A daughter of Siberia, it wasn't the resistance of the depleted Wehrmacht that troubled Svetlana during the 3rd Guards Army's advance on Brest - it was the tortuously wet July heat of the Pripet marshes.
Her Sveta didn't work more often than not, the wiring on the rifle squad's radio failed and the truck carrying their munitions got caught in the mud and had to be abandoned. But for Svetlana, it wasn't her failing equipment, the spoiling food or the warm vodka that made the march through the marsh such an ordeal.
It was the sweat matted through her long, brown hair. It was the suffocation of her uniform, the sweat pooling beneath her full breasts, rolling down the small of her back into her into her undergarments, turning her crotch into a swamp rivalling the one she was forced to trudge through day after day.
Her socks were soaked with her perspiration, making her doubt whether the squelch of her steps came from within or without her boots.
Ah, those boots. Tall, black leather boots taken from a Nazi she'd shot, who just happened to be her size. Finally, she'd thought in the heady days of March, something to replace her own wafer-thin, hole-ridden army issue shoes that did nothing to keep out the melting spring snows.
And while she could hardly deny that the shoes were a gift from God as she navigated the sticky Pripet mud, she couldn't help but despair that well-lined boots were equally good at trapping heat as they were keeping it out.
Her boots, boobs and stuffy uniform (that her lieutenant strictly refused to let her loosen in any way) all combined to make every step forward a struggle as the remorseless humidity enveloped her.
Swatting a mosquito away from her open lips, she offered a silent prayer to God to keep the bugs crawling across her uniform, if only they would abandon their plans to fly into her mouth, up her nostrils, and crawl across the back of her neck, slick with sweat.
As so often happened when facing awful circumstances so thoroughly out of her control, Sveta's heart was torn between the nihilistic depression such a situation aroused, and a powerful frustration which sought to give her the energy to rid herself of the malaise.
And for Svetlana, frustration could never exist on its own, it was always accompanied by that special itch.
Part 1: Scratching That Special Itch
Since her childhood, Svetlana had been cursed with a unique coping mechanism for moments of frustration and adversity - a sudden and undeniable sexual arousal.
Distinct from any other moment of excitement, that special itch came alive in her clit alone, a burning energy which demanded she rub it, hard.
Harder than hard.
Svetlana liked to think of herself as a sensual creature, and found herself bored by one-note lovers who idiotically, or arrogantly, thought sex was just one act repeated until satisfied.
But when overcome by the itch, which began as a minor but unceasing distraction and rapidly escalated into an all-consuming need to thrust her clit against the hardest object she could find, Sveta was reduced to that barbaric sexual-simplicity that so regularly left her disappointed.
Now, when she was alone, facing a private frustration, she recognised that the itch was honestly, a God sent gift. It focused her mind on the simplest possible task when overwhelmed by life's problems.
And its earth-shattering orgasm calmed her the fuck down afterwards, giving her the mental clarity to get her problem solved.
But when faced with an implacable foe like the wet heat of the marsh, her physiological defence mechanism became a curse.
Unable to solve the problem, she found no escape from the itch, which haunted her day and night, barely giving her rest after each unsatisfying orgasm to focus on anything other than the burning desire intermingling with the perspiration-matted hair covering her crotch.
The entire area was a disaster and it was all she could do not to march the entire day with her strong fingers stuffed down her panties, despite her heat exhaustion.
A week ago, she'd been covering a pair of rifle squads as they advanced on a farmhouse and barn the Germans were occupying. Lying flat on the driest patch of earth she could find, she'd become so pathetically distracted by the itch that she used a piece of wood to balance her SVT-40, freeing a hand to furiously push against her clit.
Her concentration slipped and she closed her eyes to focus on the feeling of her fingers pushing against her nub as she pressed down harder on her hand. Eyes tight shut as she struggled to keep her fingers, slick with her sweat and arousal alike, pressed tightly against her clit, she had no way to know that a Nazi had appeared with an MG-42 in the barn window.