Slaughterhouse

Company Two pushed forward, while Company Four's commander Yuri and Rock called on their men to lay down a saturation bombardment with grenade launchers. Chen Ge crouched in a crater filled with ankle-deep muddy water and scattered with several fresh corpses, his eyes fixed on a Ukrainian soldier carrying an NLAW anti-tank missile behind a broken wall three hundred meters ahead. This was the Ukrainian military's can opener. It hit tanks and armored vehicles with devastating force—one strike, and they never made another sound. The Peregrine Battalion's tanks could not afford the slightest scratch; losing even one would cost him a measure of security. "Round!" The moment Chen Ge extended his hand, Big Bear slapped a 60 mm high-explosive round into his palm—the usual routine, proximity fuze. "Night Cat, observe and call out targets! Lightbulb, Manhole Cover, get smoke grenades ready!" Chen Ge issued his orders calmly, slamming the mortar tube firmly against the ground and splashing up a spray of muddy water. Gripping the barrel, he depressed it slightly by feel, then dropped the round down the muzzle. Thump! The mortar round cleared the tube, arced through the fine drizzle, and detonated one meter above the Ukrainian soldier's head. The primed NLAW exploded with it! Boom! The Ukrainian soldier and three men crouching beside him behind the broken wall were blown to pieces. Ten meters away, crouching behind the wreck of a tank, Piano glanced sideways at Circlip and asked, "Did you see that? Impressive, isn't it?" Hearing was one thing, but seeing was believing. Having witnessed Chen Ge's shooting with his own eyes, Circlip was filled with instant awe. "I was wrong. I shouldn't have doubted Hammer Brother. I repent!" Thump, thump. Chen Ge fired two more rounds, wiping out an NSV heavy machine gun, then grabbed the mortar tube and vaulted out of the crater. "Smoke grenades, by that tank wreck ahead!" Lightbulb and Manhole Cover raised their AK-12s, using their underbarrel GP-30 grenade launchers to fire two GRD-100 tactical screening smoke grenades. They struck on either side of a T-64BV tank ninety meters ahead whose turret had been blown off. Smoke billowed instantly, and the five men dashed doubled over behind the wreckage. At a straight-line distance of about 220 meters from the ruined eastern wall of the Asphalt Plant, Chen Ge shot with even greater precision. Knocking out three firing points with three consecutive rounds, he drastically reduced the assault pressure on Company Two. Under cover of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, and at the cost of over a dozen casualties, Company Two finally reached the ruined perimeter wall. Tossing hand grenades to wipe out the remaining Ukrainian soldiers, they dispersed into four-man teams to search for the utility trench entrances and blow them shut. The main force pressed forward rapidly. Realizing the situation had turned grim, the Ukrainian forces pulled back swiftly, retreating to the Main Mixing Tower and the mineral powder silos on the left, 150 meters away. Da-da-da! Ukrainian soldiers inside the mixing tower opened fire, locking into crossfire with the troops in the silos. A single volley cut down seven or eight Peregrine mercenaries. Chen Ge lay behind a pile of bricks, poked his head out to observe, and swallowed hard. Adrenaline surged through him; his heart pounded in his throat. A slaughterhouse! This was a slaughterhouse! In the zone between the mixing tower and the silos, the open ground ahead was strewn with corpses lying crisscrossed everywhere—an estimated four to five hundred bodies. Two-thirds were Wagner mercenaries and K-soldiers, alongside the bodies of fighters from the Chechen Akhmat Special Forces Regiment. The Chechen soldiers had unmistakable thick beards, and their gear was better than that of the Wagner veterans and K-soldiers, all wearing Ops-Core FAST high-cut helmets. Ukrainian heavy machine gun rounds slammed into the corpses, sending human fragments and purplish-brown slurry mingled with blood flying everywhere, gory and horrifying. Watching through his monocular, Night Cat sucked in a sharp breath, fine beads of cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. It was not sheer terror, just that he had not fully adapted to the high intensity of the Ukrainian battlefield. Back when he was fighting the destitute forces of IS in Syria, when had he ever experienced such a spectacle of impenetrable machine-gun fire and whooshing rockets? "Fucking terrifying! Ice Man and his guys have lost over twenty men already, and they still can't get into the mixing tower! Call the tanks up to blast it!" Lightbulb pointed at the fortifications the Ukrainian troops had built higher up the mixing tower using sandbags and concrete. "If the tanks get close, the Ukrainian soldiers upstairs can shatter their thin turret armor with standard RPG warheads." Big Bear assembled eight mortar rounds with blinding speed, looked at Chen Ge, and asked somewhat hesitantly, "Hammer Brother, can we hit the positions on those upper floors?" Mortars were indirect fire weapons. Their shells flew on high-angle parabolic trajectories toward targets, plunging vertically from above into trenches, rooftops, courtyards, and windows. A 60 mm mortar's angle of descent ranged between 45 and 85 degrees; the shorter the range, the steeper the angle. Firing at the mixing tower three hundred meters away, the rounds would plunge almost vertically, capable of striking the roof or the top floor. Against firing positions inside the building, direct hits were impossible, but they could collapse the exterior walls, shatter the glass, and shower fragments through the windows. "Airbursts can!" Chen Ge grabbed the tube and backed up, planting the spade firmly into the ground. Adjusting the tube's angle, he took the round handed over by Big Bear and dropped it into the muzzle. Thump! The round traced an arc through the air and detonated right above the outside of the third-floor fortifications on the mixing tower's right side. Over two thousand fragments sprayed outward, and two machine guns fell silent. "Round! Fast!" Chen Ge fired three more rounds in rapid succession, grabbed the tube, and sprinted crouched to the left. Big Bear, Lightbulb, Manhole Cover, and Night Cat were already in complete sync with him. The moment he rose, the four of them bolted. Just as the five men ran twenty meters, Ukrainian troops on the fourth floor saturated their previous position with fire from an NSV heavy machine gun and an AGS-17 Plamya 30 mm automatic grenade launcher. 12.7×108 mm rounds smashed the brick pile to dust, and high-explosive grenades rained down, scattering crushed bricks and mud everywhere. The two-to-three-meter-high pile of rubble was completely leveled. Half a brick flew through the air and struck the back of Lightbulb's head. Thrown off balance, he pitched forward with a splash, taking a mud dive flat on his face. Manhole Cover hauled him up and kept running until they stopped behind a wrecked truck fifty meters ahead. The five looked at each other and burst out laughing at Lightbulb, whose chest and balaclava were plastered in mud. Chen Ge propped the mortar tube against the truck wreckage, pulled a spare sand-colored 5.11 tactical balaclava from his backpack, and handed it to Lightbulb. "Change it so you don't catch a cold." Lightbulb stared at Chen Ge with suspicion in his eyes, caught completely off guard by this sudden show of concern. "Why... why are you being so nice to me? Did you do something behind my back?" Chen Ge's temples twitched; he sorely wanted to boot this idiot into next week. "Screw you then. I'm taking it back." Lightbulb chuckled, snatched the balaclava, took off his goggles and helmet, and swapped it on. Chen Ge ignored him, shifted behind the hood of the truck, and poked half his head out to observe the mixing tower three hundred meters diagonally ahead. Having taken out six machine guns in one breath, Companies Two and Four took the opportunity to push forward, using Shmel-M and RPG-29 launchers to suppress the eastern side of the tower's first and second floors. The fortifications on the east side of the first floor were struck in succession by four thermobaric warheads. Fuel-air explosive aerosolized, followed by a secondary detonation; blinding flashes bloomed, followed by dull, thudding roars. The Ukrainian troops behind the fortifications had their internal organs ruptured in an instant, burning or suffocating to death in the extreme heat, while those farther away were left dazed and gasping for breath from the shockwaves. This was not Chen Ge's first time seeing this cost-effective weapon of mass destruction—often called a man-portable nuclear device—used in combat, yet every time he witnessed it, he was still shaken to the core. He was reminded of a famous quote: *The eternal principle of all tactics: with all means, in the shortest time, to cause the greatest damage and destruction to the enemy.* — George S. Patton. And another: *War does not determine who is right - only who is left.* — Bertrand Russell. He would be the one left. He had to be! "Round!" Chen Ge took a deep breath, stepped back two paces, kicked aside the corpse of a K-soldier whose lower half was missing, planted the tube on the ground, took the round Big Bear handed him, and dropped it into the muzzle. This shot was aimed at over a dozen Ukrainian soldiers setting up a mortar amid the top-floor rubble. Once again, an airburst. The shell detonated two meters above the Ukrainian soldiers' heads...