Chapter 14

261. Enough with the narcissism: You're not special. Ok? Get that through your thick skull. I swear, some people think so highly of themselves that I half expect to walk in on them masturbating to a picture of themselves. Don't be Fulgrim. You're not going to be the one that turns the tide of the war, get over it. You can sometimes perform vital actions in minor battles that could in turn help someone who is actually in a position to turn the tide of the war, but 99% of the time that's the best you can hope for. Stop acting like you were personally assigned by the Emperor to save the day, because I'm fairly certain he's so sick of that that he intentionally makes them get eaten by Tyranids because they thought they could take on a Hive Tyrant.

262. Make sure it's actually meat: Meat is the first thing to go out the windows when rations get strained, aside from fresh produce that is. So once we run out of Grox meat and dead soldiers, the Administratum passes off some pretty iffy things as mean. If you're lucky, they just stuffed the sausage full of bread. Sometimes rather moldy bread. If you're unlucky, it's...less pleasant affairs. Some sort of toxic sludge that someone thought was good enough to eat. Half the ship was puking within three days, and fifty men died. And we had real meat the next day.

263. Don't be a bunch of try hards: The Alpha Legion are fucking hilarious. Their Primarch(s?) was(were?) the last to join the crusade. Guilliman said that they would never be as impressive as the Ultramarines and their gold plated dicks, so they've had an inferiority complex ever since. Said inferiority complex developed into a complexity addiction just so that they can prove that they're the smartest people in the galaxy because of how utterly convoluted their plans are. When that Chaos Lord I keep bringing up was carving her way across Imperial space, she had several smaller fronts that she had commanded by Chaos Space Marine warbands. The brief time I spent on the front commanded by the Alpha Legion was easily the smoothest part of the war (granted that's not saying too much, but they are a massive step down from the rest of the traitor legions.) They spent a year forming stupid complex lines of defense on this one planet, so that we couldn't take it from them. Deep underground complexes, mountain fortresses, layers of ambush, sleeper agents planted in towns, the works. One problem. We had no orders to take their territory. Just make sure that the rest of the planet didn't fall into their hands. So all that hard work? Never came to anything. In fact, if we hadn't gotten it out of a captured enemy commander, we never would've learned any of it. Thousands of foot soldiers died in cave ins when they were digging those tunnels. And the Alpha Legion never got to use their toys. It's the freaking best. Are we sure that they aren't the ones that directly worship Tzeentch? They seem more like his kind of legion than the Thousand Sons.

264. Looting won't do jack for you: Now please note, I am talking about looting material goods. Weaponry, munitions, food and other military supplies? Loot everything you can carry and then a few more things for me. But gold, chalices, paintings, rings, watches, and things of that nature? Don't bother. If you're lucky, you're just end with a bunch of dead weight that you can't move. That's the thing about looting, most of it is pretty expensive stuff that you can't sell without giving yourself away as a looter. Assuming you can find someone who can both afford and actually wants those solid gold rings. So if you do try and sell if, the local commissar will see a giant sign saying "do the usual." Assuming the corpse you try and pull it off of wasn't actually a corpse.

265. Take more than what you think you need: You will always, ALWAYS, need more than you think you do. Tell me something, When was the last time you took exactly what you needed, not a smidgen more, and ended up ok? Never. You never used every last shot that you had, you always have some left over. Because you'd make an ass of yourself if you only took the exact number of shots that you needed. And missed just once. Same goes to grenades. Had a couple of troopers who hadn't needed to use their grenades in months, so they didn't bother bringing them. Grenades sure would've made storming those trenches easier. Would've kept those gunners from tearing those idiots to shreds.

266. Recognize when absolute cunts are right: Don't want to talk about this, but I have to. Met a blueblood. He was an utter prick. Cut from the same cloth as all the other prick bluebloods. But he knew what he was doing. I really wanted to ignore him, but he said that if we walked right onto a highway while all dressed as rich merchants, the bandits we were hunting would come straight to us and more than close enough to kill. I wanted search parties working around the clock, but eventually went with him because I couldn't get enough men. The men who did go on search parties with other commanders died while we all accomplished our mission. Blueblood smugly said that he was an expert at tracking outlaws. I downed three bottles, screamed for an hour, swore for two more, broke something, then wrote this to talk more about how right he was. Cunt.

267. Don't underestimate (or overestimate) psychological warfare: My daughter knows a very neat little trick. She can use her psyker powers to mess with the cognition of those we are fighting. In a minor brush war against some rebels, she made an enemy platoon think that we were all thirty foot tall monstrosities. Half of them fled, while the other half tried to shoot at our nonexistent thirty foot tall faces. It was a clean sweep from that point on. The obvious part is knowing that that is a tool that can be used, I've seen plenty of costly battles that could've been easy if we had weakened the enemy's resolve before charging them. However, the more important lesson is to recognize when this trick won't work. It'll work on rebels, Chaos footsoldiers Gretchen, and MAYBE some kinds of Eldar. MAYBE! My money would be on Corsairs and not much else. If you're lucky. You'd think it'd work on Tau, but for some reason they don't break as much as you think they would. Something about the Ethereals. Anyway, intimidation tactics don't work on Daemons. Go fucking figure. I know we were getting desperate during the Chaos Lord's campaign, but really? Fucking really?

268. Flamers don't work on Necrons: It's kind of telling that, of all the enemies of man, my sister hates the Necrons the most for this reason. Cultists burn, Orks burn, Tyranids burn, Eldar burn, Tau burn, even Chaos Space Marines burn if you can make an opening in their armor. But Necrons do not burn (Unless you can pull a Ciaphas Cain, but we rarely have eight million liters of promethium on hand.) Leave flamers behind when fighting them, they don't help. The mission where I lost my foot had a lot of this going on. Local defense force had a thing where all of their soldiers had a fire motif. They were proud to bring their weapons against the metal skeletons. None of them are alive anymore.

269. Clean and dress your fucking wounds: Zamora practically has to scream this at everyone in the 23rd EDR, seeing as how she acts as the makeshift chief medical officer. Makeshift because we keep getting assigned official ones, but they keep dying. So Zamora has more or less been filling the post. Congrats, you survived the Ork assault, and one of their bullets just nick your arm. You walk around base, showing it off. Then it gets infected, the arm needs to be amputated but you refuse to believe it's actually that bad, so you try and tough it out, and the next thing I know there's a very smelly corpse in the bunk above me. All this because she didn't want to have bandages and disinfectant. And don't get me going on what happens when Nurgle's inbred children are around.

270. Hygiene is desirable, but sometimes expendable: Look, no one wants to be stuck in a foxhole with someone who smells. But all too often, clean water runs short and we need to ration it. When that happens, none of us are bathing and we're going to have to tough it out. Do not, I repeat, do NOT steal several gallons of water when we're having a shortage in the middle of the desert SO YOU CAN TAKE A FUCKING BATH! The only reason that idiot didn't get lynched within seconds was because I stopped the mob from doing it. They were using utterly shit rope and I wasn't doing this twice.

271. Only use medical supplies for their intended purpose: It really is astounding how many supplies an army constantly chews through in order to survive (literally if it's food.) We need ammunition, fuel, armor, water, munitions, clean clothes, spare parts, just to name a few. And medical supplies are in an odd spot. They're something we hope we never need, but we also hope we're never caught without. So no stealing them, no selling them, no trading them and for the love of the Emperor, not using them for personal use. I've seen at least seven people who died from overdosing on painkillers. The rest just got robbed and murdered. Turns out that for a drug dealer looking to increase his stash, a soldier who can't admit that she stole supplies is an ideal target.

272. Recognize which aliens can be negotiated with: Eldar, Tau, Kroot...nope, that's it. Those are the only ones that are capable of any kind of negotiation. Everything else will kill/eat/torture you to its heart's content. So no more flowers for the Orks, ok? They think you're supposed to eat them. And then accidently take off a hand of a very stupid man.

273. Don't get involved with local politicking: This never ends well. Every planet, outside of its devotion to the Imperium, has its own set of bullshit rules, customs, political structure, culture, and you can't figure it out in a weekend. Whenever we find a long lost colony, the Ecclesiarchy has to send in a team specifically designed to handle crap like this. Working through their special snowflake nonsense so that we can pull them back into the Imperium. If you do it they kill you because you violated their sacred laws, or end up worshiping you as a god. Then kill you because they want to release you from your physical form. Lady didn't seem to realize that she was going to be the main course at the feast honoring her.

274. Space is three dimensional: Remember the time one of the Chaos Lord's generals went out on her own? Remember how the navy did a good job turning her forces to ash? It's because our ship commanders remembered this, and hers didn't. We had a young commander in charge of the battle group, and here's the plot twist. He was there because of merit and not because his da-da was the lord of a hive that gave the Imperium a lot of money and bodies. He had his ships divided into groups, one would fly just near enough that the enemy would THINK that they could hit it, only to miss when they pulled back. Then another group would hit them from below while they were firing in the opposite direction. While his ships were darting around like that, up and down, side to side, twisting and turning, the Chaos ships moved along a vertical plane, utterly rigid. There's a reason the casualty rate was 1:5 in our favor and that kid is a lord-admiral, while all the Chaos ships are now floating lifelessly in orbit of that planet.

275. Learn the fucking basic concepts of how Space Marine chapters work: These people are the Emperor's angels of death! I don't know how you can reach adolescence within the Imperium without having every bit of trivia about Space Marines shoved down your throats! Sure, you might not know about the lesser known chapters (are the Rainbow Warriors a thing? I hear a lot of back and forth on that one) but you should know who they are and how they work. So when one chapter says that they'll be sending in their scouts to help, one commander led a suicidal charge, because she thought that she would be getting a thousand scouts. A THOUSAND FUCKING SCOUTS! We were finally pushing back against the Chaos Lord, and this idiot thought that the Space Wolves had a THOUSAND SCOUTS! Emperor on his Throne, I'm glad she's dead now.

276. Do not play around with artificial intelligence ever: First of all, no. You have no idea what you're doing, you wouldn't have access to the tools to do it properly and it would never end well. But assuming you found a way around all of that, you still shouldn't do it because the Adeptus Mechanicus really, really, REALLY doesn't like the concept. They kill people for trying to figure out how the inner mechanisms on a Leman Russ work! Someone bragging about how they're going to find a STC for Men of Iron is most certainly going to get a mechadendrite clamping down on their head until it bursts. I don't think he even knew if there was a Men of Iron STC in that fucking segmentum! He was just shooting his mouth off!

277. You cannot solely use your bare hands in combat. We have spent tens of thousands of years perfecting our weaponry. The Tech Priests were nice enough to make all of those lasguns, bolters, hellguns, plasma guns and all the other nice stuff we get to play with (even if they horde the better stuff for themselves.) Use them. I mean, we already talked about this in 137,but apparently some people take it even further. They refuse to use weapons, thinking them crude and uncivilized, and resort only to hand to hand combat. Because apparently bashing someone's head in with your fists or strangling them to death is "civilized." Lady tried to do this on a Tau. Got a hole in her chest before she was even halfway towards him. I'm surprised she got that far.

278. Marriage is not something to contemplate while an invasion is going on: I did not propose to my wife while we were still fighting those Orks. Zamora did not propose to her husband while the Dark Eldar were still running around pillaging cities. If you really want to pledge everlasting love and loyalty to someone else, can you at least wait until the enemy shells stop pounding our position? Because it's a bit of a mood killer if you propose to someone, only for your legs to instantly get blown off by enemy artillery. Doubly so when the force of the blast lodges the ring in someone else's cybernetic eye. Thanks assholes.

279. Recognize when you have a terrible commander: Ok, so imagine this. You have a wall you need to defend. You have Basilisks, Whirlwinds, Valkyries, Imperial Knights, heavy bolters, autocannons, lascannons, mines, you even have Space Marines helping out, both with Marines on the ground and Thunderhawks in the sky. You are defending the wall from Orks, who have nothing but infantry and a couple of trucks. Here's a question. HOW!? HOW THE HELL DO YOU FUCK THIS UP!? They had three trucks with explosives in it, and they were able to punch a hole in the wall with it. YOU HAD FUCKING IMPERIAL KNIGHTS! HOW COULD YOU NOT STOP THREE FUCKING TRUCKS!? I've fought battles where we had a tenth as many forces going up against twice as many Orks and we still managed to come out better than you had! That victory should've been FUCKING GIFT WRAPPED FOR YOU! So yeah. Few dozen men died when the wall came down, a couple hundred more when they stormed the breach and caught the men behind it off guard, and then the commander was executed for gross incompetence. Situations like this are proof that Commissars, while I don't like them, are badly needed.

280. Recognize when people just aren't interested in anything: Sex is something that's a core part of the human race. It's why there are quintillions of us. And when I have too much time on my hands, I step back and realize that means it took quintillions of fucks to get where we are now. Our expansion to the stars isn't quite as romantic when you think about it that way, is it? The majority of us like to rub our naughty bits against those of the opposite sex. Some of us like to rub our naughty bits against those of the same sex. Some of us like both. That being said, you people need to remember that there are some who just want their naughty bits to be used for pissing and that's about it. My sister is one of them.

This isn't because she's a Sorita (although remember that some people like her are and we've already covered that. Apparently some of them don't take vows of chastity but if I were you I wouldn't play Valhallan Roulette by taking a chance.) She genuinely doesn't feel any sexual attraction to anything. She never did, even when we were kids. While I was going through that lovely phase where I thought tits were the best thing in the galaxy, she was just looking at me like I was crazy. Ok, the hormones being pumped in my head were making me a little crazy for anything that had the slightest bumps on their chest, but we're getting off topic.

Our dad, lovely piece of shit that he was, actually got really mad about this. For some Emperor forsaken reason. Our mom actually stopped drinking herself into a coma long enough to get on her ass for this one too. They thought that she was faking it...for attention or something. I don't know, they weren't making any sense, the reason that they were mad changed from drunken rant to drunken rant. Not that they ever made sense, it was always just shrieking, cussing and the occasional thrown object with the two of them, usually at each other and the two of us whenever we were unlucky enough to get caught in the crossfire. Both our parents thought that she was a harlot who was just trying to make herself be more desirable by playing hard to get. Even though she was getting plenty of requests from all the "desirable" boys, and she was still turning them down. Apparently they thought she was holding out for a dowery. When they didn't think that she was secretly hiding perverted desires of some kind. And that was when they didn't think that she was sleeping with every boy on the block. I don't know, they made no fucking sense.

I told her that I didn't blame her for not liking boys. This was because I was just a kid and thought being sexually attracted to men was disgusting. I was a little shit, but it was what she needed to hear. I said it for utterly the wrong reasons, but it still helped her. Go me? Anyway, after our mom got utterly plastered on the job and got her stupid ass killed in a factory accident (head stuck between two cogs) dad really started to come down hard on my sister. To his barely functional brain, this was somehow his fault. He really liked to go after her more than me. Guess he thought she was an easier target. That Molotov Cocktail proved him wrong on that front.

I honestly think that my sister joined the Order of the Bloody Rose just so that people would stop getting on her ass. Men flirt with her and she shoots them down, which causes a few women to think they have an opening, and they all act like she's faking it. Even now that she's a Sister of Battle, some people still keep hitting on her. Those who keep pushing it have had it end very messily for them. Though now she's got a solid group around her to tell her that it's perfectly naturally to not be interested. Always gets a smile on her face. Then she and I remember our dad writing on the floor with his face on fire and share a good laugh. Oh what? We've got dark senses of humor.