Face-Planting Would Be No Fun

The explosion itself was silent. A blinding white flash first swallowed half the night sky, followed by a huge, twisted mushroom cloud rising into the air. Rolling flames dyed the surrounding clouds an eerie orange-red.

Several seconds later, the muffled, oppressive boom finally arrived, making his chest feel tight and his head buzz.

The heat wave that followed rushed at him from afar, leaving an ill-timed burning sensation on his cheeks, which were so cold they had nearly gone numb.

Then, the thoughts stunned by that magnificent scene were instantly seized once more by primal terror.

I'm falling!

The thought was like a bolt of icy lightning, splitting through his brain, which had grown sluggish from oxygen deprivation and fright.

An endless sensation of weightlessness enveloped his entire body. He felt like a pebble shot from a slingshot, helplessly plummeting toward the bottomless black abyss beneath his feet.

The gale was like countless sharp little blades, slicing past every part of his body from all directions with a ghostly howl.

He tried to open his mouth and shout something, but the wind poured in and forced every sound back down his throat, leaving only a wheezing noise like a leaking bellows.

He struggled to open his eyes, but the wind pressure was too great. Tears streamed down his face, and everything before him was a blurred, distorted mass of light and shadow.

"The ripcord! The parachute ripcord!"

At last, he remembered the most critical thing through the chaos.

His hands began frantically searching his body. The cold gloves had made his sense of touch incredibly dull. His chest, abdomen, both sides of his thighs... everywhere was covered in bulging equipment pouches and webbing. No matter how he felt around, he found nothing but cold metal buckles and rough canvas.

Fuck! Where is it?! Chu Hang roared inwardly. His heart pounded like a metronome gone haywire, and he could even hear his blood rushing past his ears with a buzzing roar.

That old bastard Dugan had demonstrated it on the plane, sure, but who could have imagined they would actually need it less than an hour later? His mind raced as he tried to recall that brief lesson. Dugan seemed to have said that the ripcord was on the right side of the chest, a red-painted T-shaped handle so it could be identified in the dark.

But he was tumbling through the air nonstop now, and he could barely tell where his own right hand was.

Calm down! Calm down! Chu Hang, fucking calm down! he shouted desperately at himself. In his previous life, he had been a programmer. What he was best at was finding the BUG that caused an entire system to crash amid complicated code. This was the same. Before he was smashed into a meat patty, he had to find the "switch" that could save his life.

He recalled some skydiving tips he had read in some magazine somewhere: spread out his limbs as much as possible, like a giant octopus, and use air resistance to stabilize his posture.

He forced himself to stretch out, spreading both arms and legs wide. The movement drained every ounce of strength from him. He could feel his muscles fighting against the gale, but although it was difficult, the tendency for his body to tumble was indeed slowing.

At last, he barely regained control of his body and settled into a standard dive position, face down and back up.

Good. Now I can tell up from down.

He clutched the metal buckle of the webbing across his chest with his left hand and carefully searched the right side of his chest with his right. His hand found the cold stock of his M1 Submachine Gun and a stiff canvas pouch filled with magazines.

Nothing! Still nothing!

Did I remember wrong? Or is this parachute pack defective? Getting faulty equipment on the battlefield was nothing new. In an instant, Chu Hang's heart sank to the bottom. He thought of his previous life, when he had died from overwork. Was he going to die from poor equipment quality in this life? That would be too fucking darkly ironic.

Just as he had begun mentally greeting the quartermaster's entire family in every language he knew, his fingertips finally touched something different. It was a cold metal ring fixed inside a clasp.

This is it!

A surge of wild joy filled Chu Hang. Adrenaline flooded his body. Without pausing to think, he used every bit of strength he had and yanked hard!

"Creeeak—"

A teeth-grating sound of metal scraping rang out. Then he felt as though a charging rhinoceros had slammed viciously into his back!

An irresistible, massive force surged from the parachute pack behind him and spread through the harness across his entire body in an instant. It was as if an invisible giant hand had violently hauled him upward, bringing his mad plunge to an abrupt halt.

"Urgh—!"

Chu Hang let out a painfully warped groan. That immense pulling force had nearly cinched him in half on the spot. His shoulders felt as if they were about to be torn apart, while an indescribable agony flared between his legs, as though his very soul were being ripped to pieces. It made him seriously question whether his happiness for the rest of his life had just been sacrificed.

Yet amid the agony, a familiar warm current followed.

Healing Factor!

He could clearly feel the muscle fibers nearly severed by the harness reconnecting and repairing themselves at an unbelievable speed.

The soul-rending pain lasted only a few hellish seconds before quickly changing into an intense numb soreness, then slowly fading away.

He still felt terrible, as if he had run ten thousand meters and then done five hundred squats, but at least he had not passed out on the spot, nor had anything important actually been torn off.

At last, he could catch his breath.

Above him, the enormous canopy silently opened in the darkness, like a white dandelion blooming at midnight. The terrifying roar of the wind by his ears disappeared, replaced by an eerie quiet broken only by his own ragged, wheezing breaths.

He had survived.

Chu Hang dangled in midair like a sausage hanging in the wind, swaying with the air currents as his entire body neared collapse.

He looked up at the enormous white canvas above him, then down at the bottomless darkness below, and a powerful sense of relief after surviving disaster rose within him.

Fuck, if anyone ever tells me skydiving is exciting and fun again, I'll throw him off the Empire State Building—and I won't give him a parachute.

After steadying himself a little, he began observing his surroundings.

The night sky was dark, without a moon. Only a few scattered stars flickered through gaps in the clouds. The fire from the crashed plane in the distance was gradually dying out.

By that faint light, he could just make out several little black dots in the sky like himself. They were his teammates.

Everyone had jumped out. That was good news.

He tried hard to recall the two and a half sentences of parachute-control techniques Dugan had taught him. He tugged at the control lines on either side, hoping to drift toward his teammates.

But it was his first time, after all. His movements were clumsy, and after tugging for ages, not only did he fail to get closer, but a sudden crosswind carried him even farther away.

Forget it. I'll leave it to fate. Chu Hang simply gave up struggling. The most important thing now was landing safely.

However, reality was always far harsher than the plan.

"Fuck!"

Just as he finished preparing himself mentally, he suddenly dropped! The edge of his parachute had become firmly snagged in the dense crown of a tall pine tree.

Bang!

His back slammed solidly against a trunk covered in rough bark. The impact left him dazed, stars bursting before his eyes, and made him feel as though his spine were about to snap.

"Cough... cough, cough..." Chu Hang spat out a mouthful of pine needles and snowflakes, feeling as though there was not a single spot on his body that did not hurt.

The Healing Factor worked hard to repair the wounds scratched open by the branches, sending waves of itching through him that made him feel even worse.

What the fuck is this? The mission hasn't even begun and I'm already dead. I haven't become a hero yet, and I'm already a bat hanging upside down.

Chu Hang took out his knife and cut the connecting straps.

Thump!

He plunged headfirst into a soft pile of snow.

At least he had landed safely.

He pulled out the waterproof compass from his pocket and checked it. After wavering slightly, the needle settled, pointing north.

Then he looked up at the faint firelight on a distant mountaintop that was about to go out and identified his direction. Dugan had said to gather toward the factory in the east.

He had to find his teammates as quickly as possible, or find somewhere to hide. Wandering alone through a forest in unfamiliar enemy-occupied territory was no different from suicide.

Just as he took two steps, an extremely faint sound suddenly came from the darkness not far ahead to his left. Yet in this deathly quiet environment, it was incomparably clear.

"Crack."

The sound was soft, like someone had accidentally stepped on and snapped a dead branch covered in snow.

Chu Hang's body instantly froze. Almost on instinct, he raised the submachine gun in his hand, its black muzzle aimed toward the source of the sound.

His heart leaped into his throat again.

Was it a teammate? Or... German soldiers? Or some kind of beast in this forest?