Chapter 1: The Death-Defying Rearguard Regiment

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“Pain! It hurts!!!!”

Long Wencheng clutched his head, feeling as though it were being torn apart. All around him, rifles cracked in rapid succession, mingling with explosions that shook his eardrums.

At that very moment, scalding blood splashed across his face, jolting him instantly awake.

Long Wencheng watched helplessly as a soldier in a gray-blue uniform collapsed stiffly right in front of him. The red star on the soldier’s cap shone dazzlingly beneath the sunlight.

Was this… the Red Army?

“Commander, are you all right?!”

The voice was young and hoarse. Long Wencheng turned toward it.

A small soldier stood there, covered in blood and mud. He looked no older than fourteen or fifteen, and his face still bore traces of childish innocence.

Then Long Wencheng remembered. This was his orderly, Little Stone.

As for himself, he had become Long Wencheng, commander of the Eighteenth Regiment of the Sixth Division of the Third Red Army Corps, fighting a desperate delaying action against the enemy pursuing from the rear during the Bloody Battle of the Xiang River.

He knew this unit. During the bloody battle at the Xiang River, the Eighteenth Regiment had held the area around Xinxu against the pursuing Nationalist forces. In the end, the entire regiment had been wiped out, without a single survivor. The ferocity of its sacrifice rivaled that of the Thirty-Fourth Division, later known as the “Death Rearguard Division.”

“I… I’m fine.”

Long Wencheng waved his hand and looked around. The Red Army soldiers, their bodies smeared with blood and grime, held their positions, fighting to the death without retreating an inch.

“Commander, the enemy’s heavy machine-gun fire is too fierce!”

The one shouting was Yang Gang, commander of the Second Battalion. He was built like a bull, and the shrapnel wound across his face had not even been stitched. His appearance was savage and fearsome.

The instant he finished speaking, another burst of heavy-machine-gun fire swept across the position, cutting down two soldiers who had been firing.

Without question, if they could not silence that heavy machine gun, the position would likely be lost.

Long Wencheng reached out and picked up a Hanyang rifle from one of the soldiers.

“I’ll take care of it!”

With that, he steadied himself and rested the bloodstained Hanyang rifle against a fallen soldier’s body, aiming toward the front.

The Maxim was still roaring, less than two hundred meters away.

That single weapon had pinned down the entire position of the Eighteenth Regiment, keeping every soldier’s head lowered.

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After all, the entire Eighteenth Regiment possessed only two ancient light machine guns, and they had already exhausted all their ammunition.

Hoping that Hanyang rifles older than Little Stone himself could suppress a Maxim was practically impossible.

Long Wencheng had previously been a military cadet. His marksmanship had always been perfect, and he had even taken an elective course in battlefield sniping.

He set the sights to two hundred meters, held his breath, and kept his body steady. Through the notch sights, his keen eyes fixed like an eagle’s upon the roaring enemy Maxim gun.

Without the aid of an optical scope, relying solely on iron sights, the enemy machine gunner was little more than a black speck in Long Wencheng’s vision.

Bang!

The instant he pulled the trigger, the bullet flew out—but it missed the machine gunner and struck a broken tree beside him.

The trajectory was drifting left!

Long Wencheng cursed silently and immediately shifted his firing position.

The moment he left his previous spot, a burst of bullets lashed across it like fiery whips, striking the earth with a series of dull thuds.

After moving fifteen meters away, Long Wencheng steadied his breathing, raised the Hanyang rifle once more, and locked onto the enemy machine gunner.

Bang!!!!

After correcting his aim, the bullet struck the machine gunner squarely in the head. It pierced through the bridge of his nose and burst out through the back of his skull.

The assistant gunner hurried to take his place and maintain the barrage, but the next instant, another bullet flew over and punched through his head as well.

“Excellent shooting, Commander!”

Yang Gang roared. Raising the flower-pattern submachine gun in his hands, he swept a burst of fire across several enemies charging forward.

With the heavy machine gun silenced, the other soldiers also cautiously raised their heads and began firing.

The enemy tried to approach the Maxim, but the Hanyang rifle in Long Wencheng’s hands refused to let them. He pulled the trigger again and again.

Before long, four more bodies lay sprawled beside the Maxim.

After the charging force had suffered more than one-third casualties, the Guangxi troops realized that this assault was unlikely to succeed. They began withdrawing in a disorderly mass.

Before retreating, however, one Guangxi soldier threw a grenade beneath the Maxim, clearly unwilling to let Long Wencheng and his men capture the weapon.

Yet perhaps it was the protagonist’s luck—the grenade released a stream of white smoke but failed to explode.

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After the Guangxi troops had withdrawn, Long Wencheng led several soldiers to the Maxim.

“Good heavens, a Maxim! This is a real treasure.”

Yang Gang was green with envy. He reached out to caress the weapon, forgetting that the Maxim had just endured a long spell of firing. The moment he touched the scorching barrel, he jerked back, baring his teeth in pain.

Long Wencheng picked up the dud grenade and thought that it was no wonder it had failed to explode. It was a locally manufactured grenade from the Liuzhou Arsenal, whose rate of misfires was indeed somewhat higher.

In any case, with this heavy machine gun, they could continue fighting.

“Carry it back. Take inventory of the ammunition and personnel,” Long Wencheng ordered.

The headcount was completed quickly. Little Stone reported:

“Reporting, Commander. The regiment has two hundred and eight combat personnel remaining. There are also forty-five lightly or seriously wounded soldiers.”

Long Wencheng was deeply shocked by the figure.

With an ordinary unit, once casualties exceeded half its strength, it would generally lose all combat effectiveness.

The Eighteenth Regiment had already suffered casualties exceeding eighty percent, yet it could still remain nailed to its position without giving up a single step. Such fighting spirit was truly astonishing.

“What about the ammunition?”

As he pressed bullets into the Hanyang rifle, Long Wencheng turned and asked.

Little Stone consulted the small booklet containing the latest figures.

“We still have a fair amount of ammunition for the flower-pattern submachine guns. Each weapon can be issued two hundred rounds. Each Hanyang rifle can receive ten rounds. But we have no light-machine-gun ammunition left. Aside from the Maxim we just captured, there are only a little over five hundred rounds for it.”

Hearing this, Long Wencheng scratched his head. Other people who crossed into another world got a system; he had been dropped straight into a hopeless situation—and had not even been given one.

Then again, he thought, the heroes of history had possessed no system to aid them. They had built the Great Wall with nothing but flesh and blood.

Just then, someone came running over, gasping for breath. It was a communications soldier from divisional headquarters.

“Commander Long… Commander Long, there are orders.”

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