V2 Chapter 21: Living Saint
Six kilometres from the Dukarala Gate, at the 112th Regiment's rear camp.
The air was thick with the combined smell of antiseptic and blood. Inside the medical tent, Doctor Wayne worked by the dim light of a single overhead lamp, both hands red, suturing a penetrating abdominal wound on an Astra Militarum soldier.
Lena stood beside him, holding a tray loaded with haemostatic clamps and dressing gauze, her expression taut.
Without warning, the stainless steel tray slipped from Lena's hands. The medical instruments hit the hardened earth floor with a sharp, rattling crash.
The scream that came next was unlike anything Doctor Wayne had heard in years of field surgery. It tore out of the girl's throat without any apparent control. Lena dropped to the ground, both hands clamped over her head, her entire body shaking in violent, uncontrollable spasms.
"Lena!" Wayne dropped his suturing thread immediately and moved to her side. He pressed both hands to her shoulders and tried to bring her back.
As Lena gradually steadied, Wayne had barely drawn breath to ask what had happened when something ran up his spine, cold and sourceless, without explanation.
He lifted his head.
Something made him pull the medical tent's heavy door flap aside and look toward the main hive.
The skyline was unrecognisable. The sky above the main hive city was buried completely under a heavy, churning mass of crimson storm cloud. The great searchlight columns the Imperial Guard had deployed across their positions, and the illumination rounds still being fired upward, touched the edge of that crimson storm and were swallowed without trace, as though some vast invisible void had taken them and closed over them without a sound.
Substantial Warp energy was bleeding through the veil of reality. Its ripples carried six kilometres out to where he was standing.
Doctor Wayne looked at the twisted shapes moving dimly through the storm and his expression hardened. He knew what it meant. Something beyond ordinary mortal comprehension had gone catastrophically wrong at the front.
He went back to Lena's side. He bent down and gathered the trembling girl against him, and let out one long, heavy sigh. "May the Emperor protect His warriors."
At the same time, at the forward command post.
Major General Petrov Duval had both hands braced on the tactical holographic table. He pressed a hand briefly to his brow and watched every communications channel on the board die in sequence, resolving one by one into featureless static.
Harsh interference noise filled the entire command post. Every electronic transmission had been completely paralysed. Information could only pass now by human runners, the slowest method the Imperium had ever relied on.
"What in the Throne is happening?!" Petrov raised his head and demanded an answer from the staff officers around him.
"It's Warp energy, General!" The adjutant beside him was soaked in sweat, his uniform cap sitting askew. He was holding several parchment reports just delivered by messengers, answering in a frantic rush. "Warp energy at a density sufficient to tear the physical laws of reality. The energy tide has triggered a large-scale psychic screaming across the entire zone, and the whispers carried in the storm can directly affect the minds of any soldiers caught in range of it!"
"What is the status at our positions?" Petrov pressed.
"After the regimental priests intervened directly, using prayer and summary executions to suppress the panic, the breakdown on the defensive line at Dukarala Gate has been temporarily halted." The adjutant was flipping rapidly through his reports.
"What about the enemy? Have they counterattacked?" Petrov demanded.
"No, General. The enemy lines have..." A flash of genuine fear moved through the adjutant's eyes. "Completely lost their minds. All Chaos believers and soldiers have gone mad. They are screaming and killing each other."
"Pull all units back. Abandon the outer positions, everyone back, now!" Petrov Duval did not hesitate. The emergency order to contract the defensive line came without delay. In a battle situation this bizarre, holding an exposed position meant nothing but annihilation.
"Commander, most of the outer Astra Militarum units have already begun an orderly withdrawal." The adjutant added one more piece of information, and this one was the one that mattered most. "But before communications cut out completely, the final position data from the auspex array showed that the White Scars Astartes and the Ash Watchers 112th Regiment have already broken into the upper hive."
"And according to the front-line priests' identification, the words those mad believers are screaming include Colonel Duvette's name."
"Damn it..." Petrov drove his fist down hard onto the holographic communicator buried under the interference. The metal casing produced a dull thud beneath his knuckles.
He raised his head and fixed his eyes on the adjutant. "Can our people approach the upper hive now? Send our best armoured assault team in to support them. Bring them back."
"No, sir. We cannot." The adjutant shook his head in despair. "The closer to the upper hive, the higher the Warp contamination concentration. Any ordinary soldier who approaches the upper hive's connecting passages will immediately lose their reason and begin attacking whoever is standing beside them. We cannot get through."
The words hit, and Petrov Duval seemed to have had every last reserve of strength taken from him. He slumped back into the command chair.
He looked at the blurry red light on the holographic screen and could only let out a long, exhausted sigh. "Then we can only pray the Emperor protects them."
In low orbit above Formal Prime, in the strategic command room of the flagship Absalom.
Marshal Slaydo was pacing back and forth on the wide metal floor. His chief of staff Macaroth stepped forward quickly, head down, voice carrying weight. "Warmaster, communications with the ground have completely cut off. Large-scale Warp energy interference has blocked all conventional and encrypted transmissions."
Slaydo stopped pacing. He nodded once, and shifted his gaze to the largest holographic screen at the centre of the room, which showed the current state of Formal Prime with clear fidelity.
Above the main hive city, a crimson energy vortex of enormous scale rotated slowly in the feed, large enough to swallow the entire hive within its diameter. Lightning continuously tore out from the vortex's depths.
"Can we determine what caused this?" Slaydo asked, his tone carrying no heat.
"We do not know the specifics of what ritual occurred on the surface," Macaroth said. "But in the last second before communications cut out entirely, the ship's monitoring arrays captured an enormous noise burst originating from the upper hive. After noise-reduction processing, this is what every enemy is screaming."
Macaroth pressed a key on the control console. A recording, processed to filter out the lethal psychic fluctuations it had originally carried, played through the command room. What it contained was a terrifying chorus, assembled from countless hoarse and maddened throats:
[Vrak'thar, great Lord of the Eight-fold Tiers of Blood, the great Wrathful One, leader at the Eighth Step! He descends! He thirsts for blood! He will kill the miscreant named Duvette! He will take all skulls!]
"Duvette..."
Slaydo closed his eyes. In the few seconds of dead silence that followed, the face of the young legendary commissar moved through his mind.
He opened his eyes sharply and looked toward Macaroth. "If landing craft and drop pods forced their way through this energy vortex, what would the survival rate be?"
"Less than five percent, sir." Macaroth answered without softening it. "The storm's physical manifestation would instantly tear apart any Thunderhawk or drop pod that entered it."
"Order the orbital fleet to immediately raise altitude. Avoid direct engulfment by the Warp storm."
Slaydo reached his decision and issued his highest directive to Macaroth. "Activate the Astropath choir. Notify the Iron Snakes Chapter immediately, order them to move to support."
Chief of Staff Macaroth nodded heavily, turned, and left at once to transmit the orders.
Slaydo stood alone before the vast holographic screen, watching the enormous energy vortex that had come close to dragging the entire city into somewhere beyond any living thing's right to go.
Both hands clasped behind his back tightened into fists. In the quiet of the command room, he allowed himself one private thought: I hope you can receive the Emperor's protection.
Deep in the upper hive spire of Formal Prime.
Joghaten Khan swung the crescent blade of his power tulwar. Blue force-field arcs traced lethal overlapping streaks through the air with each swing, cutting through the howling cultists ahead and the flak armour on their backs with equal precision.
Headless bodies threw blood across the magnificent marble floor and crashed down.
Around him, the Fourth Brotherhood's battle-brothers held a perfect assault formation. Under Joghaten's lead, they trod across heretic remains and pushed steadily deeper into the upper reaches of the spire.
Their bolt guns fired in regular, deliberate bursts, tearing apart any living thing that tried to close.
The surrounding heretic believers were cleared.
But the smell of blood in the air showed no sign of thinning. It was becoming more dense and more viscous with every passing moment.
The fierce wind that had been what the sons of Jaghatai craved on every hunt, the wind that made their blood surge, had become something else. Something nauseating and toxic.
Then the change came.
The blood that had been running quietly across the floor, spreading through the gaps between the marble tiles, began churning violently.
The pools spread and connected. In the churning river of blood, what the surface now reflected was no longer the tall frames of White Scars warriors and the smoke of battle, but a crimson ocean laid across a floor of endless white skulls.
An arm without skin, all musculature fully exposed, reached out from the blood river and seized the marble floor's edge.
A Bloodletter came roaring out from the river next, gripping an enormous hellblade, its entire body the dark crimson of violence given form.
Then a second. A third. Dozens of daemons began pouring continuously from this point where physical space and the Warp had ceased to be separated.
As the daemons emerged, a pure desire to kill rose irresistibly in every White Scars warrior present. It came from somewhere below the reach of conscious thought.
It was Warp psychic pollution. Its purpose was to make them discard tactics, abandon reason, and exist only for the act of slaughter.
The sons of Jaghatai Khan did not waver.
Like the most composed observers standing outside the event, they examined that primitive desire churning in their own hearts with cold attention, and drove it down beneath an iron discipline built over a lifetime.
Joghaten Khan wore no helmet. He looked at the blasphemous daemons with undisguised contempt, exhaled a steady stream of hot breath through his nostrils, and tightened his grip on the power tulwar.
The Great Khan had once taught them: true freedom is to drive yourself through the wild wind, to guide the storm's direction. Not to become a slave to emotion and instinct. Khorne's rage, turned against Chogorian hunters, was nothing but a crude form of provocation.
Joghaten let out a full, unhesitating laugh. The power tulwar swept outward in overlapping arcs of motion, the blue disintegration force field humming with lethal resonance.
"Come then, daemons! Face the wild wind of Chogoris!" Joghaten Khan's voice overrode the Bloodletters' screeching and filled the space entirely. "The Great Khan stands above! The Khan of Khans watches what we do!"
Without a moment's pause, the White Scars warriors' jump packs ignited. They went in like white lightning, like a storm whose only purpose is to tear apart what stands before it, driving directly into the mass of daemons.
As the Brotherhood of the Scimitar, the White Scars' foremost close-assault fighters, they feared nothing the galaxy had produced. Chogorian scimitars and hellblades struck against each other in blinding sparks. They trod on daemon remains and pressed straight toward the ritual hall deeper within.
At the same time, on another main passage of the upper hive.
Duvette was leading the 112th's warriors toward the tower spire's core zone at full speed.
In the Eye of Judgement's interface running across his retina, not far ahead, a position had been marked with an enormous, pitch-black stain.
That was what it looked like when Chaos corruption reached its absolute limit, when the veil of reality was on the verge of shattering completely.
Duvette understood the situation clearly. If the problem ahead was not resolved immediately, if that ritual was not severed at the root, Formal Prime's final fate would be an Exterminatus order from the Conclave, the planet reduced along with everything on it to dust.
And before that fate arrived, the Bloodthirster that had already been summoned would take his head personally.
Along the way, the Chaos believers who had completely lost their minds, doing nothing but howling and charging, were killed without mercy by the 112th's massed hellgun fire and heavy weapons. But Duvette quickly noted that the deaths of these mortal believers were not the end of the problem.
As each believer's body fell, the blood flowing across the floor began rapidly pooling together. Crimson rivers formed in the corridors. Flesh Hounds came bounding out of the blood, and Bloodletters gripping enormous hellblades began pouring through the same junction.
"Open fire!" Anderson roared, the heavy grenade launcher in his hands delivering a continuous rolling thunder.
But Khornate daemons had an intrinsic resistance to ranged weaponry. Laser fire on a Bloodletter's hide left nothing but weak scorch marks. Grenade fragmentation could not stop the Flesh Hounds' lightning-fast lunges.
"Prepare for close quarters!"
Duvette did not retreat. He activated without hesitation.
[Flesh Engine: active.]
Every 112th soldier's heart rate accelerated in that instant. Muscle tissue swelled. Bone structure reinforced. Adrenaline surged through their systems at a rate that violated every physiological norm.
This was the second time the 112th's warriors had faced a pure daemon army on the battlefield. This time, not one soldier showed fear.
Under [Iron Crusade's] properties, their will was iron-hard. Every one of them drew their combat knives, drove into the daemons, and engaged in a reckless, fully committed close-quarters fight.
Duvette stood at the very front of the line, his power sword precisely parrying each attack as it came. Fighting in the midst of the enemy, he pulled up the System interface in his mind.
He looked at the Emperor's Wrath balance he had accumulated over ten years of campaigns, plus what had been earned recently: 2,300 points.
He knew that to reach the high-tier skill called Purification, he still needed 700 more.
But the current situation would no longer allow him to accumulate slowly. The Warp contamination surrounding him was multiplying by the moment. The Greater Daemon's oppressive presence had made the very air feel thick. He could not keep waiting any longer.
His focus locked onto the skill in the System interface that had always been in a state of waiting to be confirmed.
[Living Saint]
[Description: During the duration, obtain part of ???'s power, with some unknown additional effects. Note: this skill can only be used once.]
[Cost: 1,000 Emperor's Wrath.]
[Witness His glory.]
He did not hesitate.
"Don't let me down," Duvette said quietly, pressing the confirmation. "At least let me deal with that Greater Daemon."
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