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SCL Chapter 140: No Glory, Just Guts
🕑 Added 2025-07-05 05:24:14 +0000 UTCLower deck of the Norad II, Launch Bay. Ship time: 04:03. “Carry out your orders, Tychus. And don’t cause me any trouble.” As Tychus strode
Lower deck of the Norad II, Launch Bay. Ship time: 04:03.
“Carry out your orders, Tychus. And don’t cause me any trouble.”
As Tychus strode like a beast toward the Heaven’s Devils’ personal APOD transport—the Little Devil—he could still hear Augustus’s voice issuing commands from the bridge through his powered armor’s comms: “Rendezvous on my signal, Hyperion! Open fire on the port side!”
“No problem, sir! Where do you want me to shoot?” came Raynor’s reply, his voice almost drowned out by background noise. “Ah—I see him now. Captain Jim, ready to engage!”
Tychus’s old friend, Captain Jim Raynor, was a spirited young man—full of life and universally regarded by the Heaven’s Devils as both amusing and easy to get along with. Raynor had an inexhaustible energy and a strong sense of justice. Among all of Augustus’s former troops, he had adapted most successfully to his new role after leaving the Confederacy Marine Corps.
No one would associate Raynor now with images of decadence or failure. He was the right-hand man of the Revolutionary Marshal—a trusted pillar of the movement. Despite his youth, he commanded a Behemoth-class battlecruiser and led a detachment of over 20,000 fleet personnel. Yet his position hadn’t made him arrogant in the slightest.
Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Raynor would be promoted to general.
He was born for revolution. Coming from an ordinary family on Shiloh, he understood the suffering of the Confederate’s people. And more importantly, Raynor was a man of action—he rarely spoke of justice and freedom, but he embodied both.
Without question, Raynor was Augustus’s righteous gun—point and shoot.
At that moment, on the launch pad of the Norad II’s lower deck, over a hundred transport craft were lifting off. Ground crews were rushing to guide each low-orbit shuttle onto the runway.
Behind Tychus, at least three APOD transports were rising slowly, their downward-blasting plasma thrusters generating powerful, crisscrossing gusts of wind. The voices of pilots, ground engineers, shuttle bus drivers, and soldiers waiting in formation all merged into an indistinguishable roar.
Amid the thunderous hum of maglev launch rails, the wedge-shaped shuttles—each clad in triple-layer molded ceramic armor—vanished into the distance in a blink. Transport craft disappeared gradually into the orange-red plasma flame of their thrusters.
Silent Revolutionary soldiers advanced under the pale blue glow of the deck lights, their powered armor reflecting the cold hues. Several Goliath-class combat mechs marched among the boarding troops, their servo systems humming softly.
If there was one thing that set these warriors apart from Confederate soldiers, it was that they were all displaced citizens of Korhal IV, bound by a shared faith and a common purpose: to overthrow the Terran Confederacy and build a nation founded on freedom and equality.
Just as the Revolutionary Army’s propaganda department proclaimed, the movement saw itself as the savior of all Terrans.
The Korhal Autonomous Dominion remained a distant, nearly impossible dream, but the new generation of Korhalites pursued something even more elusive—a Great Republic.
Tychus chewed on his cigar, smoke swirling thick inside his helmet. The air circulation system wheezed like an old man with a cough, struggling to keep up. The miniature turbine fans inside his CMC-300 powered armor whirred quietly. Behind him marched 32 Styrling Wolfhunters, all clad in deep crimson powered armor.
These warriors, said to dance with wolves, bore long-handled battle axes and the emblem of the Styrling Wolf on their armor. Unlike the emblem of the Mengsk Family, the Wolfhunter insignia featured a pure white Styrling Wolf, with a mane at its nape shaped like rolling clouds.
The Wolfhunters were one of the few elite units within the Revolutionary Army—just below Augustus’s Faraday Guard, Warfield’s Iron Battalion, Raynor’s Rangers, and the Styrling Strikers, the anti-psionic corps.
At one point, Augustus had even considered having Tychus Findlay rebuild the Heaven’s Devils, turning the name into a new special operations unit. But Tychus had rejected the idea without hesitation. Augustus proposed another name—Tychus Findlay’s Outlaws—which Tychus dismissed as sounding awful.
After much thought, Tychus decided to name his unit the Ass-Kickin’ Battalion, but Augustus shot that down immediately. Since Tychus had no real ambition to form a full-fledged unit of his own, the matter was soon dropped.
Still, Tychus continued to refer to his squad privately as the Ass-Kickin’ Battalion—the same name he used for basic training camps back in the day. Tychus also made it clear that his battalion wasn’t open to recruits—no rookies, no fresh-faced boys, no wide-eyed girls.
At first, his subordinates tolerated the ridiculous name. But when Mr. Findlay actually used it in an official setting, the captains collectively pushed back in protest.
Compared to Raynor, who had risen to the rank of captain and commanded an entire battlecruiser, Tychus seemed to be the least accomplished among Augustus’s former officers. To this day, he held the modest rank of Staff Sergeant, with formal authority over just a single platoon. In truth, that amounted to no more than one battalion of Styrling Wolfhunters under his command.
One reason was that Tychus simply wasn’t leading larger units anymore—not for lack of ability, but because he couldn’t be bothered to deal with that many people.
Now, within the Revolutionary Army, only Augustus had the authority to keep Tychus in check. If anyone else tried—not even Warfield could rein him in.
Augustus knew exactly what kind of man Tychus was. In every sense, he was not someone built for patience. His moral compass was questionable, and his bottom line was alarmingly low—so low it was practically dust, so small it was barely visible.
Augustus didn’t dare place Tychus in a position too far from his direct oversight. Given Tychus’s temperament, abuse of power would be almost guaranteed.
Still, Tychus’s standing wasn’t far below that of his old comrades. Augustus still counted on him to fight the toughest battles.
As Tychus climbed up the boarding ramp into the passenger bay of the Little Devil transport ship, the Norad II continued to tremble now and then, as if a giant hammer were pounding against this vast and majestic coffin of steel.
If those new recruits picked up from Deadman’s Port were here, they’d probably have wet themselves by now. But Tychus’s men were hardened veterans—every one of them capable of wrestling a wolf barehanded.
Once Tychus and his unit were seated and secured, the Little Devil transport began its ascent. Through the HUD displays in their powered armor—linked to the ship’s external cameras—the Revolutionary soldiers could clearly see the brutal battlefield beyond the hull of the Norad II.
The planetary orbital defense platform, which had been just a blurry black dot five minutes earlier, now loomed directly ahead. The wreckage of countless warships floated in space, while shattered alloy fragments glinting in the starlight faded into the void as they hurtled toward Tarsonis.
The Styrling Wolfhunters remained utterly silent. There were no gasps, no opinions about the war, no comments on their mission.
Whether they were elite Revolutionary troops from Korhal, regulars, or militia reservists, every one of them carried a sense of solemn coldness. The loss of their homeland had left them steeped in sorrow and pain. At times like these, no one would ever call a weeping soldier a coward—but anyone laughing aloud would seem jarring, even deranged.
...
From the hangar of the Norad II, the fleet’s transport ships burst forth like a swarm of scattered hornets. Under the escort of fighter squadrons, they flew toward Tarsonis alongside the landing vessels from the Hyperion and Iron Justice.
By now, the outcome of the fleet engagement was clear. The hastily assembled Terran Confederacy fleet had been defeated—of the nine battlecruisers deployed, five were destroyed, two were heavily damaged, and the last two Behemoth-class ships, riddled with damage, retreated into the shadow between the orbital defense platforms and the planet.
Just as Tychus’s transport, the Little Devil, began accelerating, a space-time distortion appeared within the hyperspace corridor. From the whirlpool created by the collapsing light, two Behemoth-class battlecruisers, their hulls clad in iron-gray armor, warped in to within 90 metres of a severely damaged Confederate Leviathan-class ship and opened fire at close range.
The outdated armor of the Leviathan-class vessel stood no chance against the brutal barrage. In one blinding flash, it exploded, its core hull flung by the shockwave toward Tarsonis—only to be caught by the planet’s gravity and pulled down to the surface.
And yet, Tarsonis’s three orbital defense platforms remained a nearly insurmountable barrier between the Revolutionary Army fleet and the planet. Their anti-aircraft firepower network covered most of the orbital ring, and the heavily armed Drakken II-class pulse cannons were capable of bringing down even battlecruisers, effectively sealing off the approach for an entire fleet.
Augustus had no intention of seizing those orbital platforms. Even if the retreating Confederacy fleet managed to return to the Tarsonis system, the Revolutionary Army would never be able to capture all the platforms—and at this stage, such an effort would hold no real strategic value.
The true objective was the surface of Tarsonis itself. Even if he couldn’t capture members of the Old Families, Augustus intended to rattle them. For that reason, he still managed to launch several nuclear warheads onto the orbital platforms, successfully destroying segments of their primary anti-air networks and creating openings for more landing forces to reach the planet’s surface.
Tychus’s squadron was among the first to enter the atmosphere. From the pilot’s perspective, a dense curtain of fire stretched up toward the heavens—pulse cannons, flak guns, and missiles forming an unrelenting barrage. Revolutionary Army transports were being shot down every moment.
But Tychus had grown used to this. It was simply the fate of any airborne assault force—most casualties occurred before they even touched the ground.
By now, the breathing heard over the comms channel had grown noticeably heavier. Many had shut off the HUD displays inside their armor. Even the elite Styrling Wolfhunters felt fear—and many of them had never even been to space before. There had already been several cases of rookies vomiting all over the inside of their power armor during transit.
