Chapter 362: Ascension into a Daemon
Inside the walls, the streets were packed with cultist soldiers, all crowded beneath the wall trying to climb ladders and reinforce the assault above.
The warlord landed hard, crushing two or three soldiers underfoot, then shoved through the crowd like a man possessed, sprinting deeper into the city.
Kian dropped down right after him, chasing hard.
But Kian was an enemy in the middle of a mass of hostile territory, and the moment the cultists spotted him, they surged forward with a shriek, weapons drawn.
His pace slowed, forced to cut down attacker after attacker just to keep moving.
Every second he lost bought the warlord more distance, and the man was disappearing fast toward the city center.
Kian felt his urgency spike, but with cultists throwing themselves at him with total disregard for their own lives, there was only so much he could do.
He glanced around and spotted the surrounding buildings.
Stone houses, two or three stories tall, packed together in dense rows.
Kian slashed his way through a path with a burst of frantic swings, then sprinted for the nearest one.
He leapt straight up, pulled himself over the edge with a burst of raw strength, and hauled himself onto the rooftop.
Fortunately, the building was solid stone through and through, or it never would have held his tonne of armoured bulk.
Up on the roofline, the cultists below cursed uselessly, unable to reach him.
He moved fast across the rooftops, leaping building to building, tracking the direction the warlord had fled.
Meanwhile, the warlord had already reached the inner city and thrown himself straight into the center of the ritual circle, into the pool of blackened blood pooled there.
"God! Give me power! I need more power!!"
He plunged into the pool, drenching himself in the reeking blood.
He knew perfectly well the ritual needed two more full days to complete. But he couldn't wait that long anymore.
He could feel it, that terrifying golden-armoured warrior closing in on him, and it wouldn't be long before the man caught up and finished him for good.
He needed power now, before that happened.
He knelt in the blood pool, screaming and begging, desperate for strength.
In his panic, he seemed to have forgotten exactly what kind of god Khorne actually was.
A god who prized courage, despised weakness, and held nothing but contempt for cowardice and flight.
Had this man stood his ground and died fighting Kian, Khorne might well have looked kindly on him. Even in defeat, honor intact, Khorne might have claimed his soul and reborn him as some lesser daemon in the Warp.
But instead, he'd fled the field like a beaten dog, and now knelt here whimpering for salvation.
Never mind that the ritual wasn't complete. Even if it had been, there was no version of events where Khorne would grant him anything now.
"Answer me! Why won't you answer me?!!
You promised me! You said if I offered eighty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight heads, you'd grant me your blessing! Answer me, damn you!!"
The warlord thrashed in the blood pool, screaming his lungs out, surrounded by his eight grisly monuments of skulls.
No answer came. No blessing. Despair and rage boiled up in him in equal measure.
"You're not a god at all. You're a liar. A filthy, cowardly liar!!"
The instant those words left his mouth, the unfinished ritual circle erupted into violent motion, Warp energy condensing so thick it manifested physically in reality, a deep, unsettling red light flooding the space.
The warlord's face lit up with joy at the sight, convinced his outburst had finally caught his god's attention, that his blessing was finally coming.
The red light and the surging Warp energy, moving as though guided by some vast, deliberate will, converged onto him in a single instant.
The warlord let out a strangled grunt, and his body began to change violently.
His bones thickened and grew, his muscles swelled, his height climbing from a bit over two meters to two and a half, then surging further toward three.
Crimson scales erupted across his skin, and two horns pushed up through his skull.
Something like bat wings tore free of his back, his tailbone lengthened into a thick, heavy lizard's tail.
His legs began bending backward, taking on the shape of a beast's hind legs, and his severed arm-stumps began writhing, sprouting weapons directly out of raw flesh. His left became a cluster of fleshy whip-tendrils, his right a long, spear-like spike of bone.
Every sign pointed straight toward one thing: ascension into a full Greater Daemon.
"Power. Ha... HA! POWER!!"
The warlord's laughter turned sharp and shrieking, his body still expanding, three meters now climbing toward four.
The agony of that violent, forced growth left him grinding his teeth, veins bulging across what remained of his face, but underneath the pain, pure ecstasy still burned in him.
His eyes, nearly fully bestial now, caught sight of a figure standing atop the inner wall above. Kian.
Mid-transformation, the warlord's now-daemonic face twisted into a warped, gleeful grin.
Once his ascension finished, this man's death was assured.
Up on the wall, Kian looked down at the eight mounds of gleaming gold light, and fell silent for a moment.
This, he thought, is exactly why, no matter how rotten the Imperium gets, any human worth the name has to stand with it against the daemons. No exceptions.
His gaze settled on the warlord, already grown to four meters, and he gave a cold snort.
"Bro thinks he's got magical-girl plot armour mid-transformation, huh."
Kian stepped back a few paces and dropped low, his muscles and the servo-motors in his armour winding up for a burst of power.
Then he exploded forward, planted a boot on the top of the parapet, and launched himself into the air.
Under the transforming warlord's shocked gaze, Kian soared upward, both hands gripping his sword hilt, blade raised high overhead.
Like a falling meteor, he crossed the thirty-plus meters in a single arc, dropping straight toward the warlord.
The instant the two of them met, the disruption-wrapped blade came down with everything Kian had, straight at the warlord's skull.
Mid-ascension, bones and muscle tearing and reforming, wracked with agonizing pain, the warlord couldn't move at all. All he could do was watch that blade come down toward his forehead.
The next instant, steel met skull with a resounding clang.
The disruption field cut through skin and muscle but failed to punch through the reforming bone underneath, ringing out instead with a harsh metallic screech.
Kian felt the shock rattle straight up his arms, numbing them, but he didn't stop. He kept dragging the blade downward.
What had struck the top of the warlord's skull tore diagonally down across his left cheek, ripping the entire side of his face clean off.
The blade kept cutting, driving down hard into the daemon's massive trapezius muscle.
The warlord let out an agonized shriek as burning, fire-wreathed blood erupted from the gash in his shoulder, splattering across Kian's face.
The blade caught against his collarbone and stopped its downward path, but Kian wasn't finished.
He planted both boots against the half-transformed daemon's chest for leverage, hooked one hand into the scaled meat of the shoulder, and wrenched the blade free. Then he drove it straight into the creature's throat.
Squelch!
With nothing left in that daemonic throat to stop it, the blade punched clean through, the tip bursting out the back of the creature's neck.
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