Chapter 29: The Witch of the Wastes
[DEPLOYING OPERATIVE]
Location: Northern Trench Sector
Status: 16:00 Solar Time. Sunset imminent.
The world stabilized. Kian Voss checked his mental map. The Great Aquifer was thirty kilometers away—a massive distance for a man on foot, especially with only a few hours of daylight remaining.
Furthermore, he realized the overlapping nature of his objectives. Both Reno's data-slate and Rudolphson's investigation pointed to the same structure: the Hydro-Seismic Monitoring Station. This meant the station wasn't just a landmark; it was likely the lair of the Warp-witch.
"The Emperor provides a path for the bold," Kian muttered, though his gut told him he was walking into a meat-grinder. "Let's see what a Sorcerer actually looks like."
He began his sprint. Thirty kilometers was a death-march for a normal man, but Kian had his "cheats." Every time his stamina bar hit red, he downed a bottle of Adrenal-Caffeine Stim.
The effect was miraculous. The burning in his lungs vanished; the lactic acid in his muscles was neutralized by the high-grade chemical cocktail. He felt his heart rate stabilize even as he maintained a frantic pace. He ran for two and a half hours, crossing the desolate plains under the cover of the gathering dusk.
Luck was on his side. The PDF and the Rebels were too busy fortifying their main lines to worry about a lone, ragged runner crossing the "No-Man's Land."
He reached the Great Aquifer just as the last sliver of the sun vanished. He flattened himself against a massive boulder at the water's edge and scanned the horizon.
The Aquifer was staggering—a lake so vast that the opposite shore was lost in the industrial haze. Five hundred meters ahead, the Monitoring Station stood like a jagged metal tomb. It was a seven-story plasteel monolith, half-submerged in the dark water. A series of sensor arrays and pipes protruded from its base into the lake like the legs of a drowned spider.
On the seventh floor, a faint, flickering amber glow emanated from a window. Not a glow-globe. Candlelight.
Kian pulled a Sanctified Ration—a "Holy Pancake"—from his pouch and ate it.
[STATUS: THE EMPEROR'S BENEDICTION ACTIVE]
+5 Mental Clarity. Corruption Cleared. Aura of Sanctity established.
He needed his senses sharp. Somewhere in that tower was a man who had slaughtered two companies of trained soldiers. Kian's heart hammered against his ribs. He planned to wait until midnight, hoping the Sorcerer would sleep, before attempting to use the master key on the sub-surface vault.
He settled into a rhythm of controlled breathing, watching the tower. His mind wandered to the legends of the Adeptus Astartes. He was nearly thirty; too old for the nineteen gene-seed surgeries. He would never be a three-meter-tall demigod. But with the System's immortality, he could at least outlive them.
Wait...
Kian shivered. Why was it suddenly cold? The equatorial night should be balmy, yet he could see his breath frosting in the air.
The crickets in the tall grass went silent. A layer of rime-frost began to crawl across the rocks.
Suddenly, Kian felt a gaze—a cold, oily pressure that seemed to drill directly into his skull. It was a sensation of primal, ancestral terror, like a child staring into the dark and realizing something is staring back.
"Detected," Kian hissed.
He tried to spring up and run, but his body refused to obey. He was paralyzed, locked in place by an invisible weight that felt like being submerged in freezing lead.
Psychic Shackles.
Crunch. Crunch.
Footsteps moved through the frosted grass behind him. A presence of absolute malevolence was approaching.
"A little... a little rat," a jittery, high-pitched male voice whispered. "Did you come because the voices... because the voices told you I was lonely? Hehehehe..."
A violent telekinetic force seized Kian, hoisting him into the air and spinning him around to face his captor.
Kian's eyes widened. Before him stood a nightmare.
The man's scalp was a ruin of raw meat and exposed bone; he had torn away his own hair and skin in patches. His face was a map of jagged, self-inflicted vertical scars, some so deep they pierced his cheeks, allowing black bile to leak from the wounds. He had no nose, no ears—just raw, cauterized holes where the flesh had been carved away.
He was shirtless, his torso a spiderweb of rusted iron wires that had been stitched through his skin in hundreds of places.
"The voices... the sounds... they are so loud tonight! Hehehehe!"
The Sorcerer reached up with a skeletal hand, grabbed a clump of the remaining hair on his bloody skull, and yanked. With a sickening tear, another patch of scalp came away.
This was a Rogue Psyker—a man whose mind was a burning beacon in the Warp, drawing the attention of Daemons. They were whispering to him, screaming in his ears, driving him to mutilate his own vessel in a desperate, mad attempt to make the noise stop. He was days away from a total daemonic possession.
Kian tried to speak, but the psychic pressure was crushing his ribs. He could hear his own bones groaning.
Fine, Kian thought grimly. I'll die here, respawn, and come back with thirty kilos of explosives. Let's see you 'hehehe' through a melta-charge.
"Kill him! Tear out his heart!" the voices in the Psyker's head screamed—a cacophony of a hundred daemonic tongues. "Snap his neck! Drink the marrow!"
The Sorcerer's eyes rolled back until only the whites remained. His blood-stained hand reached out, his fingers trembling as they closed around Kian's throat.
He prepared to rip Kian's windpipe out. But the moment his skin touched Kian's neck, the screaming in his head... stopped.
The silence was absolute. The daemonic whispers that had tormented him for years vanished into a void of pure, sanctified stillness.
The Sorcerer froze, his hand trembling on Kian's throat. His eyes cleared, the madness momentarily receding as he stared at the "rat" in front of him.
The Aura of Sanctity from the Holy Pancake had acted like a localized psychic "null-zone." By touching Kian, the Sorcerer had inadvertently found the one thing he had craved for years: Silence.
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