Chapter 690 07.689: “No One Dies”

Beep! Beep! —

A sharp whistle sounded, and the Krieg grenadiers, who were ready to go, emerged from the trenches quickly and orderly like a group of gray and black agile cheetahs.

Louise followed closely behind with nimble hands and feet. The moment they reached the top of the shooting slope, she turned around and grabbed Farida’s arm, and the two of them climbed up to the dark no-man’s land together.

As soon as Farida’s combat boots stepped onto this land, which would surely be extremely fertile and soft in the future, she felt an incredible sense of weightlessness.

She lowered her head subconsciously, and in an instant, a bone-chilling chill ran from the soles of her feet to the top of her head.

It turned out that her feet were stepping on a rotten corpse.

The rebel’s corpse was highly decomposed. Thumb-sized maggots were slowly crawling along the hardened toes of her boots, densely crawling up the boot surfaces, leaving behind streaks of yellow-red, decomposed pus and blood wherever they passed.

The floating corpse’s eyes, which were eaten by worms, stared at her empty-headedly. Its entire face was rotten and severely decayed, with pus and wrinkles faintly visible on it. A row of large, withered and yellowed teeth were exposed, one of which was shattered by shrapnel, revealing an extremely ugly gap.

“Ugh!” A strong feeling of nausea instinctively surged into Farida’s throat like a surging tide. Fortunately, she endured it in time and kept the disgusting feeling stuck in her throat.

The rich young lady, who was stepping onto the front line for the first time, gritted her teeth and tried her best. She absolutely did not want to vomit in the gas mask, and she was even more unwilling to change the filter in this harsh environment filled with highly toxic phosgene and chlorine.

“Are you okay?” Louise noticed Farida who was frozen in place, and walked closer to ask with concern, her eyes full of worry.

“Yes, I’m fine…” Farida suppressed the discomfort, swallowed the liquid that was rising in her throat with difficulty, and nodded with difficulty.

At this moment, she suddenly realized that the substance surging from her throat seemed to be no different from the “jelly” she usually ate.

A flash of enlightenment suddenly flashed through her mind, as if she instantly understood why the taste of those foods was designed to be so disgusting and strange.

At this moment, there seemed to be no difference between swallowing the food churning in his throat and eating the military rations.

Farida never thought that she would end up on the ground battlefield.

According to her father’s expectations of her, she would at least become a captain in the Imperial Navy.

Although the choice to become a military supervisor changed the trajectory of her life, she never expected that one day a member of the Hood family would go down to the ground to fight.

“Don’t bring shame to the Hood family! Go ahead!” She took a deep breath, murmured silently, and then cheered herself up again.

“Captain Louise, our attack point is…” Farida mustered her strength and asked loudly amid the deafening artillery fire.

“There!” Louis raised his arm without hesitation and pointed decisively to a slightly higher slope.

On the slope, a machine gun bunker was firing wildly at the charging Krieg soldiers, with flames spewing out continuously, like a ferocious beast ready to devour its prey.

“Even as a navy captain, you chose the most difficult point to break through on the entire battlefield, right? Humph, Louise, you…” Farida smiled as if accepting a challenge, with a determined light flashing in her eyes.

“It’s time to attack, Inspector Hood! Follow me!” Louise bent down and nimbly moved around the piles of corpses and bomb craters, advancing quickly forward.

The machine gun bunker soon discovered the charging Krieg grenadiers, and a string of bullets from the felling rifles rained down at Louise’s feet, splashing a pool of muddy water.

With her quick reflexes, Louise cleverly stayed at a distance from the gun line and quickly dodged behind a pile of corpses.

“This is Blue-01, the enemy bunker is at position 335.416, requesting light artillery fire to suppress it!” She leaned against the pile of corpses, poked her head out to look at the machine gun bunker that was sweeping, took out a walkie-talkie from her back, and spoke loudly to the supporting artillery position.

Soon, the hidden light artillery only 5 kilometers away from the position in the rear quickly began to calibrate the trajectory.

Although this is called a light artillery position, it is actually equipped with medium-caliber artillery.

The front row is 75mm rapid-fire artillery. These standard cannons of the Astra Militarum can fire intensive rapid-fire fire in a short period of time, effectively suppressing conventional enemies.

Even the powerful Astartes were nothing more than larger cannon fodder in a battle of heavy armor and artillery.

Behind the 75mm rapid-fire gun is the 105mm medium-caliber gun.

The Kriegs habitually divided the artillery that required and did not require ammunition hoists into different artillery groups to facilitate transportation and rapid deployment of positions.

After all, the required transportation capacity is different when equipped with a crane or not.

Bang bang bang! Bang bang bang!
The light artillery opened fire quickly and neatly fired the first row of artillery fire in front of the enemy’s position. Although this division would seem strange in other Astra Militarum Corps, the Kriegs, who were good at concentrated use of artillery, naturally had their own unique features.

Since the landing points were all on a line, the smoke produced by the explosion effectively blocked the enemy’s shooting line of sight.

The artillery bombardment, at a distance of 5 meters per round, advanced methodically into the depths of the enemy, bringing a great sense of oppression to the enemy soldiers on the enemy front.

Seeing the artillery barrage approaching their own positions, many enemies retreated into their trenches, which gave the grenadiers a perfect opportunity to attack.

The 105mm artillery then fired a round of smoke bombs filled with tear gas.

However, those whose gas masks were not up to standard had already lost their lives to Horatio’s phosgene-chlorine combination attack, and the tear gas effect was naturally almost useless against enemies who were still able to fight.

Now, the main function of these smoke bombs is to cover the actions of the grenadiers.

Farida bent over, holding the power sword tightly in one hand and the grenade launcher steadily in the other.

She followed Louise’s steps closely and witnessed the shocking tragedy in the no-man’s land.

This girl, who came from a naval family and was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, never imagined that the conflict on the ground would be so cruel.

She had witnessed the bloodiness and cruelty of boarding battles, and had also seen the shocking scene of naval guns destroying an entire war vessel.

But everything before my eyes was completely different from all that. It seemed like another world, a real hell on earth.

There were piles of corpses everywhere before their eyes, and they seemed to be struggling to advance in a sea of ​​corpses and blood.

Every step I took was soft, and I either sank into the mud or stepped on rotten corpses.

This was the first time in her life that she had seen so many dead bodies. They were thrown on the ground without any dignity and left to rot and melt.

There is no dignified post-war funeral of the navy, nor is there acceptance from the void. The only thing that exists is the ruthless material cycle of nature – worms and bacteria will slowly digest these corpses.

Boom!Boom!
Whoosh! —Whoosh! —

The shrill whistling of artillery shells passed overhead.

“Be careful! Enemy artillery fire!!!” Louise shouted loudly behind her. Obviously, she was reminding Farida.

Farida looked up suddenly and saw huge shells falling like raindrops above her head.

“Jump into the crater!”

Without time to think, she closed her eyes and jumped towards the bomb crater in front of her.

“Bang!” The nearest shell exploded 120 meters away from her. The powerful shock wave generated by the explosion violently hit her body. Her body wrapped in the military prison uniform seemed to be lifted high by an invisible big hand, and then shaken violently.

“Ah!” She screamed as she was hit by the shock wave. She felt her body being thrown away like a kite with a broken string.

With the familiar feeling of weightlessness, she quickly took a self-protection posture, hunched over, curled up into a ball, hugged her knees tightly with her hands, and then rolled into the water in the crater.

“Huh!!” She tried her best and stood up from the mud with difficulty.

At this moment, the majestic platinum military coat had already been stained with mud and blood, turning into muddy gray.

It was only then that she finally understood why her colleagues sent to the Astra Militarum wore clothes that were so black that they almost swallowed up all the luster, and were trimmed with bright red.

Even through the respirator, she could clearly smell the sickening stench of the bomb crater she had jumped into, as if she had fallen into a cemetery full of rotting corpses.

If it were in the past, she would have been furious at the filth and would have wanted the maid to change her clothes from head to toe immediately and then scrub her skin off in the bathroom.

Now, the only thing she was thankful for was that her face and respirator were not stuck in the dirty water, otherwise she couldn’t imagine how strong the smell would be.

Suddenly, she felt something moving on her gold-tasseled shoulder plates.

She turned her head and saw a huge worm standing up, showing her three rows of suction-like fangs.

“Ah!!!!” She screamed in fear and slapped the worm off her shoulder board. She was so scared that she quickly took two steps back, but accidentally lost her balance and her hands panickedly stuck into the slope.

The moment her hand dug into the slope, Farida felt an exceptionally soft texture, a texture that was not unfamiliar to her.

The light in her eyes instantly disappeared and her face turned ashen.

Turning his head slightly, he saw the decayed corpse of a Krieg.

Her hands were thrust right into the corpse’s rotten chest, and maggots were crawling up her dirty gloves and slowly onto her golden cuffs.

(End of this chapter)