Chapter 363: Power
The warlord's throat, punctured clean through, tore out a shriek of agony.
Kian dragged the blade sideways, working it like a saw, cutting through the daemon's rebar-tough neck.
A major artery gave way under the motion, and a torrent of blood, burning and stinking of sulfur, sprayed out in a wave.
Any ordinary man or beast would have died eight hundred times over from a wound like that.
But a daemon was a daemon. The strike hadn't touched its true nature, hadn't done a thing toward banishing it back into the Warp.
If anything, the raw agony gave the creature a flicker of control back over its own body. The arm that had become a fleshy whip lashed out at Kian, still clinging to it.
That tendril carried a thick reek of Warp energy behind it. Getting hit by that would probably shatter Kian into several pieces, the same as taking a hit from a powered flail.
Kian let go and dropped clear just in time, splashing down into the blood pool below.
The daemon's tail followed through in a wide arc, catching Kian square in the chest and sending him flying like a cannon shell, slamming into the inner wall behind him.
He scrambled back up, sword ready, dropping into a combat stance.
Just as he was about to charge back in and keep the fight going, he noticed the daemon's torn face and punctured throat healing at a visibly fast rate.
Kian's brow furrowed. Around him, the thick red Warp-light kept converging onto the warlord's body.
By now, the creature stood five meters tall.
This was no longer something he could realistically fight. Banishing something on this scale needed someone at the level of an Astartes Chapter Master, minimum.
Worse, on a world already claimed by Khorne's influence, Kian couldn't touch his own psychic power at all.
Khorne despised psychic power. In his domain, it wasn't just ranged and powered weapons that got shut down, psychic force got the same treatment.
This god was a pure brute, obsessed with the most direct, unfiltered form of combat imaginable. No schemes, no ranged sorcery, none of it allowed.
If Kian could have called golden psychic flame to the blade, one clean thrust through that throat would have kept the wound open, bleeding the thing dry permanently.
As it was, Kian narrowed his eyes. No choice but to grit his teeth and press the attack.
He raised his sword and charged the five-meter monster.
The thing was still mid-transformation. Every bit of damage he could get in before that finished was damage that counted.
If he died here, he'd simply respawn back at his Second Sanctum, call the Inquisitor, and let the ship's macro-cannons handle the banishment properly.
With that thought settled, Kian found he genuinely didn't care much about his own life right now, and pushed even harder.
The warlord was still growing, wracked with agonizing pain running through his nerves.
His human soul hadn't adjusted to the daemonic body yet either, leaving him sluggish and disoriented.
He saw Kian charging back in and raised a foot, trying to stomp him flat.
Kian rolled nimbly clear of the stomp and came up behind the towering creature.
From that angle, he raised his sword and brought it down hard on the thick, heavy tail.
The blade sank in with a wet crunch, scale and skin and muscle parting, cutting deep down into the bone underneath.
Whatever that tail's bone was made of, it was absurdly hard. Kian hacked at it a dozen more times, shredding the flesh completely, but the bone underneath refused to break.
Frustrated, he glanced up and found the creature's ass, now nearly six meters up, staring right back at him.
Not really thinking it through, some impulse took over, and Kian rammed the sword straight into it.
The warlord, already suffering the agony of forced transformation, felt a fresh, entirely unrelated stab of pain shoot up from behind.
"AAAAAAAARGH!!!"
The creature let out a soul-tearing scream, and Kian, still gripping the hilt, raised an eyebrow.
Huh. That worked?
So he kept his grip on the hilt and started twisting, hard.
"AAAAAAAAARGH!!!"
The warlord howled even louder, dimly registering that he probably wasn't going to have to worry about constipation ever again.
He tried to swing his tail around to catch Kian, but Kian stayed pressed tight against it, out of reach.
Kian kept plunging the sword in, pulling out, plunging back in, over and over, until the thing's rear end was practically shredded.
"AAAAAAAARGH!!!"
Unable to stand the pain any longer, the warlord kicked backward hard with one leg.
Kian got his shield up in time to block, but the impact sent him flying like a cannon shell, slamming into a distant patch of gleaming light.
His whole body felt like it had come apart. His system display showed every limb's health bar cut in half.
That single kick had, quite literally, taken half his life.
Worse, it had crushed the servo-motors in his armour, leaving the whole suit completely dead.
Kian wasn't done, though. He figured he might as well get a couple more stabs in before he died.
He started manually stripping off his own armour, unlocking it piece by piece with voice commands.
A series of clicks and clacks followed as his chest plate, back plate, shoulder guards, and leg armour all loosened.
He hooked his fingers into the seams and, with a bit of force, pried the pieces off one by one.
He wrenched the internal servo assembly and powered skeleton apart by hand and pulled himself free of the dead suit entirely.
Stripped down to nothing but his PDF fatigues underneath, Kian shouldered his sword, pulled a pack of cigarettes out, and dug up a lighter he hadn't touched in ages.
He took a couple drags, breathing in the thick reek of blood and sulfur, then charged the warlord again, now climbing toward six meters tall.
This time he went straight for the creature's backward-bending legs, hacking hard. But the warlord's ascension was nearly complete now, its legs armored in scales with a metallic sheen.
The blade struck the scales and burst into sparks, not penetrating even slightly.
"Screw it. This life's a wash. Wait right there, big guy. Next life, I'm bringing the whole fleet down on you."
After hacking away without so much as scratching the paint job, Kian accepted he had nothing left to offer against this thing, and figured he'd just let it stomp him flat, respawn, and come back with a warship.
So he didn't dodge. He just stood there in front of the towering warlord, hacking away, waiting to be crushed.
Except after a dozen more strikes, the warlord still hadn't raised a foot to finish him. Instead, a strange mumbling started coming from that massive head above.
"Enough. ENOUGH!"
Kian assumed the creature was talking to him and hacked even harder.
"Not enough! Not enough!"
"I said ENOUGH! That's plenty!"
Kian: "Nope! Not plenty at all!"
"I don't want it! I don't want any more! I don't want power anymore!!"
Kian: "Yes you do, you want po— ...huh?"
Something was clearly wrong. Kian looked up and saw the now seven-meter warlord's body doing something strange.
Up until now, the transformation from man to something resembling a Greater Daemon had at least stayed roughly symmetrical, a normal ascension.
But past seven meters, that symmetry broke down entirely.
One shoulder ballooned out, huge and lopsided like a pumpkin, while the wing on that same side shriveled down to a bare skeletal frame.
A trapezius muscle swelled up like a tumor, nearly engulfing the creature's own head.
Cracks split open across its thick, corded muscle, and grotesque red tendrils began pushing out from within.
The look on its face wasn't ecstasy anymore. It was the look of something that could no longer control what was happening to it.
Kian stepped back a couple of paces, watching the creature's body twist and warp, and burst out laughing.
"HAHAHA! Idiot! I knew a backwater little planet like this couldn't produce a real Greater Daemon! This poor bastard can't handle the blessing, he's turning into a Chaos Spawn!"
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