Outside Lleida, Catalonia
The sun had begun to dip behind the Catalonian hills, casting long ochre shadows across the olive groves and abandoned outposts that dotted the roadside.
The light, somber and golden, the kind that painters chase and soldiers mistrust. It illuminated every jagged edge, making everything too visible. Too still.
It was an on, and not a boon or blessing gifted by God, but sothing far more sinister to those superstitious veterans who knew the scent of blood before it was ever spilt.
Erich sat in the lead vehicle of the motorcade. An up-armored Kübelwagen variant with reinforced side plating and a front-mounted comms relay.
The convoy rolled slowly through narrow farm lanes flanked by half-ruined walls and scorched vineyards.
They had departed the rear logistics depot an hour earlier after General Roml’s inspection. Now, they moved back toward the interdiate line, just shy of the Aragonese front.
Three vehicles, twelve n; most of them International Legion volunteers under his personal assignnt.
These were officers and their guards, not front-line grenadiers. Their vehicles respected the nature of their position.
The mix was as eclectic as it was professional: Hungarians, Bulgarians, Italians, Russians, Germans, and one Greek engineer who spoke four languages and could field-strip a machine gun blindfolded.
They were ard well, too well, so whispered; with modern Sturmgewehre, semi-automatic DMRs, and belt-fed MG-42s.
Despite being rear echelon troops, they made up for it with doctrine, steel, and intent.
Behind him, one of the legionnaires was humming softly. A Prussian tune. Familiar.
Erich closed his eyes for a mont. He found himself thinking again of the letter he’d written that morning; a letter he wasn’t sure he should’ve sent.
Erika’s na still clung to the inside of his chest like damp wool.
Then, the world cracked open.
The first blast ca from the low ridge just ahead; an IED buried beneath the roadbed, likely packed with fertilizer, shrapnel, and anarchist hope.
The lead escort vehicle evaporated in a bloom of fire and shrieking tal, throwing bodies and black smoke high into the air. Shouts followed, then automatic fire from the treeline.
Syndicalist rifles opened up in coordinated arcs. The convoy had driven into a box; textbook guerrilla tactics.
Muzzle flashes winked like fireflies across the ridge, and rounds snapped through the olive trees in lethal bursts.
"CONTACT LEFT! DISPERSE, FLANK, RETURN FIRE!" Erich was already moving, diving from the command vehicle with his P-25/30 drawn in one hand. The sharp jolt of impact punched into the dirt just beside his boot.
His n reacted with brutal precision. The MG teams dropped to their knees and opened up with bone-rattling bursts, stitching the hillsides with lead.
Two DMRs locked in from the rear vehicle, cutting down rebels as they shifted positions. The rebel ambush crumbled under the storm of superior firepower.
Tactics drilled into the Legionnaires by n like Roml and modeled after doctrines tested in the South Pacific and the Korean Peninsula.
A war that had ended no more than two years prior.
A figure burst from the trees. Young.
Barely more than a boy. His shirt was torn, a red star painted crudely across his chest. He shouted sothing in Catalan.
A plea, a curse, or perhaps even a battle-cry, all while he raised a rusted rifle.
The bullet hit Erich high along the ribs, carving a shallow furrow beneath his arm.
The world narrowed to a point of fire and adrenaline. He dropped to one knee, and in that sa fluid motion, raised the P-25/30 and squeezed the trigger.
One shot. Center mass.
The boy stumbled, dropped his rifle, and slumped forward. Dust rose gently around his body as it hit the ground.
The hillside fell silent in the way only killing can quiet a place.
Smoke drifted like lazy ghosts through the olive trees. The air slled of cordite and churned earth, blood and old wood.
Three rebels had fled into the brush. The rest lay broken in the dust; so still breathing, most not.
Two of Erich’s n were wounded. One seriously, the other not so much. A third, the youngest of the group, was dead. Blown apart in the first blast. His na Erich could not recall.
But his face was forever seared into his mory. He rembered the photo the boy had of his sisters tucked inside his chest pocket. No doubt turned to ash along with his body inside the flaming wreckage.
Erich sat against the Kübelwagen’s wheel, blood soaking through the shredded edge of his undershirt. A field dic hovered beside him, wrapping gauze around his side.
"You’ll live," the dic muttered, half-grinning. "Pretty enough wound to earn you a dal. Could’ve been worse, Leutnant."
Erich didn’t respond. His pistol rested across his lap, the slide locked back on an empty chamber.
His hands were steady, but his throat burned; not from fear, but from the taste of dust and copper, and sothing harder to na.
He hadn’t hesitated. Not even for a second.
The face of the boy he shot was already fading, but the position of his body, the way the rifle slipped from his fingers; that was burned in.
There had been no poetry to it. No heroism. Just reflex, and doctrine, and the instinct to kill before being killed.
His grandfather had told him once that the age of chivalry died in the last century, now all was left was n with violent hearts.
Erich hadn’t understood what that ant until now.
The convoy regrouped, limping forward now with double the escort and none of the ease they’d had that morning.
The golden hour had fled, replaced by the hard edge of twilight. Overhead, the Spanish sky turned the color of old bruises.
Erich sat in silence, the wind cutting through the open-top vehicle, blood still tacky along his ribs.
He pulled a fresh sheet of paper from his dispatch case, unfolded it; then paused.
He stared at it for a long mont, pen hovering above the blank page. Then slowly, quietly, he folded it back and placed it in his coat.
There were things ink couldn’t carry. Not yet.
Not after this.
---
On the other side of the world, in the Philippines. The jungle did not breathe. It watched.
An Arican lieutenant pressed his back against the moss-slicked roots of a strangler fig, sweat dripping from his eyelids in thick, salty streaks.
The air was too humid to breathe properly, too still to feel real. It wrapped around his platoon like a noose.
Mosquitoes buzzed in clouds. The stench of rot and cordite lingered in the green gloom.
Three hours ago, they were supposed to rendezvous with an engineering detachnt along the river trail.
Two hours ago, the point man tripped a wire strung between bamboo stalks; the explosion tore half his ribcage open, and the firefight that followed scattered the rest of the squad like rats.
Now, the lieutenant was alone. Or near enough. n under his care were either dead or missing in action. Lost in the long trek through the haunted jungles of Luzon.
Sowhere ahead, a sergeant’s voice rasped over a field radio that no longer worked. Static answered every call.
The rebels didn’t take prisoners for long.
A burst of gunfire tore through the underbrush; a dozen rounds in sharp, chaotic rhythm. Not disciplined like the Germans.
Not even wild like the Communards in Spain. This was sothing else: a kind of rhythm, like drumming from the bones of old war gods.
The Lieutenant ducked lower, heartbeat thundering against his ribs.
The Filipino rebels weren’t uniford. They wore rags, jungle paint, straw hats, Spanish-era belts, stolen Arican webbing.
They used old Mausers, Japanese Arisakas, homade SMGs; and improvised explosives of the most lethal variety.
So said the Japanese were still smuggling crates into Mindoro despite the death of their empire.
Others whispered of German agents embedded with old Katipunan families, awakening the insurgency like a blood-soaked tradition.
The lieutenant, however, didn’t care where the weapons ca from. He only cared that they were working better than anything his own unit had.
He saw them before they saw him; two silhouettes flitting through the underbrush like shadows made flesh.
One carried a bolo knife and a bolt-action rifle slung across his back. The other moved with the fluid confidence of soone who had killed n before breakfast.
The lieutenant raised his M1911 and waited, finger trembling on the trigger. He knew the rules. Fire first. Ask later.
He almost did.
But then sothing shifted behind him; just the whisper of a leaf, the barest creak of a branch.
And he realized he was already surrounded.
The bolo ca down hard, biting into his shoulder as he turned. He scread, half-spun, gun clattering from his hands.
Another figure erged from the brush; a girl, maybe thirteen, maybe younger, bare feet and a revolver too big for her hands.
She fired once.
The world went white-hot and dark at the sa ti.
They found the bodies two days later; or what was left of them.
The entire platoon had been routed. Ambushed, scattered, hunted. So were killed in the first wave. Others, like the Lieutenant, had been taken alive and tortured.
Not for information, but for mory. The rebels were fighting a war for vengeance. Not strategy. Not territory. Honor.
It wasn’t the first massacre.
Nor the last.
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