The commissar ducked again and panted heavily. Cold water pooled in his hard leather boots. A trooper beside him looked at him with an expression of horror and the commissar screamed at him to keep firing.
The crack of lasbolts shattered the evening sky over Frax. 'Frax is a backwater little planet, hardly worth fighting over,' the commissar had found himself scoffing at the general's staff dinner just a few hours prior. Now the food sat heavily in his gut, a strange reminder of the comforts he'd built up around him that felt very out of place in the warzone.
The Ork waaaagh! erupted with such malice and hatred that many of the guardsmen looked ready to run there and then. The commissar, true to his duty, knew what to do and placed a precise shot right through the head of the fearful guardsman. 'I'll shoot the whole lot of you if I have to,' he shouted.
The men moved back into position, but the commissar knew that the end of all their lives was nearly upon them. In a split-second decision, he knew what to do.
The brave commissar hauled himself out of the trench into the wide open no-man's-land. The orks screamed with crazed bloodlust when they saw him; they loved it when the humies had a hero.
With grim acceptance and the awed gaze of his men at his back he marched forward in parade fashion, imagining it was just another drill and that he would make it home safe to have that dinner again.
He knew it wouldn't happen, but it's amazing how much of a comfort imagination can be, he thought to himself as he leveled his laspistol; his training at the Commissariat came easily to his lips. 'Line your eye up with the sight. Pick out the largest ork you can - they're usually the leader. Brace yourself and keep the Emperor in your heart.' Simple.
In silence he pulled the trigger and the ork fell. A sneering smile flitted on his face for an instant, because he knew he'd won. The orks would win here, that much had been certain from the start, but the Imperium was vast. The giant of Mankind's fist would crush this slimy mudball of a planet and his beloved guardsmen would be able to go home.
He sneered because he'd won. A dozen more orks fell under his steady fire.
Reports say that the sneer was ripped off of his face by a brutal ork bullet - simplistic but effective.
His men burst over the trenches with fire in their hearts as they'd never felt before, and they ripped into the broken ork line and led the Imperium to it's greatest victory in recent memory. If only someone had remembered the name of that brave commissar.