Chapter Eighty-Nine: Need a Bigger Catch

"I guarantee the mission will be completed!"

Mei Mumu snapped to attention and declared it with swaggering confidence.

There was no helping it. In these days, anyone whose loyalties were not beyond question would be put down by the security police at the first opportunity.

Mei Mumu had no particular feeling toward the Russians, and considering what he was about to do, this internationalist traitor—no, this mage who had come back through time to stir up trouble—had better not expose himself too early.

After all, in early nineteen thirty-nine, Stalin had carried out a purge inside the Soviet Union that made every Russian quail with fear.

Under a wide variety of charges—conspiring with the enemies of the people, sabotage, espionage, and plotting terrorist acts—one hundred and ten of the one hundred and thirty-nine official members of the Central Committee elected at the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party were arrested, making up eighty percent of the total.

Among central committee members, party leaders at the district and provincial levels, and grassroots party secretaries, the situation was even more severe. Most of those arrested were executed or exiled without a public trial, and in some cases without any trial at all.

The more conservative and credible estimate in later calculations put the number punished at 1.57 million, of whom 690,000 were shot.

Even if he was only pretending, Mei Mumu knew he had to look the part.

Chuikov nodded. He had seen plenty of young men like this before, full of firm conviction, and did not mind them in the least.

"Your marksmanship is good. How are you with movement?"

"I'm very good at stealth. I once lay hidden in the snow for three days and three nights just to catch a wolf that had been terrorizing a village."

"Right now the fiercest street fighting is taking place in the city. Every house, even every wall, is becoming a position we must fight for. A young man like you, with such marksmanship and agility, would be wasted on the main front."

"Uh, sir, do you mean..."

"The enemy snipers are too skilled. We'll assign someone to serve as your observer and form a sniper team with you to hunt them down. If you can't find a target, then killing German officers will do. Of course, if you can locate their brigade and regiment headquarters, that would be even better."

Chuikov's esteem for him really left Mei Mumu a little overwhelmed.

Outwardly, though excited as he was, Mei Mumu accepted the assignment.

He did, however, pose Chuikov a problem.

"Sir, could you find me an observer with decent skills? I'm afraid an ordinary man won't be able to keep up with me."

"You... show me what you can do."

So Mei Mumu simply demonstrated a bit of climbing, and left a whole group of Soviet bigwigs staring in open-mouthed disbelief.

This was an abandoned underground workshop, full of rusted, dead pipes. With one leap, arms raised, Mei Mumu pressed one hand to a valve, and his whole body seemed to soar up like on a cloud, lightly "flying" to a point nearly four meters above the ground.

With a graceful twist, he landed almost soundlessly on a pipe running parallel to the floor. The pipe lay a full meter below the workshop ceiling, and there Mei Mumu crouched low, running swiftly along it, over valves and rivets as he went.

His speed was scarcely slower than an ordinary man sprinting at full tilt.

Yet his nimbleness, his ghostlike silence, left the big shots with tingling scalps.

If Mei Mumu had been an enemy, probably no one would have noticed him even if he had slipped all the way to their army headquarters.

"All right, come down."

He dropped lightly to the floor, his cloth shoes making almost no sound.

This drew yet another chorus of amazed exclamations from the generals.

"With skills like that... I doubt anyone could keep up with you!" Chuikov said through slightly gritted teeth.

"So can I go alone?" Mei Mumu finally showed his true colors.

An adjutant-like officer nearby said, "It's not impossible. If you have an observer, then through the observer's watchfulness, we can confirm the kill when you take the enemy down with a sniper rifle. But if you're alone, we won't be able to verify your achievements."

"Then couldn't I just bring back some trophies?"

"That... that would work too." The adjutant thought for a moment. "But they must be conclusive items, something that proves the identity of the person."

Chuikov could not bring himself to dampen this young man's spirit.

"Very well. By my authority as lieutenant general and army commander, I grant you complete freedom within the city of Stalingrad. But... five days!" Chuikov held up five fingers. "Every day is precious. If you cannot prove your value within five days, then get back to the front line and be a sniper there."

"Understood, sir! I guarantee the mission will be completed."

And so Mei Mumu obtained a Mosin-Nagant M91-30 sniper variant, a beast of a thing, absurdly heavy. He was a counterfeit sniper through and through, killing people entirely by reckless daring—no, by magic.

If he could help it, he would just carry a handful of bullets and put on a show.

Unfortunately, since he intended to infiltrate the Russians, he had to produce matching results.

After gathering a pile of supplies, Sergeant Mei Zhedorovsky went off to the front.

He did not know that his matter had already sparked a heated dispute at headquarters.

"The report on Sergeant Drosovsky's achievements should be sent upward. This is the most difficult moment for the motherland. The people need heroes."

"Let's hold it back. After all, he comes from Kamenka."

"That Kamenka?"

"The security police will have new news very soon."

At that point Chuikov slammed the table.

"Enough! What I need are soldiers who can help us hold this glorious city. Every soldier who fights for the motherland is a good soldier. Those security police people are so capable—let them come up here and help me drive the Germans back!"

Soon, everyone reached a common view.

"Then let's wait until he has earned enough merit, and decide whether to report it upward after that."

Stalingrad in mid-October was growing cold, and the supplies were terrible. If November arrived, the Volga River would freeze over, and then supplies would no longer be able to come by boat, making conditions in the city even worse.

Stalingrad worsened every day. German bombers casually dropped more than a thousand tons of bombs, pressing this city, already turned to ruins, ever lower into the earth each day.

Mei Mumu calculated that if he could get a standard Red Army cap, then a uniform and a military overcoat as well, combined with his novice gear, the Beast-Fur Coat, he would at least be a little warmer.

He had no lofty resolve to bleed to the last for the great Soviet Union, but he had to get himself some merit.

With the help of Self-Acceleration and Arrow Ward, he made his way to the roof of a relatively rare six-story building. Since it stood fairly close to the riverbank, it was naturally guarded by the Red Army.

As the observer on the roof lent him his binoculars, he said, "Be careful. The top three floors are about to collapse, and the Germans have bombed this building more than ten times."

The whole city groaned in flames, everywhere silhouettes moved amid the wreckage and buildings kept collapsing without pause. Only by going deep into the battlefield could one understand what the German soldiers meant in their memoirs when they said, "We occupied the bedroom, but had to keep fighting the Soviets in the living room."

Mei Mumu ignored the fiercest sectors of combat. He needed a big fish.

Very soon, he found a target.