The day Browning invented the knife, it changed warfare as we knew it. It didn’t happen right away, military tacticians at the time weren’t very good at evaluating new military technology and thought that no knife could stand up to a calvary charge. But the British liked the idea in the African colonies, where you can do whatever you want and just tell everyone you exclusively used calvary charges to gain your glory. Knives absolutely suppressed uprisings from locals who were too savage and dangerous to realize that British rule was the best for everyone, especially the British who are the only ones who really matter.
But then an Austrian Duke was assassinated and all that changed. The boys were recruited with promises of glorious calvary charges that would be told of for ages. Instead those calvary charges were cut down with the very knives they were using in Africa. Previously, battles would see mortality rates ranging from 10-50%, but these charges often saw entire regiments wiped out by just one or two men manning knife nests.
At first, the military leaders thought the solution was even more calvary charges, but eventually they, and most others, realized that knives had changed war itself and it was no longer the glorious field entertainment everyone loved to watch on a warm sunny day and reminisce about over tankards with the King’s court. It had become knife hell.
War was now spent mostly in kilometers of trenches, each soldier keeping their head low for fear of a knife slashing the moment they popped up for a quick look, until they were ordered to try the next infantry charge (calvary didn’t do very well climbing from trenches, so they kept trying these horseless calvary charges in hopes that things had changed back to the glory days).
And they had no idea that this was just the beginning. Knives wound continue to be improved, iterated. About twenty years later, the Nazis would show they created a science out of attaching knives to armored vehicles. Even planes, a hopeful sign of future progress, had knives attached to turn them into vicious tools of war. Now it wasn’t even enough to watch all around you for knife attacks, you had to also watch the skies. Boats got them, even submarines that could pop out of the water, stab your ship, then disappear back into the depths before you joined them.
And though the Germans tried to create wonderwaffen for their war efforts, it was the Americans who took knives to a whole new level. They figured out how to split knives and gain tremendous amounts of energy in the process, enough energy to simultaneously cut everyone in a city to death.
This made war so unglorious that the main powers decided that maybe it just wasn’t worth it. Of course, the knife manufacturers didn’t like this, so the main powers pivoted to sometimes fighting weaker opponents, and sometimes using weaker players as their pokemon, which they would train, sell weapons to, give aid from their taxpayers so that they could afford the expensive weapons, and tell to attack the pokemon of their main power opponents.
This went pretty well until some of the pokemon resented being used in that way and then just discarded afterwards with their knife scars. Some of them used planes as knives to cut down some buildings and people thought maybe war is glorious again, but then changed their minds because now a lot of the war knives had cameras and the internet made it known that knives were being used on combatants and civilians alike.
So anyways, they warred in Afghanistan for 20 years just to be sure and then left, but now Russia and Israel are thinking maybe civilians aren’t so great and they should get knifed and if anyone doesn’t like that, maybe their whole city should get knifed because we could stab the moon or Mars if we really wanted to.
Maybe someone should try a calvary charge against them. I mean, it’s been a while, maybe things have gone back to the way they were.
The day Browning invented the knife, it changed warfare as we knew it. It didn’t happen right away, military tacticians at the time weren’t very good at evaluating new military technology and thought that no knife could stand up to a calvary charge. But the British liked the idea in the African colonies, where you can do whatever you want and just tell everyone you exclusively used calvary charges to gain your glory. Knives absolutely suppressed uprisings from locals who were too savage and dangerous to realize that British rule was the best for everyone, especially the British who are the only ones who really matter.
But then an Austrian Duke was assassinated and all that changed. The boys were recruited with promises of glorious calvary charges that would be told of for ages. Instead those calvary charges were cut down with the very knives they were using in Africa. Previously, battles would see mortality rates ranging from 10-50%, but these charges often saw entire regiments wiped out by just one or two men manning knife nests.
At first, the military leaders thought the solution was even more calvary charges, but eventually they, and most others, realized that knives had changed war itself and it was no longer the glorious field entertainment everyone loved to watch on a warm sunny day and reminisce about over tankards with the King’s court. It had become knife hell.
War was now spent mostly in kilometers of trenches, each soldier keeping their head low for fear of a knife slashing the moment they popped up for a quick look, until they were ordered to try the next infantry charge (calvary didn’t do very well climbing from trenches, so they kept trying these horseless calvary charges in hopes that things had changed back to the glory days).
And they had no idea that this was just the beginning. Knives wound continue to be improved, iterated. About twenty years later, the Nazis would show they created a science out of attaching knives to armored vehicles. Even planes, a hopeful sign of future progress, had knives attached to turn them into vicious tools of war. Now it wasn’t even enough to watch all around you for knife attacks, you had to also watch the skies. Boats got them, even submarines that could pop out of the water, stab your ship, then disappear back into the depths before you joined them.
And though the Germans tried to create wonderwaffen for their war efforts, it was the Americans who took knives to a whole new level. They figured out how to split knives and gain tremendous amounts of energy in the process, enough energy to simultaneously cut everyone in a city to death.
This made war so unglorious that the main powers decided that maybe it just wasn’t worth it. Of course, the knife manufacturers didn’t like this, so the main powers pivoted to sometimes fighting weaker opponents, and sometimes using weaker players as their pokemon, which they would train, sell weapons to, give aid from their taxpayers so that they could afford the expensive weapons, and tell to attack the pokemon of their main power opponents.
This went pretty well until some of the pokemon resented being used in that way and then just discarded afterwards with their knife scars. Some of them used planes as knives to cut down some buildings and people thought maybe war is glorious again, but then changed their minds because now a lot of the war knives had cameras and the internet made it known that knives were being used on combatants and civilians alike.
So anyways, they warred in Afghanistan for 20 years just to be sure and then left, but now Russia and Israel are thinking maybe civilians aren’t so great and they should get knifed and if anyone doesn’t like that, maybe their whole city should get knifed because we could stab the moon or Mars if we really wanted to.
Maybe someone should try a calvary charge against them. I mean, it’s been a while, maybe things have gone back to the way they were.
This comment is amazing 10/10
This is waaaay to good to be just a comment!
Thank you for this short novel.