The Awakening of a Mercenary

The middle-aged veteran’s scolding and insults lasted for at least ten minutes. Lin Yu, cradling her rifle, sat on the ground and listened for just as long. The main gist was an instruction on how to survive a bombardment completely unscathed, interspersed with a torrent of dialect that, while incomprehensible, she could easily discern as profanity.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was battlefield knowledge sprinkled with a healthy dose of expletives.

Despite her curiosity about what could possibly fuel such a lengthy tirade, Lin Yu was, after all, being thoroughly berated. She lowered her head, feigning an attitude of humble receptiveness, though her mind had already drifted far beyond the confines of the trench.

It was truly infuriating to recall how the lieutenant had outwardly appeared to be helping her, only to reveal his true colors the moment the shelling began, shoving her from the safety of the bunker directly onto the trench line to face her demise.

Had the shell that knocked her down landed a little more accurately, or had she been dragged back into the dugout a moment later, Lin Yu might now be opening her eyes to experience her third life.

Each nearby explosion of a shell sent loose clumps of earth dancing into the air. Several much younger privates beside her clapped their hands over their ears, ducking their heads, appearing even more terrified than she was.

The veteran’s words were likely intended more for them, though whether they truly absorbed the lessons remained unknown. In her previous life, she had, after all, hunkered down in trenches through hundreds of shellings, and had even endured a suicide drone attack; this was hardly her first time under fire.

Before Lin Yu formally joined the front lines as a mercenary, she had undergone two months of basic training. Though more than a decade had passed, blurring her recollections, for some inexplicable reason, ever since she was kicked into this trench, those memories had been reactivated, growing increasingly vivid.

How to treat wounds, how to dig a foxhole, how to evade drones… Oh, no need to recall that last one; they couldn’t possibly field any flying machines here.

Her memories as a village girl gradually faded, while those of a mercenary slowly awakened.

The moment the shelling ceased, she proactively scrambled out of the bunker, standing in the noticeably wider trench and peering left and right.

To her left lay scorched earth, to her right, an expanse of wet mud. The unfortunate soul who hadn’t made it into cover in time lay half-buried against a sandbag, a fluid indistinguishable from blood or muddy water oozing down the trench wall.

“Ugh…”

Suddenly, a surge of sour bile rose in her throat. Clasping her steel helmet, she knelt in the trench’s stagnant water, expelling all the fragments of the steamed bun she had secretly eaten that morning.

‘Ah, I almost forgot…’

Wiping her mouth with her sleeve, and then struggling to pull herself up by a nearby log, Lin Yu finally remembered something crucial.

‘Even in my previous life, I was hardly a qualified soldier.’

That single genuflection had completely stained her civilian clothes with the color of the trench, making her appearance almost identical to the soldiers who were now emerging from the dugouts.

This unit lacked a uniform military dress; everyone wore their own civilian clothes, with only helmets and rifles issued uniformly by the quartermaster.

Otherwise, in her civilian attire, she would have long since been sent away from this trench, rather than being kicked into it.

Now, even the last vestiges of her clean civilian clothes, which might have set her apart from the battlefield, were imbued with the stench of war. Aside from being slightly younger and having more delicate, feminine features, she wondered what truly distinguished her from any fifteen or sixteen-year-old boy sent to fill the lines.

‘Will the medic be able to properly confirm my identity when they arrive?’

‘How much longer until the medic gets here…’

She lifted her gaze to the left, towards the endless stretch of communication trenches behind the main line. A deeper despair, like earth collapsing from a bunker ceiling, threatened to bury her.

“What are you gawking at?! A comrade’s buried! Dig, now!”

Another kick landed on Lin Yu’s thigh, this time from a boot heel. She stumbled, nearly falling to the ground. Turning back, she saw the veteran already furiously digging with a shovel into a collapsed section of the bunker.

She had no shovel hanging from her waist; she didn’t even have a belt. The quartermaster had merely tossed her a rifle and clapped a steel helmet onto her head.

‘Something to dig with…’

With a strenuous effort, she lifted her rifle, her gaze fixed on the water-dripping rifle butt.

Awkwardly, she began to scrape at the earth with the rifle’s stock.

A minute later, she unearthed a bloody hand, blood still oozing from the lacerations across its back.

She had forgotten even to scream, staring blankly as the hand began to tremble.

She was then jostled aside by several soldiers, landing back in the muddy water, watching them unearth an officer from the soil.

“Sir, are you alright?”

“Cough, cough, cough… I… I’m fine… The others from command…”

“We’re digging them out now. No telling how many are still alive.”

“Those Lanforths…”

“They haven’t charged yet, sir. Probably just a routine bombardment.”

“That’s… good.”

The veteran unscrewed a canteen for the officer, briefly cleaning the blood and mud from his eyes and face. Lin Yu, sitting not far off, was then able to clearly discern his features.

It was none other than the lieutenant who had called for a medic to confirm her identity earlier.

“Those foreign devils sure can hit their mark. Are they using some new technology?”

“Heaven knows… One shot just brought this whole place down.”

Lin Yu, still sitting on the ground in a daze, was soon spotted by another veteran. She struggled to her feet under a barrage of kicks and shoves.

Mimicking the others, Lin Yu took up a firing position in the trench, yet found herself unable to reach the topmost sandbags. She glanced around, surveying her surroundings, then bent down to laboriously drag an empty wooden crate from the corner to where she stood.

With this makeshift boost, she could finally observe the situation directly in front of the position. Water-filled shell craters pockmarked the reddish-brown earth, tattered, rusted barbed wire stretched out ahead, and no vegetation could be seen anywhere, save for a few charred, dead trees still standing sentinel in the heart of the battlefield.

Several corpses, who had sought cover behind the withered trees, leaned against their stumps.

‘This is truly trench warfare, damn it.’

Lin Yu’s vision swam, and she slumped over the sandbags, on the verge of tears.

Before her lay an entire defensive sector riddled with shell craters, evidence that this was no hastily dug blocking position, but a trench system meticulously maintained for years.

‘How could anyone possibly survive in such a hell?’

Suddenly, a flash of light caught her eye from beside her. She whipped her head around, to see the soldier next to her, rifle raised, firing into the distance.

‘N-no gunshot sound?’

A blue glow emanated from around him, followed only by the distinct ‘whoosh’ of bullets cutting through the air.

‘This… this can’t be a rifle, can it?’

Lin Yu stared in horror at the ephemeral magical array that blossomed from the muzzle of the soldier’s rifle. The word ‘magic’ seized her mind.

‘Tanya!?’

An anime she had followed in her previous life immediately sprang to mind, where a certain blonde, maniacal loli would wield such a weapon, and its destructive power was anything but small.

‘Are all the soldiers hunkered down in this trench mages?’

Such a notion was utterly unrealistic. Diacla had only recently been a purely ‘mortal’ nation, having embraced magic for merely a few years; it was impossible for everyone to be a magic user.

Moreover, the power of these ‘bullets’ wasn’t as formidable as depicted in the anime, occupying the same ecological niche as the rifles she knew.

Blue light also flared from the trench ahead, suggesting that engagement had already begun there. However, the enemy was still an entire defensive line away from her, surely they wouldn’t advance so quickly…

As if fate itself sought to disabuse Lin Yu of her overly optimistic thoughts, a quiet tremor of panic began to ripple through the soldiers stationed ahead.

Lin Yu watched with her own eyes as the front trench began to collapse. Many soldiers abandoned their rifles and clambered out, fleeing to the rear. Lacking an orderly retreat through the communication trenches, they were either struck by enemy bullets or caught in friendly fire.

Gradually, bullets began to whistle past from the front. In the young girl’s hazel eyes, a shocking expanse of red was reflected—columns of enemy soldiers, uniformly clad in red tunics, were launching a desperate charge towards the trench.

‘What kind of dream am I in…’

Lin Yu released her grip on the rifle resting on the sandbags. She turned, slowly crouched down, clutching her head, and pressed both hands under her steel helmet, covering her ears.

This was a beautiful, otherworldly realm, devoid of drones whirring wildly overhead, and no fighter jets indiscriminately dropping bombs from the sky.

Yet, war was ever-present.

The rifles of this otherworld were eerily silent, too quiet for a firefight.

But bullets still shrieked through the air.

‘Why, why, why?’

‘Why did I climb up there to sell steamed buns?’

‘Why didn’t the platoon leader recognize I was a girl?’

‘Why wouldn’t the lieutenant just let me go…’

‘Terrified to death, aching to death, regretful to death, yet not wanting to die in the slightest.’

A panicked group of people dashed past her. Her despairing gaze was firmly drawn to a metallic object hanging on the chest of a man in military uniform; it was entirely silver-white, but caked with mud and blood.

Lin Yu watched the whistle, watched the man bring it to his lips, and then blow, emitting a sound that carved itself into her soul—the piercing blast of a charge whistle.

The enemy soldiers did not halt after conquering the first trench but continued to leap out and press their assault forward, clearly intent on taking two defensive lines in quick succession. To prevent this, he was now commanding the privates to launch a counter-charge.

‘I’m going to die.’