Hu Hao sat at the bottom of the trench, watching Liang Wanyu film the opposite bank. She didn’t dare argue with him anymore. Hu Hao was completely different from the boy she remembered; his mood was dark and heavy, and an intimidating aura clung to him.
Whoosh—
BOOM!
“Get down! Incoming artillery!” Hu Hao roared.
He lunged forward, grabbing Liang Wanyu and dragging her to the ground beneath him.
“Hu Hao, don’t take it too far!” Liang Wanyu shrieked indignantly, having been violently thrown face-first into the dirt.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A deafening barrage of explosions instantly erupted all along the Imperial line. Their sector was no exception. The blasts violently churned the earth, showering Hu Hao and Liang Wanyu in a thick layer of mud and sand.
The terrifying roar of the artillery instantly shattered Liang Wanyu’s annoyance. The ear-splitting detonations and the violent shockwaves physically shaking the ground made her realize exactly where she was. This was a battlefield. The man pressing her into the dirt was using his own body as a human shield to protect her. She immediately stopped struggling.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The bombardment continued relentlessly. Hu Hao didn’t dare move, but noticing that the accumulating dirt was about to completely bury Liang Wanyu’s face, he freed one hand and began sweeping the soil away so she could breathe.
Liang Wanyu turned her head slightly, staring up at Hu Hao. He wasn’t even looking at her; his eyes were squeezed shut against the falling debris as he used his hand to shield her head from the raining dirt.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The Allied artillery pounded their position for nearly ten minutes before finally falling silent.
“Get up! Everyone up! Now!” Hu Hao yelled the moment the shelling stopped.
He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the dirt cascading off his uniform, and peeked over the parapet. On the opposite bank, Allied tanks had already rolled to the water’s edge, providing covering fire for their amphibious infantry.
“You stay directly behind me! Do not move unless I tell you to! If I say get down, you hit the dirt instantly! Do you hear me?!” Hu Hao ordered.
He crouched back down, seeing that Liang Wanyu had sat up. Her helmet was knocked completely askew. Hu Hao reached out, forcefully straightened her helmet, tightened the chin strap, and glared at her.
“Mmh!” Liang Wanyu nodded obediently, her eyes wide.
“Brothers, KILL THEM!” Hu Hao roared. He spun around, stood up, raised his rifle, and began firing across the river.
Liang Wanyu carefully positioned herself behind him. She raised her camcorder, intent on capturing the footage of the Imperial defensive line.
But when she looked at the LCD screen, she couldn’t believe her eyes. The trench line, which had been relatively clean just moments before, was now a charnel house. Corpses were strewn everywhere. Some bodies had been blown entirely in half by direct hits, their internal organs scattered grotesquely across the mud.
Liang Wanyu couldn’t hold it back. She dropped to a crouch and began violently vomiting.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Hu Hao paid no attention to what was happening behind him. He kept his rifle raised, firing rhythmically at the distant Allied troops, while the Imperial anti-armor teams scrambled to target the enemy tanks with their rocket launchers.
Hu Hao emptied his magazine, dropped to a crouch to reload, and saw Liang Wanyu retching into the dirt. He hesitated for a fraction of a second, finished slapping the fresh magazine in, and stood back up to resume firing without a word. He didn’t have the luxury of coddling her right now; as long as she was physically safe, that had to be enough.
“Heavy machine gun! Get that heavy machine gun firing!” Hu Hao roared, sensing a dangerous drop in suppressive fire in his immediate sector.
He knew exactly what a silenced machine gun meant: the gunner was dead. But the heavy weapons could not be allowed to stop.
Rat-tat-tat! Moments later, the heavy machine gun roared back to life as another soldier took over.
Hu Hao emptied another magazine and ducked back down. Liang Wanyu was still dry-heaving in the mud.
“Liang Wanyu!” Hu Hao shouted at her. “Do not forget why you are here! You are a war correspondent! This is not the time to throw up! Look around you! Look at our soldiers! Look at the soldiers of the Empire dying one by one!
You are here to document this! You need to record this so the people back home can see it! You need to show them that we are bleeding and dying in the mud to protect them! Do you hear me?!”
Liang Wanyu looked up at him. She saw that Hu Hao’s eyes were bloodshot and completely wild.
“Film!” Hu Hao ordered fiercely. He racked the bolt of his rifle and stood back up, resuming his desperate volley.
Fighting back her nausea, Liang Wanyu forced herself to stand up and raise the camcorder. As she looked through the small screen, she watched Imperial soldiers get hit. She watched them violently jerk backward, slump down against the trench walls, and simply cease to exist.
The tears finally broke, streaming silently down her face, but she kept the camera steady. She had to record this.
Before coming here, she had no concept of what a real war looked like. She had seen war movies, but she knew movies were staged; the dead bodies were just actors covered in fake blood. But the footage she was capturing now—the visceral, instantaneous end of human life—slammed into her soul with an unbearable weight.
“Brothers, wipe them out! Ammo! Bring up more ammo!” Hu Hao roared over the din.
Liang Wanyu turned her camera toward him. She filmed him as he fired relentlessly across the river, his expression a mask of absolute, grim determination.
“Hao-ge, the enemy is in the water!” a soldier yelled from further down the line.
“Heavy machine gun! Sweep them! Sweep the boats!” Hu Hao yelled back.
He noticed a vacant heavy machine gun nest a few meters away. Gripping his rifle in one hand, he grabbed Liang Wanyu’s wrist with the other.
“Keep your head down!” Hu Hao ordered, pressing his hand against the small of her back to force her low as he dragged her down the trench toward the vacant nest.
“Stay right behind me. Do not move!” Hu Hao instructed as they reached the position.
“I need an assistant gunner!” he roared.
A nearby soldier instantly sprinted over. Hu Hao tossed his rifle aside, grabbed the heavy machine gun, and opened fire on the river the moment the soldier fed the ammo belt into the receiver.
Liang Wanyu didn’t dare move. She huddled behind Hu Hao, pointing her camera over his shoulder to film his field of fire. On the screen, she watched as the heavy caliber rounds tore through the Allied assault boats, shredding the soldiers inside in massive, bloody swathes.
“Assistant gunner! Get me an assistant gunner!” Hu Hao suddenly yelled.
Liang Wanyu looked down and froze in horror. The soldier who had been feeding the ammo belt just a moment ago was now lying dead beside her, a bullet hole punched cleanly through his forehead.
She felt like she was going to lose her mind. If she hadn’t known this was a life-or-death battle, she would have started screaming hysterically.
Another soldier immediately sprinted over, stepping over the corpse to grab the ammo belt.
“Get down!” Hu Hao suddenly roared. He grabbed the new assistant gunner with one hand, shoved Liang Wanyu with the other, and threw himself backward, tumbling all three of them into the bottom of the trench.
CRASH!
A split second later, the heavy machine gun nest they had just vacated exploded in a shower of dirt and shrapnel.
“Motherfucker! Bring up another heavy machine gun! We need a gun here!” Hu Hao yelled, shaking off the dirt. He looked down at Liang Wanyu, who was still sprawled in the mud.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“I’m fine… but my camera!” Liang Wanyu pointed up at the parapet. In the frantic dive, she had dropped the camcorder near the edge of the trench.
Hu Hao didn’t hesitate. He lunged upward in a fluid motion, snatched the camera from the lip of the trench, and rolled back down into cover. He handed it to her, then grabbed a discarded rifle from the dirt and resumed firing at the Allied troops.
“Bring me my grenades!” Hu Hao roared. The river was swarming with assault boats. The Allied forces were launching a suicidal, human-wave offensive, and the pressure on the Imperial line was rapidly becoming unbearable.
Liang Wanyu quickly inspected her camera; miraculously, it was undamaged. She raised it and resumed filming.
“Hao-ge, grenades!” A soldier ran over and shoved a heavy canvas sack into Hu Hao’s hands.
Hu Hao tore the bag open, grabbed a grenade, and hurled it far out over the water.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
His throwing speed was terrifying. Liang Wanyu stared at him, her eyes wide with shock. She had absolutely no idea he possessed this kind of lethal skill.
She focused her camera on him, capturing the rapid, rhythmic motion of his throws. Checking the LCD screen, she saw the devastating accuracy of his airbursts. Almost every grenade detonated directly over an incoming assault boat, instantly neutralizing everyone inside.
“Brothers, ready your rocket launchers! Enemy helicopters incoming!” Hu Hao suddenly screamed. He had spotted a swarm of Allied attack helicopters approaching from the opposite bank. He knew that if those gunships reached their line, it would be an absolute massacre.
“Rocket teams, stand by!” the Imperial officers up and down the line echoed the command.
Moments later, the helicopters closed to within five hundred meters. The Imperial anti-armor teams instantly raised their launchers and fired. A swarm of rockets streaked through the air toward the approaching gunships.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Ignoring the helicopters, Hu Hao continued his relentless grenade barrage. Very quickly, the number of assault boats making it across the river plummeted; the vast majority were blown apart or left drifting aimlessly. Because Hu Hao had inflicted such massive casualties, the overall volume of suppressive fire from the Allied forces dropped significantly, allowing the other Imperial soldiers to pick off the survivors.
“Hao-ge! The adjacent sector is collapsing! The enemy has made landfall!” a Battalion Commander yelled frantically.
“Follow me! Guard detail, grab the grenade sacks and follow me!” Hu Hao ordered Liang Wanyu and the platoon of elite guards.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Hu Hao sprinted down the trench line, hurling grenades over the parapet as he ran. The rolling explosions announced his arrival to the struggling defenders.
“Hao-ge! Over here! The pressure is too heavy; there are too many of them!” a Regimental Colonel yelled in relief when he saw Hu Hao approaching.
Liang Wanyu stumbled after Hu Hao, struggling to keep up as they reached the collapsing sector.
Hu Hao found a firing position and immediately unleashed a torrent of grenades, perfectly angling them to decimate the Allied troops surging onto the beachhead.
Liang Wanyu filmed Hu Hao for a few minutes before slowly panning her camera to capture the broader battlefield. She focused on the Imperial soldiers fighting desperately to hold the line, capturing the raw courage of their counter-attack. And inevitably, she captured the tragic, fleeting moments when many of those brave men were struck down.
Liang Wanyu was no longer the fragile, terrified girl she had been at the start of the battle. She filmed with a cold, steady calm. She knew that if she wasted this opportunity, she would never forgive herself.
These images had to be seen. The entire nation needed to see this. They needed to see exactly how their soldiers were bleeding and dying on the front lines to hold back the invasion. They needed to see the men who were sacrificing their lives to protect the country and the citizens behind them.
This footage was priceless.