Chapter 27: Sakae Yuki's Grudge
Xiu Nan and Shou Gu almost simultaneously became aware of the danger ahead, a purely intuitive feeling without any reason, only because they had experienced too many life-and-death situations to develop a sixth sense. The two men exchanged a warning glance, their hands involuntarily tightening around the Type 38 rifles, with bullets already chambered and bayonets glinting in the sunlight. One on the left and one on the right, they crouched down, hugging the mountain wall as they slowly made their way towards the mountain pass. The people behind them, including Kawasaki, also hugged the mountain wall, following closely.
The mountain pass was eerily quiet. It was this silence that filled the two with a sense of terror. It was a silence accompanied by an oppressive stillness, the atmosphere was so heavy that even the insects in the grass had stopped chirping, and the birds flying overhead didn't dare to land. A gentle breeze blew from the mountain pass, carrying a faint scent of blood, although it was very subtle, but for these people who walked between life and death every day, it was enough.
The man turned to the person behind him and stretched out his hand, everyone understood that he wanted a machine gun. Toshigoro also picked up a machine gun. Almost at the same time, the two men shouted and pulled the trigger, bullets bounced wildly and flew around, shooting at rocks, sparks splashing everywhere.
They rushed out of the mountain pass, heading back in the direction they came from without any hesitation. The people behind them also shouted and ran out tightly, following the two crazy machine guns, running in the direction they came from. In the midst of the chaotic gunfire, almost no one heard the faint sound of two Mauser rifles firing softly in the gentle breeze, coming from a nearby tree with dense leaves, where the faint smoke barely lingered before dissipating into thin air. However, there was clear evidence - the two corpses lying on the ground, Hiyu and Kotani. As they were running while hugging their machine guns, Hiyu and Kotani suddenly lost all their strength as if taken by an evil hand, and fell to the ground headfirst, with the massive inertia causing their bodies to roll out four meters away. Before Kawasaki and others behind them could react, intense gunfire erupted from the grass and woods around them, leaving no pain, no feeling, only taking away the lives of those who remained.
Kawasaki was the last to be killed, and almost all the soldiers chose to protect him without hesitation. As a soldier, protecting one's superior is the first rule that has been engraved in their minds since long ago. Seeing life after life being lost, Kawasaki suddenly had an epiphany - what is the point of living, what is there to fear about dying? For some reason, at the end of his life, he thought not of his lovely daughter, nor his beautiful wife, but of the corpses of Chinese civilians who died under his sword. The faces that struggled, the angry curses, the mournful cries still echoed in his ears. A scene of a woman's white underwear occupied all his vision, white and pure, the soldiers' jeers, the woman's painful moans, and... merged into a deafening roar, gradually fading away.
Woman... dead. Kawasaki wanted to laugh, laughed wildly, but his mouth twitched weakly.
Looking at the convulsing corpse, Li Zhengxuan lightly spat out a mouthful of air, "Those who bring destruction upon me, I will surely destroy them!"
Yoshiko didn't see anything, but the sound of gunfire told her that the fate of the Imperial soldiers was predictable. She wanted to hate, but she couldn't bring herself to do so, because her disappointment with the Imperial soldiers had already reached its peak. Her good friend, Chizuko, who came to China with her, was tortured to death by the so-called meritorious officials of the Empire. A perverted old soldier even bit off one of Chizuko's... Chizuko screamed and struggled as she was being raped by the surrounding Imperial soldiers, who stripped her naked in the courtyard and killed her. The image of something straight and erect kept flashing before Yoshiko's eyes for several days. All the holes on Chizuko's body that could be inserted were filled with the genitals of those so-called meritorious officials of the Empire, white and gleaming, almost making all the women vomit. The crazed soldiers began to hunt down women, and that day, almost all the women in the hospital were raped. If it weren't for an officer who wanted to monopolize her body, she would have been half dead by now. Thinking of these things, Yoshiko really wanted to die, but in the military camp, suicide was impossible, and it was said that it would also implicate her parents and grandparents. Looking at the faces of the strangers around her, Yoshiko felt a little relieved. It's best to die at the hands of these people, which can be considered a heroic death.
But Yoshiko was shocked to discover that these people had even stripped the Imperial soldiers of their clothes, yet one soldier, when searching through an Imperial soldier's pockets and finding some silver coins, handed them over to a leader-like person without hesitation, despite no one being around to supervise them.
What kind of army is this?
Li Baoguo and Nan Weiren led their special forces companies through the enemy's defense zone with ease. The enemy's Takahashi unit was marching on the north bank of the Yangtze River, but due to the large number of real and fake landmines set up on the road surface, Takahashi did not want to affect morale, so he excluded a large number of engineer troops from clearing mines, and the main force had not yet acted. Therefore, when Li Baoguo and others infiltrated, they were sometimes only ten or twenty meters away from the enemy's patrol team, and sometimes the enemy's patrol team even greeted them in a friendly manner. Fortunately, Li Baoguo and Nan Weiren's Japanese was still able to get by.
Upstream of the floating bridge, within five hundred meters, is a gentle slope. On the slope, pine trees, cypress trees, and elm trees are densely and disorderly grown. The autumn grass has already shown signs of decline, but instead it is even more dark green, with a color that seems somewhat blackish-green. Behind the slope, it merges with the undulating mountains, the forest is dense and lush, without any boundaries in sight.
Under the gentle slope, Li Baoguo was teaching a few special warfare team members to make simple wooden frames that were used to carry helmet-shaped timed mines. Two wooden sticks clamped the helmet, and behind the sticks, a long wooden bar was slanted downwards at an angle, similar to the rudder of a wooden boat. It looked very simple, but Li Baoguo's requirements were very strict, the position of the helmet, the angle of the sticks, the length of the bar, etc., all had some vague requirements, otherwise these water mines could not smoothly rush to the place and explode.
Suddenly, Nan Wei-ren, who was in charge of the lookout, sent a warning that another devil patrol team had arrived, exactly ten minutes after the previous one was eliminated. It seems that the devils are on high alert for this place and have detected the danger of this slope. Li Bao-guo took a glance at several team members, quickly gathered their belongings, retreated to a small rock, and hid behind it.
Most of the special warfare team members were concentrated in a slightly distant dense forest, with only Li Baoguo, Xu De and Tie Xue Lian's ten soldiers here; Nan Wei Ren and Liu Jian led the ambush soldiers of the Blood Blade Team. The devils' patrol team had a total of ten people, lined up in single file, spaced one meter apart, walking towards the gentle slope.
Li Baoguo was behind the stone, peering through the gap between the roots of the grass clump under the stone at the approaching devils, his heart involuntarily tensing up. This was right under the devils' eyelids! Within a distance of less than 500 meters, not to mention heavy machine guns, even ordinary Type 38 rifles could shoot over! The devils' main force was again within arm's reach, and one charge could wrap them in dumplings. He took a close look at Nan Weiren's ambush position, and his heart praised Nan Weiren highly. It was no wonder he was the king of snipers; if they hadn't known their location beforehand, it would have been really hard to discover them. The grass clump was still so lush, although it had already been stripped from the land; the little birds were still standing so naturally on the withered grass stalks above their heads, softly chirping, singing clearly in the wind.
Just as the last Japanese soldier turned over the gentle slope, when the frontmost Japanese soldier was less than two meters away from Li Baoguo and his men, a faint "puff" "puff" sound arose, its volume no louder than the chirping of a partridge. The Japanese soldiers seemed to have received an order to lie down, each one collapsing limply on the ground. The grass was still motionless, only small birds were startled into flight by the sudden explosion. Li Baoguo waved his hand back and led the soldiers out to continue their work.
Thirty water mines were quickly made.
