Chapter 423: The Black Needle Formula
The Apothecary's screaming drew every Astartes in the bunker running. They found Desai on the floor, shaking Kian by the collar.
"Damn it, don't you dare die here!"
Even Captain Doron was thrown, shouting urgently. "What happened here? How is he dead?!"
Desai's expression twisted in genuine panic as he worked to resuscitate Kian while explaining what had happened to the others. Everyone's expression shifted the instant they heard he'd injected himself with the black needle.
They'd all heard of it before, use it and you died, guaranteed. And this man had done it to himself without a second thought.
Despite everyone's frantic efforts, Kian couldn't be revived. His vital signs had already flatlined completely.
The Astartes gathered around his body in total silence, nobody able to find a single word to say. The bunker fell into an eerie, uncomfortable quiet.
"He died here, on our watch. We're not... we're not on the hook for damages, are we?"
Desai asked weakly.
Nobody answered. Dying that recklessly, that carelessly? They'd literally just finished negotiating a major partnership, and the man just up and dropped dead on them.
Captain Doron took several deep breaths, forcing down his own shock and confusion.
"What's done is done. We return the body to his people. He was favored by the Emperor, a living saint, whatever else happened here. We owe his remains proper respect. Damn it, wait, where's the body?"
Everyone looked down. Kian's corpse had vanished entirely, leaving nothing behind but an empty suit of power armour.
Another round of panic followed. How did the body just disappear like that? Hours of psychic scanning, sorcerous detection, and every other method they could think of turned up nothing.
With no other option, Captain Doron decided to gather everyone up, take Kian's remaining gear, and shuttle up to the Inquisitor's flagship in orbit. Whatever else could be said, the man had been a living saint, and even dying this pointlessly with his body vanished entirely, he deserved proper respect. And they owed his superior, the Inquisitor, some kind of explanation.
The Astartes laid the empty suit of armour out on a hand-forged iron table, draped it with a length of serpent-hide taken from a great beast on their home world, and held a simple rite before boarding the shuttle for Trasolh's flagship.
They all looked genuinely uncomfortable the whole flight up. Astartes and Inquisitors had never really gotten along, especially with the Ordo Hereticus, which held oversight authority over their kind directly. Trasolh happened to be one of the more reasonable Inquisitors, and with the Ork crisis eating up everyone's attention, he hadn't gone looking for trouble with the Astartes at all.
The shuttle landed, and Captain Doron and his companions carried Kian's armour onto the deck, looking up to find Trasolh himself waiting to receive them.
Doron spoke, plainly uncomfortable.
"Inquisitor Trasolh. I have unfortunate news. Your comrade, our brother-in-arms, and living saint, the Count... is dead."
Trasolh blinked. He'd been bracing for something worse from the Astartes' unusual visit. This? That's all?
Relations between the two sides had always been tense, an unspoken agreement to stay out of each other's way, so an unannounced Astartes delegation had genuinely put him on edge. Hearing the news, he just waved a hand.
"Ah, that. Don't worry about it. He'll come back on his own in a while."
Doron blinked, thrown again. "What do you mean, come back on his own?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. He comes back to life. You know the term Immortal? Someone impossible to kill permanently. Same as your own Primarch, Vulkan, Lord of Drakes. No matter what happens to him, he recovers and comes back after enough time."
Since the Primarch Vulkan was famously an Immortal himself, Doron and the others understood instantly. So Kian was an Immortal too. Every Astartes present felt their expressions curdle, a distinct sense of having been played. Their faces shifted from ordinary matte black to something closer to a dense, matte-finish darkness deep enough that killing the deck lights would've rendered them invisible outright.
Trasolh, watching their expressions turn to something approaching a black hole, took an instinctive step back and moved straight to showing them out.
"Well, since the misunderstanding's cleared up, I won't keep you all for dinner."
A few minutes later, the Astartes shuttle lifted off, heading back down to the planet's surface. Nobody inside said a word for a good while.
Finally, Desai spoke up. "I think my psyche has taken genuine trauma. I need to see a counselor."
He gave Doron a long, weary look. "And you wanted to recruit that man into our Chapter. Thank the Emperor it never happened. With a personality like that, our whole Chapter would've fallen apart."
Budas said, "That's not fair. I think the Count's a genuinely decent man. You're being unreasonably biased."
As he spoke, he pulled the censer off his belt and took a long, deep inhale straight from it.
"Ahhh... bliss..."
Desai watched him with a look of pure disbelief. "I think we're already beyond saving."
Doron rubbed his chin. "When I brought up recruiting him, that was just an idle thought at the time. But thinking it over now, the man's got no idea how to read a room. He went and visited all three of you, gave you all gifts, and never once came to see me, his own Chapter captain? That's basically an insult."
Desai stared at him, aghast. "You... oh no. We really are beyond saving."
As they talked, a battlefield notice buzzed through all their helmet feeds simultaneously. Each of them read it in silence, and every expression shifted at once.
...
Back at the Sanctum, Kian's respawn cycle finished. He sprang upright in one motion, dressed himself, and opened the door out.
Just as he stepped out, he found a full set of power armour and gear waiting right outside, the very same set he'd been wearing when he died.
"Well, would you look at that, the big guy's a real stand-up brother, sent all my stuff right back to me."
He suited up, checked his gear, boarded a shuttle, and headed straight back down to the bunker on the surface. He was going to find Apothecary Desai and squeeze the black needle's formula out of him, no matter what.
Useless to anyone else, sure, but for Kian it was gold. A third boost across the board to his physical stats meant he could go toe-to-toe with a full Astartes directly. Fifty-fifty odds of dying didn't bother him one bit, dying wasn't exactly a scarce resource for him. And once he hit the Death Superman state, that one-per-second life drain was trivially offset by a single Regen-Bolt.
Whatever it took, he was getting that formula.
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