To make up for some of my lapses in posting, here’s an excerpt from my ‘adding horror’ project on ONSET:

 

“This video clip is from late oh seven,” he told them.  “It is camera footage from the commander’s Leopard Tank of Delta Company, Armored Battalion Thirteen of the Swiss Panzerbridge Eleven.  They were carrying out training exercises in the Alps, when, well… watch.”

The teacher hit a button, and the video clip started. 

 

For a moment, all that the gun camera showed was frozen mountainside, and then the camera rotated, the commander reviewing the sixteen tanks as they crunched their way over the frozen field.  The video was completely silent, so it was a complete shock when the tank on the end of the even line suddenly erupted into the air.

The sixty-plus ton vehicle flipped completely end over end, slamming turret first into the ground almost a hundred meters from its launch point with a visible crumpling.

Standing under where the tank had been driving was a monstrosity out of nightmare.  Six or more meters tall, the creature looked like a moss covered stone figure of a man – carved by rough description.  Its rough mouth was open in a silent scream as it charged at the next tank in line.

There was no way the tank driver could have reacted, and the troll ripped the mighty armored vehicle in half with one yank of its immense arms.  The professionalism of the Swiss army was demonstrated, however, in that the first shots hit the monster as it was attacking the second vehicle.

The camera was bouncing and wavering insanely as the tank started backpedalling, the formation rotating as the vehicles tried to open the distance and open fire on the creature.  The first few rounds did nothing, exploding on the troll’s stone skin and stripping off moss.

The second salvo of rounds, however, showed that the Swiss had learned the first salvo’s lessons.  The bright ‘silver arrow’ of discarding sabot anti-tank rounds lit up the cameras view as dozens of machine guns chattered to life as well.

The troll felt the armor piercing rounds, raising its head in a bellow, silent on the film, which shook the trees around it.  Whatever it felt wasn’t enough to kill it, however, and it charged the line of tanks with a speed that left the camera only recording a blur.

David had to shake his head to clear dizziness as the camera spun to catch the troll slamming into two of the tanks simultaneously with the force of a train engine.  Its broad arms crashed clean through the front armor, but got stuck.  For a moment, the troll stood still, a fist buried in each tank.

Shaking its head in confusion, a second salvo of armor piercing rounds slammed into it.  This time, the commander’s tank was close enough to clearly see the rounds punching through the stone of the creatures flesh.  Some kind of black ooze dripped from the wounds, and the creature spun around to face the other tanks.  One of its hands tore free from the tank it had struck.

The other brought the sixty ton tank around with it, only breaking free in time to send it hurtling directly at the camera.

 

The film stopped there, and faded to a still shot of the same field.  The smoldering wreckage of seven of the company’s sixteen tanks littered it, and the photographer had caught six of the remaining tanks, in a carefully aligned circle, training their main guns on the broken stone pieces of the creature.

“That,” Koburn said quietly, “was a Greater Troll.  So far as we can tell, in eras of lower magical activity, they go to sleep like Dragons.  They wake up more readily than dragons, however, and nine have awoken in the European mountains in the last decade.  It is only a matter of time until one wakes up in the Rockies, and they are, as you saw, incredibly hard to kill.

“Worse,” he continued grimly, “is their shared attribute with the type of Empowered we also call a troll.  Both must eat human flesh to survive – nothing else provides nutrition.  Evidence suggests that a Greater Troll requires a lot of human flesh – we have not always been so lucky as to have a tank company literally drive over the troll.”