With only a single rifle, Yang Xi could only defend one direction at a time. Protecting the west meant leaving the east vulnerable, and vice-versa.
No matter his strength, he lacked eyes in the back of his head, thus his rear flank would inevitably fall to Lin Yu’s protection.
Yet, entrusting Lin Yu with a rifle to confront these vicious, towering Lanforthian ‘devils’…
Could they possibly prevail?
Lin Yu’s training in this lifetime had entirely omitted any instruction on rapidly cycling a bolt and neutralizing an enemy. Her medical knowledge, the only combat-relevant skill she possessed, had been gleaned solely from Nangong.
And the training she’d acquired as a mercenary in her past life? Her old AK74 rifle hadn’t come equipped with a bayonet, making it a certainty that she’d be the one getting impaled in such a close-quarters engagement.
This sort of close-quarters fighting—face-to-face, cycling a bolt, and charging with a rifle—was truly the most treacherous.
Despite the bleak odds, she knew she had to fight with all her might; surrendering on the spot, with a meek raise of her hands, was simply not an option.
A Lanforthian materialized before her, raising a weapon and firing a shot. A blue flash accompanied the streaking bullet, which, by sheer fortune, merely struck her steel helmet and ricocheted away.
Before she could even register her luck, Lin Yu felt a weighty object settle onto her shoulder, immediately followed by the muzzle’s spell array flashing blindingly close to her face.
“Are you trying to get me killed? You’ve practically blinded me!”
Through a hazy blue blur, the Lanforthian staggered and collapsed. Lin Yu cradled the rifle in her arm, vigorously rubbing her eyes in an attempt to restore her vision.
Having been abruptly blinded by his close-range flashes on multiple occasions, she found herself somewhat accustomed to the searing blue light this time.
Blinking, she peered ahead, only to see another figure emerge where the Lanforthian gendarme had just fallen. Swiftly, she brought up her rifle, roughly aiming forward.
Pulling…
Pulling…
Why wouldn’t this cursed trigger budge? The safety was clearly disengaged!
The Lanforthian rifle’s trigger felt strikingly different from Diacla’s “Type 40 Magic Rifle,” as rigid and unyielding as if it were rusted shut and entirely unlubricated.
It required immense force for her to depress the trigger, thereby rotating the cylinder and propelling a bullet from the barrel.
With her initial aim already poor, coupled with the excessive force that distorted her posture, the bullet predictably flew wide. Its head burrowed deep into the wooden support of the trench, leaving behind an unremarkable crater in the back wall.
Observing her missed shot, the Lanforthian gendarme facing her would undoubtedly capitalize on her error.
[Die, demon!]
Instinctively, she ducked, miraculously evading the shot. The bullet zipped past, grazing someone’s uniform, before lodging itself in the chest of another Lanforthian gendarme.
“Ah!”
Yang Xi was directly behind her!
Scratched by the passing bullet, Yang Xi instantly spun around to cover Lin Yu, firing a precise shot that struck the Lanforthian gendarme directly in the face, causing blood to erupt mere meters from them.
“Don’t just stand there gaping; there are still enemies!”
To this point, Lin Yu hadn’t landed a single shot. Her combat record stood at 0-0, with a mere eighteen assists earned by loading Yang Xi’s weapons and passing them to him.
It wasn’t that her marksmanship had deteriorated; instead, each time she brought her rifle to bear on an enemy, Nangong’s words would reverberate in Lin Yu’s mind.
Her thoughts would inevitably drift to that morning she had barely escaped death, holding Nangong’s hand and assenting to her words.
“Taking a life is unequivocally not the duty of a medic.”
“They will perceive you as a demon.”
‘Once you take a life, is there truly no turning back?’
‘What kind of nonsense is this? If I don’t shoot, I’ll die!’ Even if Yang Xi were a Diacla Superman, he couldn’t single-handedly eliminate all the gendarmes. If she refused to kill, she would inevitably be the one killed.
This was the harsh reality, as stark as the war raging beyond the mountains, or the FPV drone strike she had once endured on the desolate black earth.
She ought to clearly recognize that she was no longer the oblivious otaku, happily guzzling soda and devouring fried chicken in the confines of her room.
Her mundane life had been irrevocably lost on that distant winter day, her existence withering alongside the drone. Reincarnated, she had found herself stranded on this very plain, continuously witnessing and enduring this brutal reality for a myriad of reasons.
Lin Yu began to aim with greater precision, confronting this battle of life and death with solemn determination.
Only by eliminating every enemy could she fulfill the mission entrusted to her by the lieutenant and honor the hope her squad leader had bestowed upon her.
They hoped she would survive, accompany this fool beside her, and, completing her mission, safely depart this plain rather than remain here forever.
Some truths were understood without a single word; when they had left the two of them behind, everything had been implicitly conveyed.
For this, wouldn’t bearing a small burden of sin be entirely justifiable?
‘If a person doesn’t act for their own sake, heaven and earth will destroy them.’ (TL Note: A Chinese idiom meaning ‘everyone for themselves, or be damned by heaven and earth.’) If she were to betray her initial resolve and commit an act deemed inhuman, surely someone would cry out, “Execute the national traitor!” and unleash a fusillade upon her.
Yet, in reality, there was no such outcry.
There was only her, silently murmuring “Rest in peace” for the Lanforthian soldiers before her, then proclaiming their demise with a storm of gunfire and bullets.
One? Two? Perhaps ten?
The Lanforthian soldiers, relentless in their advance, were simply too many. Grenades rained down upon them, hurled with the reckless abandon of a snowball fight.
Nearly a hundred enemy soldiers had converged, following the trails of the grenade fuses, and the trench was rapidly becoming choked with bodies and the gravely wounded.
“Clang—”
A heavy object struck Lin Yu’s steel helmet with a resounding clang, ricocheted out of the trench, and detonated in a ball of fire three seconds later.
Several more grenades arced through the air from various angles, compelling her to drop to the ground and seek cover amidst the fallen.
The longing for a server that prohibited explosives (TL Note: A humorous reference to a game server setting that disallows grenade spamming, indicating her frustration with the overwhelming grenade attack.) surged to its peak once more as her head buzzed from the impact.
She vigorously shook her head, trying to clear the ringing, then whispered to the young man crouched beside her, “…Yang Xi, is the radio still functional?”
“What are you talking about?”
Realizing her choice of words was amiss, Lin Yu quickly amended, “That contraption you’re carrying on your back.”
He unhooked the receiver dangling from the side of his “backpack,” passing it to Lin Yu, before dropping to one knee and raising his rifle, aiming forward.
However, the Lanforthian did not appear directly ahead this time; instead, a head emerged from directly above the trench.
From his elevated vantage point, he had a clear view of the two figures concealed within the trench. He cast a quick glance inside, then swiftly retracted his head and took two steps back, vanishing from behind Yang Xi’s crosshairs.
Given the exceedingly awkward angle of appearance, Yang Xi couldn’t acquire a target and fire immediately, allowing the gendarme to slip away.
No, he hadn’t fled; rather, having confirmed the enemies’ positions within the trench, he had precisely lobbed a grenade.
Lin Yu snatched the microphone, instantly relaying an urgent plea to the distant command post: “Commander! The Lanforthians have discovered us! The mission is on the verge of failure…”
Before she could utter another word, an explosion erupted between them, the concussive force violently throwing both of them backward.
Excruciating pain pierced her eardrums, then surged from every nerve ending throughout her body, overwhelming her mind.
‘What… is happening…?’
Mustering her last vestiges of strength, she extended a hand, flicking the switch on the communicator strapped to Yang Xi’s back. Through the receiver, she heard a man’s voice urgently querying from the other end.
– “Has the mission been compromised? Report your coordinates! I’ll dispatch a round of artillery support immediately!”
‘What coordinates? How could I possibly know something like that?’
Dropping the receiver, Lin Yu frantically fumbled around, quickly retrieving an ovular, heavy object from the corpse of a fallen Lanforthian soldier.
A grenade.
Instinctively, she pulled the pin and hurled it out of the trench. Within seconds, explosions and screams erupted from beyond the earthworks.
‘Still so many of them.’
‘It’s just a damn bridge, isn’t it? Blow it up, and they can rebuild another! Why are they throwing themselves forward, one after another, just to seize this detonator?’
Gritting her teeth against the pain, Lin Yu scrambled to her feet, raised her rifle, and charged forward. Her bayonet plunged deep into the chest of a Lanforthian soldier as she rounded the corner.
The young man’s face froze in the gloom, his body seeming to lose all strength as he instinctively pressed his hand against the muzzle, futilely attempting to halt the bayonet’s deeper penetration.
Alas, he failed, just as his life had failed him.
‘This is “love at first sight,” indeed.’
In her gaming days, a character named Eriri would often rush out, delivering a bayonet thrust that sent her back to the deployment screen. Today, she had become the one doing the thrusting, and to her surprise, the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
Pushing off the soldier’s stomach, Lin Yu attempted to extract the bayonet, but it remained stubbornly lodged.
The bayonet blade was firmly wedged between the Lanforthian gendarme’s ribs, refusing to budge no matter how fiercely she strained.
Forced to abandon her own weapon, she seized the fallen soldier’s rifle and unleashed a volley of fire upon the enemy around the corner, who had frantically aimed at her but misfired.
Was this the seventh? Including her previous seven hits out of eight shots, Lin Yu had now personally killed fourteen individuals.
Her military uniform, soaked through and stained a deep, uniform shade, now made it impossible to discern if the moisture was from the river that had nearly claimed her earlier, or the blood that now clung to her entire body from the battle.
Amidst the searing pain throbbing across her entire body, she could no longer distinguish between the blood of the Lanforthians and her own.
After firing two more shots, she retreated to her original position, stepping over layers of corpses before crouching beside Yang Xi, who lay sprawled on his side at the bottom of the trench.
“How are you…?”
No answer came.