You led your vast, starving mob in an attack on ordinary soldiers who prowled the city streets like scavengers.
The soldiers never saw it coming. They'd grown complacent, expecting no resistance from half-dead civilians. Your ambush was crude but effective, overwhelming them through sheer numbers and desperate fury.
You obtained food and weapons through violence. Not much, but enough to matter.
The success of that first battle gave every participant an intoxicating surge of confidence. For people who'd been powerless their entire lives, the act of killing their oppressors and taking their supplies was transformative. Revolutionary, even, though not in the way true revolution should be.
They began to understand a simple truth: the slave owners were just men. Mortal. Killable. Paper tigers that bled and died like anyone else.
After the battle ended, the several soldiers who'd thrown down weapons and surrendered were set upon by the enraged mob. Fists and boots and improvised weapons, unleashed rage finding a target. You watched them beat the prisoners nearly to death, bones breaking, flesh splitting.
You didn't intervene effectively. You reprimanded the ringleaders with harsh words, made a show of asserting authority, but ultimately let the violence run its course. These people needed an outlet. Better enemy soldiers than each other.
Through a series of small-scale raids on soldier patrols, you gradually assembled a core group of fighters. "Bandits" might be the more accurate term. They varied wildly in quality and capability, but they all shared one critical trait: willingness to kill for a meal.
They couldn't understand what revolution meant. The concept of organized uprising for political goals was beyond their comprehension or interest. They fought solely, exclusively, to fill their stomachs. Everything else was meaningless abstraction.
You became the undisputed leader of this gang through a combination of success, intimidation, and the simple fact that you seemed to know what you were doing.
You led these thugs, most of whom had just learned which end of a gun to point at the enemy, in a city-wide cleanup operation. Systematic looting of every military position and supply depot you could locate.
You seized substantial quantities of weapons, equipment, and food supplies. Your arsenal grew from pathetic to merely inadequate.
Countless small military units belonging to different Tech-guild factions became your victims. They were fighting each other, distracted by civil war, easy prey for an organized force that struck from unexpected angles.
But as battles continued, casualties mounted at an alarming rate.
Those who survived were becoming hardened fighters, veterans who'd seen blood and death and learned to function through it. But battlefield mathematics remained unforgiving. Individual skill couldn't overcome massive numerical disadvantages or superior firepower.
You were forced to issue new orders. Your men had been arbitrarily abusing and executing prisoners, venting rage and trauma. You commanded them to stop. Instead, they should coerce and entice captives to join the gang. Every recruit was another body, another gun, another chance at survival.
Meanwhile, you dispatched the most eloquent gang members, loaded with stolen supplies, to other civilian gathering points throughout the city. Their mission was simple persuasion: join us or starve alone.
Your plan succeeded beyond expectations.
In just three days, you'd assembled a massive bandit gang numbering nearly ten thousand people. An army in size, if not in discipline or training.
But the city ruins, having been thoroughly stripped of resources multiple times, could no longer sustain everyone. You'd consumed everything edible, seized every useful item. The well was dry.
After considering your limited options, you led this vast civilian force on a raiding expedition against a nearby industrial city.
With numerous vehicles and substantial weaponry, you stormed the industrial city easily. This city hadn't yet experienced the civil strife consuming others, making its defenses predictable and unprepared for determined assault.
The garrison offered token resistance before fleeing in complete disarray, abandoning their posts to save themselves.
You commanded your forces to freely seize food and weapons, but explicitly forbade them from humiliating ordinary civilians or engaging in indiscriminate killing. You shouted the orders until your throat was raw, making the rules absolutely clear.
Your commands had essentially no effect.
You discovered a room stacked floor to ceiling with civilian corpses. Men, women, children, elderly. Killed for sport, for perceived slights, for being in the wrong place. The smell was overwhelming, a physical presence that coated your throat.
With blank expression, you retrieved your two double-edged axes and systematically executed over a hundred veteran bandits who'd disobeyed orders, barely managing to prevent an even more catastrophic massacre from unfolding.
Your public executions were brutal, methodical. You wanted to send a message. But you could see it in their eyes: your acts of terror had displeased many of the veteran bandits. They'd joined for freedom to take what they wanted, not to follow someone else's rules.
Shortly after, an informant approached you secretly with troubling news. Certain elements within the gang were plotting to declare themselves independent leaders and split away from your command entirely. The coalition was fracturing before it had properly formed.
You were planning to reorganize the force, purge the troublemakers, reimpose discipline...
Then the enemy arrived.
The sudden fall of an important industrial city had finally drawn serious attention from slave owners within the Tech-guilds. This wasn't acceptable. This was embarrassing.
A regular army, professional soldiers who'd been engaged in other campaigns, was redirected to crush your upstart rebellion.
They showed absolutely no concern for the large civilian population still inside the city. Acceptable losses in pursuit of reasserting control.
You were forced to command your gang to open the city's rear passages, creating escape routes for civilians. Thousands fled through those corridors while you prepared defenses.
The bandit gang, which hadn't yet finished looting its prizes, transitioned to defensive operations under your leadership. You utilized weapons and equipment abandoned by the fleeing original garrison, establishing firing positions and fortifications.
But despite your efforts, despite using captured enemy soldiers who'd joined your ranks as the military backbone...
The gang remained fundamentally a disorganized mob. No proper training, no ideological motivation beyond survival, no cohesive command structure. And the disparity in weaponry between your forces and the professional military was catastrophic.
A single artillery bombardment lasting ten hours reduced your force from over ten thousand to barely two thousand survivors.
The shelling was methodical, devastating, inescapable. Buildings collapsed. Fire spread through entire blocks. Bodies were pulverized by direct hits or buried alive under rubble. The screams never stopped, hour after hour, until eventually there weren't enough people left alive to scream.
You gritted your teeth and accepted this bitter lesson.
Now you truly understood why Corax had spent over a decade planning before launching his first uprising. Why he'd emphasized training, discipline, ideological education.
Revolution wasn't a dinner party. A gang would always remain a gang, no matter how large.
Endless warfare couldn't forge a true rebel army from people devoid of shared purpose and revolutionary consciousness.
You led a small squad of genuinely loyal bandits in a desperate counterattack during a lull in the artillery fire, destroying several laser cannons and hybrid artillery emplacements through suicide tactics.
The raid was partially successful, damaging enemy fire support capabilities. But the professional forces, vastly outnumbering and outclassing your fighters, immediately launched a fierce counterattack with infantry and armor.
You barely escaped the subsequent encirclement. Your men fought and died to create openings, throwing themselves at enemy positions to buy seconds. You used those seconds, running through fire and chaos, making it back to the industrial city's ruins.
Having learned from the shelling, you immediately ordered surviving gang members to dig underground tunnels, abandoning all surface defenses. Let the enemy have the ruins above. You'd fight from below.
Your plan was mobile underground warfare, using the city's infrastructure against them.
The enemy, having lost significant artillery assets, deployed armored vehicles and large infantry formations into the city to engage you in brutal close-quarters combat.
The fighting through the night was savage beyond description. No quarter asked or given. Every intersection a killbox, every basement a potential grave. The tunnels ran red with blood, the darkness punctuated by muzzle flashes and screams.
By dawn, only slightly over a thousand old, weak, and wounded gang members remained. They huddled together in excavated underground passages, trembling from exhaustion and trauma, knowing the end was near.
You glanced down at your heavy metal armor, now completely covered in cracks and dents. Your double-edged axes had finally failed, blades shattered beyond repair. You tossed them aside with a metallic clatter.
You slowly drew the sharp scythe and heavy hammer that had hung behind your waist since Corax gave them to you. Their weight settled into your palms, familiar and final. These weapons had meaning. These deserved to taste blood one last time.
You paused, studying the defeated faces around you. Then you made an announcement.
You'd ordered a squad to dig an escape tunnel leading outside the industrial city. Anyone who wanted to leave could take whatever food and equipment they could carry and flee. You wouldn't stop them. Wouldn't judge them.
If someone chose to stay and fight alongside you to the bitter end, you'd welcome them as comrades.
The crowd exchanged uncertain glances, processing the offer.
After the first person hesitantly gathered supplies and successfully departed, more followed quickly. Then it became a rush, people grabbing what they could and disappearing into the escape tunnel. The flood of deserters continued until supplies ran low.
Finally, silence fell.
Only 108 people remained, including yourself.
You studied each one individually, committing faces to memory. A faint smile crossed your lips despite everything.
Among them stood middle-aged men, crude in manner but displaying exceptional close-combat skills honed through decades of hard living. Former factory workers who'd found they had a talent for killing.
There was a young woman whose beauty struck you as tragically wasted. At this moment, she was binding interconnected fragmentation grenades around her slender waist, preparing to make herself a living bomb.
A gaunt old man, one arm completely destroyed by artillery fire, had mounted a laser weapon directly to his festering wound, creating a grotesque prosthetic.
An elderly woman who'd lost both legs sat in a commandeered automated cart, a heavy weapon mounted on the front, her expression serene and accepting.
You even recognized two familiar figures: the middle-aged woman who'd been first to step forward when you'd initially rallied the mob, now wielding a laser rifle with competent ease. On her back, strapped securely, was the young child who'd shouted for food. He was unconscious, blood loss from shrapnel wounds leaving him pale as death.
You gazed at these strange, broken, beautiful people. Your comrades. Your fellow soldiers. Those willing to stay and die alongside you.
You tucked the sharp scythe under one arm and raised your free hand in an Aquila salute, the double-headed eagle gesture of the Imperium that none of these people would recognize but somehow felt appropriate.
"Today, we launched a doomed uprising," you said slowly, letting each word carry weight. "It's not that you haven't done enough. We were simply fighting against impossible odds. Wrong timing, wrong location, wrong circumstances."
You paused, meeting eyes. "But I can promise you something with absolute certainty. Right now, above us, on that mining moon where this all began, a true revolution belonging to the people is preparing to descend upon this planet that has suffered for so long."
You spoke with solemn conviction to the crowd, watching their eyes gradually brighten with something that might have been hope.
"I believe Corax will bring a better life to everyone. The people won't be tools for slave owners anymore. Their children won't return to battlefields because of hunger. Everything you dreamed of, everything we fought for, all the comrades who died... it wasn't for nothing. Their sacrifice will mean something."
You nodded once, firmly. Then turned to the communication device and transmitted your current coordinates to the mining moon. A final message. A target marker.
You gripped the scythe and hammer tightly once more, feeling their balance.
You stood before your 107 remaining comrades, meeting their gazes one final time.
Then you led them in a last assault toward the underground passage entrance where enemy forces would eventually come.
You swung the sharp scythe and heavy hammer with savage expression, the weapons emitting terrifying shrieks as they cut through air and flesh alike.
Countless enemy squads searching the tunnels became easy prey. They'd expected scattered resistance, broken people. Instead they found focused fury.
But armored vehicles arrived quickly. Reinforcements poured in, professional soldiers with orders to finish this rebellion permanently.
You fought like trapped beasts, baring claws and fangs, roaring defiance until the very end.
One by one, your fearless comrades fell in spreading pools of blood.
The middle-aged woman with the child on her back took a laser burst to the chest. She had just enough time to gently lower the boy before collapsing. The beautiful young woman detonated her grenades, taking an entire squad with her. The old man's weapon-arm finally gave out, infection and exhaustion claiming him.
Half your body was vaporized by a laser cannon mounted on an armored vehicle. You gripped the scythe in your remaining hand, barely managing to remain standing in the center of a blood-soaked battlefield littered with corpses.
Enemy soldiers approached cautiously, their eyes showing fear despite overwhelming numerical advantage. They'd won, but you'd made them pay for every meter.
You seemed completely unaware of their presence.
You merely lifted your weary face, caked with thick, sticky blood obscuring your features. Your remaining eye looked upward, beyond the ceiling, beyond the planet.
You saw clearly through the layers of rock and atmosphere: a large expanse of white mist rapidly distorting due to invisible gravity well fluctuations. A heavy object was descending toward the city's surface.
The atomic mining charge that would end this.
You smiled.
"Goodbye, Comrade Corax."
Complete darkness surrounded you as the weapon detonated.
You opened your arms wide, embracing the approaching light and heat that bloomed like a newborn star.
Your mangled body was instantly vaporized, scattered as atoms across the killing ground.
You are dead.
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