Chapter 56: Fighting Like a Beast

...The battlefield is not child's play. It is not like modern gunfight games where people wear all sorts of colorful skirts and hold exaggerated weapons while firing at opponents from afar.

Instead, it is like being a wild beast, using every possible means to kill the enemy. There is no mercy, no humanity—only a life-or-death struggle.

Anyway, ever since I time-traveled, I have never played any gunfight games again.

...Excerpt from Hu Biao's diary collection, "Biao's Truth"...

Let me explain briefly here. Perhaps due to limited time, the Japanese positions constructed at Dunwu Temple were not composed of trenches like those on Position Number Seven.

Instead, they built multiple firepower points using a large number of sandbags.

Their strongest firepower, which consisted of two Type 92 infantry guns, happened to be knocked out during the National Revolutionary Army's five-minute artillery bombardment just a moment ago.

After rushing into such a position, Black Star quickly scanned his surroundings and soon located his first victim:

Dozens of meters away on his left hand side, a Japanese second lieutenant waving a samurai sword was currently commanding a Type 96 light machine gun squad to turn their barrel toward the breach.

If that light machine gun were truly allowed to fire sideways at the breach, it would spell a huge trouble.

Quickly estimating the distance between them, which should be around fifty-five meters—well within his throwing range—Black Star pulled the fuse and grinned ferociously.

He even purposely held the smoking wooden-handled grenade in his hand for a full second before tossing it out.

Ultimately, the grenade traced an arc through the air and detonated at a height of about one meter right above the second lieutenant and the machine gun squad.

It seemed that his grenade-throwing skills, unused for several years after retiring from the military, had not grown rusty at all.

In an instant, the second lieutenant, the Type 96 light machine gun squad, along with two other little Japanese soldiers charging forward with bayoneted Arisaka rifles—a total of five men—were all laid low on the ground.

Although only two of them perished on the spot and the remaining three were not yet dead, they no longer posed any threat.

By this time, Black Star was already pulling the pin on a second grenade.

About eighty meters behind him, Uncle Bo, still maintaining a kneeling posture in his original spot, was loading bullets into his original-issue Mauser rifle for the fourth time.

The results of his previous fifteen rounds, which had taken down eight high-value targets, constituted the scorecard he handed in.

Among the total of seven time-travelers, only the two mentioned above were retired PLA veterans and active-duty regular soldiers. Aside from Hu Biao, who fared somewhat better, the remaining four could only be considered masses with zero combat experience.

Facing the Japanese soldiers launching a desperate counterattack toward this section of the breach, they found themselves handling the situation with extreme difficulty.

What could they do? What else could they possibly do?

If they didn't kill the Japanese, they would only be killed by the Japanese. With no room for compromise, they unleashed the most frantic sides of their souls, fighting and slaughtering like wild beasts.

...

By this time, it was the most intense and brutal moment of this entire charging assault.

It was akin to a grand banquet where a steaming, large braised pork knuckle was finally served onto the table...

******

"A magazine! Who the hell can give me a magazine for a Flower Machine Gun?"

After discarding an empty magazine, Chaozi roared at the top of his lungs, his voice filled with an indescribable sense of anxiety.

Make no mistake! What Chaozi was holding in his hands right then was a Flower Machine Gun, otherwise known as a submachine gun.

It was long past the Sichuan-made Type 79 rifle he had been holding when he charged out of the cotton fields.

Mainly, this novice rookie had a fairly good grip on his own limitations. Through just two or three days of training, he knew that whether in bayonet fighting or marksmanship, he was far inferior to the Japanese elite of 1937.

In the process of following the squad up onto the Dunwu Temple position, he had seen an assault team member holding a submachine gun fall down with a bullet wound straight through his forehead.

Chaozi had discarded his bolt-action rifle at the very first moment and picked up the far more fiercely firepower-endowed submachine gun.

At the same time, this quick-witted fellow had not forgotten an important matter: he pulled two spare magazines from the fallen brother's body and tucked them into his belt.

In the subsequent battle, he even filled the vacancy in the assault team and fought his way toward the left side of the position.

There was no help for it! In such fierce combat, those brothers in the assault team were nearly all wiped out.

Regrettably, after stepping up to fill the assault team, Chaozi knew very well that single-shot firing to conserve ammunition was best, but whenever tension struck, he would forget it, and by now, all his magazines had been completely emptied.

The other Sichuan army brothers around him were facing almost the exact same situation.

Consequently, Chaozi's shouts for a magazine received zero response. Instead, two little Japanese soldiers with fixed bayonets rushed over, howling unintelligible cries from their mouths.

Modern people who have never experienced hand-to-hand combat will never understand the instinctive fear the human body feels when a sharp object like a bayonet is about to pierce into flesh.

Anyway, this was the first time in Chaozi's life he had ever encountered such a situation.

Clearly knowing he mustn't cringed at this moment, his hands and feet uncontrollably grew somewhat weak as he watched himself about to be skewered and overturned to the ground by a sharp bayonet.

Fortunately, at that exact moment, a familiar figure rushed to his side, effectively saving Chaozi's life.

This person was none other than Deputy Platoon Leader Zhang Yaoge, who, on the night at the Yun Cuisine restaurant, had made Chaozi's mouth water with cravings just by talking about his wife's twice-cooked pork.

Zhang Yaoge was a second lieutenant, and his weapon was a Mauser C96 pistol with severely worn rifling—the kind of gun where bullets had no idea where they were flying once they traveled twenty meters out of the barrel.

However, at the current close distance, there was no need to worry about precision.

Raising his hand and firing a single shot, he struck a Japanese soldier squarely in the lower abdomen. True to its reputation as a powerful combat pistol, the C96 packed quite a punch.

The little Japanese soldier who took the hit immediately doubled over and collapsed onto the ground clutching his stomach.

Yet when Zhang Yaoge turned to fire at another Japanese soldier, he discovered that his old handgun had jammed. In the very next second, a bayonet drove straight into his lower abdomen.

By sheer instinct, he grabbed the bayonet on the Japanese soldier's Arisaka rifle with his left hand, ignoring how his palm was instantly sliced open.

Seeing this, the Japanese soldier frantically tried to yank the bayonet back out. The blade churned inside Zhang Yaoge's wound and even through the intestines in his lower abdomen, wringing a shrill, miserable scream from him.

Even so, Zhang Yaoge still did not release his grip.

Yet he could not possibly hold on for long like this, and this man would likely never get to eat the twice-cooked pork cooked by his wife that he had been longing for all this time.

It wasn't that Chaozi didn't want to help, but rather that his reaction lagged slightly behind.

All the events described above took place in an extremely short span of time—from start to finish, it was at most two or three seconds.

It amounted to the novice rookie Chaozi experiencing, in a dazed moment of distraction, the sheer ecstasy of escaping death by a hair's breadth, the intense terror of Zhang Yaoge being stabbed, alongside a surging hatred for the Japanese soldier and fury at his own clumsy performance.

Amidst these intensely complex emotions, Chaozi plunged into a state of utter frenzy.

This state allowed him to successfully overcome his body's instinctive dread of the sharp bayonet.

He swung his empty submachine gun like a club, smashing it toward the little Japanese soldier's skull, and taking advantage of the moment the enemy sidestepped to dodge, he made his move.

This young worker brother from a modern-plane sewage treatment plant lunged forward with his entire body.

He tackled the little Japanese soldier—who was a whole head shorter than him but much stockier—to the ground, and they immediately began wrestling fiercely.

Like a wild beast, he brandished a pair of arms conditioned by years of physical labor, raining frantic blows down upon the Japanese soldier. He paid no heed to the enemy's fists hammering against his own body, feeling no pain whatsoever.

When a punch from the Japanese soldier shattered the corner of his left eye, flooding his vision with a crimson haze, Chaozi bared a set of pearly white teeth and bit straight down onto the Japanese soldier's ear...

Chaozi's beast-like fighting style was merely a microcosm of the 3rd Company brothers' combat experience.

As early as the training sessions of the previous two days, Hu Biao and the others had indeed instructed them: in combat, use a gun whenever possible instead of a bayonet; if hand-to-hand combat is truly unavoidable, the three closest men should form a combat group—teaching them tactical skills of this nature.

Yet by now, both sides were thoroughly entangled, and those so-called techniques no longer served any purpose.

What it all boiled down to was sheer willpower—testing which side possessed a firmer resolve to fight and who could hold out until the very end.