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'Perhaps discipline did have a point', Kyla mused, taking in another deep breath through her teeth.
Her ankles were sore, and her face felt red and flushed as she made her slow way through the barracks.
Their campaign to Agrippa IV had been costly. Dearly so. 40% losses, all the command staff, bar herself, a lieutenant, and two adjutants, dead to an assassin's bomb.
The world was a backwater, a mere million or so souls, populating three meager hives, all under the yoke of the now-deceased Vorth bloodline, a 'divinely appointed' idiot tyrant, who wasn't even willing to re-arm the forces sent to his own world to secure it, so that he wouldn't lose is own personal assets.
It didn't save him from retribution, when his own betrayal had come.
Their astropaths and commanders dead, and with such a hard campaign, the men and women of the regiment had run rampant, and taken their spoils, pillaging the upper hive, alongside the vengeful citizenry, spilling into churches and looting all the gold and silver and fine things they could.
Even the men and women of... comely appearances.
Kyla lumbered around the corner, lungs burning, and slowly, deliberately, forced one leg up a single stair, thighs wrestling with the hanging weighty apron of her belly. Then she braced, breathed in, and forced it to straighten, bringing the other leg up quickly, as the first one trembled. Her pudgy fingers gripped the banister clumsily, but tightly, as she put what weight she could over it.
By the second step, her thighs burnt, and her hips throbbed. But she set her jaw, found a breathing rhythm, and kept going.
The mood, once the initial days of raping and looting in abandon petered away, was uncertain. Priests had been killed, churches sacked, and the Vorth bloodline, divinely mandated by the Emperor and High Lords, to rule Agrippa, had been slain by their doing.
There was a tension. An apprehension in the air, in the guardsmen. They knew they'd crossed the line, that they'd let their despair at the sacrifices in the name of their duty get the better of them. They feared what the Commissar would do.
Kyla supposed she could have kept them on the straight and narrow, perhaps.
But there was just as great a chance that she, alone as she was, would suffer a grenade to the sleeping quarters by those men too desperate or fearful to obey.
And Kyla was truly never the best of Commissars.
Her hindbrain wanted to stop, to rest her muscles and catch her breath. But Kyla knew from experience, that she's never catch her breath just standing up. Standing itself was a drain on her stamina, so she willed the pain down and pushed on.
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