The smoke hanging over the narrow approach road was so thick it burned the throat, smelling violently of sulfur, scorched earth, and fresh blood.
Trapped in the narrow bottleneck between the river embankment and the dense, impenetrable wall of bamboo, the remaining men of the lead American vanguard realized their escape was gone. The path back to the shallow ford was sealed by Kabo Vicente's crossfire, while Macario's veterans held the right flank with gleaming bayonets and steady rifles.
"Drop your arms! ¡Ríndanse! DROP THEM!" Pasco bellowed from the parapet, his Mauser leveled at a tight cluster of blue uniforms huddled behind an overturned supply cart.
For seconds, nobody moved. The surviving American soldiers—their faces blackened by soot, uniforms torn, eyes wide with the raw, frantic horror of men who had just watched the front half of their company disintegrate in a single heartbeat—looked at the mound of their fallen comrades. Then, they looked up at the deep, timber-braced trench.
All along the parapet, they were leveled directly at their chests.
A young corporal, his hand trembling so violently he nearly dropped his piece, was the first to let his Krag rifle fall into the churned mud. The heavy wooden stock hit the earth with a dull, wet thud.
Clatter. Clatter. Clatter.
One by one, the surviving invaders threw down their rifles, unbuckled their leather cartridge belts, and raised their hands high into the air. The arrogant charge that was supposed to clear the Bagbag bridgehead before noon had collapsed into a complete, humiliating surrender right on the riverbank.
"Sanchez, Julian! Secure the prisoners!" I quickly ordered, stepping down from the parapet, my sidearms still warm in my hand, keep it in the holster. "Get them into the secondary ditch, strip their cartridge boxes, and keep them out of sight!"
While my men rushed forward to herd the stunned captives into the earthworks, a handful of blue-coated stragglers on the absolute outer edge of the bottleneck—men who had been trailing the main column near the water's edge—managed to throw themselves wildly into the current. They swam frantically across the murky Bagbag River, kicking through the blood-stained water under a light, scattered volley from our right flank, scrambling up the far bank like drowned rats.
~~~
Two kilometres to the west, at the American forward staging area, the air inside the operational command post was stifling.
Brigadier General Loyd Wheaton stood beside a map table, adjusting his uniform coat while listening to the distant, rhythmic echo of those cannon pieces settling into silence. Beside him, Colonel Frederick Funston was leaning against a timber post, casually checking the action of his sidearm.
"The barrage ended ten minutes ago, General," Funston remarked with a confident smirk. "They should be sweeping through their secondary lines right about now. I doubt there's a single insurgent left standing to offer a decent fight."
Before Wheaton could reply, the heavy canvas flap of the command tent was yanked open so violently the ropes groaned.
A lieutenant, his blue uniform caked in river silt and dripping dark water onto the floorboards, stumbled inside. His hat was gone, his breath coming in ragged, wheezing gasps, his face completely drained of color. Behind him, two equally battered soldiers leaned against each other for support.
Wheaton's eyes narrowed instantly. "Lieutenant! What is the meaning of this? Why are you out of formation?"
"General..." the lieutenant stammered, his voice cracking as he clutched his chest, eyes wide and unfocused. "The vanguard... the vanguard is gone, sir."
Funston froze, his smirk vanishing. He took a swift step forward. "What do you mean 'gone'? Did you encounter a skirmish line?"
"It wasn't a skirmish, Colonel!" the officer choked out, his hands shaking hysterically as he gestured back toward the river. "It was a slaughter! The trenches... the trenches were empty when the guns stopped! We thought they ran! We marched down the road, and then... the earth itself opened up!"
The lieutenant fell to his knees, burying his face in his calloused hands. "They had heavy pieces hidden in the brush at point-blank range! They had deep ditches we couldn't see! The captain is dead... the lead company was wiped out in minutes! They encircled us, sir! They're either dead or captured!"
A suffocating, dead silence fell over the command tent.
Wheaton stared at the kneeling officer, his face turning from a dark, flushed red to an ashen grey. Beside him, Funston's jaw tightened so hard his moustache twitched. To an army that had spent months operating under the assumption that the local militia would break and run at the first sound of an artillery shell, the news was an absolute, shattering shock.
"A trap..." Wheaton whispered, his voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register. He turned slowly toward his staff officers, his fists clenching until his knuckles turned white. "They tricked our spotters. They let us waste our preliminary shells on empty dirt."
"General," Funston interjected, his eyes burning with a sudden, furious heat. "Give me the remaining companies. We will march back down there and tear those earthworks apart with our bare hands."
"No," Wheaton growled, slamming his fist onto the map table. "We do not throw more infantry blindly into a bottleneck. We will calibrate the guns properly this time. Every piece we have. I want the those guns to pound the entire bank—not just the forward lip, but the entire tree line! We turn every square yard of that road into a crater before another boot steps across that water!"
~~~
Across the river,our deep, timber-braced traverse lines, I didn't wait for the Americans to recover from their shock.
"Move! Move! Clear the road!" I barked, my voice cutting through the heavy wall of cordite smoke hanging over the riverbank.
My men moved like a machine. While Sanchez and Roberto marched the disarmed American prisoners down into the deep shelter of our rear communication trench, Pasco, including most of the men, are swarming the scene. Scavenging the valuables, whether ammunition, weapons with exception of their inner clothes, and personal items, all were taken.
We didn't just hold the line; we scavenged it with surgical, terrifying speed.
Every single Krags rifle dropped by the fallen or surrendered vanguard was snatched up. Leather bandoliers packed with long, the cartridges were stripped from the dead and passed down the line in human chains. Even the canteens, medical kits, officer sidearms, field glasses—even the brass-buttoned uniform coats of the fallen officers were peeled off and hauled back into our deep ditches.
"Sarhento!" Kabo Del Vamos sprinted down from his elevated observation post, sliding down the dirt wall into the trench beside me. "My men from the front send an intel that the Americans are rushing, and the enemies' guns are re-aligning their carriages—it seems they're aiming deeper this time!"
I looked over at Anya, who was standing beside a stack of newly acquired, heavy leather Krag bandoliers. A cold, sharp smile touched my lips.
"They will think that we're still sitting in the ditch waiting for round two," I said, as my mind is now exploding, processing running three steps ahead of the enemy command.
Colonel Román, who rushed to the frontline, had been watching the miraculous victory from the edge of the secondary redoubt in sheer, unadulterated awe, stepped into our dugout. "Sarhento. Honestly, I have never seen a vanguard annihilated so cleanly."
"Well, it was thanks to these men that we managed to afford it, but it seems we might be expecting another attack."
Román blinked, stunned. "Wait. like now??!"
"Yeah, but instead of embracing it, we will vacating the position." I answered.
Román, shocked ""Vacating? You want to abandon the bridgehead after taking it?"
"We aren't abandoning it," I explained, drawing a quick arc in the dirt wall with my thumb. "We know that their commanders are furious. They are going to obliterate this exact stretch of road with high explosives to avenge their vanguard. So we give them the road. I need all men, along with the regulars, to fall back through the thick vegetation area. We slide around their right flank through the thick mangrove brush near the creek."
Anya's eyes lit up with instant, deadly comprehension. "When their second wave lands to inspect the wreckage..."
"...they will step onto an empty field of corpses," I finished, my voice dropping to a low, gravelly whisper. "And while they are staring at the stripped bodies of their vanguard, wondering where we went... we will be standing directly behind them."
I relay orders to the rest to retreat to the designated location to give way to American's futile efforts.
An hour later, the second American assault commenced.
This time, the field guns spared no ammunition. For a full, earth-shattering hour, heavy high-explosive shells rained down upon the Bagbag riverbank in a relentless, systematic grid. The ground shook violently, geysers of black mud and shattered timber erupting into the sky as the secondary bombardment tore through our original parapets and flattened the surrounding brush.
Across the river, Brigadier General Wheaton and Colonel Funston watched through their field glasses as the riverbank was turned into a smoking, churned wasteland of scorched dirt and shattered trees.
"Cease fire!" Wheaton ordered, his voice echoing across the battery line.
The heavy guns fell silent. A thick, suffocating cloud of white and grey smoke drifted lazily over the ruined landscape.
"Forward!" Funston roared, drawing his sword and leaping onto the wooden embankment. "20th Kansas, move out! Secure the bank! Leave no survivors!"
Three fresh companies of American infantry—over hundreds of blue coats, their bayonets fixed, their faces hardened by vengeance—poured across the shallow ford. They scrambled up the muddy riverbanks, their boots sinking deep into the scorched, cratered earth.
They moved in a wide, cautious skirmish line, their rifles raised, ready to bayonet any surviving Filipino soldier who crawled out of the smoking ruins.
The lead company crested the shattered lip of the earthworks and stepped onto the narrow approach road where the first battle had taken place.
The American soldiers suddenly slowed down. Their chatter died away, replaced by an eerie, uncomfortable silence that settled over the entire regiment.
Sprawled across the mud were the bodies of the first vanguard. But something was horrifically, terribly wrong.
The corpses hadn't been shredded by the recent artillery bombardment—they had been completely, systematically stripped. Every single Krag rifle was gone. Every leather cartridge box had been cut away. The fallen officers lay in the mud in their undergarments, their boots, sidearms, field glasses, and brass-buttoned coats completely vanished.
There were no Filipino bodies. There were no abandoned weapons. There was nothing left on the field except the naked, stripped remains of their own men resting in the quiet dirt.
A young Kansas private lowered his rifle, his face turning pale as he looked around the silent, cratered landscape. "Where... where are they?" he whispered, his voice trembling. "There's nobody here. Heck, there's nothing here!"
The American captain in charge of the lead company stepped over a crater, his heart pounding against his ribs. Strangely, the sensation of dread began to crawl up his spine. The recent artillery barrage had pounded this exact patch of dirt into glass, yet there was no sign of a retreating enemy, no blood trails leading into the jungle, no broken equipment.
It was as if an entire army had vanished directly into the earth.
"Check the ditches!" the captain shouted, trying to mask the rising panic in his voice as he pointed his revolver toward the ruined earthworks. "Check the ditches! They must be buried under the—"
He never finished the sentence.
From the dense, untouched bamboo thicket thirty meters behind the American skirmish line—from the very direction they had just crossed—a low, rhythmic voice cut through the stillness of the morning air.
"NOW!!!... PRESENT!"
The entire American company spun around in absolute, horror-stricken unison.
Rising silently out of the tall grass behind them, completely unharmed by the artillery barrage and occupying the high ground commanding their rear, stood sixty-three Filipino soldiers lined up in a flawless, overlapping crossfire formation. At the center stood Valerian, his Orbea .44 raised, flanked by Anya and his core squad—every single one of them holding a captured, fully loaded American Krag rifle.
The American captain's eyes widened in sheer, helpless terror as he realized the horrific truth. They hadn't cleared the sector. They had walked directly into the center of a double-envelope ambush that I had specifically prepare for them, like inviting them in a red carpet..
"FUEGO!!"
PAM-PAM-PAM-PAM-PAM-PAM!
A blinding, continuous wall of synchronized rifle fire erupted from behind the American lines, transforming the quiet riverbank into a second, inescapable killing ground.