Chapter 6

  In the end, you guessed that there was little point in struggling against the flow of the world alone, and you honestly doubted that you could forgive yourself if the Empire was even the slightest bit weakened by your overall meaningless struggles. But even so, you couldn't help but hope that your concerns would turn out to be unfounded, and that the Crown would quickly be able to tame the Fatherland and its neighbours once things truly got out of hand.

  You could see that you would sooner or later need to toughen up a bit more to properly protect the Fatherland, morality isn't something a soldier should worry about anyway, it never led to anything good when soldiers decided they held the moral high ground. And the same was true for the opposite when soldiers thought they fought on the wrong side, with all the chains that come loose once you're convinced you crossed the line. Your duty as an imperial soldier was to kill and if required die for the Fatherland, and it was really getting annoying that you had to repeat that simple fact to yourself so often.

  "Roland, Mark, what do the both of you think of the future?"

  "Nothing to be honest, sir, we're busy enough with the present as it is, did you need help with something?"

  "Same thing here, sir, digging trenches for six hours doesn't leave one with all that much energy to spare on thinking about the future."

  "Ah yes, I almost forgot about the whole ordeal, how are they doing?"

  "They're learning, not as fast as we wanted, but they do make steady progress, sir."

  "Does the same go for your group as well, Mark?"

  "He's too negative, sir, they're actually doing fine, it really helps that they can see the fruits of their labour."

  You supposed that made sense, the trenches were after all growing each day by quite a bit, if one added the training flights into the mix it should make for some decent motivation to further improve their skills. At times like these you were truly happy that the higher ups showed so much trust in you, not everyone would be allowed access to the funds required to build such massive fortifications. The only thing you could truly complain about was that you were not allowed to join your Battalion in the backbreaking work, with how all three of your captains were already exhausting themselves.

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  It would be like one of the generals climbing into the trenches and asking for a spade, it wasn't what commanders were there for, nor could they do their actual duty if they spent all their energy that way, which now vexingly left you with enough energy to think about the future and morality of all things. Yeah, you would make damn sure to never tell your captains or anyone else about those moments of weakness, you would lose all respect that you haven't even created yet in no time, the men would get from you what they needed, the perfect imperial officer that gets them through everything.

  "If they're truly holding up as well as you say they do, Mark, let's increase the difficulty a bit."

  "Very well, should we increase the difficulty within reason, or should we break them, sir?"

  "I think we can afford to be nice for now, let's go with a time limit for the next expansion of our fortifications, do both of you agree?"

  "It seems reasonable, sir."

  "No complaints from me, sir."

  "I take it Dieter won't have a problem with it either, seeing as he didn't complain about the men to me as he usually does, but please inform him of the change the next time you see him just in case he does have objections, Roland."

  "We made clear quite some time ago that we would support you to the best of our abilities, sir, there won't be any objections."

  "And you have my thanks for that, Roland, but once it's an actual order there really can't be any objections anymore, so I want to make sure everyone gets the chance to open up if an order is bothering them, not just for this specific one but for future ones as well."

  "I will think on what we should focus on for the next few days, I expect that none of your Companies struggle with the time limit anymore once I'm done with that, now off you go, I've kept you long enough."

  "Sir."

  "Sir."

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