“I don’t care if you nuked him with a Deathstrike!” shouted a feminine, muffled, and robotic voice. It was robotic because it was carried over a crackling vox. It was muffled because I was covered in plascrete and ceramite—my ribs really were not happy with this development. The voice itself was feminine—Fae’s. “Blackgar isn’t dead until you find his body and put a bullet in his head! So go do that!”
Speaking of my head, a chunk of rubble was lifted off it soon after Fae’s tirade. Bliss knelt over me. She was covered in soot, grime, and blood, and I had to assume the blood was hers. Her already-limited clothing had been ripped to shreds. But she was alive and on her feet, and able to dig me out, which was more than I was up to. She then lifted a block of the building off my chest, after which I loosed a groan, which made her plant a hand over my mouth hard enough that I was able to taste her own blood as it fell from between her fingers. She put a finger to her lips with her other hand and shook her head. I nodded in pained understanding. I then looked past her and nodded forward. We were about to have company. She left to greet them while I continued trying to dig myself out.
I made good progress at first, but I was eventually paralyzed in place. Not physically so, and not out of fear, but in awe, because I witnessed something I could not comprehend. I witnessed Bliss Carmichael, or Iblis Kyle, or whoever she really was, fight for what was surely the first time in my service. And it was impossible to wrap one’s head around, especially if you were me—I had found myself awed by the mastery of combat the likes of Silas Hager, Lucene Flint, or even Zha Trantos possessed. But I saw then, atop the rubble of the blown-out Arbites station, that none of them even held a candle to Bliss, and if not for my mind, neither would I.
A trio of soldiers fell upon her at first, and she dismantled them in a flurry as she often had. That was not surprising. But three became six as their reinforcements arrived, Fae’s army recognizing the presence of my last defender. Six became twelve, and twelve became more. Bliss danced between and killed them all, a whirlwind of murder, every limb—no, every joint—being used to the fullest extent imaginable, and then some. Bliss fought a veritable horde of better armed and armored foes with such simultaneity that all her assailants quickly revealed they, too, had no idea what to do about her. She halted any and every infantry approach up the rubble, systematically dismantling Fae’s forces in the process. And the most troubling thing to me was her fighting style, or, rather, styles. She fought like a Pyrran swordsman, as though trained by my hand itself. She fought like the Vostroyans of Sigird’s homeworld. She fought as ruthless as a Cadian, she fought with the discipline of a Tempestus Scion, she fought with the rigid brutality of a Sister of Battle, or the precision of a Vindicare Assassin, or the wanton ferocity of an Eversor. And she wielded a dozen other arts I myself could not put words to. No single person should possess such a complete mastery of these things, it was utterly impossible to conceive of—especially so for where the fighting styles of the Assassinorum were concerned.
Yet, Bliss wielded them all with ruthless efficiency, killing with maximized potency and boundless vigor. And all the while, she possessed a complete understanding of the battlefield at large. When the infantry fell back, realizing that numbers alone were not sufficient at besting my Agent, she dove for me and scooped me out of the remaining rubble I was trapped under. She briefly held me over her shoulders, as I had once carried Lucene from Abseradon after her duel with the Eversor. Bliss was slightly less gentle with me, though, and instead threw my back against a rubble outcropping, shielding me from the scene ahead. I did not blame her for my violent repositioning, as shortly thereafter, a trio of lascannons painted the building red in a brilliantly violent lightshow. Bliss huddled against my front in that position, and I shielded her in my arms, though I felt she did not need it.
“How’s your head?” she yelled to me, needing to shout over the lascannons.
“Hurts!” I shouted back.
“Not what I was asking!” she grinned, and I understood.
I reached out with my mind again and felt around. “They’ll overheat in eight seconds! You’ll have five before they can fire again!”
“Can you cover me?”
I nodded to her, no more time to waste in speaking, and willed a lasgun from one of the bodies Bliss had dropped moments ago. The millisecond the lascannons overheated, Bliss dove out from our cover, and I turned the corner around it as well, falling to my knees. I picked off what straggling infantry survived their first assault, while in the meantime Bliss ran forward like a Fenrisian Wolf, at a speed exceeding that which even Lucene could match. She raced forth, scaled and jumped over the frontal shielding of one of the lascannons, and tackled its crew beyond. I assumed she eviscerated them from there.
“Everything! Hit them with everything!” Fae shrieked over the building’s failing vox, tossing strategy out the window. I did not blame her, as it did not seem conventional strategy would apply to the two of us. I heard mortar shells whistle through the air at once, and I saw the reflection of a faraway sunset bounce off a tank in the distance as it pulled up, but my attention turned to the two gunships that floated overhead. I did not have an answer to them, but I did not need one; the tank at the far end of the scene exploded into a titanic shockwave that knocked everyone to the ground, and one of the gunships erupted into a splattering fireball as the Bird sailed cleanly through it, Mirena providing her masterful piloting skills as ever. Then the mortars started to land.
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I rolled out from cover and down the sloped rubble into the jaws of the enemy while the Arbites complex behind me was pulverized from shelling not unlike the desperate fury Sigird and Espirov once wielded against me. But it had not worked then, and it was not going to work now. Though my pace was far from steady or orderly, I still knew how to carry myself like a soldier, and picked my way down the rubble, incinerating anyone that got in front of my lasgun. The second gunship had broken off, apparently deciding that service to Fae was not worth it in the presence of a Thunderhawk. I never saw it again—perhaps Mirena gunned it down elsewhere.
When I reached level ground, Bliss folded in in front of me, covered in more blood than I had last seen her wearing. This time, I do not think the new drenching was of hers. “Am I holding you back?” I muttered to her.
“Never,” she assured me, after which a breeze blew by as Mirena made a strafing run on another tank. “Can you run?”
“I’ll catch up,” I replied. She nodded and took off again, devastating some unfortunate souls elsewhere. I trudged onward, with a singular purpose: destroy the heretic. I knew where she was; I could not feel her presence, but that void was itself telling. Absence of feeling was feeling all the same. And seventy meters to the north-northwest, I felt nothing at all. I stalked off in that direction, chaos and flames and bloodshed all around me. With no replacement orders given, the mortars continued shelling the lifeless husk of the Arbites complex, even though I had already left its rubble.
She knew I was coming, and set a few final lines of defense in my way, but they were nothing a Commissar from Pyrras could not handle, much less a psychic one. When I had chewed through them, she called out to me, no longer needing vox to communicate with me. “How damn hard is it to kill you, Blackgar?” she shouted as I crested the top of the exit ramp she was hunkered down on, the ramp otherwise leading to the speedway we had taken. I found her a few meters away, covered in her foul augmetics, including a blade that emerged from the flesh of her right arm. She was standing in front of the smoldering corpse of the tank Mirena had pancaked with the Bird. “I’m really interested in figuring that out.”
“Come and see, then,” I growled, then opened fire upon her with my lasgun. I expected it to be as ineffectual as it was, but every little bit might help, and I at least singed some flesh here and there with it before needing to toss it aside as she approached. I ducked under a slash of her blade and caught her left arm against both of mine before smacking my augmetic fist into the side of her head, jabbing her away. She then stabbed her blade forward, and I had to catch it through my own augmetic arm, twisting the punctured appendage away to keep her from impaling me. I then headbutted her as the rotational motion of my augmetic lured her in, dazing us both.
She dislodged her blade from my augmetic and slashed again, and again I ducked under the attack, though this time I simply tackled her to the ground and wailed at her head. She put a foot on my gut and launched me off her with ease, but when I landed I aimed my crippled augmetic her way and sprayed her in a shower of lead. I may have only had one Bolter round in the arm, but I had a magazine’s worth of autogun ammunition in it too. “Enough toys!” she shrieked through the autogun fire, clearly not amused nor impaired by such weaponry, and rose to her feet as soon as I ran out of ammo. I started to do the same, but instead Bliss jumped over me and engaged the Phaenonite herself. Shortly after landing from her leap, Bliss kicked my lasgun back to me and, again, I understood, she and I operating with impeccable harmony.
I spun around, recognizing that even Bliss could not have killed off everyone so soon, and took aim at those that had tailed her this way. After making six kills, a great wall of iron landed in front of me, Mirena shielding me from the small arms fire beyond the hull of the Bird. I turned to re-engage the Phaenonite, finding Bliss having launched Fae into the air. Fae did not then seem to mind, and likely was preparing something vile for my Agent for when her feet touched the ground, but that never happened. Instead, a partially-broken augmetic hand clamped around the back of her head and pulled her out of the air to me, after which my hand rushed down into the ground at my feet, shattering both the ground and the skull in my grasp. Fae twitched for a few moments, but that was all she had left. The day, it seemed, was won.
Bliss smiled for a moment, until I looked at her. And then she knew, and her smile faded. She saw the fear of the unknown in my eyes, the fear of her. She had gone too far and shown her hand. She may have done it to protect me, but that was no excuse. She knew what she could not. She knew more than any single human could, to my understanding. More than all of that, even, was the sheer realization and contextualization of it all. She was perfect in every way, which made her completely wrong. She was perfectly loyal, to me and to the Imperium. She was perfectly beautiful. Perfectly intelligent. Perfectly funny. A perfect fighter. The absolute perfect operative. Flawless in every regard, which was the ultimate flaw. And she knew I knew. She nodded to me and took a deep breath, then simply asked, “Want a hand carrying her aboard?”
I nodded, weary and wary, and muttered, “Yeah. Thank you, Bliss.”
“Things will change now, huh?”
“They will,” I nodded again.
“I understand. You’ll make the right decision, Callant. You and I know that.”
“That’s what worries me.”