T
...
Ten Minutes Later
"That's it?" Grot rolled his shoulders, the metal rod in his hand scraping across the ferrocrete floor with a harsh metallic rasp. "I'm a veteran. You lot don't stand a chance."
The ruined bunker had once been part of a defensive network, though no one alive could say which war had first broken it. Half the ceiling had collapsed inward, leaving rusted rebar hanging like exposed ribs. Old scorch marks climbed the walls. Dust, shattered plasteel, and splinters of ferrocrete covered the floor in uneven drifts. Lumen-strips flickered overhead, throwing pale light across six battered trainees and the broad, scarred man standing among them.
Grot wielded the rod like a battlefield weapon rather than a training tool. Its surface was dented, blackened, and polished in places by constant handling. He shifted it from one hand to the other, testing its balance with the casual familiarity of a man who had survived more real fights than most soldiers survived drills.
Then he moved.
For all his size, Grot did not lumber. He prowled. Each step had weight, but none of it was wasted. He slipped between the six Devotees with predatory ease, turning his shoulders just enough to let one strike glance past, stepping inside another man's guard before the trainee could recover, and striking back with brutal economy.
A rod cracked against a wrist. One trainee dropped his weapon with a hiss of pain. Another lunged from the left, only for Grot to pivot and drive the butt of his rod into the man's thigh hard enough to buckle the leg. A third tried to circle behind him. Grot saw the movement without looking, ducked under a clumsy swing, and swept the man's ankles out from beneath him.
One by one, the six fell out of formation. Some lost their weapons. Some sank to one knee. One stayed standing only because pride had locked his spine after Grot's strike numbed his arm from shoulder to fingers.
Even without power armor, Grot was undeniably dangerous. Sweat gleamed across his scarred arms and neck. Old wounds crossed his body in pale lines, knife marks, burn scars, and the thicker ridges left by poorly treated shrapnel. He moved with the ugly grace of someone trained not in a dueling hall, but in arenas, trenches, alleys, and kill-zones where the only rule was to remain alive when the other man stopped moving.
"Is this the best the Devotees have?" Grot planted the rod against the floor. The worn metal tip bit into cracked ferrocrete with a grinding crunch. "You fight worse than fresh Planetary Defense Force grunts. Fanaticism doesn't make up for bad footwork. On a real battlefield, you'd be dead before you finished your first prayer."
The six trainees glared up at him, breathing hard, shame and frustration tightening their faces. None of them answered. They had asked for a sparring demonstration. Grot had given them one. The fact that it hurt was not his problem.
From the edge of the bunker, Adam watched in silence.
This was not the first time he had seen Grot fight. The former Thunderborn candidate had made genuine progress in other areas. During meditation, he could remain still for hours. During punishment drills, he no longer snapped at instructors. During group training, he followed orders with the stiff restraint of a man gripping a chain around his own throat.
But battle changed him.
The moment weapons rose, Grot's restraint evaporated. His eyes sharpened. His breathing deepened. The world narrowed around him until there was nothing except motion, impact, threat, and the clean satisfaction of overwhelming the enemy before the enemy could do the same to him.
It reminded Adam of the Champion of Blood Heresy.
The story was taught as a warning among the Devotees of the Angel: warriors who mistook courage for appetite, who dressed bloodlust in the language of duty until slaughter became its own reward. Adam had heard the sermons, memorized the doctrinal lessons, and recited the names of the fallen. He had never truly understood the temptation behind them.
Watching Grot, he began to.
Adam still did not know the exact reason Grot had been expelled from the Thunderborn. Qin Mo did not explain such decisions unless explanation served a purpose. But Adam had drawn his own conclusion. Whatever official reason had been recorded, the truth was almost certainly tied to this: Grot did not merely fight well. He enjoyed fighting too much.
Adam stepped forward and picked up one of the discarded rods.
"Let me try."
Grot turned. His irritation vanished at once, replaced by a grin so wide and hungry it looked almost feral.
"Finally." He rolled his neck until it cracked. "I've been wondering whether you could actually fight, or if you only knew how to stand around looking calm."
He lunged without warning.
The charge was not a formal opening strike. It was a trench-fighter's rush, meant to break balance before skill could matter. Grot drove forward with his shoulder lowered, intending to slam into Adam's chest and put him on the ground before the duel had properly begun.
Adam did not dodge.
He met the charge head-on.
The impact echoed through the bunker. Dust sifted from the broken ceiling. Grot expected Adam to give ground. Instead, the force of the collision rebounded into him. Adam's boots shifted less than a handspan across the rubble-strewn floor, while Grot staggered back, his own momentum broken against a body that felt less like flesh than a sealed bulkhead.
Shock flickered across Grot's face.
Adam moved before the surprise passed. He seized Grot by the collar, dragged him back into range, and drove a fist straight into his face.
Crack.
Grot hit the ground hard. His back slammed into broken stone, forcing a sharp grunt from his lungs. For a moment he stared up at the flickering lumen-strips, eyes unfocused, blood darkening one nostril. Then he laughed once, harsh and breathless, and rolled back to his feet.
"Good." His grin returned, stained red. "That was good."
He charged again. This time he did not aim for Adam's torso. He dropped his chin, drove forward, and smashed his forehead into Adam's skull.
Adam took the blow.
Now he was the one on the ground.
The trainees stirred uneasily. A headbutt from Grot was not a training strike in any normal sense. It was the kind of blow that could crack bone, blind an eye, or leave a man too dazed to know where the next hit came from.
Adam lay still for two seconds. Then he rose with the same calm expression he had worn before the duel began. No anger. No embarrassment. No thrill. His breathing remained even. His eyes were clear.
Grot stared at him.
"You're still calm after that?"
Adam brushed dust from his sleeve. "Should I not be?"
For once, Grot had no immediate answer.
The Devotees of the Angel disciplined themselves to strip away weakness, impulse, and fear. They trained the body to obey the will and the will to obey purpose. Yet even among them, few could maintain such detachment after taking a blow meant to rattle the brain inside the skull. Adam's composure was not performance. He simply did not give the pain permission to matter.
He turned to the six fallen trainees.
"Thank you for your assistance, brothers."
The trainees exchanged glances. Their pride had been bruised, along with several joints, but none complained. One by one, they bowed their heads, collected their weapons, and left the bunker. Their steps were slow, their shoulders stiff, and their eyes lowered in quiet respect.
When the last of them disappeared into the corridor, Adam turned back to Grot. His voice dropped, losing the formality he used in front of others.
"You were once chosen for the Thunderborn. You should know more about the Champion of Blood Heresy than I do."
Grot's grin faded. The change was immediate. His face hardened, and the heat that had filled his eyes during the duel cooled into something darker.
"I don't just know about it," he said. "I lived through it."
Adam held his gaze. "Then you know why I brought it up."
Grot's fingers tightened around the rod. For a moment, Adam thought he might swing it. Not out of strategy. Out of reflex. Out of the need to strike something before the thought reached too deep.
Instead, Grot clicked his tongue in irritation.
"You're saying the Lord Commander expelled me because he feared I'd end up like my brother." His jaw worked around the words. "Losing control. Turning into a beast that only knows how to slaughter."
Adam nodded.
Grot looked away. The bunker's dead lumen-light caught the old scars across his cheek and made them look deeper.
"Did you think I hadn't figured that out already?"
He had. Long ago.
At first, Grot had believed Qin Mo cast him out because of what he had done in the gladiatorial pits. He had hunted down the men who profited from his suffering. He had taken vengeance with his own hands, and he had not been gentle.
But that explanation had never fit.
Qin Mo was not merciful toward monsters wearing human skin. If anything, Grot suspected the Lord Commander would have considered righteous retribution a practical use of time, provided it did not interfere with larger objectives.
So Grot had kept thinking. During drills. During sleepless hours. During those humiliating meditation sessions where Adam spoke of restraint as if restraint were not just another word for refusing to breathe.
Eventually, only one answer remained.
The Champion of Blood Heresy.
Grot and his brother had shared the same hunger for battle. Not cruelty, not exactly. Battle. The contest. The danger. The moment when everything false was stripped away and only strength, will, and skill remained.
The difference, as Grot had always told himself, was simple.
His brother had killed the innocent. Grot did not.
So why was he being punished for a crime he had not committed? What was wrong with enjoying combat when there were so many enemies who deserved to die?
The anger simmered beneath his ribs, hot and familiar, like a furnace whose door had been forced shut but not extinguished.
Adam's voice cut through it.
"Was your brother truly a mindless butcher?"
Grot's eyes snapped back to him.
Adam continued, calm and relentless. "Or do you believe something changed him before the slaughter?"
The question struck harder than the punch had.
Adam was a soldier. He knew the official version of the Champion of Blood Heresy. He knew the warnings, the names, the consequences, and the doctrinal lesson. But he had not known the man before the legend swallowed him.
Grot had.
For several seconds, neither of them spoke. The bunker creaked around them. Somewhere beyond the ruined walls, boots passed through a distant corridor, then faded.
At last, Grot exhaled through his nose.
"Fine," he said. "You want to know what he was? I'll tell you."
So he did.
The story began twenty-four years earlier, when a boy returned home and found his parents dead. Not fallen gloriously in battle. Not taken by disease with priests beside them. Dead in the miserable, ordinary way the Lowerhive killed people: sudden violence, no justice, no explanation that meant anything to the children left behind.
With his younger siblings in tow, the boy fled downward because there was nowhere else to go. In the Lowerhive, survival was not a right. It was a task repeated every hour. They scavenged around refuse heaps where servitors dumped the hive's waste. They fought over filter cartridges, stale ration packs, and scraps of machine parts that could be traded for a night's shelter. They slept in drainage alcoves, under broken stairwells, and inside abandoned ductwork that still carried enough heat to keep frost from settling on their skin.
Gangs hunted the weak. Mutant packs prowled the dark between maintenance lights. Press gangs took anyone strong enough to work and careless enough to be seen.
He kept them alive anyway.
He stole when he had to. He fought when he had to. He lied, bargained, threatened, and bled. He fed his younger sister before himself. He gave his brother the better knife and pretended it was because the blade was too small for his hand. When other children hid behind rusted pipes and cried from hunger, he sometimes shared food they could not spare.
He was not soft. The Lowerhive did not allow softness to survive. But he had lines he would not cross, and in a place like that, lines were worth more than sermons.
Then he was dragged into war.
A forced recruitment sweep took him from the streets and threw him into an underhive conflict no one in the spires would ever remember. In his absence, the family broke apart. Antara was enslaved, sold into the pits, and forced to kill for the amusement of men who drank clean water while starving prisoners tore one another apart below them.
Years later, in those blood-soaked arenas, Grot found his brother again.
Adam listened without interrupting.
As the story unfolded, the official legend of the Champion of Blood became smaller and more human. Grot's brother had not begun as a monster. He had been a survivor who shouldered burdens too large for any child and somehow remained capable of helping others.
But he had also loved battle.
Grot did not hide that part. His brother had picked fights. Sometimes deliberately. Sometimes with a grin. But the targets had always mattered: gangers who preyed on children, pit overseers who beat slaves for sport, men who thought fear gave them ownership over the weak.
"Something changed him," Grot muttered at last. His eyes had gone distant, fixed on a memory rather than the bunker. "He wasn't like that before. Not at the start."
Adam heard the omission immediately.
"What changed him?"
Grot's grip tightened around the rod again.
He knew the answer. Or at least, he knew the answer he had carried all this time.
The Champion of Blood statue. That cursed thing. That obscene idol standing in the pit like it had been waiting for him, for his brother, for anyone with enough rage to feed it.
But the statue had been destroyed. Reduced to rubble. Gone.
And if Grot spoke of it now, what would Adam hear? A confession of weakness? A claim that stone could whisper murder into a man's heart? An excuse for blood spilled by someone Grot had loved?
No.
Not yet.
So Grot said nothing.
Adam watched him for a moment, then continued as if he had already marked the silence and filed it away.
"Your brother was turned into a pit slave," Adam said. "He was conditioned to survive by killing. A violent escape would have been expected. A killing spree against the masters of the pits would have been understandable."
His tone remained cold, analytical, almost clinical. That made the words worse.
"But he slaughtered other pit slaves. Fellow captives. Men and women who were trapped in the same machine that had trapped him. That is the anomaly."
Grot's face tightened, but he nodded.
That was the part he could never explain away.
The Arena masters deserved death. The guards deserved death. The gamblers, the flesh-brokers, the men who laughed while children bled into sand, all of them deserved worse than they received.
But the pit slaves?
Some had been cruel. Some had become beasts to survive. Some would have killed Grot without hesitation if ordered to do so. But others were simply broken people with chains around their throats and blood under their nails.
His brother had killed them too.
Adam stepped closer.
"The Lord Commander expelled you for a clear reason. He feared that whatever influenced your brother might one day influence you as well."
Grot said nothing.
"Your love of combat is not imaginary. It is not a rumor. I have seen it." Adam's gaze did not waver. "If that impulse were pushed far enough, under the right pressure, by the right force, you might stop distinguishing between enemy, captive, ally, and bystander. You might become useful to the battlefield and dangerous to everyone standing on it."
"Obvious enough," Grot muttered.
The words came out bitter, but not dismissive.
Silence settled over them. This time it was not empty. It was full of old blood, unfinished questions, and a statue Grot refused to name.
Something had changed his brother. That much seemed undeniable.
But what?
Adam folded his hands behind his back. His expression remained unreadable, though his next words carried the careful weight of a man stepping onto uncertain ground.
"Perhaps it is genetic."
Grot looked up sharply. "What?"
"Your family may carry an inherited predisposition toward bloodlust," Adam said. "At first, it manifests as enjoyment of combat. A heightened reward response to danger, violence, and physical dominance. In ordinary conditions, it may remain controllable. Under extreme trauma, prolonged conditioning, or specific psychological stress, it could escalate into uncontrollable slaughter."
Grot stared at him as if deciding whether to break his jaw.
Adam continued anyway.
"If you had endured exactly what your brother endured, if you had been isolated, brutalized, conditioned, and placed under the same pressure, you might have become the same kind of killer. Not because you are already a monster. Because you may carry the same flaw."
Grot nearly cursed him out.
The words rose hot in his throat. He wanted to tell Adam he knew nothing. He wanted to say his brother had been cursed, corrupted, twisted by something outside blood and bone. He wanted to say the statue had done it. That the thing in the arena had been more than stone.
But the curse died before it left his mouth.
Because Adam's explanation had weight.
Until now, Grot had blamed the statue. It was easier that way. Cleaner. The Champion of Blood statue had been destroyed, and with it, perhaps, the danger. But if a mere statue could do such a thing, what did that mean? That there had been another power in the pit? Another god? Another voice hidden behind blood and applause?
No.
There was only one God. The Emperor upon the Golden Throne.
That was what Grot had been taught. That was what every loyal human knew. Idols could deceive fools. Symbols could rally madmen. But stone did not own a man's soul.
A flaw in the blood, though?
That was possible.
The Imperium was full of inherited curses. Bad genes. Mutations. Weakness passed from parent to child like debt. Soldiers knew that better than priests liked to admit. Some men were born with eyes that saw poorly in the dark. Some with hearts that failed early. Some with hands that shook under stress. Why not a mind that found too much pleasure in violence?
Grot breathed in slowly. The air smelled of dust, old smoke, sweat, and rust. His pulse still wanted battle. His hands still wanted something to grip.
He looked down at the rod in his fist.
For the first time that day, the weapon felt heavier.
After a long pause, he exhaled. The sound was low, rough, and reluctant.
"Damn it…" Grot muttered. "Looks like you were right."