Chapter 111: Fish In Water
It was strange—or maybe not really.
I was more afraid while I was on the Garay nearing the landing point than I was when I saw the recruit’s corpse with its fresh bullet wound, generously bleeding on the church steps.
The dead and the bleeding were familiar sights. The scent of blood and black powder was no foreign smell. I thrived in the noise and the chaos. As much as I dreaded the idea—thanks to the modern U.S. Army—I was a fish in water in the midst of the battlefield.
Barely a second had passed when I raised my rifle and aimed into the church interior. The five pulajanes fighters had formed a line around the pulpit, their figures silhouetted by the flickering candlelight behind them. The contrast made them easy targets, even if their features were lost to shadow.
My first target was the pulajanes who had just fired—the one who killed the recruit. He was now scrambling to fish a bullet out of his cloth cartridge bag, the barrel of his rifle still exhaling thin trails of smoke. But then I spotted movement from another direction—another fighter already raising his sights toward me.
I shifted my aim and fired.
The sharp crack of my Mauser echoed inside the church, bouncing off the stone and wood. The cultist I hit was behind a pew, but my shot tore through the wood and caught him square in the right shoulder. His upper body jerked back violently, and he fell with a heavy thud. His rifle clattered across the marble tiles, slipping under the next row of pews.
Without delay, I pulled the bolt, chambered another round, and returned my focus to the first man. He was still fumbling with his cartridge like a nervous grandmother trying to thread a needle. He hadn’t even started to reload properly.
I didn’t give him a chance. My second shot caught him in the chest. He let out a groan—pain mixed with frustration—before dropping to one knee and falling sideways like a sack of rice.