The star set, and the toxic sea of clouds that hung over the Hive City year-round made the night pitch-black.
Enemy and friendly positions interlocked. Outside heavily fortified positions, no one dared light a campfire in the wilderness.
Only at dawn the next day, when firelight no longer stood out so glaringly, would warming fires be lit in scattered corners.
In a remote stretch of wilderness far from the war zone.
Soldiers carrying rifles crowded into a sheltered corner of an earthen slope, some squatting and others standing, huddled together for what little warmth they could get.
There were no flames and no hot food. Each soldier held only a cold, hardened block of compressed starch that might have been older than his grandfather.
But unlike their earlier inexperience and panic, their faces were now alert as they sat on the ground, calmly letting the food dissolve in their mouths.
The crowd was quiet until a series of clicks came from a distance-the crisp sound of hard-soled military boots striking solid ice.
"Colonel, sir!"
"Greetings, Colonel!"
The veterans rose one after another and saluted Sith. He briskly returned their salutes as he walked, looking at the pitifully small portions of food in their hands.
"Supplies have been cut off, and what little remained went to the Astra Militarum first. We only received a few blocks of compressed starch."
The officer in charge of logistics explained when he noticed. Sith looked away, turning toward a neatly dressed Astra Militarum messenger standing by a corner of the slope ahead.
Seeing Sith approach, especially the enemy blood from the earlier fighting still crusted on his uniform, the messenger abandoned his previous aloof arrogance toward the Planetary Defence Force and saluted well before Sith reached him.
"Colonel, sir, orders from headquarters!"
He presented a sheet of parchment. Sith casually returned the salute and took it, scanning it quickly with a slight frown.
A moment later, Sith put away the orders.
"Understood. My unit will head for the objective immediately."
Seeing Sith accept, the messenger let out a great sigh of relief while cautiously looking at the surrounding soldiers.
For some reason, even catching their sidelong glances left him uneasy, every hair on his body standing on end.
Let alone the heavy reek of blood coming from Sith before him.
The messenger saluted and practically fled, leaving the soldiers looking at Sith, awaiting their commander's orders.
"How much longer will the starch last?"
Sith asked, and an officer hurriedly answered:
"If we ration it, we can just about manage two days."
Sith looked toward the distant Hive City, which pierced the sea of clouds like an enormous mountain. After a moment, he let out a faint breath.
"Then we'll have to move faster."
They could not go back, could not starve to death, and certainly could not be disloyal! If Sith wanted to survive, his only option was to follow orders and head for the supply depot!
A dozen or so minutes later, the thousand-plus surviving veterans of a hundred battles emerged from the shadows beside the slope, traveling light as they ran toward the Hive City with rifles over their shoulders.
The sky was bright yet dark. As another day's sunlight shone through the sea of clouds, the 101st Regiment finally approached its objective after running for an entire day and night.
Breathing hard, the soldiers hid in the shadows at the corners of abandoned buildings outside the Hive City. Enormous transport pipes stretched straight ahead above their heads.
Sith stood in the pipes' shadow, surveying the distance through binoculars.
Lasers, roars, explosions. Before a gate, several hundred soldiers-a mixture of Astra Militarum and Planetary Defence Force troops-were struggling to hold off the rebels' encirclement from a makeshift defensive position.
"Good. Looks like the supply depot hasn't fallen yet."
Sith breathed a sigh of relief and turned toward the soldiers behind him, whose breathing was gradually settling. They exchanged a look, and Sith nodded.
"Eat all the starch. We attack in ten minutes!"
Moving in perfect unison, the veterans put their last bits of starch into their mouths. Their hands were not idle either: they immediately checked their weapons and loaded their last ammunition into their magazines.
Sith kept track of the time until a violent explosion suddenly sounded in the distance. Watching a defender clutch an explosive charge and take the rebels who had broken through down with him, Sith's eyes showed helplessness, and he abandoned the countdown.
He drew his sidearm and took his already-notched saber in his right hand.
Below him, the veterans who had been watching him with their heads raised immediately fixed bayonets to their rifles.
Then, without any words of encouragement, Sith turned and charged straight toward the gate.
The sudden appearance of reinforcements stunned the rebels, but once they saw there were only a thousand or so men, they furiously fought back.
The defenders, whose morale had soared at the arrival of reinforcements, also sank to rock bottom the instant they saw their numbers.
After all, the rebels had established plenty of defensive lines around the perimeter. Their firing positions might not have matched permanent fortifications, but against a thousand Planetary Defence Force troops who did not even have armor, how was that any different from a massacre?
But as red laser beams streaked through the air, the curses on both sides were abruptly choked off.
The rebels were silenced in the physical sense, while the defenders were given a fright.
There was almost no suspense to the battle. The veterans of a hundred battles had terrifyingly precise aim, to say nothing of Sith, whose attributes had all increased a hundredfold.
The firing positions practically became death notices for the rebels. Anyone who dared touch a machine gun had his head explode the very next second.
So much so that by the time Sith led his men into the rebels' ranks, those firing positions had not fired even a single round.
Then the rebels, who had thought they could avoid being crushed in close combat and were preparing to overwhelm Sith with numbers, were instantly brought to their senses by a lesson from sabers and bayonets.
The battle ended quickly. Under the furious assault of a thousand veterans of a hundred battles, the rebels immediately broke into a rout.
Only when the battle was over did a group of reinforcements come running and swearing from farther inside near the gate, toward the defenders who had witnessed the entire thing.
"Emperor above, who the fuck said those sons of bitches had broken through?!"
A burly man hurried over carrying a machine gun, accompanied by a dozen visibly more elite soldiers.
Hearing his voice, the defenders finally tore their attention away from Sith and his band of killing fiends, hurriedly stepping aside to let the burly man through.
But when the swearing man saw the blood-drenched unit that had suddenly appeared opposite him, he was so startled that he leveled his machine gun.
Sith frowned and immediately pointed his sidearm at him.
The burly man froze. Looking at Sith's muzzle, he said nothing, but he knew that if he dared move his finger anywhere near the trigger, his head would be gone the next second.
His Adam's apple bobbed, and a defender came over to quickly explain the situation.
Only then did the burly man lower his weapon. Although the tension faded from his eyes, his face remained thoroughly displeased.
"Didn't those bastards say an entire Astra Militarum regiment? Why did they only send this handful of... men?"
He had wanted to say expendables or some other derogatory term, but looking at the thousand men before him and considering the account of the battle he had just heard, he forced the insults back down.
Sith ignored the foul-mouthed man and instead looked toward the gate ahead, where a female tech-priest of the Adeptus Mechanicus was bustling around a device aimed at it.
At this, the burly man's expression grew even more displeased.
"That fucking half-assed Mechanicus priest. If she hadn't spent all this time failing to blast the gate open, we wouldn't have been stuck outside so long."
Speechless, Sith looked at the man who could not open his mouth without swearing. After glancing at his rank insignia, he walked straight toward the gate, speaking with a perfectly natural expression as he passed him.
"I'm the highest-ranking officer here. You're under my command now."
The burly man: "???"
Instinctively, he opened his mouth to deliver a greeting heavily involving someone's mother, but he had only just raised his head when Sith glared at him.
Looking at Sith's uniform, covered in fresh and old blood, and at the more numerous and more terrifying 101st Regiment, the burly man could only feel that the manners he had lost so long ago had suddenly returned.
His veterans, "survivors of two hundred battles," automatically began setting up defenses, while Sith approached the gate and watched the female tech-priest anxiously circle the device, her face full of confusion.
"How could this be? Why is the output so low?"
"Could the Machine Spirit be displeased?"
The female tech-priest muttered to herself, not even noticing that Sith placed both hands on the device after hearing her.
Not until Sith gripped the trigger and the device's energy readings began setting off frantic alarms.
Only then did the female tech-priest abruptly return her attention to it, staring dumbfounded at the energy readings surging wildly far beyond its design specifications.
"The... the Machine Spirit."
"Is having the time of its life?!!!"