The wind howled across the snow-swept ridgeline, a relentless, mournful sound that seemed to carry the cold of the void. From their concealed position, Meng Tian and his company of one hundred elite marines looked down upon their objective. The Klyuchi Pass Bridge was a black, skeletal lattice of wood and iron against the stark white of the Siberian wilderness. It spanned a gorge of terrifying depth, a frozen river a mere ribbon of ice at its bottom. Just as his vision had shown him, it was a vital, pulsing artery of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the single thread upon which the Tsar's entire eastern army depended. They had reached their target undetected, a ghost force in the heart of the enemy's empire.
The first phase of the Emperor's test had been passed. Now came the trial itself.
Under the cover of a freezing, moonless night, the assault began. Meng Tian remained at the command post on the ridge, coordinating the mission, while his demolition team, led by the grizzled, unflappable Sergeant Lin, began their perilous descent into the gorge. They moved like mountain goats, their white camouflage rendering them nearly invisible against the snow-dusted cliffs, their silenced footsteps making no sound.
The work at the base of the bridge was tense and agonizingly slow. The cold was a physical enemy, numbing their fingers, making the delicate work of setting the explosive charges a Herculean task. The wind shrieked through the wooden trestles, threatening to tear them from their precarious perches. Russian patrols passed on the railway tracks high above them, their voices carrying faintly on the wind, a constant, nerve-wracking reminder of their vulnerability. Sergeant Lin moved among his men, a figure of calm competence, checking their work, whispering encouragement, his own past experience in this frozen hell an invaluable asset.
They were moments from completing their work. The last charge was being set at the primary support pillar, the bridge's most critical weak point, the very spot Meng Tian's intuition had screamed was the most fragile. Success was within their grasp.
And then, disaster.
Without warning, a new sound cut through the howl of the wind—the low, heavy rumble of an approaching train. This was not a scheduled supply run. It was moving too fast, too aggressively. A single, piercingly bright searchlight cut through the darkness, its beam sweeping across the gorge. A heavily armored Russian patrol train, a beast of steel plate and heavy machine guns, rounded a bend and thundered onto the bridge. It was a threat their intelligence had not predicted, a ghost that had appeared out of the blizzard.
The searchlight's beam swept downwards, catching one of the marines in its brilliant, unforgiving glare.
For a heartbeat, there was silence. Then, the night erupted in a cacophony of violence. The train's heavy machine guns opened up, spitting streams of tracer fire that tore massive, splintering gouges into the wooden supports of the bridge. The marines, caught exposed on the structure and in the gorge below, were pinned down, hopelessly outgunned. Bullets ricocheted off the iron pylons, whining through the air like angry hornets.
Panic, the great enemy of all soldiers, began to set in. The mission was collapsing into a bloody slaughter.
At his command post, Meng Tian watched through his field glasses, his heart a cold, hard knot in his chest. This was it. The moment of failure. The moment his men would be butchered because of his heretical plan.
In that moment of extreme crisis, of imminent, catastrophic failure, his Battle Sense flared to life with an intensity he had never before experienced. The world dissolved. The chaos of the firefight, the screaming wind, the chattering guns—it all faded away.
He was no longer looking at the battle; he was inside it. He saw the conflict not as a series of individual soldiers and weapons, but as a flowing, interconnected web of probabilities and pathways. He saw the streams of enemy fire not as bullets, but as lines of angry red energy. He saw the positions of his own men as faint, flickering blue lights. And amidst the chaos, he saw the paths to victory, thin, golden threads of possibility that wove through the storm of death.
He saw the precise, parabolic trajectory a grenade must take to arc over the side of the bridge and land in the train's open coal car. He "saw" the exact moment a burst of machine-gun fire would sever a heavy support cable on the bridge, causing a section of track to sag and creating a momentary distraction. He "saw" the precise, three-second window where the searchlight's predictable sweeping pattern would leave Sergeant Lin's position in total darkness, giving him just enough time to arm the main charge.
He was no longer a general. He was an oracle of violence.
He grabbed his radio, his voice cutting through the panic with an aura of absolute, unwavering command. "All units, listen to my voice! Follow my orders precisely!"
His commands seemed like the ravings of a madman.
"Han!" he barked to his chief of staff, who was coordinating their meager supporting fire. "Suppress the forward turret with a full volley! Now! Waste the ammunition!"
"Sergeant Lin!" he transmitted to the demolition team leader. "On my mark, you will detonate charge three—and only charge three! Not the main charge! Acknowledge!"
"Archer team!" he commanded a pair of marksmen on the opposite ridge. "Fire a signal flare directly at the cliff face to your left! Aim for the rockslide!"
His men, their minds conditioned by the absolute trust he had earned on the shores of the frozen lake, obeyed without question. They did not understand the logic, but they understood the conviction in his voice.
The results were supernatural in their precision. Han's suppressive fire forced the Russian gunners to duck down for a precious few seconds. The signal flare struck the cliff face, showering the gorge in a brilliant, distracting shower of sparks. In that exact moment, as the searchlight swung away, Sergeant Lin, his face grim, detonated the secondary charge.
The explosion was not massive, but it was precise. It blew out a single, critical support beam. The railway track above it buckled with a scream of tortured metal. The armored train, moving at speed, lurched violently, its forward cars threatening to derail. In that instant of chaos, a grenade, thrown with perfect timing by a marine who had been given the order seconds before, sailed through the air in a perfect arc, landing squarely in the open coal car.
The secondary explosion was immense. The coal and ammunition in the car detonated, turning the center of the train into a raging inferno. The already-weakened bridge groaned, sagged, and a huge section, along with the burning wreckage of the train, collapsed into the gorge with a deafening roar.
The firefight ended as abruptly as it had begun. The surviving Russian soldiers in the rear cars were in disarray, their command structure shattered.
Meng Tian's voice cut through the sudden silence. "All units, withdraw! Now!"
His men used the fiery chaos and the confusion to retreat back into the blizzard, carrying their wounded with them. The mission was over. It was a pyrrhic victory. They had taken casualties—three men wounded, one killed. They had failed in their primary objective: the complete and utter destruction of the bridge.
But they had succeeded in their strategic goal. The Klyuchi Pass was blocked, choked with the fiery wreckage of the armored train. It would take the Russians weeks, perhaps months, to clear it.
As his surviving men gathered around him in the shelter of the blizzard, they looked at him with a new, profound awe. His impossible, insane commands had saved them from certain death. They saw him as a military genius, a god of war whose mind worked on a level they could not comprehend.
But Meng Tian felt only the bitter ashes of his choice. He knelt beside his dead marine, a young man he had personally selected, and felt the crushing weight of command. He now had to report back to the Emperor. The truth was a messy, costly, partial failure that had nonetheless achieved its strategic aim. But the truth was a luxury he could not afford. The Emperor was testing him. He had to project an aura of absolute, flawless success to have any hope of his new strategy being fully adopted.
He would have to lie. He would report a flawless victory, an objective achieved without complication. This new lie, this honorable deception told for the sake of his men and his vision of the war, was just another heavy stone added to the crushing burden of his many secrets.