He woke with a start, and immediately sat upright in his military field bed. He got up swiftly, threw on his uniform's jacket, put on his cap and grabbed his custom Luger P08 from the chair which stood by his bed at all times. Without second thought, he rushed into the rainstorm outside his tent, sprinting as fast as he could straight into the night.
Unlike any other point in his life, he wasn't thinking rationally at that moment. Maybe he wasn't even thinking at all. He could've been asking himself a million questions – what? Where? Why? – but instead, he ran forward at a neck-snapping pace.
The cry he had heard echoed in his head, and though he couldn't even recall exactly what it had screamed, his legs were powered by the terrifying realization that there could only be one voice hollering like that – Italy's.
.
.
Despite his undeniably inhuman stamina and physique, Germany was getting quite tired of his ceaseless sprint. His emotional rage was ending, the adrenaline in his veins had been absorbed. He was running through a rainstorm in the middle of the night and the cold water droplets were hacking away at his face from an angle, bringing his mind into a state of sobriety.
"I heard Feliciano's voice," he thought, "I am running to save him because that useless lump of carbon and proteins has gotten itself into trouble. Nicht schon wieder…"
He kept running over the wet soil, but snapped open the compass he kept in his chest pocket. His calculating mind sprang into action as he thought – Italy was meant to be holding up his last line of trench defenses before Bolzano, a few miles north of the city, in fact. He had presumably left his camp auxiliary camp in Innsbruck and had been running non-stop for an hour at an approximate of 24 km/h. After a few quick arithmetic equations he had concluded that he should be at the Italian's trenchline in less than a minute.
His feet felt heavier and heavier as he stepped off the puddle-filled dirt road and went crashing through the woods like a startled bear, only to fall, with a loud splash, straight into a long ditch. It was the Italian trench of course, with knee-high mud at the bottom and corpses lying everywhere. But the bodies were all cold and in the first stage of decomposition, and Germany concluded that none of them were Feliciano. He waded down the trench, his tall, raven-black officer boots now an ugly umber color as they were submerged in the cold, muddy concoction completely. At one point, his shoe kicked against something hard – a tree root, perhaps? – which, after an uncomfortable underwater plunge with Ludwig's right hand turned out to be, in fact, a discarded Carcano rifle. He wiped the weapon with his one clean sleeve and examined the weapon. There were no bodies in the particular section of the trench, and a Carcano like this wouldn't just be left behind if anyone was retreating. The soldier who this gun belonged to must have been taken by surprise – but by what?
Just then, Germany's strong fingers ran over a little pattern in the cold steel – two words engraved in the metal: Feliciano Vargas. So it was him – his dear little helpless friend – who got surprised by some overpowering force? Ludwig eyebrows came together as he scowled at the thoughts flooding his head. Feliciano in graver danger than he even thought. Maybe attacked by some wild animals, maybe something worse. Germany heaved himself up over the top of the trench and, being an excellent soldier and hunter alike, found a trail of footsteps left in the soggy soil of the rain-soaked forest. The footsteps were a soldier's shoes – in fact, he was even able to tell they were French officer shoes. But they seemed to leave a very strong print in the forest floor, meaning either the soldier was morbidly obese or – or he was carrying someone.
Feliciano.
Germany followed the tracks again, powered again by his immense rage. "That hurensohn, who the fuck does he think he is? And what is that dreckige hure doing to Feli!" He stormed through the woods, and soon reached a small abandoned fort outside of Bolzano. Of course, what location could be better than an underground bunker?
He approached the gate carefully. From his estimates, there were six French soldiers inside the walls, and God knows how many underground. Two were standing guard by the entrance into the fort's bunker, three were playing cards and one was sitting by the large steel gate. Germany began climbing the half-bombed, crumbling brick walls and almost slipped, as the bricks were soft and practically dissolving in the rain. Finally, he reached the top of the wall and crawled towards the main gate.
He fell onto the French soldier like thunder from the sky, knocking him out with the force of his shoe against his skull. He may have even been dead on the spot. He flipped the body over and took the French F1 grenade with a percussion fuse. Without pause he tugged off the fuse-pin, waited a few seconds and then skillfully flung the explosive at the group of soldiers playing cards.
"C'est quoi?" one of them asked, surprised by the soft splash of something into a puddle at his feet, but before any of them reacted, an ear-splitting explosion occurred and the sound bounced off the walls as all three soldiers went up in flames. The two bunker guards began shooting blindly into the darkness, but Ludwig was hiding behind an old Italian truck that stood parked at the side of the fort. He pulled his P08 Luger from its snug holster, rolled out from behind the car and took two shots – all he needed – and the two soldiers fell to the ground in a mixed puddle of their own blood and mud. He dashed past their bodies, kicked open the thick steel door and entered the narrow corridor descending sharply downwards, illuminated only by a few bare light bulbs suspended from the concrete ceiling like glowing hanged men.