FACTION
REBEL ARMY
OF THE WESTERN REACHES

"We sheltered for three days in a rebel stronghold west of Bourg while Mina patched the starboard engine. I confess, I was afraid at first. The stronghold held perhaps three hundred souls. Humans, clones, Reborn, demi-mutants, all living and sleeping and eating side by side in darkness and mud, in conditions that would break most other people. And yet everywhere I looked, I saw tenderness. Gentle touches among them are constant - a hand on an arm, a forehead pressed to a forehead - as though physical closeness is the only currency they have left, and they spend it freely. I have never seen people care for one another with such desperate, unguarded love.

Then the attack came. The same voices that had murmured comfort in the dark began calling orders. They fought like nothing I have ever witnessed, slaughtering Prime Troopers with a savagery that turned my stomach. When it was over, the stronghold went quiet. And then, without a word, they began tending to their wounded. And to the enemy's wounded. The same rebel who had just killed a dozen troopers knelt in the mud and held a dying enemy trooper’s hand, whispering comfort to her until she was gone.

Master Marek says a cartographer must be impartial, but I do not think impartiality is possible in the presence of people who love this fiercely and kill this savagely, and who seem to find no contradiction between the two - because it is the only way they can survive.”

• INX-394 “Inks”, Apprentice Cartographer, Handelstaat Guild,
  Day 11 of The Hunger, 124 AP

Far beyond the crumbling smokestacks and rain-lashed tenements of Bourg, where the last pretence of civilisation dissolves into an infinity of grey-brown sludge, the earth itself has become a weapon. The Western Reaches of the Mud Lands stretch to the horizon in every direction, an ocean of sucking, treacherous mire broken only by the twisted skeletons of half-sunken skyscrapers that jut from the slime like the rotting teeth of some buried titan. The sky above hangs in perpetual twilight, choked with toxic clouds that weep acidic rain in sheets so relentless that the inhabitants of this forsaken land have forgotten what dry skin feels like. Steam rises from countless pools in ghostly tendrils, carrying the acrid stench of chemical decay and the copper-sweet reek of blood that never quite washes away, no matter how hard it rains.

War in the West

It is here, in this endless, miserable desolation, that one of the most desperate and brutal conflicts in the post-Collapse world grinds on without pause, without mercy, and without any end in sight. The War in the West, which began in 108 AP when the Prime AI launched its clone armies toward the western mud lands, is not a war of grand strategy or noble purpose. It is a war of attrition in its purest, most horrifying form - a meat grinder that consumes lives by the thousands and spits out nothing but corpses and mud.

On one side stand the Armies of Prime: wave after wave of identical clone soldiers, grown in amber-filled birthing tanks thousands of kilometres away in the Mongolian steppes, shipped across the wasteland in colossal land trains, and hurled into combat with a complete disregard for their lives. Against them stands a desperate alliance of mutants, Reborn, liberated clones, and natural-born humans, clinging on to a network of fortified trenches and strongholds, fighting not for conquest or ideology, but for the simple right to exist.

Rebels of the Western Reaches

Facing this industrial tide of clone soldiers is an alliance that should not exist. In the trenches and fortified positions of the Western Reaches, beings who in any other circumstance would be enemies stand shoulder to shoulder, united by the one thing more powerful than hatred: the desire to survive.

At the heart of the rebel army are charismatic leaders that rise above themselves in the fight against the Prime AI’s onslaught. Heroic warriors, shamans, masterful tacticians - all are forged in the neverending battle in the mud, and for every one of them that falls, a new one will soon emerge.

The mainstay of the rebel forces are a patchwork army drawn from every corner of the Mud Lands’ fractured society. Mutants - men transformed by the Reaper Agent into creatures of terrible strength, their bodies twisted with dense muscle like steel cable, skin thickened into organic armour plating, bones reinforced through uncontrolled mutation - fight alongside the very clones they were once hunted by. Among them stand the Reborn, the rarest and most valued of all: men who survived the Reaper Agent’s assault on their Y-chromosomes with their higher cognitive functions intact, their monstrous bodies housing fully human minds. Their intelligence and superhuman endurance make them natural leaders and fearsome warriors, and in the trenches of the Western Front, they are treated with something approaching reverence.

Demi-mutants, the offspring of mutants and humans - including clones - are an increasingly common sight in the ranks of the rebel army. Born immune to the Reaper Agent, Demi-mutants are usually born with the best characteristics of their parents - the strength and resilience of mutants and the intelligence and mental endurance so common among humans and clones.

Liberated clones meanwhile, form the backbone of the rebel army. Some are deserted Prime Troopers that saw too many of their sisters die for no purpose or recognition, others are freed workers from factories or agridomes, pleasure slaves that have fled indenture in the city of Bourg and many many others from varied backgrounds. They all have one thing in common - they are willing to fight and die for their freedom and right to exist.

Natural-born humans, increasingly rare in a world where they represent less than ten percent of the population, round out the alliance. Hardened scavengers, tribal warriors who know the treacherous terrain intimately, and refugees from settlements overrun by the armies of Prime - all of them have found their way to the Western Reaches, drawn by the simple calculus that it is better to stand and fight together, than to die alone.

These mutants and rebels simply want to live their lives. They did not choose this war. They did not ask for the Reaper Agent to rewrite their DNA or the Prime AI to decree their extermination. But purging mutants with her clone armies is Prime’s original main programming, the core directive hardwired into her architecture before the Collapse, and so she sends an endless stream of Prime Troopers to crush the uprising by any means necessary. The rebels have no choice but to fight, or to die.

Resourceful Resistance

The rebel defence is not merely stubborn resistance. It is resourceful, adaptive, and at times shockingly effective. Their fortified positions, dug into the mud or constructed from scavenged pre-Collapse materials and reinforced with whatever the earth yields up, form a network of interlocking strongholds that Prime’s forces have failed to crack despite years of relentless assault. The outer defence perimeters are designed to absorb punishment, drawing in attackers while channeling them into kill zones where overlapping fields of fire can cut down entire waves in seconds.

The rebels have their own war walkers, salvaged, repaired, and jury-rigged mechs that lack the factory-fresh precision of their counterparts in the Prime AI’s army, but more than compensate for their shortcomings with the cunning of their pilots. When Prime’s walkers open fire on rebel positions, rebel walkers answer in kind, and the battlefield erupts into a thunderous duel of heavy ordnance that shakes the earth and sends plumes of mud and debris spiralling into the toxic sky. Burning wrecks soon litter the no man’s land between the lines, their gutted frames becoming impromptu cover for the infantry that follows.

Some fanatical rebels have chosen the path of ultimate sacrifice. Strapping powerful repurposed landmines or similar explosives to their bodies, they usually charge at the enemy positions in lulls of fighting, causing horrific casualties in the confines of the trenches and undermining the enemy’s morale. The Prime Troopers must endure a war which they neither choose or understand, but when they witness the tenacity and willingness of the rebels to sacrifice themselves, every Prime Trooper understands that they cannot win.

To make matters worse for the Prime Troopers, these attacks are sometimes followed up by rebel trench raiders that infiltrate the Prime position in the aftermath of the explosion. Using brutal close combat weapons and pistols, the trench raiders butcher the dazed survivors before hastily retreating back to their own lines.

Death from Above

But the rebels’ most devastating weapon comes not from the ground but from the air. Only deployed when it seems Prime’s forces are on the verge of a breakthrough, when the second wave of regular Prime Troopers pushes past the piles of dead Alpha Troopers and smash the rebel’s outer perimeter, the sky darkens with vast shapes. Rebel zeppelins - enormous, lumbering airships cobbled together from scavenged hulls and filled with volatile lifting gas - drift over the battlefield like the shadows of predatory birds. Some are brought down by ground fire, their envelopes ripping open in spectacular gouts of flame as they spiral earthward trailing smoke and their screaming crew as they become flaming torches. But the rest reach the line of fighting and begin to rain liquid fire from the sky.

The effect is devastating beyond description. Prime Troopers, packed together in the narrow trenches they have just captured, have no cover and nowhere to run. The incendiary compound - a viscous, clinging substance that burns through armour, through flesh, through bone - turns the forward positions into a crematorium. Hundreds burn alive in seconds, their screams rising above the roar of the flames before being swallowed by it. The survivors break and retreat, abandoning their hard-won gains, leaving behind their dead and wounded as they scramble back across the killing fields toward their own lines.

Life and Death in the Trenches

When the guns fall silent between attacks and the fires burn down to smoldering embers, the Western Front settles into a different kind of horror: the horror of waiting. In the rebel trenches, mutants and clones huddle together under sheets of corrugated metal and salvaged tarpaulin, listening to the rain hammer down and the mud gurgle and shift beneath them. The stench is indescribable - a compound of decay, chemical pollution, unwashed bodies, and the ever-present copper tang of blood. Food is scarce: what little the supply lines can deliver is supplemented by whatever the scavenger parties can drag from the mud. Clean water is a luxury. Medical supplies are but a myth.

And yet, against all reason, something like community exists in these trenches. Mutants who once communicated only through grunts and gestures have learned to work alongside the clones and humans who share their foxholes. Reborn men - their twisted bodies towering over their sisters-in-arms, their scarred faces made somehow gentle by the act of sharing a ration or standing watch so another can sleep - have become the emotional anchors of units that would otherwise fragment under the pressure. Bonds form in the dark, forged not by shared history or common culture but by the raw, primal understanding that the person beside you is the only thing standing between you and annihilation.