Toshiro stared off into space for a moment.

“How much damage did they do?”

“Very little. The enemy mentalist you reported from the southern front snuck forward and took out our mentalist and then commanded all the women and children to throw their munitions over the bridge into the river and flee to their side of the bridge. Our own troops shot quite a few of them before they got clear of the bridge, but then that mentalist came across the bridge and demolished what forces we had left in that area.”

Toshiro sighed. “Well, Captain Tokigawa,” he picked up a com unit and set it to start recording. “Please record a factual accounting of our current military position and what our options are other than dying in place.”

The Captain rattled off a brief summary that covered pretty much everything he had told Toshiro and concluded that their position on this world was untenable and that they should retreat.

“I concur, Captain. For the record, I am declaring this invasion of failure. I am ordering all surviving personnel to retreat through the portal as soon as it reopens.”

He shut off the recording, pocketed it, and then began organizing the defense. He ordered the troops to start setting up barricades to block the streets and make it more difficult for the enemy to drive through an opposed. But there simply wasn’t all that much left that he could do anything with. The only good news was another mentalist appeared. He had been on the northern front, where he had been wounded, but did manage to extricate himself. He was junior to Toshiro and wasn’t impressed with Toshiro’s orders to retreat.

Somehow, he hadn’t faced any of the enemy’s strong mentalists and wasn’t impressed with Toshiro’s wariness about facing them. The only enemy mentalist Kobe Toyoda had faced he had killed, so he was dismissive of the enemy. Even so, when shown the numbers the enemy had on the front lines, even he had to admit the position was hopeless, at least without reinforcements from home.

Together, they set about shoring up the defenses as best they could, but it quickly became clear that it was an impossible task without fresh troops. They did their best to halt the enemy’s advance, but it was just impossible. As soon as they set up a strong defense line, hundreds of the drones he had been told about would descend on the defenses, wreaking havoc before the enemy ground troops advanced. As a result, the enemy ground forces would then have no problem punching through the defensive positionand moving on to the next.

Toyoda ran into the strong mentalist that had been deployed on the northern front, whom he had not previously faced. Somehow, he managed to survive, but it had been a close-run thing. He looked quite shaken when he returned to Toshiro and admitted that only an artillery shell exploding against the enemy mentalist’s shield, distracting her and knocking her to the ground, had allowed him to escape. The fact that a female mentalist had proved stronger than him was so shocking he’d blurted out the truth to Toshiro without trying to lie about it.