"Comrade Division Commander, we can't rest any longer." The non-commissioned officer's voice was a rasping shadow, his throat ruined, one ear missing.
With a trembling hand, he wrenched a Mosin-Nagant from his shoulder and thrust it toward the private standing beside him. The young soldier was a shell of a man, his eyes fixed in a vacant, thousand-yard stare, his soul seemingly long departed.
"Take the Commander. Go."
The NCO struck the private's shoulder hard, a heavy, jarring blow intended to hammer a final spark of lucidity back into the boy's skull.
The adjutant leaned heavily against a pine trunk. The jagged tear in his shoulder where a stray bullet had scooped out a chunk of flesh had finally stopped bleeding, not because the wound had healed, but because the gore had frozen solid into an eerie, deep-purple icicle.
He flashed a grim, tragic smile at Kondrashov before turning his gaze back to the NCO. "We're staying here. That Butcher is right on our heels."
The NCO offered no reply. He simply cycled the bolt in a rhythmic, mechanical motion, checking the final clip of ammunition.
"Go!" the adjutant barked, giving Kondrashov a violent shove.
The private grabbed Kondrashov's arm with the jerky precision of a marionette. Together, they began to stumble forward, their boots sinking deep into the treacherous drifts as they drifted toward the treeline.
Kondrashov looked back, the last time he would ever see the two men who had followed him for years. They sat back-to-back behind an ancient pine, their rifles leveled toward the vast, white expanse of the marsh, a landscape now synonymous with death.
They had not even covered two hundred meters before the first sharp crack echoed through the woods.
Bang!
The signature roar of a Mosin-Nagant carried far through the crystalline morning air. Then, less than three seconds later…
Bang!
A second shot.
Then, the forest returned to a suffocating silence. No shouting, no return fire, only the sibilant hiss of wind through the conifers.
Kondrashov froze.
He knew. Those two flickers of loyalty, the last remnants of his command, had been snuffed out under the crosshairs of the Butcher of the Snowy Night.
"Dead... all of them... dead..." Kondrashov whispered.
The private, who had been dragging him along like a wooden doll, suddenly lurched to a halt. The young soldier turned slowly. On a face mapped with frostbite and filth, terror had finally reached its critical mass, detonating into pure, unadulterated madness.
"Did you hear that?" the private's voice rose in a shrill, neurotic peak. He stared at Kondrashov with wide, wild eyes. "They're gone! Those two fools threw their lives away for a man like you!"
"Soldier, mind your tone..."
Kondrashov attempted to summon the fading embers of his general's authority, but his voice betrayed him, trembling uncontrollably.
"Tone?" the private shrieked. He lunged forward, slamming his palms into Kondrashov's chest. The once-formidable Major General, now as fragile as a guttering candle, was sent reeling. He tumbled into the snow, rolling awkwardly in a pathetic display of helplessness.
"You damned idiot! You murderer!"
The private screamed his fury, his features contorted into a mask of rage. "Twenty thousand men! Twenty thousand boys of the 18th Division! And you led us here just to die? Where is the divisional flag? Where are the tanks? Where are all your damn promises?"
The soldier snatched up his frost-rimed Mosin-Nagant, the black void of the muzzle pointing directly at Kondrashov's forehead.
"They're all in the valleys, in the marshes, in the pits! Why aren't you down there with them?"
Kondrashov lay in the snow, staring blankly up the length of the shivering barrel. He didn't argue. He didn't beg. As a Division Commander, his soul had perished the moment he watched the Finns drag his divisional colors out of an armored car.
The private's finger hooked tight around the trigger, his knuckles a ghostly, necrotic blue from the strain. His bloodshot eyes remained locked on the man in the snow. In this moment, there was no reverence for rank, no blind obedience to military law, only the frantic mania of a man hollowed out by suffering, and the bone-deep hatred of the common soldier.
"You are... a sinner."
The private's voice sounded like sandpaper on stone, caught between a sob and a roar. "Two whole months! Over twenty thousand boys! You dragged us into these godforsaken woods and told us we'd be in Helsinki in two weeks! And look at us!"
He jammed the muzzle forward, the cold metal biting hard into Kondrashov's brow.
"When the food ran out, you officers sat in heated tents eating tinned meat, while we boiled our leather belts in snow-pits at forty below!"
"Tonight, just to save your own skin, you ordered us to abandon the wounded! You made us march over the corpses of our own brothers to charge Finnish machine-gun nests! You even lost our flag!"
The young soldier's teeth were gritted so hard they seemed ready to shatter. Tears welled in his eyes, only to flash-freeze into beads of ice that clung to his grime-streaked cheeks.
"You used us as meat-shields to step on, then tossed us into the snow to die."
The private's chest heaved as if he were purging two months of subterranean despair onto his commander's face. "Now, I'm abandoning you."
Ultimately, he didn't pull the trigger.
It wasn't mercy. A quick bullet felt like too much kindness for a general who had fled across a carpet of ten thousand bones. Moreover, even at this distance, he could feel it, a spine-chilling cold prickling at the back of his neck like a needle.
The Butcher of the Snowy Night hadn't fired. He was lurking somewhere in the shadows of the blizzard, a cold, mocking spectator to this final act of the drama.
"Die then! Stay here by yourself to rot and break and wither!"
The private let out a hysterical roar, yanked his rifle back, and turned to sprint blindly into the depths of the dense forest.
Kondrashov lay on his back against the frozen earth. He didn't struggle. He didn't cry out for help. His greatcoat, once a symbol of absolute power, was now being slowly reclaimed by the falling snow. The medals on his chest glinted with a cruel, ironic luster in the pale morning light.
He was hollow.
In this forest, a sea of trees where he had personally orchestrated the demise of twenty thousand Red Army soldiers, the brutal circle of karma had finally closed. He had abandoned an entire army to survive; now, he had been abandoned by that very army, becoming the most pathetic, solitary ghost in this frozen wasteland.
In the distance, the morning mist seemed to part as if brushed aside by invisible hands.
Walter slowly lowered his rifle. Gliding on his skis through the translucent haze, he appeared at the edge of the general's vision, a white phantom emerging from the pale dawn.
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