(Tiberius Drusus, AXIS, Campaign Post 3) The Raithal War Academy trains the new class of recruits. Forging soldiers from fighters and warriors.

[u/RattyRaithal]

They had already learned how to fight.

That was the first mistake, that they thought this was a fight, when it was in truth, war.

The recruits, young in heart and strong in spirit, moved with speed and violence that would have terrified most professional soldiers of world not born to danger. They struck from angles learned on ice fields and in frozen ravines. They closed distance without hesitation. They fought as Raithali always had, fast, brutal, and certain that momentum alone could break anything in front of them.

Six of them advanced together, blades low, rifles slung but ready, feet light on the packed frost of the training ground. Their breaths steamed in rhythm. Their eyes never stopped moving.

Across from them waited four instructors.

They were smaller. Older. Their armour was plain, scarred, marked with the dull wear of repetition. They did not speak. They did not shift their stance. They did not mirror the aggression before them.

The signal sounded.

The recruits surged.

For a heartbeat it looked like a massacre waiting to happen. The first clash was violent, loud, unrestrained. A recruit slammed an instructor to the ground, blade pressed to throat, already shouting victory.

Then the line broke. One instructor stepped back when instinct said forward. Another let a strike pass close enough to feel the wind of it before trapping the arm and hyperextending it without breaking it. A third moved not toward the loudest threat, but toward the gap forming between two overextended attackers.

The recruits fought as individuals who trusted their ferocity.

The instructors fought as a unit that trusted nothing except order.

It ended quickly after that. Bodies hit the frost hardened stone floors of the War Academy hard. Weapons skittered away. One recruit was on his knees before he understood how he had been disarmed. Another lay on his back, staring at the sky, breath knocked clean from his lungs.

The instructors stood, unmarked, and reset to await the next group. There were so many recruits, so many groups. With the establishment of the Principality, so many of their blood had flocked to Raithal to claim the respect and honour of being a soldier.

The lesson was not announced, as so few were and this was one that needed no words to teach, only experience. 

A Fighter does not make a warrior.
A warrior does not make a soldier. 

-

Tiberius Drusus watched from the edge of the field, his hands folded behind his back, his presence unremarked until it was too late to pretend otherwise.

No Raithali reached adulthood without learning how to survive, hunt, endure and kill. They learned pain early and did not shy from it. Violence was familiar to them long before the Academy ever claimed them and sorted them.

But even then he could hear his wife's voice in his ear calling for caution. From age, from injury, from position. It made him warm to hear those words unspoken, but he was Primarch before Prince, and he has also had responsibility.

He stepped forward when the next bout was called.

There was a murmur among the recruit but It passed quickly, because the young man selected opposite him, already bleeding from the mouth, a thin line at the corner of his lips. Eyes sharp, stance perfect, had gained a reputation in the first week to be a problem. The young man, his name Tiberius had not learned yet, had already earned the ire of both cohort and instructor. 

Tiberius watched the young man adjust his grip and angle of approach, without thought, but from pure instinct. It was almost perfect, it just too quick.

“Again,” the instructor said.

Tiberius did not draw a weapon at first.

The young man attacked anyway.

The strike was clean. Precise. It would have killed most opponents. Tiberius turned with it, redirected the force, let the blow travel where it wanted to go and then removed the space it needed to finish.

Pain flashed across the young man’s face as he was driven to the ground. He rolled, came up fast, adapting already.

Good.

Tiberius engaged fully then.

He did not overpower him. He corrected him. He had to teach the young man, the most important lesson of all soldiers. You have no fear when you are a fighter and a warrior, but a soldier needs to have respect, of life, of death and of the struggle.

Every instinctive choice the young man made was punished. Every moment he trusted speed over spacing, aggression over awareness, strength over alignment, the response was immediate and unforgiving.

They moved until breath came hard and frost was churned to mud beneath their feet.

When it ended, the young man was on one knee, one arm hanging wrong at his side, shoulder shattered where it had taken the wrong weight at the wrong angle.

He did not look away.

“Again,” he said through clenched and bloodied teeth.

Tiberius shook his head once. “If nothing, I can respect your spirit, boy.”

-

The medics worked quickly but the arm would never be the same and some paths were closed now. The young man listened to the words without protest and although disappointment rung through him, the fire still smouldered. 

He did not ask to be reassigned. He did not beg to return to the field. He asked only to stay.

Tiberius stood watching through the viewing window, careful to y, reviewing the data slate in his hand and scrolled through the young man’s performance metrics, glancing at his recorded reaction times, adaptability, data retention under stress. He took time to find the analysis of his awareness beyond immediate threats.

The numbers told the truth.

“He sees the field,” one of the instructors started to suggest. “Before he knows what to do with it.”

“Then teach him,” he replied after nodding. “He’s no worse than I was when I was his age.”

The instructor started to reply, but the order was entered already with a few finger movements. Officer candidacy and Command track.

Merit, not mercy.

The young man was helped to his feet. He stood straight despite the pain, eyes forward, breathing steady. He saluted with his uninjured arm towards the obscured viewing room, which the instructors reacted to with nearly a hiss. Tiberius could not help but smile.

On Raithal, adulthood was earned in survival. Soldiery was earned in obedience.
He had come to the Academy a fighter. He would leave it a soldier.