The shooting was light at first, which made sense—Fae’s ‘army’ likely did not know exactly where she was in the building they were assaulting, and so would not have wanted to engage with heavier armaments until they had secured her. That hesitance would buy me and Bliss time to get to my impounded arm, though beyond that I did not have much of a plan. I did not tell Bliss that, though. I had two objectives—survive and capture the Phaenonite—but no clear path to bringing them to fruition. However, I did see three advantages I could leverage: on the part of survival, I had the Arbites and supporting officers, who I expected I could sway in a pinch or ware again. I also had Bliss, who was, to me, still a mystery in terms of her full capabilities and reliability, but she had exceeded every requirement I had asked of her thus far. Finally, I had the fact that Fae wanted to find and kill me, unlike her traitorous allies who wanted to capture me or goad me to Amnes Minoris. That she was willing to go to such lengths to see such a desire realized also meant a greater chance of overextension and mistakes being made on her part. Still, though, she did have an army, and I did not.
Bliss and I stalked through the compound relatively unopposed. A couple officers did get in our way only to be swiftly incapacitated by Bliss’s martial arts skills, but most, I expected, were tasked to defending the exits—and therefore entrances—of the complex. Our journey, hushed but hurried, was not leading us to such destinations. It only took us a few minutes to find the compound’s evidence locker, which my mind quickly removed the reinforced door from. I then scanned the room over and found my arm in an instant, willing it to me after tossing Bliss the autogun I had taken. I caught my arm as she caught my weapon, and I began affixing it to the mounting apparatus within and around my shoulder.
“If you see something helpful here, take it,” I told Bliss while setting myself up. The flow of power from my shoulder into my arm was far from complete, in that I could only barely move my fingers. Using any of the more advanced features Varnus had provided me with would take some time longer.
“Do you suppose a place like this has an armory?” Bliss wondered, searching around for whatever she could find. “I wouldn’t mind some, you know, body armor. Or better clothes, at least.”
“Could be worth checking out,” I agreed, flexing my augmetic hand before my eyes. “What are you in for, by the way?”
“Vandalism,” she chuckled.
“I regret asking,” I smiled. I then caught the combat shotgun I had used at IS-38 out of the corner of my eyes. I chose to leave it there in evidence for now; an autogun would have more range and that could be crucial. “How’d you know to—”
“Callant, I’m not an idiot,” Bliss replied. “You needed money for something, you suspected our target would go for a spaceport, and then a spaceport erupted into chaos and warfare. I heard the Arbites call go out. It seemed likely to me that you, on your own, would run into a scrap with the Arbites, Phaenonite in tow or not. If you got arrested, I wanted to be there to help break you out.”
“And if I didn’t get arrested?” I asked, taking my autogun back from Bliss and watching out the door we had broken through.
She shrugged and frowned, and with pure indifference, answered, “Then I’d just break myself out of prison. Not too different.”
“Right,” I grinned, and almost managed a laugh.
“The warzone does complicate things a bit, though,” Bliss noted, joining me at the door. No body armor, but she did find some bandoliers and accompanying ammunition cartridges, the former of which held the latter and had been strapped over her torso. “Where to, Boss?”
“Armory?” I shrugged.
She nodded with a gentle grin. “I’ll take point,” she offered, and slid out of the doorway. I followed after her, weapon readied atop two arms. My mind, meanwhile, was watching everything in the complex. The officers were losing, which did not surprise me. We would hit heavier opposition from the true enemy soon. And Fae…
“She’s out. Watch your footing,” I warned Bliss.
“My footing?” she frowned.
“They have armor and air support, as she warned. They’ll use that now that they have her secured,” I explained. “No guarantee of the floor staying where it is.”
“I understand,” Bliss nodded. She then placed a hand against a door at the end of a hall before turning to me. I nodded to her, and she pushed it open, and from there, we stepped through into hell itself. We had not found the armory, but rather a defense perimeter block currently under siege. Bliss and I opened fire at once while diving to cover behind individual slabs of ceramite, reinforced with plascrete. Fae’s army encroached from all directions, moving with greater militant cohesion than the officers of our defense provided, and they were not entirely at our defense either. None of them opened fire upon us, but many hesitated at the sight of us, which was telling enough and could prove deadly in open combat with the enemy.
To my left, a goliath of white crushed the face of one of our foes into our shared barrier, his enemy’s head vanishing between the slab and fist of ceramite that came down upon it. The Arbites then collapsed next to his slain foe, back against the cover we were sharing, and glanced to me. “Inquisitor,” he muttered, understanding the state of things at once. A hole in your gut will do that to you; it was not large, but he and I shared an exchange of eyes indicating we both knew it was not survivable.
“Arbites,” I nodded to him, speaking under the gunfire.
“I should not have arrested you, sir,” he sighed.
“You were doing your job in an impossible scenario. I do not resent you for that.”
“I brought you to your death,” he returned.
“I’m not dying here,” I assured him.
“There’s a lot out there, sir, and they’re jamming our vox.”
+I’m not dying here.+
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He paused for a moment before nodding, then coughed up a handful of blood before reaching for and handing me his own combat shotgun. I shook my head, and raised the autogun I had taken, indicating I preferred it. He nodded again, and pumped the shotgun himself, willing to go out fighting. “The Emperor…protects,” he grunted, a sliver of blood drooling from his lips. “Do what you must, Inquisitor Blackgar. Just kill these bastards along the way.”
“I will, Arbites. Fight and die with honor,” I told him, placing my weapon down for a moment to bow to him with the Sign of the Aquila.
He set his weapon in his lap and returned the gesture to me, then picked his weapon back up and shouted, “Ave Imperator! Gloria in Excelsis Terra!” I nodded to him again, but he did not wait for me to do so before painstakingly trudging back into combat. I do not know what happened to him, specifically, for I never saw him again. I do know, however, that he did not survive the battle—there was no saving him. I also know the Throne will not have mercy on those so willingly defying a most loyal servant as he. I never sought his name, either—I had more pressing things on my mind.
Chief among them was the fact that when the Arbites left my side, Fae appeared across the room, escorted by a veritable platoon of her own goons. “There!” she shouted, identifying me at once. “Kill Callant Blackgar!” I responded by wasting a few precious seconds reaching out with my mind in an attempt to turn her minions to bloody pastes, only to be fought back not by the nothingness I had felt from her Xenos technology, but by the anti-psyker wards these Phaenonites so often employed, possibly devised from the Xenos and Pariahs alike. Instead of obliterating them, I instead came under fire myself, and ducked around what little cover I could from that angle. But there was someone trying to kill me from every angle.
+Door!+ I instructed to Bliss as she turned to face Fae, having heard the Phaenonite call for my end. Bliss had been holding her own fine until then, but recognized that was only because we had not been the focus of the army’s assault. That was about to change, and she did as I instructed, swinging the door we had entered from back open. She and I then raced back into it.
“You can’t run forever, Blackgar!” Fae shrieked from behind us as we retreated further into the complex. “I’ll be just outside if you need me! Give me the vox!” I did not know what she intended to use a vox for, but I did not imagine I would find it pleasant.
In the meantime, Bliss and I fled side by side down the hallway we had come down earlier, turning in unison as the door behind us yawned open. We sprayed our pursuers back for a time, but did not score any kills—they were expecting our retaliation. These soldiers were much more capable and organized than any we had faced so far. Maybe Fae was important enough to warrant the elite. That just made my success here all the more critical.
Rather than run straight down the hallway and be trivially pursued, I instead invited Bliss through a narrow crevice we had passed the first time. I had no idea where it led, but getting any heavy equipment through it would have been impossible, which worked great for us. I took the lead through it, squeezing my way between two great walls of plascrete. Bliss followed. I knew our timing was tight, as tight as the not-a-passage we were trying to fit through. Unfortunately, it wound up being too tight, and I only barely emerged from the crevice when I spotted two soldiers down the hallway we had just taken.
“Down!” I shouted to Bliss, and she squeezed down as best she could while I shot over her, attempting to drive them back. A door then opened to my left and another soldier emerged from it, lasgun already at the ready. I spun on my heels and lit him up at once, but knew I could not ignore Bliss, and so simply grabbed hold of her with my mind and yanked her out of the crevice myself. She landed on her side, then spun onto her back and also shot through the crevice as I had been. It was too narrow to take a meaningful fight through, though, and we had to move. I, therefore, raised my augmetic hand up to the ceiling over the crevice, and loosed a single Bolter round from my palm. That was all I had of the sort, but it sufficed for blowing out and collapsing the ceiling behind us, while in the meantime Bliss turned to take gun down two more soldiers that entered from the door I had earlier covered. “Move,” I commanded, and she silently obeyed, sticking by my side as we fled in the other direction.
It was then that Fae spoke through the vox array of the building, but revealed her communication was more wideband than that. “Attention all Arbites and law enforcement of Aerialon-4: I am Inquisitor Callant Blackgar,” she lied to the city’s forces. Bliss glanced to me when hearing that lie, but kept herself focused nonetheless. “You interrupted me at IS-38, but I will not allow that to happen again. I am engaged with a heretic at your headquarters in the city. Do not interfere, for not only will you risk your lives in the process, but I will visit the Throne’s Wrath upon you should you hamper my efforts a second time. I have brought ample resources to task, and I expect things will get loud. Restrain yourself from getting in my way.”
“Here come the big guns,” I muttered. Bliss nodded in agreement.
And indeed, after a few hallways more of frantic fighting, we both heard the spin of rotors and the growl of an approaching engine. Through holes in the walls created in our rampant combat, I was able to spy our next challenge: one of the two gunships in Fae’s arsenal, frontal heavy autogun revving up. A moment later, the entirety of the hallway we were in exploded into shards of plascrete and ceramite, piercing tracer rounds slicing through everything in sight and utterly shredding our wing of the complex. Bliss and I only survived because I recalled the full focus of my mind from any logistical intel gathering into the deflection of such an assault, shielding our bodies behind invisible barriers, but even those were only so strong.
I had caught some of the munitions thrown our way, and willed them toward the gunship itself when the onslaught had finished, but they plinked off its hull harmlessly. In retaliation, the gunship opened fire again, and I was forced to my knees in maintaining that defense. Meanwhile, soldiers entered from either side of the hall, tasking Bliss with more than it seemed she could handle. Maybe I really am going to die here, I thought, looking to Bliss, and found her looking at me as well. She realized the desperation she was feeling was shared by me, but kept her cool for a moment longer. Without the opportunity to speak or think, she instead flicked her eyes to a strap of the bandolier wrapped around her left hip, and I understood. I psychically messaged her formless, wordless assent, and when the gunship finished that volley of shooting, I instead whipped what I had caught into one end of the hallway, shredding the soldiers approaching from that direction.
Bliss, meanwhile, reached to her hip, slid a black, boxy krak grenade from her bandolier, and pulled the pin before tossing it in my direction. She, then, turned her full attention down the other end of the hallway, suppressing down our assailants in that direction. My mind grabbed hold of the krak grenade and flung it skyward, out of the now-gaping holes in the wall toward the gunship. The small thing could not have been seen at such a distance, which allowed it to sneak just under the aircraft undetected, before exploding in all of its anti-armor holiness. The gunship recoiled in panicked flight, but, unfortunately, was not knocked fully out of the air. It balanced itself after the explosion and moved for another pass on slicing my head off, but to its surprise—and mine—found it could not. Its weapon had jammed in the concussive shock from the krak grenade.
Great news, or so I thought, until the gunship backed off but still did not fully retreat away. It was then that I recognized the presence of the missiles on its wings, and perhaps just in time. At once, I shot to my feet with what little strength I still had, and ran for Bliss. I did not have the wherewithal to send her a psychic message, and even if I had thought to, I may not have had the strength remaining to manage the ordinarily-simple task. All the same, I reached her when the first missile launched, and had tackled myself into her by surprise when the missile struck the building. In the blink of an eye, flames erupted all around us, silenced only by the rubble. Two more rockets followed soon thereafter.