Chapter 22

421. Do not attempt to use a Catachan Barking Toad catapult: So apparently there's this thing called a Catachan Barking Toad. It is THE most poisonous creature in the galaxy. Bar none. Apparently someone did a compare and contrast with every other poisonous thing in the galaxy. Anyway, I've never been to that Emperor forsaken planet, the borderline mindless apes that live in their own filth that come off the planet put me off it. That's without the fact that their pets would try and scarf me down as a pre-meal snack. This was before I learned that there was a toad there that apparently kills everything within a kilometer by exploding poison gas. Some dipshit tried to throw it at the enemy. Apparently the idiot who did this found some eggs and tried to hatch them during a battle for a catapult. I was able to tell because a few hundred trees in the distances suddenly withered up and died when we called for artillery. I think he was part of the mush we saw at ground zero. I dunno, we weren't allowed within ten kilometers of it. Maybe they didn't want us catching stupid.

422. Stop trying to give everything a pretentious name: Question, do any of you know who the Aeldari and the Drukhari are? Because it turns out they're the Eldar and Dark Eldar. I know this because the Harlequin that won't get out of my fucking bedroom told me and thought I may appreciate knowing the true names of the species. I guess they want to be called by their true names. Yeah, last time I checked the majority of the Eldar twits still call us Mon-keigh, so they can deal with it. And apparently the real name of the Tau is Ta'u. Oh fuck off. And for that last fucking time, it's IMPERIAL GUARD! Not Astra whatever the fuck it is. What are you even supposed to call people from the Astra Asinine Name? Astramen? I'm a Guardsman, Emperor damn it! There have been more than a few fights over shit like this, and people tend to not walk away from them.

423. Only throw someone if you're at the edge of a cliff: Look, I get the appeal in hoisting someone up over your head and throwing them, it's a good way of showing your superiority. Slight problem. It usually doesn't do much. Unless you're standing on a cliff and are planning on making the bastard fall a few kilometers (if you are, go for it) you're just going to have to run to the end of the room to keep fighting them. And if they have a gun, you just managed to put some distance between them and you, making you doubly fucked if you don't have a gun yourself. Which is a high possibility, because you engaged someone with a gun in melee combat. And then he shot your brains out because you were more concerned with showing off your muscles to the girls back home than you were killing the giggling Chaos cultist. Who blew your genitals off with a gun that shot balls of barbed wire!

424. Soldiers need creature comforts: Our lives suck. Not a particularly radical statement I think. We're normal men and women with weapons that are excellent at killing each other, but mediocre on killing everything else. We've got pricks like Chenkov that got soldiers and bullets mixed up in their Strategy 101 textbooks and they think we need to be thrown at the enemy until we go away. We know this, and a lot of generals don't even deny it. So I really don't think it's that unreasonable that we get decent food or living conditions every once in awhile. Because while there are some pricks in their ivory towers that romanticize the idea of fighting wars by expending the very minimal amount of resources possible (maximizing efficiency they call it), lmorale drops like a fucking rock when you do that. Sorry, did I say rock? I mean rok. Sorry, let the c slip in there. Like an Ork rok smashing a planet in half. You try and make an army go six months surviving on disgusting nutrient paste so you can SAVE MONEY and you'll have people ripping your fucking head off. Literally. To eat it. And the rest of you. Ironically the campaign went BETTER after that act of cannibalism

425. Serpentine, Serpentine, FUCKING SERPENTINE!: Practice this. Run in a zigzag manner. Have you ever tried hitting someone who ran like this? I did. It's damn hard. It takes practice to adjust for it. Which makes you a harder target, and therefore harder to kill. I was out scouting with nine other Guardsmen. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we stumble upon a makeshift outpost of PDF troopers turned traitor, and we have heavy fire raining down on us. I tell everyone to serpentine and run as fast as they could in the other direction. Most of them called me stupid and just ran ahead. One girl (and I say girl because she was sixteen tops) asked frantically what serpentine meant. I think I swore at her a lot (bullets were streaming past my head, I was VERY stressed) before telling her to zig zag. She promptly started doing it. When we eventually got behind a rock crop, it was just me and her. We had taken shots to the legs, but we were alive and were able to limp back to base. The rest of the dipshits were dead. One literally got his balls shot off.

426. Swords are not axes and vice versa: I hope you people have been around long enough to figure out that swords and axes are different weapons that require different methods and styles. Swords, specifically one handed swords, are good for thrusting, slashing, and hacking, as well as parrying. Axes are good for hacking and that's about it. Maybe, MAYBE, you can block a blow with the handle, but only if it's a big two-handed axe, and even then I don't recommend it, because those things are cumbersome and it's hard to get back on the offense when you do that. But with a one handed axe? Emperor help me. Saw someone try to deflect a sword blow with a hatchet once. Lost her hand. You know what the worst part was? She thought her form was just bad. So she picked it up with her other hand. SAME FUCKING THING HAPPENED AGAIN!

427. Severed limbs are NOT cybernetics: Guardsmen lose body parts all the time, I know that too well. Here's the thing though. You need actual replacements for it. I know that if you lose a part and have it stitched back on quickly enough by someone who knows what they're doing, you'll be fine. Couple of important factors though. It needs to be YOUR part, and it needs to be soon AND by a professional. You cannot hack a arm off of a week old corpse and try and sew it onto your stump. Do you know how many diseases you can catch from doing that? I do. Zamora fucking COUNTED THEM ALL! And this is without getting into when people try and do it for legs, ears, eyes and,...other parts. I've seen every last fucking one of these. Emperor help me.

428. Account for varying levels of gravity: For obvious reasons, when humanity settled the stars tens of thousand of years ago, they mostly stuck to planets that were of similar size to Holy Terra. Mostly. There are some rather heavy planets out there, that's how we got Ogryn, bless those idiots. We also have rather light words, and they're kind of a pain in the ass. I've seen Guardsmen blown off their feet because they tried to use heavy weaponry on those kinds of planets. Hell, my wife was pushed back by her heavy bolter until she dug her feet into the ground. But she adjusted. Not the idiot who saw her, tried to dive for cover, and ended up bowling right into a line of Orks. Yeah. One three him so he splattered. On the peak of a mountain.

429. Use proper numbers: Ok, when I'm getting information saying that I'm getting XCIX soldiers sent to reinforce the garrison I'm holding, I don't know what the fuck it means. Is this a blue blood thing? I know families who have utterly stopped giving a shit like to use the same name for their kids every fucking generation so they can get bigger and more impressive sounding suffixes, but come on. We have perfectly good numbers, we don't need to resort to whatever the hell THAT is. One planet that was recently rediscovered tried to petition the Imperium for help with this, and no one had any idea what they were asking for, with there being a lot of miscalculations that lead from everything from a thousand men being sent to fight an entire army of Tau, to a million different dildos being sent all over the planet when they just wanted a handful. Because there was a lot of addition, subtraction, multiplication and in the end I think the Commissariat just had every last bureaucrat on the planet executed for being general pains in the asses. Few people complained.

430. Hold your sword properly: The fuck is this "reverse grip" bullshit? Pick up the closest sword you have. Hold it so that the blade is facing away from your other hand. If you have any common sense, you probably feel very awkward and kind of stupid. If you feel that way, I apologize, you can switch back to a proper grip. This style works all right with knives if you know what you're doing, but swords? They're not meant to be used like that, you can't handle something that long by holding it that way, so presumably you have a chode if you do this. There is nothing more pathetic than an idiot kid picking up a power sword, trying to be cool, and accidently dropping it and cutting his own foot off because he tried to make the galaxy's most awkward stab before causing himself to bleed to death.

431. Blunt weapons on things twice your size are a waste of time: See, I'm of the opinion that swords are better than most blunt weapons. Unless you're a space marine of course. It's just the fundamentals of how they work. A warhammer is designed to crush bone and snap necks. Well question. Have you ever tried to snap the neck of an Ork? It kind of takes awhile, along with multiple goes. And just forget about making chest shots with those things. You'll be lucky if you can even make them take a step back. And I'm talking about heavy blunt weapons. This is without getting into the type of people that try to smack a Nob on the head with a wooden club. The Nob honestly didn't realize he had been hit, and the angry lady had to yell and swear at him to explain what had happened. He politely thanked her. Then pounded her into paste.

432. If you attack Holy Terra, your life is over: This is very much not a first hand experience. I very much doubt that I'll ever be in the same system as Holy Terra. But you serve long enough, you meet people who have distant relatives who are pilgrims to Holy Terra, and those relatives have a lot of stories to share. A group of radicals tried to force their way through Eternity Gate. Full of piss and vinegar about how they would be the true saviors of humanity, acting like they were invincible. That was fifty years ago.

They are still being tortured to death.

I'd feel sorry for them, but to be honest, if I were to ever meet the hollowed out shell of whatever's left of them, I'd probably just ask "What the fuck did you expect to happen?"

433. Try and live a life where you can exist if you're not a victim: Most of you are probably confused senseless by this. That's a good thing, hold onto that, if means you have something going on in your life. There's a lot of general shitiness going on out there, and a lot of people are getting the raw end of it. But some of the people who face this kind of hardship, who have to deal with blue bloods and corrupt planetary governors, they're the ones who kind of need an evil overlord to oppose. They dedicate their entire lives and base their personality on being the type of person that will stand up to so and so, making all the speeches, browbeating everyone who didn't want to be part of his stupid and suicidal rebellion, that kind of stuff. The governor he was rebelling against was somewhat corrupt, and the planet's populace was smart enough to remain loyal to the Imperium, so we didn't have to put them down. But here's the thing. This guy? He couldn't adapt. He was the revolutionary, the one who stood up. He was the victim. Once there was no oppressor around, people started to realize his assholish behavior wasn't something they had ever really liked, and now they had no reason to tolerate it. He kind of got executed when it turned out he was planning a second revolution so that he could feel like the underdog again. You know, he could have come to me and asked me to be the big oppressive Imperial soldier in order to make his balls feel big. I could've shot him in the head and saved everyone else some trouble.

434. Don't play poker with Orks: I hate you people sometimes. I feel like with, some of you, when your parents told you not to talk to strangers, the first thing you did was walk up to the creepy old bearded man and his van that had "free candy" on the side. AND THEN WENT BACK TO HIM THE NEXT DAY! Orks, it seems, have finally mastered the art of poker. To be fair, it makes sense. They can be best characterized as a group of constantly drunk assholes who practically live in pubs and start a fight whenever they can, and those kinds of people do play poker from time to time. And usually end up fighting when it's over. Like taking puny human heads and smashing them against the table, because "ZOG U AND UR ZOGGING ACE!"

435. No fucking Tau: Ok, first of all, yes, that thing on the Tau's (and yes, I'm calling them Tau because Ta'u is one of the most asinine things I've heard in my life) forehead resembles a vagina. Hur, hur, hur. Congrats. You made a joke a hundred-trillion Guardsmen have already made. But seriously, It isn't. I don't know what it is, but it clearly isn't meant for that. Second of all. No. This is a sore spot for the guard, millions of Guardsmen have defected to the Tau, and not all of us feel that fondly about those fucking traitors. So while the Tau may not stab in the back quite in the same way as the Eldar (they won't kill you as much as they will try to indoctrinate you) you'll get pissed off Guardsmen riddling you with las fire if they catch you doing that. Assuming Fire Warriors don't do the same because someone tried to stick their dick in a Tau's forehead. Apparently that's a sore spot for them...I swear I didn't mean to phrase it like that.

436. Breeding non-human creatures for war doesn't work: Every time we find another planet with an unholy combination of mouths, people try to tame them. I've already covered this in number 327. But someone decided to take this already dumb idea and take it one step forward. Taking two species like that and trying to breed them together. I have seen this done once and only once. A four legged creature with rock like armor plating and horns as sharp as bayonets with some sort of tentacled thing that spat poison, had three mouths, and could breath above and below water. What was created was an fast, powerful, intelligent creature that was twice the size of both previous animals, could spit acid with the power and precision of a sniper rifle, and could jump so high it practically flew. And it could reproduce asexually. We had to bomb a city to atoms to stop it. To this day, I'm not sure if the woman who created this thing thought it would be a powerful weapon of war, or if she just thought it was hot. She was...odd.

437. You don't always have the luxury of taking your time when aiming: When you have all the time in the world, aiming is actually kind of easy. I could give my rifle to a random person, set up some cans, tell her to shoot them all, and after a few testing shots, she'd probably be all right. If she had all the time in the world and it was a low stakes situation. But that's rarely something we can afford to do. The reason Guardsmen get drilled so much is to get us to take accurate shots without putting much thought or time put into it. Because when bullets, las fire and Emperor knows what else is flying all around you, you can't pace yourself. This one woman I had didn't seem to get that. She took a solid minute to take aim at a distant Ork, exposing herself to them and earning a grenade thrown her way. She got one shot off before she died. She missed. I don't think that shot was worth getting your right leg blown off to line up darling.

438. Learn basic construction when building monuments: Hive cities are something that symbolize the Imperium perfectly. Massive, impressive looking, ugly, polluted, overpopulated, filled with violent crime, a home of suffering, and collapsing under their own weight. The sheer mass of hive cities means that the lower levels are a permanent shit show, and that's just because of the lousy structure and stability, sometimes violent gangs, rebels, and the occasional Genestealer cult make it worse. But even with these things as a hallmark of the Imperium, we evidently still have some architectural standards. No one seemed to tell the man who built a statue to Saint Anais that. A very thin plinth that had the statue lowered on top of it. It was very top heavy. Like, extremely, unrealistically, the architect probably should have masturbated before work, top heavy. The local priests were getting pissed at him for that alone, and this was before it tipped forward (Emperor on his Throne it was REALLY top heavy) and crushed the man flat. He had a damn creepy smile on his face the whole way, and everyone involved just agreed to pretend they had never seen it...wait...SHIT!

439. Guard everything: Yes. Everything. If you can think of it, guard it. Don't say "Who would possibly want to steal X?" because someone out there wants to steal it. It may be one of ours, it may be the enemy, it may be a wild animal, but someone will want to steal it. So post guards on everything, we've got the manpower to make that happen. Don't, and you'll regret it. You may think that no one will want to steal the brakes or the reverse level off of a Baneblade, but someone dead. And that's how the commander ended up going over a cliff.

440: Deserting in a Penal Legion is a stupid idea: Those assholes in penal legions do know that the Arbites and Commissars that watch them are just waiting for an excuse to shoot them, right? Seriously, we just got a few million of those wastes of carbon, and there's already been over five-hundred executions. And no one is complaining about it. Hm? They are? Allow me to rephrase my statement. No one whose opinion MATTERS is complaining about it. Just this morning, one of them stopped when we were moving them all into processing, and gave me one of those kinds of looks. You know, the kind where people lick their lips, waggle their eyebrows and give a lustful smile. Yeah, she maybe got the third word of her rape threat out when she had a bolt pistol pressed against her temple for the next second and a half that her head existed.

I really don't think these people understand the situation they're in. This wasn't the type of penal legion where you get sent there because you misfiled your taxes, oh no, this was the kind of penal legion specifically designed for the worst humanity has to offer. Murderers, rapists, arsonists, crime bosses, kidnappers, drug dealers that target kids, the scum of the Imperium and everyone knows it.

Penal legions are a little inconsistent on whether or not their members serve for life or are set free if they serve long enough, but this one is one of the latter. So really, staying and fighting is the best option you have for getting a life worth living back. Because trying to run is a guaranteed way to get killed. By an Arbitrator's bolter, by a fellow legionary, or by someone like me who would rather not have an unstable psychopath loose near people I care about.

There was an attempted uprising among the legionaries we got. A thousand or two of them tried to make a breakout and escape into the wasteland between the cities on this Emperor forsaken planet. It didn't go well. See, the Arbites were expecting this and were patrolling with Chimeras armed with a standard armament, including a turret mounted heavy bolter. The majority of this short lived rebellion was quickly turned into mulch. The only part of it that got any momentum was the platoon or two that was smart enough to duck off the main road before they started shooting.

Even then they didn't get far, as a few hundred Arbitrators and 23rd EDF Guardsmen quickly surrounded them. They then decided to settle for taking a few hundred of us with them. They didn't kill a single one, which is saying something considering even the ones that started shooting in the streets managed to kill a few people. But, to be fair, there was an...unexpected development. I'm pretty sure I shouldn't talk about it in this book, sorry. Needless to say though, I didn't see this coming.

Also, please note. I've included two chapters with this entry but 420 is missing. This is not a misprint. 420 needs some...retooling. I've been sitting on it for some time but I'm stuck. But the rest of the last chapter was good, so I released it with 420 missing so that you could all see the rest of it and not have to wait for me.