The moment Lin Yu’s eyes fell upon them, a torrent of thoughts surged through her mind, so overwhelming that she couldn’t comprehend why her hand had instinctively shot out to prevent the person beside her from firing.
Shoved abruptly, the rifle’s muzzle, meant to unleash fire upon the enemy, veered sharply towards her side. A magic array bloomed vividly before her eyes, while a bullet whistled past her ear, burrowing deep into the sturdy wooden wall of their cover.
As four or five strands of black hair drifted slowly to the ground, Lin Yu, who had narrowly escaped being shot clean through, finally felt a chilling wave of belated fear wash over her.
“What are you doing!”
“I said, don’t shoot!”
Unable to dwell on her narrow escape, Lin Yu maintained her relentless pressure on the rifle, determined to keep its barrel from returning to the firing port and aiming outward. “Look at them closely!”
The man’s strength surpassed even Nangong’s; despite Lin Yu pouring every ounce of her might into pushing down, she found herself utterly unable to counteract the rifle’s trajectory.
The preceding shot had already jolted their own lines awake; a steady stream of bullets now erupted from both flanks, while waves of energy and brilliant blue light blossomed from the trench’s firing positions, sending crimson mists spattering amidst the advancing ranks of the Lanforthians.
Yet, for Lin Yu, confined within the shelter where the blue light was invisible and, as a mage, the energy fluctuations imperceptible, the unfolding chaos outside remained utterly unknown.
Her gaze was fixed solely on the man struggling to reclaim his rifle, as her desperate explanation echoed through the semi-enclosed space: “Can’t you see how many of them there are?”
The forces garrisoned in the foremost trench were assigned solely to reconnaissance and early warning; this sector was destined to bear the brunt of the most intensive Lanforthian heavy artillery barrages, and deploying a large contingent here for defense would only invite gratuitous casualties.
In essence, once an assault began, the forward trench was designed to merely “impede the enemy’s advance,” not to “repel” it outright.
In theory, after fulfilling their immediate defensive objectives, the soldiers manning the forward trench were permitted to execute an orderly retreat to the rear, where they would reinforce subsequent defensive lines.
Naturally, a direct rout of the enemy’s assault would be the most desirable outcome, sparing them from a multitude of vexing complications.
There would be no need to fear a tactical retreat devolving into a panicked rout, nor to fret over the successful recapture of abandoned trenches. Indeed, owing to their specialized design (TL Note: Trenches were deep and only had firing positions on the enemy-facing side (parapet), making captured trenches difficult to defend normally.), reclaiming their own trenches was typically a less arduous task than seizing those held by the enemy.
Now, however, they found themselves utterly trapped within the shelter, unable to exit without several minutes of frantic digging with an entrenching shovel. Should they persist in firing upon the surging Lanforthian soldiers, they would inevitably be marooned here when the time came for retreat, their only recourse being to pray for the complete repulse of the attacking enemy.
Otherwise, they would be reduced to mere lambs awaiting slaughter within a cage, swiftly dispatched by Lanforthian grenades lobbed through their firing port.
“How can their numbers possibly justify ceasing fire! The more enemies there are, the more imperative it becomes to shoot!” With a forceful yank, he reclaimed the rifle, swiftly repositioning it atop the sandbags.
“Will you just listen to me!” Lin Yu lunged, seizing the rifle in his grasp and jamming her fingers into the magazine well, thereby preventing the bolt from seating. “If we open fire now, we’ll be completely exposed!”
He tried to force the bolt forward, but finding it stubbornly refused to chamber a round, he finally tore his gaze away from the advancing Lanforthian soldiers and fixed it on Lin Yu’s face. “What exactly do you want to say?”
“Use your head and think about what’s happening right now! You imbecile!”
‘What exactly was the situation?’
Following a brief yet ferocious artillery barrage, the Lanforthians had unleashed their assault, preempting the Diacla army’s anticipated full-scale offensive. Their bombardment, as always, proved devastatingly precise, obliterating the vast majority of the pre-established fire support positions along the front line.
The Lanforthians, surging forward like an unstoppable tide, had also donned new attire, their formations no longer exhibiting the dense packing Lin Yu had witnessed two months prior. With practiced ease, they navigated crater after crater, crushed the remnants of barbed wire beneath their boots, and swiftly traversed the hundreds of meters of no-man’s-land separating the opposing trenches.
Regardless of the reasons for their altered formations and offensive tactics, the mere sight of their khaki uniforms was enough to confirm that the opposing trenches had been re-manned by an entirely different contingent over the past two months.
Previously, it had been a clash of conscripts against “lobster soldiers.” Now, however… while khaki uniforms offered little in the way of effective camouflage against the ruddy earth, they were undeniably a vast improvement over the glaring “lobster red” of before.
Lin Yu harbored a strong suspicion that the preceding red uniforms were discarded, outdated Lanforthian military attire, specifically issued to ragtag trench-filling units such as their own. Possessing even old uniforms was preferable to having none at all, a stark contrast to the Diacla side, where soldiers were often forced to rely solely on their helmets for identification.
This explained why the conscripted privates, serving in a trench-filling capacity, had been able to hold their own against the Lanforthian irregulars, even managing a successful counter-charge two months prior that had driven the enemy back.
Now, however, the attacking soldiers comprised the Lanforthian main force—hardened, battle-scarred veterans. The Lanforthian artillery barrage was both precise and merciless, continuing almost unabated even as their troops charged, effectively neutralizing the retaliatory fire from the trenches.
The bewildering question of how the Lanforthians had managed to divert fresh forces to attack other fronts was a concern for later; Lin Yu’s immediate imperative was to convince the man before her to feign death alongside her.
“This position is utterly untenable; your continued firing will do nothing to salvage this lost cause! On the contrary, with blue light still emanating from the firing port, we’ll become prime targets for Lanforthian shells and grenades—”
Should another artillery shell land directly overhead, their demise would be absolute and instantaneous. If a single grenade were to be lobbed inside, only one of them could possibly sacrifice themselves by smothering it.
A second grenade, however, would spell certain doom for both, their young lives extinguished, crushed beneath the relentless gears of the war machine.
Regardless of how highly this imbecile, whose mind was seemingly preoccupied solely with “His Imperial Majesty,” valued a glorious death in battle, Lin Yu was certainly not prepared to draw her last breath alongside him in this wretched place.
She had yet to exact her revenge by felling six Lanforthians for her fallen comrades, and thus, death was not an option. She would employ every conceivable stratagem to survive.
“Our overhead cover has already caved in! If we don’t open fire, the Lanforthians won’t even realize we’re still here. Can’t we just quietly bide our time until their assault concludes, then seize an opportune moment to act?”
“Then, when our friendly forces launch their counterattack, we can burst out and coordinate a pincer movement! Wouldn’t that be infinitely more effective than you squatting here, taking a couple of potshots, perhaps killing two men, only to draw a hail of grenades that blow us both to smithereens!”
Driven by the sheer urgency of her argument, Lin Yu’s words tumbled out in a rapid torrent, making it barely possible to grasp the general meaning of her impassioned plea.
“So, just listen to me. Wait, don’t shoot…”
Having delivered such a lengthy monologue, she found herself utterly breathless, her shoulders heaving violently as she gulped down the surrounding air, thick with the scent of earth and blood.
At last, he relented, lowering the rifle, and Lin Yu’s left hand, scraped and painfully wedged by the bolt, was finally freed.
“But what if the rear lines collapse?” he countered, pushing the bolt home to chamber a round. “If we never get a friendly counterattack, won’t we simply be trapped and perish here?”
“Leave everything to me then; I speak Lanforthian,” Lin Yu declared, having already formulated a contingency plan in the few frantic seconds it took her to lunge and shove the rifle aside. “If it truly comes to that, we’ll simply surrender.”
At the mere mention of that word, he recoiled, shouting his refusal instinctively: “Absolutely not! I would sooner die fighting here than ever surrender to the enemy invaders!”
Lin Yu, however, remained unfazed by his outburst. She had, in fact, already committed such “shameless” acts before, specifically in the very shell crater where she had first encountered him two months prior.
Had she not, in a flash of inspiration, cried out the most practiced Lanforthian phrase from her past life’s battlefields, she would undoubtedly have been impaled through the chest, bled to death, and suffocated by pneumothorax in the desolate space between the forward and main trenches.
“Then we’ll feign surrender,” she pressed, “or better yet, strip two Lanforthian uniforms and don them. I’ll claim we’re soldiers from a Lanforthian colony; our accents and appearance should be more than enough to deceive them completely.”