Thanks to our surprise attack with the americans, it cause uniforms wall of fire to americans with such unexpected force. Of course the one the moment they enter the second time, I know that their leader is now serious to take us down.
Even my soldados give the best momentum, I honestly can see why the Americans are considered formidable. Even though they are now pinned down by us, they can give quite a punch to us, good counteroffensive, I can hear they are barking ragged commands, must be their officers. While they instinctively had dropped into low crouches. As of now, our position is quite behind compared to our previous one, since we give the Americans a false intel, to make them walk past the bridgehead, and now, we are countering them.
One thing the Americans didn't expect is the thought of them fighting a rag-tag wannabe militia with zero experience in warfare, which we had successfully fooled them with.
Back to reality, I take out the Krags, while shouting,
"Keep the pressure on them!"
I bellowed over the deafening roar,. "Don't let them establish a firing step! Keep them pinned!"
For agonizing moments, the exchange raged across the riverbank. The air turned a thick, blinding grey as smoke rolled across the mud, stinging the eyes and choking the throat. But the momentum was entirely ours. Pinned against the open road, their officers picked off one by one by Anya and Todri's veteran NCOs.
"Sarhento, the Flores's men needed support, their position has been breached."
I called Anya, "Kabo, I need you to bring a few of our men to support Flores's section, NOW!" Anya nodded and quickly picked a few of them, and rushed to Flores's.
Moments later, I take a binocular, to look at them, it's a successful rescue, now they manage to regain the sector.
Seeing the American line stiffen into a tight, defensive knot, instead of ordering to push forward, I raised my hand and signaled to the flanks.
"FALL BACK! FIRST SECTION, RETREAT!" I shouted, my voice carrying over the din of battle. I order a runner to give the letter to Todri's section, to send the men once the letter received.
On my command, the center of our line began a hurried, seemingly panicked scramble backward into the tall grass. To an outside observer, it looked like the sudden, chaotic collapse of a militia that had lost its nerve under heavy return fire.
Inside the trapped American perimeter, a surviving lieutenant caught sight of the retreating rayadillo uniforms. "They're breaking!" he screamed, desperation morphing into sudden, wild hope. "Their center is giving way! Push them back! FORWARD!"
Hoping to break out of the inescapable killing pocket, the remaining American force rallied, surging forward in a frantic, bunched-up assault directly into the gap our feigned retreat had created. They sprinted through the high grass, boots churning the mud, desperate to break through our lines and reach the safety of the open road.
What they didnt know is they ran directly into the mouth of the true trap, that we prepared for them..
Hidden beneath a thick weave of dried nipa leaves at the narrow crest of the path sat the two heavy bronze lantakas. Mateo and Miguel had relocated silently in the shadows, reloading the smoothbore cannons to the muzzle with heavy charges of black powder, iron scrap, rusted railway spikes, and lead balls. Once again, the same technique applied.
The moment the dense cluster of charging Americans reached the targeted distance, Mateo and Miguel blew on their glowing slow-matches and drove them hard into the touchholes.
BOOOOM-CRACK!
The double detonation shook the very foundations of the riverbank. A blinding, roaring cone of orange fire and thick white smoke erupted from the brush, sweeping the narrow path like a giant, iron-laden broom. The heavy blast of scrap metal cut through the charging American column with catastrophic force. The lead rank is indeed utterly disintegrated in a split second, the violent shockwave throwing men backward into the mud like ragdolls.
At the same time, Todri's men arrived in a few lines, to make it like the reinforcement had arrived, and to circling them. They move behind the cannons, and shoot to the enemy side.
One by one the Americans fallen to the earth, which makes them even more confused and now they are in the middle where we are behind them while Todri's are on their front. Perfect encirclement.
"CEASE FIRE! ¡RÍNDANSE! SURRENDER OR DIE!" I roared, stepping out of the smoke with my sidearms raised, flanked by our men who instantly re-emerged from the high grass, their rifles leveled at point-blank range. Teniente Todri also barked orders of surrender to the enemies.
The surviving Americans—bleeding, deafened by the cannon blast, and completely incapable of continuing the fight—froze. The realization that every single move they made had been anticipated and turned into a death trap completely broke their spirit.
A blood-soaked sergeant was the first to let his Krag fall into the mud.
Clatter. Clatter. Clatter.
Within seconds, the remaining handful of living American soldiers dropped their arms, unbuckled their belts, and raised their trembling, mud-caked hands into the air. Of the three fresh companies that had marched so confidently across the shallow ford an hour ago, only a small, traumatized fraction remained alive to yield. The rest lay silent across the scorched riverbank, while a few scattered stragglers scrambled frantically back across the water toward the far shore to spread the horror.
Satisfied with the absolute silence that settled over the Bagbag River, I let out a long, slow breath, lowering the hammer of my sidearm. The air was heavy, the stench of cordite, wet earth, and iron hanging thick in the morning heat.
"It's over," I said, my voice quiet but cutting through the ringing silence. "Pasco, Sanchez—secure the captives. Move them out of the open before their artillery across the river figures out what happened."
I turned to my second-in-command, who was standing beside a mound of abandoned American equipment, her face a mask of cold, professional efficiency.
"Anya," I called out. "Take Tomas, Andre, and two of Macario's veterans. Start calculating the haul. I want every weapon, ammunitions, and every valuable item appraised and logged immediately. We don't leave a single round of it in this mud."
"Understood, Sarhento," Anya replied, snapping a sharp nod. She immediately pulled out her small, leather-bound ledger, signaling the men to begin gathering the spoils. "We'll have a full inventory before the smoke clears."
While Anya's team set to work with methodical speed, Sanchez and Julian herded the newly surrendered Americans down the covered communication trench. They marched them toward a makeshift lockup—a reinforced, stone-walled storage dugout tucked beneath a dense grove of bamboo near our secondary line, where the prisoners from the first morning assault were already being held under heavy guard.
As the fresh batch of captives was shoved through the heavy timber doorway, the dark, humid interior of the dugout became a space of quiet, shell-shocked disbelief.
The newly arrived Kansas soldiers slumped against the damp stone walls, staring hollow-eyed at the floorboards. The prisoners from the earlier morning vanguard looked up, their faces equally pale.
"You too?" a young private from the first group whispered, his voice trembling as he looked at a blood-stained corporal who had just been brought in. "What happened out there? Did the general send the rest of the division?"
The corporal let out a dry, hysterical laugh, burying his face in his dirt-smudged hands. "Division? There is no division out there, man. It's a ghost unit. They let us march right over their ditches, stripped the dead, and then appeared out of the grass behind us."
"They're using quite weird tactics," another surrendered soldier muttered, shaking his head in absolute terror. "And those damn cannons... even though they're antique, it's still pure madness. They aren't running. They're sitting in the dirt waiting for us to walk into their sights. It's an absolute meat grinder out there."
The quiet murmurs of the captives filled the stone lockup, a shared, terrifying realization setting in among the invaders: the army they were fighting in this sector was no longer a rabble of scared farmers.
Leaving the squad to secure the perimeter and organize the massive haul of captured equipment, I made my way back toward the secondary defensive line to deliver my official report.
As I walked up the muddy bamboo trail, a figure stepped out from behind a timber bunker. It was Teniente Todri. His uniform was stained with sweat and dirt, his eyes wide as he looked past me toward the riverbank where the quiet smoke was still rising.
He stopped directly in front of me, staring at me as if he were looking at a ghost.
"Valerian..." Todri breathed, letting out a heavy, shaking exhale. "Glad to see you're still alive. How's the situation down there?"
"The second wave has been neutralized, Teniente," I reported calmly, offering a crisp salute. "The bridgehead is secure."
Todri opened his mouth to celebrate, but before the relief could fully settle over his face, a breathless soldado rushed up the muddy trail toward us, his face pale and eyes wide with distress.
"Sarhento! Teniente!" the runner choked out, clutching his side. "The medical detail has finished checking the line! From our sixty-three men and the regulars... nearly half are heavily wounded. Ten are officially dead."
The air instantly left my lungs. Ten dead. Nearly thirty wounded. In the grand scheme of war—against two full American assault waves backed by heavy artillery—those numbers were a miracle. But to a man who knew every single face, every single name, and every single story behind those boys, it felt like a heavy blade twisting in my chest.
I turned away from Todri without a word and hurried down toward the makeshift aid station near the secondary ditch. There, laid out in a neat, silent row on dry bamboo pallets, were the ten corpses of our fallen men, covered by torn canvas sheets.
I knelt beside them, my hands trembling as I pulled back a corner of the cloth. One of them was a kid from Flores's regulars—barely nineteen—who had cheered when the lantakas detonated. Now his eyes were fixed on the sky, empty and still.
I unclenched my fingers and drove my fist hard into the damp earth, clutching a handful of mud as the cold, bitter rage washed over me. Fuck...
I stood up slowly, swallowing the lump in my throat, forcing the emotion down into the dark, cold corner of my mind where tactical calculations lived. In war, grief was a luxury for after the final trumpet blew.
Todri stepped up behind me, placing a quiet, firm hand on my shoulder. He didn't offer empty words or pity; he knew the cost of commanding men.
"Come," Todri said softly, turning and walking alongside me back toward the central command shelter. "Colonel Román needs to hear this directly from you. The man has been pacing a hole through the floorboards since Luna's train pulled out."
We stepped through the heavy canvas flaps of the primary command post. Inside, the atmosphere was suffocatingly tense. Maps were scattered across the table, and Colonel Paco Román was hunched over a telegraph terminal, his face drawn and pale as he tried to manage the logistics of a hollowed-out front line.
He looked up as Todri and I entered.
"Valerian!" Colonel Francisco Román blurted out, dropping his papers. "The spotters reported a massive secondary bombardment on your sector. We were preparing to mobilize the secondary reserve to cover your retreat—"
"There is no need for a retreat, Koronel," I interrupted smoothly, stepping up to the map table and placing my mud-caked cap on the wood, though the dried blood on my knuckles didn't escape his gaze. "The center line held. The second American assault column has been completely broken."
Román froze. He looked at me, then at Todri, who nodded firmly despite the heavy gravity in his eyes.
"Broken?" Román repeated, his voice barely above a whisper. "You... you repelled the Americans backed by field guns?"
"We didn't just repel them, Colonel," Todri interjected, his voice carrying a mix of pride and solemn respect. "Sarhento Valerian had planned it all. He flanked the Americans twice and now, his men are calculating the loot."
Todri paused, his tone dropping into a quieter register. "Also, we took losses, Koronel. Ten confirmed KIA, nearly half our strength wounded. But the line didn't yield an inch."
Koronel Román sank slowly into his wooden chair, his jaw slack as he absorbed the sheer, bitter scale of the achievement. The casualty report hit him, but so did the reality of what had been saved: without those ten sacrifices and Valerian's ruthlessly precise tactics, the entire center line would have collapsed, and Malolos might have fallen to the Americans.
Román looked down at the map of the Bagbag River, then backed up at me, his eyes lingering on my dirt-crusted uniform and the quiet, hardened determination in my eyes. A look of profound, humbled respect washed over his weathered face.
"Sarhento Valerian..." Román whispered, shaking his head in awe. "You brought us a victory when we had no right to ask for one. You are an unexpected miracle in the middle of this godforsaken chaos."