"Ah, damn it, this is killing me."
The dust-covered, grimy soldier collapsed onto the ground, pulled off his shoes and socks, and stared at the pus-filled blisters on the soles of his feet.
The thick stink of sweaty feet spread through the air, but no one cared...
Wang Yan chuckled as he took out a needle, heated it with a lighter to sterilize it, and handed it over. "Pop it yourself."
"It'll hurt like hell even if I do."
"Who doesn't pop a few blisters when they're a soldier? Stop dragging your feet. Come on, I'll do it." Wu Liuyi walked over.
"No, no, I can do it. No need to trouble you, Squad Leader." As he spoke, the soldier grimaced and pierced the huge blister on his sole with the needle, then squeezed out the pus inside.
Xu Sanduo had finished popping his long ago and was eating compressed biscuits off to the side. He laughed. "It's actually not that bad. I got blisters yesterday, and I barely felt a thing."
"Get lost. You're limping when you walk, and you're saying it didn't affect you?"
"It just doesn't hurt."
"You're all talk."
Xu Sanduo only smiled, watching everyone else grimace in pain. It made the food go down easier...
Over a thousand soldiers were camped out in the wilderness in companies, spaced some distance apart. They drank cold water, ate convenient field rations, and smelled their comrades' stinking feet and sour sweat.
They had already been marching nonstop for two days, constantly switching between forced marches and regular marches, with the occasional rapid assault march thrown in—at a pace even faster than a forced march.
A forced march was practically a light jog the whole way, while a rapid assault march meant running in long strides while retaining enough