By Grizzle "Frostbite" Vane, GNN Senior War Correspondent HAGARU-RI PERIMETER, GPRK BORDER — The "Home-By-Winter-Solstice" offensive officially froze solid somewhere around forty degrees below zero on Tuesday night, right alongside the firing pins of the 1st Arcane Rifles and the left big toe of nearly every goblin currently shivering north of the Funchilin Pass.
Image credit: GoblinLife Vault
As enters day six of the total stalemate along the jagged rim of the Jangjin Reservoir, the surrounded elements of the 4th Goblin Scavenger Division remain completely cut off from the southern supply corridor. Above us on the razor-backed ridges of the Goblin People's Republic of Korea border, an estimated four divisions of Ogre Heavy Tallow-Eaters hold the high ground, looking down into this frozen bowl like butchers peering into an unplugged deep-freezer.
Nobody down here is talking about pushing to the river anymore. The only conversation left in the foxholes is about mana crystals—specifically, the fact that we cracked the last Grade-2 heating shard fourteen hours ago.
Without raw mana to feed the thermal braziers or cycle the plasma chambers on the heavy crew-served repeaters, the Chilled War has lived up to its name in the most literal, bone-splitting way possible. Lubricating oil has turned into axle-glue. Rations of tinned cave-slug have frozen into solid bricks that require an entrenching tool and twenty minutes of furious cursing just to chip into chewable splinters. Medics in the sunken aid tents are tucking plasma vials into their own armpits to keep them from bursting into purple slush before they can reach a casualty's vein.
Image credit: GoblinLife Vault
Meanwhile, the Ogre encirclement hasn't budged an inch since they blew the Yudam-ni causeway over the weekend. Impervious to the gale-force winds howling down from the Manchurian steppe, the Ogre brigades simply sit on the ridge crests wrapped in three-inch layers of naturally occurring blubber and stolen yak hides. Every hour on the hour, they roll frost-iron boulders and unguided scrap-mortars down the glazed hairpin turns, waiting for the cold to finish what their clubs started.
The real fury in the perimeter trenches, however, isn't directed uphill at the Ogres—it is aimed squarely southward toward Hungnam Port and the heated command bunker of General Barnaby Dingleheim.
Ever since the sub-zero gale snapped the primary aether-antennas on Wednesday morning, Dingleheim's staff has failed to establish a single stable communication link with the trapped perimeter. Operating entirely without ground-beacon telemetry, the High Command Quartermaster Corps has resorted to high-altitude "blind drops" through the cloud cover, with catastrophic results for everyone on the ground who isn't twelve feet tall and craving raw goblin.
At 0900 hours this morning, the drone of twin-engine transport blimps briefly raised hopes along the eastern barricade. Soldiers crawled out of snow-dugouts, waving signal flares and frostbitten fists as three dozen heavy cargo chutes blossomed through the gray sleet. Caught in a forty-knot crosswind that Dingleheim's weather-diviners apparently failed to account for, thirty-four of those pallets sailed majestically over the goblin wire and landed directly inside the encampment of the 9th Ogre Skull-Crusher Regiment. Through cracked binoculars, our forward observers watched Ogre infantrymen use sixty-thousand-drachma high-density mana crystals as rocks to crack open walnuts.
The two crates that actually fell inside the goblin perimeter crashed through the roof of the divisional latrine, shattering their shock-mounts on the frozen granite. Upon prying open the splintered timber, quartermasters discovered zero mana crystals, four hundred gross of uninsulated summer-weight loincloths, and twelve crates of brass ceremony bugles whose mouthpieces immediately welded themselves to the lips of the first three privates foolish enough to test them.
Commanders on the ground are no longer waiting for Dingleheim to figure out how a radio crystal or a wind-sock works. At dusk, Colonel Snikt of the 7th Sappers ordered the remaining siege tractors to drain their hydraulic fluid into the snow and burn the wooden ammunition crates to thaw the engine blocks. If the air drops won't come to the cauldron, the 4th Division intends tohack its way fourteen miles down the ice-choked mountain road to the coast—assuming anyone's fingers thaw out enough to pull a trigger by dawn.
