Chapter 25

JSDF training grounds, 1 hour until the Finals

Traf looked at his seven subordinates, as they finished routine checking of their tanks before the match. "Leopon is fine!" Suzuki announced first and he nodded in response. "And our tank too, Товарищ Командор!" Boris finished the announcements, leaving them about one hour of free time to look around the stands or rest before the match.

"Good, dismissed until the match," he said and walked over to his crew. George and Takashi were smirking for whatever reason, as they saw him coming to them. He opened his mouth to ask them about the reason, but a sudden cry of "Tiger-kun!" forced him to turn around to see Kay waving at him from her Willys MB.

"Yeah?!" he shouted back with a small smile. "Good luck!" Kay said and the jeep rode away. "We'll need that later," George noted and Takashi nodded in agreement with that. "There you are!" Katyusha's voice shouted at someone and the three friends turned to see Boris and his crewmates shivering with fear from it.

"They are my teammates now, Katyusha," Traf said as he reached them. "What do you mean?!" she asked him with irritation in her voice. "Boris, Ivan and Grigori are good tankmen. And a part of my unit," he answered, shocking the small blonde with Napoleon complex and earning a raised eyebrow from Nonna.

"Whatever. Just crush Kuromorimine like Operation Bagration!" Katyusha said and turned away. "до свидания," the vice-commander of Pravda said and followed the loli to the VIP platforms.

"Heh… They put too much hope on us…" Takashi muttered and Traf nodded in response. "They want us to win, so we do exactly that!" he announced after a while with a determined stare. "Yeah!" Boris, Ivan and Grigori cheered after hearing that. Traf smiled. "Tiger corps! Get your tanks to the starting point!" he commanded and led his unit to the rest of Oarai's forces.

Yet, he didn't realize that someone was watching him from behind a stand and wrote something to a notebook.

Viewing platform for VIP #1

Tsuneo sat down next to his wife with a nervous smile on his lips. "Well… It looks like that we'll cheer for a different daughter today…" he said and caught her nod from the corner of his eye. He opened his mouth to say something, but a sudden noise stopped him from that and his eyes widened as he turned.

"May I sit down next to you?" Renta Tsuji asked and not waiting for an answer, he really sat down next to the shocked engineer. "We had only one boy crew in the matches before, but now, there are three of them. Also, I am officially not here," the minister whispered to him, making Tsuneo nod in approval.

"Our dream really came true, right?" he asked the man, he hated in the last five years. "Indeed it did. It was only thanks to Trafalgar and his crew that I finally saw my mistakes and started fixing them," Tsuji said truthfully and Tsuneo tried his best to not look at his wife, because he was sure that she was treating them with a murderous look.

"Panzer vor/marsch!" the voices of Erika Itsumi and Miho announced and the match started. I just hope that they'll avoid the Maus… Tsuneo thought and watched the screen as it showed the most of Maho's forces entering a forest, while the Maus and Panzer III drove towards the town and a detached force of four Panthers and a Tiger I camped near the only bridge on the battlefield.

"This would be a tough battle. For both sides," Tsuneo said and felt both his wife and friend nod.

Miho was looking at the map of the surrounding area, when Trafalgar's voice suddenly shouted something on the comms. "Repeat it, please," she said. "Enemy sighted! Thirteen enemy tanks, including the Flag, are in the forest on the left side!" he repeated and Miho tensed as her Sixth sense ability, that her inner self taught her, kicked in.

Suddenly, the voices of her teammates faded away, as a familiar tune started playing through the comms. She had heard that one song several times already, when she was studying at Kuromorimine.

Ob's stürmt oder schneit,

Ob die Sonne uns lacht,

Der Tag glühend heiß

Oder eiskalt die Nacht,

"Saori! Backup channel!" she shouted, hoping that the enemy didn't find it out. "I know that tune…" she heard Trafalgar mutter one the backup channel. "A very dirty tactic using Panzerlied to try and disable our communications," Erwin agreed and Miho sighed in relief, when no tunes played on the channel.

"Товарищ! Asking permission to mess up with their comms!" That was Boris and he sounded angry… no. Pissed off by that trick. "Granted," Miho said and sighed. She didn't want to do that, but it can be helpful in the long run. A wise decision. I remember that our former school has only one channel, her inner self announced and Miho tried her best to not cringe at the thought of how she would react a year before at the same action.

Erika was smirking, when Fritz confirmed that the comms of Oarai were successfully being messed up with, but she didn't expect their own comms to start playing a tune that screamed over everything that she or anyone else tried to say.

Союз нерушимый республик свободных

Сплотила навеки Великая Русь.

Да здравствует созданный волей народов

Единый, могучий Советский Союз!

"What?! How?!" she shouted in frustration, as she was forced to listen to the Soviet anthem, repeating on loop. "Create a backup channel!" Erika commanded her readioman and impatiently stomped her foot against the lowest part of the turret's interior.

She was so engrossed with stomping her foot, that she failed to notice that Oarai's main force managed to pass around, unnoticed. "All done, zweiter Kommandant!" her radioman shouted and brought Erika back to reality. "Kommandant! Do you copy?!" Erika tried the new channel.

There were several painful seconds of silence, before she finally got an answer. "Yes, I do. What happened?" Maho demanded to know. "Well… It seems that Oarai somehow got the right wavelength to use the same tactic as Fritz did against them," Erika responded and gulped. This didn't seem to end good for either her or him.

"Was?! You knew about it and didn't even bother to tell me?! Well, it seems to be richtig, that they counterattacked with the same tactic," Maho shouted back. "Uhh… sorry to interrupt, but the enemy is almost holed up on the top of that hill," Koume announced with a bit of fear and worry in her voice.

"WAS?!" Erika shouted in disbelief at hearing that, and as she ordered her driver to exit the forest and turn to the hill, she indeed saw Oarai holed up up there with sandbags being put around them, but there was something off.

The Tigers are missing! she realized after using the binoculars. "Their heavies are missing!" she shouted to the backup channel. "This is Panzer 20! Enemy T-34/85 sighted!" one of Fritz's Panthers shouted almost simultaneously with her. "Was?! They have a T-34 now?!" she responded to that, knowing that it would pose a problem rather sooner than later, if it isn't destroyed.

Boris smirked as his tank was running away from three Panthers to actually lure them into an ambush set up by Trafalgar. "Another shell incoming!" he shouted and Grigori once again did a sharp turn, this time to the left. "We see you, Москва," George's voice announced and after that, both Tigers of Oarai showed up from the sides, each aiming at one Panther.

Boris ordered Grigori to stop and turned the turret towards the 'pursuers' that now realized about being lured into a trap. "Пожар!" Boris shouted after Ivan loaded a random shell and the T-34/85 spit it's deadly load onto the last functioning Panther.

Fritz paled as he heard that he sent those Panthers into a trap from the last functioning tank of the trio he sent, only for the radioman to announce being disabled by the accursed T-34/85 with ZiS-S-53 cannon a second later.

"Scheiße!" he screamed in frustration at that. "Fritz! is that T-34 destroyed?!" Maho asked him suddenly. "Negative. It instead lured three Panthers into an ambush and wiped them out with the Tigers," he answered sadly. "Make sure it won't happen again," she said and after that, he caught sight of something in the bushes.

It was yellow and aiming straight at his tank! "Enemy sighted! Probably an E10, E25 or Jagdpanzer 38 (t)!" he shouted and his driver quickly turned the hull. However, it was a futile attempt, because the small TD fired at the tracks and drove away, revealing itself to really be a Jagdpanzer 38 (t).

"Damage report!" he shouted at his crew. "Left track destroyed! We must repair it, in order to move!" Karl announced after quickly peeking out from the driver's hatch. "Kommandant! Requesting backup until we repair the track!" Helmut shouted into the comms, knowing that only one Panther wouldn't save them from all shots before they finished the repairs.

"Understood, Panzer 5, go support Panzer 30!" Maho's voice responded. Phew… A Tiger II would help us to even regroup with the Maus, he thought and smirked. Even if Oarai scored the First Blood, they won't win this battle. "You might've won this battle, but the war is still on," Fritz muttered and smirked darkly. After all, everything's fair in love and war.