World War: Battleship Arms Dealers

Kim Soon-sik, panting heavily, looked at the mangled corpse at his feet. His military knife was right beside him; he bent down, picked it up, and gripped it tightly. The captain's body heat still lingered on the hilt.

"Use this." He tossed his rifle to Yonghao, gripped the knife with both hands, and turned to look for his next target.

The battlefield was in complete chaos.

Two hundred soldiers from the Land of the Rising Sun faced off against nearly two thousand crazed soldiers from Cao County. Ten times the numbers, a hundred times the hatred. This was not a battle, but a frenzy of revenge.

A soldier from Cao County was stabbed through the stomach by a Japanese soldier's bayonet, but he clung tightly to the gun barrel and used his last strength to plunge the bayonet into the other soldier's neck, killing both of them.

Three soldiers from Cao County surrounded a Japanese sergeant and, without using guns, used their fists, teeth, and helmets to beat him until he was turned into a pile of minced meat.

Lee Sung-chan displayed astonishing composure. He hid in a shell crater, firing precisely in short bursts with his rifle, targeting Japanese officers and machine gunners. With each shot, he announced the number in Korean: "The third." "The fourth." "The Seoul Governor-General's debt, let's collect this little bit of interest first."

The most brutal fighting was hand-to-hand combat.

Bayonets plunged in, stirred, pulled out, and plunged in again. Rifle butts smashed skulls. Entomologists cleaved shoulders. Teeth bit through throats. The battlefield echoed with roars in the Cao County dialect, screams in Japanese, the cracking of bones breaking, and the muffled thuds of flesh tearing.

There were no tactics, no formations, only the most primal killing.

Kim Soon-sik, gripping his military knife, charged through the crowd. The blade was sharp; it cleaved open the collarbone of a Japanese soldier, lodging itself in the bone. He stepped on the corpse, forcefully pulling it out, drawing a trail of blood. Another Japanese soldier lunged from the side; he dodged, then slashed the man's back with a backhand strike, the blow penetrating deep enough to expose bone.

"Soon-sik! Behind you!"

Park Young-ho's warning made him turn around. A Japanese lieutenant, less than five meters away, aimed a pistol at him. A shot rang out—but it wasn't Kim Soon-sik who fell. Young-ho lunged forward, shielding him from the bullet with his body. The bullet struck Young-ho in the right chest, and blood splattered.

"Yonghao—!"

Kim Soon-sik roared and charged forward like a wounded beast. The lieutenant tried to fire a second shot, but Kim Soon-sik was already in front of him. The saber slashed upwards, severing the lieutenant's gun-wielding arm, and then plunged into his neck. His head was almost severed, held together only by a thin layer of skin, and his body slumped to the ground.

He helped Yonghao up. Blood foamed from Yonghao's mouth as he forced a smile: "Damn it... finally... killed an officer..."

"Don't speak!" Kim Soon-sik tore open Young-ho's clothes, trying to stop the bleeding, but the wound was too deep and the blood gushed out like a fountain.

"It's no use..." Yonghao grabbed his hand, his eyes starting to glaze over. "Tell my mom... I got the money..."

My grip loosened.

Kim Soon-sik knelt in the mud, cradling the body of his fellow villager, letting out muffled sobs. But there was no time for grief on the battlefield. A Japanese soldier charged at him with a bayonet; he instinctively raised his sword to parry, metal clashing, sparks flying.

Hatred reignited. He pushed aside Yonghao's corpse, stood up, gripped his knife with both hands, and charged at the enemy.

The battle lasted for twenty minutes.

When the last Japanese soldier was hacked to pieces by a dozen Cao County soldiers, the no man's land suddenly fell silent.

Corpses. Corpses everywhere. The bodies of Japanese soldiers, the bodies of Cao County soldiers, intertwined and piled together. Blood soaked the soil, forming dark red streams that flowed into the shell craters, turning the stagnant water a pale red.

Survivors stood amidst the piles of corpses, panting heavily, their bodies covered in blood. Some knelt and vomited, some wept bitterly while cradling the corpses of their fallen comrades, and some held aloft the heads of Japanese soldiers like trophies of war.

Kim Soon-sik leaned on his military knife, looking around. He was still alive. The knife was dulled, with bits of flesh clinging to the blade. His uniform was soaked in blood, indistinguishable between his own and the enemy's. He had wounds on his face, burning with pain, but he couldn't feel them.

He saw Lieutenant Sato.

The supervising commander stood at the edge of the second trench, his face ashen. The machine gunners around him stood frozen, their guns pointing downwards. Clearly, they were too stunned by the massacre to fire—or rather, too afraid to fire. If those two thousand bloodthirsty Cao County soldiers were to turn their guns…

Kim Soon-sik and Sato's eyes met in mid-air.

Sato instinctively took a half step back, his hand on his holster. But Kim Soon-sik merely glanced at him coldly, turned, and staggered toward Young-ho's body.

He crouched down, closed Yonghao's eyes, took the small tin box containing the family photos from Yonghao's pocket, and stuffed it into his own. Then, he picked up Yonghao's rifle and checked the bullets—five rounds left.

"Sung Chan!" he called out.

Lee Sung-chan crawled out of a shell crater, his left arm wounded and hastily bound with a torn sleeve. He walked over, glanced at Young-ho's body, said nothing, and simply patted Kim Soon-sik on the shoulder.

"Count the number of people," Kim Soon-sik said, his voice hoarse.

The survivors gathered around. Of the first squad that started with fifty men, only nine, including Kim Soon-sik and Lee Sung-chan, were still standing. The other squads were in similar numbers; this hand-to-hand combat had halved the number of survivors.

"How many...did we kill?" a young soldier asked, trembling.

No one answered. They looked at the battlefield. Of the two hundred Japanese soldiers, not one survived. Their bodies were repeatedly pierced, smashed, and hacked to pieces; some were unrecognizable as human.

This is an outpouring of hatred, and also a backlash of fear.

In the rear observation post, Major General Horatio Wellesley, commander of the British Eighth Army, lowered his binoculars.

He remained silent for a long time, so long that his staff officer couldn't help but ask, "General?"

"Write it down," Horatio's voice was eerily calm. "At 9:45 this morning, after capturing the German second line of defense, our Eastern auxiliary forces engaged in a large-scale hand-to-hand combat with...Sakura mercenaries from the German camp. The battle lasted about twenty minutes, and the enemy forces were completely annihilated."

"The results were brilliant, weren't they?" a young staff officer said.

Horatio turned to look at him, his eyes icy. "Did you see that clearly, Lieutenant? That wasn't a battle; it was wild beasts tearing each other apart. Those Cao County men..." He paused, as if searching for the right words, "...they weren't soldiers; they were unleashed, enraged wild beasts. We thought we had them chained, but now the chains are broken."

The staff officers looked at each other in bewilderment.

"So... shall the subsequent attack continue?" the operations staff officer asked.

Horatio raised his binoculars again and looked at the battlefield. The surviving soldiers from Cao County were scavenging for ammunition, food, and water among the piles of corpses. Their movements were mechanical, their eyes vacant, but something burned deep within them—embers of hatred that, if rekindled, would consume everything.

"Pause the offensive," he said. "Let them rest. Also... send a telegram to London, inquiring about why their soldiers are still among the German troops. We need an explanation."