Chapter 352: The Safe
Kian flexed his hand, not the easiest thing in a space this cramped, and worked a tube of Coolant Balm out from inside his armour.
He tore the cap into two pieces and crushed them into a pair of small metal balls.
He closed his right hand around one, wrapped it in Warp energy, and ran the spell Silentium had taught him, inverted, backward through its usual sequence.
An instant later, a portal opened above his palm, tiny, barely large enough to fit a fingernail through.
He tossed the little ball in, and the portal swallowed it whole.
"It worked! If I can throw things into the Warp, I should be able to pull them back out too."
Kian reached back into the portal with his gravity-manipulation, feeling around for the ball he'd just tossed in.
It worked. The ball came back into his hand. In and out, and it barely cost him any mental effort at all.
There was a catch, though. The instant a portal closed, the next one he opened landed on a completely random set of coordinates.
He tried it again, tossed the ball in, closed the portal, waited a few seconds, then opened a new one. Sure enough, the ball was gone, lost somewhere in the depths of the Warp.
He needed a way to fix the coordinates, so that every portal he opened would land on the same exact spot. Then he could store and retrieve things whenever he wanted, from anywhere.
A safe. A literal Warp-safe.
He'd need to think through how to pin down a fixed Warp coordinate, get himself a proper strongbox to use. Then he'd never have to worry about dying with his loot on him again, he could just stuff anything valuable straight into the void and walk around clean.
Right as he was working through the idea, a cold, mechanical voice cut through the cabin.
"Warning. Half a day of transit remaining to destination. Initiating staged deceleration protocol."
The next moment, Kian felt violent shuddering run through the life-support pod.
The tremors came every minute or two, and kept up for a full twelve hours.
The most demanding part of any space journey was acceleration and deceleration, both of which had to happen gradually, in careful stages. As long as the rate of change stayed slow enough, and the life-support system did its job, the occupant wouldn't end up smeared across the wall like paste.
What Kian was feeling was the skiff's nose thrusters firing in short bursts, and the whole deceleration sequence took a full twelve hours.
"Warning. Entering target planetary orbit. Target orbit achieved. Entering atmosphere. Atmospheric entry achieved. Landing deceleration in progress."
Listening to that flat, mechanical voice, Kian felt like he'd been thrown into a tumble dryer.
The whole world seemed to shake, the hull groaning with unsettling metallic screeches like it was about to tear itself apart.
Finally, with a thunderous crash, he felt himself slam down hard, like being shoved off a tenth-floor balcony, and then everything went silent.
"Warning. Landing successful. Locating touchdown site. Locator system damaged. Unable to determine location. Life-support pod ejecting. Please brace."
A burst of grinding metal noise, then a hiss, and the entire life-support pod was ejected, flying more than ten meters before crashing hard into the ground.
Kian punched the pod hatch open and clambered out of the cramped chamber, tore off his helmet, and let out a loud shout.
"God DAMN it, finally!"
The past few days had nearly driven him mad, cooped up in that tiny cabin. Now that he'd actually arrived, he took a moment to look around.
Beside him sat the scorched wreck of the landing pod. Not far off stretched a golden field of wheat, running unbroken for kilometers, rippling in the wind like waves on a sea of gold. Genuinely beautiful.
Further out, mountains, forests, rivers, ponds.
A world of pristine natural beauty, untouched by any industrial development.
Knight worlds, especially one bearing an Emperor-given name like Glory, held tax-exempt status. Freed from the Imperium's usual crushing tax burden, worlds like this could stay preserved in their pastoral, unspoiled state.
Kian breathed in deep, several times over. The air here was even cleaner than back on Agri-World Secundus-496b.
496b ran heavy industrial fertilizer operations, and you could occasionally catch a faint chemical tang in the air there.
Here, he genuinely couldn't detect a trace of anything artificial.
That golden ocean of wheat stretching to the horizon was the real thing, completely unspoiled.
Kian walked over to the edge of the wheat field, held up his helmet like a camera, threw up a peace sign, and snapped a few selfies.
Photo op complete, he turned his attention to a farmstead in the distance, figuring he'd find someone there who could tell him where the High King's seat was.
He walked the country road and reached the farmstead in short order.
The place really did look medieval, straight out of the era. Scanning the scene, there wasn't a single trace of industrial-age technology anywhere. Timber houses, straw-thatched barns, dirt roads, the spitting image of pre-spaceflight European medieval life.
Had Kian been dropped here without context, he might genuinely have thought he'd been transported into some Western fantasy medieval world.
He could practically picture himself raising a peasant banner, rallying an army of farmers, and marching on the High King's castle to steal the throne.
Except when that army of farmers reached the castle gates, the castle would probably just stand up and walk away. Which would be hilarious, honestly.
He entered the village, planning to find a local elder who could guide him to an audience with the High King.
But after a full circuit of the village, he found it completely empty. Not a single person.
Not even livestock. Total, dead silence.
"Damn it, they always say wherever the protagonist shows up, trouble follows. Don't tell me this world's already in the middle of something."
Kian muttered to himself and looked up at a tall mountain in the distance.
He decided to head up it and get a look at the surrounding area. He had no idea where exactly he'd touched down, and finding an actual town, someone who could point him the right way, seemed like the priority.
He had his armour's life-support system inject him with a stamina booster, then broke into a full sprint.
Ten-odd minutes later, he'd reached the slope of a mountain over five hundred meters tall, and before he even neared the summit, something felt wrong. He heard the sounds of battle.
Without his helmet on, he caught the smell too, a thick, rotten stench.
The smell of bodies torn open in great gashes, blood and viscera spilling out mixed with the stink of loosened bowels, the smell that sat closest to death itself.
Kian slowed his pace, moving carefully now, and crept the rest of the way up toward the summit.
The moment he crested the top and looked down, he found himself staring at a massive battlefield.
From the mountainside down across the broad plain below, two armed factions, red and green, close to two hundred thousand combatants total, were locked in brutal combat.
Warriors in medieval plate armour, wielding medieval melee weapons, hacking at each other in a frenzy.
In a universe full of starships and orbital bombardment, seeing a battle fought this purely with cold steel was such a bizarre sight that Kian found himself staring, momentarily transfixed.
The two factions below were distinguished by their colors, one in red, one in green.
From his vantage point, Kian could see the red faction had the clear advantage, their infantry blocks on the verge of surrounding and crushing the green formation entirely.
The red side had the greater numbers, and they were pressing hard on both of the green formation's flanks, trying to close a pincer.
The green side was already buckling, casualties mounting fast across a wide front.
If it kept going, the red army would punch through both flanks, complete the encirclement, and the green army would be annihilated with nowhere left to run.
Kian had no idea why these two forces were fighting, or why neither side was using ranged or powered weapons. Why nothing but pure cold steel?
He didn't need to understand it to enjoy the show, though. He figured he'd watch from the mountaintop until one side won, then go ask the victors what exactly was going on.
Unfortunately, someone spotted him first.
As the red faction pressed its advantage, nearly a hundred thousand strong now grinding forward while the green formation fell back layer by layer, some of them had spare attention to look around.
Sure enough, a red squad positioned partway up the mountainside noticed the figure in gold armour up on the summit, watching the battle.
They shouted and immediately surged toward him, close to a hundred of them.
Kian watched the warriors approach, fully armoured in plate, wearing dark visored helmets, carrying longswords and polearm axes, red surcoats over their armour, and felt no particular concern.
With gear that primitive, they couldn't have scratched him even if he stood still and let them swing.
Actually, this worked out fine. He'd just identify himself, have them take him to their commander, then work his way up to an audience with the High King from there.
But as the group closed in, something started to feel off.
"Wait, wait, wait, something's wrong here."
Kian used a voice command to zoom in his helmet's optics.
The moment he did, he saw it. These red-clad warriors were carrying the unmistakable mark of Khorne.
Khorne, one of the four Chaos Powers, the single most combat-oriented of them all.
Legend held that the very first primitive lifeform in the universe to bring a stone axe down on an enemy's skull was the spark that gave birth to this Warp entity.
Every Chaos God had a light side and a dark side, and Khorne was no exception.
Khorne's bright face represented defiance, resistance, courage. His dark face was pure, frenzied slaughter, boundless rage, violence unrestrained.
Khorne despised weakness, despised complacency and comfort. What he loved were warriors burning with endless fury, brave enough to raise a blade against a stronger foe.
A man, hopelessly outmatched, taunted by an enemy he had no realistic chance of beating. He knows fighting back means death, and picks up his weapon anyway, screams his defiance, and charges to his doom regardless.
A warrior like that was exactly the kind who might draw Khorne's attention, and earn his blessing, becoming monstrously powerful in return.
Sounds appealing enough on the surface. But a Chaos God was still a Chaos God.
However bright the virtuous face looked, it never canceled out the corruption underneath.
Become a follower of Khorne, and your entire life became an endless cycle of slaughter. He demanded skulls and blood offered up daily, and endless war was simply his fundamental Warp-nature.
Watching the nearly hundred red-cloaked warriors surging toward him, their armour a mess of Khorne runic markings, Kian finally understood why the green side couldn't win.
An entire faction of devotees of the war god, every one of them buffed to fight to the death. Who the hell was supposed to beat that?
Kian raised his left arm, intending to gun down the charging cultists with his arm-mounted lasrifle.
No matter what he tried, though, the weapon refused to fire a single shot.
That confirmed it for him. Khorne's power was already active on this world.
Khorne favored raw, passionate, personally heroic combat, and in places saturated with his influence, the more advanced a weapon was, the less likely it was to function. Ranged and powered weapons suffered the worst of it.
Kian grabbed his bolt rifle and pulled the trigger toward the approaching enemies. Nothing. Not a single round fired.
He slung both weapons across his back and drew the Demon-Cleaver from his hip instead, activating its disruption field.
A crackle, and the blue field shimmered to life along the blade. That still worked, at least.
What kind of combat best showcased personal valor and heroism? Melee combat, obviously.
Some idiot spraying a heavy stubber wildly from a distance wasn't a real man's fight. Close, brutal, blade-on-blade combat, that was the real thing, exactly the kind of fight Khorne loved most.
Which was why, on a battlefield touched by Khorne, powered and energy weapons had a real chance of simply failing, while melee weapons, no matter how advanced, kept functioning regardless.
And that was exactly why, in a universe of starships and interstellar travel, the two armies below were still hacking at each other with cold steel and plate armour. The Blood God's influence, plain and simple.
"Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne! Your head is mine!"
One heavily armoured red-cloaked warrior charged at Kian in a fever of excitement, both hands bringing a longsword down at his head.
To Khorne's faithful, Kian's armour marked him as someone of high status. Killing a man like that and offering the head up to Khorne carried real odds of catching the god's attention, of earning his gift of power.
Unfortunately for him, he'd picked the wrong target.
Just as the excited red-cloaked warrior's longsword was about to split his skull open, Kian moved.
His speed was so far beyond the man's perception it looked like frames dropping out of reality. The Demon-Cleaver rose high, and came down hard.
The blade sheared clean through the man's ordinary longsword and split his skull in the same stroke. It kept going, straight down through his chest, through his abdomen, and out below his hips.
With a single wet tearing sound, man and armour together were cut clean in half, organs and viscera spilling out as the two halves of the body toppled apart in opposite directions.
The red-cloaked warriors charging up behind him froze for a beat, then surged forward with even greater fervor.
A stronger enemy meant a more valuable head.
Raising steel against the strong, and winning, that was exactly what would earn Khorne's true attention.
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