Recruitment.
Recruitment?
Konrad Curze picked up the document and read it over and over carefully—he went back and forth through every word. Then, lifting his head in confusion, he set the document down and picked up the supplementary materials beside it.
The materials ran to several hundred pages, astonishingly thick. The pale yellow pages bore intricate patterns along their edges, while the Imperial Aquila gleamed brightly at the top of every page. Curze dearly wanted to know what they were made of, to look so solemn.
He read them with cautious seriousness, so meticulous that he paused even to consider each punctuation mark.
He spent a full half-hour on the stack of materials and carefully annotated them with a pen. When he had finished all of it, Konrad Curze let out a heavy sigh.
Recruitment.
It was a very serious matter—serious enough that Konrad Curze was suddenly overcome by intense fatigue once more.
The Eighth Legion currently had only twenty thousand men. That number might have sounded large, but compared to the other Legions, it was pitifully small.
A Legion was still a Legion. Twenty thousand men—even if the Eighth Legion's duty was that of adjudicators rather than warriors meant for frontal assaults, that number was still far too low.
In other words, recruitment was imperative.
There could be no war without casualties. If their ranks were not replenished, then no matter how elite the Eighth Legion was, they would inevitably wither away little by little.
But where would they recruit from?
Konrad Curze began slowly recalling the words in the materials.
The current Iron Hands, formerly the Tenth Legion, had originally recruited from Terra as well. Not from prisons, however, but from all across the globe, with the greatest numbers and widest renown coming from Albia.
The Emperor's Children,