Chapter 449: Meow~
"WHY... WHY... WHY DO YOU KEEP HISSING AT ME?!!"
Kian roared and slammed both fists into the sides of the creature's round skull in a double clap, followed up with a rapid jab, then finished with a rising uppercut straight into its jaw.
The creature flew up into the air, hit the ground, and stiffened up on landing. Kian pounced right after it, left fist high damage, right fist high damage.
THUD THUD THUD!!
CRACK CRACK CRACK!!
Punches rained down like a hailstorm, beating the creature until it started coughing up blood in a frenzy.
Kian kept swinging as he shouted, "WHY?! WHY CAN'T YOU JUST BE A NICE MAINE COON?! WHY DO YOU KEEP HISSING AT ME?!!"
BANG BANG BANG!!!
BANG BANG BANG!!!
After a relentless flurry, the creature lay sprawled on the ground, coughing up blood, unable to move at all, pinned in place under an unbroken chain of combos.
In the real world, Kian's body was pumping out a torrent of bioelectricity, feeding it straight through the neural cabling into the mechanical throne like an electric shock.
At the same time, his mental force had generated a massive stream of aggressive data, slamming straight into the throne's information-processing core.
In the mindscape, Kian's rage had stacked all the way to maximum, fist after fist crashing down until the creature's whole head and body were soaked in blood.
"WHY?! WHY DO YOU KEEP HISSING AT ME?!"
BANG BANG BANG!!
The creature's face was beaten black and blue, and with a wet spitting sound, a bloodied tooth hit the ground.
Kian was starting to tire too, breathing hard. He raised his hands, looked at the blood covering them, then crouched down, pointed two fingers at his own temple, and roared at the creature:
"Why do you keep forcing me to do this?! Why do you keep hissing at me, why can't you just be a Maine Coon?!
Think about it! You keep this hissing up, and five hundred years from now, who's ever going to want to pilot you?!"
The creature, its face beaten black and blue and slick with blood, was almost unrecognizable at this point.
Its lips twitched, and after a long moment, a sound finally came out.
"Cough... cough... meow~"
The instant Kian heard that meow, his expression softened completely. He shook the blood off his hands and put on his most relaxed, gentle smile.
He reached out and stroked the creature's bruised, swollen head.
"Aww, look at that, you CAN meow properly. C'mere, c'mere, kitty kitty..."
Back in the real world, the tech-priest holding the data-slate cried out in astonishment: "All data-stream conflict has stopped!"
Tech-priest Boothe asked, panicked, "What's happening? Is the Count dead? Or—"
"I'M NOT DEAD!!!"
A booming roar blasted out through the Preceptor's external vox, Kian's voice ringing out across the entire hangar!
On the towering, fifteen-meter Knight's massive mechanical skull, the electronic eyes flared red, the plasma reactor ignited, and the turbine cooling fans roared to life!
The ascension rite was complete. Kian and the Preceptor Knight had become one.
Every plate of armour, every adamantium bone, every data conduit, all of it was now his own body, responding as naturally as his own limbs.
Kian took a step, and the towering Preceptor took a step with him, its massive iron foot lifting free of the scaffolding as the power conduits automatically disconnected.
THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.
The two-thousand-plus-ton frame advanced step by step, the ground booming with every footfall.
The Preceptor walked out of the outfitting hangar and into the open ground beyond.
Sunlight poured down, gleaming off the gold-painted plating, rendering the fifteen-meter Knight as something closer to a god or daemon than a machine.
Every tech-priest passing by, and even those on the towering steel factory structures far in the distance, dropped to their knees at once, bowing in worship before the Preceptor Knight.
Kian looked out at the world through the Knight's mechanical eyes, and his ego had swelled to its absolute limit.
A fifteen-meter chassis, an endless supply of power from the plasma reactor, Annihilator plasma cannons and lascutter beams at his command, all of it gave him a heady, intoxicating illusion of invincibility.
Piloting a Preceptor was nothing like piloting a squire-suit. The squire-suit was only six meters, and he could still just barely keep his ego in check.
But piloting the Preceptor, that overwhelming sense of invincibility radiating off this colossal body, was genuinely intoxicating.
Intoxicating enough that it could, in theory, be the kind of thing a pilot never fully recovered from.
Pilots with weaker willpower, once bonded to a Knight and having tasted that sense of invincibility, sometimes came to despise their own frail human bodies, growing addicted to the power of the steel giant instead.
Kian forced that intoxicated feeling back down, and looked down at the rat-sized figure of Tech-priest Boothe far below.
"Take me to the firing range!! I want to test the weapons!!"
Tech-priest Boothe led the way ahead, with several hundred tech-priests drawn in from the surrounding area, trailing behind the Preceptor Knight like pilgrims, stretching out into a long procession as they made their way to the range.
This time he was led to a much larger testing ground, a stretch of desert just outside the Titan Temple's outer walls.
The desert was littered with the wrecked remains of Ork armour, tanks, transports, walkers, all of it.
Kian began preparing his weapons as Tech-priest Boothe briefed him:
"My lord, the Annihilator plasma cannons have a built-in safety lockout. They cannot fire within 500 meters, because the lethal blast radius of the plasma flare itself is a full 500 meters!
The Annihilator's effective range is 60 kilometers, with an optimal engagement distance of 20 kilometers.
Beyond 60 kilometers, the plasma sphere becomes unstable and will detonate mid-flight."
Kian acknowledged this and began operating the Annihilator cannons.
Both of the Preceptor's mechanical arms carried an Annihilator cannon, over 1,100mm in caliber, each barrel rectangular in shape and heavily armoured along its full length.
Kian aimed one cannon at a tank graveyard five kilometers away and fired.
With a sharp whoosh, a ball of blue plasma flare, roughly the size of a serving platter, streaked out and detonated instantly on impact with the tank graveyard.
A miniature sun rose up from the earth. The core blast radius alone covered a circle at least 100 meters wide, and within 500 meters, steel began to liquefy under the searing heat, pooling into molten runoff on the ground.
A guaranteed kill zone out to 500 meters, and any unarmoured unit within 1,000 meters would suffer severe burns. One shot, and the whole map was wiped clean. Truly, one shot, map cleared.
The fired Annihilator cannon immediately began venting heat, its advanced cooling system kicking in, superheated steam hissing out in sharp bursts, requiring a full minute before it could fire again.
Kian then switched weapons, engaging the four lascutter cannons mounted on the head.
The lascutters were 200mm in caliber, firing a continuous beam roughly the size of a serving bowl.
Kian fired all four lascutters at once, and four crimson beams lanced out, sweeping from left to right. The moment they touched the wrecked tanks, the beams simply carved straight through, melting the metal on contact before it detonated in a fresh explosion.
The ground beneath the beams suffered the same fate, first scorching into a layer of brown, glassy crystal, then erupting in a violent blast.
Sweeping the four beams from left to right across more than two kilometers of terrain, the desert erupted in a rolling chain of explosions, kicking up curtain after curtain of dust and debris.
The Preceptor was, by design, a pure ranged-combat platform with no meaningful melee capability at all. Not that it mattered much. Once it planted itself on a battlefield, there wasn't much left standing close enough to reach it anyway.
After that, Kian ran through the remaining tests, the quad-linked heavy bolter self-defense weapon and the ion shield, and the trial was complete.
☆☆☆
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