Chapter 333: Farewell
Time flew. Three months passed.
A great deal happened in those three months. General Zeppelin had become Governor Zeppelin, and the full weight of planetary administration now sat on his shoulders.
He'd carved out an enormous zone on the planet's surface and established a mega-training camp. Ten million able-bodied men and women drilled inside it, destined to be converted into Astra Militarum regiments at a rate of one million per year — launched into the void as the Emperor's currency, never to return.
The war between the PDF and the rebels was over. The rebellion no longer existed.
The Inquisitor's warships hung in low orbit, broadcasting absolute authority to every armed force on the planet.
Trasolh's agents had shown the rebel marshals the truth of the universe — the sheer, crushing scale of the Imperium and the reality of what lay beyond the stars. The idealists' convictions shattered on contact.
The revelation that the former Planetary Governor had been not an oppressor but a guardian further eroded the rebellion's ideological foundations from within.
In such turbulent times, of course, a stubborn remnant refused to surrender. They wanted to continue the fight, to resist a century of extinction-level taxation imposed by the Imperium of Man.
Faced with this situation, Kian — now serving as the Inquisitor's advisor — offered his first piece of counsel.
"My lord, move your warships to the planet's equatorial region. There's a sacred mountain there, roughly two thousand metres in elevation.
The first wave of revolutionaries rallied at that mountain. It's the rebellion's spiritual totem.
Level it with your macro-cannons and lance batteries. The insurgency will collapse on its own."
In truth, the Inquisitor had no obligation to manage the planet's internal affairs. His job was to collect the tithe. Everything else was the Governor's problem — and if the Governor failed, he'd burn, and the next one would take over.
But Governor Zeppelin was Kian's adoptive uncle, and this was the first suggestion Kian had made since joining the retinue. Refusing it would have been a terrible way to start the relationship.
So the Inquisitor ordered his fleet to the sacred mountain and opened fire for thirty minutes.
Shells measured in hundreds of tonnes rained down from orbit like a monsoon.
They punched through the mountainside, burrowed hundreds of metres underground, and detonated — blasting thousands of tonnes of earth and rock into the sky.
The ship-mounted laser weapons — lance batteries — fired beams of concentrated energy into the surface. These massive, high-output weapons vaporised stone on contact, turning everything within a hundred-metre radius of each strike into glass.
The earth roared. Rock shattered. Pillars of light descended from the heavens like divine punishment.
The sacred mountain was surrounded by rebel forces — senior leadership, specifically. They stood at a distance with tens of millions of fighters and watched the judgement fall.
Under that apocalyptic bombardment, the mountain sank, metre by metre.
When it was over, the two-thousand-metre peak had been replaced by a glass-lined crater plunging two hundred metres below the original ground level.
Nearly ten million tonnes of rock and soil had simply ceased to exist. Destructive power on that scale extinguished every last flicker of resistance in the rebel ranks.
Governor Zeppelin invited the rebel marshals and all the nobility to form a joint government.
He divided Agri-World Secundus-496b into several thousand administrative districts, then assigned each one to a noble house or a former rebel marshal.
Every district was required to deliver its tithe quota on schedule — monthly and annually. Any administrator who fell short would have their entire family converted into servitors and surrendered as part of the blood tithe.
Governor Zeppelin was operating under crushing pressure. He built the joint government at breakneck speed, drew up district boundaries, and designed the enforcement framework.
This system would run for a hundred years. It was not built around the happiness of the people. It existed for one purpose: to repay twenty-three years of outstanding Imperial tithes plus staggering punitive surcharges.
This oppressive, fundamentally inhumane system would grind on for a full century, extracting every last drop of value from the planet and reducing a population of thirty billion to fewer than five.
Kian, for his part, had given this world the best start he could. While pursuing his own future among the stars, he'd secured a one per cent tithe reduction.
That single per cent was an astronomical sum — equivalent to sparing the entire planet roughly one full year of suffering.
To rank among the Imperium's saints, you'd have to grind harder than anyone alive, Kian thought. And I'd have to grind until I exploded.
Another six months passed. The tithe system was running steadily.
Massive quantities of agricultural produce and the first blood-tithe regiments had already been delivered. A portion had been loaded onto the transport ships flanking the Inquisitor's fleet and dispatched into the void, completing the initial payment.
Inquisitor Trasolh had finished his work on this world. It was time to leave.
Kian was going with him. But before departing, he gathered everyone who mattered to him inside the Governor's spire for one last meal together.
The guest list included Governor Zeppelin, Baron Reynaud, Silentium, Sister Teresa, Shiv, Little Joel, and the other key subordinates — along with Lady Nightingale, now visibly pregnant.
Some of them were staying behind. Others planned to follow Kian into the stars.
In every sense that mattered, this was a farewell.
At the banquet, everyone ate with ferocious speed, drank with desperate abandon. They all knew what was coming. Their half-garden, half-farmland paradise was about to be transformed. The next hundred years would be a sentence, not a life.
Reynaud clung to Kian's shoulder and wept openly.
He babbled about his responsibilities as one of the Mercator Aqua's senior figures — the horrific tithe burden that awaited him. If Kian ever came back, Reynaud said, he'd probably find nothing left but a skeleton.
Governor Zeppelin, set off by Reynaud's breakdown, started crying too.
His pressure was worse than anyone's. One annual tithe delivery. One single missed instalment, and it was the white phosphorus pyre for him.
The previous Governor had been roasted to a crackling right before his eyes. He'd watched it happen in person.
Every night since, he'd had the same nightmare — except in the dream, the figure lashed to the stake wasn't Governor Reynaldo.
It was him.
Kian could do nothing but keep pouring them drinks.
When the evening wound into its later hours, Kian drew Confessor Pious and his disciple Sister Teresa out onto the balcony and spoke to them in low tones.
He pressed a keycard into the Confessor's hand.
"Father, this card opens a hidden storeroom. Inside are five hundred bottles of Holy Amasec. I trust you understand what that substance actually is."
Confessor Pious nodded slowly.
"That spirit carries a potent concentration of the Emperor's power. Warrior of the Emperor... this is your doing, isn't it?"
Kian didn't deny it.
"Father, I'm entrusting these to you. I hope you'll find a prudent way to release them — carefully, in measured quantities — and use them to offset some of the planet's tithe burden."
The Imperium of Man was not a centralised nation-state. It was a loose, quasi-feudal confederation more akin to the medieval period than any modern government.
In that kind of fragmented power structure, if something outrageously valuable surfaced, it wouldn't necessarily attract allies. But it would absolutely attract predators, and death.
Holy Amasec was priceless. Diluted, it could cleanse Warp contamination. Concentrated, it could destroy daemons outright. Nothing short of extraordinary.
Used correctly, it could offset not just a century of tithes but potentially win the planet outright tax-exempt status.
But they didn't have the strength to protect a treasure like that.
The same was true of the Armour of Reason Fragment sitting in Kian's deep storage. Hand it over to the right people and it could easily buy a planet's freedom from taxation.
But hand it to whom? Could you even find someone trustworthy enough? And after you gave it to them, what stopped them from killing you and taking everything else?
Hand it to Inquisitor Trasolh? Don't be ridiculous. Kian hadn't even figured out what kind of man his new boss really was yet. Handing over something that valuable this early would be insane.
He'd been willing to invest in Nor'n previously because the Crimson Bite Chapter were the galactic equivalent of a decorated military unit — their reputation preceded them.
Even then, he hadn't dared give the Armour of Reason Fragment to the Astartes. He was afraid even they couldn't protect it.
The Holy Amasec, the Regen-Bolts, the Armour of Reason Fragment — Kian estimated he'd need at least two or three warships under his command, over a hundred thousand armoured troops, and an army exceeding a million before he'd have the standing to sit at the table and eat with the real players. Only then could he afford to convert his treasures into power.
For now, he wanted Confessor Pious to make careful use of the Holy Amasec — dilute it, reduce the potency to something less world-shaking, and trade it for tithe credits.
As for the cover story? Simple. Confessor Pious and his congregation had prayed day and night, and their devotion had produced holy water.
In a universe where belief shaped reality, that sort of thing wasn't unheard of. Theirs would just happen to be a bit more potent. A bit more valuable.
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