They found Major Blackwood at dawn, crawling through the contaminated zone with chemical burns that had eaten through his protective gear. His skin sloughed off in wet sheets where the modified agents had made contact. The German patrol almost shot him until they saw he was clutching a bloodstained notebook - his final report on what was happening in Medical Station Three.

  His last act was pressing the papers into the intelligence officer's hands before the seizures took him. His body contorted as the combined nerve agents reached their final stage. The pages were stained with blood and vomit, the handwriting degrading from military precision to desperate scrawls:

  Day 1: Something's wrong with the chemical composition. Cooper started the screaming - said his nerves were on fire. We thought it was standard nerve gas. Mills couldn't take watching it. Shot himself, then Harrison. Called it mercy. Started a chain reaction. Half the platoon dead by their own hands or each other's within hours.

  Day 2: Anderson's unit tried cutting off contaminated limbs. The medics couldn't stop them. Said the burning was spreading through their bodies, that amputation was the only way. But the agents had already entered the bloodstream. They died screaming anyway, watching their remaining limbs dissolve from the inside.

  Day 3: Chen figured it out too late. The soil toxicity, the water table - it's all been weaponized. Multiple agents working in concert. The pain drives them mad before the physical effects finish them. Some beg to be killed. The lucky ones find someone willing to do it.

  The writing became more frantic:

  Harrison's remaining men broke first. Started tearing into each other - not from madness, from mercy. Better a quick death than feeling your organs liquefy. Found Carson's platoon dead in their bunker. They'd drawn straws, each man agreeing to end the next's suffering. The last one used his belt.

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  The chemical interactions aren't random. Multiple agents designed to work together, each making the others more potent. The ones who understand the science go mad faster. Chen worked it out before his unit fell. Wrote the molecular structures in his own blood before begging for death.

  The final pages were barely legible:

  They're not running from death anymore. They're running toward it. Looking for anyone with bullets left. The pain is worse than anything. Better to die quick. Better to find mercy in gunfire than feel yourself dissolve.

  Medical Station Three is hell. Men tearing off their own skin trying to stop the burning. The screaming never stops. The ones who understand what's happening to them suffer most. The ignorant just die. The ones who know beg for bullets.

  The last entry trailed into madness:

  She knew. Knew exactly what these combinations would do. Not just killing - making us understand the price of chemical warfare through our own bodies. Making us learn with our own dissolving flesh what real horror means. The mercy of cyanide versus the lesson of living through—

  The intelligence officer sealed the notebook as evidence while the medical team documented what remained of Major Blackwood. Behind their lines, Medical Station Three still echoed with the sounds of men begging for quick deaths as modified nerve agents continued their work.

  In the farmhouse cellar, Tanya traced casualty patterns on her maps. The metallic dryness persisted in the back of her throat as reports confirmed the agents were working exactly as designed - each compound making the others more potent, more terrible. Let them understand exactly what chemical warfare really meant when stripped of all restraint.

  The implementation continued in carefully chosen sectors. More men discovering that knowledge only made the horror worse. That understanding the science of their dying only amplified their suffering.

  They would break.

  Not from random madness, but from the pure clarity of knowing exactly what was happening to them.

  As she showed them precisely what it meant when chemical warfare transcended mere killing.

  Mad with pain, they would tell her anything.

  Give her everything.

  Just to earn the mercy of a bullet rather than endure the full course of her educated horror.

  And in chosen sectors, the lessons continued spreading through enemy lines.

  Teaching them all the true price of understanding.

  As she showed them exactly what chemical warfare meant when stripped of all mercy and constraint.