You Want to Promote Me? I Don't Even Want It!

The roar of battle came swiftly and ended just as swiftly. When the last Genestealer hybrid was cleaved in two by a Chainsword, the narrow passage fell back into an eerie silence. Only the Players' heavy breathing remained, along with the low hum of idling Chainsword engines.

Some Players casually shut off their Chainsword engines or wiped their combat knives, stained with Xenos blood, on the corpses before sheathing them. Others checked their condition, saw that they were missing arms or legs and that their stats had dropped severely, then decisively pulled out their pistols and fired at their own temples. A flash of white light passed, and seconds later, an intact Astra Militarum soldier respawned beside Big Eagle Cop.

Once they had caught their breath, everyone's gaze, intentional or otherwise, focused on the massive figure standing amid the pile of corpses.

Big Eagle Cop, and the bloody carpet at his feet, almost entirely of his own making.

After a brief silence, the battlefield erupted with cries of amazement and despair.

"Holy shit, those stats. That's way too fucking broken!" One Player looked at a mutant crushed into a meat pancake, then at Big Eagle Cop, and offered his heartfelt praise.

"This is pure wheelchair mode. We ordinary mortals could struggle our whole lives and still only reach Lord Ogryn's lower limit." Another Player leaned against the wall, his tone filled with the world-weary resignation of someone who had seen through life.

"Fuck, where's the delete-account button in this game?! I'm rerolling until I get Ogryn as my race. I'm not logging in otherwise!" One Player who had just reset on the spot declared that his defenses had been utterly shattered.

The Players' complaints were not without reason. In terms of combat sense, none of them were much worse than Big Eagle Cop. They were all rank-and-file soldiers who had fought and died together amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. There was no reason for there to be any great difference. They could assess an enemy's threat, spot openings to attack, and find chances to survive through storms of gunfire just as well as he could.

But the Ogryn racial stats were simply too high.

The gap was despairing. They could hack away two or three times with combat knives and still fail to completely sever a mutant's arm bone, while Big Eagle Cop only needed one plain, unremarkable swing of his iron bar to smash the same monster thirty centimeters shorter. Strength, endurance, organ vitality... the gulf in these basic attributes could not be bridged by so-called combat skill.

"Seriously," someone said, "those stats are comparable to an Adeptus Astartes, aren't they?"

"Not that powerless."

"Not that weak."

"Oh, so he's an Adeptus Astartes. I thought he was an Ogryn with ALS."

"Seriously, an Ogryn definitely can't beat an ordinary Adeptus Astartes one-on-one, but if all one hundred and twenty of us were Ogryns, even a Chaos Space Marine kill team would be dumbfounded when they showed up..."

Hearing the other Players, Big Eagle Cop, as the Squad Leader, chuckled foolishly and proudly said, "Good luck, good luck."

He patted his broad, solid chest with a hand as large as a fan, producing muffled thumps. "The only reason I couldn't kill that pure-blood Genestealer before was 'cause I wasn't used to the controls. Now that I'm used to 'em, I could handle ten more. One Genestealer, one club—I'll smash every last one of 'em into the wall so hard you won't be able to pry 'em off!"

His half-joking, half-serious boast immediately drew another round of reactions from the Players.

"You've already put it like that. What else can I say? Just 666."

"666, this guy's a legend."

The Players' voices were full of envy, jealousy, and resentment, but there was nothing they could do. In the original Warhammer setting, the Ogryn abhuman race at least had the fatal restriction of [Extremely Low Intelligence] to balance out their terrifying physical qualities.

After all, a species that could not even count clearly from one to nine naturally could not be expected to shoulder major responsibilities on the battlefield.

But in the game, Players naturally could not truly become idiots. Their organs of thought and their souls—whether Earthlings even possessed souls in the Warhammer worldview, or souls in the Warp, was something Bit was still investigating—remained safely inside the Game Pods on Earth. Through Bit's authority, they merely transmitted control signals into these flesh-and-blood bodies in another universe.

This turned Ogryn Players into a complete Bug: they possessed the combat wisdom and reaction speed of human veterans, while also possessing Ogryns' terrifying strength and physiques, even greater than those of the Adeptus Astartes. Once that sole weakness had been covered, all that remained was pure power.

If he wished, Big Eagle Cop could even rely on the extraordinary stamina and mental capacity granted by a Player's soul to become an excellent battlefield commander... but an Ogryn serving as a battlefield commander looked too fucking strange from every angle, and Big Eagle Cop himself had absolutely no desire for promotion.

In Big Eagle Cop's own words: "I'm doing just fine as a rank-and-file soldier. What do you mean, transferring me to be a commander? If the Company Commander hadn't appointed me, I wouldn't even wanna be Squad Leader. I ain't done chopping people up yet!"

Big Eagle Cop's words also reflected the general feelings of many ordinary Players: they simply did not want promotions. They all saw how Ruan Wenbo spent every day thinking—march routes, battlefield planning, allocation of merit, tactical measures... commanders had to consider every last detail.

At the end of the day, most Players were here to play a game. After growing accustomed to the brutal environment of the hive city, in this extreme realism, pulling a trigger and swinging a blade carried a primal, direct pleasure of their own. Perhaps a small number of Players enjoyed being commanders and the feeling of planning from afar and deciding victory a thousand miles away, but they were ultimately a minority. If most Players were forcibly promoted, they would not even be willing.

It had to be said that there was no strict hierarchy among Players, nor had they ever possessed any deeply ingrained sense of authority. We followed your command because we trusted your ability; we gave you the authority to command us, and you had to bear the corresponding responsibility. If your terrible command caused the battle to collapse, then be prepared to get flamed to shit. Not to mention that this game had friendly fire. Once conflicts escalated, things might not end with mere verbal clashes.

In a sense, this was also a manifestation of responsibility. The Players clearly understood the limits of their own abilities, knew what they wanted to do, and knew what position they belonged in. Therefore, they never sought power they should not have, nor power they did not want.

And whether in the past, present, or future, there had always been far too many people in this dark and cruel universe who could not see their own place. Whether it was Magnus, who considered himself exceptionally gifted; the mad Cardinal Vandire, corrupted by power; or those High Lords who still sought to seize power and oppose Guilliman even after the Regent's return... all they brought to the Imperium of Man was suffering, and more suffering.