Chapter 276: The Dense Forest Frontier

The tent's curtain door made a small sound of being lifted open.

Spades tightened his hand over Bai Liu's lips and whispered close to his ear, "Here it comes."

Bai Liu's gaze moved past the several obstacles blocking his view and landed on the shoes of the person who had just stepped into the tent - a pair of well-made prop shoes.

Spades was right in his prediction and it was indeed his teammates who came in.

Someone muttered, " Spades, this guy left his looted body here, what the hell?"

"Reverse God, what do you think?"

The Reverse God looked around, and spoke, "I think he's going to use this place as a base."

Bai Liu, who was hiding under the bed, squinted for a moment - the voice of this Reverse God was an AI synthesized mechanical voice so close to a human voice that it could not be heard without close listening.

But the games Bai Liu had worked on had done some technical interfacing on this piece, and one of the voices was almost identical to the Reverse God's, and Bai Liu instantly heard it -

--This guy uses a synthesized voice in front of his teammates, not his original human voice.

He looked upwards and shifted his gaze, trying to see the face of the god, but behind him Spades' grip tightened, but eventually, Bai Liu saw the face of the god walking to the bedside.

It was a face so unrecognisable that even a pro like Bai Liu, who is good at remembering people's facial features, had to stare at it for two or three seconds before he could barely remember it.

--But the next time he sees one, Bai Liu is not sure he will be able to immediately recognise the Reverse God from the crowd.

The man's features were ordinary-looking to the point of blurriness.

Like his voice, there is a sense of being artificially tuned and overly normal and balanced against the grain.

The Reverse God did not stay long at the bedside, before turning away with the rest of the team:" Spades probably found a better stronghold and abandoned this original ......"

"But he didn't even take his body with him ......"

"...... Probably saw a better one on the way, a corpse with more points on the verdict, and Spades dropped this one, not the first time he's done that, last time against the Kabbalah guild ...... "

The group walked out of the tent with a lot of chatter.

But Spades remained motionless, stuck to Bai Liu's shoulder, seemingly waiting for something to happen and not getting out from under the bed.

"There's another wave coming in." Spades said.

As his words fell, the curtain of the tent, which had not long been closed, was lifted once more and Bai Liu peered through the cracks in the assorted items at the bottom of the bed to see several pairs of panicked army green rubber shoes dragging a bloodied, or what can only be described as bloodied, human form lying on a stretcher into the tent.

This [blood clot] had no limbs left, and the semi-viscous blood gushing out of his mouth had smeared his entire face so that his features were invisible; the severed limbs kept spurting blood out, and the tent was already covered with his spurting blood.

One soldier tried to stop the bleeding by tying bandages around the broken limbs, but it was futile labour - the flow of blood only changed from a 'fountain' to a 'stream', but there was no sign of it stopping. There was no sign of it stopping.

The soldier's voice was piteous and panicked: "...... He's still alive! Why didn't the medics carry him away for treatment when they were clearing the battlefield! Just let him stay where he was and get blown up like this by enemy sweeping shells!"

"He could have lived!" As he said this, the soldier was still trying to tighten the bandage in his arms that was stuck to the break, attempting to stop the bleeding by such human means - his voice was shaking a little from the sheer force of it.

The other soldier's voice was much calmer, but it was still hard to hide the heaviness: "...... Haven't you noticed that we've been encountering more and more living people when we're cleaning up the battlefield lately?"

"...... There are more and more wounded soldiers on the battlefield, but medical supplies are clearly not keeping up, we don't have that much to aid the wounded and leaving them unattended damages morale, so the troops in the rear are preparing ...... "

The soldier who was tightening his bandages to save the men had a hard voice: "-so the group just didn't save them and let us collect them as corpses so that there would be no wounded soldiers, only martyrs, right?"

The other soldier was silent.

The soldier sneered ruefully, "A mere metal medal for a replacement martyr's merit, less than five cents wholesale from these sergeants, and they think it's worth a life?"

He shouted sternly, but with a sobbing voice: " Guy, this corpse lying on the ground, who yesterday was eating and sleeping with us to collect the bodies, writing letters to his mother and fiancée, do you think a martyr's medal is worth his life?"

"...... I don't think it's worth it." Guy replied sadly, "But Alex, this is war and the value of our lives is not judged by us, not even by our dead bodies."

Alex finally let go of his strangled-to-the-point-of-shaking hand as he sat limply on the floor and muttered, "...... Yeah, it's war, and isn't that what the high and mighty sergeants want most, a corpse to attack? -- no emotion, no value, not even life."

There was no more blood coming from the severed limbs of the body on the stretcher - he was long dead.

Guy held a trance-like Alex and rested his head on his shoulder, "-but there are no such corpses in this world, so we are human beings at war like corpses, and we shouldn't have humanity anymore."

"- Alex, stop harbouring feelings for other corpses, it's too painful."

Alex wrapped his arms tightly around Guy's back shoulder and he buried his face in it, sobbing stoically, "I can't do it, Guy, I can't do it - I'm not a corpse."

"I can't stop myself from feeling compassionate suspicion of hate and love."

Alex's face was streaked with tears as he looked over Guy's bloodstained shoulder at the bloodstained, disfigured corpse on the ground and asked in a trance, "- Guy, do you think that if corpses could move and keep fighting the war as those people want them to, then there would be no anyone get hurt or die, there would just be soldiers like us to recover the bodies?"

Guy stroked Alex's hair and sighed as if he thought he was being silly, "You're not turning twenty for a month, this isn't something you should be thinking about."

"Trying hard to survive the battlefield is what you should be thinking about."

Alex lowered his head against Guy's heart and suddenly raised his head and kissed him, also encircling his neck with his arms.

Instead of being shocked by Alex's behaviour, Guy leans back softly on the bed, still letting Alex's frenzied, passionate kisses get the better of him - not the first time this has happened, it seems.

The two men removed each other's bloodstained clothes, breathing heavily for a long moment as they stared at each other, Alex straining against Guy's body as if to contain and restrain himself from the emotions and desires he shouldn't have, shivering at the waist.

He knew it was wrong.

But he no longer knew what was the right thing to do.

Seemingly sensing Alex's rejection this time, Guy, lying on the bed, raised his hand over his eyes as he tried to sound relaxed and slightly flirtatious, "Hey lad, relax, there's a way for anyone to use condoms wisely, Tom in the next tent goes through ten boxes of Warlock condoms a month in the town brothel. "

"We do it just ......" Guy paused, "just, it's like going to a brothel you know? But of course it's not quite the same as that either, it's just that you and I don't want to go to a brothel, so we let off steam in this way ......"

Alex still kept his head down and didn't say anything.

"God!" Guy interrupted himself abruptly, dropping his hands and staring vacantly at the blood-spattered tent roof, muttering to himself in a trance, "What am I saying to you ...... Alex, you're still a child."

"You should not do such things with me in such places and at such times ...... I have brought you down, and God will punish me."

Guy tries to push Alex up on top.

"Then God should punish me too." Alex lifted her eyes bright red from crying, "because I just wanted to do it with you, I couldn't help it, I couldn't think of anyone else but you that this could happen to. "

"You're the only person in this place that makes me feel like I'm not a corpse myself. "

"I love you, Guy."

Alex pushed a stunned Guy back onto the bed and they rocked violently on the modest steel-framed cot, as if they were about to become corpses under it the next moment.

Spades, who was concentrating on the main plot line and suddenly switched to the adult channel halfway through the episode and couldn't understand it, so he looked confused: "......?"

Bai Liu, who listened intently to the main thread and realised what was going to happen halfway through: "......"

This Guy and Alex are actually a couple.

Although Bai Liu has read a lot of strange studies, he is aware that in some difficult, special environments where women are lacking, the percentage of gay men can skyrocket.

Not because these men are naturally attracted to men, but in this cramped, high-risk environment it is hard not to have some kind of special attachment above friendship to their comrades in arms, who they spend their days with and entrust their backs to.

The most direct manifestation of this is that many men in this environment will tend to have intimate relationships, such as sexual relationships, with the men around them.

So Bai Liu anticipated the possibility that he would see this in this copy, but not in this condition.

The steel frame at the foot of the bed shakes violently and occasionally strikes the back of Bai Liu's head with a calm gaze as a passionate tangle takes place just a bedpan away, gasps and erotic phrases reverberating through the small tent.

If Bai Liu was alone, he could have shamelessly walked right out from under the bed.

But ...... when there is someone in that situation, everything becomes ......

Spades, after making sure that the two people above him could not be disturbed by some small movements, approached Bai Liu and asked in a dignified whisper, "Is this thing they're doing, is it relevant to the main plot?"

Bai Liu turned to face Spades and said calmly, "Not really relevant, except to say that this thing shows the character relationship between the two NPCs."

"What are you asking that for?"

"Oh." Spades nodded knowingly, "Is that right? Just now you felt a little nervous ducking out when you heard Alex was about to insert Guy."

"I thought it was something closely related to the main storyline and you wanted to hear it seriously."

Bai Liu: "......"

Spades looked at Bai Liu in confusion: "? Why are you red?"