Lin Yu, amidst her rounds, checking the IV drips of the wounded, heard her name. She turned, her gaze sweeping through the throng, yet nothing seemed amiss.
A moment later, however, a hand emerged from the crowd, waving distinctly in her direction.
Navigating carefully around the other patients, Lin Yu approached the individual who had beckoned her. She knelt beside him, a question forming on her lips. “You’re…”
Her brow furrowed as she sifted through her memories, trying to reconcile the wounded man’s face with the countless others she knew. Finally, a name clicked into place. “Xun Lan?”
The sound of his name, uttered aloud, seemed to bring a measure of relief, softening the grimace of pain that had twisted the soldier’s features.
Lin Yu recognized him—the very soldier whose thigh had been bayoneted back when she was first assigned to that assault squad.
She recalled his name not for any particular brilliance on his part, for one fool was quite enough, but rather for his previous, tireless efforts in broadcasting her good name.
He had lauded her with praises such as ‘miraculous medical skill, capable of reviving the dead,’ and ‘gentle, considerate, with a voice like honey.’
Yet, it was his final, undeniably offensive, though perhaps factual, descriptor—’delicate, weak, and easily toppled’—that had truly cemented his place in her memory, seating him metaphorically at the same table as Commander Yang.
The detestable ‘flat-chest enthusiast’ (TL Note: A slang term for someone with a preference for small-breasted women) had, in his current half-dead state, finally managed to chip away a tiny sliver of Lin Yu’s deep-seated aversion. “Where are you injured?”
“My leg, I took a shot to the leg… Could you tell me how far it is from my knee?”
Pulling back the blood-soaked blanket, Lin Yu’s gaze fell upon a horrifying indentation directly in the center of his knee. The bones within were undoubtedly shattered.
Such extensive surgery was impossible on the front lines, meaning a military medic had likely sealed the wound with a healing spell to staunch the bleeding, leaving it in this ghastly, misshapen condition.
“It’s nothing major,” she murmured, drawing the blanket back over the grotesque wound, her gaze fixed on his eyes in a gesture of reassurance. “A minor surgery in the rear, and you’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”
“Really… how fortunate…”
“Indeed.”
He was hardly what one might call ‘lucky,’ especially when compared to Lin Yu, who had endured three artillery barrages in two months without a scratch.
Yet, when measured against the countless Diacla and Lanforthian soldiers who now lay eternally silent on the battlefield, his return to the rear for recovery marked him as considerably more fortunate.
A life with a limp, after all, was infinitely preferable to no life at all.
Shifting the conversation away from his injury, Lin Yu pressed on. “By the way, do you have any news of the others? How many managed to retreat from the front line?”
“Less than one in ten survived.”
Through his words, Lin Yu was finally able to piece together the full, harrowing picture of the Diacla army’s retreat yesterday.
A brief yet ferocious artillery barrage had driven the Diacla defenders into their various shelters.
These positions were then systematically targeted and precisely blasted by high-explosive shells, burying nearly half the men within their bunkers, from which they never emerged.
Those who did manage to crawl out were met by the overwhelming, relentless charge of Lanforthian soldiers—a scene Lin Yu herself had witnessed when peering through the firing port.
The forward trench was breached, leading to wave after wave of brutal, hand-to-hand combat.
Xun Lan, along with his comrades, fell back to the support trench, where they continued their defense, even managing to detonate the communication trench leading to the rear as they withdrew.
Soon after, even the support trench fell, forcing them to retreat further, into the final reserve trench.
However, the soldiers already stationed in the reserve trench, witnessing the utter rout, simply abandoned their positions and fled.
This triggered a complete collapse of their own unit, and they scattered, fleeing all the way to the outskirts of the logistics area, where the scattered remnants were eventually gathered by the 104th Reserve Regiment along the banks of the Mang River.
Of the several hundred front-line soldiers, combined with the non-combat personnel working and living in the logistics area, Commander Yang’s original force of two thousand had dwindled to fewer than two hundred who managed to link up with allied troops.
Having miraculously avoided injury during the initial retreat, he had been dispatched to defend the left bank.
There, in last night’s engagement, he took a bullet to the knee—an unfortunate turn, to be wounded by a mere handful of Lanforthian soldiers who had breached the trench, yet incredibly fortunate that the injury was confined solely to his knee.
Once he had concluded his account, Lin Yu eagerly shifted the conversation, her thoughts turning to her friends. “Did you, by any chance, see any medics among the retreating throng? They’re a bit taller than me, with…”
“No,” he replied, slowly shaking his head as he lay there. “So many perished, and the chaos was absolute. I truly have no idea who survived.”
“…”
Though she hadn’t received the answer she desperately sought, Lin Yu understood.
In the utter pandemonium of a rout, few would spare a thought for the whereabouts of a few unfamiliar medics.
This wasn’t a truth to be unearthed by merely asking a couple of questions; it demanded her unwavering, persistent effort, tracing every minute clue to uncover her friends’ fate.
“Very well, then. Go to the rear and focus on your recovery. If you hear anything at all, please be sure to write and let me know.”
As she slowly rose from beside him, Lin Yu suddenly realized the carriage door had silently closed.
She moved to the door and pushed with all her might, only to discover that it stubbornly refused to budge under her strength.
Realizing this, Lin Yu, afflicted with a severe case of ‘Can’t Get Off the Vehicle PTSD’ (TL Note: A humorous, colloquial term for anxiety or fear related to being trapped in a moving vehicle), immediately lunged two steps to the window, pressing against the glass as she cried out for help. “Hey! Why did you lock the door? I haven’t gotten off yet!”
Fortunately, her voice was sharp enough to carry a considerable distance through the window.
Before long, someone opened the carriage door for her; it was the same junior officer who had initially called her for assistance. “The window isn’t locked, you know. Couldn’t you have just climbed out?”
Lin Yu cast a scathing glance at the officer, then turned to peer back at the carriage window, which stood a daunting one and a half times her height from the ground. “Jumping from that high, I’d undoubtedly take a nasty tumble!”
“That’s your problem, isn’t it…”
By the time the officer truly registered her words, the diminutive soldier had already vanished into the distance.
“…”
Dismissing the officer’s words entirely, Lin Yu instead held the wounded soldier’s information firmly in her mind as she walked in silence, heading towards the logistics area nestled behind the small hill.
The non-combat personnel of the 104th Reserve Regiment had also established numerous facilities here.
Given their temporary deployment, every structure was a tent, a stark contrast to the more permanent logistics areas she had encountered previously.
This was, without a doubt, a regular army.
Not only were their medics accompanied by mages, but their cooks were equipped with mobile dining carts, and transportation relied not on civilian porters but on sturdy mules, horses, and vehicles.
A dozen or so trucks, distinctly different in appearance and size from those of the Lanforthians, were parked along the muddy road, unloading their cargo.
In the distance, Lin Yu could discern another dozen horses, straining together to haul heavy artillery pieces up the hill, destined to bolster the firepower of the reverse-slope battery.
From this, it was clear that command was taking the defenses here seriously: reinforcements had arrived promptly, and the heavy artillery was genuine, consisting entirely of the largest caliber divisional howitzers.
May they succeed.
Finding an unobtrusive corner to settle into, Lin Yu silently gazed upwards.
In the vast, cloudless expanse of the sky, she was fortunate enough to spot the silhouette of a bird in flight.
“Hello there, little bird.”
She mused whether it was possible that the bird she now gazed upon was the very same one she had watched while lying in the trench two months prior, and again yesterday afternoon from a stretcher.
After all, it possessed the same beautiful plumage and soared with the same effortless freedom, unlike her own soul, which felt so hopelessly tethered to the ground.
Yet, such a possibility was infinitesimally small; what ordinary bird would continuously circle the same stretch of sky for two consecutive days?
As for the one she had seen two months ago, it had likely long since been shot down by some famished soldier, plucked, summarily stewed, and consumed. There was no chance of ever seeing it again.
Her mind awash with irrelevant musings, Lin Yu felt an overwhelming weariness creep into her eyes.
The young woman, still in her military uniform, sprawled out on the grass, her consciousness succumbing to the relentless fatigue of the past few days.
The experiences of the past few days had been too intense, too fraught with tension, too utterly stimulating for her young mind, containing an information overload that most fifteen-year-old girls would never encounter in a lifetime.
Or perhaps it was merely the lingering aftereffects of her recent ‘shell-hammering mini-game’ escapade.
Whatever the reason, she closed her brown eyes, stretched out languidly, and succumbed to a profound sleep.
A faint, almost imperceptible smile gradually curved her thin, chapped lips.