The members that had arrived first crouched at the bottom of the mountain, then glared at the top part of it. Kang Chan tightly grabbed the back of the neck of the new recruit who was about to fall. After letting go of the flustered squadmate, he sharply looked around them.
Meanwhile, the chick adjusted his posture.
“Go.”
Gérard ordered three members to scout ahead with Kang Chan’s brief command.
Before them was a long mountain range that looked as if it had multiple mountains overlapping each other. It was actually considerably far from them.
Sunlight occasionally peeked through the tall and straight trees. At some point, they heard a weird bird call that went ‘beep’ amid the wind and the patchy weed.
Kang Chan placed the string of the Abu-Dhabi carbine over his right shoulder and walked with his index finger on the trigger.
They were amid a cool mountain, so they didn’t sweat.
Flap.
Birds flew above them.
Wheeng! Wheeng!
And they even heard the weird cry of a beast.
This was Mongolia.
A battle was bound to happen regardless of who caught them, and no excuse could stop it. They would either survive through a desperate escape or die in battle, leaving not even a trace of their existence on paper.
They very nervously marched forward.
Even though they had sent three men to scout ahead of the groups, they still didn’t know when or at which side the enemy would come from.
The difference between training and an actual battle was whether or not they felt extreme nervousness. In a situation where they didn’t know when or from where a bullet would go through their necks, most people would collapse after about six hours of walking.
A few members glanced at Kang Chan with suspicion. Unlike how he ran at full speed from the helicopter, they thought he didn’t know a thing about marching. Their lives were on the line here, so he should be wary of his surroundings. However, he seemed to be carelessly marching without thinking about the consequences instead…
Rustle! Click!
Just then, they heard the sound of grass being pushed back from the right side of the woods.
Click! Click!?
When the members flinched, Kang Chan had already pointed his rifle. By a narrow margin, Dayeru and Gérard followed suit and aimed their weapons as well.
What just happened?
Was it possible for a person to react like that? Especially against the specialized team of the thirteenth foreign brigade that was overflowing with pride?
Was that why they stood with Dayeru, Gérard, and Kang Chan and inserted the rest of the members in between them?
Rustle. Rustle.
After two more rustles, a shape of a blackish animal went down the mountain.
The silence returned.
If Kang Chan was their opponent, Dayeru and Gérard would’ve already been killed in that small difference in speed. The members would’ve been turned into corpses the moment they flinched.
When Gérard received a glance from Kang Chan, he mouthed, “I’m going to go crazy” to himself. He drew a circle in the air with his index and middle fingers and pointed to their front, signaling that the situation ended and to march forward.
It wasn’t a world of difference, but they had to admit that Kang Chan’s skills were on another level, even if only a little.
***
“Captain,” Kang Chan called and stopped their march when the wind that touched their foreheads felt cool. They had been walking for about an hour.
“Gather around,” Kang Chan continued.
Gérard obediently called the members.
They had to place at least the minimum number of sentries to guard them. However, Kang Chan gathered all the members.
“Give me the map,” Kang Chan ordered again.
Gérard spread out the map on the floor.
“Look closely. This is where we are right now, and this is where we think the enemy’s base to be. If we go straight toward the back from here…” With his finger, Kang Chan pointed to a spot in the riverside. “This is location ‘alpha.’ And this place just over the mountain is ‘beta.’”
Except for Seok Kang-Ho and Gérard, the members looked at Kang Chan with faces that asked, ‘What’s he saying?’
“Regardless of what I yell out, just listen for the words ‘alpha’ and ‘beta.’ If I yell ‘Alpha, lima,’ then head to location ‘alpha,’” Kang Chan explained.
The members observed Gérard’s reaction when they showed Kang Chan they understood through their eyes, only to find Gérard unexpectedly calm.
“We’ll take a five-minute break. Guard our vicinity within a ten-meter radius,” Kang Chan ordered.
They stopped on the top of a slope in the middle of the mountain. Kang Chan decided to rest in this area since it posed no risk of being shot from behind the trees.
Gérard didn’t spout nonsense. He just called the three members ahead of them, then stationed four members in four locations that were ten meters apart.
While resting, Kang Chan plopped down to the ground and leaned back against a tree to get comfortable.
After Kang Chan, Seok Kang-Ho, and Gérard sat down, the others also found a comfortable place to rest.
Gérard looked at Kang Chan with a strange expression.
“What?” Kang Chan asked Gérard.
“If we keep going at this speed, it wouldn’t even take us four hours to get to the location.”
“What’s he saying?” Seok Kang-Ho asked Kang Chan.
“He’s saying that it won’t even take four hours if we keep going at this speed,” Kang Chan answered.
“Idiot. Is he planning on walking all day?” Seok Kang-Ho asked.
“What did he say?” Gérard asked Kang Chan.
Kang Chan chuckled. These two fuckers kept tiring him out.
“Do we have anyone that knows how to speak Algeria’s languages?”
These people were already curious about Kang Chan. Hence, when he asked them that question, the eyes of two of them suddenly sparkled. Moreover, when Dayeru talked to them, they answered looking surprised and happy. Meanwhile, Gérard sighed as he looked at Dayeru.
“Let’s go.”
When Kang Chan stood up, three members moved ahead first.
The atmosphere was very different than before they rested.
***
Kang Chan felt as if something was bothering him. contemporary romance
“Stop!” Kang Chan ordered, and the members quickly did as instructed. They then nervously examined their surroundings.
Having walked for three hours, they had gotten the hang of determining whether Kang Chan was walking leisurely or if he was nervous.
However, right now, Kang Chan was exuding bloodthirst.
It couldn’t be explained with words.
Kang Chan ordered Dayeru, Gérard, and the members to go to their respective positions with his index and middle finger.
‘What’s going on?’
Kang Chan slowly looked around them but found nothing noteworthy right now.
‘Is it nothing?’
Kang Chan couldn’t explain his gut feelings.
It happened all the time in Africa and South Korea, but he didn’t know when and what was going to happen.
About a minute passed.
Just as Gérard looked at Kang Chan with eyes that asked, ‘what’s wrong?’,?they heard people talking, moving, then stepping on rocks.
When Kang Chan got nervous, he heard the sound of his own breathing before anything else, which was the result of his training that had been repeated multiple times and the actual combat experience he had accumulated over the years.
Normally, people would instead get a headache while their cheeks burned or hear the sound of their hearts beating. This was why it was emphasized in every training session to listen to the sound of their breathing.
If they heard the sound of their heart beating or felt their head going blank due to nervousness, then there was a high chance that the opponent could hear them breathing.
This was happening to the new recruit right now. He had gone through adequate training, but he was lacking actual combat experience.
The sounds kept getting closer and closer.
Kang Chan couldn’t understand what they were saying, but considering that their sentences were pronounced with fortises and ended with sounds such as ‘tu-deuk’ and ‘ba-teuk,’ they were clearly speaking Mongolian.
Rather than cautiously, they were walking comfortably.
Kang Chan took out the bayonet that he had attached to his right foot. If he had to eliminate them, then he intended to do so without gunshots.
Dayeru and Gérard also took out their bayonets, having figured out Kang Chan’s intention.
Three opponents walked past the area just below where Kang Chan and the members were hiding.
They had a rifle slung over their shoulders that looked to be a few decades old. Two of them had a mountain animal hanging around their waists. It was as big as a forearm and appeared to have been caught in a trap.
Kang Chan planned to run over and pounce on them before they could fire their guns.
There was a fair distance between Kang Chan and the trio. However, their voices sounded awfully loud perhaps because they were on a mountain.
‘Just go.’
Kang Chan didn’t want to kill these talkative people with dirty faces, however.
They kept walking, but one of the three glanced upward when they were right below Kang Chan without knowing that fourteen guns and three bayonets were seeking to kill them right above.
Their voices had grown fainter about three minutes later. After three more minutes, they couldn’t hear them anymore.
Kang Chan shook his head when he received a look from Gérard.
People like them who hunted for a living had eyes and ears sensitive enough to be comparable to mountain animals.
After about five more minutes passed, Kang Chan slowly raised himself up.
They were leaving.
They walked for thirty minutes, then Kang Chan decided they should rest. “Captain.”
Gérard now understood what Kang Chan wanted from the look in his eyes alone, so he immediately assigned four members to guard their perimeter.
They were halfway up the mountain, so they could easily look down and see in all four directions. It was also a great place to hide since it was packed with trees.
“We’ll have lunch before moving onward,” Gérard told the members.
“Understood.”
The C-rations were swiftly distributed.
1. Fortis refers to consonants(especially voiceless ones) being strongly articulated more so than another consonant articulated in the same place
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