“The main headquarters is on the tenth floor, sir. They want to up there immediately, sir. The elevators are over here, sir.”

Toshiro’s head was still throbbing, but he was feeling somewhat better, and he followed the man to where the bank of elevators was. Once aboard one, he leaned up against the wall of the vehicle until the doors opened on the tenth floor. What was clearly a floor of normal offices had been rearranged to make it a usable command center. It was immediately evident that it had been done in a hurry and in a very ad hoc manner. What was also apparent was the confused state of all the staff. A regular army Captain pulled away from the crowd of what looked to be civilians, mostly with a few uniforms sprinkled amongst them, and came over to Toshiro and saluted.

“Captain Tokigawa, sir. As the senior remaining military mentalist, I have to inform you that you are now in command of the invasion.”

“What?” Toshiro said in surprise. “What happened to General Koga?”

“His command vehicle was hit by one of those big missiles of the enemy’s. No survivors. General Yamashita took command two days ago and went forward to study the situation as he had mostly been on the southern front. I don’t think he appreciated how fast the enemy was advancing and got caught near the front and killed by one of their mentalists, apparently. She appears to be nearly as strong as the one you’ve been facing down south.”

Toshiro shook his head, which wasn’t a good idea. “So what happened on the northern front? I thought things were going well?”

“They were until the enemy deployed three completely fresh divisions with armored vehicles and aircraft without any warning. Since then, they’ve been taking down our satellites as fast as we put them up, and we’ve run out of the rockets at the moment anyway. On top of that, they’ve developed these killer drones that hunt down our drones and take them out. It has really curtailed our intelligence gathering abilities and has meant that we had barely a few hours warning about the new units they were deploying.”

He pointed to a map that was on the wall of the building. There were red lines marking the enemy advances all over it.

“They punched through here, here, and here, catching us totally unprepared. Not that we would have been able to stop them anyway with the losses we’ve been taking. These are all new troops they have deployed, and they have taken the time to fully train them and combine them with the leavening of veterans from the north. Lots of armor, lots of artillery, and thousands of drones. They’ve clearly been stockpiling their drones rather than using too many of them too openly, so we were totally unprepared for literally swarms of them flooding the front lines.”

The man paused and shook his head.

“Tell me.” Toshiro encouraged him.

“They use them for recon, plus they have these hunter-killer ones that are designed to take down our drones, and then they have armed drones. Some carry one or two hand grenades, and others carry RPG rounds strapped to them. The ones with the RPG rounds they simply guide straight into our vehicles, kamikaze fashion, and they are almost impossible to stop. They just rolled right over our front lines and advanced nearly fifteen kilometers on the first day. They are only five kilometers north of the outskirts of this city now.”