Chapter 367: A Psychic Beacon
Kian Voss stepped into the Baron's underground vault, and for a moment the sheer glare of it threw him off balance.
Mountains of treasure spread out before him. Gold and silver work filled dozens of crates. Paintings, sculptures, vases, carved jade, all sealed safely under glass domes.
Sure, this stuff was worth a fortune on this planet. Out in the void, though? Limited value. Hard currency in the galaxy was food, fuel, and weapons. Full stop.
Fortunately, this particular room also had no shortage of weapons, and that got his eyes lighting up.
Row after row of sealed lasrifles, laspistols, plasma rifles, plasma pistols.
Bolt rifles, rotary autocannons, laser cannons, you name it, all laid out like a showroom.
Small arms, heavy weapons, at least a few thousand pieces crammed in here.
These advanced energy weapons had gone dead the moment Khorne's influence washed over the planet, so the Baron must have ordered them sealed away.
Kian picked up a plasma pistol. Seven shots per charge, each one a superheated plasma orb capable of a full meltdown detonation.
Small package, massive punch. A genuinely nasty piece of hardware.
Except right now it was as useful as a corpse. Just lying there, dead weight.
He tucked the plasma pistol into his belt anyway, figuring he'd run it as a sidearm once it came back online, then kept digging for anything else worth grabbing.
Beyond the treasure and the weapons, the Baron's vault also had a stash of sealed communications gear.
High-output equipment, the kind that could reach a ship in orbit straight from the ground. Shame it was all dead too, another casualty of Khorne's halo effect.
Kian was picking through the comms gear when something caught his eye: a square unit, about waist-high.
Its surface was covered in brass piping that made no sense to the eye, etched with runes packed so densely they blurred together, script that didn't belong to any language he recognized.
One look and he knew. Those runes had to be some kind of Warp-sigil array. This square box wasn't communications equipment at all. It was a psychic device.
No idea what it actually did, but given the planet's psychic potential was currently getting strangled by Khorne, sealing it away made a certain kind of sense.
He walked over, wrapped both arms around the unit, and heaved. It came up off the ground without too much trouble.
Three hundred-odd kilos, dense as hell, but at his current strength he could still lift it clean.
And that was all that mattered, because the second something left the ground, the system's appraisal function could kick in.
Kian held the square device against his chest and pulled up the system interface with a thought, running an identification scan.
First-time scans on the Scavenge-Strike-Extract System always started pitch black. Kian just had to wait while the little magnifying glass icon spun in place.
A few seconds later, a soft chime, and suddenly the whole readout flushed red in front of his eyes. An orange-tier item, no, wait, full red. Legendary.
Psychic Beacon:Constructed by a mysterious seer drawing on their own knowledge of the Immaterium.
Feed the device sufficient Warp energy, and whoever channels that energy will be able to sense the device's location. No matter the distance, no matter the intervening space, whether or not something physical stands between them, whether or not it currently exists within realspace.
Kian sucked in a sharp breath. A storage vault. An actual personal storage vault!
All he had to do was crack open a Warp portal, toss this thing through, and from then on he'd be able to lock onto that coordinate with nothing but his mind.
He could have whooped for joy. The one thing his loadout had always been missing, finally filled.
Once he left this planet, found a stretch of space Khorne's influence hadn't touched, opened a Warp gate, and pitched this Psychic Beacon through, he'd have himself a proper vault.
Right about then, Luca's troops started filing in through the breached ceramite gates. An Enginseer at the head of the column spoke up.
"My lord, everything in here is your spoils. Would you like us to help haul it out?"
Kian thought it over. "Your Lord Luca did promise me he'd leave with me once his world tour wraps up.
Once we're off this planet, the Ruinous Power's influence won't reach us anymore, and these weapons will start working again.
Have Lord Luca's soldiers gear up with this stuff. Plate and blades don't do much good once you're in the void."
The arsenal in this vault could outfit a full regiment, conveniently about the size of Luca's private army.
Might as well let them kit out now, since they'd all be coming along eventually anyway.
The Enginseer said he understood, and had the soldiers start passing out the guns and distributing the load as they moved out.
As for the gold and treasure, the Enginseer offered to call it his own spoils and keep it safely stored, ready to hand over whenever it was convenient.
After that, the three thousand troops stripped the city's food stores bare and pulled out through the gates.
Luca climbed down from his Knight suit, took up a torch, stood on the city wall, and hurled it down into the streets below.
The torch landed in a pile of fuel stacked along the road, and flame erupted instantly.
It spread from one street to two, from two streets to half the district, and before long the whole city was swallowed in fire.
The souls of everyone slaughtered here, the filthy corpses of the Ruinous Power's soldiers, the Warp-graffiti scrawled across the walls, all of it burned away.
Fire purifies everything. Time heals the rest.
Luca stood on the wall, the blaze inside the city painting his face a deep, furious red.
Kian stood beside him and asked, "I heard you've actually seen the Emperor in person. What was He like?"
As far as Kian knew, in the war that broke the Imperium from its peak, the Emperor had been gravely wounded by His own firstborn, the Primarch Horus.
Ever since, He'd been confined to the Golden Throne, unable to rise for ten thousand years.
Something moved behind Luca's eyes. His thoughts crossed ten thousand years of history and landed back in the age when the Imperium of Man stood at the height of its glory.
"He wore armor of pure gold," Luca said slowly, "and He was towering. Immense."
"His bearing, His face, it was perfection. No one who looked upon Him could look away.
He had a presence that filled a room. Wisdom that seemed to see straight through your soul.
His words could be as warm as a father's, or as sharp as a lance-point.
He led His loyal legions charging across the galaxy, scouring away every horror in His path, and put humanity at the very summit of the stars!
Wherever the Emperor's blade pointed, a million soldiers surged forward without fear. Any enemy of mankind was ground to dust."
Luca's voice had risen, his whole face alight with emotion. He turned and looked back past the wall at the towering Knight suit standing outside.
"Back then, it, alongside thousands of other Knight suits, alongside millions of Angels, all of them, surged forward together the instant the Emperor's blade pointed at the enemy. Surged forward! Onward!"
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