Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 153: “Tell them this battlefield is no longer theirs. Moreau is just a child in front of me."
Chapter 153: “Tell them this battlefield is no longer theirs. Moreau is just a child in front of me."
The rain came hard on the third night.
Not enough to flood the trails, but enough to turn the dust to red clay, enough to ground Esteve’s planes and silence the engines of the PAP recon bikes.
In the tented field HQ west of Lécera
Moreau stared at a messagee coming in.
"We intercepted four bursts," the officer said.
"French cadence. PAP encryption. Zone markings match our standard."
Renaud bent over the decoded lines.
"Three teams, all east of Zaragoza. Reporting Nationalist troop movements. Two requests for artillery support."
Moreau’s eyes narrowed. "We don’t have teams in any of those zones."
Everyone fell quiet.
Moreau picked up the receiver and spoke into it slowly.
"This is Commander Moreau. Identify your commanding officer. Authentication alpha-nine."
No answer.
Then a response calm, professional.
"Captain Laurent, PAP-Five. Sir, I’ve got targets marked on ridge forty-two. Please confirm drop vector...."
Moreau killed the signal.
"Captain Laurent died in Barbastro. Guderian’s inside our bandwidth."
Esteve leaned against the tent’s entrance, soaked, his pilot’s scarf dripping.
"How many other ghosts are talking to us?"
Moreau looked up.
"That’s the point. We don’t know."
Two nights earlier, Guderian stood in the ruins of Battery Two, the same field his own artillery had been reduced to rubble by French PAP teams days before.
He’d lost the last round badly.
But he hadn’t lost the war.
He stared at the chalk map on the inside wall of a half-burnt storage hut.
A dozen pins marked Moreau’s unit paths too precise, too fluid.
Guderian’s fingers moved across them like pieces on a chessboard.
He turned to the officer beside him.
"Begin full broadcast mimicry. Clone his signal timings. Send falsified ops in layered zones enough to stretch their response net. I want them chasing their own shadows."
The officer nodded. "And if they realize?"
"They will. That’s fine. The moment they hesitate, we strike."
On August 12th, three simultaneous French forward units received strike orders from HQ.
All three were false.
One PAP squad moved to intercept a ’Nationalist column’ and found nothing then tripped a buried cluster mine laid days before.
Another launched a flanking maneuver against a phantom artillery nest and walked into a pre-sighted mortar arc.
Two died before they even saw the guns.
The third unit, led by a veteran sergeant named Fortin, picked up a supposed friendly signal and found what looked like a PAP supply truck.
The truck exploded when they approached.
By sundown, eight French dead.
No confirmed enemy contact.
Moreau stood at the field table in silence.
He traced the comms routes on the map.
"He’s creating confusion in our lanes. Not just dummies voices but familiar voices."
Renaud asked, "How many do you think?"
"All of them."
That night, Guderian unleashed the second phase.
Confusion by tempo.
Four fake French columns broadcast withdrawal orders.
Another signaled panic.
One claimed Esteve’s air recon had been shot down.
For one hour, chaos rippled through the French command.
Teams moved without approval.
Some halted and lost sync.
One mistakenly flagged another as an enemy and opened fire in the dark.
Moreau issued a full comms lockdown.
Too late.
The moment the grid fell silent, the Luftwaffe struck.
Stukas roared in over the riverbed near Belchite.
They didn’t hit armor they hit relay posts.
Fuel trucks.
Artillery reload stations.
One PAP forward airfield was destroyed in four minutes.
Esteve survived only because he was sleeping under the wing of his plane and heard the bombs coming before he saw them.
He radioed in, voice hoarse.
"Field One is gone. Four aircraft. Crew tents. Everything."
Moreau didn’t reply.
He was watching the fires light up the hills through his field scope.
At 05:30 the next morning, Guderian stepped over the wreckage of a French logistics point.
One of the few survivors a bleeding teenage Republican radio runner lay twitching in the grass.
Guderian knelt and took the boy’s signal codebook from his satchel.
He stood, flipping the pages.
"Tell them this battlefield is no longer theirs. Moreau is just a child in front of me."
Renaud kicked over a chair in the command tent.
"This is beyond ambushes. He’s rewriting our chain of response. Esteve’s grounded, three PAP squads have ghosted off-grid, and we’ve got supply teams firing on their own recon."
"He’s not using tanks anymore," Esteve said.
"He’s using noise."
Moreau finally spoke.
"He’s killed us for now."
The men went quiet.
"What do we do?" Renaud asked.
Moreau circled the map.
Slowly.
Calculating.
"We scatter. Strip it all down. No formal chain. No zones. No permissions. Every squad acts on instinct, direct-only protocols. If a unit doesn’t return signal in one hour, we don’t chase it. We forget it."
Renaud stared. "That’s... collapse."
"No," Moreau said. "That’s evolution."
Elsewhere, Soviet observers Andreyev and Vlasenko recorded the another 48 hours into their logbook.
"French forces suffering decentralized collapse. Enemy signal infiltration successful. Apparent loss of command confidence. Counter-ghost strategy effective: false doctrine now driving enemy action.
Recommend further observation. War entering unstable phase. Control structures now fluid."
At dusk, Moreau rode in a stripped-down command car to the southern approach ridge.
With him: no escorts.
Just a map, a rifle, and a battered field radio.
The PAP squads were moving like phantoms now autonomous, bitter, quiet.
One had recovered the charred husk of the fake PAP truck that killed Fortin’s team.
Inside they found German markings layered beneath French camouflage paint.
Moreau stared at the wreckage.
"He painted our skin," he murmured.
Esteve radioed in from a ridge 40 kilometers west.
"Confirmed sighting, another convoy. Again, French markings. Moving in our pattern. But the crew... they’re wrong. They don’t wave. They don’t break speed."
Moreau didn’t hesitate.
"Don’t engage. Watch them. See where they go. If they vanish, let them vanish."
On August 13th, Guderian issued a new order.
"Broadcast this message in French code, on open bands."
"This is Moreau. I have been captured. Our operation is compromised. Fall back. Repeat. Fall back."
The message ran three times.
And then the Luftwaffe bombed a French listening post in Sector Delta.
Moreau himself heard the message.
He did not react.
But Renaud did.
"Sir, if that spreads..."
Moreau nodded.
"It won’t. By the time they believe it, I’ll be speaking louder."
That night, Guderian stood at the center of a captured French depot.
Radio towers glowed in the dark behind him.
One of his officers approached.
"Interceptions report silence across five French sectors. No response from at least two PAP squads in 36 hours. Esteve hasn’t flown recon since the firebombing."
"Do they know?" the officer asked.
Guderian smiled faintly.
"They don’t trust what they know."
He turned back to the horizon.
"Now we’ll see if Moreau fights when he no longer believes his own hand."
But Moreau wasn’t broken.
He stood alone, helmet under one arm, rifle slung, overlooking the destroyed forward airstrip.
All around him, mechanics and survivors picked through ash and steel.
Renaud walked up beside him.
"This is the part where you say we rebuild, right?"
"No," Moreau said.
"This is the part where we stop being French."
Renaud blinked. "What does that mean?"
"It means the next attack doesn’t have a name. No signals. No zones. No identity. We vanish fully. He wants to fight ghosts let’s become them."
