The Saga of Tanya the Merciless

Vespertine light suffused the charnel fields, casting aureate shadows through the miasma of cordite and decay. Tanya's fingers traced the argent curves of Morris's tags, worn smooth like ancient votives polished by generations of supplicants. The metal sang with memories of yuletide revelry - Morris's calabrine laugh echoing through the candescent winter night, his mother's schnapps recipe scratched on vellum now stained with wines both red and ferrous.

The enhanced soldier before her watched with vitreous eyes, optical arrays whirring in mechanical genuflection as her hunters practiced their crimson craft. Its dermis, once Reich-pristine, now bore a palimpsest of their ministrations - each laceration a verse in their growing grimoire of atrocity. Mueller's blade inscribed fresh syllables in synthetic sinew, drawing forth ichorous oils that should have been blood.

Prismatic dawn painted the tableau in shades of amber and carnelian, light fracturing through the crystalline residue of their previous exhibitions. The detritus of war lay transmuted - brass casings melted to liquid aureate pools, steel fragments metamorphosed into writhing sculptural forms that defied euclidean geometry. Nature itself seemed to recoil from their works, trees bending away from the kill zones where enhanced soldiers came to study their own dissection.

"More approaching through the umbra," Steiner whispered, his voice carrying the timbre of those who'd witnessed Reich perfection rendered into profane shapes. "They move like automatons playing at predation."

Indeed, the enhanced troops advanced with mechanical grace, each step calculated to optimize their hunt. Yet their precision betrayed them - no blood flowed through those augmented veins, no memories of shared cigarettes or clandestine toasts haunted their crystaline minds. The Reich had excised humanity's beautiful chaos, replacing it with cold algorithms that could never comprehend the poetry of pain.

The first detonation transformed their mathematical advance into abstract expressionism. Harrison's British forces had learned well the art of transformation - how to transmute proper soldiers into creatures of gorgeous violence. The enhanced troops' thermal-hardened armor flowered into crimson blossoms, their internal mechanisms revealed like mechanical stigmata.

Through her field glasses, Tanya watched their glass eyes widen in algorithmic confusion as training routines crashed against primitive chaos. Their Reich masters had given them libraries of tactical doctrine, but no volumes covered the mad opera now unfolding. No propaganda reels had prepared them for humans, who'd remembered older songs of tooth and claw.

The tags at her throat chimed a dirge of remembrance - Morris, Bennett, Andrews. A litany of the lost who'd shared that last Christmas before their world dissolved into beautiful horror. Each name a prayer, a curse, a reminder that humanity's capacity for savagery needed no enhancement. The Reich had tried to improve on nature's design, forgetting that monsters wore their hearts outside their chest, beating in time with war drums made from dead friends' bones.

"Let them witness," she commanded, her voice carrying notes of schnapps-soaked carols now sung in keys of crimson. Her hunters moved like poetry given flesh, all savage rhyme and bloody meter. They'd learned to harmonize with chaos, to dance in time with death's irregular waltz.

The enhanced soldiers died in movements of mounting confusion, their glass eyes recording every exquisite detail of their own unmaking. Send that data back, she thought. Let your masters watch their soldiers undone by mere humans who remembered how to embrace the primitive dark, who'd learned that survival meant becoming something wonderful and terrible.

Mueller harvested their components with artists' care, each extracted piece a brushstroke in their evolving masterpiece. No Reich-approved efficiency here - just the raw artistry of butchers who'd learned to love their work, who painted in oils both mechanical and organic. They arranged the pieces in patterns that would draw more enhanced troops to study, to analyze, to feed their growing gallery.

Somewhere in the distance, more Reich creations advanced through the crepuscular gloom. More glass eyes coming to witness human ingenuity unfettered by sanity or mercy. 

Tanya smiled, tasting metal and memory on her tongue. The Reich had tried to create perfect soldiers, but they'd forgotten the fundamental truth - war was art, not science. War was Weber dying with a jest and a prayer. War was Christmas dreams drowned in wine and cordite. War was humanity's dark beauty made manifest in blood and bone.

Let them come with their glass eyes and synthetic sinews. Let them learn why their makers should have left Christmas memories alone. Let them witness what blooms in hearts fertilized with loss and watered with revenge.

The tags whispered dead men's names as she prepared to teach another lesson in human artistry.