Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 113: "Your brother’s life depends on your thumb don’t fucking slipping here.”

Chapter 113: "Your brother’s life depends on your thumb don’t fucking slipping here.”

The crate came in under night sky, quiet and unannounced, just as it was meant to.

A lone truck, no markings, rolled through the south gate at 0340.

No ceremony.

No lights.

Just the sound of tires over cold dirt and the occasional bark of a chained dog from the outer fence.

Moreau stood waiting at the bay door, coat buttoned to the top, leather gloves tight.

Gaulle was with him, silent, a cigarette dangling from his lip though he hadn’t lit it.

No words were needed.

They both understood what was inside.

Four men offloaded the crate.

No inspection.

No clipboard signatures.

The metal box thudded on the warehouse floor, then was wheeled in on a dolly and locked away in Storage Room 6.

They left it there, untouched, while Moreau briefed the trainers.

By dawn, the first ten recruits were inside the old brewery building on the south edge of Reims.

The place had been shut since ’29 dry rot in the rafters, broken tiles underfoot, paint peeled like dead skin from the walls.

It was perfect.

No windows.

No neighbors.

No questions.

The recruits three NCOs, two instructors, and five young corporals all sat straight-backed in the converted office room as Moreau laid the PAP on the desk in front of them.

Black matte, grease-slick from final checks, the weapon looked unassuming until he turned it sideways and exposed the feed system.

"Forget everything you’ve learned," he said. "Your rifle drills, your bolt-action reloads, the rest of that textbook garbage? Throw it out."

He picked up the weapon and cleared it in front of them with fast, mechanical movements.

The action snapped like a guillotine.

"This is not a rifle. It’s not a machine gun. It’s a force multiplier. That means you are the weapon. This is just the extension."

No one spoke.

That was good.

He didn’t want enthusiasm.

He wanted compliance.

The next two hours were spent at the bench, disassembling and reassembling PAP units by hand.

No stopwatches.

No games.

Just muscle memory drilled over and over. Gaulle walked the line with a baton, rapping the table when fingers fumbled or lagged.

"You’re not building a damn chair," Gaulle growled at one corporal. "Your brother’s life depends on your thumb don’t fucking slipping here."

By midday, they moved to dry-fire drills low ready, sight picture, one-tap trigger control, four-round bursts.

No ammunition yet.

Just form, repetition, stance.

Moreau watched knees, elbows, shoulder lean.

If a man leaned too far or hunched his back, he stopped the drill.

No shouting.

Just silence and cold correction.

"Every corner you take is a decision between being first to fire or first to die," Moreau said. "You’ll learn the difference."

They ran movement drills next single-room clears using chalk-scratched outlines on the warehouse floor.

Two-man, three-man entries.

No noise, no comms.

Just glances.

The training didn’t resemble the standard French infantry doctrine.

There were no lines.

No bayonet charges.

No pipe dreams about glory in open fields.

This was ghost warfare.

Close range.

Rapid engagement.

House to house.

Alley to alley.

In one corner of the brewery, they had converted a disused fermentation pit into a kill-house replica.

Wood frames marked out rooms.

Tarps hung from above to block visibility.

Every wall had soft boards to take chalk rounds.

The first time through, the squad cleared the house in sixty-two seconds.

Unacceptable.

Gaulle made them do it again.

And again.

And again.

By the end of the day, the fastest run was thirty-four seconds two chalk-mark "wounds," one accidental jam.

Moreau didn’t say a word about the time.

Just the jam.

"Jammed because you slouched your wrist," he said flatly, handing the PAP back to the corporal. "You do that in a tenement block and a German conscript gets your liver on the wall."

The man nodded once, eyes forward.

At dusk, the trainees collapsed in their barracks an unmarked wing on the far side of the Reims compound.

No one else used that building anymore.

Too drafty, too quiet.

Just the way Moreau liked it.

There were no evening passes.

No mess hall chatter.

Food was brought in.

Cold most nights.

That was intentional.

Less comfort meant fewer habits to undo later.

By day four, the group ran coordinated breaches with live blanks and simulated flashbangs.

Gaulle screamed less.

The rhythm was forming.

Room entry was muscle memory now, stack at the door, breach and move, double tap, call clear.

Each man had a sector.

Every corner was life or death.

They began to think in angles, in seconds, in velocity.

On day six, Moreau brought in pressure exercises.

Smoke filled the training house.

Sirens blared.

Flashbulbs burst at random from corners.

A recording of German shouting played through an old phonograph.

It was crude.

But it worked.

One corporal broke.

Froze in a corner.

Didn’t shoot.

After the exercise, Moreau pulled him aside.

"You freeze like that again and you don’t get recycled," he said. "You get cut. Permanently."

The next run, the corporal didn’t miss a single target.

By the end of week one, the PAPs were extensions of the body.

They carried them differently close to the chest, not slung lazily like old Lebels.

Trigger fingers hovered just shy of engagement.

Feet stepped toe-first, silently.

At the beginning of week two, Moreau ordered mock patrol exercises through the industrial ruins on the edge of town old rail yards, broken workshops, bombed-out buildings leftover from the last war.

The squad moved in rotating two-man cells, sweeping a quarter kilometer of terrain in thirty minutes.

They weren’t looking for flags.

They were looking for traps, shadows, decisions.

Gaille marked errors with chalk bullets.

He always carried a pouch of them.

"You’re too slow in transition," he snapped at one NCO, smacking him between the shoulders with a white mark. "He moved right. You covered left. You just let him flank and gut you."

Moreau watched from a rooftop that morning, binoculars to his eyes, silent.

He didn’t measure them by their formations or posture.

He measured by sync.

How fast one man moved when another hesitated.

How little was said between decisions.

He wanted flow.

He wanted instinct born of repetition.

Ghosts didn’t speak.

They reacted.

Every PAP unit was maintained at day’s end.

Cleaned twice.

Reassembled blindfolded.

No weapon was ever put down without three points of confirmation.

If a bolt stuttered or a feed catch failed, it was logged and fixed.

No armorers.

No support staff.

The unit maintained itself.

On day nine, Moreau finally addressed the group.

"You’re not soldiers," he said. "You’re the prelude. The thing that happens before the war gets declared. No one will ever write your names down. No medals. No glory. Just the mission. And then the next one."

They didn’t cheer.

Not a whisper left the base.

No reports filed in Paris.

No accidents.

No curious eyes.

It was clean.

Just as it had to be.