You were tasked with guarding the Sihang Warehouse, and you brought out a Tiger tank?

Sergeant Yamamoto crawled forward several hundred meters, the Japanese soldiers around him falling one by one, until only he and Private Kobayashi remained.

"Kobayashi! Cover me!"

Yamamoto roared and pulled the fuse of the explosive charge, the hissing sound of burning filling the air.

He suddenly straightened up, clutching the heavy explosive charge, and charged towards the Tiger tank ahead like a mad bull.

To the side and behind, Private First Class Kobayashi also stood up, raised his Type 38 rifle, and helplessly fired at the steel monster, trying to attract its attention.

"Onboard!"

Time seemed to slow down at that moment.

Out of the corner of his eye, Yamamoto saw that puffs of blood mist suddenly burst from Kobayashi's body.

That was the result of Tiger tanks firing their coaxial machine guns.

Xiaolin's body trembled like a rag doll before falling backward.

"Xiaolin!!!"

Yamamoto's heart was bleeding, and tears welled up in his eyes.

"I will never let Kobayashi down!"

This is our final bond!

"Aaaaaaah! Die, monster!"

He was only three meters away from the Tiger tank; he could even see the mud clinging to the tracks.

Simply stuff the explosive charge under the vehicle and it will be destroyed.

However, at that moment...

He saw a strange flash of light suddenly appear on the front of the Tiger tank, on the left and right "shoulders".

"What is that...?"

Before he could even finish thinking about it, he lost consciousness the next instant.

"Boom! Boom!"

Two S-shaped anti-personnel bounding mines were ejected from the launch tubes on the shoulder of the Tiger vehicle and exploded in mid-air.

Originally, the Tiger E variant had removed this bouncing mine compared to the Tiger H variant, but Lin Feng considered that he only had one Tiger and might get caught up in an infantry attack, so he spent 5 merit points to upgrade the launcher back.

Unexpectedly, it came in handy.

The vicious weapon, known as "Bouncing Betty," is filled with hundreds of steel balls.

At the moment of the explosion, countless steel balls were ejected in a 360-degree arc, sweeping across the entire space within several meters in front of the tank.

Yamamoto's body was instantly riddled with holes by hundreds of steel balls, and he fell to the ground along with the explosive charge that had been detonated.

A few seconds later.

"BOOM—!!!"

The explosive charge detonated, completely obliterating Yamamoto's already mangled body, leaving only a large crater emitting black smoke on the ground.

Inside the Tiger tank.

Xu Rui released his finger from the S-type laser launch button, pressed the microphone to his throat, and his voice remained calm:

"This is vehicle number 231. The S-mines at the front of my vehicle are empty, and the vehicle's ammunition is more than half used."

Vehicles 301 and 302 provide cover while my vehicle reverses to the opposite slope to reload bounding mines and ammunition.

The commanders of the two Panzer III tanks next to them immediately responded over the radio:

"301, warded! Provide cover fire!"

"302 received! Watch out for the flanks!"

The massive Tiger tank slowly reversed, like a satiated beast retreating to its lair for the time being, preparing for the next round of slaughter.

On the battlefield before it, the corpses of the Japanese soldiers were piled up layer upon layer.

-----

The sun finally sank below the horizon, the last crimson rays of the setting sun swallowed by the thick smoke of battle.

The battlefield did not cease with the arrival of darkness; on the contrary, the obstructed vision made it even more dangerous and eerie.

"Sizzle—sizzle—"

The wide tracks of Tiger tank No. 231 rolled through the mud, producing a teeth-grinding grinding sound.

It was like a mobile steel fortress, hidden in the dim twilight, with only the coaxial machine gun on the turret still roaring tirelessly.

In order to calibrate the trajectory at night and deter the enemy, a tracer round was mixed in every four rounds in the machine gun ammunition belt.

"Da da da da da—!!!"

The MG42 machine gun's unique high rate of fire made these tracer rounds appear almost as a line in the night sky.

It wasn't intermittent firelight, but rather straight, blazing red whips, seemingly frozen in the air.

These "whips of death" lashed wildly in the darkness, sometimes to the left, sometimes to the right, sometimes up, sometimes down.

Each swing of the sword would send screams and sparks flying from the darkness in the distance.

That was the echo of a bullet piercing a human body, hitting a rock, or drilling into the fuel tank of a Japanese truck.

On the flank of the Tiger tank, several Panzer III tanks and 222 armored vehicles also joined this spectacle of light and shadow.

Dozens of red tracer bullets intertwined on the battlefield, forming an impenetrable net of fire that pinned down the Japanese infantry who were trying to sneak up under the cover of night, grinding them into the mud.

A Japanese lieutenant had just raised his sword, attempting to launch a desperate charge under the cover of darkness.

The next second, three red light whips crossed instantly and converged at his chest.

"puff!"

In the instant illuminated by the tracer rounds, one could even clearly see his body instantly shattered into pieces, turning into a cloud of blood mist that exploded in the air before being swallowed by darkness.

This is the violent aesthetics of the industrial age—cruel, yet breathtakingly dazzling.

-----

High in the sky, the Japanese Type 97 reconnaissance plane circled like a lone vulture.

Sergeant Oshima, the scout in the back seat, was staring intently at the hellish landscape below.

The cold wind blew in through the gaps in the cockpit, and even though he was wearing goggles and a dog-skin flight helmet, his face still stung, but he dared not blink.

"Is this...this is hell?"

Sergeant Oshima's hands were trembling slightly, and he could barely hold onto the binoculars.

From the air, the once flat wilderness has now been transformed into a massive steel graveyard.

Dozens of bonfires were scattered along the road leading to Xiejiaqiao and in the paddy fields on both sides.

That wasn't a fire for warmth, but the wreckage of an Imperial Army tank.

By the firelight, Oshima could vaguely see that those once invincible Type 89 tanks now looked like flattened soda cans trampled by naughty children.

Some turrets were blown off and landed in craters more than ten meters away; some vehicles were blown to pieces, with only the chassis still burning; others were overturned on the side of the road, their tracks dragging outside like dead snakes.

Around these burning steel wrecks, countless small, motionless black dots were densely distributed.

Oshima knew very well that those were neither ants nor stones.

That's a corpse.

They were the brave warriors of the 16th Division of the Imperial Army.

Some of them fell to the ground in their charging posture, some curled up in shell craters, and others... were no longer recognizable as they were.

Hundreds and thousands of tiny black dots covered the entire land, stretching all the way to the riverbank.

At the heart of it all, those Chinese tanks, spitting out red flames, continued to reap lives tirelessly, like invincible demons.

"It's over...it's all over..."

Oshima felt a deep sense of powerlessness.

He couldn't imagine the despair the troops on the ground had experienced.

That kind of despair when faced with an impenetrable steel monster, you can only fill the void with your own body.

As darkness fell, the firelight on the ground became even more blinding.

"Oshima-kun, we're running low on fuel, and it's getting dark so we can't land. We have to turn back."

The pilot in the front seat had a hoarse voice, clearly shocked by the devastation on the ground.

"...Hai."

Oshima took one last look at the boxy tank that was still spitting fire, as if trying to etch that terrifying image into his mind.

The reconnaissance plane lowered its wings and circled the battlefield one last time, as if conducting a silent farewell ceremony.

Then, it pulled up its nose, turned around, and flew towards the eastern night sky.