveloped, but he was not defeated, he could withdraw his salient of troops fast enough that loses should have remained favourable to him, with the initial Neuroi forces along the coast still under bombardment from the fleets.
Finally the Neuroi revealed their true trump cards. Rommel had read reports of the lasers which could turn in midair, the invisible weapon speculated to be sonic in nature, and of the radio interference given off by the Neuroi and had scrambled to think of counters, but when the Neuroi of Afrika showed no signs of using any of these new weapons, intelligence suggested that the new laser was a localised adaptation. The new Neuroi forces quickly put that hope to rest. Barely did the reports of the homing lasers go out before the entire North Afrikan coast descend into the darkness of radio jamming.
For eight hours, Rommel paced in front of the comms station at Tobruk, hearing nothing but static. What reports he did hear were not positive, calls for support from battleships, their tall masts and powerful generators allowing them to burn through the jamming and report of Neuroi naval ships of all things engaging them. Then two particular loud squeals of static forced the operator to pull off his earphones with a shout of pain, Rommel shook his head, wondering what on Earth could possibly generate such powerful radio waves.
Dusk descended, and both the east and west horizons glowed red.
The first of the forces Rommel sent out returned. A single witch, carrying two of her fellows. In dribs and drabs, troops returning in tattered convoys, bearing more injured and dead than hale hearty troops.
Not a single bomber returned and Tobruks harbour remained empty, the waters still.
Rommel had personally met the returning troops, receiving a briefing from a emotionless kapitan, who's voice never wavered and whose haunted eyes never stopped looking a thousand yards past the Feldmarshall, revealing the true extent of the enemy adaptations and forces. Lasers that bent and turned, never missing. An invisible killer that had witches falling from the sky, never even knowing from where they were being shot, and tank crews collapsing, never leaving a mark on their armoured shells. Constant radio static that made communication beyond line of sight impossible. Lastly, a Hellfire that could burn anything, bolts of liquid lightning that were so bright they were painful to look at.
All from Neuroi so numerous the ground was black from their bodies and the shadows of those that flew above.
Even as intelligence officers frantically sent signals out with the wired lines, the air raid alarms started ringing. Radar completely jammed, the anti-air crew returned to spot lights, trying to find black on black.
Rommel hadn't reached the command center yet. That saved his life. A single bolt of light crashed down into Tobruk, surgically placed. Even from five blocks away within a car, Rommel had his eyebrows scorched, and the devils own luck allowed him to keep both eyes despite lacerations from shattered glass. Sweeping aside medics, Rommel arrived to the command center to the sight of charred, carbonised skeletons that was all that were left of his command staff.
Then the radio jamming turned off. Radar showed a solid mass of black slowly approaching Tobruk. Swallowing bile, Rommel did the only thing he could and called for a general retreat.
The truck ran over another pothole on the desert road, jolting Rommel out of his review. He angrily shoved his journal back into his pocket. Stalking towards the back of the truck he swept aside the covering and looked out over all that remained of the Afrikakorps, the last remaining army of Karlsland. Behind them, the East horizon still glowed red, likely from the fires as Tobruk burned.
Men clung all over each other on overloaded vehicles, a dozen sitting upon each tank, leaning against each other as they slept, pure exhaustion overcoming the noise of the diesel engines. The trucks were even more crowded, men either squeezed like sardines shoulder to shoulder, or resting above the compartment, shoving their arms through holes in the canvas to hold themselves in place.
Occasionally, smaller convoys caught up to the main body, but more often, overtaxed vehicles broke down, others in the column slowing only to throw down what sparse supplies they had to spare and a few well wishes. Most of those men would probably die, baked, on the desert roads, but the convoy could not afford to stop, lest their implacable enemies catch up. Rommel saluted as he passed a group of such men, no doubt from a broken down vehicle up ahead. Only one raised his arm up in weary acknowledgement, the others staring at him with thinly veiled hostility or simply too tired to raise their heads.
Swallowing down guilt, Rommel turned away. On the cabin of the truck next to him, a witch sat, looking back east, easily cradling in her diminutive arms a heavy machine gun. Though it was hard to tell under the desert grime, Rommel recognised her as Anahita, one of the pair whom had been carried back, missing three fingers on her left hand and her left leg down from the knee as a result of her Striker Unit detonating from an attack. Yellow headlights illuminated tear tracks down her face.
Rommel shook his head as he walked back inside, remembering how his stomach had twisted when he received word of the Battle of Berlin. Anahita had been one of the Witches recruited locally, now she was abandoning her people and her homeland.
"Feldmarschall, we've received word from Admiral Bergamini" Rommel jolted, he'd fallen asleep standing up for a moment.
"What is it?" he asked, striding forwards around his officers and snatching up the record before the junior aide could respond.
'Ottoman & Romangan fleets prepared to make pickup of Afrikakorps at Benghazi. Last ship leaves at end of June. End'
Rommel felt the bottom of his stomach drop away, "Put out the word. Best speed to Benghazi." for a moment Rommel's voice failed him as a lump rose in his throat "Stragglers will be left behind. That's all."
Collapsing into his chair, Rommel buried his head into his hands. Afrika was lost.