This heretic cannot be burned, he must be hung up and whipped!

"Die, heretic!" Neos swung the round iron rod and hit the back of the enemy's neck.

"Crack!"

The feeling of a shattered skull came along the iron rod, and a huge dent appeared on the heretic soldier's helmet. It was pulled away by the iron nails of the trench rod, and Neos almost vomited brain matter and flesh fragments.

"Finish the job! Quick!" Valentine roared as he crawled out from under the corpse, his bayonet piercing the heretic's throat, bringing up a pool of blood. "The weak spot of these bastards is—"

Before he could finish his words, two heretic soldiers suddenly lunged from the side! Neos instinctively raised his iron bar to block, his twisted dagger rubbing against the nails, sparks flying. Foul breath suffused his face, and through the glass eyepiece of his gas mask, he saw the other men's pupils split into compound eyes. The heretic on the left suddenly lashed out a long, scarlet tongue, its forked barb piercing his right eye.

"Die!" Neos bent his knees and pushed towards the enemy's crotch. When the enemy bent over in pain, the counterweight at the end of the iron rod hit his temple hard.

Amidst the dull thud of his skull caved in, he felt the shattering of flesh and bone along with the weapon. Smelly body fluids splashed across his face, and he tasted the salty, rusty flavor of iron.

The third heretic froze. Valentine's bayonet pierced its back, its tip piercing its chest with half a lung lobe. The sergeant twisted the handle, crushing its heart. Blood splattered like a fountain against the trench wall, staining the prayer "Saint Michael's sword cuts the devil's throat" a blasphemous deep purple. As the corpse fell, Neos saw an inverted cross tattooed on its back, surrounded by blasphemous mottos inscribed in Hebrew.

"Rookie," Valentin gasped as he pulled out his bayonet, the blade twisted into a jagged shape. "Congratulations on your graduation!"

"Watch your back!"

Neos's warning was a fraction of a second too late. The first heretic, seemingly dead, suddenly leaped to its feet, its arms wrapping around the sergeant's ankles. As Valentine stumbled and fell, Neos swung his iron bar like a madman.

"Bang bang bang!"

Each blow was accompanied by a sticky, cracking sound. The nails tore through the festering flesh and smashed the internal organs until the body could no longer move. When he finally stopped, he found himself covered in blood.

"Outstanding graduate!" Valentine stood up with a limp, picked up an overturned iron helmet from the ground and put it on his head. Neos glanced and saw that there were also sacred scriptures engraved inside the helmet.

Suddenly, blasphemous poetry echoed from the distance. Neos felt his temples throbbing, and the silver cross felt hot in his palm—it wasn't an illusion; the thorn patterns carved into the metal surface truly glowed with a faint blue light. Black slime began to seep from the trench walls, and tiny buds of flesh emerged from the cracks in the wooden planks.

"Go!" The sergeant's face changed drastically. "That's the chanting of the spell singer. Without a protective helmet, listening for three seconds will make you—"

Inhuman screams suddenly erupted from the left trench. They turned to see a horrifying scene: three defenders dropped their weapons and frantically scratched their faces. Their nails peeled back skin, ripping away flesh, revealing the gritty bones. The youngest even thrust his fingers into his ears and forcibly ripped out two bloody cochleae. Their eyeballs bulged from their sockets, their pupils dilated into a pitch-black abyss, yet a strange smile played upon their lips.

But Neos only felt that the poem was a little noisy.

"Cover your ears!" Valentine yelled and pulled Neos back.

"Where are we going?"

"We can't hold on here anymore. We need to notify command immediately! Go to that bomb shelter where you sleep!"

"Huh? We're not—" "We'll talk about it when we get there! Be quiet!"

After several minutes of movement, the two finally found the cat ear cave. At this time, the shouting and killing sounds outside had gradually subsided. It seemed that the comrades should have been eliminated.

"Let alone three months, we couldn't even last three hours." Neos sighed.

"That was under normal circumstances. Hell sent an elite force to raid our place—and you are the only one in our company with super powers."

"Ah? Me?" Neos pointed at himself, looking confused.

The sergeant ignored him and began to give orders: "There is a special shell under your bed. This is how we notify the rear. It contains divine power. It is not very useful against ordinary heretic soldiers, but it is very effective against elites who are contaminated with a lot of hell power.

The most important thing is that as soon as it explodes, the people behind it will know."

"And then reinforcements will arrive?" Neos said as he opened the ammunition box.

Valentine still ignored him. He took out a fuse from the bottom of the box and handed it to Neos.

"Now is the time for you to play your role, use some divine power, or just say a few words." "Uh-" Neos' mind was blank, just like a student in class who was suddenly called upon by the teacher to recite a text.

The head of the curse singer from the outside world screamed like a baby crying, and the sound was getting closer and closer. Seeing how disappointing this flying novice priest was, Valentine made up his mind:

"Skip this part! Quick! Hold the cross in your palm and screw the fuse on. Then, pinch the white cap on the tip and turn it clockwise 50 times. Quick! We don't have time!"

The screams of the approaching heretic outside were the best stimulant. Neos, who had been single for thirty years, was so fast that his hands were almost rubbing the fuse to smoke.

"This thing will leave a fifty-meter crater if it explodes. Now all we need to do is lure all the heretics over here! You, go up there and howl a few times. The people from your church are nothing but walking light bulbs in the eyes of the Hell soldiers. If we don't lure them over here, we won't have a chance to hold on!"

"I, I, I, I don't dare, this can't be done!"

"Forty-nine." "What?" "Forty-eight." "I'll go up now!"

Either go to heaven and dig trenches now or wait a few years. Adrenaline made the choice for Neos. He crawled out of the hole and climbed to the top of the trench. One hand hooked on the barbed wire and shouted:

"Full (three) Sisling Paint Woyang IV Scar body eyes aligned with me! Look at me, look at me! Lucifer is a fool - idiot -"

As if a switch had been flicked, the entire battle zone suddenly fell silent. Then, countless inhuman roars rose from all directions. The ground trembled, and the bodies on the barbed wire swayed like windchimes. A massive monster was galloping towards them, crushing the crosses in its path. Moonlight pierced the mist, revealing a two-and-a-half-meter-tall silhouette—it wielded a long spear and wore Gothic plate armor. It looked like it was not to be trifled with.

"The Plague Knight of the Black Grail Cult..." Valentine's voice was filled with despair for the first time. "This thing should appear on the New Antioch front..."

The sharp-eyed Neos suddenly discovered that behind the big guy was a humanoid creature wearing a V-shaped iron helmet, and it was holding a bomb suspended in its hand and throwing it at him.

"Run!! To the artillery trenches!!"

Valentine's roar and the shockwave of the explosion arrived simultaneously. The moment Neos leaped into the trench, the machine gun position above him was blasted skyward, and half of the anti-artillery hole collapsed!

The two men ran towards the anti-artillery trench at the rear of the defense line, with less than forty seconds left to detonate the fuse.

"It's too late, jump down!!"

"boom!!!"

To withstand enemy artillery fire exceeding 255mm, the front-line anti-artillery trenches were built at a minimum depth of 15 meters. Just before jumping into the trench, Neos turned and saw an unforgettable sight:

A pale blue sun appeared where the shells were. Wherever the shock wave passed, the flesh and blood of the heretics melted like wax figures, and the heads of the curse singers turned to ashes in the strong light. In the distance, the Plague Knights raised their swords to resist, and their indestructible Gothic plate armor was twisted into a pile of scrap metal.

The shockwave threw them both into the ditch. Neos's back slammed hard into the sandbag, and the rotten sack burst, sending sand flying all over his head and face. A familiar, reassuring curse echoed in his ears:

"Fuck... my left leg must be broken..."

Valentine sat slumped to the side, his left calf bent at an unnatural angle. A dozen bodies lay scattered in the anti-artillery trench, and one recruit had his chest pierced by his own bayonet—apparently, he had committed suicide in a frenzy. The sergeant tore off his leggings and began to fix the wound:

"How strange! Has the church improved the formula? Shouldn't the holy light normally be white? Oh, you—"

The sergeant looked up at Neos in the light, looking at him in surprise:

"my Lord!"

In Flames: 1914: Chapter 4: Synthetic Ammonia, When Did It Leave?

In the 15-meter-deep anti-artillery trench, the pitch-thick darkness was illuminated by a blue light. Even though several minutes had passed since the artillery shells exploded outside, the blue light had not dissipated.

"Brother, what are you looking at me for?"

Neos's back pressed against the damp earth. Intermittent explosions echoed overhead, sending clods of mud cascading down and depositing a thick layer of dust on his priest's hat. He stared at his right hand—a faint blue light flickered between the lines of his palm, flickering with his heartbeat like a firefly trapped beneath his skin.

"A miracle..." Valentine's surprised voice came from the side. The sergeant's left hand had unsheathed a bayonet, the tip of the blade trembling slightly with his breathing, but it pointed precisely at Neos' palm. "Your hand is shining exactly like the glorious bullet outside!"

"That shell...seems to be stained with my blood?"

Neos suddenly curled up his fingers and looked carefully at the blue fluorescent lines on the palm of his hand.

"I don't know what this is," he said honestly, his throat still burning from running. "It's like... some kind of chemical reaction? It must be God's will, right?"

"Chemical reaction?" Valentine sneered, his eyes narrowed under his pointed hat.

"You've been saying some weird things lately. It doesn't sound like something a theologian from a church school would say. And now you've come up with this weird thing."

He suddenly grabbed Neos' wrist and pressed it against the earthen wall, and a blue light suddenly illuminated the small space between them. The sergeant had human bone fragments embedded in his fingernails - an hour ago he had smashed open the head of a heretic soldier with a hammer.

"You are not a devil, are you?" Valentine stared at Neos closely, with the bayonet in his right hand already pressed against Neos' heart.

Neos instantly broke out in a sweat. No, a normal person wouldn't suspect someone they were talking to was a foreign spy if they encountered someone speaking strange, incomprehensible language (like, say, anime). Why was this psycho so alert?!

It's all caused by war!

The brain is working at high speed under the pressure of the desire to survive:

"Do you think my style looks like something from Hell?" Neos quickly defended himself. "Even if I'm real, think carefully. What value do you have in me that would warrant Hell creating something so realistic just to deceive you?"

"Yeah." Valentine nodded and retracted the dagger, but the vigilance in his eyes still did not disappear.

After a few minutes, he seemed to have made up his mind:

"Take this bayonet and help me dig out the heretic's bullet now."

"I, I, I, I haven't learned battlefield medicine!" Neos didn't understand why the sergeant's attitude suddenly changed 180 degrees, and he really didn't know how to do medical treatment.

"I don't have time. Either I get infected and go to heaven to dig trenches, or I ask 'friendly forces' to help me treat my wounds. I was originally thinking of killing a heretic before going to heaven, but now seeing how cowardly you are, you might be a heretic, but it's unlikely that you are."

Neos held the bayonet in both hands helplessly, with a look of clear stupidity on his face.

Valentine grabbed Neos's glowing right hand and brought it to his neck. He then ripped open the collar of his dirty uniform, revealing the wound below his collarbone. He then pointed to the pile of corpses outside and said, "Did you see that? The day before yesterday, a new recruit was hit by a heretic bullet. The bullet wasn't removed in time, and last night his internal organs were pouring out of his mouth!"

"Forget it, I'll do it myself."

Valentine, feeling disappointed, used the light from Neos's hand, gritted his teeth, and quickly dug open the wound with a knife, hooking out a slightly deformed bullet with several small holes on it.

"It's bad, the eggs have entered the blood." Valentine was a little desperate, "Give me a pain--".

"Wait, you mean this?"

Neos, standing by, curiously picked out a few insect corpses from the bullet with holes in it and placed them on the dagger.

Valentin's eyes widened. "How dare you hold it with your bare hands? How did you survive until now? Wait, how did you crush the bullet? Why are all the bugs dead? Are you a saint?!"

"Just - just a pinch like this?" Neos rubbed the bullet, which felt like biscuit crumbs, and crushed it a little more.

Valentine was silent for a moment, a complex look flashing in his eyes. He whispered, "... Neos, were you... were you chosen by some strange deity? Or... by some other power? Honestly, you don't look like a believer from the church at all. Since you saved my life, I swear on my faith that I will never tell anyone about this."

Neos gave a wry smile. "Chosen? If that's the case, I'd rather not be 'chosen'. Let's think about how to survive first! We're trapped here, and the enemy has already occupied the position. With only two of us, breaking out is simply impossible."

Valentine sighed, leaning against the wall of the artillery trench, his eyes fixed on the dark sky above him. "Yes, a breakout is impossible. We can only wait for the rear positions to send out assault teams. When it's daytime, they might try to retake the position."

"Wait until daytime?" Neos frowned. "Can't we take the initiative to do something? Are we just going to sit there and wait for death?"

Valentine shook his head, his tone filled with helplessness. "This isn't the main battlefield, and our ammunition reserves are extremely limited. We're running low on bullets and shells. If we want to retake our position, we can only rely on close combat and infiltration raids. Without sufficient firepower support, we simply can't break through the enemy's defenses head-on."

Hearing this, Neos's confusion deepened. He recalled his memories of World War I—it had been an industrialized slaughter, with fronts strewn with machine gun bunkers and artillery, artillery preparations (where infantry would fire artillery rounds at opposing positions before charging) lasting a week or two, and ammunition seemingly never running out. So why was ammunition so scarce in this world?

"Valentin, I don't understand," Neos couldn't help but ask. "We've been fighting for so many years, why are we still short of ammunition? Warfare should be industrialized, and ammunition should be in constant supply like sausages on an assembly line. Why is this happening?"

Valentine glanced at Neos, his eyes filled with doubt and confusion: "Neos, you speak as if you are not from this world." He paused and continued,

"Ammunition production requires gunpowder, and gunpowder requires saltpeter. However, after so many years of war, Europe's saltpeter mines have been largely depleted. Last year, the Crusaders in Cairo were besieged by heretics, and the Sultanate's camel caravans couldn't deliver a single shipload of saltpeter for three months. Currently, Europe's annual saltpeter production is only a little over 4,000 tons, which is simply not enough."

PS: Before World War I, more than 90% of the world's saltpeter exports came from Chile. Without exports from the Americas and India, Europe's annual production before the war would not have exceeded 6,000 tons, until the emergence of the Haber process for synthesizing ammonia freed the restrictions on ammunition production.

"From Egypt?" Neos paused, then pressed on. "What about the United States? Shouldn't the US be able to provide large quantities of ammunition? Their industrial capacity is so strong, shouldn't they be able to support Europe?"

Valentine frowned and looked at Neos blankly. "America? Which country is that?"

Neos was speechless for a moment, feeling a surge of unease. He tentatively said, "It's a country in America, on the American continent, where the Atlantic Ocean ends to the west."

"America?" Valentine's expression became even more confused. "What is America? Neos, what are you talking about? The Atlantic Ocean is a very old term. We now call it the 'Impassable Boiling Sea.'"

Neos' heart sank. Fragments of this world's memory were reassembling in his mind—no America, no America, and the western end of the map was marked with "the impassable boiling sea."

He swallowed hard. "Suppose... I mean suppose, there is a continent on the other side of the ocean, with mountains of saltpeter mines..."

"Then I suggest you go see an alchemist and heal your brain." Valentine frowned. "Ever since the fall of Gibraltar, even the Mediterranean has become a hunting ground for heretical submarines. What else can you say—"

Neos realized that the world seemed to have no technology to synthesize ammonia. In the absence of artillery shells and bullets, trench warfare would change from an industrialized massacre consisting of machine guns and artillery to a bloody battle under barbed wire where soldiers would fight with their flesh and will in close combat.

This is a test of both sides' will and mobilization capabilities. In this prison-like war, there will be no winner. No! Since hell exists, the long and painful sustainable death of mankind is exactly what they want to see!

What a sustainable way of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs!

"It's time to change the dynamics of the war."

Neos made up his mind.

Valentine was silent for a moment, then patted Neos on the shoulder. "The most important thing now is to survive. We have to find a way to hold on until dawn and reinforcements arrive."

Neos nodded, but his mind was restless. He realized that he wasn't just struggling to survive in an unfamiliar war, but also searching for his place in an utterly unfamiliar world. And the blue light in his hand seemed to symbolize some mysterious connection between him and this world.

"Valentin," Neos suddenly raised his head, his eyes determined, "If we can return home alive, would you be willing to do something big with me?"

Valentine looked at Neos, a complex emotion flickering in his eyes as he recalled the strange things that had just happened to him. He nodded. "Since you saved me, this life is yours. But now, we must remain vigilant. The enemy could search here at any time."

Neos took a deep breath and clenched his fists. The blue light emanating from his palms seemed to intensify.

PS: My family, I’m asking for some recommendation votes here. 100 recommendation votes will get me 4k votes in the next update.

In Flames: 1914: Chapter 5 Damn, times have changed!

The sound of artillery fire occasionally rang out in the distance, accompanied by the faint roars of Hell's soldiers. This front line had already fallen. Although the previous artillery explosion killed many heretic soldiers who entered the position, the position, lacking reinforcements, was still under Hell's control.