Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 156: "If we meet again, it won’t be as soldiers. It’ll be as architects of ruin."

Chapter 156: "If we meet again, it won’t be as soldiers. It’ll be as architects of ruin."

The mountain wind howled over Teruel like the groaning of a dying man.

Inside a commandeered monastery turned field hospital, men moaned on stretchers lined against stone walls.

A kerosene lamp flickered as Major Moreau lay semi-conscious, sweat-soaked and pale, his bandaged side bleeding through.

"Pressure’s dropping again," the field doctor muttered.

"We need to keep him under or he’ll tear the stitches."

Captain Renaud leaned over the table, his face worn from smoke and sleepless nights.

"You’re sure it didn’t hit the lung?"

The doctor glanced up.

"He’s lucky. The shrapnel missed by millimeters. But if infection sets in, rank or luck won’t matter."

Renaud exhaled.

"Then he needs to be back on his feet before the men start doubting there’s still a spine to this war."

Near Zaragoza, the German forward HQ operated from a half-demolished farmhouse.

General Heinz Guderian stood over a map table, illuminated by a single desk lamp.

Flies buzzed over bloodstained boots.

An officer entered with reports. "Sir, confirmed the French pulled back from the corridor. Teruel holds, but barely. No sign of Moreau."

Guderian didn’t speak for a long moment.

Finally, he murmured, "He lived."

"Sir?"

"He was in that pass. We crossed steel. He lives."

The officer hesitated. "Berlin requests a strategic update, General. The High Command is... skeptical about the necessity of these recent flanking operations."

Guderian snapped the map closed.

"Let Berlin stare at ink and paper. I will deal in fire and steel."

At the edge of the Zaragoza-Teruel corridor, the valley had gone silent.

French and German dead lay tangled together in trenches carved by chaos.

Horses wandered aimlessly through the fog, their riders long gone.

Captain Renaud stood on a ridge overlooking the ruins of the pass.

He was flanked by a pair of engineers.

"What’s left of the 3rd Battalion?" he asked.

The sergeant grimaced. "Two platoons. Maybe. The rest... dead."

Renaud muttered, "We promised them clarity. Instead we gave them death."

The sergeant hesitated. "And Major Moreau?"

"In surgery. He’ll live."

"For what?"

Renaud had no answer.

In Madrid, within a dim Republican coordination hall, Soviet observer Grigoriy Petrov shuffled through intercepted reports. Radio chatter.

PAP field communications.

German frequency fragments.

He turned to a Spanish political liaison. "Do you see what this means?"

"The French and Germans bleeding each other out?" the Spaniard replied.

"Exactly. While Madrid dithers, the real war is being decided by outsiders. And soon, when they’re both on their knees..."

"You’ll step in."

Petrov smiled thinly. "We’ll offer... suggestions."

Moreau awoke in the monastery hospital as the bells outside tolled for the hour.

His chest throbbed like fire.

"Water," he rasped.

Renaud stepped forward, lifting a canteen. "You should still be under. But I figured you’d claw your way back before the morphine wore off."

Moreau drank, then whispered, "The pass?"

"Gone. Yours. Theirs. No one’s. We pulled out what was left of the 3rd. German armor stalled, but they hold the east ridge."

Moreau nodded slowly. "And the men?"

"Disoriented. Fractured. We lost Duval. Gaudin too. Rousseau’s leg nearly gone due to sharpnel but doctors say he is lucky."

Moreau closed his eyes.

"We’ve taught them to fight like ghosts. But ghosts don’t win wars. Men do."

"You made them ghosts," Renaud said. "But now they need a man to follow again."

Back in Zaragoza, Guderian met with his field officers in a bunker lit by candle and maps stained with coffee and blood. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

"We hold Zaragoza. But morale is shaken," said Major Braun.

"The French may have lost more, but they fight like demons."

Guderian remained seated, his fingers drumming on his baton.

"I faced Moreau in that pass," he said suddenly. "Hand to hand."

There was a silence.

One officer spoke hesitantly.

"And you didn’t kill him?"

"He wasn’t the one holding the blade in that moment."

"Then why let him live?"

Guderian stood.

"Because legends must bleed before they break. And because next time, I won’t miss."

In the highlands, a new issue had begun festering.

French-aligned Republican militia cut off and left to rot in the chaos of the pass had turned rogue.

In Calamocha, a once-loyal unit seized an armory and declared autonomy.

"We are not pawns of Paris," their leader, Mateo Ortega, broadcast by radio.

"We fight for Spain, not for France’s dying doctrine."

Renaud rode out with a convoy to the town, meeting Ortega in the burned-out church the militia had turned into a headquarters.

A tricolor flag was half-buried in the mud outside.

"You’re deserting," Renaud said coldly.

"We’re surviving," Ortega replied. "And we’re not the only ones."

"You’re fracturing what little resistance we have."

"We were never unified," Ortega spat. "Moreau taught us to fight like wolves. So now we hunt alone."

Renaud stared at him. "If you go your own way, you’ll be hunted like them too."

Ortega didn’t flinch. "Better that than die in a pass built from someone else’s theory."

That night, in the monastery, Moreau was helped into a chair by two medics.

He winced but waved off their aid.

"Bring me paper," he said.

Renaud entered moments later. "What are you doing?"

"Writing a letter."

"To who?"

"To the man who nearly killed me."

He scrawled slowly, blood-stained bandages tightening with each breath.

"General Heinz Guderian,

I saw your eyes in the pass. I saw what you’ve become. We both crafted monsters. But only one of us still believes he controls it.

If we meet again, it won’t be as soldiers. It’ll be as architects of ruin.

Major Moreau

In Berlin, the report was quietly filed into intelligence summaries.

No direct meeting.

No reprimand.

Just a simple notation.

Moreau lives.

The campaign continues.

Disruption likely.

But Guderian, reviewing a copy delivered by air courier, read the letter in silence for a long time.

He set it on the table.

"Order the engineers to build a forward bunker. Reinforced. I want eyes on every ridge from Zaragoza to Teruel."

His aide blinked. "Sir?"

Guderian looked out the cracked window, wind screaming across the plains.

"Because next time he comes, he won’t be limping. And I intend to be ready."