"Enemy of Volk, you have come here to die the death of all deaths. You will know no victory here. Run while you still can." -Standard response to hostile naval presence, Volk Naval Traffic Control Guide as of M31.005

M31.004 21:04/Volk, the Volk System/the Palacial Plaza in Vrantanius

I kneeled on the ground, rubbing my head, as a feeling like my brain trying to break out of its skeletal prison washed over me. If I had my faculties about me, I would've been worrying about not being in cover, the visions, or another equally important problem, that wasn't coming to mind. But as it stood, I was rubbing my head, trying to soothe the incredible pain.

Either seconds or minutes later (I couldn't tell) I heard the familiar noise of carapace-clad footfalls approaching me until they stopped right next to me. Out of my peripheral vision, I could see a violet officer's coat. And like a bug flying by my ear, I could hear a voice speaking to me.

"W-what?" I asked, still a little befuddled, and looked up at Freya.

"I asked if you were alright," she said, an unreadable look crossing her face.

She's rethinking her decision to choose you. That little thing that had been in the back of my mind since before I could remember said.

"I'm fine." I lied.

"You took a lasbolt to the face, that should have left some damage to speak of." She said.

"Your Majesty." The stormtrooper lieutenant interrupted, cutting off what would have been the world's least productive argument, "We should get moving."

Freya turned back to me, "Can you move?"

"Yeah, probably," I said, standing up, and shooing away her hand as she tried to help me stand.

Without further comments or complaints, Second and Third Platoons moved forward, except now the lasrifle-equipped troopers were scanning every bit of cover, looking for threats.

Freya and I were comfortably situated in the centre of the knot of advancing troopers. And while Freya discussed the plan moving forward, I was looking at the looming palace before me. It was threatening in its architecture, but not in the manner of being openly hostile or distinctly military, it was more threatening in how ornate, ostentatious, and downright large it was. It projected an air of royalty so potent it seemed as if it could kill a commoner with a single glance.

But as I scanned its buttresses, windows, and other architectural features I was too low-born to know the names of, something was nagging at me. It's too quiet. We should be ducking for cover or hearing the screams of... lasfire by now.

"Freya," I addressed her.

"Yes?" She responded, turning away from the lieutenant while he was mid-sentence.

"Do you think it's a bit too... quiet?" I asked her, "If this is the epicentre of all loyalist forces in the city, then... shouldn't we be getting shot at by now?"

She thought for a moment before turning back to the lieutenant, "They make a good point. We could be moving into a trap."

"Unlikely," The lieutenant was keen to dismiss her, "The section we ran into was probably the only unit covering this entrance, and, with help from your friend, we routed them."

Freya gave the lieutenant a dirty look as he dismissed our concerns, "I still think we should move more cautiously."

"Your concerns are noted." The lieutenant said but gave his men no orders.

The conversation over, Freya and I lagged behind a little to be a little farther from the lieutenant.

Freya turned to me and, in a low voice, said, "He's getting his ass punished for failure to comply with a superior's orders after all this."

I gave her a surprised look, "Why don't you tell him that now?"

"Because he's not going to change anything, and because chewing him out might affect his abilities to keep my skin intact. Better he thinks I'm a mild pain in the ass than a real threat to his job when the shooting starts." She responded.

To be honest, I was surprised to hear her giving such a reasonable answer, I had half expected her reasoning to be entirely petty. So I simply nodded and continued walking with her toward the oppressively monolithic palace before me.

We made it inside without a single problem, where Second and Third Platoons split down into squads, so they could sweep the winding maze-like palace much quicker. Freya and I stayed with the lieutenant, whose name I still hadn't learned, and his accompaniment: a squad of las rifles, plus the four other men of his command squad. I had to ask Freya why it seemed as if we were also sweeping the premises, to which she responded:

"My guess is that the lieutenant wants to find somewhere suitable to set up and command the sweep from, though that's just a guess, I'm also not entirely sure what we're doing." She shrugged as if we weren't taunting death itself in an active combat zone.

The lieutenant slid in beside her, as if on cue, and said, "Up here there should be a larger chamber where we can set up a temporary command post. From the schematics I have, it looks as if, bar exceptional circumstances, we would be able to hold there indefinitely in the event of a concentrated assault."

Freya studied the dataslate the lieutenant proffered to her for a moment before handing it back, "You seem to have chosen well, I can only hope that the enemy has not already set up-"

As a handful of troopers checked one of the chambers to either side of our group, a chorus of lasfire greeted the poor trooper in the doorway. Simultaneously, the other door flew open with a similar result. We'd been flanked.

Without thinking, I thumbed the activator on my power axe, which crackled to life instantly and charged the door opposite the one our troopers had tried to breach. One of the auxiliaries¹Auxiliarie: a single trooper of the Solar Auxilia. This nomenclature is no longer in use to describe individuals in the Volk Army. screamed as he saw me and lost his aim. I cut him down first, causing the other auxiliaries in the chamber to focus on me.

Before any of them could fire, I buried my axe deep in the chest of the closest, but I knew I wasn't quick enough. Too slow. This is where it ends.

I braced for the impact of lasbolts on my void carapace, but it never came. I heard the bark of a bolt pistol firing off a handful of shots, and when I looked back, the two auxiliaries were dead. Freya was standing in the doorway, an ornate bolt pistol still smoking from the barrel.

After pausing for a moment, I rushed out of the room, finding only a single auxiliarie left among the melee. He was carrying his lasrifle like a club, holding it high above his head, preparing to strike.

In an instant I was between him and Freya, blocking the strike aimed at her with the guard of my axe, and manoeuvred my axe to swing back at him. I struck him in the head while he was still discombobulated.

With that, the melee was over, just as quickly as it had started. I took a few breaths to try and calm down so that I could take stock of the situation, but Freya got to her senses first.

"Well, that saves me the trouble of disciplining him later." She said.

"That's a... unique way to look at it," I said, looking at the bodies of the lieutenant, his command squad, and the lasrifle squad, all of whom had died in the ambush.

"Come on, we can't stay here for long." Freya said, probably wanting to be away from the steaming bodies of the dead, "I want to find a vox-relay, my comm-bead won't connect to HQ."

"What about-" I was interrupted by the HUD in my helmet glitching, before completely shutting down, I tore it off, damning my bad luck. As the pressure seals on my helmet broke, I was hit with a sense of unease, which I attributed to being so vulnerable in a location where three score men had already died.

"Sorry. Why won't master Vox work for... whatever you need to do?" I asked, gesturing down to the now-dead Vox officer.

"If it was in working condition, I'd still be able to hear HQ in my ear," She said.

I decided that she had a point as she pulled out a dataslate and began walking. I picked up a lasrifle from a dead trooper as we left, deciding that I didn't want to get into any melees without a helmet.

After an indeterminate amount of time, which I failed to note, due to my helmet, and its built-in chronometer being destroyed and abandoned, we were walking down a corridor with windows to the rest of the city to our right, and very few doors to our left. I noticed that seeing as we had climbed quite a few staircases, I was looking down upon the city below me.

We made it to a corner in the hall, which I noted had taken some sort of explosive, leaving it open to the elements and scattered with a wall and a large chunk of the floor above's worth of rubble. Freya looked up for more than a second and shouted, "Aha!" Before running over towards a panel which looked like fifty others we had already passed, only a bit larger, and started messing with it.

It came off the wall with a little fiddling, revealing a pristine vox relay. Without hesitation, Freya connected her dataslate to the relay using an arcane technique I couldn't possibly understand (though it did seem to involve a cable).

After a few minutes, she tapped me on my shoulder while my back was turned to her, nearly scaring me into shooting her.

"Hey," She said, while holding out a canteen, "Got some amersec, want a drink 'r two?"

I was positively befuddled, "Did you... get in contact with HQ?"

"Oh, yeah," she confirmed as she took a drink from the canteen full of what was no doubt potent alcohol.

Still confused, I had trouble finding the right words for the situation, "Is... someone coming?"

"Oh! Yeah, no." She responded, far too casually.

"What."

"We're stretched thin as it is, and the rest of Second and Third Platoons aren't coming in, so there's no one to spare to come and get us." She said, shrugging.

"Aren't you like... the second most important person... in the system? And you're... in an enemy-controlled zone... shouldn't someone be sending troops to come make sure you're safe?" I said, trying to wrap my head around the information that she was giving me.

"I'm safe. You're here after all. And so I'll be safe enough to wait until some troops are freed up to come 'n get us." She said, with a heartwarmingly genuine amount of confidence in my abilities. She's blind to how poorly you are performing.

"Alright then," I said, her choices were obviously not up for debate.

"I probably shouldn't have offered you any amersec, I forgot how drunk you got at that party. It might impact your fighting skills 'n all that." She said, staring down into the large container of alcohol she had brought into a combat mission. "Ya'know, if you ever need to talk about anything, I'm always here. In my eyes, you know, we're equals, and I don't want to come to you with something one day and have you feel like you can't come to me about something, you get what I'm saying?"

"Um... I think?" I responded, cutting off her upcoming rant.

"Good, good." She said, before a smile crossed her face, "Oh! I remember! Happy New Year!"

"Wait, what?" I asked, I couldn't believe it was New Year's already.

"Yeah! Tonight's the 31st!" She said, nearly jumping with joy, "That's why I brought the amersec! To celebrate!"

"And here I was thinking that you brought it because you're a high-functioning alcoholic," I said.

"Hey!" she punched me in the arm, clearly forgetting I was wearing void armour and doing more damage to her fist than she did to me. "Oh! and another thing! I found out that my royal Vox bypass code still works on the loyalist's orders channel!"

"What!?" I said. If we had known something like that a few months ago we could have won the war by now.

"Yeah! I can't decode their orders though. But we can send 'em!" She said, "They might know that it's me so we gotta send something memorable."

"Wait, what are you implying?" I asked, cautiously.

"Let's fuck with 'em!" She said enthusiastically.

"I..."

"That's an order," she said, a goofy grin crossing her face.

I opened and closed my mouth a few times in my best imitation of a goldfish, before snatching the amersec out of her hand, "I'll need a drink for this."

"Not too much! I need you in working order!" She said, grabbing it back after I had taken a deep, sour, sip. "Now, come with me!" she dragged me over towards the vox relay in the wall where a little mechanism was writing some sort of encoded orders onto a roll of parchment with a stylus. It was moving pretty fast too, the stylus never stopping for more than a second.

"Now," Freya said, proffering me a small do-dad, "Just say what you to want to into here, and it'll transmit it to every enemy officer on the battlefield, simple enough."

I took the offered mechanism gingerly and thought about what I could say. After a minute I had decided.

I spoke into the small brass mechanism, "Enemies to the Crown of Volk, I am coming. Be afraid."

Verity hit a button which made a satisfying clack, "Sent." She said.

And for a whole minute, the stylus which had been scratching orders went silent.

Trans_nerd

Apologies for the minor hiatus, I lost motivation for a long while. However! With the release of Legions Imperialis (what inspired me to write this whole thing anyway), My motivation has been borne anew! Im hoping to milk this burst of motivation for as long as I can. 

While I was gone I was working on a few different projects, one of which may make its way here eventually, though, that is if I finish it. 

Anyways! I hope you enjoyed this chapter! Im probably going to disappear again without warning sometime soon, but I hope to get one (maybe two) more chapters out before then!