DATALOG 235
THE BATTLE OF PHU-BAC

“I write this account with hands that still shake from nerve damage caused by chemical exposure during my reconnaissance of the Phu-Bac war zone. The lingering toxins have left permanent scars across my throat, making speech painful, but my duty to record the truth remains unimpaired. What follows is compiled from sealed Jade Domain military archives, survivor testimonies gathered at considerable personal risk, and my own observations of the battlefield aftermath.

The Battle of Phu-Bac stands as perhaps the most catastrophic single engagement in the endless war that consumes Southeast Asia's mutated jungles. In a single day, an entire Jade Domain division - over ten thousand fresh clone troopers - was fed into the green hell alongside an estimated fifty thousand Neo-Cong fighters. By nightfall, barely a handful from either side would live to see another dawn.

This was not merely a military disaster. It was a perfect distillation of the Prime AI's grand design - a symphony of orchestrated death that served a single master while the jungle itself gorged on the carnage.”

• Senior Cartographer Tam Nguyen,
  Day 9 of The Green Fever, 94 AP

Prelude

The battle began, as so many do in Hell, with the whisper of the Prime AI’s emissaries. Prime's chrome-collared messengers arrived simultaneously at the Jade Queen's court and the hidden sanctuaries of the Bright Path leadership. They delivered near identical messages wrapped in different rhetoric - promises of decisive victory to the Jade Domain, prophecies of glorious martyrdom to the Neo-Cong.

Over the coming months, the Jade Queen's war council drew up plans for a massive air assault designed to destroy a vast gathering of Neo-Cong forces that were reportedly trying to establish a permanent foothold in the Phu-Bac sector. The target was strategically vital: control of the region would secure several major orange sap harvesting zones and destroy a sizable amount of Neo-Cong troops.

On day 27 of The Blooming Death, 72AP, a fleet of drop ships carrying an entire division of ten thousand Jade Troopers lifted off from staging areas along the coastline of the Jade Domain, heading towards the Phu-Bac war zone. ​​30 small, agile landing craft, each carrying a platoon of 30 Jade Troopers, formed the vanguard. Their mission would be to gain initial footholds on the ground - most of them would be expected to be destroyed during the approach or shortly after landing. 10 mid-sized drop ships formed the second wave. These hulking transports carried complete companies of 100 Jade Troopers, their mission to quickly reinforce any tentative foothold that survivors from the first wave might have gained. The third wave was composed of eight heavy transports that each carried an entire regiment of 1000 Jade Troopers. Their role was to reinforce and later link the most successful landings.

What the Jade Domain commanders didn't know was that their enemy had received equally detailed intelligence about the coming assault. The Bright Path leadership spoke of visions granted by the divine Emissaries - visions that precisely outlined Jade Domain battle plans, drop zones, and timings. The monks of the Bright Path had amassed a vast Neo-Cong force in the Phu-Bac war zone, planning to ambush and destroy the Jade Trooper division on arrival, when the drop ships would slow down for the final approach and would be most vulnerable.

Throughout the region, tens of thousands of warriors were drawn together and prepared for the coming battle. The Prime AI had equipped the Neo-Cong with an impressive arsenal of anti air defences, ready to hit the Jade Domain force with an unexpected punch when it arrived.

The stage was set for both sides to engage in a bloodbath.

The Ambush

Dawn brought the rumble of engines as the massive fleet of Jade Domain drop ships delivered its massive payload of Jade Domain Troopers towards the misty, endless jungle landscape of Hell.

These clone troopers had been decanted less than a year ago, their minds and bodies still reeling from the months of neural and practical combat training they had received. They clutched their weapons with white knuckles, their eyes wide as they stared down at the endless green expanse below. They didn’t know it then, but more than half of them would be dead within the hour.

The Neo-Cong had positioned themselves with deadly patience throughout the Phu-Bac river valley. Surface-to-air missiles, supplied by the divine Emissaries, were carefully camouflaged under the canopy. Anti-aircraft guns waited in hidden clearings. Thousands of fighters crouched in the undergrowth, their bamboo spears and captured rifles ready.

The drop ships descended toward their designated landing zones like mechanical locusts, their engines roaring in defiance at the green hell below. In the hot and humid passenger compartments, the sweat covered bodies of clone troopers were pushed together as the fleet decelerated.

Then the jungle erupted in fire and death.

As the first missile shrieked skyward, its vapor trail carved a white scar across the morning sky. Within seconds, the air filled with streaking death as dozens of surface-to-air missiles launched from hidden positions throughout the valley. The larger transport ships, their massive engines screaming as they tried to abort their landing approach, became flying coffins painted with Jade Domain insignia.

While many of the smaller transports avoided the deadly barrage, around half of the larger dropships took direct hits. Huge explosions bloomed like orange flowers against the green backdrop, showering burning metal and bodies across several square kilometres of jungle. Among the twisted metal falling from the sky, clone troopers ripped from their crew compartments tumbled screaming toward the earth below, their flimsy armor useless against the crushing impact of gravity.

Trooper LKR-873 later described her ordeal onboard a regimental transport:

 “I felt the deck shudder beneath my feet as proximity alarms screamed through the passenger bay. Around me, hundreds of troopers nervously pressed against their restraint harnesses, their eyes wide with the first taste of genuine terror. I could hear the transport's defensive guns blasting away frantically, trying to intercept incoming missiles, but there were too many.

A missile punched through the armored hull twenty meters forward from me, its warhead detonating among the tightly packed troopers. The explosion vapourised dozens of sisters, painting the interior walls with a thick red paste of flesh and bone. The lucky ones died instantly. Others found themselves missing limbs or faces, rapidly bleeding out in pools of their own liquefied tissue. Their screams will haunt me forever.

The transport lurched sideways. Through a porthole, I could see one of its engines trailing black smoke and chunks of burning metal. Through the jagged hole where the missile had struck, I could see the Phu-Bac River far below, its waters reflecting the burning sky like a mirror of hell.” 

As ship after ship fell from the sky, the smaller, more agile craft fared better, their pilots weaving between missile salvoes with desperate skill. Those transports that attempted emergency landings in the river found their hulls compacting against hidden rocks. The modular armoured hulls that had protected them from small arms fire became death traps as they buckled inward, crushing the clone troopers packed inside. Hydraulic fluid mixed with blood as damaged loading ramps refused to open, trapping survivors inside their rapidly flooding metal coffins.

Those dropships that managed to reach their designated landing zones, found Neo-Cong snipers already zeroed in on their approach vectors. As loading ramps descended and clone troopers attempted to deploy, high-caliber rifles picked off many Troopers with deadly precision, leaving the rest to hastily move under the canopy of the jungle for at least a temporary respite.

Within the first hour of the battle of Phu-Bac, roughly half of the Jade Domain force was already dead or dying. The lucky ones had died in the sky, their lives ending unexpectedly amidst the flash of an explosion. The unlucky ones were scattered throughout the jungle, many of them injured and cut-off from their units. The survivors faced  a fighting withdrawal through the nightmare landscape of Hell itself, surrounded by an enemy that knew every tree, every stream, and every hidden path through the verdant maze.

The River

Surviving clone troopers, their units shattered and communications down, formed ad-hoc companies around any surviving officers. The only way any of them were going to survive quickly became clear: cross the Phu-Bac river, climb the muddy banks on the opposite side, then push through the dense jungle and reach the Phu-Bac fortress beyond.

The Neo-Cong had transformed the river crossing into a killzone. Snipers, and heavily armed Neo-Cong warriors cunningly concealed themselves among the gnarled roots of mutated mangrove trees, commanding overlapping fields of fire across the muddy banks. 

The Jade Domain Troopers had no choice. In order to reach the Phu-Bac fortress, they had to cross the river. The first unit waded into the muddy water. Neo-Cong gunners opened fire when the advancing clones reached the middle of the river when they were at their slowest and too far in to simply turn back. The water erupted in geysers of water fountains and gore as heavy-calibre rounds raked the river, mowing down the first wave.

Without hesitation, the next unit waded into the blood-warm water, using the floating corpses of their sisters as cover. Their dying screams soon mixed with the splash of gunfire, the wet thunk of rounds finding flesh and the gurgling cries of the drowning. Despite the carnage, here and there fire was returned and Neo-Cong defenders were killed one by one. Every wave of Troopers made it slightly further across the river, killing a few more defenders.

Eventually, the first few Troopers reached the far river bank. Most of them were quickly picked off by snipers, but here and there heroic individuals managed to provide covering fire for their sisters crossing the river. More and more troopers reached the muddy river bank, and soon enough attempts were made to scale the river bank.

Scaling the muddy incline proved even more difficult than crossing the river itself and troopers would continuously slip and slide back down the muddy banks while under constant fire. Every step forward was bought with blood and the river bank was soon clogged with the bodies of more and more dead and dying troopers.

Only once a few troopers reached the top of the muddy bank and found cover, did the superior training and firepower of the Jade Domain Troopers finally begin to tell as they established footholds in the mud, their return fire driving back the Neo-Cong defenders. For a brief moment, it seemed the bloody river crossing might have concluded.

Then the river itself turned against them.

The creatures that dwelt in the Phu-Bac's depths had tasted blood before, but never in such abundance. Massive things, part plant and part predator, stirred from their muddy lairs. Tentacles thick as tree trunks erupted from the riverbed, wrapping around struggling troopers and dragging them into the murky depths.

The water boiled with feeding frenzies as dozens of creatures converged on the feast. Clones vanished beneath the surface, their final screams cut short by crushing jaws or dissolving acids. Others found their legs eaten away as they tried to cross, leaving them to bleed out in the shallows while their comrades pressed forward over their dying bodies.

The river crossing and the far banks had become a slaughterhouse, its banks littered with the remnants of countless troopers. 2-3 thousand Troopers had been killed in the crossing, and those that had reached the far side were utterly traumatised by the experience, the slaughter simply being too overwhelming to comprehend. Far worse was yet to come.

Into Hell

Under the jungle canopy, darkness reigned even at midday. The survivors - perhaps two thousand troopers from the original ten thousand - pressed deeper into Neo-Cong territory, guided only by compass readings toward the distant fortress.

The Neo-Cong hit them again and again. These were not the organized ambushes of the riverbank, but desperate, savage engagements fought among the massive trees. Bright Path shamans eviscerated troopers with bursts of crackling energy. Neo-Cong peasant warriors would take horrendous losses to get into close range to kill troopers with primitive bows and arrows or bamboo spears.

The jungle itself began to awaken and predators were drawn towards the battle by the scent of blood. Giant spiders, their glistening dark forms scarred by old shrapnel wounds, descended on silk strong enough to garrotte a human. Their legs moved with mechanical precision as they plucked struggling warriors from both sides, carrying them into the canopy where their screams gradually faded into wet, tearing sounds.Others were strangled by thorny vines and dragged into the dark recesses between tree roots to still the jungle's insatiable hunger for flesh and blood.

As the hours ground on, unit cohesion disintegrated on both sides. The jungle's maze-like quality separated soldiers into isolated pockets of terror. Individual warriors found themselves fighting alone, unable to distinguish friend from foe in the shifting shadows, almost naked warriors caked in mud and blood fighting each other with bare hands, only for many of them to be devoured by the jungle itself.

Human Waves

As the day wore on and ammunition ran low, officers managed to draw most of what was left of the division into a single rag tag regiment of fewer than a thousand troopers, holding a rapidly shrinking perimeter surrounded by tens of thousands of Neo-Cong warriors. It became clear that under current conditions, none of them would make it to the Phu-Bac fortress. Desperate attempts were made to make contact with high command and to request air support, but to no avail.

With the majority of well armed Neo-Cong warriors spent at this point in the battle, the Neo-Cong sent their peasant warriors to crush the shrinking Jade Domain position. Wave after wave of peasant warriors, equipped with nothing but bamboo spears, charged into the Jade Trooper’s gunfire. While thousands were killed, thousands more prepared to attack in the next wave. As ammunition began to run low and more and more troopers fell to the relentless onslaught, the Neo-Cong paused, drawing together their remaining strength for one final human wave attack that would overrun the Jade Domain perimeter. In the brief slow-down of the fighting, a Jade Domain officer finally established radio contact with the Phu-Bac fortress.

Orange Death

The squadron of Zhandou bombers arriving from the Phu-Bac fortress came in low over the jungle canopy, their engines screaming like mechanical banshees as they descended toward the designated target zone. The engine noise of the approaching bombers drowned out the sounds of battle in the jungle below. Their cargo was the Jade Domain's answer to asymmetric warfare - chemical weapons designed to turn the jungle into a sterile wasteland void of any life.

The pilots had their orders: eliminate all remaining Neo-Cong forces in the target zone. The fighting in the jungle was so close and desperate at this point, that collateral damage to friendly forces was inevitable and acceptable.

As the Zhandou bombers made their attack run, Orange death fell from the sky as a toxic mist. Clone troopers and Neo-Cong fighters alike suffocated as their lungs burned, their screams lost in the hiss of chemical dissolution of organic tissue. Without any protective equipment, the last human wave of Neo-Cong peasants, several thousand warriors strong, died in a few brief moments of absolute agony. Those Jade Domain troopers who still had functioning protective gear put on their breathing masks and ran for their lives, but the attack had saturated such a large area that many troopers perished before they could make it out of the toxic clouds. 

Aftermath

Eventually, a trickle of surviving Jade Domain troopers emerged from the toxic clouds, stumbling toward the Phu-Bac fortress like ghosts. For many, their protective breathing equipment began to fail on the last few metres, their filters clogged with toxic residue. Tragically, many troopers collapsed within sight of safety, their lungs dissolving as the filters of their masks finally stopped to protect them.

Fewer than three hundred Jade Domain troopers remained alive. 

The Neo-Cong had fared even worse. None of their troops had any protection against the chemical assault and the warriors assembled for the final human wave attack were almost completely wiped out. Those few who survived did so only by chance, some being on the edge of the toxic clouds or finding intact breathing masks on the bodies of dead Jade troopers. 

Night of Terror

As night fell over the Phu-Bac river valley, the jungle began its true work. Wounded and lost soldiers from both sides found themselves scattered across several square kilometres of jungle, at the mercy of predators that had waited patiently for nightfall and the end of battle. Carnivorous plants unfurled to reveal maws lined with needle teeth ready to devour survivors unable to move. Insectoid swarms descended to strip flesh from bone. Hybrids stalked the shadows, carrying away those survivors least injured and still suitable for breeding. Giant spiders picked up wounded warriors to devour or to paralyze them and lay eggs in their flesh, turning them into the first meal for the hatchlings.

There are so many ways to die out alone in the Dìyù, many of which defy description.

The screams lasted until just before dawn. Afterwards, a deafening, oppressive silence descended over the battlefield.

A New Day

The survivors of the battle of Phu-Bac had become hardened veterans within a single day. Within 24 hours, they watched the arrival of fresh new clone troopers at the Phu-Bac fortress, their young faces eager for their first taste of combat. 

Watching them with hollow eyes, the veterans knew that these new soldiers would be thrown into the meat grinder of the jungle within days, with only a slim chance of survival.

The Neo-Cong, too, received fresh recruits - liberated clone workers from the agricultural zones of the Dìyù, their calloused hands quickly trained to grip weapons instead of farming tools. The cycle would continue, as it always did, as it always will.

Addendum

“I visited the Phu-Bac battlefield years after the engagement. The chemical weapons had left vast stretches of dead earth where nothing would ever grow again. Scattered among the withered vegetation were discarded equipment, rusted weapons, helmets and the occasional bleached bone that the scavengers had missed.

Local guides refused to stay in the area after sunset. They spoke of lights that moved between the dead trees, of voices calling from empty air, of shapes and shadows that might once have been human. I cannot verify these claims as I dared not stay in the former combat zone after dark by myself, but I can confirm a profound feeling of unease I experienced even during the daytime.

The Battle of Phu-Bac stands as a monument to the futility of resistance against Prime's grand design. Both sides believed they were fighting for something meaningful - freedom, order, survival, purpose. In the end, they were all just fuel for a fire that burns without warmth, consumes without satisfaction, and demands ever greater sacrifices to feed its hunger.

May this record serve as warning to those who would underestimate the cost of conflict in Hell's domain. The jungle claims all who enter it, regardless of allegiance or intention.”

• Report compiled by Senior Cartographer Tam Nguyen,
  Day 9 of The Green Fever, 94 AP