There is No Honor.

Fraihn stood outside the court, breathing in the cool air of freedom.

He looked for the Supreme Commander, wanting to thank him for everything but there were other things on the commander's mind.

"Take this." He said, handing Fraihn a sealed envelope. The imperial seal gleamed against the parchment, its wax unbroken, a sign of utmost importance.

"The Emperor is waiting for you." The Commander added, his tone calm yet heavy with meaning. He moved toward the sleek black car parked nearby and opened the door. "Let's sit inside."

Fraihn hesitated for a second before climbing into the car. He noticed the vehicle was heavily armored, far more than any standard car. The reinforced steel, the bulletproof glass everything seemed too much.

Why would the highest ranking commander of the Imperium need such extreme protection? Everyone feared the Emperor and his right-hand man, so who in their right mind would dare attack them?

As the car door closed with a solid thud, locking him inside the armored bubble, Fraihn felt his unease grow. The Supreme Commander handed him yet another document, this one stamped with large, bold letters, confidential.

As his eyes fell on the document, he knew immediately what it was an official report, one that contained horrors he was all too familiar with. His hands shook slightly as he flipped open the first page. 

The first few photographs were piles of corpses, their bodies burned, ripped apart. The destruction was total, and even in black-and-white, the images bled with violence. Fraihn's eyes lingered on a picture of the three officers, each with a single bullet hole in their foreheads. The bullets were clear in the photograph, and each casing had the unmistakable insignia of the Imperium.

The bullet he fired.

He swallowed hard, flipping to the next page, trying to steel himself for whatever came next. The following photos were even worse, the tree line filled with the dead, the Iron beasts burned out and exploded.Detailed descriptions of the investigations followed, each word sinking like lead in Fraihn's gut.

But the real shock came on page twenty-three.

"The Zhanur Infantry and Artillery Division was mostly defeated, falling back to the border city. 1,067 soldiers were counted, though many were unrecognizable, as only parts of their bodies were found. Commanding Officer Walen Honfer Ian was executed for his disastrous defeat in the Zhanur Capital. All information has been collected from the Imperial Intelligence Force and the Special Operations Unit."

Fraihn's heart raced as he read the lines. His mind spun. If the enemy had had a more experienced commander, they would have been killed. The thought haunted him. They had come so close to complete destruction, and the pages in his hands laid bare every mistake, every failure.

He went through and read every line of the report and then came the next and most shocking thing.

"Investigation Results."

He turned the page, his fingers trembling. The first sentence hit him like a hammer.

"The investigation found no results as to who ordered the 4th Battalion of the 2nd Imperial Transport Division and the 2nd Battalion of the 1st Imperial Infantry Division to the Snagur Line, Lenon. The order was given within the headquarters, but no record evidence exists. The radio operator who relayed the order had gone missing."

The report revealed not only the brutal defeat but also something far worse, there had been no purpose. No strategy. No higher ideal. Hundreds of soldiers, men he had fought alongside, had been sent to their deaths without reason. It wasn't for the glory of the Imperium, nor to protect civilians or secure the borders. They had been sacrificed.

Fraihn's chest tightened as the realization set in. His comrades, brave men and women who had marched into battle with their heads held high, thinking they were defending something greater than themselves had died for nothing.They had believed in the cause, believed in the Imperium, just as he had. And now, all that remained were their broken bodies, scattered across a battlefield that hadn't mattered.

He stared at the black-and-white photographs of the dead again. They weren't nameless soldiers, they were friends, brothers-in-arms. 

Fraihn recognized a few of them. Kharis, who had always told stories of going home to his family after the war.

Sergeant Jalik, the jokester who kept morale high even in the darkest times. Their faces, now unrecognizable, haunted him. They hadn't died with honor, as he had always believed they would. They had been butchered, left to rot in a foreign land without purpose, without respect.

The further Fraihn read, the more his vision blurred with anger and grief. The investigation was missing on the high ranking officers. This investigation just touched the surface and did not go deeper. 

No record. No evidence. It was as if the battalion had never existed, as if their deaths had never happened. 

He leaned back in the seat, his hands gripping the document so tightly his knuckles turned white. His mind reeled, trying to make sense of it all, but there was no making sense of it. There was no reason, no purpose behind what had happened at the Snagur Line. 

Fraihn's thoughts turned to the families of the fallen, wives, husbands, children who would never know the truth. They would be told that their loved ones had died in service to the Imperium, that they had died heroes. But it was a lie. There was no honor in the way they had died, no glory in their sacrifice.

Tears welled in Fraihn's eyes, but he blinked them away. He couldn't afford to break down, not here, not now. The Supreme Commander was watching him, waiting for his reaction, but Fraihn couldn't speak.

As the armored car moved through the city streets, Fraihn stared out the window, his reflection ghostly in the glass. He was no longer sure who he was, or what he was fighting for. Everything had changed in the span of a few pages, and he wasn't sure he would ever see the world the same way again.

The Supreme Commander finally broke the silence, his voice low but firm. "This is the truth of war, Fraihn. There is no honor in it. Only survival."

He turned his head slowly, his eyes locking onto the Supreme Commander's. 

"My mother and little sister died under the rubble when our city was being shelled," Fraihn began, his voice wavering at first but growing stronger with every word. "I was just a kid… maybe seven or eight. You know I was there with them. They were calling me, reaching out to me, their hands bloody and broken under the stone, their skin torn and burnt, their bones crushed beneath the weight. They were right there, just one step away from me, calling my name, screaming for me to help them… but I couldn't do anything. I just held their hands while they slowly died, bit by bit, hour by hour. My mother, my sister, fading right in front of me while I was powerless to save them."

His breath hitched, and his fists clenched as if he could still feel their hands in his. "When the army finally arrived, they dragged me away. I didn't even want to leave them. I just wanted to stay there, because leaving meant they were really gone. And that was the moment I became a soldier. I didn't want justice… I wanted revenge."

Fraihn's voice turned cold. "I wanted to kill. To slaughter the Zhanur soldiers like they had slaughtered my family. I wanted to hunt down every single one of them, drag them out of their homes, and make them suffer like my mother and sister suffered. I wanted to shoot them and watch them drown in their own blood, to hear their screams, to see them reach out for help and know that no one would come."

He shook his head, the bitterness of his confession eating at him. "And I did it. I killed soldiers. I killed civilians. I burned villages, destroyed homes. I committed war crimes, and I knew it. I became a monster, a monster with no honor, no restraint, no limits. I was uncontrollable. That's why they transferred me to the transportation division. They didn't know what to do with me anymore. I was an executioner, a rabid dog unleashed on the battlefield. I didn't care who I killed, as long as I could hurt them. As long as I could make someone, anyone, feel what I had felt."

He paused, the weight of his words sinking in, the truth of his rage laid bare for the first time. His voice lowered, almost a whisper. "There was no honor in any of that. I was a murderer, driven by revenge and hatred. And even after all the blood I spilled, it didn't bring my family back. It didn't fix anything. It didn't make the pain go away."

Fraihn looked at the Commander. "That's what I learned. War isn't about honor. It's about survival. But sometimes, it's not even that. Sometimes, it's just about how much you can make the other side suffer before you lose yourself completely."

The Supreme Commander sat in silence for a moment. His expression remained unreadable, a man too seasoned in war, too accustomed to hearing horrors, to let anything shock him anymore. But there was a shift in his eyes, something darker, deeper before he finally spoke.

"I ordered the bombings," the Commander began. "The burnings. The slaughter of entire cities and villages. I signed the papers that condemned thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, to death. Every single one of my orders is a war crime by the standards of most of the world."

He paused, looking directly at Fraihn. "But in the Imperium, there is no law that says killing the enemy is wrong. No law that defines who the enemy even is. We make that decision. We choose who lives and who dies. And there's no one to stop us."

His words were cold, calculated, and filled with a brutal honesty that cut through any illusion Fraihn might have had about the system they served. There was no pretense, no attempt to justify or excuse the atrocities. The Commander wasn't asking for forgiveness. He wasn't seeking redemption.

"I've ordered executions without trial, sent soldiers to their deaths without a second thought. Burned towns to the ground to send a message. And I did it all because I believed it was necessary. Because the Imperium needed it."

The Commander leaned back in his seat, his gaze distant, as though he were seeing the devastation he'd caused play out in his mind's eye. "But in the end, what does it matter? War isn't about what's right or wrong. It's about power. It's about control. And we're the ones who have it."

There was a heavy, bitter silence. The weight of their shared sins hung in the air like a shroud. The Supreme Commander's face was hard, unyielding, but beneath that steely exterior was a man who had made peace with the darkness a long time ago.

He looked at Fraihn again, his tone almost weary. "You think you're a monster because you wanted revenge? Because you killed for it? That's nothing. We're all monsters.You, me, every soldier who pulls a trigger, every officer who signs an order. There's no honor in any of it, Fraihn. Not for us."

The car rumbled beneath them, the armored doors sealing them in a world where the lines between right and wrong, enemy and ally, had long since blurred. The Supreme Commander's voice softened, but his words carried a weight that was impossible to shake.

"We kill. We burn. We destroy. And when it's over, all that's left is ash. And you tell yourself it was for something honor, revenge, survival. But in the end, it's just death. And we live with it because we have to. Because someone has to."

He turned his gaze back to the road, the conversation over.

But the truth of his words of their shared burden hung in the air like a scar that would never fade.