Impossible

On the upper floor of Regiment 425's cadres' quarters, Lao Jian stood before the window of his room, listening from afar to the familiar singing drifting through the night sky. He even hummed along to a few lines without realizing it. Tradition Night... So today's the day... I've been so frazzled I completely forgot. All of a sudden, Lao Jian heard the same song coming softly from nearby, off to the side. Turning his head, he realized that by the window of the adjacent room stood an old acquaintance—now a regimental staff officer. The two exchanged glances, smiled, and nodded to each other. "Tradition Night—you didn't go?" Lao Jian asked with a smile. "I went, but I came back a bit earlier than the rest." The regimental staff officer glanced back toward the room behind him, a warm look in his eyes. "My third child is only two months old... In another month or so, I'll be rotating back to the frontline, so... I just wanted to spend a bit more time watching her grow." Lao Jian nodded slowly. "What about you? By the schedule, shouldn't it be about time for you to rotate back to regimental headquarters?" "Ah, me..." Lao Jian stammered, then changed the subject. "Right, how was Tradition Night this year? Did the four kids I brought go? How did they do?" "Them?" The staff officer pondered for a moment. "Among the recruits you brought, is there one named Han... Han Qingyu?" "Yes! Did he go?" Lao Jian asked, both surprised and eager. "How did he perform?" "He... it's hard to say." What the staff officer meant was simply that he didn't quite know how to explain it on short notice. Anxious over the boy's welfare, Lao Jian misunderstood, assuming Han Qingyu had run into trouble. He rushed to defend him: "That can't be, right? He's such a good kid—honest, filial..." The staff officer replied, "Is... he?" *Knock, knock.* A knock sounded at the door. Lao Jian waved to the staff officer, stepped away from the window, and went over to answer it. In truth, he wasn't really being detained or interrogated. Aside from the initial two or three days when he had been taken through various questioning sessions and tests, he had spent the following dozen or so days living in this suite in the cadres' quarters, waiting for the results. The door wasn't locked, and no guards were posted; it was just that he hadn't applied to go outside himself. "Regimental Commander?" Opening the door, Lao Jian saw Regimental Commander Li Wangqiang. Feigning ignorance of the beef and yellow wine in Li's hands, and pretending not to know it was Tradition Night, he grumbled aggrievedly to his former superior, "Why are you personally coming to interrogate me again? The situation really was just like that—it just vanished, who knows where... I've repeated the exact same words so many times. You can't expect me to make something up, can you?" Having commanded him for nine years, Li Wangqiang knew Lao Jian was playing dumb. He let himself in and set down the beef and wine first. It so happened that he had another matter to "interrogate" him about today, so he simply played along. "It's not about the source energy block. There's precedent for that abroad. Once you and your squad finish going through the formal procedures on your respective ends, that'll basically be that. Higher-ups won't be able to say much either." Soldiers had no use for raw metal blocks; turning them in for refining, on the other hand, yielded a modest reward in return. This was common knowledge. Lao Jian nodded, though it didn't necessarily mean he felt entirely relieved. Even so, he had always had complete faith in Regiment 425. "Eat and talk?" Li Wangqiang asked, raising an eyebrow. "You'd better tell me first." Lao Jian glanced at the beef and chuckled. "Otherwise my heart will stay in my throat, wondering what kind of trouble I've landed in again. I wouldn't be able to swallow a bite." "Fine, that works too." Li Wangqiang opened the wine and said casually, "The night before you came here, you went to reinforce Reserve Station 700, right?" That was quite some time ago—why bring it up out of nowhere? Lao Jian replied, "Yeah, what about it?" Li Wangqiang said, "Something happened." "Oh, I know... You mean the signs of Cleansing Faction activity back then, right?" Lao Jian's expression turned serious. "Did the investigation turn up anything later? What's the situation?" "Yeah, the investigation finished. It was people from Pure Purgatory." "Oh, those dumbasses." Lao Jian spat with disdain. As a Cleansing Faction organization, Pure Purgatory was so relatively low-grade and crude that the Azure Coalition had never thought much of it. What was truly terrifying and worrisome to the people of Azure was another organization within the Cleansing Faction. "Right, so that part isn't the problem," Li Wangqiang said, looking down as he poured the wine. "The problem is... let me ask you: when you were there, besides helping to hack that Great Spike, did you kill anyone else?!" In truth, he had come to investigate who deserved credit for the deed, but according to protocol, Li Wangqiang couldn't say so upfront. He kept his head lowered, pouring the wine with a grave tone. Caught completely off guard by such a heavy accusation suddenly being dropped on his head, Lao Jian grew agitated. "How could that be?! I—Regimental Commander..." He even sounded somewhat wronged. "I was helping hack the Great Spike back then, pushing myself to hold the front line. I even coughed up pints of blood afterward! If you don't believe me, go ask... ask the people at the medical post!" "If you didn't do it, then you didn't! What the hell are you getting so worked up for?! Braving the front while already injured, and you have the nerve to brag about coughing up blood afterward... Did you want me to praise you or chew you out?" It was a process of elimination anyway; if it wasn't him, so be it. Li Wangqiang scolded him a bit in his capacity as his old captain, then looked at Lao Jian and asked, "Then did you see anyone else moving around at the time?" "Back then, I... no." Lao Jian rubbed his nose in front of his old leader, sat down thoughtfully, and asked cautiously, "Did one of our comrades fall in battle?" The regimental commander replied, "A soldier did fall—fought until his source energy block ran out and died at the hands of two men from Pure Purgatory. That part has already been confirmed." Lao Jian nodded heavily. "And then?" Li Wangqiang took a sip of wine with a sharp hiss. "Then the two men from Pure Purgatory were taken out as well... Not by anyone from Reserve Station 700, and not by Regional Squad 764. And now you're saying it wasn't you either..." So it wasn't an accusation after all... It was a major achievement. Lao Jian froze for a moment, his mind racing. Suddenly, a possibility flashed through his mind, and he blurted out, "Impossible! How could that be?!" "What do you mean, 'how could that be'?" Li Wangqiang had long caught on to his odd reaction, and this exclamation only confirmed it. "Don't lie to me. We go way back; you can't fool me... Besides, this is a merit, not a crime." "I know..." Lao Jian took a gulp of wine, tilting his head with a furrowed brow. "It's just... it's simply impossible." "Never mind whether it's possible or not. Talk first." Lao Jian recounted the events of that night, including the part where he brought Han Qingyu along and told the kid to stay down in the pit. When he finished, Li Wangqiang also blurted out, "Impossible! How could that be?!" Lao Jian said, "Exactly!" A civilian, a nineteen-year-old kid, taking out two combatants from Pure Purgatory equipped with generation-seven gear—there was simply no way for them to comprehend or accept such a deduction. "Well, let's leave it aside and investigate slowly later. First, drink. To be honest, it's been years since the two of us had a proper chat." Li Wangqiang, currently the commander of Regiment 425 and also Lao Jian's captain when he first stepped onto the battlefield years ago, filled Lao Jian's cup, tapped it against his own, and said, "Down three to start—no problem, right?" "Fine by me," Lao Jian chuckled cockily. "Honestly, Captain, you might not be able to outdrink me these days." There was a peculiar tendency among soldiers: even after they became squad leaders, platoon leaders, or even company commanders, carrying themselves with maturity and poise in front of their men... the moment they stood before their old squad leader from their recruit days, a trace of boyishness would always resurface. The two reminisced about the past, caught up on each other's recent years, and then turned to the current situation. "Seems like there are quite a lot of recruits in this batch," Lao Jian remarked. "I remember back then, there were only around two hundred per class. Now it's over four hundred." "Yeah, some of the other regiments have even more." Li Wangqiang fell silent for a moment before looking up. "There's no other way. The frontline casualties have been too heavy... A lot of the people who were supposed to return on this rotation leave didn't make it back." Lao Jian nodded in silence. On this matter, as a combat captain on the sighting frontline, he naturally understood all too well. In previous years, his squad would sortie once or twice a year at most. Yet this year, in just the first eight months, they had already deployed four times, suffering casualties of nearly a quarter of their squad. The shuttle craft were arriving with increasing frequency. "Your 752 is tied for the most deployments in our regiment so far, but in other regiments, there are squads that have had even more... deployed six times already this year," Li Wangqiang said. Lao Jian lowered his voice. "Has command given any assessment or statement on this?" "Not yet." Li Wangqiang shook his head. "Oh, right—recently, command has been calling on officers not currently engaged on the frontline to donate source energy blocks..." "What for?" "To power the source energy field for this recruit testing." "Are things... really that poor already?" "Probably. Or maybe the old man's just being stingy." They spoke as if joking, but both of their expressions were grim. If it really was because resources were stretched this thin—if the current situation had already pushed them to their bare essentials—then what if a large-scale invasion of Great Spikes truly arrived in the coming years...? "By the way, that borehole up north in bear territory—how deep have they drilled? Did they pull anything out?" Lao Jian asked abruptly. The borehole he referred to was publicly known as the "Kola Superdeep Borehole." "Over twelve thousand meters... Heard they found nothing." When Li Wangqiang said they had found nothing, he naturally didn't mean that literally nothing had been discovered on the public record... Publicly, layers of gold and diamonds had at least been found, even if large-scale extraction was temporarily unfeasible. What he referred to was the true objective hidden beneath the public surface: the Azure Alliance's attempt to search the deep underground, even the earth's core, for dead iron and source energy had yielded no results. In any case, it was all hearsay. Li Wangqiang soon noted that this topic was far beyond what his post allowed him to know. And so, toward the end of their drinking, the two circled right back to the previous topic. "Hypothetically... Let's assume for a moment that it really was that kid who took out those two guys from Pure Purgatory..." Li Wangqiang leaned against the table, tilting his head toward Lao Jian. "Can you come up with any possible scenario for me?" "Well..." Lao Jian drew out the word, pondering for a good while. "He's very good at lying low in a pit." "How good?" "While flesh and blood were flying everywhere as we hacked at the Great Spike right beside him, he stayed flat... and even saved my life."