Ajax ran every CQC drill with every squad in 10th company. Each run, he focused on calling out mistakes his squads made, forcing his men to practice until they could do it right, according to his standards.
Ajax wanted to make his squads practice until they didn't make any mistakes, but there simply wasn't enough time. Even practicing for 12 hours a day couldn't turn his soldiers into perfect killing machines, not with only seven days to do it. But they were sharp.
Ajax had grown up idolizing special operators like the Navy Seals, Delta force, and the U.S. Army Rangers. Those groups often talked about three principles to CQC. Speed, Surprise, and Violence of Action. If you lose one element, you lose all the others. Only by maintaining these three elements could a group of soldiers dominate their enemies.
Ajax worked with his squads to develop their speed by actually doing the opposite, going slow. He had heard this phrase that described how soldiers developed speed in their fighting: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. The entire company spent hours on the training deck drilling their most fundamental movements. Unslinging their rifles. Raising their rifle. Aiming. Moving while firing. Each movement was slow at first, comically slow.
But Ajax demanded his men focus on smooth repeatable movements. Each time they had to execute the movement smoothly, without hitches that could disrupt them in combat. Each time they did it they would have to speed up just slightly.
As the week wore on, they were starting to return to the usual speed, but now the men were smooth. They did each action subconsciously. No thought needed to execute the action without failure.
Ajax focused his men on how they entered rooms and in what order they did so. By setting a convention, his men grew faster and faster charging into buildings. Each man knew his place in the breaching stack. Each man knew when they entered a room who was going left, who was going right, and who was charging dead ahead.
Much of this knowledge was already known by the troopers, but it had not been emphasized to them. They were foot-sloggers. Soldiers who held lines or charged them. Even if they were gene troopers of the Old Hundred, It was rare for them to take on elite enemies in close quarter battles, that sort of stuff was better left to Astartes.
But Ajax knew that the Rangda were exactly the type of foe that would require his men to be on top of their game. The tight confines of a spaceship or orbital dockyards would be a far more frenetic environment.
Ajax played with settings of the CQC simulators to exhibit xenos of many varieties, almost all non-humanoid. He also tweaked the settings for most of the xenos simulations to be equipped with personal shield technology, one of the few definite traits of the Rangda that Ajax was aware of.
Because of the Order of Oblivion enacted upon all information regarding the Rangdan Xenocides, almost no information was included in the books Ajax had read.
All he knew about the Rangda in combat was they were somehow related to Slaugth 'murder mind', they had advanced technology, and they like to have mind slaves fight on their behalf. Ajax knew their advanced tech extended to war-moons, personal shield technology, and 'shadow' radiation blasters on their ships.
Only one of those did he really have any conceptual understanding of. So he was preparing his men to get used to dealing with the unknown. For all he knew, they wouldn't be fighting any Rangdan Osseivores or Cerabvores in direct combat. They might just fight a bunch of mind controlled xenos or humans.
While Aajx was hopeful that would be the case, Ajax liked his bones and his brains staying right where they belonged. Since the Osseivores and Cerabvores were said to be combatants that could battle Astartes on an equal level, Ajax wanted to stay away as far as possible from them. However, he had to make a plan in case he couldn't.
Ajax was also training his troops to maintain their 'Violence of Action.' Violence of Action was a relatively straightforward concept that simply described the amount of force going through battle actions.
Once a situation has escalated to CQC, you have to maintain a flow of momentum at all times. It is a bad idea to stop and pick the lock of a door in the middle of a gun fight. To maintain violence of action, it is better to blow the hinges on the door, toss grenades in, and charge in firing after the grenades have gone off.
The forcefulness, aggressiveness, and speed of application of overwhelming force was integral to keeping the enemy off balance. When an enemy is off balance, they have to react. They cannot plan and take steps towards victory, because they are too busy trying to prevent their defeat. Ajax went to the armory aboard the Truth's Razor and smooth talked the armorer out of a ridiculous amount of Haywire grenades that had belonged to some Mechanicum forces in the Crusade group at one point.
Ajax didn't feel that it was theft to use his psyker powers like this, afterall, there's only one thief in the Imperial Army. Everyone else is just trying to steal the things they need back. If they had been properly supplied in the first place, Ajax wouldn't have had to 'liberate' the grenades in the first place.
Ajax didn't think his loquacious self-justifications held much water, but it made him feel better about using his powers to manipulate the minds of men. In his past life, Ajax would have viewed anything that violated the sanctity of the human mind as abhorrent. Yet now, he felt forced to use such a method to obtain equipment necessary for survival.
Ajax didn't want to make a habit of treating his principles like dust in the wind. However, he realized that, as a matter of practicality, he must change his principles to fit this new dark future. He had lived in a post-Enlightenment world in his first life. It had it's problems for sure, but those problems seemed so small in the face of the horrors he knew stalked in the darkness.
The only respite Ajax had from training with his men, was training in the hall of the Astartes. Unlike the halls of the Imperial Army, the training of the Astartes did not seem to differ at all in intensity. The Space Marines always trained hard. It was their way. It brought Ajax a small modicum of peace and confidence that he stood on the same side as the Space Marines.
Ajax watched as Grandmaster Thrane dueled Remus Venatus and the two Dark Angels, one after the next. Instead of his usual mimicry, Ajax was entirely focused on cataloging the movements of Hector Thrane. In case he didn't survive this battle, Ajax did not want to lose all of his access to the repository of swordplay that Thrane was. Ajax had decided upon the next three steps he would learn from the Grandmaster.
The 'Offline' step was a type of retreating and advancing step that moved the Grandmaster off the centerline of the combat. With this step, He controlled the angles of attack, either closing lines of attack from his opponent or opening lines of attack for himself. This step allowed Hector to limit the timing of attacks by manipulating the spacing of the fight in ways that humans found difficult to fully understand, as the eyes struggled to track diagonal movements. Hector almost always set up this step with a thrust to wrongfoot his opponent.
The 'Pulling' step was a step used by Hector when his sword was bound up against his opponent's in a clinch. Hector Thrane would rock forward leaning into the bind, trying to trick his opponent into thinking the sword fight was becoming a contest of strength, and then he would pull all pressure back out of clinch by rocking backwards. This would cause his opponent to stumble forward a little or overextend his defense. Thrane would follow this up with rapid cuts from a new angle of attack. Sometimes, Thrane would even do a half spin to take his opponents back, if the opponent had been pulled far enough forward.
The 'Swirl' step was a combined step and sword movement that combined a rapid attack at the enemy's blade into a pressure bind of the swords. Followed by a ducking step across the centerline of combat and a swirl of the blade, the 'swirl' step allowed lateral disengagement from the fight, while protecting the body.
Ajax was frankly flummoxed by the depth of Thrane's swordplay. Everytime he felt that he had understood even a small morsel of the knowledge contained within the sword dance, he found the morsel breaking into a fractal pattern of even deeper truths and principles. He noticed threads connecting the movements that had previously gone unseen by his ignorant self.
Ajax watched the Dark Angel with the blond buzzcut duel furiously with Grandmaster Thrane. Each furious blow being eaten up by the depths of Grandmaster's swordplay, and then returned in kind from another angle, using the young Marine's momentum against him. Ajax was starting to see the thread of conservation of momentum being played throughout the Grandmaster's swordplay. In the 'Parthian' step, the 'Swirl' step, and the 'Pulling' step, the truth was plain to see. Ajax sighed heavily in admiration of Thrane's ability, and in lament to any likelihood that he would be able to 'steal' Thrane's style fully.
"He tends to cause that reaction, even amongst us" said a voice from Ajax's right. Trying not to yelp in surprise, Ajax slowly turned his head to the right and saw a Space Marine standing next to him in a dark blue robe, with a stylized XIII embroidered on the shoulder.