"Ten thousand years a traitor? Congratulations," Chen Ye said coldly.
To him, Rod was not a relic of history or some tragic survivor carried forward by the tides of the Warp. He was a festering wound the Imperium had failed to cauterize, a remnant of the Heresy still walking, still speaking, still breathing corruption into the stars simply by existing.
In Chen Ye's eyes, Rod was blasphemy given shape. A cursed survivor of Prospero. A traitor who should have been purged from history in the fires of Imperial retribution long before this poisoned night on Agripinaa.
Rod seemed utterly unmoved by the contempt.
He stood beneath the polluted sky of Forge World Agripinaa, where iron smoke, furnace glare, and radiation haze formed a ceiling no honest starlight could pierce.
Above them, orbital manufactoria burned like dull machine-eyes behind the smog. Ash drifted through the air in slow gray sheets. The ground beneath their boots was blackened slag, powdered bone, and old industrial dust baked hard by reactor heat.
Yet Rod's gaze did not remain on the ruined world around him. It drifted upward, past the smoke, past the fire, past the blind mechanical glow of the forge-moons and the orbital shipyards, toward something only he could see. Some memory buried beneath ten thousand years of treason, exile, and damnation. A world untouched by war, a home lost to time.
"I don't feel aged," Rod said quietly. His voice was frayed by time, but strangely distant, as though he were speaking from the far side of a sealed tomb. "That is the strangest part. I feel no different than I did before all this madness. My will, my thoughts… they have not changed since Prospero."
His helm tilted slightly. The firelight caught along the scarred edges of his armor.
"Oh, my Last Light… how I miss you."
The words left him as a whisper, too soft for the cruelty of the place. For a moment he seemed less like a Chaos Space Marine and more like a man standing in the ashes of a battlefield long after the war had moved on without him.
Then the moment passed.
Rod lowered his gaze. "I have seen little of the Long War compared to the others. Not truly. Time does not pass cleanly for those cast adrift. I came to Agripinaa for one reason only: to settle a debt long past due."
Chen Ye had no interest in the ramblings of a traitor, and even less in his nostalgia. Whatever scraps of grief still clung to Rod did not erase what he was.
A former Astartes who had betrayed the Imperium was a threat by existence alone.
Even weakened, even tired, even regretful, such warriors carried centuries of hatred, forbidden knowledge, and violence in every movement. Many had butchered worlds. Many had damned entire systems. Even those who claimed exhaustion could become catastrophes if given one chance too many.
"I want to die with dignity," Rod said calmly. There was no pride in the request, no defiance, no last attempt at bargaining. Only the bleak resignation of a man who had outlived every sin and knew none of them would be forgiven.
He had accepted this end long ago. He had never truly believed Chen Ye or Yoan would spare him. Their alliance in the arena had been necessity, nothing more: blades aimed in the same direction because all other choices had been worse.
Chen Ye studied him for several seconds. His hand remained near his weapon, though the chain-axe he had used in the arena had been discarded before their escape.
At last, he gave one curt nod.
"…Fine."
Rod turned toward the daemon behind him.
The creature unfolded slightly from where it lingered in the edge of the firelight. Its form was feminine only in the way a blade might be called elegant. Too graceful. Too sharp. Too deliberate in every motion. Its claws flexed around the hilt of a bone-forged blade, and the air near it carried the metallic stink of old blood and hot copper.
Rod spoke to it in a tongue neither Chen Ye nor Yoan could understand.
The daemon reacted violently. It hissed, thrashed, and bared needle-like fangs. The bone blade swept outward in a warning arc, and the sound that came from its throat was low, layered, and full of hatred. The noise pressed against the ears like pressure before a storm.
Yoan and Chen Ye moved at once.
Chen Ye shifted his stance, weight lowering, hands ready to seize, strike, or kill. Yoan's posture changed more subtly, but the response was no less immediate. The Null's presence seemed to draw warmth from the air, flattening the edge of the daemon's aura and making the thing recoil with visible disgust.
Though Chen Ye no longer carried his chain-axe, he did not doubt they could destroy the creature together if necessary. It would be ugly, fast, and dangerous, but he had killed enough monsters to know when one could bleed.
Rod raised one hand before either side could commit.
He murmured several more words to the daemon, his tone low and firm. Not pleading. Not commanding exactly. Something more intimate, and more bitter.
The daemon snarled once more, but it stopped advancing.
Then Rod began to chant.
The incantation was quiet, almost swallowed by the crackling bonfire and the distant groan of Agripinaa's forges. Thin threads of warpsmoke curled around the daemon's limbs. Its outline blurred, the firelight bending strangely across its skin. The creature reached for him once, claws opening, but whether in anger or farewell was impossible to tell.
A breath later, it vanished in a hiss of smoke and bruised light.
Yoan's eyes narrowed. "How did you do that?"
There was genuine interest in the question. Not admiration. Calculation. To a Null who had spent his life being treated as a weapon against the Warp, any method of forcing a daemon out of realspace was worth understanding.
Rod looked at him with open distaste. "How I did it has nothing to do with a soulless one like you. Do not get ideas."
Yoan did not react. The insult was old, predictable, and beneath notice.
With his final act completed, Rod straightened and stepped away from the fire. Out of habit, his hand moved toward the bolt pistol that should have hung at his waist. His fingers closed on empty air. The weapon had been taken when the Foresworns captured him.
For the first time, a faint trace of dry amusement entered his voice.
"Of course."
Then he turned toward Yoan.
"Use your shoulder-mounted cannon. Make it quick."
Yoan did not answer. He simply angled his body a fraction. The weapon mounted over his shoulder unfolded with a precise mechanical click. Plasma coils brightened from dull red to fierce white-blue, the glow reflecting across Rod's scorched armor and the faces of the watching survivors.
Rod stood still.
He did not kneel. He did not pray. He did not offer some final curse against the Imperium or the Emperor. He merely faced death with the weary composure of a warrior who had carried his end for longer than most civilizations endured.
The cannon fired.
A searing beam of light crossed the space between them in less than a heartbeat. Rod's body vanished inside it, armor, flesh, bone, and whatever remained of his long, corrupted life reduced to burning ash and drifting fragments of incandescent dust.
When the glare faded, nothing recognizable remained.
Yoan felt no remorse. If Rod had possessed enough strength, he would almost certainly have tried to kill them both before the night ended. Letting him live would not have been mercy. It would have been negligence.
For several seconds, no one spoke.
Then the prisoners gathered around the bonfire began to breathe again. It happened slowly, unevenly, as if the whole group had been holding one shared breath since Rod first spoke. A few lowered their heads. A few made the sign of the Aquila. Others stared at the ash where a traitor Astartes had stood and seemed unable to decide whether they had witnessed justice, mercy, or merely another execution in a universe built from them.
Many of the survivors had feared the worst. Among those who had captured and tormented them had been warriors very much like Rod. To ordinary men and women, the differences between one ancient traitor and another mattered less than the armor, the strength, and the smell of damnation. Some had feared Yoan and Chen Ye might strike a bargain with him. Some had imagined themselves being traded away, sacrificed for a truce, or abandoned in exchange for information.
Instead, Rod was dead.
That was enough for now.
Yoan activated his link to the Celestial Engine orbiting far above the poisoned skies of Agripinaa. The connection formed in his helm as a clean line of machine-light, steady despite the radiation haze, industrial interference, and low-orbit debris fields choking the world.
He turned to the survivors.
"It's time to leave. Everyone, gather close."
The command spread through the group at once. Guardsmen helped the wounded stand. Laborers lifted children. A manufactorum worker with a broken arm dragged a half-conscious pilgrim toward the center of the extraction zone. No one argued. No one asked where they were going. After the arena, any place that was not here was salvation enough.
A teleportation beacon descended from the heavens.
It struck the ground near the bonfire with a hard metallic impact, legs biting into slag and ash. Runes ignited along its casing. A shimmering field expanded outward in a perfect circle, not a holy light and not quite a void shield, but something colder and more precise. Static crawled over skin. Loose ash lifted from the ground and hung suspended around them.
Yoan checked the perimeter once. Chen Ye did the same, his gaze lingering on the darkness beyond the fire. Nothing moved there except smoke and distant furnace glare.
Then the wide-range teleportation sequence activated.
The survivors, the beacon, and the last traces of the ruined camp disappeared from Agripinaa's surface in a flash of clean white light.
....
Elsewhere...
The command chamber shook faintly as another distant bombardment rolled across Agripinaa's equatorial manufactorum belt. Dust fell from the ceiling in fine gray threads. The hololithic table at the center of the room flickered, then stabilized, projecting a ghostly map of the surrounding forge districts: data-feeds, enemy-held sectors, collapsed transit routes, loyalist strongpoints, orbital fire corridors, and the vast dead zone marked as the lost Engine Foundry.
Grey stood beside the table with Vick and Sevin. Around them, Talon officers, Skitarii liaison adepts, vox-operators, and servitor-clerks moved with restrained urgency. Every voice was lowered. Every display showed too many red marks. The war for Agripinaa had not ended, even if its direction was beginning to change.
The proposed assault route into the Equatorial Region glowed amber across the map. It led through kilometers of damaged macro-rail lines, contaminated coolant channels, half-flooded forge vaults, and enemy-occupied machine cathedrals before reaching the Engine Foundry itself.
Sevin stared at the projection with a frown that he was trying, and failing, to keep diplomatic.
"I still do not see the strategic value," he said at last. His voice was careful, each word chosen like a tool that might explode if handled poorly. "Most of the personnel stationed there are presumed dead. The manufactorums were likely sabotaged during the initial collapse, if not destroyed outright. I agree the site may retain some value, but not enough to justify diverting forces from the stronger operational targets."
He glanced toward Vick as he spoke, gauging his old friend's reaction.
Vick's remaining organic eye did not soften. His augmetic eye clicked as its lens narrowed, focusing on Sevin with mechanical irritation.
Sevin suppressed a sigh.
He was trying to oppose Grey without insulting him, and trying to do that in front of Vick made the task far worse. Vick's faith in Talon was not political convenience. It was devotional. To him, Talon was not merely an allied power. It was proof that the Omnissiah still acted through flesh, steel, and enlightened machinecraft.
Grey knew the argument against the assault was reasonable.
The rationale was thin. Painfully thin. Under ordinary circumstances, he would not have approved such an operation. The projected losses outweighed the known gain, and the intelligence regarding the foundry was incomplete at best. The only reason the idea remained on the table was because Yoan had personally requested it.
Yoan did not waste requests.
That alone gave the operation weight.
Grey folded his arms. "You do not have to participate. But we are going ahead. The First Legion regiments are already prepared."
He did not soften the answer. He did not try to persuade Sevin with empty assurances or heroic slogans. The plan had been accepted at the level that mattered. Participation from Agripinaa's remaining loyal Mechanicus elements was useful, not mandatory.
Sevin's jaw tightened. He did not want to damage relations with Talon High Command. The balance of power had shifted too sharply for old habits of forge-world autonomy to survive untouched. Agripinaa had not asked the Talon Sector for aid, yet aid had come regardless: soldiers, war machines, orbital support, and technology Sevin still could not comfortably classify without risking theological vertigo.
To deny a Talon request now would be… unwise. Worse, it would be disrespectful.
And yet he still did not understand why this particular Engine Foundry mattered.
If the site guarded intact Whirlwind missile stockpiles, a functioning plasma reactor spine, sealed STC fragments, or even a trapped Magos of high enough rank, Sevin would have mobilized every Skitarii cohort and tech-guard company at his disposal. But for a ruined industrial complex with dead staff and unknown output?
He began to offer a compromise.
"Very well. Perhaps I can assign a limited support formation—"
Grey raised one hand. The gesture cut him off without force or insult.
"Hold that thought. Incoming vox."
Sevin closed his mouth and nodded.
Grey turned slightly away from the table as the transmission entered his command channel. The audio did not spill into the room, but those present saw the change in his posture. His attention sharpened. The ambient noise of the chamber seemed to fade around him.
While Grey listened, Sevin glanced again toward Vick.
Vick rolled his only organic eye.
It was an almost painfully human gesture from a man whose body had been surrendered piece by piece to metal and sacred machinery. It also carried more judgment than a formal reprimand.
Sevin knew that look. He had seen it when they were younger, when Vick thought an instructor was being slow, a cogitator was being misused, or a superior had mistaken caution for wisdom.
You are hesitating because you do not understand.
Perhaps that was true. Perhaps not. Sevin's caution had kept him alive through forge politics, civil unrest, Mechanicus doctrinal disputes, and the current war. But caution could become blindness if the world changed faster than one's assumptions.
Grey ended the transmission.
"Cancel the assault on the foundry."
Sevin stared at him. For half a second he wondered whether he had misheard.
"What changed?"
Grey looked back at the hololith. The amber assault route still glowed across the map, now suddenly irrelevant.
"Yoan has reported in. Two senior commanders of the Foresworn warband have been eliminated. Immediate action against the Engine Foundry is no longer necessary."
That explanation did not answer everything. In fact, it answered almost nothing. But Grey knew Yoan well enough to accept the shape of the message. Yoan was cryptic. He preferred to reveal only what needed to be known, and sometimes not even that until the proper moment.
But he was not irrational.
If Yoan said the foundry assault was no longer needed, then something decisive had already happened.
Sevin absorbed the news, then let out a slow breath. Relief crossed his face before he managed to hide it.
"A wise decision," he said. "There is no need to rush. Victory is already moving in our favor."
Grey nodded once.
The map shifted as Sevin began adjusting projections. Red threat clusters pulsed across the forge world's surface, then contracted as he fed the new information into the tactical model. His mechadendrites moved over the table's rune-keys with precise, insect-like motions.
"Assuming current attrition rates hold, we will likely achieve complete strategic victory within three standard months," Sevin said. "However, full eradication of all heretic remnants will take far longer. Agripinaa is too large, too layered, and too contaminated by industrial infrastructure to cleanse quickly. Once their organized command collapses, enemy survivors will scatter into manufactorum depths, coolant tunnels, slag warrens, and abandoned assembly vaults."
He paused, then added with visible distaste, "With fewer numbers, they may become more difficult to root out. Guerrilla action favors the desperate, the fanatical, and the already damned."
"We have time," Grey replied simply.
For him, the essential objectives had already been achieved. Agripinaa would not fall. Vick was alive. The Foresworn command structure had been damaged, perhaps crippled, and their momentum broken. Even if heretic remnants skirmished for decades in the forge world's forgotten depths, they would never again hold dominion over the planet. They would never kill Vick. They would never turn Agripinaa fully into a bastion of the Archenemy.
The next mission was straightforward: continue defending the Agripinaa Sector, stabilize loyalist control, and wait for a reliable communications channel between Talon and the Celestial Engine in orbit. Once that link was secure, Grey could finally report the full situation and await new instructions from Qin Mo.
The thought of that report sat heavily in his mind. Agripinaa had been saved, but not cleanly. Too many had died. Too much had been revealed. Too many alliances had shifted in the smoke.
Still, victory was victory.
Grey turned toward Vick.
"When the channel stabilizes, you will be able to contact the Talon System directly."
For the first time in the discussion, Vick's severe expression cracked. His augmetics hummed softly as his hands clenched around the edge of the hololithic table. His remaining organic eye shone with emotion that no machine lens could fully imitate.
"That is excellent news," Vick said. His voice trembled, not with weakness, but devotion barely contained by flesh and steel.
He bowed his head.
"Praise be to the Omnissiah."
.....
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