Warhammer 40K in a box

Chapter 415 Paul's Retirement
At dawn, accompanied by the sound of a steam whistle outside the window, Paul climbed out of his narrow, hard bed.

The chill of the morning air made him shiver; the thin blanket was no match for the dry cold of the Rostov II in the early morning, but it also woke him up.

He habitually reached for the prosthetic leg by the bedside, and after struggling to put it on with one hand, he stood up and began to wash up.

The man in the mirror on the washstand had a weathered face, with a prominent scar above his left eye extending to his forehead. It was a relic of an explosion during the war that had almost blinded him.

He turned on the rusty faucet, scooped up ice water with his only remaining right hand, and splashed it on his face, trying to wash away the lingering battlefield memories from his mind.

Paul was lucky. As a retired veteran of the defense army, he had worked as a secret agent for the governor's government. Those days of infiltrating the Blood Oath Order were more suffocating than the battlefield.

He remembered the tension of exchanging intelligence in the dark alleys late at night, the crazed eyes of the cultists, and the blood splattered on his uniform when he personally executed traitors.

Later, he served as a militia instructor, leading those passionate young men into battle when the Necromancers invaded Rostov-2.

Most of those young faces have become names on monuments, but he alone survived, dragging his crippled body along.

When Chen Xi was recruiting soldiers on a large scale, fate gave him a second chance.

After receiving a new prosthetic leg, he once again became a proud member of the expeditionary force.

The new hydraulic prosthesis is much more flexible than the old model, allowing him to fight on the battlefield like an able-bodied person.

During the ten years of bloodshed, he earned the rank of Star Guardian Sergeant for his military achievements.

This rank insignia, gleaming with a bronze sheen, was earned through countless life-or-death battles—from the surface defense of Rostov II to the orbital assault of Kherson III, Paul proved his worth in dozens of campaigns.

This is almost impossible for the vast majority of people.

In the Star Guard's rigorous promotion system, ordinary soldiers who want to obtain the rank of sergeant often need to prove their abilities in countless battles and survive in order to be promoted to sergeant.

Paul not only completed the crossing, but also survived, which was a miracle in the entire expeditionary force.

It should be noted that during the Rostov Expedition, which lasted for nearly ten years, the total number of troops deployed by the Empire had already exceeded ten million, and the casualty rate had exceeded forty percent.

Transport ships send tens of thousands of new recruits to the front lines every day, but often return empty.

Soldiers on the front lines often say that stepping onto a transport ship is like having one foot in the grave.

Those new recruits who were going to war for the first time often didn't even have time to remember the names of their comrades before they became another nameless corpse on the battlefield.

Almost one in two would die, and that was with the Empire deploying a large number of Astral Army troops.

If we consider casualties, the proportion reaches as high as 70%—only three out of every ten soldiers can leave the battlefield unharmed.

If these battle-hardened elite troops suffered such heavy losses, the casualties among the temporarily conscripted defense forces and militia were even more shocking.

Paul's ability to survive and rise through the ranks in this meat grinder-like war required not only exceptional military skills but also unimaginable luck.

Of the first batch of soldiers conscripted into the Rostov II, very few survived.

Of the 100,000 soldiers, fewer than 1,000 survived the battlefield, a survival rate of less than 1%. Of his comrades who enlisted at the same time, only a faded group photo on his bedside table remains as proof that they once existed.

Paul was lucky; he survived and, due to his merits and disability, was able to retire with the rank of Sergeant in the Star Guard and was awarded a medal.

The bronze Imperial Double-Headed Eagle medal now hung on his faded uniform, though Paul's medal was not a particularly high-ranking one, or even just a medal, not the individual shield generator worn by those officers.

But this medal could grant him a government job in any world under imperial rule, one that would provide him with a comfortable living.

If this were in the world of Hive City, this medal could even allow him to live a decent life in Middle-Hive.

He wouldn't have to live in the stinking Hive slums like the lower-class residents of Hive City; instead, he would be allocated an apartment with a private bathroom. His children would also have the opportunity to attend Imperial military academies and join the Star Guardians.

Although this means a new career on the battlefield, for a commoner, it is already a rare opportunity for upward mobility.

It could be said that if Paul's children were to live up to expectations, a Star Guardian family might even be on the rise.

Throughout imperial history, there are numerous examples of people who started as low-ranking officers and eventually built up military families.

Of course, this is on the premise that Caul has children.

Having only recently retired, he is still a single middle-aged man and has not yet married.

The war robbed him of the age when he should have been starting a family. While his peers were already surrounded by children, he was still fighting against space monsters on the battlefield of Rostov.

However, Kaul didn't have much of a thought about marriage. Having just returned from ten years of fighting, he felt as if he were back on the battlefield when he closed his eyes, with the deafening roar of artillery and the sound of laser guns firing in his ears, occasionally mixed with the roars of officers and the screams and wails of fallen comrades.

Although Kaul knew that being hit by the Space Necromancer's green Gaussian rays wouldn't elicit any screams.

Those terrifying weapons would directly break down flesh and blood into molecules, and those hit would gradually disintegrate into a pile of ashes, making it impossible to even collect the bodies.

But memory always arbitrarily alters details, turning a silent death into a mournful cry.

Paul doesn't remember how many comrades he's lost in those ten years. He only knows that his unit number changed seven times, and each time it changed, it was after the original unit was wiped out and the new unit was reorganized.

The changing of the serial number was like a death countdown, reminding him that he might be next.

In short, after his troops were wiped out for the eighth time, he received a demobilization notice at a hospital in the rear.

His body covered in scars was proof that he had survived the war, while the medal was the empire's cold compensation for his ten years of bloody battles.

Normally, an Astronautical soldier serves for fifteen years, especially a sergeant.

These veterans, forged in blood and fire, are the most crucial cogs in the imperial military machine; their experience and will often determine the survival of an entire unit.

No regimental colonel would let go of an experienced junior sergeant, because often the regimental colonel was just a figurehead, and the soldiers fought more by following the orders of the junior sergeants.

(End of this chapter)