Chapter 94: Black Widow

The man with the little mustache flew into a rage. Once was bad enough, but to have his headquarters stolen twice in less than a week was beyond belief.

“What is going on? Are the Wehrmacht really this useless?”

One adjutant said softly, “It may have nothing to do with the Wehrmacht. My Führer, perhaps Hydra can help relieve your burden?”

“Oh?”

Soon afterward, Hitler met with an officer.

“Hi, Hitler!” The newcomer gave a perfectly proper Nazi salute. “John Schmidt sends his greetings!”

No one knew what Hitler and the leader of Hydra discussed.

On the other side, the entire Stalingrad front exploded with excitement.

Zhukov personally phoned the Kremlin. “Yes, Comrade General Secretary, it was that fine young man. He infiltrated the enemy camp alone and brought us back General of the Army Hermann Hoth, commander of the German Fourth Army. With Hoth captured, the enemy armored assault has been left more or less paralyzed. Our men are interrogating Hoth now, hoping to obtain more useful intelligence.”

“Excellent. Tell him for me: heroes who make outstanding contributions to the motherland will surely be rewarded.” Stalin was overjoyed, his eyes narrowing into pleased little slits.

Throughout history, decapitation strikes had always been devastatingly effective. Last time, taking out two generals had enabled the Stalingrad counteroffensive to succeed. This time, they might be able to recover at least half the city, perhaps?

Stalingrad was far too important. It was not only a major military hub, but also home to the Soviet Union’s largest tractor factory, which in fact had already been converted into a tank production plant after the war began. Large numbers of workers were essentially building tanks here and driving them straight out the gate to the front lines, where they rolled right into battle.

Stalin found Meimumu more and more pleasing to the eye. With a sweeping stroke of the pen, he approved the transfer: Comrade Lopatin had spoken only the truth, and his Party spirit was beyond question. He was hereby reassigned to command the Thirty-fourth Army of the Northwestern Front.

He had come within a hair’s breadth of rotting in prison, and suddenly he was merely transferred to another post.

Such were the vicissitudes of fortune.

When Lopatin came out of the Ministry of Internal Affairs office, he still felt as though he were dreaming. In general, anyone who went in there for coffee emerged stripped of skin if not dead outright.

Outside, naturally, his old subordinates came to congratulate him, and quietly told him that his good nephew had made merit and, in an indirect way, helped pull him out of this mess.

Meanwhile, Meimumu had no idea that his bargain-bin uncle had already been saved. In fact, Lopatin had even taken away a fair share of his accomplishments; otherwise the rewards would have been even greater.

Field Marshal Hoth was truly unlucky. In another timeline, he would not have been removed from command by Hitler until November 1943 for poor performance in combat. Now that he was a Soviet prisoner, and knowing the Soviets’ habits, he would most likely be shot after the war.

The moment Hoth was handed over to the Soviets, Meimumu received, for the first time in a long while, a single point of Fate Shift. The two generals before that had not yielded nothing either; perhaps they were fated to die anyway, and Meimumu had only received two scraps of fate, which was better than nothing.

In one stroke, he was promoted to Red Army lieutenant colonel and awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Meimumu knew his military career had basically reached its ceiling.

To become a Red Army general, one had at least to attend the officers’ advanced training course, and of course if one could go to the Soviet West Point, the Frunze Military Academy, that was the real mark of a proper Party pedigree.

With Lopatin dragging him down like a sinker, Meimumu could forget about climbing any higher in the army.

Besides, Chuikov was using him as an assassin anyway.

Meimumu did not mind. For the next stretch of time, he would simply be a guerrilla sniper. On one side he would pick off a couple of German officers, and on the other he would blow up a tank. In any case, he managed some sort of result every day, and that was satisfying enough.

He could no longer keep creating miracles, and Chuikov did not mind either.

After being ambushed twice in a row, the Germans had moved their headquarters far, far to the rear. How could command from the distant back lines possibly stay sharp? In any case, Chuikov and Zhukov’s job was to hold Stalingrad, and they were happy enough.

Just when Meimumu had already prepared to move on to Plan B, his aimless wandering finally led him to a target.

Afternoon of October 25.

“Ah! Help—”

“Catch her!”

“Careful, this girl is fierce!”

Then the staccato crack of an MP40 burst out.

Under normal circumstances, an ordinary Russian girl caught in such a situation would have been done for.

But the red-haired figure in Meimumu’s line of sight bent with astonishing agility, dodging the submachine-gun fire. Like a lithe cat, she rolled across the ground, then darted out of the ruined house.

A German soldier rushed to the windowsill, reloading his submachine gun while craning his head out to see where the girl had gone.

At that very moment, he flew backward.

Rat-a-tat-tat! The exact same sound of submachine-gun fire.

Seeing Meimumu waving at her from across the street, the Russian girl’s eyes lit with hope, and she sprinted over with quick, nimble steps.

Another German soldier was a bit more cautious and executed a textbook tactical maneuver, first pressing himself flat against the wall by the window.

However...

Boom!

With a thunderous blast, the German soldier’s brains and blood exploded outward, and he too was sent flying backward.

After the bombardment, that wall’s concrete had already been blown away by half, leaving only cracked fragments clinging to the steel reinforcement.

Under normal circumstances, a Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle might not even have been enough to blow out that wall. But after Meimumu quietly added the magic of Advanced Missile Casting, the bullet’s power was practically comparable to an anti-materiel sniper rifle.

“Ah!”

“The German’s dead!”

“Damn it, that bastard across the street has an anti-tank rifle!”

The system had given Meimumu German, so of course he could understand what they were saying. He was a little stunned. Only then did he remember that during the Second World War, anti-materiel sniper rifles did not yet have that name.

In the early years of the war there were anti-tank rifles, but as tank armor grew ever more obscene, those things faded into history. It was only after the war that anti-materiel rifles were developed specifically to deal with lightly armored vehicles such as armored cars and helicopters.

By then, the red-haired girl had already reached Meimumu’s side.

“They have numbers on their side. Move!” Meimumu said as he hurled a wooden-handled grenade across the street. With the aid of magic, it landed neatly through the opposite window, and once again there was chaos and panic.

Taking the girl with him, leaping and darting about with parkour-like movements, Meimumu did not slow down until they had run beyond three large houses. Only then did he have the leisure to take a good look at her.

In fact, the girl’s blue eyes were also fixed on him.

“Are you all right?” Meimumu asked.

“I... I just had a little of my clothes torn. Thank you for saving my life, comrade. I’m Natalia Arinovna Romanova. You can call me Natalia. Since the war began, I’ve been hiding in the basement at home. My parents never came back, and I ate up all the food. When I was starving, I ran out.” Her clear eyes were filled with gratitude.

Meimumu smiled.

At first hearing that name, he barely reacted. But the girl’s other name would one day shine brilliantly.

Natasha Romanoff.

Yes, she was the famous Black Widow!

One of the few female heroes in the Avengers!