Chapter 236: Collapse
Squad Leader Kameda’s inhuman screams were like a rusty saw, tugging back and forth at every person’s eardrums and nerves in the trench, sending chills down their spines.
He clutched the gushing stump of his severed leg with both hands, trying to stem the flow of life, but the warm, sticky liquid still stubbornly spurted out from between his fingers, dyeing the ground beneath him an ever deeper red.
“Medic! Medic!”
He roared with all his strength, his voice distorted by extreme pain and fear, then he shouted at the soldiers around him: “Save me… come save me quick! I’m your squad leader!”
However, a bizarre scene unfolded: not a single person around him extended a helping hand.
Nakada Katsuhiko leaned against the mud wall, quietly watching all of this. He found that his heart, unusually, held not the slightest ripple.
No fear, no sympathy, not even any schadenfreude.
It was just like watching a boring, irrelevant silent play.
Perhaps Takeshi Bamboo’s gruesome death had already exhausted all his emotions, or maybe having witnessed too much death and severed limbs these past few days, his nerves had gone completely numb.
He just watched calmly.
Even stranger, the soldiers around him—Squad Leader Kameda’s subordinates—reacted just the same as him.
There were clearly still seven or eight living soldiers in the trench. Some leaned against the parapet, some squatted by ammo crates, some had just recovered from the blast’s shock. Everyone’s gazes were fixed on the man wailing in the pool of blood.
But their eyes were empty.
Like a group of indifferent spectators appreciating a performance whose ending they had long foreseen.
No one moved.
No one stepped forward to bandage him.
No one went to help him up.
No one even spoke a word.
They just watched silently. Watching their officer, the normally majestic Squad Leader Kameda who would beat and curse them at the drop of a hat, wailing in despair in the mud like a dying wild dog.
Squad Leader Kameda’s harsh discipline was infamous, but calling it “harsh” was far too mild.
In his squad, “brutal” was a far more fitting description.
A single imperfect move in training meant two slaps; a blanket folded unsatisfactorily during housekeeping meant two slaps; making noise while eating meant two slaps; even just catching his bad mood that day and looking displeasing meant two slaps.
In this squad, not a single soldier’s cheek had escaped a vicious slap from his rough palm.
That burning pain and bone-deep humiliation had long planted seeds of resentment in everyone’s heart.
Bushido spirit? Comradeship?
In the face of absolute, day-after-day violence and humiliation, such things had long been crushed to dust.
Now, the tables had turned.
The man who once lorded over them, trampling their dignity at will, was now lying bare-assed in the mud, crying helplessly like an infant.
But not a soul around stepped up to help.
This was not surprising at all.
One soldier silently bowed his head and began checking the bullets in his rifle.
Another pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pocket, struck a match with trembling hands, lit it, took a deep drag, and exhaled smoke that mingled with the battlefield’s gunsmoke, blurring the indifference on his face.
Kameda’s screams gradually weakened, replaced by heavy gasps and intermittent moans. The madness and pleading in his eyes slowly gave way to the pallor and despair of blood loss.
He finally understood: no one was coming to save him.
He gave up wailing and struggling, released his tight grip on his thigh, and lay quietly in the muddy water, awaiting death’s arrival…
Just as Squad Leader Kameda’s moans were about to be completely drowned by the battlefield’s clamor, another grim reaper descended from the sky.
“Boom—!”
An MKII grenade landed precisely in the middle of the trench.
An orange-red flash erupted violently, and the savage shockwave along with countless high-speed spinning, serrated fragments carried out an indiscriminate bloody baptism in the narrow space.
A Japanese soldier who had been squatting blankly by an ammo crate, staring at Kameda, didn’t even have time to react.
A scalding, irregular fragment, like a high-speed spinning razor, sliced viciously into the side of his neck.
“Urgh!”
A short, pained grunt squeezed from his throat.
He instinctively reached to clutch his neck, but when his palm touched the wound, a warm, surging torrent under immense pressure burst from between his fingers!
It was the carotid artery!
That bright red jet of blood, like a water pipe punctured by a mischievous child, gushed upward with astonishing force, tracing a shrill yet gorgeous arc in the air before raining down on the surrounding mud walls and comrades.
His eyes bulged wide in an instant, filled with ultimate terror and disbelief.
He desperately pressed both hands to the fatal wound, trying to staunch the life-leak, but the raging blood flow was so brutal that no matter how hard he pressed, he couldn’t stop it from draining his body’s warmth and strength in a frenzy.
His body began convulsing violently, legs kicking feebly in the mud, mouth opening and closing but emitting no sound.
Seconds later, the light in his eyes rapidly faded, his body went limp, and he collapsed heavily to the ground, soon ceasing his final struggles in the pool of blood he had sprayed.
This explosion was like a signal.
Immediately after, more “pineapples” rained down from the sky.
Boom! Boom! Boom…
Successive explosions merged into a symphony of death in the trench.
Each blast came with the dull rips of human flesh tearing and shrill screams. Fragments flew wildly, blood and flesh splattered; this once relatively intact trench turned in mere seconds into a true trench of flesh, piled with severed limbs, torsos, and organ fragments.
Any experienced commander knew what it meant when the enemy could toss grenades so precisely and in batches right into your position.
The enemy was right in their face.
The position could no longer be held.
To survive, the only choice was to retreat.
Unfortunately, Squad Leader Kameda had become a gradually cooling corpse in the blood pool; he could issue no more orders. And the remaining sergeant in the squad had likely been reduced to unrecognizable minced meat in one of the earlier blasts.
Leaderless, the unit collapsed.
The surviving Japanese soldiers, under the dual pressure of death’s threat and broken chain of command, fell into utter chaos.
Some ran randomly through the trench like headless flies, some knelt praying desperately, others fired wildly outward in madness.
No one noticed.
Amid this hellish chaos, one figure quietly moved.
Nakada Katsuhiko.
In his previously numb, hollow eyes, as he watched the carotid-severed soldier spray blood and fall, a faint gleam finally flickered back to life.
It was the most primal instinct of life: the thirst for survival.
Fuck Bushido.
Fuck the Empire.
Dead, and it’s all over.
Senior Bamboo was dead, Squad Leader Kameda was dead, everyone was about to die.
He didn’t want to die.
Once this thought emerged, it spread like wildly proliferating vines, instantly overtaking his entire mind.
He hesitated no longer. Like a gecko, he hugged the trench’s inner wall tight, using the blast smoke and chaotic crowd for cover, silently retreating step by step toward the trench’s rear. His movements were light, slow, but each step utterly resolute.
He skirted a corpse blasted half to pieces, stepped over a slick, unidentified intestine, and finally reached a trench corner. He cautiously peered out, confirmed no Chinese soldiers behind for the moment, then gritted his teeth and scrambled out of this trench that had devoured countless lives.
He didn’t even look back…
………..
Xinxian County town, Japanese 24th Division headquarters.
The air here felt solidified into lead weights, suffocating everyone.
The radio’s “beep-beep” and the hoarse calls of comms staff intertwined.
A young comms staff officer had cracked lips and bloodshot eyes; he’d been calling into the mike for hours at unit designations that would never respond again, his throat raspy like a worn bellows.
Division Commander Lieutenant General Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu stood like a stone statue before the massive operations map, utterly motionless.
On the map, the red arrows of his subordinate units were sliced, surrounded by countless blue arrows representing “Shanxi Militia,” like moths trapped in a spiderweb.
That huge, shocking gap on the flank was like an unhealing scar, mockingly proclaiming his incompetence.
Chief of Staff Colonel Miyake Toshio walked heavily to his side, the air thick with wordless sorrow.
“The 20th Division still hasn’t replied?”
Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu’s voice was eerily calm, heart-chillingly so. He didn’t turn, his gaze still fixed on that fatal gap on the map.
Miyake Toshio shook his head with difficulty, throat clogged like with a lump of cotton, unable to utter a word.
“I see…” Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu’s lips twitched in near-self-mockery, “If no reply, then forget it.”
He finally turned, his once sharp eyes now dull as stagnant water.
He scanned the ashen-faced staff in the headquarters, issuing his final order in an unquestionable tone laced with madness.
“Pass the order! All units hold position! Any who dare withdraw without orders…” A savage glint flashed in his eyes, “Execute without mercy!”
Dead silence in the headquarters, only the radio’s static “zzz” humming.
Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu paused, as if drained of all strength, leaning wearily on the map table’s edge, his voice lowering but resolute with mutual destruction.
“Also… send farewell telegrams to Commander Shizuka Yoshio and North China Area Army Commander Terauchi Hisaichi.”
He raised his head, eyes filled with endless sorrow and unwillingness.
“I, Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu, don’t want to die here unknown. At least, let GHQ know how the 24th Division fought to the last moment.”
“Division Commander, sir…”
Miyake Toshio could no longer hold back, eyes instantly reddening, hot tears sliding down his wrinkled face; he snapped to attention, bowing his proud head.
“Hai!”
…
Tens of minutes later, Taiyuan, 1st Army headquarters.
When the decoder delivered that ominous telegram to Lieutenant General Shizuka Yoshio, the entire headquarters’ atmosphere plunged to freezing.
Shizuka Yoshio read the words “jade shatter farewell” on the telegram, face first turning iron-blue, then pork-liver red. His white-gloved hand trembled violently with rage.
“Smack!”
He slammed the table, hurling the thin telegram paper to the floor.
“Useless! A bunch of useless trash!” His roar shook the windows buzzing, “That pig Kuroiwa! The 24th Division’s over 10,000 elite troops, beaten to sending a farewell telegram by a local militia!
He’s lost the Empire’s face! What the hell is that bastard Nanada Ichiro doing? His 20th Division landed a day ago—why hasn’t it reached Xinxian to rescue?”
His fury targeted not just Kuroiwa Yoshikatsu’s incompetence, but also the allied forces’ inaction. To him, this was a supreme humiliation, a massive failure of imperial army coordination.
Meanwhile, Beiping, North China Area Army headquarters.
Commander General Terauchi Hisaichi, upon seeing the same telegram, displayed a wholly different rage.
He didn’t roar, just sat quietly in his chair, face darkly overcast as if dripping water. His baton creaked in his grip.
He slowly stood, walked to the map, eyes scanning Shanxi’s battlefield, finally lingering on the torn gap at Xinxian.
“Baka…” He hissed through clenched teeth, voice icily piercing.
His anger wasn’t just at the 24th Division’s failure. It was disappointment in Shizuka Yoshio’s command ability, and the terrifying combat power shown by that “Shanxi Militia” unit.
Powerful artillery, sharp penetrations, superb equipment… This was no local militia’s strength! This suddenly emerged force was a venomous thorn stabbing into the North China Area Army’s heart, utterly disrupting all his strategic plans.
“Telegram to GHQ!” Terauchi Hisaichi’s voice brimmed with killing intent, “Demand immediate re-evaluation of Su Yaoyang and his unit’s threat level.
This scourge… if not eliminated, will become the Empire’s greatest liability!”
His anger stemmed from a deeper fear of the future—or rather, the collapse of his belief in inevitable victory in the war; this collapse was more terrifying than any defeat.
