<Battle Record: The Second Battle for Mount Umbra>
Date of creation: Nova Aetas 3, Fab 7

I was woken up by alarms again.

"Grrr... Again?!" I shouted, more than slightly annoyed, "Why do they always disturb my sleep, the whole day is the night, does it even matter? I'm gonna have to change my sleep schedule."

The screens in the control room were pitch black. When the spotlights were turned on, however, it revealed a black, squirming mass of Storm Creatures. "And here we are again." I muttered, this time they got even more cannon fodder they call "soldiers". While they are just medieval in my standards, they outnumber me at least 50 to 1. I have a fear that it's not even a fraction of their full power.

Machine guns are not widely deployed yet, so I could only see a few of them firing, but there are way more artillery pieces than before. With this new material advantage, I started to pour artillery fire down on them. "Artillery open fire at section 7 to 19, range 280, creeping barrage interval 10."

Unfortunately, they seemed to have become indifferent towards the artillery fire. Despite multiple barrages, they just didn't care at all and continued their attack. While most of them are cut down, eventually through sheer numbers they started to push back on the defense lines.

Why are they willing to charge headfirst into a literal wall of death that kills 99% of those who go through it? Don't they see all the flying chunks of armor and explosions ripping up the ground around them? It's like they are just heartless, apathetic killing machines with no sense of self-preservation. I can only assume that they are extremely well-trained, but if that is the case they should be much more organised than what I see right now. These storm creatures just raises so many questions.

As more storm creatures try to enter the battlefield, chaos took hold. I see them climbing over one another, pushing others over, even blocking the line of fire of cannons of their own and subsequently exploding into a red mist. With this kind of "strategy", they might as well as carry a bomb and run towards me.

"Kaboom!"

Jinxed it...

That seemed to be an isolated incident though, as I don't see any more explosions. Still, I couldn't shake off the thought of forcing someone to blow himself up. The battlefield didn't change though, the bots won't get intimidated by a fanatical army of storm creature, which probably surprised their superiors. Looking at their aggressive and arrogant tactics(or rather, the lack of tactics), I won't be surprised if they've never lost any wars, and they built up such a reputation that they didn't need to fight. Thus after a while they just assumed that everyone is a pushover and will surrender immediately, and all that's left of their officers are just too incompetent to do anything but order a charge.

With more and more storm creatures quite literally squirming towards the defenses, I had no choice but to start moving back. Inch by inch, the defenders start stepping back, their synchronized movements is in stark contrast with the disorganized scramble of Storm Empire soldiers. Without any hesitation, the Storm Army greedily takes the land, and their sorry bottoms were promptly blown up by makeshift landmines. "Wait, so they just fell for that?" I was surprised by how smoothly it went, even though it's an improvised plan, "I'm gonna be using it so much more!" Those storm creatures somehow aren't alarmed by the ground blowing them up, and continued to move forward, triggering every single landmine in the process.

Suddenly, I saw some huge silhouettes in the sky, bombers! The anti-air cannons started to open fire on these airborne threats, shooting several of them out of the sky. The falling bombers went down on top of their forces, and a huge explosion shook the mountains, destabilizing the snow layer. I knew what's going to happen next, so I gave the order get off the mountainside as fast as possible. With the enemies' bombers are preparing to drop their bombs, and the anti-air cannons unable to fire during transport, I hoped for the best and watched as the bombers flew over the peak.

But then a strange thing happened, they stopped right after passing over the peak, and started dropping bombs on their own soldiers. Bomb after bomb rained down and they still didn't notice their mistake. I realized that they must've been given an outdated flight plan, as my defense line was in fact there, but it had shifted back during the intense combat and now it was instead occupied by their own ground forces. With my spotlights off, and near zero visibility in the darkness, they most likely relied on compass and stars to navigate the area. Unfortunately for them, their bombers never received the order to cancel the operation or update the target location. When they've started bombing what's presumably my defense line, they ended up damaging their own force.

As another avalanche rolled across the landscape, the battle had mostly ended. Almost all defenders escaped the avalanche undamaged, while the storm creature on that mountainside are most likely wiped out by their own reckless bombing. With enemy forces on the other side of the mountain taking control of the area, this is more or less a defeat for me both tactically and strategically, but I did gain some valuable knowledge in the enemy. Namely their lack of coordination and brute-force tendencies. While they will eventually get over these shortcomings, I don't see a problem with exploiting these a few times, just enough not to get too much of their attention and see how long I can keep it up until they fixed these issues.

My defenders are now at the location of my command centre, I realized that the Northern Mountains are almost completely lost to those brutes. With a renewed sense of urgency, I prepared a retreat away from the mountains, and onto the tundras of the great north.