[b][i]The Victoria Avenue Plains, Essex...[/b][/i]

The skies had shifted gray and hollow, clouds bellowing with indigestion above the warrior's heads. Between two armies lay a two hundred yard stretch of death and decay, the Victoria Avenue Plains. A dead forest of trees riddled with sandbags, shallow trenches and burned out automobile fortresses stretched out along the northern wall. It stood before the Armies of the Father like a predetermined goal, a quest already completed with stories of it's victory waiting to be told. Alongside a line of thinly placed barbed wire stood a stout force of exactly two hundred and sixty eight men and women. Father Nilsson was counted as the first, and it was there he stood at the helm of it all. Couldn't have been a year less than seventy five, with a wispy white beard tipped off at his belly. His face wrinkled outward and withered, his shady blue eyes astute and wide open, a book older than himself collects an aura of dust within every page turned. From his wavering voice he shouts to the Intimadatus Commandant whom in turn shouts forth the Father's taunting speech to the heathens. 

The words ring hollow, of course, through deafened ears. A foreboding silence chills the air, and the old man steps down from his shambling platform. An elegant golden cross draped over his shoulders, his linen black robes carried off the ground by his servants following closely by, his eyes droop down to the earth beneath him and his heart aches for the many fated for doom this dreary night. Within the fog appears a force of over one hundred and fifty men and women collectively displaying their newly fashioned armor. A clenched fist bearing a spark of electricity is painted proudly upon their center mass, with forged steel draping down their chest and over their stomachs. Their shoulder plating shows paintings of a unique variety to each and every one of their individual characters, with an R-91 'Urban-Assault' Rifle at the ready and two more clips fastened to each of their belts. They line up and crouch along the barbed wire, as another hundred come up behind them. A different force this time, tribals adorned with markings of lightning and thunder draped along their skin and their leather hide garments. A loud clapping sound of thunder echoes throughout the plains as a showering storm of hail and rain address the battlefield. The paint steadily washes over their bare hides, their weapons telling every story of their heritage. Some with roughs on two by fours studded with rusty steel bolts deconstructed off security gates, others with a tightly bundled grouping of three rebar sticks their owners spent months filing down and sharpening to a fine point. Raided depot store sledgehammers, machetes, shears, whips created from extension cords and a few gas bombs created with a little ingenuity. The 'Urban Tribes' certainly had an inventive way with things. 

To the right side of the massive force was a thing of legends. Robes fashioned of purple silk and cotton draped over the ankles of eight towering figures, fastened up along their chests with a polished metallic armor which protected the upper torso with additional shoulder plating. Tesla coils erected along both shoulders sprouted an aura of small sparks which visibly fascinated most uninformed tribals and wastelanders. The enemy before them, however, remained unamused. They'd slaughtered four of them before in a display of merciless execution, and they'd gladly do it again. These eight men stood reformed, baptized with hatred and fury, yet remaining calm and collected...methodical. They eerily kept hoods over their visage, a shadowed reminder of their mysterious identities. They grip their AER9's with a fierce determination blatantly obvious in their hooded stance. A lone figure reproaches the platform, adorned in a thick layering of crimson robes. He holds an AEP-7 in his right hand, and from his gray mane he spouts forth the holy indoctrination of the Teslaist Battle Speech. It is time to initiate the Siege of Essex, and everyone couldn't be more ready. 

"[i]Exterminatus![/i]" The word shot out of Battlepriest Gabriel like a strike of lightning. 

A line of forty troopers laid down suppressing fire from their assault rifles as the siege weaponry advanced. Twelve hollow automobile frames, hauled by two brahmin each, headed straight into the mined plains. When a brahmin was killed by a land mine or a stray bullet, a squad of five troopers escorted another one to take it's place. As the army slowly advanced, many had been bathed in the blood and guts and shit of all things brahmin. The automobile husks could only cover so much land before imploding into millions of bits of shrapnel, and all forty of the brahmin acquired were now sprayed over the battlefield like a tuesday shower. Molten laser fire singed through the wood and sheet metal covering the target fortress, burning the flesh of several enemy snipers and cooking several heathen's brains as the Brothers in Arms advanced behind their forces, electrical tesla discharges raging about their physical aura. Twenty tribesmen had been ordered to charge to last forty yards the brahmin couldn't stretch, ultimately covering the last of the minefield as they blew into a dozen bloody chunks. The final charge tore down a fiery section in the fortresses's frontmost wall as they stormed the hill, and from it's bowels spewed forth the marauding heathens with their bats and knives and bloodied fists. Both sides fought hard and tense, and eventually the heathens would retreat into town where they would be extensively rounded up and massacred in the town center in full view of their women and children. A practice not uncommon amongst the newly regulated Teslaist State of Neo Electros. 

--

The TMF is what they were called. A conjunction of loosely rehabilitated raiders turned into an as of yet functioning fighting force. To fight in the Teslaist Militant Front required only two things, your name and your dedication to loyalty and hard work. It's benefits included discounted drugs and alcohol, more meals than what the common folk were eating, and a shitty place to sleep every few nights you had the chance to. It was a better life than serving in the 'Cult Raiders', whom had practically become tribal slave fighters through systematic brainwashing and the destruction of identity. Still, one could never understand the life of a Battlepriest or a Brother in Arms, they were the real 'cult raiders'.

[i]More mysterious than their insane religion...[/i] Anya thought, a curl of her violet hair intertwined around her index finger. She snapped immediately into herself as she entered any violent conflict, she found herself an artist of conducting death and pain. It was one of very few things she found passion and a love of interest in, sex and painting being the only other two. For now her hair was matted and stained in blood, a piece of shrapnel lodged itself through her shoulder plating and cut into her flesh. If she hadn't gazed down, she would never have felt the stinging pain of a bullet entering her abdomen and cutting through the other end. Clutching her wound, she aimed a ten millimeter pistol six feet ahead toward a fiery entrance in the collapsing wall of lumber and fencing. She squeezed the trigger and blew a kiss to her assailer, watching his forehead pop open with a cloud of blood in satisfaction. 

"Ahck...das no good, buddy." Brutus frowned in his thick accent, immediately taking Anya by the arm and laying her down by a cover of concrete debris. 

"Ya, it's flow of the painting, handsome. Me getting shot, it is like a good piece of art, ya?" The wounded dame couldn't help but smile in all her coughing fit. 

"Only if you live to paint it, Anya! Up an over, let's go buddy."

As the two friends limped out from the battle, dozens more charged in to take their place. A third of Essex was raised to the ground that night, the following morning would be a grieving sight of the Deathmonks wading through the mud and guts and shit to haul away the dead for burial. The total casualty count was one hundred and fourteen TMF soldiers to be given proper burial and eighty slave fighters, along with two hundred and eighty nameless heathens to be dumped into a mass grave. Within three weeks a hefty haul of various metals, brahmin livestock, a small cadre of captured dogs and ammunition stocks had been escorted back to Neo Electros. Once again southern Detroit would be secured and a foothold could be established upon Olympus Bridge, and the making of an empire could finally be at hand.