The Macragge's Honour, Gun Deck.
As the Thunderhawk Gunship touched down firmly on the flight deck, Sergeant Titus and a squad of fully armed Astartes Honor Guards escorted Clark toward the bridge.
Along the way, wherever they passed, whether it was naval armsmen holding lasguns or red-robed Tech-Priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, all fell to their knees in terror and piety. The Priests' greedy bionic eyes scanned Clark's body frantically, their mouths muttering neurotically about "the Omnissiah's perfect creation" and "an uncorrupted prototype of the Golden Age."
But when the group passed through the heavy blast doors carved with skulls and cogs and entered the Gun Deck, Clark suddenly stopped.
Hs relaxed expression froze instantly.
This was the heart of the ship's firepower, and a true microcosm of hell.
The vast space rose dozens of meters high, yet it felt suffocating. The air was thick with a nauseating cocktail of smells: pungent sacred incense, stale and sour machine oil, and the overpowering, inescapable stench of mortal sweat and old blood.
There were no automated loading arms here—at least none like those in Clark's memory (or the ancient Terran films Jonathan had shown him).
In their place was a writhing "sea of flesh."
Thousands of bare-chested, skeletal mortal serfs swarmed like ants between massive winches and chains. Heavy, rusted iron shackles were locked around their ankles, and their pale skin was branded with barcodes and service numbers.
"One! Two! HEAVE!"
"Praise! The Emperor! HEAVE!"
Accompanied by the crack of a supervisor's barbed neural-whip, thousands of serfs shouted desperate, raspy cadences. Their muscles tore and veins bulged as they used pure, primitive human strength to drag a massive macro-cannon shell—the size of a small truck and weighing several tons—bit by bit, loading it into a breech engraved with prayers.
Beside them were even more hair-raising existences: Servitors.
These were the "living dead"—lobotomized humans whose limbs had been crudely replaced with hydraulic claws and data probes. Drooling, with eyes as hollow as cold ash and thick cables plugged into the backs of their heads, they performed fire-control calculations tirelessly until their bodies failed and they were tossed into reclamation furnaces like trash.
This was Warhammer 40,000.
Technology was regressing; human life was as cheap as grass. To keep this gargantuan war machine running, the Imperium turned countless mortals into literal "flesh-and-blood gears."
"Hurry up! You lazy swine! Do you want to be turned into Corpse Starch?!"
A Tech-Priest overseer in red robes, half his face replaced by metal implants, brandished a crackling high-voltage whip, savagely lashing a group of serfs who were lagging slightly.
Crack!
Skin split and flesh tore.
Due to extreme fatigue and chronic malnutrition, an elderly serf at the end of the line slipped and fell to the ground.
Disaster struck instantly.
Losing his support point, the balance of force was broken. The massive, moving macro-cannon shell spiraled out of control, rolling backward down the inclined track.
The heavy iron roared as it ground against the floor, poised to crush the fallen old man and several people behind him into a bloody pulp!
"AH—!"
The old man closed his eyes in despair, his withered hands instinctively covering his face. The surrounding serfs shrieked in terror, powerless to stop this multi-ton iron reaper.
However, the expected sound of shattering bone and flesh did not come.
THUD!
A heavy, muffled metallic impact made the entire deck floor tremble slightly.
It was the sound of flesh meeting several tons of iron head-on.
The overseer froze. Titus froze. All the serfs gaped, as if witnessing a miracle.
The "Important Figure" who had been walking at the front, surrounded by the Space Marines like stars around a moon, had disappeared from his spot at some point.
In the next heartbeat, he appeared in front of the runaway shell.
Clark held a single hand against the tip of the shell.
The massive ammunition, capable of blasting a crater into a planet's surface and requiring hundreds of men to move, was motionless beneath his palm. It was like a basketball being casually held down by an adult.
The kinetic energy was reduced to zero instantly, without even a tremor.
Clark didn't look at the shell. Instead, he slowly turned his head, his azure eyes staring fixatedly at the overseer holding the electric whip.
His gaze was calm.
But that calmness was more terrifying than the roar of a Khorne daemon. It was the deep sorrow of a higher-dimensional being toward lower-dimensional savagery, and a suppressed fury about to erupt from his chest.
"My... My Lord..."
Under that gaze, the overseer felt the machine oil in his veins turn to ice. The whip in his hand dropped to the floor with a CLANG. His legs buckled, his servo-motors overloaded and locked, and he fell directly to his knees.
Clark ignored him.
He casually pushed the multi-ton shell back into place like a toy (a move that made the surrounding serfs' eyes twitch) and reached out to help the terrified old man up.
"Are you alright?"
His voice was gentle. He even reached out with the hand that had just stopped death itself to pat the old dust off the man's back.
The old man trembled, looking at the perfect giant before him who radiated a faint glow like a divine statue. He wanted to speak, but his throat—vocal cords long since removed to prevent talking—could only emit raspy "huff-huff" sounds. He could only kowtow frantically, his murky tears washing away the grease on his face.
Clark looked at the man's throat, and his gaze darkened.
He stood up and turned to look at Titus behind him.
"Titus."
"Present... My Lord." Titus lowered his proud head. Even through his power armor, he could feel the low-pressure aura radiating from Clark—a disappointment more piercing than the cold winds of the void.
"Is this also a 'necessary sacrifice' for the Imperium's 'victory'?"
Clark raised his hand, pointing at the scarred deck, the laborers chained like cattle, and the lobotomized walking corpses.
His voice was low but powerful, every word hitting Titus's heart like a heavy hammer:
"Even with ships that cross the sea of stars, you still use whips and chains to drive them? Using human lives to compensate for the regression of technology?"
"My Lord... these are the dogmas of the Adeptus Mechanicus," Titus tried to explain, but his voice grew smaller and weaker. "To appease the Machine Spirit, to prevent the resurgence of the Abominable Intelligence (AI)..."
"That's just the Adeptus Mechanicus being incompetent."
Clark interrupted him.
If anyone else had said these words, they would have been judged as a heretic blaspheming the Machine God and executed on the spot.
But coming from his mouth, paired with his iron-like muscles and divine brilliance, they carried a sense of indisputable truth—as if he were Truth itself.
Clark's voice, amplified by the power armor's vox-casters, echoed across the entire Gun Deck:
"People are not spare parts. Nor are they consumables."
He looked around, his gaze sweeping across the face of every serf:
"From this day forward, as long as I am on this ship, I do not wish to see this again. If the Adeptus Mechanicus doesn't know how to build an autoloader..."
Clark paused, a golden light flashing briefly in his eyes—an absolute confidence born of the Golden Age and Kryptonian technology:
"Then tell them to get over here. I will teach them what real 'technology' is."
Total silence.
Only the hum of the exhaust fans in the ventilation shafts remained.
Then.
THUD.
The old man who had been saved knelt on the ground, reaching his withered hands toward Clark and letting out an intensely suppressed sob.
Then came a second, then a third...
Like a wave of black wheat blown over by the wind. Thousands of serfs, and even some Servitors who retained a shred of consciousness, fell to their knees in unison.
In this dark, cold 41st Millennium that knew only oppression and obedience, they offered a faith more pious and fanatical than that for the distant Emperor to this Lord—the one who, for the first time, looked at them as "people" and stood between them and death.
[SOL: High-purity faith energy accumulation detected. Emotional analysis: Gratitude, Adoration, Fanaticism.]
[Progress of 'Idealistic Great Work' has increased slightly. Host, your 'bleeding heart' behavior may be tactically inefficient, but it seems... in this desperate world, it is surprisingly effective.]
Clark ignored the system's remark. Looking at those eyes filled with tears and hope, he felt a knot in his chest.
Just then.
Wooo—Wooo—Wooo—!
The piercing red alarm, like the howl of a wounded beast, suddenly resounded through the entire ship. The bright lighting system cut out instantly, and blood-red emergency lights began to flash frantically, dyeing the entire Gun Deck a hellish red.
"Enemy contact! Enemy contact! All hands to battle stations!"
From the ship's vox-casters came the terrified, cracking voice of an Auspex officer:
"Warp jump signature detected! Distance 300 kilometers! It's practically in our faces! It's... a Chaos fleet! It's an ambush!"
[SOL: WARNING! High-energy weapon lock detected.]
[Type: Chaos 'Slaughter-class' Cruiser. They hid their heat signatures using the debris of a derelict space station, lurking in the shadows of the asteroid belt.]
[Tactical Analysis: This is a perfect trap. They were waiting for that microsecond when the 'Macragge's Honour' lowered its Void Shield frequency to recover the Thunderhawk!]
"Damn! Despicable traitors!"
Titus's face changed instantly as he looked at the tactical panel on his wrist. "The Void Shield generator is restarting its cycle! It needs 30 seconds to re-energize!"
Thirty seconds.
In a space battle measured in light-seconds, thirty seconds was an unbridgeable chasm between life and death.
Through the massive, meters-thick reinforced blast-glass windows of the Gun Deck, Clark saw a Chaos ship in the distant dark sky. Covered in spikes and looking as hideous as a flayed corpse, it revealed its form. It radiated a profane green Warp glow, like a nightmare rising from the deep sea.
At its prow, the torpedo tubes—like giant gaping maws—had already opened.