Reincarnated: Vive La France-Chapter 162: “No flag. No grave. Let him rot.”

Smoke rose over the skeleton of Alborán, the last broken town between Teruel and Valencia.

What had once been a quiet railway hub was now a ruin, its buildings shattered, its roads split by shell fire.

Smoke seeped through broken windows.

It was silent except the breath of men who knew they would not live to see another sunrise.

Fewer than two hundred fighters remained.

No reserves.

No supplies.

No orders left.

Just dust, blood, and the reality that the Unified Column had bled all the way here and would not go further.

Moreau stood with one arm bound to his chest which is already darkening with seeped blood.

His coat was torn, and the only thing untouched was the white armband on his wrist worn for every soldier under his command who hadn’t made it this far.

A map of Alborán was nailed to a makeshift board beside the remnants of the train station.

"We don’t have days," he said, eyes sweeping the room. "Maybe not hours."

Captain Renaud leaned on a ruined pillar, his leg bandaged from a firefight the day before. "What are we doing here, Moreau? There’s nothing left to hold. Why don’t we just fucking leave and go back to France. General Beauchamp has already given orders if situation is desparate then retreat this is not our battlefield now."

Moreau’s jawhardened. "I have given the people of Spain hope, if I leave like a dog then I am coward and everything I have stood up for is a lie."

Ortega stood beside a half-destroyed cargo truck, puffing slowly on a cigarette.

"Romantic bullshit," he muttered, but he wasn’t arguing.

He knew Moreau was right. "Southern quarter?"

Moreau nodded. "Take three barrels of fuel. Use the two grenadiers with a death wish."

Ortega grinned, nodded, and left without another word.

Clara Valera sat slouched in a medical stretcher nearby.

Her face was pale with fever, her side still wrapped from a previous wound.

She pushed herself upright.

"I’ll coordinate medical fallback at the rail station," she said.

"If they break through, I’ll hold the lobby myself."

Renaud frowned. "Clara, you need to be evacuated...."

"I’ve spent enough time running," she interrupted. "Let me stand."

Moreau gave no further command.

He just looked at each of them, and they knew.

"Every building becomes a barricade," he said.

"Every hallway a graveyard. No surrender. No retreat. If we fall, we fall like thunder."

At 0200, the first bombs came.

The sky screamed open with the thunder of German Stukas.

The southern pass was the first to glow red.

Ortega’s men waited in silence, crouched behind overturned trams and sandbagged balconies.

When the first tank cleared the corner, Ortega rose slowly, lit the oil trench with a torch, and watched the flames leap skyward.

"Welcome to Alborán," he said softly, pulling the pin on a grenade and sprinting directly into the gap between two tanks.

The grenade exploded with a flash that lit up the smoke like lightning.

For a moment, everything was white and then gone.

His lieutenant, face burned and lungs choked, screamed into the radio.

"Ortega’s down! Repeat....Ortega’s down!"

In the northwest, Clara’s hospital had become a charnel house.

Cots overturned.

IV bottles shattered.

A shell had split the second floor, and dust choked the stairwells.

"They’re inside!" a nurse shouted, pointing up the staircase.

"Third floor!"

Clara, with trembling fingers, grabbed a pistol from the belt of a fallen guard.

She dragged herself to the door and fired until the clip was empty.

"Move the wounded to the corridor!" she barked. "This isn’t a hospital anymore. It’s a barricade!"

The nurses moved like soldiers, dragging limp bodies to the far wall while another laid barbed wire across the entrance.

On the eastern flank, Renaud led his last functioning unit a ragtag mixture of POUM, Free Militia, and farmers who hadn’t fired a rifle before this week.

They fired into the smoke until the barrels steamed and jammed, then drew knives and clubs.

A boy beside him was split open by a burst of machine-gun fire.

Another man’s arm was blown clean off.

Renaud pressed a tourniquet with one hand and fired his pistol with the other until the hammer clicked dry.

Then he was hit shrapnel tore through his thigh.

He fell into a crater, pain screaming through him.

He grabbed the field radio, voice shaking. "Pull back! All units fall to the central square!"

In the heart of the town, Moreau stood on the steps of the ruined cathedral.

Twelve fighters around him.

Four rifles.

One machine gun with twenty rounds.

He looked at them each in turn.

"Positions."

A boy, barely sixteen, cradled a bolt-action rifle. "Sir... we don’t have enough bullets."

Moreau crouched beside him, placed a hand on his shoulder. "Then shoot twice as loud."

A second passed.

Then a third.

Then the tanks came.

The final assault hit just after dawn.

Panzers rolled across corpses.

Italian units burned what remained of the town’s flanks.

Mortar fire rained on the cathedral.

The bell tower fell in a scream of metal and stone.

Clara’s radio went silent as the western wing of the hospital collapsed.

Renaud’s unit what was left had made it to the square, dragging the wounded with them.

He limped to Moreau’s side, one hand pressing a bloody bandage to his hip.

"They’re inside the station. Nothing left on the flanks."

Moreau nodded. "We end it here."

The first enemy wave breached the square.

Machine guns roared.

Molotovs exploded against tanks.

Men screamed, died, rose again, and died again.

Moreau was hit in the leg, then in the shoulder. He stayed standing.

He fired until his rifle clicked empty, then picked up a fallen pistol.

"Burn it," he said.

A signal flare screamed into the sky.

The buried fuel caches, rigged beneath the square, ignited in a chain of explosions.

The plaza vanished in flame.

Panzers were lifted and thrown like toys.

Even the church melted in the blast.

For hours afterward, the town was still.

When the German troops entered the square, the ruins smoldered.

Ash fell like snow.

A medic found Moreau crushed beneath a collapsed pillar, unconscious, half-buried, but breathing.

Guderian arrived with two officers.

They pulled the rubble away, revealing the bloodied, broken major.

"You should be dead," Guderian muttered.

Moreau opened one eye. "And yet here I am."

"You lost."

"I stood."

Guderian raised his pistol, then paused.

"No flag. No grave. Let him rot."

They left him there.

And though the war moved on.

Alborán stayed quiet.

In a barn near Castellón, a refugee child painted a lion on the wall with charcoal.

Beneath it, he wrote.

He stood until the world forgot how to kneel.

In Paris, Beauchamp opened a sealed telegram.

Valencia fallen. Unified Column dissolved. Major Charles Moreau presumed dead.

Beauchamp stared out the window, lit a cigarette, and whispered.

"Legends don’t die. They go underground."

And somewhere beneath the ash, buried in the quiet Alborán, the lion slept.

Still breathing.