Chapter 231: Since Ancient Times, the Left Side Always Loses a Beam Clash
Silentium's psychic shockwave met the rebel psyker's counter-discharge head on. Both collapsed into a burst of crackling warp lightning between them.
The rebel studied him with something between wariness and appreciation.
"You've been practicing, child. But can you manage this?"
He raised both arms and built a lightning sphere — then, instead of hurling it as a projectile, he redirected it into a continuous beam, a sustained lightning lance connecting his hands to the target, pouring energy in a constant stream.
Silentium formed a barrier. The lance hit it, crackling and spitting, but it didn't dissipate — the rebel kept feeding power into it, and the beam grew thicker, more intense, hammering the shield with increasing pressure.
The accumulated energy reached a threshold. The barrier exploded outward.
Silentium went backwards through the air, rolled several times across the farmland, and came to a stop face-down in the dirt.
He got up. The powered suit was thoroughly coated in mud.
Kian watched this from the command Chimera's screen and felt the first edge of genuine concern.
"Are you alright? If this isn't working we pull back — or I get the whole force to put fire on him simultaneously—"
Silentium shook his head to clear it, eyes fixed on his opponent.
"Don't. I haven't had a proper opponent in my entire life. I want to see who's stronger.
And I drank holy amasec before we left. My psychic use is covered — no daemon will get a foothold through me right now.
Look at him though. He's pretending to be calm, but I can feel it — the daemons in the warp are already circling him. Every ability he uses is another opening."
Kian looked at the rebel's face on screen. The composure was showing hairline cracks — a tightness around the eyes, brief flashes of something unfocused.
An unsanctioned psyker burning through ability after ability with no soul-shielding. His projection in the immaterium was drawing the attention of things that didn't need an invitation.
"Alright. Handle it your way. Win and I'll add an extra protein ration."
Silentium dusted himself off, rose back into the air, raised both hands, and formed a lightning lance — the exact technique the rebel had just used on him.
The rebel blinked.
"You saw it once and copied it."
"Yes."
He formed his own lance in response. Both psykers extended their beams simultaneously — two streams of focused warp energy intersecting in the space between them, the collision point exploding continuously, each feeding more power into their respective streams.
The beam clash had begun.
On the battlefield periphery, a rebel soldier in the trench line decided this was his moment and put a burst toward Silentium.
The visual effect of the psyker duel had run its course. Kian snapped his attention back to the wider engagement.
"Fire! Suppress those trenches — don't let them interfere!"
The Chimeras opened up again. Lasfire and grenades swept the trench network. A flanking element of rebels trying to work around the left side of the formation ran into a wall of las-bolts. A cavalry suicide charge that had looped around the rear was flagged by the auspex and scattered before it reached weapon range.
The battle ran on two tracks simultaneously — the conventional engagement grinding along the trench line, and the psyker duel crackling in the open ground between the forces.
Both beams were growing. The intersection point was producing expanding bursts of warp discharge that neither combatant seemed to particularly care about. Occasionally a stray round would arc toward one of the two figures and detonate harmlessly against their respective barriers.
The energy accumulation reached critical mass.
Both beams collapsed into a single detonation — a psychic explosion that blew a substantial crater in the farmland and sent both participants in opposite directions.
Silentium hit the ground and rolled. When he came to a stop, he had a helmet full of dirt. He extracted his head and shouted at the sky:
"Why can't I beat him?!"
Kian's voice came through the helmet vox immediately.
"Classic mistake. Everyone knows — since ancient times, the left side always loses a beam clash. Get over to the right side and go again. You'll win this time."
A pause.
"...Is that actually a thing?"
"Guaranteed. Your father has never once steered you wrong."
Silentium climbed out of the crater, moved to the right side of the engagement, raised his hands, and formed the lance again.
The rebel psyker didn't know what to make of the repositioning, started to say something, then gave up and formed his own lance.
The beams met again.
This time the intersection point drifted. Silentium's stream was thicker, more stable — he was pouring energy in with better focus, and the clash point was moving toward the rebel rather than holding neutral ground.
Does standing on the right actually make a difference? he thought, bewildered by his own improvement.
It didn't matter. The rebel's output became erratic — the pressure of the approaching collision point, combined with whatever the daemons circling his soul were doing to his concentration, disrupted his control at the critical moment.
Silentium's lance closed the remaining distance and hit.
The rebel psyker took the full discharge to the chest. The detonation threw him backward, landed him hard, and left him twitching in the field with a scorched hole through his torso.
He could not get up.
[End of Chapter 231]
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