Chapter 436: Gold Flame, Streaked Red, Tinged Green
Kian's consciousness slowly resurfaced. He found himself lying on an advanced medical bed.
A tangle of vital-sign monitors had been fixed to his body, and a few medical servitors stood by, waiting on standby nearby.
Kian blinked a few times. Once his mind cleared fully, he registered that he was in an Astartes bunker. He was safe.
After a while, feeling returned to his body, and he caught a heavy stink of blood.
He turned toward the smell and found, on the next advanced medical bed over, Apothecary Desai.
His power armour had already been stripped off him. All that remained was a single arm and half a torso, threaded through with a mass of tubing.
Kian glanced at the display screen mounted on the bed's frame. It showed Desai's vitals, cycling through readouts, and the man still had half a life left in him.
Kian sat up, swayed a little, felt a faint dizziness, but nothing worse. He got up and crossed to Desai's bedside, looked the man over, half of him left, and clicked his tongue.
The torn stump of Desai's abdomen had been sealed under an artificial membrane, with tubes running in and out of it, pumping in anti-inflammatory agents and nutrient solution while drawing out blood and waste.
The life-support rig was keeping Desai alive, but it clearly wasn't a comfortable way to live.
Kian could see pus leaking from where the membrane met the wound, pooling on the bed, giving off a stench of blood and rot.
Kian turned to the medical servitors nearby. "Clean him up."
"Yes, my lord."
Two servitors, their arms fitted with surgical tools, set to work clearing the pus from the wound.
The procedure seemed to sting. Desai, reduced to half a body, slowly opened his eyes, and they were full of pain and exhaustion.
Seeing him suffering, Kian dug through his pockets and pulled out a tin of Sanctified Anointing Oil, dabbing a bit onto Desai's face.
The pain visibly eased, and Desai looked at Kian with real gratitude.
Kian pulled out a Regen-Bolt, meaning to give him a shot, but Desai stopped him.
"Thank you, Count Voss, but there's no need.
That stimulant of yours doesn't do anything for wounds exposed to heavy radiation, chemical contamination, or toxin poisoning.
That Ork's powered claw was filthy. The wound it left me took a heavy dose of radiation, and right now my bloodstream is running thick with it."
Kian let him finish, then gave him the shot anyway.
"Might help a little. Not like I'm short on these."
Then he asked, "What happens to you now, in this state? Are you going into a Dreadnought?"
The Dreadnought was a hyper-powerful war machine reserved for crippled Astartes.
An Astartes like Desai, wounds contaminated with radiation too severe to heal, would be sealed into what was known as a sarcophagus.
The sarcophagus was, quite literally, a long coffin-shaped pod, fitted with a full life-support system that let a catastrophically wounded Astartes keep living, and it doubled as a neural interface.
Mount that sarcophagus into a four- or five-meter Dreadnought chassis, and these broken veterans could return to the battlefield.
Except it was agony. Sealing a living man into a coffin, no hands, no limbs, unable to move a muscle, cut off from nearly all human contact.
And it was worse for First Founding Astartes like these. The Redeemer-pattern Dreadnoughts built for them had a design flaw baked in.
When the tech-priests of the Mechanicus engineered these newer Dreadnoughts for First Founding Astartes, they'd chased efficiency above all else and given no weight to the pilot's wellbeing.
To these half-machine priests, efficiency came first. Whether the pilot lived or died in comfort was beside the point.
Overpowered reactors paired with an inadequate cooling system meant the pilot sealed inside could effectively be cooked alive.
Slow-roasted. Rare, medium, however you wanted to call it.
Which was why, more often than not, a gravely wounded Astartes would rather die outright than pilot a Dreadnought. It was simply too much to endure.
Desai let out a sigh.
"My Chapter cannot afford to lose me. If this is the Emperor's will, then I accept the Dreadnought."
Desai had already lost his lower body and one arm. He still had one good hand left.
If he wanted the Dreadnought, he'd have to sever that last good hand himself. That was the brutal reality of this universe.
Kian had nothing to say to that choice.
Desai managed a small smile, reached into a compartment built into the side of the medical bed with his one good hand, and pulled out something shaped like a USB drive, holding it out to Kian.
"Count Voss, this is what we agreed on. You got my battle-brothers out. Here's the formula for the black needle."
Kian took the drive and nodded to him, then set the tin of Sanctified Anointing Oil he'd just used down on Desai's chest.
"Use it if the pain gets bad. No side effects, just pain relief. May the Emperor's strength watch over you."
With that, Kian left the medical bay and stepped outside.
He was currently in the Astartes' fortified bunker position. The rescued Astartes were kneeling on one knee, led by Chaplain Reisach, offering a final farewell to the three gene-seed containers set beside the statue of the Emperor.
Chaplain Reisach spoke.
"Death marks the end of duty. Battle-brothers, may your souls return to the Golden Throne.
An ending is also a beginning. Your gene-seed will carry on.
Three new recruits will inherit your duty, will become our battle-brothers, and will continue the fight in the Emperor's name."
Chaplain Reisach kept praying, and the Astartes gathered around him joined in, their mouths moving in unison with the words of the rite.
After a while, the farewell rite concluded. A dozen or so of the assembled Astartes broke off at once, heading straight for the front to deal with the Ork threat, not even pausing for breath.
Kian made his way over to Nor'n and asked, "What happened? Bad luck, getting pinned down by the Orks like that?"
Nor'n let out a sigh.
"It was Blackiron. He set the trap deliberately.
You remember we'd already knocked out a good chunk of his war-workshops, which meant fewer of his mechanized forces active on the field.
We figured we'd push deep into the Deathmine and blow up his refining facilities while he was weak.
But Blackiron saw it coming. He guessed we'd try to hit his key fuel production while his mechanized forces were thin.
So he pulled together his best troops and hid them near the Deathmine.
The moment my squad and I went in, he sprang the ambush and surrounded us."
Kian let out a low whistle. "Blackiron's a crafty bastard. Well, I did tear him in half. Not sure if he's dead or not."
Nor'n shook his head.
"Probably not. Reports from the front say the Ork assault is still going strong, no real sign of it faltering.
And there's no infighting among the Orks over a new boss, either. Blackiron's probably still alive."
Kian thought about it for a moment.
"Even if he's alive, he's taken a beating he won't walk away from clean. I tore off his lower body and both his arms. That should knock his threat level down a lot."
Nor'n smiled.
"If that's true, all the better.
Maybe in a few days, one of Blackiron's own boys sees the state he's in and can't resist taking him out. Then the Orks tear themselves apart in a civil war, and we get a shot at retaking a whole continent.
Oh, right, there's something else.
Remember those two nukes your people dropped down here for us? We fired both of them deep into the Deathmine.
By the Emperor's mercy, they hit the Ork fuel storage depot dead center, and now the entire Deathmine is on fire.
From orbit, the ground for fifty li around the Deathmine is still smoking. There's got to be a hell of an underground fire burning down there.
That fire won't burn itself out for a hundred years. The Orks just lost an entire strategic fuel reserve, which means their armoured forces are about to shrink again."
While the two of them were talking, Chaplain Reisach approached and said to Kian, "Count Voss, I need a word with you."
Kian noted the string of formal titles being thrown his way and couldn't help a small grin.
These men used to just call him Count. Now there was an honorific tacked onto every sentence.
Seemed like this operation had fully earned him the Astartes' respect. They were starting to treat him as an equal.
Kian agreed easily, said his goodbyes to Nor'n, and followed Chaplain Reisach into a confessional chamber.
Reisach shut the door behind them, sealing the two of them in alone.
He removed his signature skull helm and fixed Kian with a deadly serious expression.
"Count Voss, I want to ask you something. Are you loyal to the Emperor?"
Kian blinked. "What do you mean by that?"
Reisach drew a slow breath.
"Count Voss, have you examined your own soul? Have you examined your loyalty to the Emperor?"
The man's expression was grave, and his left hand had drifted to rest on the combat knife at his hip, poised as though he might draw it and cut Kian down at any moment.
Kian froze. What the hell was this about?
He couldn't figure it out at first, but then he noticed something was off with his own status.
He quietly pulled up the system in his mind, opened the quest log, and saw Khorne's quest marked complete. His brain nearly hemorrhaged on the spot.
Back on Glory, he'd taken a standing quest from Khorne: kill 888 valuable enemies, and receive the second tier of Khorne's Blessing.
The definition of a "valuable enemy" was frustratingly arbitrary. If Kian was just in power armour swinging the Demon-Cleaver around, cutting down a regular Ork Boy might count as valuable.
But once he was piloting a Knight suit, the enemies he killed had to be on the level of an Ork Dreadnought to count.
Either way, after the fight with Blackiron, the quest had gone through. 888 sacrificed enemies, tallied and done, and he'd been granted the second tier of Khorne's Blessing.
Blessing effect: Strength +8, Endurance +8, ongoing Corruption Rank 2.
With this added on, his three stats now stood at Strength 74, Endurance 74, Focus 76.
Sounded great on paper. His strength had spiked again. But his corruption had spiked right along with it.
Corruption Rank 2 meant +2 Corruption per second.
Earlier, the Emperor had granted him a status: Divine Purging, removing 1 point of Corruption per second.
That had exactly offset Khorne's Rank 1 output before, keeping his Corruption pinned at 0 no matter what.
But he'd gone and completed Khorne's quest without even noticing, and Khorne's corruption output had jumped to the second tier.
Two points a second, minus the Emperor's one, left him with a net gain of one point a second, damn it!
For however long he'd been unconscious, his Corruption had been ticking up the whole time.
He checked now and found his Corruption had already climbed to nearly thirty.
Kian did the math and something didn't add up. If he'd been out that long at one point a second, his Corruption should have shot up into the hundreds, maybe thousands. Why was it only sitting at thirty-something?
What he didn't know was that while he'd been unconscious, his forces had pulled out of the Deathmine fast, and Chaplain Reisach had immediately sensed something wrong.
The Astartes Chaplain had a sharp instinct for the proximity of Chaos taint, and after some investigation, he'd traced the source of the corruption straight back to Kian.
Once the force made it safely back to human-controlled territory and Kian had been pulled out of the squire-suit's cockpit, Reisach had taken custody of him and spent the whole time praying over him, chanting and working his rites, and had managed to suppress the Chaos taint clinging to him.
Even now, the Chaos taint on Kian was still ticking upward, but only by tenths, a slow, crawling rise, precisely because of the work Reisach had been doing on him.
Kian swore under his breath. He genuinely did not want anything to do with Chaos, didn't dare touch it if he could help it.
In this universe, almost nobody who got tangled up with Chaos came out the other side well. But the problem was Khorne kept shoving himself onto Kian whether he wanted it or not, and there was nothing to be done about it.
Right now, Kian's quest log had a new Khorne quest hanging on it too. This time it wanted 8,888 valuable enemies sacrificed before the Blessing advanced another tier.
Meanwhile, the Emperor? Not a peep out of him.
Kian figured the Emperor was probably too busy, or maybe just figured Kian could handle a little trouble like this on his own, and wasn't stepping in to help.
He closed the system and looked back up at Reisach.
Reisach's gaze was fixed on him, distant and probing, his right hand resting, seemingly by accident, on the combat knife at his belt, like he was interrogating a confirmed heretic.
Kian said, exasperated, "I just saved your life and the life of your entire Astartes squad, and this is the look you're giving me? Like you're about to cut me to pieces?"
Reisach's tone stayed grave.
"It's precisely because you saved me and my battle-brothers that I didn't cut you apart while you were unconscious. I'm giving you the chance to explain yourself."
The Ecclesiarchy's religious personnel had been burned by daemons too many times, and held a zero-tolerance policy toward anything touched by Chaos.
The fact that Reisach had noticed the taint on Kian and was still offering him a chance to speak, that alone made him remarkably open-minded, for a man of his order.
Kian had no choice. He spread his hand and summoned a ball of golden psychic flame.
"There. That's my proof. If I'd thrown my lot in with heretics, do you really think I'd still be able to call on the golden psychic power the Emperor himself granted me?"
Reisach looked at the golden flame, felt the unmistakably holy, unmistakably Emperor-touched power radiating off it, and his expression eased. His hand drifted a little further from the monomolecular blade.
But then his face twisted into something strange.
"Why is your flame streaked with red... and is that a hint of green in there?"
Kian blinked, confused, and looked closer. Sure enough, something was off.
The psychic flame hovering over his hand was mostly gold, as it should be, but every so often it flickered with streaks of red and green light.
"Ah, that... that's just a flame test reaction. They taught that in high school chemistry. Totally normal, totally normal..."
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