Snow hamred Detroit like shrapnel softened into water. It was heavy, relentless, and piling on steel and concrete until the city no longer resembled Arica’s industrial crown jewel, but the mausoleum of a nation pretending it wasn’t dying.
The factories were silent, the furnaces were cold. And for the first ti since the war began, the workers finally understood why.
Too many tanks had rolled out of these buildings. Too many jeeps. Too many crates of munitions bound for oceans and continents they’d never see.
And yet so few sons ca ho to drive the machines they’d built. Those absences were the water boiling over a pot.
The lack of steel, the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of it, was the oil tossed directly onto the fla.
Shipnts had been rerouted east, toward Delaware. This hadn’t been an accident, or a mistake.
And nobody at the factory level, not even the foren, supervisors, or plant managers, had been told a damn thing.
When the materials dried up and the paychecks thinned, even the most docile n began to think, and even the most loyal began to talk.
Today they gathered outside city hall. Dockworkers, machinists, miners, welders, n carved out of iron and soot, ard not with picket signs and slogans, but with rifles slung over winter coats and bandoliers across their chests.
"Where are our sons?" "Where is our steel?" "Why is the war still going on?"
Their voices echoed down the frozen boulevard, swallowed only by the storm.
Detroit’s police force arrived in tight formation ard with rifles, shotguns, and submachine guns.
For many gathered, the sight triggered the sa mory at the sa ti: the protest two years ago, when police opened fire, when the streets ran red, when Roosevelt declared the strike a "German-inspired insurrection."
The massacre that had nearly torn the nation apart.
It was that mont, burned into their bones. One that reminded the workers what Roosevelt’s Arica truly was. Not a republic, but a dictatorship.
But today, the crowd wasn’t afraid of the state, they weren’t even angry. No... today they were determined.
Roosevelt’s National Firearms Act of 1934 had tried to declaw the people. It was designed to strip them of their ans to match the governnt in terms of firepower. A notion the current suits in Washington might approve of, but perhaps not the founding fathers.
However, Arica had always been a land of tinkerers. And the industrial workers of Detroit were the best gunsmiths in the world who had never been called such.
Many carried M1903s and old hunting rifles, others flaunted submachine guns shaped in backroom workshops. So were even equipped with "misplaced" military models from crates bound for the Pacific.
And one man, standing quietly near the back of the crowd, shouldering a Browning Automatic Rifle like it weighed nothing at all, smoked a cigarette beneath aviator-style sunglasses that hid everything except intent.
To the police, he looked like any other worker ready to fight. But to the crowd, he looked like hope.
And to his fellow werewolves he was known simply as Operative H-13.
His gaze wasn’t on the police line, it was instead on the podium above, where the city’s mayor hovered nervously over the microphone, face pale, knuckles white.
H-13 couldn’t hear the exchange with the aide beside him, but he read the lips perfectly.
"Where the hell is the National Guard?"
"Sir... they were recalled to Pennsylvania last month. It’s just us."
That was all he needed to know.
He exhaled smoke, flicked the cigarette aside, and with a motion so subtle it vanished in the storm, tilted the brim of his flat cap downward by a single deliberate inch.
To ninety-nine percent of the crowd, it ant nothing.
To one man three blocks away, peering through a precision German scope from a decrepit hotel loft...
It ant: Begin...
H-13 lowered the BAR into a relaxed cradle. Not in preparation for a riot, but in preparation for timing.
The shot cracked the air like thunder. Not from the mob, and not from the police, but from above.
A single, perfect round drilled through the mayor’s chest and exited in a spray of red mist that painted the podium.
For one heartbeat, Detroit froze. Then the world burned.
The police scread, believing the protestors had fired. The protestors roared, believing the police had killed again.
And in the span of that shared misunderstanding, two terrified halves of a city tore into each other with righteous fury. Hell didn’t descend, it erupted upward.
H-13 was already behind a stone barricade before the first officer chambered a round. He planted the bipod, pressed the BAR into his shoulder, and fired in clean, controlled bursts, no panic, no haste.
Every burst directed with surgical purpose: escalate police fear, amplify mob fury, guarantee that bla would be impossible to assign.
A perfect storm requires only pressure, and Werwolf provided the lightning strike.
anwhile, the sniper who had taken the opening shot was already packing up. The shell didn’t clatter to the floor, it fell neatly into a gloved hand.
The rifle broke down into innocuous pieces. Footprints were brushed away, and within seconds no trace remained of his sins.
By the ti lawn reached the loft hours later, they would find nothing but cold wind and an open window.
Back in the square, fire began to bloom, Police cruisers overturned, and storefronts shattered.
Smoke rose black and oily into the night, and the chants of protest morphed into the howl of full-blown insurrection.
Detroit was gone, Arica had been given its spark, and Werwolf had made sure it landed in the right pile of tinder.
H-13 slung the BAR over his shoulder and slipped into a service alley while gunfire echoed behind him like a funeral march.
His mission was complete, now the mob would carry the torch. Detroit wasn’t the first city to tremble, and it most certainly wouldn’t be the last. But it was the first to burn in a way the nation could no longer ignore.
And sowhere across the Atlantic, in the Tyrolean Alps, a man who had predicted this mont decades ago would soon receive a wire from his operatives.
Three words.
The fire rises....
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