"How are you able to see anything?" Spearman asked me as our small party of four trudged through the dense woods in search of our quarry. "I can barely see my own hand if I stick it out in front of my face!"

"Practice." I simply answered, feeling it would be better to spare him an explanation of my upbringing, not that I believed he would have cared to hear it.

It had been over an hour since we had started to make our way to the bandit's camp illustrated on the crudely drawn map we pilfered from the ambushers we left behind us. Progress had been unsurprisingly slow, given how the map's markers were made by someone who was likely illiterate given some of the scribbles they had left on their navigational tool. Regardless of how useful I felt the map was, we had no other leads that could show us the way to the remaining bandits lurking in the first we were wandering through almost aimlessly.

Dusk had come and gone and with it, the last few rays of sunlight that had made trekking through the dense pines we were surrounded by a trivial matter. Had we not been pressed for time in dealing with the remaining bandits before they noticed their detachment of ambushers had been slain, I would have gladly waited until morning before seeking them out. Unfortunately, with no way to tell how many of their numbers we would be forced to deal with or if they would stay and fight rather than flee and make it near impossible for us to complete our current quest, we had to move through the forest with only what little meager moonlight poured through the forest canopy from the twin moons hanging above us.

Overall, this was one of the better unexpected excursions I had been on throughout my career. No one had tried to kill us so far and the fate of the planet or millions of lives wasn't resting on my shoulders as they somehow always did, making the overall experience of skipping out on a good night's rest and a belly full of amasec surprisingly tolerable for once.

"Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on that." The spikey haired idiot grumbled. "Me and Witch have explored more than our fair share of caves since becoming adventurers, and we've been following you two by your smell more than anything else."

As if to prove just how much trouble the braggart was having, one of the branches my aide pushed in front of him as he followed closely behind me while navigating the thick brush we were currently passing through snapped back and smacked the blue armored idiot directly in the face.

"Gah!? Pffff-ack! Oi, watch what you're doing up there!" The fool shouted at us. "I had my damn mouth open when you did that."

"Sorry, won't happen again." My aide said underneath his faint chuckle.

Jurgen wasn't the only one enjoying the momentary distraction, as I could hear a seductive snickering coming from Witch as she offered to check her partner's face for any damage. Had it not been for years of dealing with 'Jinxie', the most unlucky guardsman I have ever had the pleasure of encountering, I would have doubled over in laughter. Instead, I put on my usual act of a charismatic and unflappable leader once more.

"I'm sure it was an accident, but try not to let it happen again, Jurgen. Spearman's looks are one of the only things he has going for him. We wouldn't want anyone to think you did it on purpose." I joked.

My aide turned oddly silent after I said that last part instead of cracking another witty remark like I expected him to. After years of being a commissar beloved by his troops, I knew better than to inquire any further on the matter. There were some disciplinary issues that simply were not filling out the paperwork for, and this one of them.

"How long… until we reach… our destination, Commissar?" Witch spoke up after she finished examining her crush's face which took suspiciously longer than it should have in my opinion.

Oh, to be young and in love. Although my days of bedding every governor's daughter I came across were long behind me, that didn't mean I was opposed to watching a tender moment like this pass by so long as there was no risk of anyone dying over it. With that said, I had no intentions of becoming one of the many embarrassing entries on the next edition of Avoiding Stupid Deaths in the 41st Millenium.

"It shouldn't be too much longer, so try to save the flirting for later, you two." I teased, enjoying the girlish huff I heard come from behind me.

"What do you mean by that?" Spearman questioned, oblivious as ever.

"I mean you might want to watch out for Jurgen. Beating people with tree limbs is a sign of affection on Valhalla." I lied, somehow keeping a straight face in the process despite the absurdity of my claim.

"Oh, hah hah. Very funny, Commissar." Spearman grumbled, earning a small chuckle from his partner.

"The Commissar isn't lying." My aide interrupted, leaving all three of us at a loss of words for a moment.

It was only when I turned around to see the shit eating grin he was wearing, one that the darkness obscured from the rest of our party, that I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. The same couldn't be said for Spearman, who made the wise decision to take a few more steps away from my aide just to be safe. I wasn't sure which was funnier, the idiot's reaction or that he really thought my aide was starting to fall for his self-appointed 'rugged charm'.

Despite my dislike of the cocky fool, I honestly couldn't blame him. Jurgen's repugnant odor was legendary, so much so that some of the troops and commander's I've worked beside recognized my aide before they noticed me. Considering how it would happen whenever visibility was low or the weather hot enough for his putrid aroma to be exceptionally ripe, it wasn't much of a surprise when it did happen. Few people could stand to be in the same room as him, let alone consider the idea of being more than just a colleague working alongside him. Sometimes I wonder if that is why he is always so fond of me, since aside from Amberley who values his status as a blank alongside the other services and skills he is capable of providing her, I am perhaps the only person who appreciates him for who he is and not what he can do. From his impeccable marksmanship to how a Nurglite cultist accidentally mistook him for a fellow Chaos worshiper once and his unwavering loyalty to those he is close to, there is nothing I would want to change about him.

That isn't to say I am daring enough to breathe through my nose whenever I am in an enclosed space with him and risk losing my lunch due to his concentrated musk and halitosis, however.

We fell back into our previous silence after Jurgen had his fun at Spearman's expense, once again returning to the monotonous task of navigating a near pitch black forest in search of a bandit camp on a map that might or might not be marked correctly. In all honesty, my hopes of actually finding our intended destination were not high. In fact, I was secretly wishing we would never find any additional threats even if it meant I went the night without any sleep. I would always take a little bit of weariness over an angry horde of poorly armed peasants, to say nothing of getting shot at by said peasants.

It was just as I was beginning to think I could convince the two Silver Ranked adventurers that the map we stole was meant to misdirect anyone who looked at it that we found the first flicker of life dwelling within the forest we had seen since we were ambushed. A small fire, one that could only have been made by man or monster, was visible only a few dozen meters from where our party was when we spotted it.

I motioned for the adventurers to stop behind me and slow our purposeful march to a careful crawl, but the duo proved why they were some of the highest ranking members of the Adventurer's Guild Frontier Town branch by coming at a stop as soon as Jurgen and I noticed our potential target up ahead. A quick glance at the equipment and specialties each of us possessed led to the obvious choice of Jurgen and I taking the first steps towards the fire in front of us which soon revealed itself as a campfire of the base we were searching for.

A scraggly looking group of humans and xenos were gathered around it, either having passed out drunk from indulging in their previous spoils or huddling next to it for warmth. For perhaps the first time since arriving on this planet, I felt glad I brought along my Commissarial greatcoat before everything went ploin shaped and I ended up stranded on a backwater planet in the middle of frakking summer. We must have been downwind of them as they had not smelled my aide by the time we drew close enough to hear them.

"When the hell are those idiots going to come back?" One of the humans complained to anyone who would bother to listen to her. "They should have been here over an hour ago."

"Probably got lost if they let 'Navigator' lead them back using that damn map of his." Another one grumbled.

A chorus of chuckles and a few complaints mirroring my own after having used the nearly illegible parchment to find their base rang out throughout the camp's lighthearted atmosphere. It was only when I was discussing which targets Jurgen and I would respectively take when we started assault that the one figure amongst them who hadn't responded to the jab at their directionally challenged cohort. To my complete lack of surprise, it was the lone Eldar amongst them who was stuck up his own arse, or so I thought until he finally spoke his mind.

"Maybe THEY finally caught up to us." He muttered, the entire group that wasn't asleep growing noticeably more spooked at his words.

"Why the fuck would you say that?" The woman, who initially started their discussion, groaned as a scared murmuring rang out around her. "We agreed not to talk about THEM when it's dark."

"Hey, I never saw any of these freaky goblins you were telling me about so I don't get what your deal is." The xenos countered as a half dozen frenzied eyes fell on him. "Why don't you tell me what there is to be so afraid of and maybe I'll stop bringing up how none of you are brave enough to face a normal freaking gob-"

"Those THINGS are notnormal." The female bandit interrupted, her breathing starting to become erratic all of a sudden. "I… I just… fuck, I don't know what in the God of Knowledge's name those THINGS are, but THEY ARE NOT NORMAL."

"I've scared off my fair share of goblins in the past, we all have." She continued, earning a general nod of assent from the gathered crowd of vandals. "And let me tell you something, knife ears, you ain't ever seen anything like those goblins before."

"Really? Did one of them shoot a lightning bolt at you or carry a club as big as a child?" The Eldar mocked in an attempt to feign confidence, although I could start to see his facade starting to crack even from where I was standing, waiting to call the other adventurers over and start our assault in an attempt to gleam anything potentially useful out of these bandits.

"The bloody greenskins ate my wife right in front of me." One of the other bandits, possibly a squat given his shorter and rounder stature compared to the others present, told them. "Creepy buggers barely even looked human, more so than those monsters normally do with all of those extra arms and thick chunks of bone growing out of THEM. Didn't even bother to kill her first or take her to their nest like THEY are supposed to do with womenfolk. THEY just… just tore into her while we were trying to run away for our lives and there wasn't anything I could do to help her. I-I-I still hear the screaming, sometimes."

The xenos' bravado quickly fell into an expression of pure terror as the bandit recounted his apparent encounter with the little Slaaneshi worshiping bastards and I too felt my stomach lurch at the thought of witnessing such a horror and being unable to do anything about it. Something about the story struck me as odd, my palms tingling as my subconscious picked up something the rest of my waking mind didn't. I couldn't figure out what exactly about the bandit's story that bothered me, so I decided to wait a little longer to see if they mentioned anything else I needed to worry about.

"Is that enough proof for you?" The female bandit asked the spooked Eldar, before adding, "Or would you like to hear more about the bastards that made most of us flee from our homes and start robbing careless merchants to make our living?"

Well, that explained why there were so many bandits prowling the forest, the natural defense around them providing some semblance of safety compared to that of a few poorly constructed houses could provide them. With that said it did little to help resolve the uneasy feeling building up in the pit of my stomach that I had acquired from listening to them as I thought back to a similar experience of my own.

My first quest that I took for the Adventurer's Guild with Priestess had greenskins that also could have qualified as being particularly disgusting, even amongst their own vile species. Thankfully for her, Jurgen and I were able to protect her from the lack of common sense and self-preservation the rest of our initial party lacked. Otherwise, she would have likely ended up in the same sorry state as her other two female companions or that idiot the goblins hacked to pieces.

At the time, I hoped those two girls were alright. Apparently they had run off to parts unknown shortly after we rescued them. Had I known why they left the safety of the church we dropped them off in, I wouldn't have brushed their mysterious disappearance off so easily.

Feeling as if there wasn't anything else about the bandits origins that was worth looking into, a mistake that would come to bite me soon enough, I finally signaled Witch and Spearman to start moving into position behind us. To my surprise, the two of them moved in absolute silence unlike they had earlier. Spearman's sudden stealthy feat struck me as exceptionally odd given the bulky metal armor he was wearing, so rather than wonder if he had been taking the frak with me earlier by refusing to scout ahead instead of me, I wrote off his soundless foot falls as some sort of witchcraft given who the other adventurer at his side was. As I had eventually learned after the quest, my assumptions were correct.

"Jurgen and I will take care of the bandits who are awake." I told them and then pointed to a few of our targets who were fast asleep without any visible weaponry beside them adding, "If you can take care of those few once we take their nigh watch out, Jurgen and I should be able to pick off the others before they become a problem for you."

"Huh, not the kind of plan I expected from you after our last fight against these guys." Spearman mused. "Not saying it's a bad thing, but definitely unexpected."

"How so?" I inquired, my curiosity getting the better of me.

"I had you pegged as one of those assholes who care more about glory and looking impressive to people than someone who can think with their head." He told me, completely oblivious to the irony of his statement. "Guess I was wrong about you."

"There's a reason I try to make a show of myself. The enemy never expects a hero with a reputation for running head first into danger to be just as willing to ambush them from behind." I half-lied.

While protecting my stellar reputation and the perks that came with it was the primary goal of presenting myself as the hero the Commissariat intended to make me out to be, it also came with the side effect of people seeing me as a hero who was as brave as he was brash and foolhardy. While they might have been right to a certain extent, I did take advantage of people underestimating my intelligence on more than one occasion. A great number of those times also involved bluffing my way through impossible scenarios with only the scant information I possessed at the time like when I retrieved the Shadowlight artifact from a mad inquisitor, but my acting skills paled in comparison to the benefits a level head and some self-awareness provided me.

"No kidding. Well, you had me fooled, Commissar." The fool said, as if that was supposed to be an accomplishment I should be proud of.

"Hey did one of you guys hear something?" One of the bandits sitting around the campfire suddenly asked their companions.

Before he could get his answer, Jurgen and I started unloading our lasweapons into the unfortunate few bandits who had managed to stay awake just in time to be cut down by our combined firepower. Spearman sprung out from the foliage concealing us and immediately rushed towards the bandits we left for him while Witch stayed beside us, sending a shiver down my spine as she uttered something that reeked of Sorcery.

Had I still been attached to the Imperial Guard, I would have been obligated to shoot her then and there under the suspicion of being an unsanctioned psyker. Fortunately for her, what the Imperium doesn't know can't hurt it according to most people in positions of authority, except the reasonable ones like myself, so I tactfully ignored both her and how being in close proximity to my aide hadn't given her a seizure like the ones Rakel experienced on the rare few occasions they accidentally came close enough to touch each other. The only logical explanation I could see was that whatever magic Witch was using wasn't Warp based, but that only raised more questions than answers for me. Luckily for me, finding said answers was the Inquisition's job, not mine.

While Spearman and Witch were making short work of the bandits on their side of the campfire, Jurgen and I turned our attention to the others who were scrambling to get to their weapons following their rude awakening. To say it was a slaughter is perhaps the most mild way to describe what happened.

Once the last of the bandits were dealt with by Spearman, all of us cleared up a small area around the campfire and took a well deserved break following our near constant march until our latest assault.

"Not going to lie, this quest went a whole lot easier than I expected it to." The fool beside me sighed, not bothering to hide his disappointment. "No wonder that armored blockhead is willing to take you on his goblin hunts."

"Please, this much is nothing compared to diving in a cave with who knows how many greenskins trying to cut you to pieces." I quickly said in an attempt to shrug off his mild praise.

"Coming from someone who was able to take down two Ogres without breaking a sweat, I'm surprised you aren't picking up harder quests since taking care of a few bandits seems beneath you." He continued. "You know, I could always put in a word with some of the Guild staff and-

Before he could finish the obvious attempt to win my favor by increasing my rank, pay, or both, I interrupted him before he could make a fool out of us both. "I'm not doing this for fame or fortune." I told him.

"I kinda figured that one out since you do hunt goblins all the time." Spearman fired back, completely unaware of exactly how lucrative those excursions could be if luck was on your side. "But still, a guy like you can't exactly be happy with lounging around in the sticks like the rest of us."

"Really?" I gasped, feigning surprise. "And here I thought you loved the attention that comes with being the 'Frontier's Strongest.'"

"Hey, I grew up on the Frontier. I wouldn't abandon my home for anything, but I don't really see you having the same reason to stay around here instead of moving to the capitol or maybe somewhere nice nearby like Water Town." He explained.

"Just like you have your reason, Jurgen and I have our own." I bluntly informed him, hoping that would be the end of it.

"And what… would that be?" Witch drawled out in her usual and oddly sensual way of speaking.

I let out a sigh as I put on my best, most sincere sounding voice and gave her the first thing that came to my mind to avoid being exposed as fraud.

"Because, like I said before, we didn't become adventurers for the fame, glory, money, or anything else the Adventurer's Guild could offer us." I started to tell the two adventurers, "Jurgen and I have been fighting against the forces of Chaos and other vile threats for decades and we're not about to stop now just because we are a little lost at the moment. Now, while we could go ahead and protect the lords and ladies of these lands like most high ranking adventurers, I felt that our skills would be put to better use protecting the common folk who do not have access to the same world renowned heroes their rulers have serving their every beck and call."

"We've seen what happens to the people who are left behind in the fires of war or whenever a dire threat encroaches on a beleaguered people. Families are shattered, homes destroyed, lives lost, and sometimes a whole corner civilization can be wiped out of existence without a single trace that they were ever there. Usually, there was never anything either of us could do about it except put an end to the greater threats in a given area in the hopes that it would free up enough resources for the locals to solve their own problems. Now that I no longer have an entire regiment to take care of, I am finally free to help those poor souls that are so often overlooked in their darkest moments and I have no intentions of stopping anytime soon."

It was only as I finished my speech that I realized I might have gone a little overboard in making myself sound like the living saint the Imperium saw me as, but as I saw the awestruck looks of the two adventurers accompanying myself, I smiled knowing that they fully believed every word I said.

"Can't forget about the food the Guild serves." My aide added in an attempt to be helpful, "It's better than most of the slop we've been served over the years."

I let out a hearty laugh at how Jurgen managed to completely misread our audience. "Yes, that's another thing I would hate to pass up. You'd be surprised at how awful some of our rations have been. I know I never would have imagined burning a ration bar until it resembled charcoal more than anything remotely edible could make it taste better until after eating them exclusively for a month straight."

Spearman and Witch let out a chuckle of their own at my unfortunate recollection of the inedible scraps the Munitorum has the audacity to call 'food'. I doubt that label would remain unchanged if they were forced to dine on nothing but them for as long as they forced us on the front lines to.

The rest of the night passed by quickly. The bodies of the bandits were checked for any familiar faces that were worth being taken with us if they had any individual bounties on them, stripped of all and any valuables, and then burned to avoid them might potentially be a latent strand of zombie plague living organisms were immune to. I say potentially because neither Spearman nor Witch seemed to be familiar with that damnable Chaos virus or the Ruinous Power that controlled it and I was in no mood to find out if I had anything else to worry about when the odds of returning to the Imperium seemed less likely with every passing day.

After the corpses were dealt with and some bedding was secured, we passed the night in relative luxury using the bandit's camp as our own instead of wasting time building our own since a few bloodstains never hurt anyone and could easily be washed out of clothes on this world. Sleep came to us easily enough as we did spend almost the entire day roaming the forest looking for our quest targets. Once dawn finally woke us up, we carried whatever loot we could haul on our backs in a single trip to our waiting carriage before we started the long process of returning back to Frontier Town, starting with removing that bloody tree our initial ambushers left in our way.


Special thanks to Doc43Soulsfor beta reading this chapter!


Author's Corner:

And there you have it, another short little adventure of Cain and company.

Before I move onto the comments, let me address a little shoutout to another fic some of you might or might not know about. Avoiding Stupid Deaths in the 41st Millenium is a lovely little collection of both probable yet stupid ways to bite the dust in W40K as well as 'passionate' critiques of brain dead tropes and other insanity some authors tend to use from the perspective of your average veteran guardsman who has seen it all and then some. Plenty of fun to be hand reading a W40K fic that is a collection of Darwin Awards.


Comments:

Cousin687: (On when the definitely not Genestealer Hybrid Goblins will make a reappearance and future Imperial activity)

As you pointed out yourself, any goblins of questionable heritage will be dealt with whenever they become a problem. In regards to that last bit, all I will say is that I have had this story planned out for a long time. While there are a lot of things that I am fully willing and expecting to change or write on the fly, this is absolutely not one of them.

Sir Deadpool: (On the potential Cain rescue plan/Imperium's standard response to unconquered worlds)

Yeah… should the Imperium ever be aware of the Four Cornered World it will be an absolute massacre should the Imperial Guard ever attempt to assert their control over it. The sheer amount of xenos, possible psyker activity, and other heresies would definitely not result in a peaceful integration by any stretch of the imagination.

Dovahsinn270: (On the not-so humble lasbolt)

For all the jokes I and the rest of the community makes about the Imperial Guard's standard issue flashlight, these things would be insanely deadly and useful in our modern day world. The power packs themselves would be even more so given how efficient they are at converting sunlight and thermal energy into electrical energy. The fact that they are one of the weakest weapons in W40K really goes to show how batshit crazy the setting is and how powerful most units are in comparison when they absorb modern day anti-tank round equivalents by the hundreds like they are nothing.

Dorben: (On Cain's pseudo darkvision)

While I do agree with the sentiment behind your outrage, let me remind you that there are MULTIPLE INSTANCES where an Inquisitor of all people finds Cain's ability to navigate in the dark to be noteworthy and how he usually ends up leading search parties in caverns and underhives due to this. It does manage to save his life and those of his cadets in Cain's Last Stand if you were interested in looking at a more blatant example of this happening. It's bullshit, like a lot of what Cain does, but it is canon bullshit... which is also a lot of what Cain does and is one more reason why he is such an entertaining character.


Well, that's it for me. Thanks for reading and I hope to see you all again in the future.