Chapter 371: Against the Current
Luca's army broke into a forced march. Both Knight suits led the way, clearing the path, followed by a portion of the engineering vehicles, with the main body of cavalry bringing up the rear.
The further they advanced, the more refugees they passed. Crowds of hundreds, sometimes close to a thousand, sprinting down the road.
Men clutching infants to their chests, elderly mothers carried on their backs, wives trailing behind hauling packs stuffed with whatever they could carry. Whole families, and the road was lined with hundreds, thousands of them just like it.
The sheer panic on their faces told Luca everything he needed to know: the situation at the Golden Bridge had already turned dire. It only sharpened his urgency.
After half an hour of hard marching, Luca's army finally reached the Golden River.
The name fit. The surrounding terrain was a vast plain, clearly shaped by heavy machinery at some point in the past, and every inch of it was blanketed in golden wheat, stretching out farther than the eye could follow.
A river five hundred meters wide split the golden fields in half, spanned by a great bridge built from a mix of ceramite, polysteel, and reinforced alloy.
What should have been an idyllic pastoral scene had become something else entirely. The bridge and the roads around it were choked with fleeing civilians, the air thick with panicked screaming and the wailing of children.
In the distance, Throne Mountain sat wreathed in red light, thousands of scavenger creatures circling and diving to feed on the mountain of headless corpses piled at its base.
What had once been the highest seat of government on this world had become, unmistakably, a den of daemons.
On the far side of the Golden Bridge, several million civilians waited to cross, while soldiers still loyal to the old order fought to hold order in the crowd, keeping the crossing organized.
Beyond that surging, desperate mass of humanity lay a battlefield fielding nearly a million combatants.
The golden wheat fields had been dug up wall to wall with trenches, not to shelter from gunfire, but to give cover from the crushing feet of Knight suits.
Soldiers in green cloaks made up the loyalist forces, holding the line under the command of several Knight suits, buying time for the million-plus civilians behind them to cross.
Soldiers in red made up Khorne's daemon-touched army, everything about them, armour and weapons alike, stained crimson, radiating corruption, killing anyone in reach.
From above, the loyalist green forces numbered roughly eight hundred thousand, formed into a half-circle around the fleeing civilians, holding the perimeter to let them reach the bridge.
The red Khornate army was smaller, perhaps under two hundred thousand.
And yet that two hundred thousand, purely melee, was steadily grinding the eight hundred thousand loyalists into the ground.
Across the field, several Knight suits fought furiously, green loyalist machines locked in combat with red Chaos-touched ones.
Chainswords roared, powered gauntlets crackled with lightning.
Below the towering Knights, smaller squire-suits hunted each other through the chaos, clashing wherever they found an opponent.
And below even the squires, tens of thousands of mortal infantry, shields and blades raised, charged each other with grim, determined cries.
A battlefield fielding a million combatants was a genuinely terrifying thing to look at.
Luca sent his Enginseer ahead to negotiate with the bridge guard, requesting passage to reach the front line.
The bridge guards, spotting Luca's white-painted Knight, were visibly startled. But recognizing the difference a single Knight lord could make on that battlefield, they immediately began clearing the way for Luca's column to cross.
Seated in his Knight, Luca called down to Kian below.
"My apologies, Count Voss. It seems our journey among the stars will have to wait."
Kian's gaze swept past the Golden River, over the packed, desperate crowd waiting on the far bank, and further still, to the chaos of the battlefield beyond.
"Luca, a fight on this scale, with a Chaos God involved. You could actually die out there."
Kian himself could always respawn, no real stakes for him. But Luca only had the one life.
And the man they were facing wasn't just any warlord, this was the High King himself, gone traitor, a man who'd apparently already performed sacrifice after sacrifice. There was no telling what kind of power he'd already been granted.
Luca, with everything pointing to him being some kind of exiled prince, had "destined confrontation" written all over his face right now. Kian had a bad feeling that if Luca crossed that bridge, something was going to go badly wrong.
Luca fell silent for a moment at Kian's words, then answered.
"Count Voss, do you know why my family has served the Emperor faithfully for generation after generation?"
Kian waited for him to continue.
"Count Voss, for over a thousand generations, whenever the Emperor called, my ancestors answered without hesitation, throwing themselves into battle. A thousand generations. A thousand generations, every one of them choosing loyalty. Myself included."
That caught Kian's genuine interest. What kept loyalty burning for a thousand generations straight?
"My family served at the Emperor's own side for several generations, and through the Knight's mechanical throne, I've seen the recorded memories my ancestors left behind, moments spent in His presence. Some call the Emperor a god. Some call him inhuman. Some call him a tyrant, others the wisest ruler who ever lived or ever will. But what my ancestors witnessed, what they recorded, was a liberator of mankind.
In the gap between humanity's golden age and the founding of the Imperium, humanity was scattered across the galaxy, isolated worlds cut off from each other, dying slowly, powerless. Xenos of every kind, heretics, techno-cults, gene-cults, ran rampant across those isolated little islands of civilization. Humans were treated as livestock, bred and butchered for food. Reshaped and toyed with. Their minds enslaved. Their souls harvested. People stopped being people.
Then the Emperor appeared. He carried his unstoppable fleet out into the void, world after world, and swept away every xenos, every heretic in his path. He built a unified government, and yes, that government was rushed, flawed in a hundred ways, but it still transformed the lives of humans on every world it touched.
A human could die of overwork. Could die crushed under taxation. Could die in gang violence, in radiation sickness, in plague, in a thousand mundane, unglamorous ways. But he would not be butchered by xenos filth and served up on a plate like an animal. He would not have his soul drained out of him and devoured by some heretical daemon, toyed with until nothing remained.
A human can die with dignity. But he must never be tortured to death for a heretic's amusement. We are not playthings."
That was when the Enginseer, sent ahead to arrange the crossing, came running back.
"My lord, the bridge garrison has cleared the way for us. We have five minutes to cross. We must move now."
Luca's vox-amplifier boomed to full volume, addressing the three thousand retainers behind him.
"Brothers! For His Most Holy and Divine Majesty! For the purity of the human soul! With me, across the bridge!"
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