Chapter 12: We Can't Retreat Directly; We Must Break Through!

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“This damned artillery fire! I’ve had enough!”

Feeling shells raining down relentlessly overhead, Andrei could not help cursing again, seized by the urge to kill someone.

Fortunately, this barrage did not linger over their position for long. It soon shifted toward the enemy lines.

The enemy soldiers caught in the advancing barrage had the worst of it. They had rushed into the ground between the two trench lines during the earlier fighting and had not yet managed to withdraw.

Many of them chose to hide in shell craters, praying that another shell would not land on top of them. After all, according to probability, the chance of two shells striking the exact same spot was extremely low. This was one of the many superstitions passed down among soldiers.

But if they truly understood probability, they would know that it made no difference where they hid. Whether in a shell crater or some other corner, their chances of being hit were exactly the same.

It was like tossing a coin and getting heads ten times in a row. The chance of getting tails on the next toss would still be fifty percent. No matter how many times heads had appeared, that probability would not change.

While the enemy position in the distance was being swallowed by artillery fire, Andrei cautiously poked his head out to survey the battlefield and see how things were going.

Then he noticed that some players had already emerged from their hiding places.

“Company commander, how are you? Are you still alive?”

One of the players stared at the devastated position and shouted. Before Andrei could answer, however, another player beside him announced their location in the chat.

The player immediately hurried over, apparently waiting for Andrei to issue an order.

“Don’t worry. I’m still alive!”

Andrei shook the dust from his uniform and climbed out of the dugout with the others. He now understood why soldiers in wartime were usually covered in grime.

Smoke filled the battlefield. In the dugout, dirt had poured down from above as though it were free, burying them almost completely in sand and soil.

Anyone drinking coffee in a trench had to be seriously unwell in the head. After all that shaking, there would probably be several times more dirt in the cup than coffee grounds. What they were drinking was plainly mud soup.

On top of that, soldiers had to crawl and scramble through trenches and every kind of muddy ground. Anyone who could remain spotless under such circumstances was either endowed with supernatural abilities or was some overstyled hero from a ridiculous anti-Japanese war drama.

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“Everyone, we have to get out of here immediately. We need to break through!”

“Those bastards have no idea what they’re doing. They’ve forgotten about us!”

“There aren’t many living people left on this position. If we don’t leave now, we’ll all be killed when the enemy charges up here!”

Andrei shouted urgently at the soldiers around him. As he watched the enemy position being engulfed by artillery fire in the distance, he felt no relief whatsoever.

He knew that once the bombardment ended, the enemy would launch its assault.

When that happened, facing thousands upon thousands of enemy troops, the few of them here would have no chance of survival.

Nor was Andrei the sort of man willing to raise his hands and surrender. Who knew whether the enemies before him observed the Geneva Convention—or whether this world even had anything resembling the Geneva Convention at all?

What if these bastards were as savage as the Japanese and simply gunned them all down?

Their only choice was to break through as best they could and find a way out.

Taking advantage of the brief interval, Andrei quickly counted the men in his company. In the end, he discovered that only sixty-six remained.

Based on their earlier conversations and his own rank, Andrei had confirmed that he was the company commander.

Now, with only sixty-six men left in the entire company—and twenty of them players—that meant only forty-six actual human soldiers remained alive.

“Brothers, while the enemy hasn’t charged up yet, we’ll move out along the flank of the trenches and make for the woods to the north!”

After consulting the crude hand-drawn map tucked against his uniform, Andrei addressed the others. At once, an officer raised his hand.

“Captain, I don’t understand. Why are we withdrawing north along the side of the trenches instead of running straight to the rear?”

“Our division hasn’t gone far. If we move at a run, we should be able to catch up with the main force soon enough!”

Andrei merely shrugged and pointed toward a huge steel wreck on the battlefield.

“You’re right. If we run that way, we can catch up with the main force. But have you considered one problem? The enemy will catch up with us even faster.”

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“From this point onward, the enemy’s main line of attack will inevitably coincide with the direction in which our main force is retreating. When that happens, we’ll climb out of the trenches and encounter monsters like that in open ground. What exactly are we supposed to fight them with?”

Andrei continued explaining:

“I have a feeling our division is about to be completely surrounded. Otherwise, the artillery barrage would not have been fired so hastily.”

“If we want to survive, we have to do the opposite of what they expect. We’ll move along the flank first, reach the edge of the battlefield where the fighting is less intense, and then break through in the opposite direction.”

“While the enemy is busy attacking and pursuing us, it will never occur to them that a force might emerge from their flank and strike outward. That gives us a better chance of breaking through their encirclement!”

Some of the soldiers believed Andrei; others remained skeptical. But he was their commanding officer, and in the end they all chose to obey his orders.

This also demonstrated the benefit of the Basic Leadership skill Andrei had selected earlier. With that skill, his unit had not completely collapsed despite suffering such heavy casualties.

They were agitated and physically and mentally exhausted, but they could still organize themselves, obey their commander’s orders, and retain their fighting spirit.

Compared with the ordinary soldiers, however, the players were already engaged in heated discussion in the chat.

These players, who never seemed to mind making matters worse by watching the spectacle, felt not the slightest tension about the coming breakout battle. Instead, they were all speculating about where the game’s storyline would go next.

Seeing their state of mind, Andrei could only laugh bitterly to himself. The more dangerous the situation became, the happier these players seemed to be.

After gathering as much ammunition and as many supplies as they could carry, Andrei and his unit set out at once, moving rapidly along the trenches toward the flank of the battlefield.

At the same time, Andrei spent five hundred Influence Points to exchange for a map of the surrounding area in his mind and quickly examined it.

This map function was different from the minimap. It could not display the positions of friendly or enemy forces and was no different from an ordinary paper map.

The difference was that, based on the terrain and landforms within a fifty-kilometer radius of Andrei’s position, the function could rapidly draw a sufficiently clear and accurate map, giving him a general understanding of the surrounding landscape.

Studying the map in his mind, Andrei quickly formed a plan.

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