Chapter 61: The Butcher of the Snowy Night

Late at night, snow fell like thick goose feathers, draping the forest in a boundless shroud of white. The wind wove through the pine branches, letting out low, mournful howls.

Anatoly, a Soviet private, huddled beneath the chassis of a truck half-buried in the drifts. He held his Mosin-Nagant rifle in a death grip, the metal so cold it felt sticky against his palms. A thin crust of ice had formed over his greatcoat; every slight movement he made resulted in a faint, brittle cracking sound.

Across from him, an older soldier named Viktor was struggling with a flint, trying desperately to light a low-quality hand-rolled cigarette.

"Don't bother, Viktor," Anatoly whispered. "The light will bring that thing here."

Viktor's hand stiffened for a moment before he slumped, dejectedly setting the flint down. He looked up, revealing a leaden-gray face with cheeks sunken from starvation.

"You mean the White Death?" Viktor let out a self-deprecating laugh. "In this godforsaken weather, visibility isn't even ten meters. Even that Finnish devil couldn't see his sights. He likes to wait behind snowbanks like a patient hunter."

"No, I'm not talking about him." Anatoly blew a puff of warm air into his cupped hands, his eyes reflecting a terror that reached into his very marrow. "I'm talking about the Butcher of the Snowy Night."

Viktor went silent.

In the shattered graveyard that was Lemetti, two terrifying monikers had begun to circulate recently. One was the "White Death," representing a divine, untouchable long-range judgment, an emotionless natural disaster that struck like lightning from the frozen horizon hundreds of meters away.

The other was a nightmare born from the deepest reaches of the wind and snow, a name that clung like a persistent rot: "The Butcher of the Snowy Night."

Between the two, the Soviet soldiers feared the latter far more.

The Butcher seemed to belong to the darkness and the gale. In these extreme conditions of minus thirty or forty degrees, where ice fog and blizzard choked the air, a normal soldier's vision was completely hindered. Yet the Butcher moved as if strolling through his own backyard, reaping lives with surgical precision.

"Seryozha from Third Company was found dead in his snow hole yesterday," Anatoly said, trembling. "He had buried himself a meter deep with only a tiny air vent. When we found him, his throat had been slit. The blood melted the snow beneath him before freezing into red ice."

"Viktor, it was a snow hole! Not even God could have seen him hiding there, yet that Finn just slipped in and slaughtered him like a chicken."

Viktor spat a glob of bloody phlegm. "That thing isn't human. He's an evil spirit of the forest. I heard we've lost seventy or eighty men to mysterious disappearances or snipers in the last five days alone."

"The strangest part was the night before last," Anatoly continued. "A whole squad from the second battalion was huddled around a dying fire, just talking. In the first minute, the deputy squad leader went silent. In the second, the machine gunner tumbled face-first into the embers. The rest didn't even know where the enemy was until the last man had the top of his skull taken off by a bullet."

In the minds of the Soviet troops, this kind of killing defied logic. They had tried every camouflage, set traps on every path, and even hung bells around their camp. But all of it was useless against the Butcher.

As soon as night fell and the snow began to drift, that white shadow appeared. He was more than a sniper; he was a demon of close-quarters slaughter. He could see through the thickest canvas and sniff out the faintest trace of body heat buried under the snow.

"He must be able to see our ki," Anatoly muttered to himself. "I heard some Siberian witch doctors can see the souls of the dead. That Butcher must have those eyes. As long as your heart beats, as long as you're breathing, he can stare right at your heart through the ice fog and the snow."

"Shut up!" Viktor snapped in a low hiss. "The more you talk, the more the back of my neck crawls."

The two fell into a deathly silence. The blizzard seemed to intensify, building a shifting wall of white crystals between them.

"Viktor..." Anatoly spoke suddenly, his voice very soft. "When this war is over, if I make it back to my home in Tula, I'm going to burn these cursed leather boots. I never want to step on snow again."

"You'll make it back. We have tanks, we have cannons..."

Before Viktor could finish, before the white mist of his breath could even dissipate, a terrifying, sharp crack tore through the wailing wind, sounding like a frozen log being split by a heavy sledgehammer.

Pah-chak!

It wasn't a dull impact; it was the sound of kinetic energy exploding instantly.

Anatoly, who had been about to nod, was jerked backward as if by a giant, invisible hand. The 7.62mm rifle round that had punched through the snowstorm carried a lethal spin, brutally smashing through his frontal bone before tumbling and expanding inside the cranium, finally tearing a ragged exit wound at the back of his head.

The precision of the shot made Anatoly's head burst like a frozen watermelon struck by an iron bar. Viktor watched in horror as red and white brain matter sprayed into the forty-below air. The bits of warm bone and tissue made a series of sickening, staccato thap-thap sounds as they hit the freezing steel of the truck chassis.

Viktor wiped his face, his palm coming away covered in a slick, lukewarm liquid. He stared blankly at his comrade, who only a second ago was dreaming of Tula, but was now a shattered husk whose legs were still twitching feebly in the snow pit.

"A... Anatoly?"

Viktor let out a distorted shriek. Extreme terror shattered his reason in an instant. He forgot all about cover and rolled out from under the truck, his Mosin-Nagant screaming as he pulled the trigger wildly into the white void.

"Come out! You bastard! Come out!"

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The muzzle flashes flickered in the heavy snow, illuminating Viktor's near-manic face. He couldn't see a target; he couldn't see an enemy. He was simply venting his final despair into the pure white abyss that swallowed everything.

However, there was no response save for the howling wind and the distant whistles of the alerted Soviet camp.

Viktor's magazine ran dry. His hands shook as he tried to claw bullets from his ammo pouch, but his frozen fingers refused to obey, and the cartridges spilled uselessly into the deep snow.

The moment he looked down to find his bullets, at that exact moment, he felt it. Within that all-consuming white, a gaze had locked onto his heart.

"Please..."

The sound died in Viktor's throat.

Crack.

Another crisp report. This bullet pierced through layers of falling snow and drilled precisely into the center of Viktor's brow.

The impact threw his body backward, slamming him against the truck's tire. His eyes remained wide, staring at the snowflakes falling from the sky. Before the fire of his life went out completely, the last thought to flash through his mind was that the Butcher of the Snowy Night really could see him.

The snow continued to fall, quickly covering the two bodies before they had even gone cold.

In the distance, Walter slowly lowered his Mosin-Nagant, which was wrapped in white cloth strips. In his eyes, the burning orange-red glow of the Eye of Death gradually faded.

"Eighty-five. Eighty-six."

The snowy night returned to silence. For the survivors of the 18th Division, this silence was the deepest hell of all.