Walter's silhouette streaked through the forest, his skis letting out a faint, rhythmic hiss against the snow.
The cluster of heat signatures representing Kondrashov and his final escort was veering jaggedly into a wide, open marsh. To these cornered Soviet soldiers, the bog seemed like their last sliver of hope for escape.
Logically, in the soul-crushing grip of minus forty degrees, everything should have been frozen stone-solid. But the Finnish marshes possessed a treacherous cunning.
Months of relentless snowfall had piled up a layer of powder nearly a meter deep. This fluffy expanse acted like a heavy down puff, sealing the warmth of the earth beneath it. This insulation ensured that the peat and standing water below never truly froze, instead remaining in a bizarre, semi-liquid state of frigid slush.
"Ahk!"
A lead Soviet guard let out a sharp, truncated cry. He had expected the firm resistance of permafrost; instead, he had stepped into a gap in the brush masked by the drifts. Weighted down by his heavy gear, his entire thigh plunged instantly into the icy, viscous black mire below.
"Don't stop! Pull him out!" Kondrashov roared.
Several guards stumbled forward to help, but with no solid footing, the snowbanks beneath them collapsed in sheets. They became like flies caught in a web, struggling frantically in a waist-deep slurry of snow and mud.
From the shadows at the marsh's edge, Walter carved a graceful, wide arc on his skis. The broad surface area of the planks allowed him to glide effortlessly over the treacherous terrain, skimming the surface like a skater on ice.
In this pitch-black night, where even the dying embers of the flares had faded, the world in the eyes of the Soviet soldiers was nothing but chaotic blacks and dismal whites. They didn't even dare to switch on their flashlights; they could only grope through the snow-pits like blind men.
But to Walter, those soldiers clawing desperately at the snow were like flickering orange-red flames dancing against a deep blue canvas.
Bang!
The crack of the Mosin-Nagant shattered the silence of the night without warning.
A guard, turning back to haul up his comrade, saw the back of his head erupt in a brilliant spray of thermal energy. The bullet precision-tore through his skull; his body didn't even have time to twitch before gravity claimed it, pulling him slowly into the bog.
"Where is he? I can't see him!"
The remaining guards cycled their bolts with frantic hands, firing blindly into the endless dark. The muzzle flashes blinked in the night like a string of bright signal lamps.
"It's... it's the Butcher," a soldier whimpered, huddled behind a ridge of snow, his voice trembling beyond recognition.
This level of precision, this one-sided slaughter that utterly disregarded the darkness, in the hearts of the survivors of the 18th Division, there was only one name for it.
The Butcher of the Snowy Night.
They whispered that the Finn possessed the eyes of a demon, capable of peering through the wind and snow to see a man's very soul.
Bang!
A second shot.
Another soldier attempted to set up a light machine gun to return fire. The moment his fingertip brushed the trigger, his heart was utterly pulverized by a 7.62mm rifle round.
Walter was in no rush to charge.
He prowled the perimeter of the marsh. With every shot, he utilized the mobility of his skis to shift positions constantly. The Soviet soldiers were descending into total collapse. They couldn't even tell which direction the shots were coming from, as the echoes bounced and vibrated across the hollow expanse of the bog.
"The Butcher... the Butcher is here!"
One guard threw down his rifle, clawing backward in a fit of madness, only to hit an air pocket. He pitched forward into a bottomless pool of slush; nothing remained but a few rising bubbles.
Kondrashov fumbled for the Tokarev pistol at his hip, but his fingernails were packed with ice crust. His fingers, stiffened by the extreme cold and paralyzing terror, felt like rusted iron.
The death toll on the marsh continued to climb.
Walter maintained a steady distance of about eighty meters. In the dead of night, this was a visual blind spot for any ordinary man, but within the vision of the Eye of Death, it was the most comfortable of shooting galleries.
Bang!
Another cold roar of gunpowder.
A guard's occipital bone disintegrated in a sudden, vivid spark of heat.
"Ignore me! Fire! Fire in that direction!" Kondrashov screeched. His voice, strained by the biting cold, sounded shrill and distorted.
The remaining guards had lost all semblance of tactical discipline. They sprayed lead wildly at the residual muzzle flashes Walter left behind, bullets zipping aimlessly across the open marsh. By then, Walter had already used his high-speed maneuvers to appear on the opposite side of the column.
"Three," Walter muttered under his breath, cycling the bolt with practiced ease as he glided.
"He can see us... he's playing with us!"
A guard abandoned his machine gun and knelt in the snow, clutching his head and screaming. In the face of a one-sided massacre where the enemy remained invisible, dignity, military orders, and ideology all dissolved into primal, raw fear.
Kondrashov's face was now a mask of frost and mud. His greatcoat, once a symbol of generalship and honor, was soaked through. He scrambled forward on all fours, completely oblivious to the soldiers behind him who were dying to cover his retreat.
Behind him, the final guards were being picked off one by one. One was struck precisely in the knee, left to wait for the frost to claim him in the mire; another had his scalp shorn off by a bullet, sinking without even a groan.
Walter was like a patient hunter, systematically trimming the excess from this herd of broken men. As time ticked by, the once-large cluster of heat signatures withered at a visible rate.
After an eternity, a pale, leaden-gray glimmer began to bleed over the eastern horizon.
When Kondrashov's frostbitten hands finally touched hard, dry earth, he let out a sob that bordered on a total mental break. He stumbled up a high slope thick with Scots pines. This was the edge of the marsh, safety from the man-eating mire.
Kondrashov turned back, searching for his Northern Column and his elite escort, but he found only a harrowing silence.
Across the white expanse of the marsh, black protrusions were scattered here and there. They were the guards the Butcher of the Snowy Night had executed over the past hour, or the lonely souls who had simply run out of strength and slipped beneath the slush.
By Kondrashov's side, only three men remained.
An NCO missing an ear, clutching his rifle to his chest; an adjutant with a chunk of his shoulder shorn off by a stray bullet, dripping dark purple beads of blood; and a private with hollow eyes, moving his legs with nothing but mechanical instinct.
The sun rose.
The sickly white light pierced the fog, illuminating Kondrashov's ravaged face. His divisional colors were lost, his four thousand soldiers were being slaughtered behind him, and he, the commander, was huddled at the edge of an anonymous forest, shivering like a stricken dog.
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