Chapter 129: Hero’s Madness

Sulfurous fog thinned as dawn crept across the sky. The Japanese-Czech forces assembled in the forward trenches, checking weapons and adjusting packs. They waited for the enemy’s morning barrage.

The barrage never came.

Silence settled over the battlefield. The usual sounds of shouted orders from the Bolshevik lines were absent. Only the wind whistled over the blasted landscape.

A Czech scout returned, slithering back into the trench on his belly. His face was smeared with mud. “They are fighting each other.”

Sergeant Takeru leaned forward. “Explain.”

“I crawled to the old listening post and heard gunfire from their rear positions. They are calling each other traitors and true believers. One group chants for the commissar. The other yells about Koschei.”

Colonel Rachmaninoff closed his eyes. “So it begins.”

They watched from the parapet. Pockets of muzzle flash sparked in the dim light, aimed inward toward their own trench lines. The flat sound of rifle fire echoed, punctuated by the occasional crump of a grenade. A column of black smoke began to rise from the direction of a supply depot.

The Japanese lieutenant lowered his binoculars. “Their discipline has shattered. They are purging the doubters.”

The crow fluttered onto the sandbag next to Su Yao. “The revolution consumes its children. Just as it always does.”

Su Yao watched the smoke rise. This was the first domino falling in a chain they could no longer control.

“We could arm the defectors,” Sergeant Takeru suggested. He watched another burst of internal gunfire light up the gloom. “Give them ammunition. Help them overthrow the impostor from within.”

Colonel Rachmaninoff shook his head. “No. The moment we support them, the rumor becomes a confirmed plot. The commissar will point to our aid as proof the Koschei story is foreign propaganda. He will use it to unite the factions against a common outside enemy. We will heal the schism we just created.”

The crow bobbed its head. “He is correct. The idea must feel organic. It must grow from their own doubt and own observations. Our fingerprints must remain invisible.”

Jeon Woochi leaned against the trench wall, his arms crossed. “So we watch and let them fight. We let the idea spread on its own momentum. Intervene only if one side is about to be completely crushed.”

Su Yao listened to the distant conflict. The sounds began to change as random gunfire coalesced into distinct fronts. Inside the Bolshevik trench network, battle lines were solidifying. “They are organizing their civil war and choosing sides. We gave them the question. Now they are killing each other for the answer.”

Sitri joined them, wiping her hands with a clean rag. “The commissar will now have to prove he is real. Or he will have to crush the heresy with overwhelming force. Both actions will expose him. Both will feed the doubt further.”

They settled in to observe. The Japanese-Czech soldiers stood down from their attack readiness, but remained vigilant at the parapets. They watched the enemy tear itself apart across the scarred earth.

The commissar’s response came at noon. A thunderous artillery barrage hammered the rebel-held sections of his own trench line. The earth shook. Plumes of dirt and debris geysered into the air, mixed with darker fragments.

Through binoculars, they saw him. He stood on a command platform with a megaphone in hand. “Comrades! The enemy feeds you fairy tales! They call me a wizard to divide us! They fear our unity! Crush these traitors and their bourgeois superstitions!”

His loyalist troops advanced behind a rolling wall of mortar fire, bayonets fixed. They overwhelmed the mutineers in a brutal close-quarters slaughter.

Colonel Rachmaninoff lowered his binoculars. “That is a Stalin move. Trotsky would have debated them. He would have given a fourteen-hour speech to win them back. This is just brute force.”

Colonel Vasha watched the commissar’s troops turn their guns outward. “That is indeed pure Stalin. Just identify the enemy and let the guns do the talking. Anyone with a brutal enough heart can manage that. All it takes is a willingness to purge.”

Su Yao watched the carnage. “Stalin was a Russian Lu Bu.

Jeon Woochi glanced at her. “The warrior who served three masters and betrayed each one?”

“Yes. A man of immense personal power and no loyalty except to his own ambition. And that,” she pointed her chin toward the commissar, now surveying the smoking ruin of the mutiny, “is what our enemy is choosing to emulate. He is proving Rachmaninoff right by acting like the paranoid, murderous traitor.”

“So the mask slips.” The crow crackled. “He reveals his methodology is control through fear. The mutineers died for a rumor and the survivors will remember that. Fear can cement loyalty. It can also breed deeper, quieter hate.”

The commissar’s amplified voice boomed again. “The imperialist propagandists watch us from their trenches! They laugh as we spill our own blood! They planted this poison! They will pay for every drop!”

With that, the remaining loyalist forces turned as one. Their rifles and bayonets shifted direction. They began advancing across no-man’s land, fixing their eyes on the Japanese-Czech positions. The smoke from their own internal massacre still coiled above them.

“He redirects their anger,” Jeon Woochi observed. “Classic. The failed father blames the neighbors.”

The Czech captain shouted orders. Machine gun crews scrambled to their weapons. Riflemen took their positions on the fire step. The brief respite was over.

Su Yao watched the approaching horde. We turned them against each other. Now he has turned them against us.

The crow launched itself from her shoulder, circling once above the trench. “So the final act begins. They come to kill the authors of their doubt.”

“Let them come,” Su Yao said. She summoned her Void-Severing Glaive. “We wanted a battle. It seems we get one after all.”

The first wave reached the wire. Japanese machine guns opened up, scything through their ranks. Men fell. Others kept coming. They climbed over the bodies of their comrades.

Su Yao phased to the forward parapet. Her glaive cut through three soldiers in a single sweep. They collapsed. A fourth lunged at her, a bayonet aimed at her throat. She sidestepped, severing his arm at the shoulder. He switched his rifle to his other hand and kept coming. His eyes were glassy, fixed on a point behind her head.

They feel no pain.

A Czech soldier bayoneted a Bolshevik in the chest. The Bolshevik grabbed the barrel of the rifle and sank his teeth into the Czech’s neck. They fell together in a tangle of limbs and gore.

“They won’t stop!” Sergeant Takeru yelled, firing his pistol into a face at point-blank range. The face kept snarling until the third bullet.

A crimson light flickered deep in each soldier’s pupils. It pulsed in time with the distant chant she could now hear beneath the gunfire. The words were guttural.

Ancient Slavic sorcery. Berserker’s curse poured into hundreds of minds at once. It stripped away fear, pain, and individual thought, leaving only the drive to kill the enemy defined by their commissar.

A soldier missing half his jaw charged her, swinging his rifle like a club. She decapitated him. The body took two more stumbling steps before it fell.

“He has enchanted them!” she shouted back toward the command dugout. “They will not stop until they are dead!”

Colonel Rachmaninoff fired his captured rifle. “Bogatyr frenzy. The hero’s madness. He is using the oldest stories to make them march.”

The trench line threatened to buckle as the frenzied Bolsheviks climbed over their own dead, forming a wall of flesh and crimson eyes. A Czech machine gunner fell, having his throat torn out by bare hands and the line wavered.

Then a voice rose from the rear trench, chanting in staccato Japanese. It was one of the freed Gulag prisoners, a young man with sunken cheeks and fever-bright eyes. He thrust his hands forward. Shimmering bands of light wrapped around the legs of six charging soldiers. They crashed to the mud, snarling and clawing at the bindings.

“First Company, Magecraft Unit!” Sergeant Takeru roared. “Suppressive fire!”

“Hold the line!” someone shouted back through the smoke.

More freed prisoners joined the chant. Some were Japanese, their spells forming barriers of shimmering force that deflected bayonets. Others were Czech, their murmured words causing the ground to soften and grab at Bolshevik boots. These were specialists imprisoned for their dangerous knowledge. Now they used it.

“Don’t lose the rhythm,” a mage hissed. “Hold the spell.”

Su Yao became the eye of the storm. She phased through the chaos, carving through knots of frenzied soldiers. Each stroke felled three or four. Bodies piled around her, black demonic blood mixing with the red of human vestiges.

“Saints preserve us,” someone breathed.

The Japanese infantry protected the chanting mages and the Czech riflemen fired disciplined volleys into the gaps Su Yao created. Sergeant Takeru directed a squad to flank a breakthrough.

“Second squad, with me!” Takeru barked. “Now!”

Colonel Rachmaninoff pointed out a weak spot in the frenzy’s formation and a Czech earth-mage made the ground erupt there, swallowing a dozen attackers trapped by a lesser demon’s binding spell.

“There,” Rachmaninoff said. “Exploit it.”

Coordination met relentless fury. The frenzied Bolsheviks pushed against a defense that adapted and used each unique asset in concert.

“They’re just throwing themselves at us,” a rifleman muttered.

The tide slowed. Then it stopped. The last wave of berserkers threw themselves onto a wall of bayonets and binding light. They fell.

“…It’s over,” a voice said.

Among the soldiers, the demon troops remained steady. One knelt beside a dying berserker and placed two fingers on the man’s brow. The crimson light guttered out of the corpse’s eyes as he muttered a short phrase.

“Clean,” the demon said.

Another demon checked the bodies for lingering enchantments. “No residue remained.”

A third scraped a smear of corrupted blood from his coat sleeve with a hiss. He nodded when a Czech medic approached.

“…Thank you,” the medic said after a pause.

Silence returned, broken by the groans of the wounded and the ragged breathing of the defenders. The crimson light faded from the eyes of the fallen.

“…We’re alive,” someone whispered.

Su Yao stood amidst a hill of corpses, her glaive dripping. She looked back at the trench. The Japanese mages slumped, supported by their comrades. The Czech specialists leaned against the parapet.

Colonel Rachmaninoff surveyed the field. “He gave them fury and took their minds. In the end, that was his mistake. A hammer can’t outthink a scalpel.”

The frenzied horde lay dead, and the distant Bolshevik lines stood abandoned.

“Did we win?” a Czech soldier whispered.

The crow landed on a splintered post. “He has no more soldiers to throw. The next move is retreat. Or personal intervention.”

A low tremor shook the ground, starting deep in the enemy’s territory. Something massive moved through the smoke and ruins.

It breached the haze to reveal a serpentine head the size of a tank, its scales the color of tarnished iron. A second head rose beside it, followed by a third and a fourth. There were nine heads total, each crowned with bony crests. Their mouths dripped viscous green venom. The creature’s body was a coiled mountain of muscle and scale, crushing trenches and gun emplacements beneath its bulk as it advanced.

Sergeant Takeru stared. “It’s larger than Yamata-no-Orochi.”

Colonel Rachmaninoff’s face paled. “A D’yavol Tron. I read the reports, the classified ones. A smaller one crossed the Podkamennaya Tunguska river in ‘08 before the great flash.”

The Colonel turned to stare at the advancing beast, his eyes wide. “A Cossack patrol found it first. Then the Tsar’s army. They hit it with everything: Maxim guns, field cannons, anti-tank rockets brought in by train. The shells bounced off, the rockets scarred the scales and did nothing more. It ate a village. Then it vanished.”

He swallowed hard. “The official story was a meteorite, the Tunguska event. But in the General Staff, we knew something walked out of that blast zone. Something that shrugged off 105mm artillery like rain. That was a small one. This… this is its elder sibling.”

The beast’s eighteen eyes fixed on their trench. A guttural hiss echoed from nine throats.

Su Yao cracked her neck. “It’s just a big snake.”

She phased from the trench, reappearing a hundred yards into no-man’s land in the creature’s path. Her Void-Severing Glaive hummed in her hand.

The central head struck first, a blur of scale and fang. Su Yao dodged, the impact cratering the ground where she stood. She slashed upward. As the glaive bit into the neck, it sheared through scale and meat before sending the head thudding to the ground.

Two more heads struck from opposite sides. She spun, her weapon cutting a wide arc. It severed both. Black blood fountained.

The severed necks writhed. Then they bubbled and regrew. Three new heads erupted from the stumps, snarling at her. Now there were eleven. Hydra rules, Su Yao noted, leaping back as venom splashed where she landed. The liquid ate through the rock, smoking. Cut one, two grow back.

She needed a different approach. The commissar watched from a distant ridge, shrouded in gloom. This was his last trick.

The D’yavol Tron coiled, its massive body beginning to encircle her position. All eleven heads poised to strike.

Su Yao recalled the old legend. Heracles cut the Hydra’s heads. His nephew cauterized the stumps with fire. Simple.

She phased behind the D’yavol Tron’s bulk and severed three heads with a sweeping blow. Black blood sprayed. Before the necks could writhe, she unleashed a torrent of foxfire from her palm. The searing green flames engulfed the bleeding stumps.

The stumps charred black. They stopped twitching.

Then the charred flesh cracked. New heads pushed through the scorched scales. These heads had horns. Their teeth were longer and sharper.

The creature roared. It now had thirteen heads. The two new ones breathed a cloud of swirling darkness that made the air scream. Stones touched by the cloud crumbled to dust.

From the trench, Malphas’s shriek cut through the noise. “Its power grows from defeat! Each attempt to stop it makes it stronger!”

Su Yao leaped away as the dark cloud ate the ground where she stood. Stupid. I assumed the story was universal.

The commissar’s voice echoed from the ridge. “Try again, fox. Cut more. I enjoy the spectacle.”

The beast coiled tighter, its thirteen heads forming a cage of fangs and corrosive breath around her. It attacked in coordinated waves, leaving no space to phase.

Su Yao stopped trying to outmaneuver the heads. She let them close in. The cavern of fangs and darkness tightened around her. If it grows from defeat, then I must make its defeat utterly permanent. Can it regenerate from dust?

The commissar already knew her vulpine nature. He had seen her power. There was no reason to hold back here.

She closed her eyes and let go of the human shape. Power unspooled from her core.

A shockwave of primal energy blasted outwards, throwing the encircling heads back. Where Su Yao stood, light and shadow coalesced into a new form. Nine magnificent tails fanned out behind her, each glowing with a different hue of foxfire. Her ears lengthened, becoming pointed and furred.

One tail held a spear forged from a dying star’s core. Another wielded a bell that rang with frequencies that shattered spiritual cohesion. A third grasped a fan whose gusts carried the erosion of centuries. There were whips that crackled with captured lightning, blades that stilled the air around them, and a mirror that showed a soul its own decay.

These were her ancient arsenal.

Among them, the Tide-Cutter’s sharp aquatic gleam was a recent gift. The watchful Keyblade was a prize from a Beijing mansion. They joined the older relics as part of the storm now facing the D’yavol Tron.

The D’yavol Tron hesitated, sensing the shift in its prey.

Her Tide-Cutter lashed out in the tail that held it. A sweeping arc of pressurized water sharper than any steel sliced clean through two heads. They fell.

Before the stumps could twitch, the Keyblade in another tail flashed. It locked the concept of regeneration at the wound site. There, the flesh became inert and refused to regrow.

The creature shrieked. It struck back with its dark-cloud breath. A third tail swept forward, the whip of singing chains spinning into a vortex that scattered the corrosive mist.

Su Yao advanced, each strike aimed to unravel the beast’s foundational magic.

On the ridge, the commissar watched. His hand tightened around the megaphone. He began to chant again, trying to feed the beast new strength.

The D’yavol Tron’s scales hardened, taking on a metallic sheen. It adapted, but now it was adapting against nine different schools of destruction at once. The battle became a race between her attacks and its accelerated evolution.