Nynn felt it distinctly as a bead of sweat rolled from beneath her helmet, down the tanned skin of her neck, and down past the collar of her well-worn combat fatigues. The heat, like almost everything in this damn country, was oppressive, but it wasn't the reason for Nynn's sweating. The reason was a small muddy hole in the earth that every member of her squad was intently focused on. The hole looked like a wound to Nynn's mind, a messy, festering thing gouged into the side of the jungle hill. Dark mud stained with woody tannins had colored the grass all around a sickly reddish brown that almost looked like decaying blood. The raucous calls of jungle birds in the surrounding trees sounded almost like a funeral dirge to the brunette gnome. Nynn adjusted her helmet and took a cigarette from a pouch on her shoulder. She lit the soggy cigarette and savored the cheap smoke that filled her lungs as she cast her hazel eyes skyward in a wordless prayer. It was her turn for tunnel-clearing duty, and she knew it.
"Nynny Goat, you're up. Take five to get ready, then head into that hole for clearing duty. The rest of you, keep an eye out for ambushes and side exits. Eyes on a swivel, ladies. You know that there's never just one hole," Sergeant Waxer said, her words sharp and grating as they issued from her scaly snout. The sergeant was a kobold with grey scales and two intentionally shorn horns atop her draconic head. She, like the rest of the 4th Recon Squad, belonged to the 1st Bantam Battalion, and, like every other soldier in the Bantam Battalions, she was under 160 centimeters in height. Short soldiers for specialty jobs, who more often than not got the short end of a very shitty stick.
Nynn, like many, had been enticed to join the U.C.C. Army by the promise of big benefits. The war in the jungle country of Chitran had seen demand for soldiers of her height skyrocket, and recruiting offices made big promises to get small soldiers to join up. Turns out that you need diminutive soldiers when your enemy is an equally diminutive race of crafty rodent beast folk. Extra pay, extra benefits, and extra danger to any soldier small enough to squeeze their ass into the myriad tunnels that the enemy rats had dug throughout the occupied country. The military would not only pay her way through college, but would buy her a new car and put a downpayment on a house for her ... if she lived long enough to claim it.
"Come on, Sarge, my deployment is supposed to be up in a month. Two extensions on a two-year tour, and you're really gonna send me down there to get killed 30 days before I'm out?" Nynn asked half in jest. She shrugged off her heavy pack and puffed away at her cigarette. The girl had done this before, they all had. Clearing the rat tunnels was unofficially their official job as Bantam soldiers. Still, it was about as dangerous as could be. The rats liked to set traps in those tunnels, liked to prepare ambushes. If a soldier in her unit was to meet a bad end, then it was likely going to be a hundred meters down some rain-slicked death hole dug by illiterate local rat-kin resistance fighters.
"Quit your bleating, Nynny Goat. You didn't hear Mags complaining when she went down the last one," Thera, the only human among their group said as she fiddled with the squad radio. The only human, and the tallest of their squad, she was a bit of a dour sort, but trustworthy.
"Yeah, well that one turned out to just be a pig den. This one's a rat hole, and a well-used one," Nynn said as she pointed out the long, five-toed footprints that littered the mud in front of the hole. There could be no question. This was an enemy tunnel, and a recently traveled one at that. If it wasn't filled with deadly traps, then Nynn was sure that there were at least a dozen enemy rat-kin just waiting to ambush her.
"You know protocol, Nynn. Just go down a hundred meters or so, set the charge, and get out. Nothing fancy," Sergeant Waxer said as she placed a scaled hand on Nynn's shoulder to re-assure her. She knew what Nynn was about to go through, they all did, though none of them envied her.
As her cigarette burned, Nynn made what adjustments that she could to ease movement in the tunnels. At 115 centimeters tall, she was the smallest of the group, and one of the few comfortably able to crawl through the rat-kin tunnels. Even those in the Bantam Battalions sometimes had trouble maneuvering in the excessively cramped spaces of the often hastily dug tunnels. Nynn buttoned up her shirt, and buttoned her sleeves in place. She tucked her pant legs into her boots and secured her belt tight around her middle. Anything and everything that she could do to ease her movement and decrease the risk of getting snagged on something down there in the dark. Her cigarette had almost burned down to the butt as she double-tied her boot laces.
Sergeant Waxer passed the sun-kissed gnome a flashlight, a pistol, and a small satchel of explosives. The kobold gave Nynn a small nod before taking up a guard position by the muddy entrance to the rat tunnel. Nynn sighed as she took one last puff from her cigarette. She released the cloud of acrid smoke into the air through pursed lips, and drank in the sounds of jungle birds and buzzing insects that filled the humid air. One last taste of the world above before delving underground, perhaps never to see the sun again. Nynn flicked the smoldering butt of her cigarette down the tunnel before her, and watched it sail down off into the darkness before guttering out in the mud some dozen feet away.
"Just get in, plant the bomb, and get out," Nynn whispered to herself as she flicked on the flashlight, held it out before her like a torch, and carefully crept into the damp, dank, likely enemy-infested mud hole before her.