Chapter 373: 300 Proficiency
All three Cerastus-pattern loyalist Knights were visibly thrilled to see Luca back. One of the pilots spoke up.
"Lord Luca, His Majesty has fallen to Chaos, broken his oath of loyalty to the Emperor himself! And yet this Chaos King still dares call us traitors! He believes that protecting the people from his own slaughter, refusing to let him butcher them, makes us the ones who've betrayed our House's honor. The nerve of it.
Lord Luca, the enemy's assault is overwhelming, and evacuating a million civilians will take a full day at minimum. We must hold this line against everything they throw at us for that entire day, buying them the time to cross. This will not be easy. We have already made our peace with returning to the Golden Throne today. There is only one thing left weighing on us, and we hope you might set it right for us."
Luca answered, "Say what troubles you, my lords. Whatever is within my power, I will do."
The moment he finished speaking, all three Cerastus Knights dropped to one knee, right there on the field.
The soldiers resting in the trenches nearby had no idea what was happening. But if even the noble Knight suits were kneeling, they couldn't very well stay seated.
One by one, the surrounding troops rose to their feet and knelt as well, facing Luca.
"Wh— my lords, what is the meaning of this? Please, rise!"
Luca had no idea why they'd suddenly knelt, and the sight caught him completely off guard.
The lead Cerastus pilot spoke.
"Lord Luca, you are the direct bloodline of the High King. You won the duel against your brother that day. You are the rightful, lawful High King. The one who sits the throne now has fallen. He is unworthy of that seat. And yet this fallen thing on the throne still dares speak with the King's voice, still dares call us traitors. By what right? He has no right at all.
Lord Luca. Here, now, we ask you to claim the crown. We pledge our loyalty to you. If it means dying today and returning to the Golden Throne, we go willingly, and gladly, knowing we died loyal to you."
Luca could hear the resolve to die in every word of it. Clearly the battle was going badly enough that none of them expected to survive it.
But even facing death, they refused to let the fallen King brand them as traitors. So they offered their loyalty instead to the true King, Luca. A strange, stubborn kind of pride, but pride all the same.
Luca fell silent for a long moment, then spoke, solemn.
"That you noble lords would name me King is an honor beyond words. My friends. Will you march with me into this field, and cleanse it of every last heretic?"
At that exact moment, the red legion in the distance stirred into motion.
Three Cerastus-class Knights, painted red, their hulls studded with severed heads and stretched skins, began advancing.
Alongside them came a mass of squire-suits, and behind that, an even greater tide of mortal daemon-troops.
The final battle had begun. The fallen King's daemon army was launching its full assault.
They meant to kill everyone here, take every head, and haul them up Throne Mountain to add to the towers of skulls for the final ritual.
The three loyalist Cerastus Knights rose to their feet and rallied several squire-suits and Knights of their own, forming up into a proper Knight formation.
"My King! We march with you!!"
BLAAAARE!!!
BLAAAARE!!!
A grim war-horn sounded from the red legion's side, and two hundred thousand Khornate troops began their full assault.
They came in three columns, ordinary infantry on the flanks, elite forces driving straight through the center.
The three corrupted Knight suits and their attendant squires formed the spearhead there, meant to punch clean through the loyalist line.
On the loyalist side, with Luca's arrival, they now fielded a full four Knight suits of their own.
Eight hundred thousand soldiers formed a protective shell around the Golden River, a million civilians sheltered inside it, their only path to safety the Golden Bridge.
Support troops worked to keep order, organizing the crowd into orderly, fast-moving lines across the river.
The bridge stretched five hundred meters long and thirty meters wide.
As long as the crowd stayed disciplined, no panic, no shoving, a million people could make it across in a little over a day.
The war broke loose. The red army struck like several drill bits, boring in from three directions against the green shell, while the green forces formed a shield wall and held their trenches as best they could.
Blessed by their dark god, the red troops fought at absurd levels, one of them a match for three. Two hundred thousand against eight hundred thousand, and the advantage still sat firmly with the smaller force.
Kian stood in the crowd, shield up, sword thrusting forward again and again, cutting down enemy after enemy.
He'd originally hoped to break out, show off a little, carve a path through the enemy in style.
But in a battle fielding over a million bodies, there were people everywhere, corpses everywhere, no room to actually maneuver.
Directly ahead of him, a solid wall of red troops. To his left, right, and behind, an ocean of green.
Against numbers on this scale, even Kian, fully armoured, was reduced to just another grunt with a sword and shield, boxed into a single line.
His power sword had effectively become an efficient spear now, field active, thrusting forward again and again.
Didn't matter who was in front of him, didn't matter how thick their armour was. One thrust, straight through.
He kept his face blank and just kept stabbing, forward, forward, forward.
Before long, the pile of bodies in front of him had grown into a small hill.
On a normal cold-steel battlefield, two fully armoured warriors could trade blows for ages without ever breaking through each other's defenses.
Then a monster like Kian shows up, wielding a powered blade, punching a hole clean through anyone regardless of armour thickness. Hardly a fair fight.
And on a battlefield this vast, this chaotic, nobody had any idea there was a ringer like him mixed in among the regular troops.
Which meant the enemy just kept feeding more bodies into his section of the line, and Kian kept cutting every one of them down.
The fighting dragged on for the better part of half a day, and by the end of it, Kian genuinely had no idea how many he'd killed.
The red warriors in front of him died in waves, one after another. The green defenders around him died in waves too.
Only Kian stayed put, planted in place like some kind of permanent fixture.
Fortunately, the bodies he'd cut down never piled up too badly around him, because the green line was steadily being pushed back under the red assault, which kept clearing fresh open ground in front of him for the corpses to land in.
"Damn it, I might actually be closing in on ten thousand kills at this point."
Kian muttered under his breath, shield up, going through the same motion, pull out, thrust in, pull out, thrust in.
"I'm starting to feel more efficient than a fish-cutting knife at the market."
Someone stepped in front of him, he stabbed. Someone else stepped up, he stabbed again.
Even fully armoured, these men held up about as well as tofu against a powered weapon. One thrust, clean through, ice-cold on the other side.
Cutting down rank-and-file like this was almost too easy. His stamina bar barely dipped.
All he had to do was track the pace of the green line's retreat, fall back a few steps every so often to stay with the group, and let the grunts on either side and behind him cover his flanks.
Come to think of it, what's my melee proficiency sitting at these days?
Bored out of his mind mid-stab, Kian pulled up his system display.
The next instant, he sucked in a sharp breath. His melee weapon proficiency had climbed past 300.
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