There was an explosion on the second floor. The echo sobered him, made him smell death. He was overcome by fear of the reality of death. He had to pull himself together, above all for the sake of the children. Ruthra cursed everything he could; he decided he had to get out of here at any cost and end his hated service. But how to get out? One must win! You have to think!

The shot came from the side, so the bullet didn't go straight through. That fact made Ruthra wake up quickly, hearing rustling noises. There was no time to delay. He reloaded his grenade launcher and prepared a conventional fragmentation grenade. He listened – the danger could come from anywhere. "What if they attack from both sides of the structure at once?" – Ruthra pondered.

To avoid guessing and giving them the initiative, he decided to act on his own. Abruptly throwing the grenade around the corner, Ruthra quickly ran in the opposite direction, nestled against the wall, and peered out. He was not mistaken. The fighters had tactically calculated that he would leap forward after the explosion and had decided to outflank him. Two of them were already running toward him. Time was running out in fractions of a second, firing a grenade launcher so close was deadly to himself. There was no time to switch to the ARX-160.

The Groza's variant of the machine-grenade launcher system had the added inconvenience of combining the firing functions of a machine gun and a grenade launcher in one trigger, which required additional time to switch the trigger mechanism. Rutra decided to do what his comrades had marveled at when he used the trick in a combat situation. He calculated that the attackers must be quite close, extended his arm with the Thunderbolt, threw it momentarily behind the wall, and fired it downward at the feet of the attackers. The next moment there was a deafening rumble that mingled with the screaming and shrieking of the attackers. Ruthra had forgotten to turn on the noise reduction on his helmet, and he was a bit stunned as well.

He crouched against the main wall, swapped the Thunderbolt for an ARX-160, and waited for an attack from the other side. Moans and screams could be heard on the left side for a while, but they soon stopped. It was quiet. He waited. About 10 minutes passed. Nothing happened. He decided to wait a little longer, but everything stayed the same. Then he wanted to see if he was wrong about the number of attackers. If there were three of them, then no one should be alive anymore. The one upstairs might still be alive, though. He got up, walked quietly to the wall, crept to the very edge of the structure, and peered in the direction from which he had been shot. There was a dilapidated village house. It was quiet, nothing was happening. Rutra decided to provoke the enemy. He shot towards the house and ran back, looking out from behind the wall where he had fired the grenade launcher. A gruesome sight was revealed – two men lay with their stomachs ripped open. A foul odor made it hard to breathe. Ruthra decided to check what had become of the one on the second floor. It was important.

He stepped carefully over the dead and peered around the next corner. As he stuck his head out, a bullet whizzed by. Ruthra jumped back against the wall and waited. There was no attack, though he expected it from both sides. Everything was quiet again.

Ruthra stuck his machine gun around the corner and fired a line in the direction of the shooter. There was no response, so he waited again. There was silence for about five minutes. Rutra reloaded the grenade launcher. This was the last grenade. In addition, he prepared hand grenades. There were two of them – one fragmentation and one noise grenade. I threw the noise grenade first around the corner. There was an explosion. Despite the buzzing in my ears, I ran over to the building I had first shot at and threw the fragmentation one on the second floor. There was another explosion. As soon as it subsided, I listened. Everything seemed to be quiet.