Chapter 58: The Artillery King of Lemetti

Clang!

The moment the first shell shrieked from the muzzle, the semi-automatic breech of the 45mm 1932 anti-tank gun (19-K) snapped open, ejecting a scorching brass casing.

The casing hissed as it hit the snow, sending up a thin wisp of white smoke before being instantly swallowed by the biting frost.

The sound of the tent collapsing followed the blast with a crystalline sharpness, the groan of splintering wooden support beams and the violent tearing of canvas. Because the falling tent had toppled a kerosene heater, the spilled fuel ignited rapidly across the shredded fabric.

Through the impenetrable ice fog, this blossoming fireball was not particularly bright, but to the other Soviet troops trapped within the pocket, it was a flare of pure catastrophe.

The nearby Soviet camp erupted into total chaos.

Piercing screams and frantic whistles cut through the fog, underscored by the rhythmic, metallic clack-clack of bolt-action rifles being cycled in unison. Soldiers scrambled from their foxholes, aiming blindly into the white void, desperate to pinpoint the source of the devastation.

In the thick of the ice fog, however, they couldn't even tell where the thunder had originated.

"Help! The Colonel is in there! Save him!"

From beneath the wreckage of the tent, the young staff officer who had just been pouring water for Colonel Iovlev crawled out, his face masked in gray soot and grime. He screamed in terror, firing his Tokarev pistol repeatedly into the sky to summon reinforcements.

"Stop staring! Keep loading!" Walter growled, snapping his gaze back to the task at hand.

Ojala, heedless of the sizzle of his gloves against the glowing-hot breech, snatched another armor-piercing shell from Lindholm's hands and slammed it into the chamber with frantic speed.

"Loaded!"

"Vatanen, one notch left! Keep the elevation, aim for the fire!" Walter commanded, his eyes locked onto the scene through the Eye of Death.

"Fire!"

The instant the command left Walter's lips, Vatanen yanked the firing lever again.

BOOM—!!!

A second thunderclap shook the air.

Because of the haste and the recoil shifting the unanchored spades slightly, the shell's trajectory veered ever so marginally. The two-kilogram armor-piercing projectile drew a horizontal line through the air, grazing the side of a guard who had just scrambled out of the tent.

The guard didn't even feel pain. He only felt as if the left side of his body had been sideswiped by a speeding locomotive.

In a heartbeat, his entire left arm, along with half his shoulder and ribcage, was torn bodily away. Dark red flesh and bone fragments sprayed across the ice fog like a macabre fan.

The shell, its momentum barely hindered, continued its flight through the other side of the ruins. The young staff officer at the center of the wreckage had just raised his head when the blood-slicked shell slammed into his right shoulder.

Crunch!

There was no explosion, only the dull, sickening thud of bone being pulverized.

Half of the officer's body collapsed instantly. His right shoulder and scapula were ground into mush, and he was hurled backward like a ragdoll for over three meters, hitting the snow with a heavy thud. Whether he lived or died was impossible to tell.

"That's two."

In the thermal vision of Walter's Eye of Death, the tent's location had become a chaotic blur of deep purples and dark reds.

But he knew it wasn't enough.

"Keep firing! We're clearing this place out entirely!"

Beyond their line of sight, Soviet soldiers, guided by the roar of the cannon and the screams, were already stumbling forward through the fog with fixed bayonets. Though terrified, the guard units were narrowing in on the burning wreckage, closing the gap.

"Hurry, Ojala! A few more rounds and we vanish!"

Clang—Click!

Ojala's eyes were bloodshot, like an enraged beast. He mechanically cycled the breech and shoved the third AP shell home.

For a highly trained Soviet elite crew, this 45mm gun could spit out fifteen to twenty rounds a minute if the aim didn't need adjusting. But Walter and his men weren't artillerymen, and in this forty-below-zero hell where metal threatened to shatter, every movement was a battle against stiffening muscles and the freezing cold.

Nearly forty seconds had passed since the first shot.

Through Walter's thermal vision, the area around the tent was now littered with severed limbs. Due to the terrifying kinetic energy of the AP rounds, fragments of the Soviet officers lay scattered across the snow, appearing as mottled, rapidly cooling dark red shadows.

However, death had not scattered the Soviets; instead, it had provoked the desperate, feral madness of cornered animals.

"There! Over by the gun!"

A sharp burst of Russian shouting rang out from deep within the fog.

Seconds later, a dozen orange silhouettes stumbled out from the shadows behind the tent. It was the regimental guard platoon. Though blinded by the ice fog, they had locked onto the position of the "traitorous" cannon based on the muzzle flashes.

Bang! Bang!

Walter snatched up his nearby Mosin-Nagant. Without time for a precise aim, he fired two shots purely on thermal instinct. Two leading Soviet soldiers took hits to the chest, hot steam geysering from their wounds as they collapsed into the snow.

"Vatanen, cover us!"

Walter yanked a grenade, tapped the cap, and hurled it deep into the mist.

Boom!

The explosion bloomed like a massive orange fireball in the ice fog, instantly swallowing several silhouettes. But the remaining Russians ignored the casualties. They knew that if they didn't silence this gun at point-blank range, every one of them would die under the next shell.

"Squad leader! They're less than fifteen meters away!"

Vatanen pulled the trigger of his empty submachine gun frantically, cold sweat running down his temples and instantly freezing into ice beads. The veterans couldn't see through the fog; they could only follow Walter's lead.

"Get on the gun! Forget the handwheels! No time to traverse!" Walter roared.

He sprinted to the side of the carriage, pointing at the long steel trail legs extending behind the piece. "Ojala, Lindholm! Lift the trails! Pivot the whole damn thing by hand! Move!"

The two powerhouses lunged forward, their hands gripping the freezing steel.

"HEAVE—!!"

With a primal, savage grunt and veins bulging from their foreheads, they wrenched the half-ton rear of the gun out of the frozen earth. Using the wheels as a fulcrum, the entire cannon swung across the snow in a menacing arc.

The muzzle swept through the air, leveling directly toward the encroaching mist.

At that exact moment, a Soviet soldier charging with a glinting bayonet burst through the curtain of ice fog. He was gasping for air, the ferocity in his eyes shattering instantly at the sight before him.

He didn't see a group of Finnish skirmishers. He saw a cavernous, black bore, still smoking from its previous shot.

The muzzle was less than two meters from his head.

Before his brain could even register the signal of fear…

"Fire!"

Vatanen yanked the firing lever.

BOOM—!!!

At zero range, the gun unleashed its most primitive, hideous violence.

There was no process of blood spraying. It happened too fast. The moment the soldier was hit, half of his physical being simply ceased to exist. His upper torso was atomized into a cloud of fine fragments. The shell, trailing a blur of gore, shrieked onward, skewering the two soldiers behind him like a macabre kebab.

The violent shockwave from the blast cleared a circular vacuum in the surrounding ice fog.

"Hell yes! God, that feels good!"

Vatanen gripped the firing handle, his entire body trembling with hyper-adrenaline. His face, blackened by cordite smoke, held eyes that burned brighter than the muzzle flash.

Before this, he had always thought of these heavy iron lumps as a burden for the infantry. But as he personally pulled the lever and watched a living man be physically erased from existence, the power of total destruction sent his dopamine levels off the charts.

"Squad leader! Did you see that? That bastard didn't even have time to fart before he fell apart!"

Vatanen screamed hysterically, his voice echoing in the deathly silent fog. "To hell with the Suomi submachine gun! That's for girls! This is a man's romance!"

Clang—!

Ojala kicked away the scorching empty casing, the brass ringing out musically against the frozen ground. He, too, was infected by the raw bloodlust of the moment, gasping for air as he jammed another AP round into the breech.

"I've never fought a battle this damn satisfying in my life!"

Vatanen laughed wildly, wiping a fleck of blood from his face. He puffed out his chest and roared at the white void ahead:

"Remember this, you Ruskies! I am Vatanen of the 4th Company, 5th Infantry Division!"

"From this day on, I'm the Artillery King of Lemetti! Anyone who doesn't like it, come stick your head in front of this pipe and see how wide it is!"