Chapter 956: Exchange

Wolf shook his head inside the tank, his senses still reeling from the shockwave of the nearby high-explosive shell. He then realized his tank had stalled, its ability to advance gone in an instant.

The enemy King Tiger, however, was still intact. This was not good news for him and his crew. For that reason, he had to take out the greater threat first, not Rein’s crew.

Coincidentally, the greater threat was Markus’s undamaged King Tiger. So, as his senses returned, Wolf made an immediate decision: first, eliminate Markus’s King Tiger No. 112, then come back and finish off Rein’s crew to complete this failed offensive.

Yes, a failed offensive. The Soviet plan to encircle the Das Reich Division had clearly fallen apart. After all, the only Soviet tank left was his own. Even if he managed to get behind the Das Reich, one tank against thousands of German grenadiers—fanatical SS grenadiers at that—probably wouldn’t make much of a splash.

But none of that mattered to Wolf. At least he could complete his fateful duel. So he ordered his gunner to aim for the undamaged King Tiger in front, and with his one chance to fire, he pierced the side armor of King Tiger No. 112.

The gunner hadn’t been aiming for the King Tiger’s rear, but for its center. However, the German tank suddenly accelerated, narrowly avoiding the fatal blow. But now, that King Tiger was spewing flames, clearly having lost all combat capability.

Now there were more problems to consider. For example, Rein’s paralyzed King Tiger No. 113 was turning its cannon towards him. Given the Stalin tank’s incredibly slow reload speed, Wolf and his crew held no illusions—if they waited for the Stalin to fire a second shot, Rein’s crew might as well all eat a bullet.

Sure enough, after No. 113 had aimed, it had fired its armor-piercing round in less than two seconds. The tungsten-core shell, after a rapid friction with the air, slammed into the Stalin’s track like a meteor. The shell had hit its target, but due to the problem with the sight, it was slightly off-center.

The armor-piercing round effortlessly snapped the Stalin’s track, then, from a very shallow angle, it cut into the tank’s side armor. Because of its position, the shell didn’t even ricochet. It pierced the side armor and wrecked the Stalin’s engine.

Now Wolf’s tank was completely paralyzed. It had been stalled before; now its engine was smoking faintly. You didn’t need to look to know it would never turn again.

“Load high-explosive! Andre! Get a good position and give them another one!” Rein saw the shell hit the enemy tank. If the next one was a high-explosive round, they wouldn’t have to waste time re-aiming. They just needed to load another shell and fire at the Soviet tank again.

Bruce cleanly shoved the last remaining high-explosive shell from the two-shell rack into the King Tiger’s breech. “HE loaded! Ready to fire!”

As his words fell, Andre fired the just-loaded high-explosive round without the slightest hesitation. This shell also drew a straight line and rushed towards the Stalin tank opposite them. Because neither side had adjusted their position, this shell even saved the step of aiming. With the King Tiger’s excellent loading speed, the interval between this shot and the last armor-piercing round was shockingly short.

Wolf was not in the habit of waiting to be finished off. So he had already thrown open his tank’s hatch and, in the brief moment the last shell had struck the Stalin, had jumped out of the turret, attempting to escape.

But he had not expected that the shell that followed would not be an armor-piercing round, but a damn high-explosive one. This shell slammed directly into the hull of the Stalin tank, and the huge explosion sent Wolf, who had just run a few steps behind the tank, flying.

The men inside the Stalin tank were not much better off. It could be said that they had been almost completely incapacitated by this one high-explosive round. The loader had just managed to stuff the warhead of the shell into the breech but could no longer bend down to pick up the propellant charge. Flesh and blood were not steel, after all. To have a taste of a high-explosive detonation at such close range, to have survived was already a stroke of luck.

Clearly, Rein, this top student from the Wolf Knight Academy, had no intention of giving the other side a chance to be lucky. He looked at the black smoke from the exploding high-explosive shell and once again gave the attack order. “Armor-piercing! Load! Prepare to fire!”

Without even needing to look, Bruce pulled out the last shell from the bottom of the ammunition box and once again completed the action he had performed thousands of times, ramming the shell into the cannon’s breech.

“Adjust the firing position based on the impact of that HE round,” Rein said, looking at Andre’s blood-streaked face. “We can’t get a penetration from the original position, and we can’t completely destroy that tank. Find a good penetration spot, and then fire!”

“Understood!” Andre didn’t say much. He pressed his eye to the sight and, with the already-inaccurate aiming device, slightly adjusted the cannon’s position. Opposite him, the Soviet crew was also struggling to recover. The loader finally managed to lift the propellant charge for the shell from his feet.

He gritted his teeth, enduring the pain in his body and the dizziness in his head, and shoved the charge into his cannon. With his effort, this Stalin tank, with only three men left, finally had a chance to strike back.

“Fire! Fire! Make that damn King Tiger disappear forever!” the Stalin tank’s gunner roared, and then he aimed his cannon at Rein’s King Tiger.

BOOM! The two tanks, almost at the same time, fired this fatal shot. The Soviet shell struck the frontal hull armor of the King Tiger but did not penetrate its thick armor. The immense force peeled off a piece of the King Tiger’s armor plate, and a deep crater, larger than a fist, showed everyone the astonishing power of the Soviet tank gun.

The force of the armor-piercing round striking the armor sent everyone inside the King Tiger into a state of unconsciousness. Bruce was knocked out directly against the turret. Andre’s wound reopened, and blood once again flowed out, staining his uniform red.

Rein was not much better off. He was only operating his body on instinct. He dazedly pushed open his turret hatch, letting the dust-filled air rush into the tank’s compartment.

“Can anyone hear me? Get out of here!” Rein’s dazed eyes searched for his companions in the sunlight streaming in. He saw Andre, covered in blood, and also saw Bruce lying on the floor. “Andre! Bruce! Wake up… My God… Alice! Are you alright? Alice!”

BOOM! A huge explosion came. The distant Stalin tank had been hit by the Rein Hardt crew’s last armor-piercing round and had been completely blown into a pile of scrap iron. The burning flames had ignited the remaining ammunition, causing the tank to cook off like a pack of explosives. It was absolutely certain that no one inside could have survived.

“Alice! Alice!” Rein awkwardly slung his assault rifle over his back and then laboriously climbed out of his turret. He almost fell onto the hatch in front of the turret. He then struggled to open the radio operator’s hatch and saw Alice with her eyes tightly closed.

Although the tank’s armor had not been penetrated, the interior, due to the twisting and deformation, had still shed a good number of broken iron fragments. These fragments, when they had first broken off, were like the pellets of a shotgun. Alice’s shoulder had clearly been injured by this stuff, and it looked very serious.

“Damn it!” Rein grabbed Alice’s collar and forcefully pulled her from her position. Rein, having been exposed to the wind, had recovered a little. After a great deal of effort to place Alice on the grass beside the tank, he quickly returned to the tank and opened Baumann’s hatch.

Blood was everywhere inside. Baumann lay in a bloody mess in his seat—he was dead. The shell had struck his frontal armor, and the place where the armor had spalled the most was right in front of him. Alice had only been slightly affected and was already seriously wounded and unconscious, let alone Baumann, who had been right in front of it.

Rein returned to the top of the turret, wanting to pull out Andre and Bruce from inside. But just as he was about to get into the tank, several bullets accurately struck the King Tiger’s hatch.

Clang! A shower of sparks made Rein squint. He quickly ducked to the side of the turret and took the assault rifle from his back. With a gentle pull of the action, this gun, which had accompanied him in battle for a year, made a crisp clicking sound, and a bullet was already chambered.

In a patch of grass not far away, Wolf shook his head. It seemed the temporary damage from the high-explosive explosion just now had not yet ended. Otherwise, given the time he had just had to aim, Rein should have already been turned into a sieve. The weapon might also have had a problem. It was clear that the accuracy of the PPSh submachine gun was a clear gap compared to the MP-44.

Holding the PPSh in both hands, Wolf, like a wolf lurking in the grass, slowly approached his prey.

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