Chapter 237: The Emperor's Glance
The daemon had passed out. Kian looked at it with undisguised contempt.
He put an arm around Silentium's shoulder.
"Couldn't answer three basic questions. That's a third-rate intellect at best. We're not playing with him anymore."
Silentium hesitated — but looking at his research subject, now thoroughly scorched and battered by Kian's earlier intervention, a faint sense of aesthetic dissatisfaction crept in. The thing was rather ruined. He said nothing and let Kian proceed.
The daemon recovered consciousness in time to hear this decision being made.
"It doesn't matter," it said, its blue eyes full of cold venom. "You cannot truly kill me. My soul belongs to the Lord of Truth — when it returns to the Empyrean, my body will be remade. And then I will visit upon you retributions beyond your capacity to imagine. HAHAHAHA—"
Kian smiled in a way that suggested he had thought of something.
"Hold that thought."
He stepped out and came back carrying the Imperial Shrine.
An ordinary Imperial devotional figurine had limited spiritual potency — modest symbolic value, minimal actual warp resonance. The Sanctum's shrine was different. It had a direct connection to the Emperor's psychic emanation — a live channel rather than a recorded message, running at continuous throughput.
To a Chaos entity, this was approximately what looking directly at a star is to unprotected eyes.
The daemon screamed the moment the shrine entered the room. Not metaphorically — physically. The golden light pouring from the shrine struck its mutated eyes and liquefied them, the fluid running down its feathered cheeks. Its scales and feathers began smouldering immediately.
Kian raised the shrine above his head, advanced on the daemon, and announced:
"The God-Emperor makes a personal appearance! IMPERIAL SHRINE SMASH!"
He brought it down on the daemon's head.
He held back slightly — the shrine was solid hardwood and he didn't want to damage it. On an ordinary person, this would have been a nasty but survivable blow.
On a Chaos entity, contact with an object saturated in the Emperor's psychic resonance was categorically different.
The daemon ignited.
Not just the surface — the flame worked inward, burning through the physical vessel into the warp-stuff beneath, reaching the daemon's actual essence and consuming it from the soul outward. The thing screamed with the specific quality of an entity realising it is facing permanent, unrecoverable destruction rather than temporary death.
In the warp, a daemon's death was normally an inconvenience — dissolution back into the Empyrean, eventual reconstitution, continuity of self maintained. What the Emperor's resonance did was different. It didn't return the essence to the warp. It unmade it.
The screaming stopped.
Both Kian and Silentium felt it simultaneously — the sudden absence of warp presence, the body on the wall becoming simply a body, no passenger remaining.
Silentium sighed.
"Such a waste. He really had given me substantial knowledge. All of it gone now."
Kian wasn't listening. His attention had been taken by something internal.
*Ding.* The God-Emperor has noted your complete destruction of a Tzeentchian daemon. His attention rests on you for 0.0000001 seconds.
Though the daemon destroyed was minor and its elimination represents negligible improvement to humanity's overall situation, the Emperor has perceived your potential.
*Ding.* New Imperial Mission: Destroy ten daemons completely. Upon completion, you will earn the God-Emperor's Friendship.
Kian's breath came in sharply.
The God-Emperor of Mankind was one of the most powerful entities in the galaxy — a being who had walked the Earth since before recorded history, who had nearly ascended to godhood through accumulated psychic power, who sat on the Golden Throne maintaining the Astronomican and the webway barrier through continuous act of will, keeping humanity alive across a million worlds through the force of a single consciousness that had chosen not to become what it could become.
Because if he ascended — if he became a true warp deity — he would enter the immaterium, and he would become a fifth Chaos God, and the shockwave of that transformation would annihilate the species he had spent forty thousand years protecting.
So he sat. Millennium after millennium. Holding the line.
And 0.0000001 seconds of that awareness had noticed Kian Voss.
The Imperium spanned a million worlds. Events of genuine significance happened continuously across all of them. To attract even the faintest fraction of the Emperor's attention at all—
What does completing this mission give me?
He didn't dare speculate. The Emperor's friendship, distributed by someone operating at that scale, could take forms beyond ordinary comprehension.
He became very motivated.
"Daemons. I need to kill daemons. Where are the daemons? Someone show me the daemons, I will destroy them—"
The problem was immediate and obvious. Secundus-496b was, by the standards of the galaxy, an almost aggressively peaceful world in terms of warp incursion. Two significant Chaos events in recent history. Both resolved. The planet was, spiritually speaking, rather clean.
He looked at Silentium, who was still quietly mourning his research subject.
A thought arrived.
He put his arm around Silentium's shoulder and smiled pleasantly.
"I've always been a supportive guardian. Very encouraging of the children's interests and hobbies.
You want to study the immaterium? Great. Excellent. Call up a few daemons. Let's have some fun."
[End of Chapter 237]
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