"What is the 101st Regiment doing?"
"Looks like they're... drilling?"
In front of the trenches, as the other Planetary Defence Force units around them, the Astra Militarum overseeing them from behind, and even the distant rebels watched dumbstruck, Sith stood at the head of his regiment, weapon in hand, leading his soldiers through shooting and close-combat drills.
"I have to say, the 101st Regiment is more elite than I imagined."
The Commissar, who had been staring fixedly at Sith and watching for any attempt to flee, soon found his attention drawn to the soldiers' outstanding performance as their close-combat movements grew more practiced and their shooting more accurate.
Though they still fell short of the Astra Militarum, whose members were the best of the best, Sith's 101st Regiment could certainly be called elite among the Planetary Defence Force, whose ranks were filled with deadweight and whose training and equipment were abysmal.
After all, in terms of sheer numbers, the soldiers under Sith had already practiced close combat over ten thousand times and fired over ten thousand shots in those mere twenty minutes.
That pace was not fast, but looking at his hungry, freezing soldiers, Sith knew this was the limit of how much he could train them.
Another bugle call sounded behind the trenches. Sith let out a faint cloud of white breath and loaded a fresh magazine, surrounded by trenches where heads began to stir at the sound.
Large numbers of soldiers rose under the shouted orders of the officers behind them. Despair and terror filled their faces as they instinctively looked toward the rebel positions, only to shut their eyes in fright at the countless corpses ahead.
At that moment, only the repeated sharp cracks of executions could keep their bodies, shaking violently in the cold wind, firmly nailed to their positions.
As the execution shots continued, the Commissar inspected the line. After a single sweep, his gaze finally settled on Sith's unit again.
Because no matter how the officers overseeing them paced behind them, not one soldier in Sith's entire regiment showed any sign of being "insufficiently loyal."
On the contrary, across the entire front, the morale of Sith's soldiers was outrageously high!
Sith glanced at the Commissar staring at him in astonishment and the officers behind him, who exchanged looks as though questioning everything they knew, and felt somewhat moved himself:
"This hundredfold multiplier really is a conceptual ability!"
"Even my soldiers' morale gets multiplied a hundredfold."
Though their morale had originally been low, after being multiplied a hundredfold, his soldiers' fighting spirit had already overwhelmed that of all their comrades.
"If their starting morale were any higher, wouldn't they be clamoring to pick fights after it got multiplied a hundredfold?"
As he grumbled briefly, the bugle calls that had originally sounded every five minutes began sounding every minute.
The more frequent bugle calls brought more soldiers out of the trenches.
The cold wind swept over the hard, frozen ground and through the crowd, yet no longer felt cold.
There were only countless eyes staring fixedly at the dense firing positions in the distance and the guns within them pointing their way.
There were no words, no hope, only hands gripping weapons so hard they turned white.
Until the final bugle call sounded on time amid the moaning cold wind...
"For the Emperor! For the Imperium of Man!!!"
The officers roared, firing their pistols into the sky, followed by clearly audible deep breaths and then a surging, thunderous charge!
A tide of men, a barrage of bullets, roars.
Machine guns sent out long, dark-red streaks of light, sweeping down the densely packed crowd like whips.
Lacking armor, the Planetary Defence Force soldiers burst into masses of blood and flesh the instant they faced the concentrated fire pouring from the rebel firing positions.
So much so that the comrades behind them had to keep charging and shouting through a rain of blood and severed limbs.
They pulled the triggers of their Lasguns desperately, pouring ammunition toward the rebels without a thought for anything else.
Yet those laser shots, fired with every ounce of their strength, ultimately left nothing but little blackened marks on the fronts of the rebel bunkers...
The same charge, the same deaths.
The officers overseeing the attack looked away helplessly. The Astra Militarum exchanged glances before finally turning toward their commander.
The commander's face was indifferent, and he was about to look away as well, but as the smoke at the front dispersed slightly, the sight before him rooted him to the spot.
The commander's eyes widened instantly. Those around him who had been looking his way paused, then followed his gaze.
Then the distant sight made their eyes widen too!
"They... they made it up there???"
Everyone was stunned. Watching the dense tide of enemies as Sith finally reached their lines, forcing all the rebels to leave their firing positions and enter the trenches to fight him to the death, the commander froze briefly before whipping around toward the messenger beside him:
"Quick! All artillery, disregard friend or foe! Fire every shell!"
The Astra Militarum moved immediately, their faces showing no surprise, only acceptance that this was as it should be.
At the front, Sith held a pistol in his left hand and a saber in his right. Layers of corpses lay beneath his feet, while the rebels crowded together around him, staring at him in terror and not daring to come half a step closer.
Then a heavy artillery shell landed amid the melee nearby.
Severed limbs and blood rained down, and the blast stunned the soldiers on both sides who had been desperately fighting.
Standing atop the pile of corpses, Sith shot dead a distant rebel attempting to rake him with heavy weapons, then gritted his teeth and looked back at the Astra Militarum, who had unleashed the bombardment and stood ready for battle.
That shell had certainly killed plenty of enemies.
But it would have been better if they had let him get farther away before blanketing the area with artillery fire!
There was no time to curse. Sith raised his hand again and shot another rebel beside the heavy weapon who still refused to give up, then pointed farther ahead as he addressed his soldiers amid the increasingly dense shellfire:
"Push forward! Keep pushing forward!"
"If you want to live, cut your way through these traitors!"
The soldiers who had survived this long had vicious eyes. At Sith's command, they quickly finished off the opponents before them and followed him in another rush at the rebels.
Already stunned by the bombardment, the rebels had never expected a band of ruthless men to dare cross straight through the entire barrage, cutting every enemy in their path in half along the way.
The officer at their head, in particular, seemed blessed by the Emperor. He fired his pistol like a machine gun, and the firing positions blocking his path did not even have time to pull their triggers.
Through the gaps in the shellfire, the Astra Militarum behind them also witnessed Sith's continued assault.
The sight of him crossing that sea of fire and cutting through the entire rebel position under heavy artillery fire left even the strictest Commissar speechless with shock.
"If I'd known, I wouldn't have sent them to the front..."
The commander could not help feeling some regret as well. After all, he had thought he was merely throwing away a handful of the Emperor's worthless sand, only to discover on closer inspection that it contained such a hard, shining silver coin!
Gold coins were the Astartes. To be recognized as a silver coin was already the highest praise a mortal force could receive.
But the commander's regret lasted only a brief instant. After witnessing Sith lead his men clean through the entire rebel defensive line, he glanced at a distant, isolated friendly position on his map, surrounded by a dense mass of red dots.
After some thought, the commander pointed toward Sith:
"Send word to that unit. Have them keep advancing and reinforce the encircled supply depot."
The others looked over briefly. After all, advancing deep behind enemy lines without support to reinforce a position that might already have fallen looked like a death sentence no matter how one viewed it.
But supplies were scarce, and a unit had finally broken through the enemy, so the commander could only make a last-ditch attempt and assign Sith the task of finding out the situation with the supplies.
By then, smoke filled the air. The rebels in the positions had suffered heavy casualties from the artillery fire and no longer dared leave their bunkers at all.
Only in the rear, far from the battle line, did Sith plant his saber in the ground and sit among the heaps of corpses, catching his breath as he surveyed the soldiers under his command who had survived this long.
Looking at their faces, as though they had been reborn, and the killing intent in their eyes that had almost taken physical form, Sith became certain of one thing.
In this fucked-up galaxy where it was Waaagh this and Waaagh that at the drop of a hat, battle-hardened veterans would be the bare minimum for his troops from now on!