"How about the others," Saito asked, trying to remain as calm as possible.

Arai read the names one by one with a crying voice, and it sounded like only one person had survived to this day.

This number of people is simply not a combat force at all, and if the Satsuma infantry rushes up, it will be engulfed in an instant.

No, maybe they didn't have to rush all at once, just stand as far away as they are now, and bombard this place at any cost with Yasuke cannons and bullets woven like a dense web, just like they have done with Aizu Castle for so many days.

Sooner or later, Rulaitang would be razed to the ground by this fierce and dense artillery fire. No one survived.

"Arai, do what you're supposed to do. He tried to calm himself down, and without looking back, he said to the young man beside him.

Arai is not very good at swordsmanship, and after the Shinsengumi began to train according to the Western style of military training, he found that he still had a little talent in learning marksmanship, so he is now quite relied on every time he fights. The task is generally to shoot at the rear to cover and kill the comrades who come forward, or to shoot the enemy soldiers from a long distance when the enemy is approaching, so tonight may have such an advantage, when his comrades were wounded and killed, he still stood here, and it seemed that in addition to not being in good spirits, he was not physically injured, and he was already very lucky.

Seeing that his captain was trying to poke his head out of the trench and observe the situation of the enemy troops in the distance in the middle of the rumbling artillery fire, Arai squirmed his lips a few times, and finally squeezed out a sentence.

"Captain, aren't you afraid. ”

As soon as he said this, he immediately realized how stupid his question was.

Saito, Captain Yamaguchi is one of the pillars of the Shinsengumi, and he has won the trust of Director Kondo and Deputy Chief Hijikata at all times, and how can such a person who is sent to carry out the most difficult and dangerous mission to be so shaken that he wants to turn around and flee because death is imminent

In other words, hasn't he seen death many times in front of him?

Sure enough, he saw Captain Saito's strange look on his face and turned his head to look at him.

"I'm afraid, I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Captain Saito's voice remained as calm as usual, faintly resounding in the trenches filled with the smell of earth and choking gunpowder.

"From the moment I applied to stay in Aizu, I never thought that I would be able to live until the end of the war. He said quietly.

Just when Arai thought that his esteemed captain was about to say more bold words, Saito turned his gaze away.

"If you're not ready to come to your senses right now, do it quickly. ”

Arai ""

He felt a little speechless for a moment.

On the contrary, it was the strange woman who stood aside and claimed to be a member of the women's team, whose mother's family was in Osaka, and who came to Noraido at this time because the Shinsengumi had rescued the favor of her own shop, burst out laughing when she heard this.

In this low pressure of impending death, her laughter was a little obvious and out of place. Arai turned his gaze to her blankly, as if puzzled as to why she could be so relieved when she was dying.

As if noticing his gaze, the young woman turned her face as well.

"I'll help too. ”

A faint smile still lingered on the corners of her eyebrows, but she said it in a serious tone.

"I'm sure I'll let Yamaguchi-kun see the sunrise tomorrow. ”

Arai ""

For a moment, his heart flashed by complaints like "Why don't you mention my name" and "The captain's skills are much better than mine, so I'm the one who needs to be saved". However, he still had a shred of reason, and knew that these words could never be said, so he just forced out a trace of a stick similar to being attacked and knocked on the back of the head, so angry that he still had to keep smiling, coughed, and replied awkwardly, "Yes, yes"

The next moment, he noticed that his captain was also surprised, and then the surprise quickly turned into a helpless expression, and he glanced at the young woman who claimed to be "Shinoda Kazuo" and said nothing.

If it weren't for the fact that they were already dying, it wouldn't be a good time to gossip, and Arai would have carefully inquired about the secrets behind this girl, including what had happened in Osaka, and why Captain Saito had said that it was Deputy Hijikata who had been kind to her, not him, but she was still so stubbornly planning to pour out her act of reciprocating the favor on Captain Saito's head

Ah, maybe after tonight, the answers to these questions will never have a chance to know

Arai sighed wistfully.

Maybe it was because I watched too many of my companions fall tonight, or were blown up to pieces, and in the face of the unshakable calmness and coldness of his captain's iron mask, the kind of horror that would have gradually risen in Arai's heart was finally suppressed by reason, and slowly fell.

Eventually, he took a deep breath, whispered a "yes," picked up his rifle, and walked away slowly.

Saito crawled through the trenches with his waist bent, and with the cover of the trenches that had been scrawled up and shallow enough to stand up straight, he could only block most of his body, and he went as far as he could in all directions of the position to observe the situation in the vicinity.

Even as he lowered his body in the trenches and walked back and forth, of course, the side of the army did not stop. Shells and bullets whizzed over the trenches as if they didn't need money, almost so dense that they were intertwined into a web of fire.

Saito lowered his body a little more, carried a rifle in his right hand, and quickened his pace back to where he had been.

That position was now a vital point for confronting the officers and troops, but there was no one left here in the Shinsengumi to strengthen the forces to defend it.

When Saito returned to that position, he was a little surprised to find that Shinoda Kazuo had found a rifle from nowhere, and was now pulling the bolt to check inside, and the people she brought were divided into three groups, and the two young men were in their own group, and the remaining three teenagers were scattered in a few places not far from each other as a group, and they happened to monitor all the front and back directions of the piece.

Saito shook off a little of the strange feeling that protruded in his heart, and solemnly said to Shinoda Kazuo, "Thank you." ”

As a result, she looked up at him with an expression that was stranger than her own.

"Oh, I haven't done anything."

Saito ""

For some reason, he wanted to laugh a little at that moment, and quickly froze again.

He coughed and began to tell her solemnly what he had observed.

"The Satsuma probably wanted to kill us all with cannonballs, lest they rush up and die in a white-knuckle battle. ”

"On the side of the Changfu Baoguo team, because in the trenches, the terrain is too low, and it is not clear to see their movements. But they've been tossing and turning for most of the night, and even if they swim, they should swim over. ”

He said his reasoning with a serious face, and when he said this, he obviously felt that there was nothing wrong with his reasoning, but he paused because he found that she in front of him grinned again.

Though none of their faces were good-looking, dusty and dirty, after most of the night's fighting, she still looked cleaner than he was because she had come late, so that the smile now seemed more vivid, and it was so bright that it almost dazzled his eyes.

Saito's words couldn't help but pause, and a layer of confusion rose in his tone.

"What's the matter, I'm not going to say something laughable. He asked.

However, such a simple question made the smile on the corner of her lips suddenly freeze there

Saito

The doubts in his heart deepened, and he opened his mouth to continue asking, when he heard the wind from the flight of cannonballs overhead, and the whistling sound that was already extremely close to his position, so that it was getting louder and louder

Before reason shouted for the police, his body automatically reacted subconsciously.

He threw himself forward, slamming the girl to the ground, who had just been laughing vividly. Their bodies slammed against the rough ground at the bottom of the trench, rubble and sore his exposed skin

But the next moment, his thoughts were interrupted.

An earth-shattering bang exploded over his head almost at the same moment. As if it had been shaken into powder, the earth and stone were suddenly lifted into the air and then fell down like rain.

The loud explosion and the impact seemed like someone punched him in an instant, burrowed through his ear piercing, went straight to his brain, and then gave him a lot of blows in his brain, and then tore at his brain and eardrums, and in an instant his brain was chaotic, his ears tingled, and the sand and stones fell on him like a torrential rain.

He felt a pain in the top of his head, and in an instant there was a buzzing sound. The pain gradually seemed like someone holding the sharpest knife, piercing the most fragile bones and flesh in his heart, and tearing them apart alive; finally, in the midst of the shock, shock, and unbearable pain, his memory and his body suddenly turned into a blank at a moment.