The atmosphere turned icy in an instant.
Everyone held their breath, waiting for the inevitable outburst. By convention, the standard response for a newly arrived Commissar faced with such blatant provocation was to draw his Bolt Pistol on the spot and blast the veteran's head into pulp as a warning to the others.
Yet Alexander did not move.
He simply looked calmly at the veteran on the verge of losing control, his pale golden eyes steady.
He could clearly sense the abyss of pain, despair, and post-traumatic stress hidden beneath the veteran's furious exterior.
He sensed no malice in him, only an urge to die. The man was testing the limits of authority this way-or rather, he longed for authority to end his life and free him from those endlessly tormenting memories.
"What is your name, soldier?" Alexander asked. His voice was quiet but remarkably steady, carrying a soothing strength.
The veteran froze for a moment. He had not expected that response.
"...Orik," he answered instinctively.
"Orik." Alexander nodded. "Which regiment?"
"...Formerly the Cadian 8th Regiment. Kasrkin assault squad." Orik's voice grew subdued. As he spoke his unit's designation, unmistakable pride and pain flashed across his weathered face.
"Kasrkin..." Alexander repeated the name. They were Cadia's finest troops, legends of the Imperium. "I've read your battle reports. At Iron Gorge, your three companies held off the Black Legion's assault for three hours, buying precious time for the main force to withdraw during the 13th Black Crusade. You are heroes, Sergeant Orik."
Orik was utterly stunned.
He had never imagined that this young Commissar, who looked barely old enough to shave, would know their unit's designation, let alone that insignificant battle, long since buried beneath countless defeats.
"Heroes?" Orik gave a bitter laugh, his voice hoarse. "In that battle, my company had three hundred and twenty-seven brothers. I was the only one who survived. What kind of fucking hero does that make me? I'm just a coward who ran over his brothers' corpses to escape!"
He grew agitated again, his eyes turning bloodshot.
Alexander stepped forward and did something that stunned everyone, including Orik himself.
He reached out and gently, yet with extraordinary firmness, embraced the veteran, who was far taller and stronger than he was.
He said nothing. He simply held him.
There was not a trace of revulsion in that embrace. It was filled with warmth, understanding, and silent comfort.
Orik's iron-hard body went rigid. He could smell the clean scent of incense on the young Commissar. He could feel the other man's steady, powerful heartbeat.
An indescribable emotion, like a warm current, pierced the thick defenses he had built around his heart with alcohol and brutality. His eyes, so accustomed to death and horror, suddenly blurred.
He wanted to push him away. He wanted to roar. He wanted to prove he was no weakling in need of sympathy.
But his body would not obey. The pain, grief, and guilt bottled up inside him, enough to drive a man mad, found an outlet like floodwaters bursting through a dam.
This Kasrkin veteran, who had never taken a single step back before a charge of Chaos Space Marines, this hardened man who had survived the apocalypse of a planet's destruction, began bawling like a child in front of everyone.
He cried with heart-wrenching anguish, pouring all his pain onto the young Commissar's shoulder.
The entire camp fell deathly silent.
Everyone stared, dumbfounded, at a scene that seemed like something out of magical realism.
Their image of a Commissar-cold, merciless, treating human lives as worthless-was completely overturned in that moment.
Alexander kept holding him in silence until Orik's sobbing gradually subsided into low, broken sniffles.
Only then did he gently pat the veteran's broad back.
"I know you're no coward, Sergeant." His voice reached every person there clearly. "You're alive because your brothers wanted you to live."
"Through their sacrifice, they planted Cadia's last banner in your soul. They wanted you to carry that banner and keep fighting. They wanted you, one day, to plant it in Cadia's soil again with your own hands."
"Your life no longer belongs to you alone. It is the continuation of those three hundred and twenty-six brothers' lives. You have no right to insult their sacrifice with alcohol and self-destruction."
Alexander released him and looked straight into Orik's bloodshot eyes.
"Now tell me, Sergeant Orik. Are you willing to take up this banner?"
Orik looked at the young face before him, at those pale golden eyes that seemed able to see through everything.
He saw no pity in them, no sympathy.
Only understanding, and an unquestionable... trust.
Slowly, he straightened his back, which had grown somewhat stooped from drinking. He raised an arm and roughly wiped the tears and mucus from his face with his scarred, threadbare sleeve.
Then he stood at attention, snapping his heels together with a sharp crack.
He gave Alexander a salute so flawless it could have belonged in a textbook.
"Sergeant Orik, Kasrkin, formerly of the Cadian 8th Regiment!" His voice was no longer hoarse and defeated. It rang with steel once more. "I am willing, Commissar, sir!"
Alexander smiled and returned the salute.
Then he turned to face the soldiers, who were still in shock.
"My name is Alexander von Lawrence. I am your new Commissar."
"I know who you are. You are the survivors of Cadia, the orphans of Taro, the ghosts who crawled back from countless battlefields forgotten by the Imperium. You have lost your homes, your comrades, your honor."
"You think you are trash, refuse, expendable parts in the Imperium's war machine, ready to be discarded at any moment."
His words pierced every soldier's heart with the precision of a knife.
"But today, I stand here to tell you!" His voice began to fill with the uniquely incendiary power of a "heretical leader." "You are not trash!"
"You are embers!"
"You are the toughest, most tenacious embers, tempered in the fires of hell and still burning!"