Chapter 16

301. Don't try and earn a place in this book: You think this is something to be proud of? It isn't. Lets count the reasons why. #1, you're dead. Last time I checked, hardly something to brag about. Even if you die doing something impressive, it would've been more impressive if you had somehow managed to come out alive. Not to disrespect those who die heroically, but them dying tends to be a by-product that most rational people (IE not the people I talk about) try to avoid if possible. #2, you died a STUPID death. I mean, you did read the title right? You didn't just start flicking through to try and find pretty pictures right? #3, fuck you, stop trying to make life harder for everyone else. I'm not listing any examples here (no matter how much butter they used) because I refuse to encourage this behavior, we don't need more attention seekers who want me to talk about how cleverly idiotic they are.

302. A mission is not a big game hunting expedition: I've already talked about taking trophies from enemy and how people can be stupid about it, but trophies from game hunting are more understandable. What ISN'T understandable is doing it when we're on duty. If I'm taking you out for foraging, that means we're just shooting a couple of the big, slow herd grazers for food. We are not making the mating call of the local predators to lure them out into the open so you can stuff one of their frakking heads. Idiot boy and girl duo try to do this, get both of their throats torn out by some abomination of nature with two heads (Chaos corruption may have played a factor) I barely manage to shoot it while its feeding, and I go back to camp with an empty stomach. They always have to find a way to make the living suffer, even after their deaths.

303. Don't fucking touch anything: Are you in an ancient alien ruin, or an uncharted planet, or maybe just a sinister lab? DO NOT! TOUCH! A SINGLE FUCKING! THING! I mean wanting to do this has varying degrees of reasonable. For example, if we're in a heavy firefight, low on ammo, and there's a massive and ancient weapon mounted on the wall, I can understand trying to turn it on the enemy. It's still going to blow up and take both of your arms off, but I can at least follow the train of logic that led you to this decision. Less so when we're in the depth of an Ork fortress and we find a pit of green goop. Some dipshit took a look at the bubbling, green sludge and said, "Yeah! I wanna stick my hand in that!" Entire body dissolved in three seconds, and five seconds after that we get a pissed off Ork attacking us for messing with his "speshul gunk." I do not want to fucking know.

304. The enemy don't get last words: When we were cleaning out the holdouts left over from the Chaos Lord's first campaign (having to type first fills me with existential dread) this happened a few times. I was sent into the HQ of a holdout after it had been bombarded for an hour by tanks. Local commander was missing both legs and was the only one left alive. He said he wanted some last words. He got a las round to the face. He had been reaching for a bolt pistol, so fuck him. At a nearby outpost though, some poor sentimental bastard let a cultist give a speech while he was priming a melta charge. Seventeen dead men. So that went well. And you just know the fucker was only screaming "Blood for the Blood God," over and over again.

305. The point of hospitals are to make people better. General rule of thumb. When someone goes into a field hospital, they should not be coming out in worse condition. We get some pretty good doctors out here on the front, but you can always tell when things are getting stretched thin when the quacks show up. One man goes into the tent with a las round hole in his leg, no major arteries and it missed the bone. Bandages, painkillers and bed rest would've been enough for him, I've seen that injury hundreds of times. The quack amputated the leg. Poorly. Kid died from blood loss. Then he tried to examine me. He later was turned over to Comissars with half his teeth missing. On a totally unrelated note, entrenching tools make good makeshift clubs.

306. Duck and fucking cover: When shells start coming down, you get into a bunker, or into any natural formations that make good cover. Upper floors in a building are the first place to be hit when the bombardment starts, and out in the open is a killing field, So kindly refrain from running around like a grox with its dick cut off. We were riding out the bombardment in a decent bunker, but this trio thought they'd sneak out and loot the local jewelry store while everyone was distracted. They were two thirds of the way there when a shell hit right between the middle of them. It was like the cultist manning the cannon was deadeyeing it. One was reduced to chunks, biggest piece was the size of a fist. One cartwheeled away and was impaled on the store's Aquila. And the third had his rib-cage inverted, minus the few that flew out and were half buried in a concrete wall. He half crawled towards the store before he bled out, and I honestly think he was still trying to rob the place before shell #2 hit him. Then shell #3. And #4. And #5. Then I kinda lost count. A betting pool got going behind me, and all I know is that it was about how much longer that was going to keep going.

307. Non-Space Marine power armor has limited power supply: I'm not sure if I should bother with this, considering how unlikely it is that anyone reading will get a chance to try out powered armor. But who knows, a Rogue Trader may pick this up. If that happens, power armor designed for regular humans has a time limit of a few hours at most. If you're putting that thing on, you either need to be heading directly into a battlefield or be in a position where you'll be fighting within an hour. No running around during a parade showing how stupidly rich you are before heading off to fight local rebels. Because if you get halfway through the enemy holdout and then run out of power, you're going to have a few thousand rounds from very pissed off rebels all converging on you. I'm not exaggerating, a hundred surviving rebels were all firing on him because he had stopped in the middle of their kill-zone. The armor was good, but the damage all those shots did added up, and slowly contributed to a drawn out and very painful death. But hey, it was a blue blood, so fuck him.

308. Do not use cybernetic apes:..Fuck you. I don't care if they're technically aliens, they're apes. Their weapons are nice, grab them if you can, but seriously? Fucking seriously? Some radical Inquisitors work with these things, Jokaero they're called apparently, but please list five ways in which working with an ape alien can end well. Because, last time I checked, the Imperium wants to wipe out all alien life and I think that gives them good reason to want to kill us. They're not like the Eldar or Tau were they can have a temporary ceasefire when a greater threat approaches, THEY'RE FUCKING APES! Am I being racist? Probably. But why the fuck are you accusing me of being racist, you're a thousand times more likely to take the "suffer not the alien, the mutant, the heretic," line more seriously than I do, so don't get on my ass for this. You haven't seen one of these things go beserk and rip off the arm of three guardsmen while his handler was trying to calm him down. Fuck these things

309. Learn when it's a good time to screw: People, I'm getting real sick of your shit. When there's rumors of a Dark Eldar Mandrake stalking the town we're garrisoned in, with several mutilated corpses to back up those rumors now is not the time to fuck in the local primary school. Doubly so when the last few corpses were strung up outside it. Because Dark Eldar are sick bastards that will let you get going before it then aims for the genitals. Christ that was a mess. And they were in the Emperor forsaken pool.

310. Don't bother with primitive weapons: Some backwater worlds are extremely backwater. As in, live in a mud hut, sharpen a stick for a weapon, shit in the lake we drink from backwater. If you ever end up fighting on one of these worlds, don't bother using their weapons. Even if they're (relatively) more advanced and have advanced to muskets. Even if you're out of ammo, you'd be better off going for your knife or just running for it. Have you ever seen twenty Guardsmen charge a Chaos Space Marine with spears? Its depressing. I honestly think even the marine was depressed, he looked really out of it while butchering them. Think about that. They were so utterly moronic that they managed to MAKE A CHAOS SPACE MARINE DEPRESSED!

311. Space is big: I mean, let's sit down and think about it. You know how massive a planet can be? How it can take ages to scout every last corner of it? A planet is a tiny little speck compared to the star system its in. Think dropping a bread crumb into the ocean and you get a pretty similar size ratio. Now that we've gotten down how big a star system is, chew on this. There are a hundred-billion star systems of that size in this galaxy alone. And there are Emperor knows how many galaxies out there, but there's at least another hundred-billion. Just to give you an idea of scope. So when you say you're going to scout every planet in existence, I'm going to stand and laugh. Doubly so when we find a derelict scouting vessel, half the crew dead from starvation and the other half from scurvy. Oh, and while I'm on the subject.

312 Eat your fucking vegtables: Yet another thing I managed to get down with my daughter when she was five. Ok, quick vocabulary lesson dipshits. Malnourished does not mean starving. You can gorge yourself daily and still be malnourished if you've been eating nothing but garbage. Now look, I get that we don't get fresh produce often because the Administratum forgot we exist, or the entire shipment went bad or whatever fresh breed of stupidity is plaguing us, but eat it when we get it. Don't be a stubborn twit and then start complaining when your gums bleed.

313. No using flamers for a barbeque: You know, sometimes I wonder if people are trying to piss me off. A dozen flamer tanks go missing, my sister is screaming up a storm, I'm tearing through the camp worried that they're going to be used for sabotage, only to find some idiots having a cook out. If you can count grox streaks being burned to a uniform black crisp cooking. There were three different fires and they all had been drinking. One person spilled his beer while he was tending to the steaks, and the predictable happened. I was standing a good way away, yet still found myself on my back, smelling burning hair and thinking "Oh goodie, I'm going bald for the next few months FUCKING AGAIN!"

314. Chivalry will get you nowhere: Look, let's address the elephant in the room, ok? Eldar women are good looking. I'm pretty sure I just got onto the shit list of around a thousand different Inquisitors, but they are. If you're attracted to ladies, you'll probably like Eldar women. And you need to get the fuck over that, because as we've already discussed way back when, they are not interested in fucking you. You need to remember that being good looking doesn't mean shit, and this is for those who don't fantasize about screwing them too, in fact it's mainly them. So many times I've seen them lower their weapons, thinking the beautiful woman standing before them was a kind and generous soul. Just before they were decapitated. If they were ugly you wouldn't be doing this, so get your head on straight. Hey, count yourself lucky she didn't cut your other heads off first, I think she was tempted.

315. Do not throw your weapon: Great you think your cool. You can take a knife or whatever and put it between a cultists' eyes. Unless you put a spin on it and you accidently end up hitting them with the hilt, which happens more than you might think. So there's reason one to not to it, you're not as good at it as you think you are. But the bigger problem is that you just threw away a weapon you idiot. Even if it is a backup weapon, it's still a weapon, and we only have so many of those. So don't waste your knife trying to nail an Ork in the throat. You'll fail and get your neck snapped. And when you see this happen, do not ask me for my knife so that you can try. You'll end up on the ground with a tooth missing, because if you're gonna act like an Ork, so will I.

316. Don't aim for limbs: Have I gotten across how durable the things we fight are? Because this is a pretty universal rule because of that. Blow a arm off of an Ork, he'll crush you with the bicep of the other one. Take a Necron's leg off, it'll just keep blasting at you. A Tyranid is so durable and determined that you'll have to blow off half of them before it'll fall over, and even then it'll still viciously scramble its way toward you, a mess of blood, teeth and pissed off. So don't bother, ok? Aim for center mass or a head if it presents itself. Don't take off the arm of a Broodlord and expect it to forget it has a mouth that can wrap around your whole body. Because it didn't.

317. Drinking blood is not an effective way to respond to blood loss: First of all, you're gross. Second of all, that's not how it works. Third, if you're going to do it can you at least make sure it's HUMAN blood? Ork blood isn't even red (most of the times) it's green (when it's not black) so what made you think THAT was a good fucking idea? But no, mix it with rum and moonshine for a cocktail (Not only did this happen, it got a name. The Ork Piledriver. No I am not making this up.) to make it go down easier. There were three ruptured livers that week. I'm surprised there weren't more.

318. Learn how invisibility works: Eldar Rangers are a fucking nightmare. I was part of a thousand man unit. We lost a hundred men to a single one of them and were pinned down for an entire week. We had to carpet bomb ten square kilometers before we could get moving again, and even then we never found a body. I think we just wounded it and it pulled out. So I get that we want to pull something like that off, and get an invisible sniper. Just one teensie weensie thing. Eldar Rangers take on the color of their environment, they don't turn invisible. Some very radical individuals in the Adeptus Mechanicus tried their hands at making a human invisible. They did, all light was bent around him. And he couldn't see, so he staggered off and got his head stuck in a set of factory gears, popping his head off. This happened five more times before the Tech Priests had to admit it wasn't working.

319. Remember that Tyranids can adapt: This tends to get glazed over in favor of all the other horrible shit they do, but they're durable fuckers. So you need to be really careful when it comes to these things, because if they adapt in just the right way, they become a nightmare to deal with. Even more of a nightmare than they already are, just to clarify. One six month campaign that I was a part of was a very good example of this. The entire planet was a forrest, never seen anything like it. Tyranids were on it, so a general decided to set the entire thing on fire. For awhile, we thought it worked, because a lot of them did die. And then the survivors moved on. Have you ever fought flame proof Tyranids? They have thick, glossy black armor that's twice as thick as their normal armor. Nice going dipshit, like they weren't bad enough.

320: No cryptic hints: I hate people who think they're poets. We need to do something important, there's this vague threat coming, but no one actually feels like telling us what it is! They say something like "darkness is coming." NO FUCKING SHIT! Darkness has been coming for the last ten-thousand years! It's been coming so hard that the bed sheets are now a solid shade of white! Be a little more specific about what you're talking about! I taught my daughter how to do this when she was six! The number of times this has happened in the Imperium, either via asshole outsiders or pretentious psykers, and the time wasted on trying to figure out what the actually hell they were talking about.

The experience I had...actually wasn't example of this. Let me see, how do I put this lightly-there's a Harlequin in the same room as me. He's sitting cross legged across from me and smiling. Not a smug, holier than thou smile, but a friendly, "how's it going" smile. Ironically that makes me want to punch him in the face even more. But I get ahead of myself.

I was just sitting in my quarters, working on this book, when all of a sudden he pops in out of nowhere. Apparently there's an old Webway tunnel on this planet and this guy snuck in via that way. He's been spending the last few months scouting out the planets that fell to the Chaos Lord. Getting information on how many men she has, what her supply situation looks like, things like that.

He started off by telling me that "that which has happened before will happen again," and "the black tide will wash over us all." And when I was about to shoot him in the face with my hellgun for being an unhelpful prick (in hindsight, attempting to do that probably would've ended badly for me) he laughed and said he was just messing with me. Then he started giving me detailed reports on numbers and movements. I gagged a little when I saw how many Titans she managed to get her hands on.

This guy said that he came to me because apparently he found a couple copies of my book on those planets (popular kindling among cultists it seems) and thought I'd be a safe person to come to with this info, as I could move it up the chain of command. To the colonel, to be specific. Oh I want to punch this smug cunt so much.

But sadly, I really do need to bring this to the colonel. The Chaos Lord is going all in. Most times Chaos actually maintains something resembling a civilian population, as it does need a work force to keep its war machine running. Farmers, factory workers, mechanics, things like that. She's conscripting everyone she has. Even if it's just taking a farmer and shoving a lasgun into his hands (a spear if she's short on lasguns) she's arming everyone. She really wants to take this planet, to get revenge for her defeat. Emperor help me. Emperor help us all. He'll be sticking around if we'll have him (let's see how long he lives) but even if everyone is extremely radical today, I don't know how much of a difference he's going to make. It really is the End Times.