Brass cybernetic terror regenerated atop the rubble of a sundered continent, Boltgun reconstituting from nothingness and claw ripping through reality to grasp at open skies. What it found, instead, was 230 tons of steel unceremoniously rammed into its front as the Eximus Convictor strode across the pummeled landscape, surveying what little was left. Galen did not even notice the Stalker’s regenerating existence until his Knight stepped off it, after which he paused for a moment to look with idle curiosity at the daemonic humanoid ebbing back into material form in his footfall. Galen, as the Eximus Convictor, looked at the decrepit, pancaked daemoncraft for perhaps ten seconds before silently raising the Volcano Lance installed on his Knight Castellan’s right arm over the Warp-thing’s torso.
A shriek of ungodly light erupted from Galen’s Volcano Lance. It was subsequently met by a likewise-ungodly shriek of shadows which erupted from the ground, but those quieted before Galen’s weapon, a gargantuan lasgun that could cleanly carve off a leg from a God-machine, even began to whirr down. He then moved on, 230 tons of cold fury marching in search of its target. In as ignominious an end as it deserved, the Phaenonite’s Maletek Stalker was no more, suffused with the molten slag of rock at its back, buried into the crust of the planet.
#THERE YOU ARE.#
Galen plunged his left arm into rubble some distance from where the Stalker had been, for installed on the Eximus Convictor’s left was no Knightly weapon, but a large Thunderstrike Gauntlet for a hand. When his hand emerged from the ground, he pulled out a body. Mine. His hand, far larger than my being, curled around my form, shielding it from view.
#YOU ALWAYS WERE A MADMAN, COMMISSAR.#
Galen turned the Eximus Convictor just in time to react to yet another bombardment, though this was lighter than that of an orbital vessel. It came, instead, from a pair of tanks that had rolled over a ridge a hundred meters away. Galen’s Ion Shields cared little of such armament, catching the salvo and holding from the ensuing explosions. Before the fire and brimstone parted, the Siegebreaker Cannon mounted to the top of his right shoulder popped both tanks like over-pressurized cans of tin. Likewise, without needing to face it, his left shoulder’s Siegebreaker Cannon blew a third tank sky high.
An instant later, the Eximus Convictor stumbled forward, eating the payload of a bombing run from a pair of aircraft. Galen raised his Volcano Lance to one, but also needed to focus his Void Shields against a cluster of explosive small arms fire, a veritable army moving against him.
Embroiled in smoke and flame, Galen shot forth, hundreds of tons of metal racing for their lines and driving any sane individual into panic. As Galen’s Thunderstrike Gauntlet tightened around me, his Knight bellowed out, #YOU WANT HIM? COME AND TAKE HIM! YOU FACE THE ONCE-GATEKEEPER OF HOUSE CARADRED, AND WILL NOT KNOW THE TASTE OF VICTORY WHILE HE YET STANDS!# A trio of rockets from the Stormspear Pod installed above and between his shoulders screeched into the skies, each tracking different clusters of infantry, while Galen’s Volcano Lance spun on its horizontal axis and sublimated one of the bombers that had hit him earlier.
+Galen.+
#STILL WITH ME, COMMISSAR? YOU CALL THIS A BATTLE? YOU HAD PROMISED ME SOME FUN.# It was then that he pried his Gauntlet open ever so slightly, and brief confusion set in when he saw I had not moved in his grasp. I had not spoken to him, or even opened my eyes. He did not let this disturbing development stop him from reducing another tank to infernal sludge with a carapace-mounted twin-Melta. #YOU SPEAK, YET I DO NOT HEAR,# he noted.
+You had asked how I came to be an Inquisitor,+ I answered. +This is how. I am a psyker. Took a lot of bloodshed to learn that.+
#WHATEVER YOU ARE, YOU ARE MY COMMANDING OFFICER. REMAIN STEADFAST, OLD FRIEND. NO FOE OR MASSED COWARDS LURK UPON THIS EMPEROR-FORSAKEN WORLD THAT I CANNOT OR WILL NOT SLAY.#
+I know. Thank you.+ Galen nodded through the form of his blessed, Knightly visage, a hundred tons of steel bowing to my near-unconscious existence while he disintegrated two dozen enemies on a half-dozen fronts. I had never seen through a Knight’s eyes as Galen had once lamented I could not. Only a special type of man could sit upon a Throne Mechanicum, a true Noble—unlike those of the useless ‘houses’ that sat on a futile court on Skardak’s Reach—like himself. But when Galen had so-lamented of my missing out on the experience, neither of us knew I was a psyker.
Now we did.
I peered inside, out of sheer curiosity, and saw the world as he saw it from a dozen eyes. I saw targeting indicators displayed over range metrics, sensorium scans and mass-readouts of our surroundings, and heat signature readings for the target locks of missiles. I saw energy readings and impulses, I felt the ebb and flow of the Knight Castellan he controlled; no, it is wrong to say he controlled it. A man controls a vessel like an aircraft or the God-machines of the Titanica, but a man becomes a Knight. Galen was the Eximus Convictor. He moved its intangible ion shield to intercept enemy fire as though blinking an eye. He felt the striking of heavy munitions like the prattling tap of fingers. It was he that waded through a literal army, he that smote traitorous flesh and armor from existence, he that shielded my limp form in the grasp of his left hand.
It—no, he—was awesome. Wonderous. Amazing, and as sure a sign as any that the Beneficent Emperor remained strong in the Imperium. For that, so ought we. +Galen, if you can command the battlefield, can you return to where you found me?+ I asked of him.
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#JUST A MOMENT,# he replied, loosing a flurry of eight more missiles from the Stormspear Rocket Pod and finally managing to snipe the other bomber from the skies with his Lance. The missiles he had launched screeched away and lit the landscape up, pummeling what straggling infantry remained. His lower half, his legs, then marched in place to turn around while his top half remained in place, surveying the scene. Satisfied that he had beaten an army into submission, Galen turned in full, his legs already taking strides back to my requested destination. He took a few steps toward our start, then paused. #HMM, NUCLEAR DEATHSTRIKE LAUNCH. ARRIVAL IMMINENT. ANOTHER MOMENT, COMMISSAR.# His hulking form looked to the skies for a few moments, scanning through the atmospheric warzone, before raising and priming his Volcano Lance on a glimmer of light thousands of meters away. He fired it in spurts rather than as a contiguous beam, even the Knight’s targeting systems struggling to track the missile at such a range and velocity.
Eventually, however, he hit his target, and the world roughly eight kilometers away from us erupted into a second sun. #NOT TO WORRY.#
+Show off.+
#YOU’RE ONE TO TALK. WHAT WAS THAT PHRASE? EXIGENT CALAMITY? FANCY. YOU DID NOT USE SUCH WORDS IN THE COMISSARIAT.#
+Big words do not embolden common soldiers. I no longer lead common soldiers.+
#WELL, THAT’S CERTAINLY TRUE, ISN’T IT? HERE WE ARE, YOUR DESTINATION,# he told me, having crossed the distance in no time at all. Though the proportional figure of his Castellan looked as though it were taking slow steps, it was of such a size that it crossed the distance faster than the nine tanks he had flattened could have at top speed. And this, I knew, was far from him sprinting. He and the Eximus Convictor were a marvel to me even still.
+My allies…one is missing from the rubble.#
#CALLSIGN? I CAN BEGIN SCANS.#
+Intel-1. Zha Trantos.+
***
“Prareus, you idiot, leave her!” Gerhart Heirene protested, smacking the back of Prareus Avrodam’s head and earning a snarl from the Phaenonite from Canicus.
“I made her a promise that I will not neglect,” Prareus growled in return. “You run if you want. But I am a man of my word.”
“What part of third front don’t you understand? There are Fenrisians in orbit, now! We have blasted Wolves to deal with, on top of everything else!” Heirene seethed.
“Then go deal with them. The Wolves won’t play nice with the others anyways, especially not the Red Hunters which that fool Caliman commands,” Prareus deflected, disinterested. “Go set them up on a date or something. My day is booked.”
“You are doomed, then, to your idiocy. I will not get caught up in it,” Heirene sighed, leaving Prareus to his work. Prareus shook his head, then picked up a scalpel and made for the medicae station, where his prey had been gagged and tied.
“So, where were we, you and I?” he asked Zha, removing the gag from her mouth. She lurched for him, but did not manage even an inch from the table she was tied to.
“Heirene is right,” she heaved out, fire burning in dark eyes.
“In what way?” Prareus asked, tapping his scalpel to her face, and pricking a tiny cut under her right eye.
“You are an idiot. And you are doomed,” Zha seethed. “When Blackgar finds you—”
“When he finds me? Oh, dear Trantos, Blackgar is likely a radioactive paste at this point. I heard word of a Deathstrike launch. Not even our pestilent friend could survive such a thing. In any case, you really must learn to fend for yourself. Or, you should have, rather. It’s too late now,” Prareus sneered. “Are you not the least bit curious how I’m here? Of how I am not dead?”
“I think I’ve figured it out,” Zha rolled her eyes.
“Oh?”
“You’re using the Pariah extract to tunnel through pockets of the Warp pulled out from flects to guide your souls to growth-vat bodies. It’s not too hard to extrapolate, even if it is highly heretical,” Zha determined.
“Huh,” Prareus frowned. With a shrug, he then cut another small slit beneath Zha’s other eye, and as she tensed up from that, lurched himself forward and planted his lips upon hers. That only lasted a moment before he recoiled in minor pain, his tongue having been bitten. “Such delightful fight in you. I do wonder how long you’ll keep it up. And such supple flesh. You will be a treat to dissect,” Prareus nodded to himself, turning around momentarily to a low thudding in the background. He did not pay it much mind, though it did continue. “Shall we?”
“Frig you,” Zha seethed, wrestling against her shackles with all her might as Prareus descended upon her once more. He cut a wide strike through the left side of her head, but before his opening incision reached her cheeks, he froze in place. Completely. Zha suffered for a few moments, believing Prareus was savoring her dissection, until she looked into Prareus’s face. A single tear of blood fell from his eyes, but he otherwise remained petrified. The scalpel then flung away from her and through Prareus’s hand altogether, impaling itself in a faraway wall. Prareus remained frozen, unflinching despite the newly-formed hole in his palm. A moment later, the Phaenonite facility was torn open, a gigantic metal fist cleaving through the ceiling. Zha’s shackles were vaporized when the debris finished falling, allowing her to jump from the table, skirting backward away from Prareus and the metal hulk looming behind him.
#WORRY NOT, MISS TRANTOS. WE HAVE MET, AND I BRING A FRIEND.#
“Who…what?” Zha asked, panicked, blood sliding from her face.
+Move to the Knight, Ms. Trantos.+
“M…Mr. Blackgar?” she hesitated.
+Ignore the Phaenonite. He is in my grasp now, and will learn how pestilent I can be. Move to the Knight.+
Zha nodded to herself, and with one eye kept locked on Prareus’s still-blood-crying, still-paralyzed form, moved herself across the room. #YOU WILL NEED TO MAKE ROOM,# Galen warned her, lowering his fist near to her and opening it. Zha nearly shrieked at the sight of me. #YES, HE IS A LITTLE BLOODIED. BUT VERY ALIVE, AS EVIDENCED.#
“Mr…Cal, you have such a head wound, I…I…I do not know how to—” Zha fretted, climbing into Galen’s grasp and embracing my inert form in a panicked hug.
+I will be fine.+
“Mr. Blackgar, I believe the Phaenonites are Perpetuals, of a sort,” she warned me.
+Yes, I have learned as much myself.+
“What will you do with Avrodam?”
+I have already done it. I have inflicted as much pain as I can dream of upon him, but not enough to kill him. He will suffer for days yet, until he dies of hunger or thirst. If he returns from that death, he may likely be entirely mad. Galen, there is a second army approaching.+
#GOOD. THE FIRST WAS TOO LIGHTWEIGHT. I AM FAR FROM SATED.#