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Chapter Text

Chapter 1 — Awakening


There was warmth, constant and soft around me. A muffled heartbeat somewhere beyond the glass. I drifted in a sea of nutrient fluid, suspended in a sleep deeper than memory, and yet… not truly asleep.

Thought stirred before consciousness. There was little capacity of thought yet in my mind, but understanding flickered, sensory impressions I shouldn’t have been capable of parsing, patterns buried in the light, rhythms in the vibrations of distant voices.

Then light pierced the dark.

Soft at first. Gold.

I opened my eyes, or tried to. They responded sluggishly, my lids struggling to part against the fluid that cradled me like a womb. Shapes swam beyond the transparent curve of my world, but one stood at the center of everything.

“…responding well to gene treatments…”
“…I will never understand why use a lost human soul for this one, my lady…”
“…incorruptible—second will be a bulkhead against the parasites…”

Words came and went even when I couldn’t parse through them, what I did notice wasn’t with my normal senses… it was with my soul. She radiated power, even to my primitive brain. Radiated it not like sun, like the concept of divinity made flesh. I could feel the change in the air, or whatever passed for it in this chamber, when she drew close. The machines hummed louder in her presence. The glass of my pod felt warmer.

“…a potential replacement for Project Magnus…”
“…Psychic potential through the roof…”

She was beautiful. Terrifyingly so. I wanted to avert my eyes, but I found that I couldn’t.

Black hair fell like cascading night over shoulders wrapped in a golden toga that shimmered as though woven from captured starlight. Her eyes…

Her eyes were what held me. Bright, flawless orbs of molten gold. Living suns.

I couldn’t look away.

She turned to the figure beside her. A man, shorter, stooped with age, his grey beard combed and robes marked with arcane sigils. He leaned on a staff shaped like a dagger plunged into a book.

“Number Two responds to your voice, old friend,” the man said. His voice was dry, amused. “Neural activity spikes every time.”

“I know,” she replied, and the words were music. Light, full of gravity and grace. She stepped closer. “The Soul integration is going well, he seems… more than before.”

Her hand rose to touch the surface of my pod.

“I see you, my son,” she said softly. “And you see me, don’t you?

Her fingers splayed against the reinforced plasteel, and I floated forward, helpless in the current of my own awe. I couldn’t reach out, not yet. Could barely move. But I felt.

Her power reached out to my mind and I felt her emotions.

Love. Unconditional. Massive. Terrifying in its depth. And pride, a lot of it. She was sending her emotions directly into my brain.

“You are Second,” she whispered. “Second forged, second born. My blade, my storm, my flesh and my light. I have made you strong.”

A rumble from somewhere far away. The machinery whirred as my tiny heart surged. My mind flooded with impossible colors.

“Perhaps,” the old man muttered, glancing at a data-slate, “you have made this one too strong.”

The Empress smiled. Just a little. It was a thing of absolute serenity.

“The warp has not touched him,” she said. “He is… perfect.”

Malcador’s brow furrowed. “They all are. In their own ways. Perfection is not uniform, my lady.”

“No,” she agreed, and looked at me again. “But this one has balance. His soul is… anchored.”

I didn’t understand the words. Not yet. But I felt them. I remembered them. Somewhere deep, deep in the parts of me that were already more than human.

“I am sorry for what I must make of you, little lost soul.” she said at last. The gold of her gaze softened. “But you will not be alone. Your brothers and sisters grow nearby. You will have family.”

She leaned in, her forehead resting against the glass.

“Alexander. Sleep. Your time will come.”

And her voice, oh, that voice, washed over me like a tide.

“…Alexander? Really?”
“…We have to stick to the classics…”

Her power affected me, and I drifted back into the abyss. Safe. Warm. Cradled in divinity and power.

Wait… Empress? Sisters?!

The thought rushed through me before sleep claimed me.

Somewhere in the lab, a machine noted the spike in psychic potential and filed the data away.
Subject II: Stable.
Neural Growth: Accelerated.
Soul Resonance: High.

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I awoke to pressure and heat. A tremendous force squeezed my chest, as if gravity itself had grown angry.

Everything was shaking. The pod. My body. My thoughts.

I opened my eyes.

Not fluid. Not warmth. The walls groaned as if being torn apart. Sirens screamed, a bone-deep howl I somehow understood to mean danger, terminal descent, impact imminent.

I was no longer in the lab. Thoughts came to me like lightning. The Empress, Malcador, the lab, Ἀλέξανδρος, Alexander.

Memories pounded in my skull like fists on iron. Fragmented, blazing with clarity one moment, then slipping away like smoke the next.

I saw her, the Empress. She stood beyond the glass of my incubation pod, radiant as a star. Her golden eyes met mine through the nutrient fog, and for a breathless instant, I remembered what it felt like to belong. She was smiling, the way a creator might smile at their favored creation.

A white coat hung from her shoulders, half-buttoned over a golden tunic. She chewed cutely on a pen, the metal glinting between her perfect teeth. Her other hand moved swiftly, scribbling calculations onto a clipboard and parchment. The air around her shimmered with data-streams and the soft glow of cogitator banks.

The Empress had built me for war. And somewhere, far beyond the stars, she was waiting for me to rise.

Names have power.

I sat up too fast and slammed my head into the curved ceiling. It didn’t hurt. Not really. I blinked and raised a hand.

Big.

The fingers were mine, but they weren’t. Sculpted like marble. Veins thick as cords under skin too smooth to be real. I turned it, flexed it, felt every tendon move like a steel cable under tension. The fluid in my pod was just gone.

My mind raced. Not in a metaphorical sense. Thoughts erupted in terrifying speed. Language, physics, memories, old ones, not mine. Neural pathways lit up like a map of stars. Concepts clicked into place faster than I could track them.

I looked down.

I was almost naked. Clothed only in some smooth synthetic wrap that clung to my skin like a second layer of flesh. My legs were muscled. My chest and shoulders wide enough to block the emergency lighting above.

Thirteen, maybe fifteen in appearance. But no boy had ever looked like this.

A Primarch body, mind and soul.

The pod lurched violently. Something slammed into the outer hull and the lights blinked out, leaving only crimson emergency strips flashing in rhythmic pulses.

Thud-thud-thud-thud, my heart pounded like a war drum.

I leaned toward the viewport, driven by a mixture of instinct and terror. Grabbing the frame with one hand, I pulled myself up to stare out.

Flames.

The atmosphere burned around me in long, orange ribbons. The pod was a comet, punching through a world’s sky with murderous intent.

Below, the surface curved across the horizon in a black silhouette. Clouds boiled beneath me. A continent lay sprawled under cover of night, lit not by nature, but by civilization.

Megacities.

From orbit I could see it all. Endless grids, strange spirals, clusters of shifting luminescence.

The planet's surface was broken open with artificial scars, miles-wide craters turned into extraction pits, mountains leveled into slabs for infrastructure. Hive spires rose like jagged blades stabbing through the clouds, their tips adorned with red and green lights that blinked like angry stars. Some of the megastructures leaned under their own weight, surrounded by slums that wrapped around their bases like parasites feeding off a decaying god.

Highways of light threaded between the cities, arteries of motion where ships flowed like blood cells. But there was no beauty here. No harmony. It was function stacked upon function. Hive upon hive. Smoke-choked sprawls that pulsed with life and labor, unending.

And at the edge of one of these monstrous metropoles, a single flare of fire marked my descent. One pod, one godling, falling into a world that had long since forgotten it once belonged to Man.

I recognized none of it. This was not Earth.

Terra, my mind screamed at me.

I leaned closer, heart in my throat.

Warhammer 40k…

“Oh no,” I whispered. The words tore free from a throat deeper than mine had ever been. Rich. Resonant. Wrong. “No no no no no—”

I staggered back. My foot caught on the internal scaffolding and I tumbled, smashing into the wall hard enough to dent it. Alarms screamed louder.

The pod was screaming too. Vents opened to spray coolant. Inertial dampeners flared as the descent angle shifted. The lower hull turned red, glowing with the heat of reentry.

I tried to breathe. Failed. My lungs were too big, too strong, pulling in more air than I needed. Panic surged.

It wasn’t just the body. It was the mind. Too many thoughts. Too many sensations. I could hear the turbulence outside, feel the gravity well pulling at every atom in the metal.

This was real.

The pod shook again. Harder. G-forces slammed me back into the crash webbing as the altimeter shrieked inside my skull in pulses of binary data I shouldn’t have been able to process, but I did.

My muscles tensed. I braced.

Impact in five… four…

A blinding light filled the pod.

Three… two…

I screamed. I think.

One.

Then the world ended.

The pod hit something. Then everything. A shockwave tore through the superstructure. The walls twisted inward. The viewports exploded. The ground rose up like a titan’s fist and slapped the pod sideways, throwing me against a metal bulkhead. I felt ribs crack. Then reknit. Then crack again as the rolling didn’t stop.

There was a final, thunderous crash. The sound of a mountain collapsing onto itself. A split-second of weightlessness.

And darkness.

Pure. Absolute.

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Pain brought me back.

It was dull, at first. Then sharp. A throb in my shoulder, a sting across my left forearm. I groaned and shifted, metal creaking beneath me.

Smoke drifted in lazy coils inside the shattered pod. Sparks danced from ruined consoles. The acrid stench of scorched wiring filled my nostrils.

I coughed. Sat up.

The pod was tilted at an angle, half-buried in concrete and twisted rebar. The crash had cratered the landing zone and embedded the lower hull deep into some kind of foundation layer.

I blinked slowly.

My vision adjusted instantly, switching through a dozen spectrums.

I looked down.

A deep gash, from elbow to wrist, was torn across my left arm. Muscle fibers pulsed like coiled ropes. Bone glinted through the torn flesh.

I stared.

Then it closed.

Tendons knit together. Skin pulled itself shut like time reversing. No pain. No scar. Just new, unblemished flesh.

“…Holy shit.”

The words left my mouth before I could stop them. My voice still felt wrong. Rich. Deeper than a teenager’s had any right to be.

I was alive. Not just alive, I felt indestructible.

I stood, slowly. The internal servos of the pod whined weakly. Some of the restraints had snapped during the crash. The rest hung uselessly. The main hatch blinked red, sealed tight.

I reached for the manual override.

Nothing.

Something in me… twitched.

I pulled back my arm. Focused.

And drove my heel into the pod door with all my strength.

The sound was deafening. The metal screamed as it bent, crumpling like paper. The hinges snapped. The hatch flew outward, slamming into the rubble with a crash loud enough to echo through the world.

Light poured in.

Real light. Harsh and ugly.

I stepped out of the ruin and froze.

The world around me was wrong. Towering buildings loomed above me like titans of steel and rust. Enormous towers bristled with antennas and rotating cogitator arrays. Pipes the size of freight trains ran along the walls, belching steam into the air. Walkways spanned between structures at impossible heights. Girders crisscrossed the sky.

It was… a city. But one that screamed dystopia at me.

Don’t tell me I am in a hive world…

The air was thick with fumes. The ground was slick with grease and oil. Every surface was metal or ferrocrete, scorched by centuries of use. The smell was industrial rot, ozone, chemical waste, and overheated steel.

No trees. No earth. No sky.

Except, above, there was a sky. A glimpse. Cloud-choked and distant, but open. Not a fully sealed hive.

That confused me.

A hybrid city?

A minor sprawl connected to a greater hive structure?

I turned slowly. The crater behind me was massive. Smoke trailed upward into the sky. A few charred corpses lay nearby, partially vaporized. No survivors. No spectators.

Too quiet. I was alone. I should’ve panicked.

Instead, I crouched. Placed one hand on the metal street and stared at the rust stains and grease pools with a mind already calculating angles.

I needed a vantage point.

I needed information.

I needed control.

The nearest structure rose fifty meters above me, its side lined with exhaust pipes and lift rails. Ladders zig-zagged along the edge. Without thinking, I started forward, naked, barefoot, body wrapped only in the remnants of synthetic padding that had survived the crash.

I reached the ladder. Grabbed the lowest rung. It bent slightly under my grip. I reached the first platform. Turned. Looked out over the metallic valley below.

Smoke rose from several distant stacks. A train hissed and clanked across a suspended rail a few kilometers out, hauling massive cargo containers etched with symbols I recognized as a derivative of greek.

The city stretched around me like a living machine, an endless sprawl of metal and fire. I might have once called it beautiful, perhaps it had been, long ago. But whatever grace it had once known was buried beneath centuries of exploitation. Now it was a dystopia of industry, noise, and relentless motion.

Sky-cars buzzed through the air in tight patterns, weaving between towers like wasps circling a corpse. Elevated train lines coiled across the city like iron veins, connecting one factory block to the next. Great mechanical arms moved in the distance, shifting cargo crates the size of buildings from dock to depot.

Endless layers of hab-blocks, factories, transit rails, and smoking chimneys sprawled to the horizon. Here and there, flashes of moving lights marked patrol drones or skimmer convoys. Further out, I saw the silhouette of a foundry-fortress, its furnaces vomiting red light into the dark sky like some ancient volcano. High above, another cargo train thundered past on a suspended rail, dragging a dozen containers marked with stenciled glyphs.

I had no idea where this was, I could remember everything, a perfect memory coming from my engineered genes, but no memory of endless books and wikis told me where I was.

I need to get back to the pod…

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I was halfway down the ladder, maybe three stories from the ground, when I heard it.

Footsteps.

I froze, pressed myself against the structure’s side, and listened.

Voices followed, if you could call them that. Clicks, guttural warbles, and chittering syllables filled the air, accompanied by the faint whine of something mechanical powering up.

Weapons.

I climbed back down, silent as shadow, and crouched beside the base of the ruined pod. Smoke still billowed from it in slow, lazy curls, masking my presence.

Then they came into view.

Five of them.

Humanoid, but only just. Reptilian features, scaled skin ranging from obsidian black to swamp green. Long, sinewy limbs, clawed feet, armored chests, and tails that moved like whips. Their eyes gleamed like molten copper in the half-light, and each one carried a long rifle with a crystal core that pulsed with energy.

The lead one barked something. A series of sharp clicks and low growls. It pointed toward the crater.

My crater.

A second creature advanced cautiously, gun raised. It scanned the pod, then sniffed the air. Its nostrils flared, its frills extended like a lizard sensing prey.

I held my breath.

Whatever this species was, they weren’t from any Warhammer canon I knew. Or maybe they were part of the deep lore, the kind that only showed up once, in the margins of a decades-old codex I had never read.

Given I seem to be the second primarch… This species probably died with me.

One of them stopped in front of a nearby door. It looked like a maintenance hatch or a broken storefront, warped inward from the shockwave of the crash.

The xenos hissed something in its garbled tongue.

Then kicked the door in.

A scream followed.

Human. Female.

I tensed, watching from cover as the reptilian brute dragged someone out into the light.

She looked half-dead. Thin, filthy, and bloodied. Blonde hair matted with soot, clothes in tatters. She stumbled and fell to her knees, coughing.

The xeno leader barked something again, louder this time. The words clicked and growled, but then, under the harshness, something shifted.

The language changed.

Still rough, but intelligible.

“Where... child?”

I blinked.

It had spoken in Greek.

I know Greek now?

It had spoken the language I knew from Earth.

She screamed again. “I don’t know! I told you, I don’t—!”

Another blast echoed from inside the building. Screams. Then silence.

My fists clenched.

The alien raised its rifle. Pointed it at her head.

Enough.

I stepped out from cover.

“Hey,” I said.

Five heads turned. The woman froze. The xenos snapped to alert.

I could feel it again, that slow boil of energy under my skin. The wrongness that felt right. Like the air itself was holding its breath.

The lead xeno growled and stepped forward, weapon raised. “Identify.”

I smiled.

“No.”

Then I moved.

The world slowed to syrup. My foot hit the ground, and the pavement cracked. I sprinted forward, faster than I’d ever moved in my life, faster than a car, faster than a train. The wind howled past my ears.

The first shot grazed my cheek. I barely felt it.

The second I caught mid-air, my fingers closing around the barrel of the alien’s weapon. The rifle discharged directly into my palm with a crackling surge of plasma.

It burned.

Then stopped.

I crushed the rifle in my hand. The alien's eyes widened in the moment before my other fist caved in its skull.

Bone. Brain. Blood.

Gone.

The others reacted. Too slow.

One raised its gun. I was already on it. My elbow struck its throat. Cartilage shattered. A follow-up kick sent its body flying ten meters down the street.

Two left. One tried to run.

I grabbed it by the tail, spun, and threw it like a hammer into a wall.

The last one was smarter. It dropped its weapon and raised both clawed hands.

“Yield!” it hissed. “No... harm!”

I stepped forward, blood still dripping from my fists. I looked it in the eye.

“No,” I said coldly.

Then I ended it.

The street fell quiet again. The woman was still on her knees, shaking. Her eyes locked onto me like I was something between a savior and a monster.

I knelt beside her.

“You’re safe,” I said.

She recoiled.

I didn’t blame her.

She spoke at last, voice hoarse.

“They came looking for... for a boy. A child.”

How did they know I would be here? Chaos shenanigans?

I looked toward the broken building. Bodies lay inside. Civilians. Not soldiers. Hiding from monsters.

Sound came from a side alley once more, sounds of xenos running and the clicking of their language.

I crouched low beside a ruined wall, eyes locked on the cracked avenue ahead. The woman I’d saved huddled behind me, trembling, her fingers wrapped around a rusted pipe like it might somehow protect her.

“Stay quiet,” I whispered.

She didn’t answer. Just nodded, eyes wide.

There were six of them this time. Larger than the first patrol. Heavier armor, darker scales. One carried a heavy rifle that hissed with barely-contained plasma. Another had something like a whip crackling with energy. Officers?

Didn’t matter.

I reached down and wrapped my fingers around a chunk of rebar and concrete. The thing had to weigh at least a hundred kilos. I lifted it like a stick.

One of the xenos barked, raising its head to scent the air.

I threw the rock.

It howled through the air like a comet and crunched into the side of its head. Bone exploded. The creature crumpled without a sound, half its skull missing.

The others snapped into motion. Their rifles came up fast. Too fast for a normal man.

But I wasn’t normal.

I was already moving.

I closed the distance between me and the closest one in four strides. Its rifle hissed, something sizzled past my ear, but then my shoulder drove into its chest with the force of a charging rhino.

There was a wet, meaty pop. Ribs caved in. It hit the ground like a dropped bag of meat.

Two more opened fire. One bolt of energy slammed into my side, another into my left thigh.

Pain. Real, burning pain. But manageable.

I roared, voice echoing through the metal alleys like a primal storm, and grabbed one of their rifles mid-burst. The alien tried to wrench it back, claws scraping against the grip, but I drove my fist into its jaw and heard the satisfying crack of shattered bone.

The rifle buzzed in my hand. Alien tech, sleek and cold, glowing with hostile energy. But it spoke to me.

Somehow, I understood it. Like my hands remembered things my mind didn’t. I flipped the weapon sideways, aimed at the remaining xenos, and pulled the trigger.

Light. Heat. Sound like a dragon screaming.

Three of them dropped instantly. Their bodies burst into flame, armor melting from the inside. One tried to run. A second shot tore its torso in half mid-stride.

Only one remained.

It had a claw around the woman’s throat.

“Stop!” it hissed. “Stop or she dies!”

I didn’t stop.

I took one step forward.

The xeno tightened its grip, its weapon raised.

“I said—”

I pulled the trigger.

The energy bolt hit the creature square in the chest. It exploded into black mist and burning gore. The woman dropped to her knees, coughing, covered in blood that wasn’t hers.

Silence.

Just the whine of the cooling rifle, and my own breath heaving in my lungs.

I dropped the weapon.

My hands were burned. Smoking in places. One of the plasma shots had cooked a chunk of my side, it sizzled now, skin knitting itself back together with eerie speed. I could feel the heat retreating, the tissue sealing without scar.

I stepped over the corpse of the last alien and knelt beside the woman. She was shivering, staring at me like I was one of them.

“Hey,” I said, voice softer now. “You’re safe. It’s over.”

She blinked.

Her lip trembled. Then, hesitantly, she reached out.

I took her hand.

Calloused fingers. Nails chipped. She had the look of someone who hadn’t eaten a proper meal in weeks. But she clung to me like a lifeline.

Her eyes welled with tears. She leaned forward, forehead pressing to my chest.

I let her. She needed something to hold onto. Something human.

I looked around at the carnage. Bodies steaming on the concrete. Smoke rising into the air. The quiet between battles.

It wouldn’t last.

More would come. Dozens. Hundreds. They’d seen my escape. They were hunting for me. And now they had a reason to hunt harder.

But for the first time since I fell out of the sky, I had more than just questions.

I stood slowly, pulling her up with me.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Ariana,” she whispered. “Ariana Delos.”

“Ariana,” I repeated, then nodded. “We need to move. Fast. Somewhere safe.”

She nodded, still clinging to my arm. “I... I know a place. Not far.”

I looked down the street. The towers loomed like sentinels. This city was a prison, a battlefield, and a mystery all at once.

And how the fuck am I supposed to conquer a Xeno held planet?

Author's Note: If you wish to check my sites, go to jajasx222.carrd.co you may find up to 10 more chapters there!!

Chapter Text

Chapter 2 — The Girl and the City


She didn’t let go of my hand.

Even with blood drying on her skin and the scent of smoke thick in the air, she dragged me forward like a woman possessed. We sprinted down rust-stained alleys and through broken doorways, winding through the bones of the city.

Dawn was breaking. A dull, sickly light that filtered through smog and ash, bleeding across the horizon like an open wound.

“This way,” she gasped. “Almost there.”

I followed, steps thudding against rusted metal. The city felt empty, but I knew better. Something watched. Somewhere above or beneath, more of those xenos, Dereniks, she’d called them, were moving.

She ducked into a crumbling tenement, pushing through a battered door held together with bent rebar. Inside, the stench of oil and sweat hung heavy. Dim light flickered from a sputtering lumen-strip on the ceiling.

Then I saw him.

A man, sprawled on the floor. Thin. Bearded. His chest was soaked with blood, riddled with cauterized wounds.

Ariana fell to her knees beside him.

“Father...” Her voice broke.

I stood frozen. A sense of helplessness that didn’t belong to this life. For a moment, I wasn’t a godling from a golden cradle. I was just... someone watching a girl lose everything.

She clutched at his hand, whispering broken words I couldn’t hear. Then she screamed. Not loud. Not dramatic. A raw, animal sound. The kind of grief that comes when there’s no one left to hear you.

I knelt beside her. Reached out slowly. Put a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry.”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull away.

“He... he told me to hide when the sirens went off. He said he’d be back.” Her voice was hoarse. “He tried to stop them.”

I looked at the burn patterns. Plasma. Precision shots. Executed.

God… What a mess…

“We have to go,” she said suddenly. Her eyes were red, but her voice was steady. She wiped her face with a trembling hand and stood. “They’ll be back. Dereniks don’t leave alarms unanswered.”

I glanced back through the cracked doorway. My pod was only a few blocks behind us. Hidden by rubble. But it wouldn’t be long before the xenos found it. Or tried to.

I hesitated.

That pod was more than a lifeboat. It was a relic of Terra. There might be data in there, secrets of who I was, what I was built to become. It was a thread back to the Empress and Terran tech. Probably the most advanced in human held hands right now.

I clenched my fists.

But I couldn’t drag it. I couldn’t hide it. And I wouldn’t risk Ariana.

They wouldn’t know how to interface with it. Even if they broke it open, Terran tech was designed to be incomprehensible to lesser minds.

I hoped.

“We’ll come back for it,” I said quietly. A lie. Or maybe a prayer.

Ariana gave me a confused look, but didn’t question it. She was already grabbing a small satchel from beneath a loose panel in the floor. A few ration bars. Water canister. A small stub pistol, the kind that looked like it would explode in the hand if fired twice.

She handed it to me.

“You should carry it.”

I took the weapon. It felt like a toy in my hands. My fingers could crush it with barely a squeeze. But I nodded.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

She slung the satchel over her shoulder and looked out the door.

“Down.”

I followed her out into the rising light, one hand on the pistol, the other resting at my side. My wounds had healed. My strength intact. I felt... anchored. Like every step I took hammered me more firmly into the world.

I had no armor. No army. No name that meant anything to these people. For now I needed to find refuge, somewhere to hide from the xenos that were looking for me.

We moved through the city in silence. The smog had begun to thin, rising in slow coils off cracked stone and shattered ferrocrete. I could hear the distant rumble of machines now, Denerikian patrols.

Our boots crunched over broken glass and splintered bone. Ariana kept a steady pace, but I saw the tension in her jaw. She was scared. She was trying not to show it.

She is a strong girl… she just lost her father.

We turned a corner into what had once been a marketplace. The stalls were long gone, collapsed into piles of junk and twisted steel. A single figure stood in the middle of the plaza.

Tall. Still.

Denerikian. But wrong.

His armor was dull and scorched, covered in filth and soot. His helm was gone, and his skin, what was left of it, seemed to shimmer and crawl under the light. His eyes were sunken, glowing faintly with a dull red pulse. He didn’t reach for a weapon. He didn’t speak.

He raised a hand.

And the world shifted.

It felt like my stomach dropped into the floor. The air thickened, pressed against my ears. My vision narrowed. A cold pressure pushed at the edges of my mind, like fingers scraping the inside of my skull.

Ariana gasped, staggered back. I stepped in front of her and drew the pistol. Useless. I knew it even as I raised it.

The figure began to chant.

I didn’t understand the words, but they rang in my bones. Something deeper. A call. A summons.

Psychic energy lanced toward me, visible as a ripple in the air. I ducked, rolled forward, closed the distance.

I drove my fist into his chest.

Bone shattered. Armor cracked. He hissed, and blood sprayed from his mouth, dark, thick, and wrong. He snarled something guttural, then sent another blast of psychic force that hurled me back into a wall.

Pain bloomed through my shoulder, but I got up.

He came for me then. Fast. A blur of speed and hate. A blade in his hand now, crude, jagged, etched with symbols that pulsed like open wounds.

I caught his wrist mid-swing and drove my head into his face.

Cartilage snapped. He screamed.

I grabbed his throat, twisted, and slammed him into the ground.

He writhed beneath me, muttering foul syllables, and the air burned with the stink of ozone and rot. My vision blurred. My ears rang. My heart thundered.

I silenced him with one brutal blow.

His head came off in my hands.

The moment he died, the pressure vanished. The air cleared. The world felt... real again.

I stood over the corpse, breathing hard. Ariana approached cautiously, still holding her sidearm.

I looked down at the body.

His chestplate had split in the struggle, revealing the skin beneath. It was carved, no, branded, with symbols that made my vision swim. The edges of them seemed to move when I wasn’t looking directly at them. Spikes. Eyes. Mouths. Loops that spiraled inward forever.

And four among them that I recognized.

Even without ever having seen them before, I knew what they were.

Chaos.

The Gods of the Warp. The Ruinous Powers.

Their marks burned in the flesh of this thing that had once been a soldier. My head throbbed just looking at them.

I landed in a conquered human world held by Xenos that worship chaos… great.

“We need to move,” I said, my voice low.

Ariana looked at the corpse, then at me with wide blue eyes. “You killed a witch!”

She is kinda cute…

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The city was awake now. We had moved on from the broken slums and into a more lived-in part of the city.

Gray light dripped from the sky like the world had forgotten how to shine. What passed for streets below us were a clogged network of metal walkways, plasteel stairs, and alleys choked with soot and static discharges. The smell was worse. Rotting garbage, recycled sewage, ozone and industrial runoff. Every few meters, a rusted vent hissed steam or smoke into the haze.

We moved fast. Ariana kept her hood up, head down, guiding us through half-collapsed corridors and narrow walkways where no one dared speak. Eyes followed us, sunken, hollow stares from half-starved humans lining the walls or huddling around scavenged heat-pylons.

I realized something as I watched them: there were a lot of us.

Not just a few survivors clinging to life. The entire lower city was packed with humanity, millions, maybe more, crammed into stacked warrens and buried levels. And every one of them moved with fear etched into their bones. Eyes never lingered. Backs were always turned.

Then I saw why.

A thrum of boots. Clattering claws. And that smell, something acidic, foreign.

A Derenik patrol emerged from a split-street two levels up, marching in formation with brutal efficiency. Half a dozen of them in blackened carapace armor, their reptilian bodies hunched and coiled like a predator halfway to the kill. Their eyes glowed a faint green behind lens-filters. One of them barked a command in its native tongue, clicks and growls and something metallic, and the rest responded in perfect sync.

Civilians scattered.

No one resisted. No one questioned. They didn’t even look at them.

“Keep moving,” Ariana whispered. “Don’t make eye contact.”

“They’re not here for us,” I muttered back.

She shot me a look. “That doesn’t mean they won’t kill you just because they feel like it, idiot.”

The patrol descended the ramp ahead and moved past us without pause. I stood still, watching them. Their weapons weren’t energy-based like the last ones. They were kinetic. Industrial. Brutal. Riot suppression turned into full-scale subjugation.

It hit me then.

We outnumbered them.

By a lot.

Yet we obeyed.

A ruling caste, alien in form and thought, holding dominion over a hive-world full of terrified, broken humans. I could see the design now, strategic cruelty, layered control, fear so deep it had become normal. Every glance. Every step. Every silence was a lesson carved into flesh.

And we let them.

I looked back at Ariana. She was already two meters ahead, slipping through a busted fence into a back alley that reeked of rust and mold.

“You coming, titan?” she hissed.

I followed, jaw tight.

She knew this city better than I knew my own mind. She moved like she'd been crawling through these shadows since birth. No hesitation. No second guesses. Every turn, every climb, every half-collapsed stairwell had a rhythm to it. She ducked under hanging wires, skipped over pools of chemical runoff, and never missed a handhold.

I matched her step for step.

After nearly thirty minutes of weaving through crumbling steel and concrete veins, we reached the foot of a high-rise. Not the glittering spires I’d glimpsed from the upper sky during my fall, those were much further from here, but one of the old mid-tier blocks. Fifty, maybe sixty floors of rusted girders and patchwork hab units, many long since abandoned.

“This is it,” Ariana said, brushing damp hair from her face. “Block S-89.”

She stepped inside through a maintenance hatch and led me into darkness. The stairwells were pitch black, the walls peeling and tagged with graffiti in three different languages. Derenik runes, human warnings, and something else, pictographs carved deep into the metal. Old and angry.

We climbed. Floor after floor. Ariana paused only to catch her breath around level thirty. I didn’t need to. My lungs didn’t burn. My legs didn’t tire. But I kept pace with her, silently counting the steps.

At floor fifty, she stopped.

A door blocked our way. Real metal. Reinforced. She produced a narrow access key and a panel snatched from a nearby terminal, gutted tech.

She slid the panel into a slot, then jabbed the key into the side and twisted.

The door clicked. The lock gave.

The apartment beyond was small. Cramped. Filthy by any real standard. But much better than the city streets. Dust clung to the floor, and a single shattered holoscreen blinked on the wall. The furniture was old scrap nailed together, and the air stank of recycled oxygen. But it was shelter. And it seemed to have real appliances. Water, electricity.

At least I am not in some feudal shithole, now that would have been tough.

Ariana slumped into a corner, breathing hard. “This is my aunt's place. I don’t think they ever tagged this place officially. We can stay here until the heat dies down.”

“Thank you… I can't give anything back for all this help…”

“You saved my life… I am just repaying my debt to you!” She blushed while she spoke.

After the climb, the blood, and the fear, we finally had space to breathe. The room buzzed with faint electrical hums from old wall lines. A cracked solar plate struggled to power a dim bulb in the ceiling, flickering with every gust of wind through the shattered windows.

I sat cross-legged on the floor, elbows resting on my knees. The floor creaked beneath me.

Ariana paced in front of me like a caged animal, her hands twitching.

“You’re not from here,” she said. “Not just the city. Here here.”

“No.”

She stopped. “You fell from the sky.”

“I did.”

“Half a building exploded when you hit.”

I nodded. “My pod, but yes.”

“You killed a dozen Dereniks and a witch one like they were made of paper.”

“Just fragile in the right spots.” I said.

She stared at me, chewing her lip. Her eyes were bloodshot, her cheeks still streaked from dried tears. But she was trying to piece things together. Trying to understand. I admired that.

Then the questions came.

“Where did you come from? What are you? How are you so strong? Why are your eyes so blue?! How old are you?! What the hell are you?!What—”

I raised a hand, smiling gently. “Hey! Hey! Let’s make this easier. A game. One question at a time. We take turns. You ask one. Then I ask one.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I’ll even let you go first.”

She hesitated. Then: “Fine. What’s your name?”

“Alexander.” I leaned back against the wall. “My mother called me Alexander, no last name. Now mine: what’s yours?”

I already knew it, but when she told me, she had been half in shock.

“Ariana,” she replied. “Ariana Delos.”

“Nice to meet you, Ariana.”

She sat cross-legged across from me, still wary. “Okay. My turn. Where are you from?”

I paused. There was no point lying. Not to her.

“Terra.”

She tilted her head. “Never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have,” I said. “It’s... far. Very far.”

“What is it?”

“The cradle of humanity,” I said softly. “Our homeworld. Where it all began.”

She frowned. “I thought this was our homeworld.”

I didn’t blame her. Not really.

The Age of Strife had shattered more than just worlds. It had broken memory. Time itself had become fractured, history devoured by fire and silence. Across the stars, mankind had been scattered, reduced to warlords and tribes, each clutching at the remains of a past they no longer understood. Records were ash, libraries rubble, and the ones who still held knowledge either hoarded it like treasure or perverted it into cult and superstition.

After thousands of years of isolation, terror, and regression, most planets no longer remembered where they came from, only that the void was vast, cruel, and full of monsters.

Terra might as well have been a myth.

Even her name, Delos, hinted at a culture long decayed and repurposed. And Ariana herself, she wasn’t some scholar or high-born. She moved like a scrapper. Spoke like someone who'd had to learn fast or die. Whatever education she had was fractured, probably oral, passed down in scraps. Like the rest of this crumbling galaxy.

I looked at her, young, defiant, half-starved, and still unbroken, and it struck me again just how far humanity had fallen. And how much further we might fall still.

“Your turn,” she said quietly.

“Who are the aliens that rule this world?”

She looked up. “Dereniks. Reptilian bastards. Been here since before my grandfather was born. My mother used to say they came in ships the size of cities. Cracked the sky open and dropped soldiers into every major spire and district.”

“How long ago?”

“About two hundred years. Maybe more. Records from before are mostly gone.”

I nodded slowly. “And humanity?”

She shrugged. “What you’ve seen. We live in the lower levels, in the wastes, the slums. Some collaborate. Most scrape by. There’s resistance... sort of. Whispers, rumors. But anyone caught gets... taken. No one comes back.”

That lined up with what I’d seen. A conquered people, controlled by fear and brutality. Yet still breathing. Still present.

“Your turn again,” I said.

She leaned forward. “What are you? You’re not normal. You heal like nothing I’ve ever seen. You bent a solid alloy in half. Your voice makes walls shake.”

“I am a human,” I admitted. “But I was made, not born. Crafted by someone powerful.”

She gave me a disbelieving look. “You’re saying you’re some kind of... experiment?”

“In a way,” I said. “A weapon. A leader. A son.”

She stared at me, silent. Her lips parted like she was about to speak, but nothing came out.

“Your turn again, I made more than one question.” I prompted gently.

She blinked. “Right. Um... okay. Why are you here?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I didn’t choose to come. I was... sent. Or lost. Thrown through the void and spat out here.”

“Like the legend of Apollion falling to the planet…” she muttered.

“Apollion?”

“The great Demigod hero that killed the gods!” She replied animatedly.

They have a legend of a demigod falling from the sky? Not suspicious at all…

Outside, something screamed in the distance, mechanical, bestial. A siren going through the seemingly infinite city.

“Is there anyone left fighting?” I asked. “Really fighting? Organized?”

She hesitated. “Maybe. There used to be cells, underground networks, saboteurs. My fa—father told me stories when I was little. They’d blow up convoys, hack Derenik comms, smuggle food and meds to the lower districts. But after the Burnings... most went dark.”

“The Burnings?”

“When I was just five years old,” she said. “The Dereniks executed ten billion people across six hives. They made everyone watch. Said it was punishment for a failed rebellion in another system. Since then, everyone’s quiet. Even whispers feel dangerous.”

Ten billion. The number echoed in my mind like a bell toll.

“I… need to take a bath, and so do you Alexander.”

I was covered in Xeno blood and soot, so it was probably a good idea.

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I had just finished patching the crack in the window with a strip of old polymer when the door slammed open with a bang that echoed through the walls like a gunshot.

Ariana jumped to her feet. I was already moving, muscles tensed, xeno rifle pointing at the door, halfway across the room before I even thought to act.

A woman burst through the doorway, wild-eyed and gasping, her blond hair tied in a loose knot and her long coat torn at the hem. She wore the look of someone who had been running through hell, because she had.

“Ariana!” she cried.

“Aunt Penelope!”

The two collided in a crushing embrace. Ariana wrapped her arms around the woman and clung to her like a lifeline. Penelope dropped to her knees, running her hands through Ariana’s hair, pressing kisses to her forehead.

“I thought—I thought they had you,” she whispered. “When I saw the patrols, the smoke—I heard that Mikael is dead...”

“I’m okay, they killed father…” Ariana said softly, her voice shaking. “I got away. I—he—he saved me.”

That was when Penelope saw me.

She froze. Her eyes narrowed, scanning every inch of my face, my size, my eyes, the faint blood still staining my knuckles. Her body tensed like a spring coiled to snap.

“I’m not a threat to you,” I said gently, lowering the gun onto the coffee table and raising my hands.

Ariana took her aunt’s hand. “He’s come from the sky. He killed the Dereniks.”

Penelope’s eyes snapped to her niece. “What?”

“He’s not like us,” Ariana said. “He’s stronger. Faster. And he killed them all. A dozen of them. With his bare hands. I saw it. He even got a witch!”

Penelope turned back to me slowly. Her expression was unreadable, caught somewhere between awe and suspicion. For a long moment, Penelope said nothing. Then she stood, walked across the room, and extended her hand.

“I’m Penelope Delos,” she said. “Ariana’s aunt. Thank you for saving her. I mean that.”

I took her hand. She had a strong grip, calloused and worn. A survivor’s hand.

“Alexander,” I said.

She nodded, looking me up and down. “You’ve got the build of a plow-hauler and the eyes of a Derenik warpriest, but if Ariana says you’re a friend, that’s good enough for me.”

She stepped back and took off her coat, hanging it on a crooked nail by the door. Then she looked around the apartment with a tired sigh.

“This place looks better than usual.”

“I reinforced the door,” I said. “And patched the window.”

Penelope blinked at me, then gave a crooked smile. “Well, that’s already more useful than half the people I’ve let in here.”

She crossed to the kitchen unit, a rusted alcove with an electric burner and a cracked water tank, and poured stale, filtered water into three cups.

“Sit down,” she said. “If you’re staying, then you eat with us.”

“Staying?” I asked.

Penelope turned, offering me a cup. “You’ve got no place to go. You saved my niece. That makes you family as far as I’m concerned.”

Ariana’s eyes lit up. I felt something twist in my chest.

I took the cup, holding it in both hands. The water was lukewarm and slightly metallic, but I drank it gladly. It grounded me more than any battlefield ever had.

This was no throne room, no fortress, no parade of banners. Just a tired woman, a grieving girl, and the smell of old metal and burnt spice.

But here, in the heart of a broken world, I was being welcomed.

Accepted. These people had almost nothing and yet they gave me what little they had…

“Thank you,” I said.

Penelope just waved it off. “Rest now. Tomorrow, you’ll need to learn how to move without drawing attention. You’re not exactly inconspicuous.”

“I’ll do what I must,” I said.

She looked at me for a long second, then nodded. “Good. We could use someone like you at the factory; you certainly seem strong.”

She looked at me and bit her lip.

Eh?!

Ariana just sighed, like she was used to this.

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The apartment was quiet. Penelope had gone to her room hours ago, and Ariana had curled up on the thin mattress in the corner room, her breathing slow and soft behind a half-closed door.

I lay on the couch, its springs long dead and its frame groaning beneath my weight. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. I wasn’t even tired.

Instead, I stared through the grime-frosted window, past the cracked plastic blinds, out into the city beyond.

And what a city it was.

Vast towers reached into the clouds like the fingers of dead gods. Whole districts were stacked one atop the other, glowing with layered webs of dying neon and flickering banners in languages I didn’t know. Monorail tracks clung to superstructures like veins, while heavy-lift craft rumbled through the smog, their searchlights carving through the mist like blades of pale fire.

There was no Empress here, no Aquila carved into the walls. Just metal, smoke, and quiet despair. The skyline stretched out like a battlefield yet to be named.

I shifted slightly, the couch frame creaking beneath me. The Dereniks had ruled here for generations, according to Ariana. I could see their influence even now, military beacons pulsing from high towers, drone traffic zipping through restricted lanes, patrol barges scanning rooftops for the smallest breach in order.

And beneath it all, the people: the humans, crammed into mold-ridden hab-blocks, hiding from reptilian tyrants who saw them as little more than cattle.

Far beyond the city's edge, just barely visible through the haze of distance and smog, I saw them.

Spikes on the horizon. Monolithic, jagged, inhuman in scale. At first, I thought they were mountains. But they were too symmetrical, too precise. Their lines were harsh and deliberate, their forms alien in their immensity. They pierced the sky like blades aimed at the stars, taller than anything in the city around me.

Hive spires. They had to be.

Even from here, dozens, maybe hundreds of kilometers away, I could make them out in near-perfect detail. The sharp glint of glass and steel where the sun caught the highest tiers. The dark scars of exhaust vents and orbital lifts clinging to their lower halves like barnacles. Around their bases, even fainter, a storm of blinking lights, distant movement, endless vertical layers vanishing into the smog-choked void.

This planet must house hundreds of billions… How are they all fed?

I blinked. My vision didn’t blur.

There were no imperfections anymore. No flicker, no strain. I could see further and sharper than any man should. The way one could study a grain of sand under a microscope, or watch the slow turn of a satellite from orbit.

It should have unnerved me, but it didn’t.

It felt... right.

The way things should be.

I leaned back into the couch. It groaned again, but I barely heard it. My thoughts drifted.

What kind of power did it take to build something like that? Not just in terms of materials or labor, but belief. Conviction. The kind of ruthless, focused will that could shape continents and scar atmospheres.

What remained of those who built them?

The weight settled on my chest again.

Responsibility.

I had the body of a demigod, the mind of a tactician, and knowledge no one else on this planet could possibly have. I was born, grown, and shaped to change the fate of entire worlds. I knew it. I felt it in my blood.

But even so, this place felt alien. Not just because of the city or the Dereniks.

Because there was no path ahead. No legion. No Empress. No grand vision to follow. Just me.

I heard the door creak behind me, soft steps on the worn tile. I didn’t turn.

Ariana shuffled into the room, her small form wrapped in a threadbare blanket. She looked barely awake, her hair a tangle of gold and shadow.

Wordlessly, she climbed onto the couch beside me, curling up at my side. Her head rested against my arm.

I turned to look at her. Her eyes were already closed, her breath soft. She didn’t speak. Didn’t ask permission. She simply trusted.

That hit harder than any plasma round ever could.

She had witnessed death. Seen her father murdered. Been hunted by monsters. And still—still—she reached for warmth in a world of cold metal.

I shifted slightly, wrapping one arm around her. She fit there perfectly, like she’d belonged there all along.

She murmured something I didn’t catch, half a dream, then sank deeper into sleep.

I stayed still, watching the lights of the city ripple and fade in the polluted night. Somewhere out there, billions of humans toiled eternally, oppressed by a Xenos regime.

And I was here, cradling a girl that couldn’t be older than nineteen, trying to understand what kind of future I was meant to build.

Not a destroyer. Not just a weapon.

I would be more.

I would be hope.

My soul reached out. My eyes glowed.

Ariana sighed in her sleep, the tiniest smile tugging at her lips.

I let my eyes drift closed, not in rest, but in thought. There was no map for what came next. No orders from above. No star to follow.

Just this world.

This girl.

And the blood that burned in my veins.

Chapter Text

Chapter 3 — The Hive World of Athenia

The days blurred.

Time passed differently in hiding. Every hour felt coiled, like a spring waiting to snap. I paced the apartment when no one was looking, always watching the window, always listening for the whine of xenos engines or the clatter of boots against steel. But they never came.

The Dereniks were searching. That much was certain. Ariana had spotted smoke near her old home on the second day. Penelope said they had burnt the whole block. The patrols below were thicker now, their armored forms gliding through the alleys like shadows. But they didn’t knock on every door. They didn’t scan every face.

That struck me as strange. A paranoid regime like this should’ve locked the entire city down. Instead, they were sluggish, more concerned with keeping the factory lines running than flushing out the source of last week’s bloodbath.

It was confidence. Arrogance.

They didn’t fear uprisings. They didn’t believe any human could challenge them.

That would change.

I stood at the window in the early light, my breath fogging the cracked glass. The city beyond was waking, sirens moaned, smog stacks belched black smoke, and distant transit rails began their endless loop through the hive’s metal bones.

Behind me, the room stirred. Ariana coughed and sat up on her mattress. She rubbed her eyes, blond hair sticking out in all directions.

“Mornin’,” she said sleepily.

“Morning,” I replied, watching a formation of worker drones swarm toward a distant factory dome.

She joined me at the window, wrapping herself in a thin blanket. “You always wake up first.”

“I never really sleep,” I said. “Not like you do.”

Ariana didn’t question it. She had grown used to my oddities. The fact I rarely needed to eat. That I didn’t bleed like other people. That I could snap metal like it was twine.

“Another shift today?” I asked.

She nodded. “Standard rotation. I’m back on line six at the mag-recycler. Better than vent-duty, I guess.”

“You shouldn’t have to work at all,” I muttered.

She gave me a tired look. “That’s the world, Alexander. Everyone works. Everyone has to.”

By everyone, she meant humans.

The Dereniks didn’t toil. They administered, enforced, and consumed. The rest was done by our kind. Men and women ran the assembly lines. Children worked the sorting drums. Even the elderly swept the ferrocrete streets and monitored the forges.

The whole planet was one colossal factory, its surface scarred with mining pits, smelters, power furnaces, and endless shipping yards. Each city block was built atop another, layered like sediment over centuries of expansion.

Athenia. Ariana said that was it's name. One of many worlds under Derenikian control. But the way she said it, it didn’t sound alien. It sounded like it had been theirs once. Ours.

When she left for work, I sat with Penelope. She brewed the bitter black liquid they called caff. I sipped it only to keep up appearances with her. It tasted like boiled shit.

She didn’t speak much, not unless I asked.

“How long have the Dereniks ruled here?” I asked one morning.

She didn’t look up from her mug. “Two hundred and thirty-six years. I was born long after. My great-grandparents fought in the war. But they’re gone. Most who remember are long dead… or serving the xenos.”

“Collaborators?” I hissed.

She grimaced. “Rejuvenated ones. Given extra years for loyal service. Overseers. Governors.”

I filed that away.

The Dereniks used rewards to keep human leadership docile. Rejuvenation protocols, advanced medical augments, positions of power within their puppet bureaucracy. They didn’t rule by terror alone; they ruled by indulgence.

It was a trick older than history. Bread and titles for the few. Chains for the rest. The architecture wasn’t entirely Derenikian.

This wasn’t built by aliens.

Humans had once ruled here. Not just lived here, ruled. This was a long-forgotten human colony, beautiful and full of life. Probably the capital of this entire sector.

Ariana spoke of myths. Stories of star-kings and flame-armored knights who fell from the skies in ages past. Before the Conquest. Before the Collapse.

I knew what they were.

Remnants of the Age of Strife. Or perhaps even earlier, an offshoot of the Dark Age of Technology, a distant human colony-empire left isolated when the warp storms choked the galaxy. Cut off. Forgotten. Only to rise up again.

Only to fall once more.

The Dereniks hadn’t built this world. They had stolen it. Stripped it. Rewired it to serve their empire. But under the soot and steel, something remained.

Something ours.

Something worth reclaiming.

She topped off her mug and sat across from me, legs tucked under her, the way someone does when they’re used to making do with whatever space they have.

I watched her for a moment. The slight lines around her eyes, the tension in her shoulders that never seemed to fully leave. She was a very beautiful woman. Silky blond hair and a full figure. But life here had aged her more than years could.

“What did you do?” I asked. “Before I showed up.”

She shrugged, eyes on her drink. “Maintenance. HVAC, mostly. Air recyclers, power junctions. The stuff that keeps hab-blocks from collapsing or gassing the residents in their sleep.”

“Important work.”

She gave a short, bitter laugh. “Sure. If the overseers notice, they send a ration chit. If something fails, they send a patrol. If it explodes, they send a mass notice about human incompetence and dock three days’ pay from the whole zone.”

I said nothing. There was nothing to say.

“I had a big brother once, Ariana’s uncle,” she added after a pause. “He was smarter than me. Could’ve gone off-world, if that were still a thing. They took him at eighteen. Drafted into the Derenik auxiliaries. Said he was going to be trained. Transferred to a better life.”
She looked at me. Her eyes were hard now. Empty in a way that said the story didn’t have a happy ending.
“They sent us a sealed box two years later. Said it was 'biohazardous remains'. Never said what happened.”

I clenched my jaw. Not out of anger. Out of familiarity.

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded, once. Not for comfort. Just acknowledgment.

“Now they have taken both my brothers…”

We sat in silence for a while.

The walls of the apartment hummed faintly with power. Somewhere in the ducts, something skittered. Outside, the city breathed its smog and neon sighs.

"I will take a shower. You can watch the holo if you want, not much to watch anyway."

She was right, the holo was mostly propaganda done by collaborators. But it taught me much about the world and how it was run.

Our glorious overlords indeed...

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The door creaked open.

Penelope stepped into the room, steam trailing behind her from the cramped washroom. She wore nothing but a towel wrapped tightly around her body, damp fabric clinging to her skin, still glistening with beads of water. Her hair, blonde and heavy with moisture, fell over one shoulder. She moved without self-consciousness, like someone long past caring what others thought.

But my eyes, my cursed, perfected eyes, caught everything. Every detail. The faint scar above her hip. The small birthmark near her collarbone. The soft lines of her stomach, the tension in her calves, the motion of muscle and breath beneath skin.

She was beautiful.

She noticed me looking and smirked slightly, more amused than flustered.

“You want to shower?” she asked, her voice casual, worn. “Hot water’s still holding.”

Without waiting for an answer, she tossed a second towel across the room. It hit me in the chest and slid into my lap.

I caught it, more from reflex than anything else.

“Thanks,” I said, setting it aside as I stood.

“Don’t use all the soap,” she called over her shoulder as she disappeared back into the hallway. “That block has to last another week.”

She left without waiting for a reply, the door shutting behind her with a soft click.

I watched her go.

That woman is going to kill me…

I stood in silence for a moment, towel in hand, before stepping toward the mirror.

It was cracked, a jagged split running down its center like a war wound. But enough of my reflection remained.

There I was.

Or rather… the thing I had become.

My skin was pale, unblemished. Not the bloodless pallor of sickness, but the luminous stillness of sculpted marble. My hair, already thick and shoulder-length, was the color of bleached bone. And my eyes… they shone like a dying star, brilliant, electric blue, faintly glowing in the dim bathroom light.

The empress really liked white hair, it seemed. I joined the ranks of Rogal and Fulgrim.

Even standing still, I radiated pressure.

Not bulk, though the muscle was there, coiled beneath my skin like knotted steel, but presence. As if reality itself bent slightly around me.

I raised my hands, flexed my fingers.

Perfect symmetry. Not a scar, not a freckle. Every knuckle aligned, every vein mapped with purpose.

I had measured myself last night. Roughly six feet, perhaps a little more. Broad-shouldered, dense with muscle, heavier than I looked.

But size meant nothing. I remembered what I had done to that pod door. The metal should’ve required a cutting torch to breach. I had kicked it open. The same way I had pulped a xeno’s skull with a rock.

I tested more in secret.

Beneath the apartment, deep in the building’s old service ducts, I had bent steel rebar in my fists like it was copper wire. I’d run twenty kilometers without breaking a sweat. My hearing could isolate conversations two floors below. My night vision was pristine.

And once, when I was angry, truly angry, I had reached out with my mind… and something had shifted. Just a flicker. Like a spark between wires.

It didn’t happen again.

But the potential was there. Coiled. Hungry.

A Primarch.

That’s what I was.

One of the twenty.

The mirror showed a teenager, maybe fifteen. But I wasn’t a child. Not in mind. Not in body. And I would grow fast.

Still… I was not yet complete. I could feel it. My bones weren’t done growing. My organs hummed with dormant potential. My mind, vast though it was, still spun faster than it could grasp itself. I wasn’t ready. Not yet.

But soon.

Very soon.

I touched the mirror. Cold against my fingertips.

I wonder if Alexander the Great looked like this; wasn't he blond?

There were still too many unknowns. The Dereniks ruled this world, and they were more than slavers or conquerors. Their control was subtle, systematized. They had institutions. Infrastructure. Weapons I hadn’t seen yet.

And worse, they had psykers that followed the Chaos Gods.

Like I was.

If I unleashed my powers now, they would notice.

And I wasn’t strong enough yet to fight an entire world. Not alone.

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A week passed.

The city held its breath for the first few days, every shadow twitching with tension, every siren sounding like the start of another crackdown. Denerikian patrols swept through the sector in double shifts, kicking in doors, hauling people away under the cover of static-laced loudspeakers and the ever-watchful drones.

But then, as quickly as it had escalated, it eased.

The patrols thinned. The curfews softened. The routines returned, oppressive, hollow, but familiar. The city exhaled and tried to forget again.

For the first time in days, I stepped out into open air, the early morning smog curling around me like a living thing.

My mind cataloged every face, every drone above, every sigil etched into rusted steel. I saw the slumped shoulders of men carrying crates too heavy for their frames. Children with hollow eyes scouring dumpsters for scraps. The grim choreography of a people surviving inside a machine designed to break them.

The market was a wound in the metal flesh of the city.

Steel buildings loomed like tombstones, stacked with layers of grime and corrosion. The air stank of ozone, burned grease, and despair. Above us, thick bundles of industrial piping crisscrossed the sky, blotting out the sun except for the shafts of light that pierced through like searchlights. It was midday, but the world felt dim and caged.

The Space Elevator was a huge feature of the city scape, more present than even the Central Hive whose spires reached the skies. Ariana had said that, apparently, every hive had a space elevator. Athenia was an incredibly developed world.

Ariana held my hand tightly. She walked fast, eyes alert, weaving us through the packed crowd with Penelope close behind.

“Keep your head down,” Penelope murmured. “Don’t stare. Don’t act like you’re looking for anything.”

I wasn’t. I wasn’t looking.

I was studying.

Every sound, every twitch of motion, every voice raised too loud or too quiet, I filed it away.

The market was crowded, yes, but hushed. People here moved like they were being watched. Because they were.

Towering above the crowd on a humming anti-grav skimmer was a Derenik patrol tank. Sleek and obsidian-black, its smooth plates shimmered with alien script. Mounted on its sides were two auto-lance turrets that tracked independently, always scanning.

Perched in the open cabin were two Derenik warriors in segmented armor. Their long, reptilian limbs hung relaxed, but their eyes were always moving. Gold and slit-pupiled. Cold. Inhuman.

The crowd parted slightly as the tank drifted by.

No words. No shouts or commands.

Just presence.

That was enough.

I clenched my jaw, but kept my posture casual. Calm. Insignificant.

I had learnt how to tone down my aura and it showed. People barely looked at me. I was just a tall human clothed like them.

It would be a long time before I could afford to stop pretending.

The humans around us looked… hollow. Not starved or beaten, but reduced. Like glass worn smooth by centuries of waves. Their eyes flicked up to the patrol, then away. Always away. No one made contact. No one resisted.

The Dereniks didn’t need chains. They had generations of control. Culture, memory, history, all broken. The human soul here had been compressed into function.

Ariana tugged me forward, past a vendor selling nutrient paste wrapped in synthcloth. I caught the exchange: a ration card passed subtly beneath a countertop, fingers brushing in silent trust.

We paused near a stall with crude metal trinkets, gear-shaped amulets and bits of broken machine parts sold as good luck charms. Ariana pretended to browse, voice low.

“Most of the Dereniks don’t live here,” she said. “They keep to the Central Hive or off-world. Only patrols stay groundside.”

Penelope added, “The ones that do… they’re the rejects. Or the cruel ones.”

“And the tanks?” I asked softly.

“They never leave,” she replied. “Every sector gets a few and hundreds of armored vehicles.”

I turned slightly to watch one pass by again. No noise except the low hum of its anti-grav. It slid past like a shark through murky water.

Denerikian tech was advanced.

I’d seen their drones patrolling the upper sectors. Bipedal constructs with linked targeting arrays, weapon systems grown as much as forged. Terrifyingly quiet. The skies were full of flying ones too.

Their systems were biological in part, neural cores sealed in alloyed bone, organic wiring weaved into hardened shells. Half-living things, born in vats and sealed into place.

The air-drones were worse. You didn’t hear them until they’d already passed, and by then, if they were looking for you, it was too late. Their optics could see across spectra, read heartbeats through walls. And they never tired...

Denerikian tech was advanced.

But it wasn’t infallible.

And it wasn’t theirs to begin with. Most of it was reverse-engineered from the fallen Athenian Federation.

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The stall was small, almost invisible, tucked between a rust-stained machine shop and a place that reeked of synthoil and boiled meat.

The sign overhead was faded and dented. It simply read: “ARCHIVES.” In Ancient Greek, no less. That alone made me pause.

I didn’t question how I knew ancient Greek, knowledge came to me from my creator at the most random times.

Rows of cracked books, data slates, and odd trinkets were laid out like offerings. Some were complete, others clearly broken, guts exposed, circuitry burned. Most people walked past without so much as a glance.

But I felt something.

Old things speak, if you know how to listen.

“Go ahead,” Penelope said, gesturing for Ariana to follow her down the next row of vendors. “We’ll grab some food.”

I nodded and turned to the stall. The keeper was an older man, hunched and wiry. His skin was leathery from recycled air and low-light living, and his eyes held the wariness of someone who'd learned to survive by never trusting anyone too quickly.

I scanned the shelves casually, fingers brushing over worn book spines. Most of it was junk, old maintenance manuals, fiction prints, obsolete programming guides.

I reached down and picked up a thin, soft-bound volume. The cover had long since faded, but the title was stamped in raised, flaking ink.

“Whispers of the Star-Serpent: Folk Legends of Old Athenia.”

The kind of thing you’d find in a child’s corner of a medicae waiting room or printed in bulk for off-world propaganda. A trivial book. Decorative, not informative. Something to make people feel rooted in a past that had already been paved over by Deenihanian boots and recycled concrete. I had read that many of the actual history books had been banned by the administrators, but this lingered.

I held it in one hand and flipped it open with the other.

To anyone watching, I was thumbing through it idly. Killing time. Passing interest at best.

But my eyes scanned each page in seconds, my mind parsing and storing the words faster than I could consciously register them. Pattern recognition kicked in. Language decryption followed. Neural overlays mapped the symbolic structures, highlighted inconsistencies, filtered out filler and flagged anomalies. I wasn’t reading. I was absorbing.

One page. Two. Five. Twenty.

The text spoke of old things, serpents of living flame, winged kings that fell from the stars, machines that bled light, and a “Goddess of Silence” who once ruled from a tower that reached the edge of heaven.

The Legend of Apollion…

Apollion fell like a comet, burning through the heavens with fire in his bones and sorrow in his heart. Born of divine blood but shaped by mortal pain, he saw the world not as the gods decreed it, but as it truly was, choked by chains, echoing with prayers that went unanswered.

While the other demigods bent the knee and basked in celestial privilege, Apollion turned his back on Olympus. With a sword of starlight and fury, he waged war against the heavens themselves. He shattered thrones, broke eternal laws, and cast down those who had ruled for eons. In the end, Apollion did not claim a crown, nor build a temple in his name. Instead, he gave the world back to humanity, free and ungoverned. Fields grew fertile where his blood was spilled, and the sky wept rain, not fire.

My enhanced mind sorted it all into categories. Allegory. Corruption of ancient myth. Likely references to warp entities, to the coming of the Dereniks, to forgotten human lords whose memory had decayed into bedtime tales.

But beneath the crude poetry and repeated motifs, there was structure. Repetition with meaning. A cadence to the myths that suggested origin, shared origin. These weren’t just Athenian stories.

They were fragments of human memory.

Stripped of context, twisted by centuries of occupation and oral transmission, but still there. The names were wrong, the timelines broken, but I could feel the bones underneath.

I closed the book and set it back down carefully.

A few minutes. That’s all it had taken.

I looked at the old man again, and he gave me the faintest nod. He watched me with an almost imperceptible tension.

Guarded interest.

His pulse quickened when my hand hovered near a stack of cracked data tablets.

I smiled faintly and said, “Got anything pre-war?”

His eyes narrowed. He leaned in. “No one askes for that. The knowledge is banned.”

“I just did.”

A pause. His throat moved as he swallowed.

“What are you really looking for?” he asked, voice low.

“Truth,” I said.

He studied me. I watched his pupils shift, his microexpressions, the clench of his jaw. The way his left foot slid half an inch toward the back curtain.

He was hiding something.

“Wait here,” he muttered.

He vanished behind the stall. I heard faint rustling, a soft hiss of depressurized storage. When he returned, he held something wrapped in grimy cloth. He laid it on the table like a relic.

He unwrapped it slowly.

It was a rectangular tablet, no larger than my forearm. Matte black. Old, but clean.

This thing was made three hundred years ago.

“This has surviving memory partitions,” the old man said, holding up the wrapped slate with reverence. “Encrypted, but it’s all local. Civil engineering records, media logs, planetary surveys. Pre-conquest. Real stuff.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Hundred thousand denims.”

I let out a short breath, not quite a laugh. “You selling a library or a planet?”

His expression didn’t change. “It’s knowledge that could get me killed just for showing it to you, lad. You think cheap gets you safe?”

He had a point.

But I had something more valuable than money.

I stepped forward slightly, just enough to let the light catch my face. My posture straightened, and I let my voice drop into that place between command and calm.

“Look at me.”

He did. His eyes met mine and held there for a long, quiet moment. I let him feel it, just a fraction of what I was. Presence. Psychic powers giving off an aura of authority that few could resist.

“I will pay you,” I said, voice steady. “I swear it. You know I’m not lying.”

The silence stretched, thick with tension, until he finally exhaled, slow and hard through his nose. He didn’t speak. Just unwrapped the slate, checked it once more, and placed it carefully into my hands.

“I want the money before years end,” he muttered.

“You’ll get it back with great interest,” I replied.

He gave a dry grunt, half disbelief, half resignation. “Don’t make a habit of this.”

“I won’t.”

I nodded to him and stepped away. Ariana waved from the next alley. “You find anything?”

“Just junk,” I called back, slipping the slate into the inside of my coat.

As we walked, I could feel its weight settle against me. Heavier than I expected. Old tech always was. Meant to last.

I brushed my thumb over the engraved sigil on its lower edge. A marker of the past. A fragment of Athenia as it had once been.

Some things are worth more than gold. And I would pay the old man back.

I always keep my word.

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I lay back on the threadbare couch, arms behind my head, watching the window. The glass was tinted yellow from age, patched in places with clearseal film, but the view beyond remained clear enough.

The city spread forever.

Ariana and Penelope were asleep, or at least pretending to be. I waited until their breathing evened out before retrieving the slate from my coat.

It powered on with a flicker, its screen dull but functional. The old man hadn’t lied. The interface was crude by modern standards, a pre-conquest layout running on stripped-back logic cores and self-healing memory partitions. But it worked. That was all that mattered.

I scrolled through the indexed folders, civil records, population logs, infrastructure maps, atmospheric profiles, planetary transit systems. All pre-Denerik occupation. I dove into the census data first.

It took my breath away.

Athenia had once housed six hundred and eighty-five billion human souls.

Cities so vast they breached the stratosphere, their sublevels punching into the crust like the roots of titanic trees. There were orbital elevators, fusion-linked transport webs, oceans harnessed for energy, polar regulators keeping the planet’s climate in perfect balance. Civilized. Ordered. Human.

Now?

Now the world was half-dead. There must be less than half as many people on the planet, and the standards of living had fallen to the dust. Athenia was beautiful in the images. Even with so many people everyone had a home, food, space, and education.

I traced the outlines of a transportation grid that had once ferried tens of millions per hour. Now it was a rat warren, half-flooded and crawling with predators, both human and not.

It took hours to unpack the encryption layers, but my mind made short work of it. Each layer unfolded like a puzzle half-remembered, and soon I was navigating data untouched in centuries. Entire administrative networks are preserved in local cache. A miracle of old human redundancy.

I opened the Athenia System Overview.

The main display was grainy but functional, a rendered holograph of the system in its prime. Five planets. The closest to the star, Athenia Prime, was named Kiel, a mining world much like Mercury.

Athenia, second from the sun. A fortress of industry and civilization, once home to billions human beings. Its orbital stations had numbered in the hundreds. Defense platforms, trade hubs, population relief arcologies. All gone now, or repurposed by alien hands. A massive shipbuilding industry. There were massive shipshards in orbit.

Probably making xeno ships now.

And its moon Eaena, a frozen moon that was full of mines and winter resorts once. It was cold enough to be frozen, but hot enough to have water in it surface. A few lakes and frozen rivers. I hadn't ever seen it through the smog in the sky.

But the thind planet… that was different.

Olyssus.

An agriworld. A paradise of engineered crops and regulated weather cycles. The slate showed it blanketed in vast agro-sectors, each the size of a continent. Massive irrigation seas, atmospheric stabilization pylons, herds of engineered livestock designed to feed billions across the system.

Olyssus fed Athenia.

Fully automated harvest-to-orbit chains, regular convoys every six hours, precision-timed cargo haulers that fed directly into Athenia’s orbital docks. It had been a perfectly balanced system, industry and intellect on Athenia, sustenance and renewal from Olyssus.

If it still functioned, it meant the Deneriks hadn’t destroyed everything. They needed food, even for their slave systems.

Then came the two gas giants. The first one had two moons, one a mining world and the other what might have been clasified as a civilized world by the future Imperium.

The galactic position seems to be in the future Segmentum Pacificus, around its center of it.

Not that far from Terra.

I bookmarked the orbital data. It would be worth investigating.

Then I opened the folder marked FEDERATION RECORDS.

It took longer to decode. Older language matrix. Fractured files. But eventually the history began to unfold.

Athenia hadn’t just been a world.

It had been the capital of a human federation.

The Athenian Federation.

Four hundred and eighty-two human worlds. Founded during the late Age of Strife by a splinter of Old Earth’s diaspora. A coalition. Trade-based. Knowledge-based. Unified by a shared commitment to order, survival, and technological preservation.

It had survived the storms.

It had endured the collapse of the warp lanes longer than most.

And then the Deneriks came.

One world fell, then ten. Then the war fleets came.

Within three hundred years, the Federation had been dismantled, its core worlds gutted, its leadership exterminated. Athenia was the last to fall. A final siege that broke the planetary shields and sent fire through the spires.

I leaned back, the slate resting against my chest.

The Federation’s bones are still buried beneath these cities. This system remembers what it was. I can rebuild it…

Ariana padded quietly across the room, curled up at the edge of the couch, then slowly leaned into me without a word. This had become a ritual every night.

Her cheek rested on my chest. I felt the soft hitch of her breath, the exhaustion of her frame. She still trembled faintly, even in sleep. Her nightmares must’ve followed her here.

I wrapped one arm around her shoulder and placed my hand over hers. She relaxed into me, like a frightened animal finding warmth for the first time.

She was small. So small. But not weak.

She’d seen her father murdered. Fled her home. Hidden me in defiance of occupation. All in the span of days.

And she still got up each morning.

Ariana shifted slightly. I looked down and found her hand tightening over mine.

Enough reading for today.

That night, for the first time in days, I slept.

Chapter Text

Chapter 4 — The Factory Chains

The stink hit first every fucking day; the genetically enhanced senses had their drawbacks. Oil, ash, burnt rubber, rusted metal, sweat, and blood, sharp in the back of the throat. Even my enhanced senses had to adjust for a bit.

I stood at line thirteen, wrist clamped in a rust-colored band of identification, watching the grinding arc of machines spewing molten slag. Around me, humans toiled like ghosts. Bent-backed. Gaunt. Faces blank. Hands shaking from old injuries, some still bleeding.

This factory infringed every regulation I could think of.

The interior stretched kilometers in every direction, like the inside of a mechanical beast. Conveyor belts screamed and shuddered.

I didn’t cough. I didn’t tremble. I didn’t feel the exhaustion creeping into my muscles like the others. I had gotten this job for one of a few reasons, first it was required that every human work, if a patrol stopped me in the streets and I did not have an identification number connected to a factory, they would detain me.

Or try to and fail miserably... The job also gave me a few Denims that I could give to Penelope as rent, and it also allowed me to see for myself what this world was like. It gave me freedom to walk the streets of the city and talk to its people.

My lungs processed the toxins, filtered them out as if they were morning mist. My body drank the heat like it was sunlight. I could have worked this entire line alone.

But I didn’t draw attention. I matched the rhythm. I lifted the crates. I dragged slag bins. I kept my strength restrained to human levels.

The guards watched. Not well, but enough.

Derenik overseers lumbered along the catwalks above. They shouted commands in guttural barks, then in broken Athenian.

“Faster. Stop… and you’re gone.” Followed by the clicking that I had come to realize was their laughter.

One did not need clarity to understand. The message was in the whips. The stunners. The corpses strung from gantries as reminders that if you fell behind there were millions to replace you.

A man two rows down slipped on an oil slick. He didn’t get up fast enough. One of the guards fired a short-range burst. The man convulsed. Smoke curled from his spine. He didn’t scream. He just twitched and died. I had to restrain myself from starting a massacre, for all my power, I couldn't fight a whole world alone.

No one looked.

That, more than anything, told me the truth.

This world was broken long before I arrived.

And they had grown used to it.

I clenched my jaw, jaw tight beneath a thin respirator mask that I didn’t need. This isn’t how it should be.

I thought of Angron.

My brother.

He was dropped into hell and forced to fight in slave pits. Forced to lead rebellions. And failed miserably...

I will not be him. I will not fail to free my world. I will not leave its people in chains.

I scanned the rafters. One of the xenos patrols had paused near the upper vents. They looked down, then back to the far distance, toward the horizon.

Toward the crash site.

I followed their gaze.

Through a grime-streaked pane, I saw it. A vessel hanging in the mid-sky. Angular and dark bronze, its hull shimmered faintly in the polluted light. It wasn’t of xeno design; the shape was Athenian. Or it had been. You could see it in the engine array. The dorsal gun mounts. The underlying logic of the design.

Human ships, repurposed. Enslaved, like the people beneath them.

My pod had been taken upon it, but thankfully the ship had not left. I had been hovering over that part of the city for weeks now.

My cradle. My last connection to the Empress and the technology of Old Terra.

And they had it.

That would not do.

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The sun was long gone in Athenia, smothered beneath layers of smoke and cloud. Night on Athenia wasn’t darkness; it was a neon haze and rust-orange floodlights, a grim parody of starlight that never touched the ground. The light of Athenia Prime rarely penetrated the smog, and at night, the light reflected by our only moon Eaena made the sky a dark orange.

I walked with my hood up, shoulders hunched like everyone else, just another figure trudging through the decay. The streets were nearly empty. Only the desperate moved after curfew.

I was three blocks from the apartment when I heard it.

Boots. Flesh. Boots again. A wet cough. A choked whimper. Then another impact.

I slowed my pace and turned into the alley.

Two Deneriks.

Their armor was low-grade, scout units, probably bored, armed only with shock batons and side arms. They stood over the crumpled shape of a man. Thin, middle-aged, limbs curled protectively around his head. His jacket was ripped open. One of them kicked him again, muttering in their tongue. A short, barked laugh followed.

They didn’t even see me.

I moved like water.

One step. Two. I was behind the first one.

My hand shot out and crushed his throat before he could turn. He gagged and dropped, baton clattering against the wall.

The second turned and saw me, his mouth parting to shout. I silenced him with my elbow to his temple, then drove his head into the wall hard enough to crack both the ferrocrete and his skull. He slid down without a sound.

It took less than two seconds.

The human on the ground wheezed, looked up, eyes wide and filled with confusion. Blood ran from his nose and mouth. He opened his lips, a question on his tongue.

"Run home, sir" I said. Before taking the side arms from the xenos, they would be useful in the future.

When the man started to thank me, I was already gone.

Back in the street, cloak pulled tight, steps steady. The light from a passing drone swept over me and moved on.

There were thousands like him.

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The couch groaned beneath my weight, its springs had long surrendered to my might.

I am not fat... I am just... dense.

I lay stretched across it, one boot planted against the armrest, the other half-hanging off the edge. A dim lamp buzzed above, flickering with a dying filament.

Penelope was curled beside me, half-lying across my chest, her legs draped over a threadbare pillow. She held a steaming tin cup, sipping something that smelled like fermented spice and engine coolant, caff they called it, a synthetic, disgusting attempt at making coffee. The holoscreen washed the room in pale blue light, flickering with a parade of carefully edited imagery.

Marching troops. Denerik banners. Speeches in a language meant to sound victorious even when they said nothing.

Order. Prosperity. Unity. Lies.

She leaned against me, warm and quiet, eyes glazed as the screen repeated a looped broadcast of a children's hospital being inaugurated on the southern continent, Hive Artemisa. I doubted it was even real.

The slate sat on my chest, humming gently as I scrolled through its most recent unlock.

A back-channel archive. Technical files. Nothing military-grade, sadly. Civilian stuff, compiled from university records, engineering guilds, patent offices. Blueprints, chemical formulas, system designs for terraforming stabilizers and atmospheric processors. The Athenian Federation was advanced before the xenos came. It still was, but the people did not benefit from the tech anymore.

But I wasn’t looking for climate tech.

I was looking for fire.

And I was finding it.

The data wasn’t complete. The slate hadn’t been made for war, it was a civilian machine, it was like trying to find how to make a pipe bomb on a more advanced and foolproof Google. But I didn’t need schematics to build a bomb.

I needed principles.

Ignition thresholds. Volatility indexes. Circuit templates. Distribution diagrams. Chemical structures. Detonation waveforms. I devoured them all in minutes. The science of the federation was on this dataslate, and I would not let it go to waste.

Plasma pipe bombs... my dreams are coming true.

Where the data stopped, my mind filled in the gaps.

Munitions were just chemistry and courage. I had both in abundance. The rest was time.

Penelope shifted slightly, drawing the blanket higher across her legs. She didn’t notice the way my eyes followed her movements while pretending to read a thermal stress diagram.

She didn’t ask what I was reading. She just stretched like a cat.

Desire.

I clenched my jaw and stared at the ceiling, as if answers might be etched there in the water-stained plaster. But nothing came except speculation.

Primarchs weren’t meant to want.

We were built to lead, to fight, to endure. Not to reproduce. Our emotions were engineered, focused into loyalty, rage and resolve. The capacity for pleasure, for lust, for anything disruptive had been excised or suppressed, I theorized.

Locked away beneath layers of gene-tempered inhibition. Waiting for our creator to unlock it. That had always been the truth of the legions: we were humanity’s shields and swords, not its fathers.

The Astartes had no children. No legacy, except death and duty.

And yet…

My eyes moved to the naked legs of Penelope, to the way the blanket clung to her breasts, and my mind shifted to the feel of her soft body pressing against mine.

I should at least be sterile...

That had been the Empress’s design. No heir should come from a weapon. She didn’t want us to supplant mankind, only to shepherd it.

So what changed?

Was it this world? The fall through the warp? Was I made differently? Or was this some dormant trait, left sleeping in the genome until the right time? Did Slaanesh get to me? Or is it just remnants of my past life?

I had so many questions.

Questions I would one day put to Her, if I ever saw her again.

But for now, I had distracted myself from the tightness in my pants enough to keep working, I looked down at Penelope. Her hair had fallen across her cheek. Her breath was soft. I reached up and turned off the holoscreen; it was just a news feed of marching xeno troops on a newly colonized planet.

The silence settled over us like a blanket.

I bookmarked three formulas, pressure-activated gel explosives, reconstituted from industrial polymer waste. Crude, ugly, perfect for the streets.

Penelope exhaled softly and rested her head closer to my shoulder.

And I kept reading.

The door clicked open softly an hour later.

Penelope stirred at the sound, muttering something incoherent as she shifted against me.

Ariana stepped in, boots scuffing tiredly across the cracked floor tiles. Her hair was damp with sweat, pulled back in a rough tie. Her coveralls were stained with rust and machine oil, sleeves tied around her waist, undershirt clinging to her skin in patches of soot and labor.

She closed the door behind her, quietly, like she was afraid to wake us.

She half glared at her aunt draped over me.

“You’re up,” she whispered, noticing my eyes tracking her movement.

“Still working,” I said, lifting the slate slightly in one hand.

She smirked and dropped her satchel by the wall with a heavy thud. “Of course you are. Do you ever not work?”

“Only when pretending not to.”

She snorted and stepped into the light. Her face was flushed, a smear of carbon across one cheek. “Smokestacks blew again. Half the line went down. They kept us overtime sealing a fuel main with caustic gel.”

“Sounds safe.”

“Oh yeah. Real safe. I only almost lost one hand this time.”

I quirked an eyebrow. “Only one?”

“Progress,” she smirked at me, dragging over a bent metal stool. She sat on it backward, arms folded on the backrest, chin resting on her wrists. “Smells like Penelope finally got caff again.”

“She did. And didn’t share.”

Ariana laughed under her breath. “Figures. She hoards it like it’s fuckin’ gold.”

"No waste, that thing is disgusting."

"One day you have to make me this real coffee of yours."

"It's going to blow your mind, I promise."

We sat there for a while, quiet except for the soft breathing from Penelope beside me and the quiet hum of the slate in my lap.

Ariana’s eyes wandered to the screen. “More weapons stuff?”

“Science,” I said. “But yes. Explosives.”

She grinned. “Remind me not to get on your bad side.”

I gave a faint smile. “You’d know if you had.”

She leaned her head slightly to the side, watching me with tired but curious eyes. “You know… for someone built like a demigod and silent half the time, you’re weirdly comforting to be around.”

I raised an eyebrow, though she couldn’t see it. “You’re just saying that so I don’t make you stop cuddling with me.”

She chuckled. “That must be it.”

She squeezed on my other side, making my arm go around her. Then she sighed, and the humor faded just a little. Her voice dropped.

“Keep doing what you’re doing,” she said. “Whatever you’re planning… just… keep doing it.”

She gave me a peck in the cheek and stood again, slower this time, and made her way toward the back room where she had her mattress.

I watched her disappear into the dark.

The slate’s glow lit up the edge of Penelope’s sleeping face.

And I kept reading. Impossible as it was while living with these two women.

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I sat at the table, fingers lightly drumming against the ancient tablet a few days later. It's screen was dark now, but my mind still roiled with everything I had pulled from it, machine logic, tactical flow, forgotten worlds. I had not blinked in minutes.

The lock clicked.

I turned.

Penelope stepped in through the door coming back from work. She wore makeup, light, but noticeable, and a form-fitting black top that shimmered faintly beneath the flickering overhead light. Her hair was tied back, freshly washed.

She didn’t speak at first. Just closed the door, leaned back against it, and watched me.

I tilted my head slightly. “You’re dressed up.”

She smiled, dry, tired. “Noticed, did you?”

“Somewhere important to be?”

"A human overseer came to work today, and we girls know how to stop them from sending us to our deaths. All men are the same..." She said while smirking at me. I just nodded with dead eyes. I knew enough about women not to question them when they said that.

I could see that she hated this as much as I did.

So they pretty themselves up to stop the collaborators from sending them to work camps for small insubordination or just because they felt like it.

She chuckled at my nod and moved to the table, her boots clicking across the floor. The apartment was silent aside from the distant noise of the manofactorums and the low hiss of steam from the ventilation pipes. She sat beside me, closer than usual. Her thigh brushed mine, and she didn’t move away.

She leaned forward, arms on the table, and studied the dark tablet. “You’ve been staring at that thing for hours. Get anything out of it?”

I nodded. “Some history. A few technical schematics. Some… interesting absences.”

She glanced at me sidelong, one brow raised. “Absences?”

“They erased a lot,” I said. “Cleanly. Like they didn’t want anyone remembering what came before the occupation. I managed to get most of the information back through.”

“Yeah,” she murmured. “Sounds like them.”

A pause.

Then she shifted gears, voice lowering. “Heard something interesting yesterday. Thought you’d want to know.”

I waited.

“A freighter pilot came through last week. Said the Resistance hit the Gurania Fortress . A full-on assault. Killed every Derenik inside and freed twenty thousand people from the work camps."

That name, Gurania, sparked nothing in my memory.

“Where?” I asked.

“This same continent. Near Hive Vern to the west.”

The Resistance wasn’t dead, it seemed. Far from it.

I pictured it, splinter cells in the shadows of every hive tower, whisper networks, sabotage teams using scavenged weapons and old doctrines from a dead federation.

They could be unified.

With a symbol. A sword. A star to march toward.

A spark...

Penelope’s voice drew me back. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she said bitterly. “We’ve heard stories like that before. ‘Heroes in the smoke,’ they say. ‘Freedom’s coming,’ they say. And then the next day someone gets dragged into an armored car and never comes back.”

I watched her carefully. “You don’t believe in the resistance?”

“I believe in not dying,” she snapped. Then sighed. “Sorry. Just tired.”

I nodded once. “You’ve earned it. You have been working hard…”

“Alexander... don’t die on us,” she whispered. “Not like the others. Ariana needs you. Hell… maybe I do too.”

The room was quiet again.

She pulled back after a moment, stood, and walked slowly to the bedroom. Just before the curtain fell behind her, she glanced back.

“Goodnight, Alexander.”

“Goodnight, Penelope.”

The curtain whispered shut.

I sat alone for a while longer, staring at the dark tablet, the smog-lit skyline beyond the glass, and the quiet tremor of a world waiting for its hour.

The Resistance had struck.

There was fire still in humanity here.

I just need to light the match. But how?

I had a few ideas already.

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The night was smothering. The kind that pressed down on you like wet cloth, thick with smoke and silence. A heatless wind whispered through the open balcony door, carrying with it the burnt-metal tang of industry and the rot of a dying world.

Everyone else was asleep.

I stood alone in the living room, shirtless, breathing slow and deep. My hands rested on the rusted balcony rail, fingers curled around the corroded metal as I stared into the infinite lights of the city.

Athenia.

A factory world wrapped in endless strata of habitation and exploitation. A place where hope came in flickers, and freedom was a whisper buried beneath xeno opreession.

Below me, the streets buzzed faintly with the movements of night laborers and patrol drones. Even now, even in darkness, the xenos made sure their boot never lifted.

I had made my decision.

The Resistance, fragmented, bloodied, half-forgotten, was real.

They just needed something to believe in again.

Someone.

I exhaled slowly, watching the fog of my breath vanish into the night air.

Back on Terra, in the long-forgotten days before even the Empress’ dream, when she walked the land like any other human, there had been countless uprisings across Earth’s fractured continents. I remembered the old texts I had consumed, about jungle wars and ghost soldiers. Vietnam, Cambodia, Haiti and a hundred others. Few ever successful. Guerilla warfare against occupying superpowers.

They lost battles. But sometimes, they won wars.

Not with might. Not with better weapons or numbers.

With resolve. With patience. With an understanding of the terrain better than their oppressors.

And with symbols.

The Dereniks had no ideology beyond dominance and conquest, their had religion but that was just the warp parasites controlling their highest strata.

They ruled through fear, automation, and stolen tech. Their system was ancient, decaying, running on inertia more than power.

But humans? Even after centuries of slavery, they still believed.

I would give them something more.

They didn’t need another fighter. They had fighters. They died every day.

What they needed was a myth.

A rallying cry.

The lights of the city blurred at the edges. Pressure built inside of me.

I closed my eyes.

And dropped into the deep.

The warp did not roar this time. It did not scream or twist or claw. It welcomed me as a stranger, but as a native son returned.

My soul unfolded like a war-banner caught in a hurricane.

It was vast. A mountain of thought and fury and divine purpose, coiled in silence beneath my flesh. And I saw it now, it was me, everything I was. Not just shaped by the Empress, but an extension of Her Will, stretched across time and matter.

A Primarch’s soul.

And it was glorious.

It did not flicker like a candle in the currets of the warp like the millions of human souls I could see.

It burned like a star compared to them.

No wonder they revere us.

I sank deeper, reaching inward, through the layers of identity, through memory, function, and myth. Through centuries of purpose stitched into my very being. And at the center of that radiance, I found a name.

Alexander.

The name she gave me.

The name of a conqueror. A name that once brought half a planet to its knees under one man’s ambition.

And in that moment, I knew it was a title.

A prophecy buried in genetic code and divine will. The Empress hadn’t named me after a warlord.

She had named me after herself. A legend she had forged herself. Himself... whatever, when you could shapeshift at will, you could be whatever you wanted.

The great unifier. The relentless force of conquest. The one who brought armies to the edge of the world and made it obey. The one whose speeches made men tired of a decade of war move ever forward.

And now I would do the same.

I opened my eyes.

The aura surged. Power flooded my veins, visible and alive, threatening to break loose like a tidal wave. The walls creaked. The railing cracked beneath my grip. The air shimmered around me.

The city felt me, for a second, I touched billions of human souls in a hundred-kilometer radius and their souls listened to what I had to say.

And I forced it down.

With an act of will that shook the threads of the warp around me, I contained it. Reined it in like a beast on a chain. The light faded. The walls stilled. My breath returned to silence.

I would be a symbol. A myth reborn in flesh.

A conqueror could easily become a liberator with the right context.

I could use the aura to make people follow me, believe, and fight.

I would teach them.

I pressed my palms together, resting them against my forehead, eyes closed.

The next phase would be delicate. I would have to leave the apartment more often, vanish for hours. I’d need clothes that blended in, contacts who spoke the right tongues. Ariana and Penelope would notice. I would have to lie. I didn’t want to…

I would find the Resistance. If they existed in the open, I would learn their names, study their networks. If they were ghosts in tunnels, I would follow the whispers. Either way, I would offer them something they hadn’t had in generations.

Victory. Real. Untainted.

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Dim crimson light poured from hexagonal overhead fixtures inside the barracks, casting the long steel chamber in a warlike gloom. The Denerik patrol squad moved in practiced silence, slipping into armor with mechanical grace. Their carapace suits hissed and clicked into place, encasing their lean reptilian bodies in segmented plating etched with sigils of rank and conquest. Their scaled skin glistened with moisture in the heat, their long tails twitching with anticipation.

One of them, a veteran bearing a ritual scar carved into his upper mandible, pressed a finger against his helmet’s control node. A soft chirrup followed, syncing their squad-channel.

“:: Sector sweep, Industrial Nine. Route Delta-Three. Contact probability: low. ::”

“:: Copy. Sensors clear. Human zone quiet. ::”

Another chittered in a harsh tone, the consonants guttural and barked. “:: Quiet is how they breed rebellion. Better when they scream. ::”

Laughter crackled over the comms. They checked weapons, plasma rifles with serrated bayonets, compact disintegration pistols and shock batons. Each Denerik moved like a predator, claws clinking against the deck as they filed into formation.

Their convoy waited outside: six angular, black-armored vehicles humming with anti-grav suspension. The lead APC bore the insignia of the 12th Compliance Battalion, its rear hatch open, awaiting its cargo. The xenos boarded swiftly, the doors hissing shut behind them.

Engines flared. The convoy lifted into motion, gliding through the smoke-choked streets of Hive Athenia.

The industrial sector sprawled endlessly before them, a forest of steel skeletons and choking chimneys. Towers sagged under centuries of disrepair, and walkways shimmered with chemical runoff. Yellow smog clung to every surface like a second skin. Overhead, Denerik patrol drones buzzed like metal locusts, scanning crowds with faceless red eyes.

Humans shuffled beneath them. Thin, filthy beings. Laborers in patched uniforms moved toward factories as klaxons blared the morning cycle. None looked up at the armored vehicles drifting past. Doing so was courting death.

Inside the lead transport, the squad leader growled low. “:: They smell like fear. It keeps them orderly. No disruption reports today. Boring. ::”

A younger trooper tapped the side of his rifle. “:: Boring is good. More time to play plack. ::”

“:: Weakling’s logic. No gambling in the barracks! ::” The leader sneered.

The convoy turned sharply onto an elevated mag-bridge spanning several decaying structures. Their target was a surveillance node for relay calibration, a routine inspection with armed muscle. Simple.

Then, everything went wrong.

The blast came without warning.

A massive BOOM shattered the silence, and the lead APC erupted in a plume of blue-white fire. The shockwave hurled it into the air like a toy, spinning end over end before crashing upside down on the mag-bridge. Molten debris sprayed in every direction.

Before the Deneriks could react, the rear vehicle exploded next, flipped into the wall by a high-yield directional charge. The convoy was boxed in, front and back annihilated, the remaining four vehicles trapped in the middle of a smoking deathtrap.

Panic erupted.

“:: Ambush! Ambush! Multiple explosions! ::”

“:: Deploy, deploy, take cover! ::”

Then came the gunfire.

From the top floors of a nearby factory tower, a coordinated burst of auto-fire raked across the street. It wasn’t xeno energy-based, it was crude, kinetic, ancient. Solid slugs, but they hit like thunder, each round spitting blood and armor fragments as Denerikians toppled where they stood.

A squad sergeant took a burst to the throat, gurgling as he collapsed.

Another tried to return fire, only to catch a round between the eyes.

“:: Snipers! Rooftop three-seven-two! ::”

The third vehicle’s turret activated and swung to face the building, too slow.

A second explosion bloomed beneath it. The ground beneath the APC fractured as the detonation folded it in half. Black smoke swallowed the vehicle, and bodies were hurled through the air, screaming.

The remaining xenos scattered behind wreckage, their discipline fraying as death rained from above.

Among them, Squad Leader Varrak clawed his way out from under a twisted slab of metal. His right leg was broken, armor split at the knee, but adrenaline dulled the pain. He ducked low behind a scorched strut, activating his visor’s thermal overlay.

Nothing. Just the fire, the smoke, the dead.

His comms chirped with chaos.

“:: We're cut off! They're moving fast, non-human speed! ::”

“:: Sensors aren’t tracking, something’s jamming us! ::”

“:: I saw it, I swear on the blood, I saw it! White hair! Tall!! ::”

Varrak cursed. His squad was being picked apart. He tapped his plasma sidearm to his temple, breathing in short, controlled bursts.

A shadow darted across the far alley. Too fast to track. Varrak’s heart thumped once. Twice. Then a scream from his left, one of his lieutenants was dragged behind a dumpster, the scream ending in a wet crunch.

He spun. Nothing there.

“:: Stay together! Fan out, tight radius! We’ve got a rogue human sorceror, it moves too fast to be nor—::”

Another blur, this time closer. A figure slammed into the fourth APC. Metal screamed as something tore through it like paper. Pulse bolts fired blindly from within, then went silent.

Blood sprayed across the cracked street in long arcs.

Varrak ducked lower, clutching his weapon. H

A shape emerged from the smoke.

It towered over the wreckage, easily two meters tall. Pale skin gleamed beneath a tattered coat. Silver-white hair billowed around a face too symmetrical, too calm. Glowing blue eyes locked onto Varrak.

In one hand, it held a sword longer than a Denerik torso. Blood dripped from its length like rain.

Varrak raised his pistol.

The figure moved.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Time dilated.

I closed the gap in an instant, boots slamming into the pavement with thunderous force. My blade whistled as it cleaved downward.

The xeno managed to fire once and I dodged. The bolt sizzled past my cheek.

Then the jagged sword I had made met armor.

The carapace split like bark beneath a lightning strike. It’s body split diagonally, upper torso sliding apart with a grotesque squelch. Blood fanned across the smoggy air as the xeno died with eyes wide in disbelief.

I stood over the remains, breathing steady, heart calm. My senses stretched outward.

No one else.

Only the moan of wind through shattered metal and the distant hum of Athenia’s poisoned sky.

Around me, the street was a killing field. Six vehicles, sixty xenos, all annihilated in less than a minute. Smoke coiled through the air like mourning incense. Drones hovered overhead, their lenses cracked or burning.

I painted a rough design of a burning chain into the wall.

The Ghost in the Smog had struck.

It would happen a hundred times over the next few days.

Chapter Text

Chapter 5 — The Spark in the Smog

Synthetic coffee, burnt, acrid, and trying its best to be something better than it was, Olyssus produced a bit of everything, but coffee was not one of the things it did... but humanity couldn’t go without its coffee, right?

The scent clung to the recycled air, and for a moment, if I deluded myself hard, I could almost pretend this was a different world.

Light filtered through the blinds in fractured shafts, catching on the rising dust and turning the apartment into a dream of gold and grime. I stirred, instantly awake and looked toward the kitchen alcove.

Ariana stood there, humming under her breath, one hand nudging a scorched nutrient block around a half-functional electric skillet. The stove sparked irregularly, throwing out sharp clicks of faulty ignition. She cursed at it softly and thumped the side with her palm.

She was wearing one of Penelope’s oversized jackets over her factory uniform. Her hair was braided tight, grease still clinging to the edges of her sleeves. A faint bruise darkened her wrist where a conveyor had caught her yesterday.

“Morning,” I said, voice thick with sleep.

She glanced over her shoulder and gave me a tired smile. “Sleep well, lord of the couch?”

I grunted and sat up. “Surprisingly, yes. I think the springs gave up on stabbing me halfway through the night.”

Another victory for mankind!

From the bathroom, I heard the whine of the recycler fan. A moment later, the door slid open with a hiss of protesting hydraulics.

Penelope stepped out into the open, wrapped in nothing but one of my shirts. It barely covered her thighs. Her damp hair clung to her collarbone, a towel draped casually over one shoulder. She arched a brow at me as she padded barefoot across the cracked floor tiles.

For all the oppression, the culture here is surprisingly libertarian… or maybe that’s just Penelope.

Ariana looked at her aunt and started glaring daggers at her and her eyed twitched; it didn't take a primarchs brain to decipher what was going on.

“You’re staring,” Penelope said with a smirk.

“There was an insect near you,” I corrected with conviction.

She smirked and tossed the towel at me. “Sure there was.”

Dammit.

"Ariana, darling, are you trying to stab that poor pan?" She continued.

Ariana rolled her eyes and scraped the burnt meal onto three plates. The smell wasn’t pleasant, but it was warm, and warmth was a kind of victory in a place like this.

We gathered around the makeshift table. Penelope perched beside me, one leg tucked under the other, her skin still dewy from the shower. Ariana stirred her coffee with the end of a broken utensil and muttered something about acid reflux.

Penelope poked at her plate. “What are we eating?”

“Something that used to be food,” Ariana replied. “Don’t ask questions. Just eat it before it eats you.”

I took a bite. It was… chewy. Bland. Slightly bitter. Probably protein brick smuggled out of the line and reheated with whatever grease Ariana could scavenge. But I’d eaten worse. Much worse. Olyssus produced genetically engineered crops for hundreds of billions, even some meat, but most of it went to the factories and got processed into tasteless nutrient paste... tasteless if you were lucky.

I hadn’t gotten a real meal since I got to this planet.  

“Factory?” I asked between bites.

“Hell,” Ariana said simply. “Shift boss fell into the press yesterday. No one helped him until the machine stopped whining.”

Penelope snorted. “Bet someone still clocked his hours.”

“Oh, they gave his pay to his replacement,” Ariana said, lifting her mug in a mock-toast. “To honor his sacrifice.”

Their laughter was dry. Bitter.

"The collaborator rounds are starting now." Penelope said.

"Collaborator rounds?"

"Those traitors come to our factories this time of year, every year. They look at us like insects and make deals with the Dereniks." Ariana explained.

Fucking Traitors...

I leaned back in my chair, watching them. I loved these stolen moments. We felt like a family at moments like this. Sure, a family living under an oppressive and uncaring regime, but a family all the same.

For a moment, I wondered if this is what most families in the future imperium would live.

Every word, every motion, every smile, they were precious, yes, but fragile.

Like glass on a battlefield.

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The air inside the factory was thick enough to chew. Hot, metallic, and soaked in the reek of ozone and hydraulic fluid. Even with the respirator clipped to my face, the stench found its way into my lungs. It coated the tongue, clung to the skin, worked into the pores.

The shift whistle screamed overhead. I moved with the others, a mass of bodies trudging through the blast doors into the belly of the machine.

I kept my head down, eyes forward. Just another worker. Tired. Filthy. Anonymous.

The crate I lifted should’ve needed a loader rig and two men. I hoisted it onto the conveyor with one arm, adjusting my posture to make it look like I was struggling. Veins bulged in my forearm, but I kept the motion awkward, forced. Slow enough to be believable. Fast enough to impress.

Nobody noticed. Or if they did, they didn’t care. Most of them were too broken to question a miracle.

Above us, two Derenikian overseers watched us work, their armored frames hunched.

One snapped a command in their tongue, a wet click-crackle of syllables. A worker nearby winced and adjusted a misaligned press arm.

They never did the work. Only barked orders, punished mistakes, and soaked in the weight of human submission like a fucking narcotic.

In a corner near Line F, one of the plasma welders had a coolant leak. Two cycles out of sync. A pressure build-up, left alone long enough, would rupture the conduit and torch half the line. An "accident." Fatal. Useful.

My muscles moved on instinct while my mind mapped every inch of the floor.

By the time the break whistle blew, my jumpsuit was soaked through. I joined the others near a busted pipe that served as a water line. Steam hissed and droplets pattered onto rust-stained barrels. The benches were warped metal sheets, bent into crude seats.

A few men sat hunched together, sipping from dented flasks and smoking smuggled strips of factory-grade tobacco. They barely looked up as I approached.

“First time on this line?” one asked.

I nodded. “Transfer from Sector J-9, we made artillery shells. They cut the shift. Said the yields were too low.”

“Figures.” The speaker was a wiry old man with silver hair and soot-black hands. His voice rasped like rusted gears. “They squeeze one sector, bleed it, then move the workers like scrap.”

“They’ll do worse if we let them,” I said, calmly.

That made a few heads turn.

One man snorted. “What’re we gonna do? Throw rocks at plasma guns?”

Silence settled. A beat. Two.

Then he leaned in slightly, voice lowering to a whisper. “You hear about the Burning Chain?”

I shook my head. But I smirked internally. The symbol I had started planting every time I killed some aliens was getting steam.

“Last week, they say a whole munitions plant got blown sky-high. No casualties. But the factory was gone, weird thing… most of the munition was gone, they took what they could and blew up the rest.”

"Bah! The rebels won't last long, like always..." Another older worker chimed in.

"They are freedom fighters! This time is different..." The first one said.

That one wasn’t me… It must have been some other rebel cell.

The rebellion is getting steam. I was giving crumbs, killing some Xenos every day.

But we need a big victory, something for people to point at and show them that we can win.

Then the whistle screamed again. The break was over.

I stood and dusted off my hands, the muscles in my back coiled like tension wire.

The old man glanced once over his shoulder. “Watch your step, newcomer. The drones don’t miss twice.”

The shift resumed with the usual mechanical grind. Sparks flew in every direction. Overhead cranes rumbled, dragging half-ton slabs of ore into magmatic presses.

I returned to my station at the stamping line and resumed the motion, pull, align, press, release. It was mindless work, but it gave me time to watch.

Fifteen minutes into the second cycle, the plant floor shifted.

A section of guards moved from their usual posts, forming a tight escort formation by the entry. I felt it before I saw him. The stillness in the air, the sudden tension in the shoulders of every worker nearby.

A man walked in, not a xeno, but one of ours. Human. Except not like us. Not anymore.

He was dressed in an immaculate cobalt suit, the fabric shimmering faintly beneath the overhead lights. His skin was clean. Too clean. No soot, no oil, no burns. His shoes shined. The factory floor swallowed every step in silence. He moved like he belonged here, like he’d walked these halls a thousand times but never touched a machine. Around him, the Denerikian guards kept a respectful distance.

He looked forty, maybe younger. But I knew better. His eyes were ancient. Rejuvenation treatments had erased a century or more, but not the scent of rot underneath.

This was a collaborator. A traitor. The kind of man who sold out humanity piece by piece and called it “management.”

He stopped halfway down the line, speaking quietly to one of the xeno foremen through a translator embedded in his collar. The guards nodded. One pointed toward a cluster of vats in the secondary smelting corridor. The man smiled.

And that was when I knew. He was here for an inspection. Maybe a deal. Some trade. A favor. Maybe a bribe for more privileges. It didn’t matter. I had already decided he would not walk out of this plant.

I waited.

Three hours.

The sabotage required precision. There were dozens of interlinked conduits snaking through the plant’s east sector, carrying volatile plasma coolant under pressure. I knew when the load increased, when the older valves flexed, and when a small tampering, a loosened fastener, a sheared pressure clamp, could cause catastrophic failure.

The pipe in question fed an upper pressure manifold just beneath the catwalk where the collaborator would be stopping. I loosened the seals while pretending to work.

He paused exactly where I expected. Hands on the rail. Conversing. Smiling.

I was fifty meters away when it blew.

The scream of rupturing metal was drowned out by the roar of ignited coolant. A geyser of green-blue flame shot upward from the manifold, punching through the platform like it was made of foil. The collaborator’s body was caught mid-sentence, vaporized in an instant, his outline etched in scorched carbon against the bulkhead behind him. Two Denerikian escorts were hurled into the molten pits below, their armor melting as they screamed.

The alarms blared seconds later. Drones swept overhead. Workers scattered.

I didn’t move.

I stood still as chaos bloomed around me, soot on my face, my uniform stained like everyone else's. Just another cog in the machine, watching another tragedy unfold.

By the time the xenos cordoned off the area, the damage was done.

One down... own many millions to go? I need help...

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The stolen coat hung heavy over my shoulders, it draped well, hiding the shape of my armor plates and the stolen compact plasma cutter strapped against my thigh. I moved like smoke through the underbelly of Athenia, boots silent on metal.

Above, the towers gleamed in sickly green light, but down here, it was darker. Colder. Beneath the streets ran a forgotten web of tunnels, old sewer access, worker catwalks, maintenance ducts left to rust when the occupiers stopped bothering to care.

The city’s bones, rotting quietly.

I moved through them like a ghost.

The depot was up ahead. A squat, armored structure squatting near a ruined transport interchange, its walls glinting with xeno-alloy. The fuel inside wasn’t just for transports. It was routed upward through reinforced pipes to the reactor vents of Spire Three, an entire district of industry fed by that one artery.

If it burned, something far bigger than a factory would go silent.

I crouched near a grate, eyes tracking the route. Two guards. Derenikian. Broad, reptilian shapes in armors that clicked faintly as they shifted positions. They carried plasma rifles.

I slowed my breathing. Counted heartbeats. Then I moved.

A whisper through the dark. I slid behind the wall and attached the charges to the pipeline’s intake valve. They were primitive explosives, but they would do.

I sealed the detonator against the inner wall. Ten minutes.

Then I was gone.

I took a different path back, a faster one through a collapsed service route that bent under the weight of debris. My boots crunched softly over broken glass and scorched insulation. Then I heard them, another patrol. Three this time. Derenikians again, but lightly armored. One of them let out a short burst of chittering laughter. They were talking about something. Joking. Relaxed.

I stepped into the open.

They froze.

I was on them before the first one raised his weapon.

The knife in my hand slipped under the first xeno’s jaw with a wet crack. The second turned, hissed, fired wildly. I knocked the shot wide with my forearm, grabbed the barrel, and rammed it through the third one’s throat. He screamed in a high, reptilian wail before gurgling silence.

The second fell last, arms flailing as I crushed his throat with one hand. He twitched, then stilled.

Two seconds. Maybe three. I was getting faster every time.

Doing this every night got a bit repetitive. But it made people speak about it and prepared the stage for something bigger.

I dragged the bodies into the dark before marking the burning chain into the hiding place. Took rifles. Cleaned my blade on one of their armors. Then I vanished again.

By the time I reached the surface, the depot was a firestorm.

The charges detonated cleanly, rupturing the pipe. A bloom of orange and violet fire split the night, punching skyward in a column of smoke and pressure. The sound followed seconds later. The shockwave shattered windows in a mile radius. I felt the tremor in my bones.

Screams followed. Sirens. The buzz of patrol drones igniting across the skyline.

I crouched beneath a broken skybridge and watched for just a moment.

There would be retaliation. Curfews. Sweeps. Executions.

But they would also whisper.

They would say the Burning Chain had struck again.

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I leaned on the rusting balcony rail, elbows resting atop flaking paint, eyes fixed on the smog-choked skyline. The depot still burned in the distance. Faint plumes of black firelight smudged the sky like bruises.

The door creaked behind me.

Ariana stepped out, hugging a frayed shawl around her shoulders. Her face was tired, lined with fatigue no girl her age should’ve known.

She leaned beside me, arms crossed, and breathed in slowly through her nose. We did not speak for a minute; we just watched the column of smoke in the distance as it joined the almost permanent smog in the sky.

“You can almost pretend the stars are up there,” she said.

"Mmm?"

“They used to say you could see them,” she went on. “On clear nights. My grandfather remembered. He said they looked like lights in the sky.” Her voice grew softer, more wistful. “I always wanted to see them. For real. Not just some projection in a museum dome or some propaganda broadcast of the Grand Shipyard. But actually there in the sky.”

I glanced at her. “There are some pictures from before the occupation on the dataslate. They are beautiful, Ari. Penelope told me the sky clears a few times a year, we can see them together next time.”

She shrugged, a faint smile on her lips. “Maybe then I would like that we were part of something bigger. Not prisoners on our soil.”

We stood quietly for a while. The sounds of the city drifted up around us, low engines, shouting, sirens in the far distance. The world grinding on.

“One day,” I said, my voice low but certain, “you’ll see them. Not from here. Not from under someone’s boot. You’ll stand on a clean world, and you’ll look up and see every star your ancestors ever dreamed of. And all will be yours. Every single one of them.”

Moments like this just steeled my resolve. The people of this world saw little things like that as luxuries; it was not fair...

Ariana turned to me. Her eyes searched mine like she wanted to believe it but had been taught not to. And then, slowly, she nodded.

We sat together on the bench bolted to the balcony wall, legs drawn up for warmth. The metal was cold through our clothes, but she leaned against me, and I let her. A moment of warmth in the polluted dark. No words passed. There were none needed.

The door creaked open again.

Penelope stood in the frame, arms folded, one hip tilted. Her eyes flicked to Ariana, then settled on me.

I knew what she saw.

The blood was dry, but it was there. Faint smears across my boots.

Green blood. Xeno blood.

She didn’t say anything right away. Just stepped out onto the balcony and looked out over the city at the rising smoke.

“Busy night?” she asked, voice too casual.

I didn’t answer.

Penelope’s tone softened. “I saw the fire. Spire-side fuel pipe, they said.”

She didn’t push. She just walked over, stood in front of me, and reached for my hand. Her fingers closed around mine.

“Just don’t die,” she whispered.

I squeezed her hand once. Firm. Promise enough.

Penelope stood, brushed her hair back, and went inside without another word. The door clicked softly shut.

Ariana hadn’t moved. She leaned her head against my shoulder again, as if nothing had passed.

But I could hear her hearth, she also knew even if she said nothing.

There was fire in her eyes as she looked at the smoke.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My hiding spot was dead quiet, save for the occasional pop of cooling metal or the distant hum of the city far overhead.

I had taken it three nights ago, slipped in through a shattered maintenance tunnel. Athenia had forgotten it. The maps still showed it condemned. Too unstable, too irradiated from a refinery fire two decades ago.

The xenos didn’t even patrol here anymore. That was their first mistake.

I stood in what had once been a storage chamber. A wide concrete chamber with cracked walls, graffiti-scarred consoles, and a half-collapsed ceiling covered in rust-flecked beams. Makeshift lights buzzed overhead, stolen from a shipment truck and wired into an old battery cell.

Their flicker cast long shadows across the weapons racks, metal crates, and improvised benches now crowding the room.

One wall was lined with scrap plating and old industrial power tools. On the table before me sat the disassembled guts of a Derenik plasma rifle. Their weapons were elegant but inefficient. Heat-sensitive. I was correcting that.

I wiped sweat from my brow and leaned in again, tightening the refitted firing pin with a precision torque tool.

Human-made, salvaged from a dead engineer’s satchel. I had killed the patrol that dragged his body into the alleys. At least his tools would serve something greater.

Scattered across the room were crates and canisters, all labeled by hand.
POLYMER-GEL: unstable, volatile, good for pressure mines.
OXIDIZER-3B: rare, corrosive, could eat through hull alloy in seconds.
WIRE MESH (TRIGGER): torn from street barricades.
DETONATORS (HANDMADE): crude, but functional.

A dozen makeshift bombs sat in one corner, round, ugly things no bigger than a loaf of bread, but packed with enough force to collapse a tunnel or kill a tank. I had built them over the last few days.

The formulas came from half-buried civil tech papers, and the rest I’d inferred from raw logic and instinct. My mind knew what the data didn’t say. I remembered patterns. Materials. Reactions.

It came naturally.

I wonder just how much information the Empress had implanted into our brains while we were gestating.

On another bench lay several books and shattered dataslates, all half-melted by time or damage, but legible enough for me to reconstruct the science beneath them.

And in the back, propped up on a stand of welded scrap, was a long rifle.

My rifle.

I had built it from the chassis of a stolen Derenik gun. Reinforced the chamber with fused steel coil and a triple-load magnetic rail along the stock. It looked ugly. Rough. But when I pulled the trigger yesterday, it blew a half-meter hole through reinforced concrete.

Guerrilla warfare wasn’t about firepower. It was about message. Every explosion would be a voice. Every fire a scream the xenos couldn’t silence.

I moved to the corner, where a sheet of alloy plating had been bolted to the wall. A map. Tracing city blocks and sewer lines, marking xeno outposts, patrol routes, blind spots. Red lines crisscrossed the slums. Blue ones marked escape routes. Yellow for targets. Every week, I updated it. Every day, it got more crowded.

I turned back to the rifle and slid the final component into place. The bolt clicked home with a clean, mechanical snap.

I held it up, sighted along the barrel, and imagined the head of a Derenik officer exploding in a mist of green ichor.

I allowed myself a breath of satisfaction. Then set the weapon aside, moved to the next one. Always the next one.

There was so much to do.

Tonight it was the time for my biggest hit yet.

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Ahead, the war depot squatted behind jagged walls of ferrocrete and razorwire. Twin guard towers rose like blunt fangs, each armed with turret sentries and roving spotlights. The structure pulsed faintly with energy signatures, movement, heat, and the slow churn of machinery.

I knelt behind the corpse of a half-crushed crawler engine, pulled out the cracked tablet I’d stolen three nights ago, and flicked through the schematics. The depot had been designed for heavy logistical traffic. That meant entrances. Unsecured when used properly. A liability when subverted.

I watched. Counted steps. Timed the rotation of each turret. Every guard’s path. Two Derenik officers at the northern entrance, armed with plasma rifles and reinforced armor. Their postures were lazy, unfocused. The arrogance of occupiers.

I moved.

A single dash through shadow brought me to the outer fence. My fingers dug into the seams of the metal, and I hauled myself over in complete silence.

I was inside the first ring.

The automated turrets along the perimeter wall were older models from the Federation. Still reactive, but sluggish. I slipped beneath their sweep, crawled along a trench and climbed into the scaffolding.

I found the access panel beneath a rust-stained overhang. Pried it open. The internals hissed faintly, alive with static charge. I jammed my fist into the thing and pulled the wires.

Fzzz—pop.

The turret above me gave a mechanical groan and sagged to the side.

One down.

I moved again.

A shadow passed overhead. I froze, letting the patrol drone drift by, its scanner light sweeping uselessly across the surface.

Near the second tower, two xenos chatted idly, their voices clicking and rasping. I dropped from the scaffolding and hit the ground running.

They noticed me a second too late.

My blade flashed once, then twice. The first xeno lost his legs mid-turn, screaming as he crumpled. The second raised his rifle, but I was already inside his reach. I drove the blade under his chin, splitting his skull in two.

They hit the ground with wet thuds.

Still no alarms.

I stepped over their corpses, wiped my blade clean on the dead one’s cloak, and slipped inside the cargo entrance as the blast doors hissed partway open from my earlier tampering.

Inside, the depot was cavernous, stacked with crates, drone racks, and storage units. Hissing pumps expelled pressurized gas through floor vents. I followed the humming of active stasis units to the back, toward a row of sealed transport trucks. Three of them. Freshly loaded.

I cracked one open.

Inside were rows of canisters, each tagged with warning glyphs and xeno-code identifiers. I scanned them quickly. Flammable. High-yield. Volatile under vibration. Industrial-grade accelerants, designed for plasma combustion engines or weapons.

The other crates were full of plasma weapons and munitions.

A grin ghosted across my face.

I didn’t have time to empty the depot. But I could take enough to begin a resistance cell.

I branded the Burning Chain symbol on the floor and placed an explosive in the other trucks.

I climbed into the cabin of the nearest hauler. The controls were half-familiar. Alien tech with a stolen Human foundation. It purred under my fingers.

The first alarm shrieked just as I slammed my fist into the ignition.

Motion sensors. Dead guards. Turret failures. They had pieced it together.

The truck lurched forward, tires spinning on slick metal. I rammed through the first blast gate, clipped a landing crawler, and felt the vehicle shudder as the external hull took a grazing shot from a plasma tower.

The second gate slammed down ahead of me.

I didn’t slow.

I routed full energy to the front servos and released the onboard pressure lock from the chemical tanks. The resulting shift in weight sent the truck crashing forward like a battering ram. The gate folded inward with a bone-rattling crunch, sparks spraying across the cockpit.

Then I was through just as the other trucks, full of munitions and dangerous chemicals and exposies, blew up.

"Bye, fuckers!" I laughed manically. That was straight out of a movie!

Behind me, alarms wailed. Drones launched into the smog, but I was already weaving through the ruins of the industrial fringe, the truck roaring like a wounded beast.

The city swallowed me whole.

Fifteen minutes later, I unloaded the cargo in my hiding spot and then abandoned the truck near the tunnels. I left a series of trip mines on the tires, a failsafe on the cargo bay. If they found it, it would take them with it.

I walked the last few kilometers through the undercity, hands black with soot, boots slick with blood and fuel.

My mind was already racing.

With all this…

The chemicals. The detonation yields.

The ship hovering over the city…

It wouldn’t take much. Not with the right delivery system.

But first, I would teach the Xenos what it meant to fear the night.

Konrad was right about one thing at least… terror is key.

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The door creaked open on silent hinges. I stepped into the apartment.

I shut the door quietly and moved toward the washroom, already thinking about the fuel stashed under the false floor in the maintenance bay.

“Ari’s asleep,” I murmured under my breath, expecting quiet.

“I’m not.”

I froze.

She was standing in the middle of the room, arms crossed, a single dim light casting long shadows across her face. Ariana’s eyes blazed with a fire I hadn’t seen before, not since the night we met. Her jaw was tight, and her hands trembled slightly, not from fear, but from fury barely contained.

“Dramatic.” She just ignored my quip.

“You’ve been out again,” she said, voice low and sharp. “Out there. In the dark.”

I didn’t answer.

She took a step forward, eyes scanning me like a hunter reading blood on the ground. “You think we don’t notice? The blood? The burns on your gloves? You disappear for hours at a time, and when you come back, a new sector is burning.”

I sighed. “You shouldn’t be up, Ari...”

“Don’t do that,” she snapped. “Don’t change the subject. You may be a hundred times smarter than I, but I’m not an idiot, Alexander. The xenos have been broadcasting alerts nonstop. Whole patrols, gone. Fuel depots in flames. They’re afraid. And they keep talking about him, this ‘ghost in the smog.’ The burning Chain. The shadow that kills without being seen.”

She pointed at me.

“It’s you. Isn’t it?”

I looked away. Silence lingered like a held breath.

“Say it,” she demanded. “I want to hear it from you.”

“…Yes,” I said.

The word landed with the weight of a thunderclap.

Her face didn’t twist in fear or disappointment. It hardened. “I knew it...”

“I’m trying to protect you,” I said, voice low. “Both of you.”

“You think we need protection?” she shot back. “You think we’re fragile? We’ve lived our whole lives in fear, Alex. I watched my mother get taken by those things. I still hear her scream in my dreams. You saw me cry over the corpse of my father! I survived. Aunt Penelope survived. You don’t get to shut us out.”

“It’s not the same,” I growled. “You don’t know what’s coming. You think skirmishes and bombings are war? When the xenos strike back, when they really fight, they’ll burn whole districts. They’ll turn this place to ash. I can’t protect you if you’re out there with me.”

“You’re not protecting me by lying,” she hissed. “You’re just deciding that my life’s not worth the same fight. You think you’re alone? that no one else can carry this? You’re wrong.”

She stepped closer, hands clenched into fists at her sides. “I want to fight. I need to. For dad, for mom. For everyone who’s still a slave. You always say we need hope. A symbol. But that doesn’t mean people sit around and wait for someone else to save them.”

I looked at her, really looked. The bruises on her knuckles from factory accidents. The faded scar on her collarbone from when the guards dragged her down the line. The smudges of oil and fire that never quite washed away. She wasn’t some fragile girl I’d pulled out of danger. She was forged in it.

“You’ll die,” I said, my voice soft now, bitter. “You’ll die out there.”

“Then I’ll die standing,” she said. “Not kneeling.”

I laughed a bit at that. She did not know she was quoting a revolutionary.

A long silence passed between us. The city murmured outside, smog whispering against the balcony glass.

Something shifted in my chest.

She was right.

The war was coming to her whether I wanted it or not. And she would be in its path either way.

“Fine,” I said.

Her eyes widened. Like she couldn't believe the words.

“I’ll train you. I’ll teach you everything I can. You’ll carry weapons, learn to move in silence, to shoot, to strike, to kill. But you will follow my orders. You don’t deviate. You don’t lie to me. You train like your life depends on it, because it will.”

A beat. Her mouth opened, then closed again. Then she let out a sharp, breathless laugh and jumped forward, throwing her arms around my neck.

“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you’d say yes.”

She kissed me on the cheek, quick, warm, burning with unspoken joy.

I caught her by the shoulders and looked her dead in the eye. “This isn’t a game.”

“I know,” she said, eyes still shining. “But now it’s a war I can fight.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 6 — Sparks in the Night

We were training in one of my hiding places a few weeks later. It had been a productive few weeks. I had managed to recruit a few people, and training was going well. Convincing people to fight their oppressors was not too difficult if you knew what to look for and used a bit of primarch aura in the process.

This place was hidden, forgotten, and solid. That was enough. In the next room, the crates upon crates of weapons and explosives were hidden and protected, and they had already been of use in the last attacks and in the training of my recruits.

Today was another day of training and grinding them into a fighting force worth the name.

Ariana stood across from me, wrapped in a tight training vest and worn trousers, sweat plastering stray strands of hair across her brow.

Her breath came quickly. She kept her stance low and coiled, blade held with both hands, trembling just enough to betray the tension. Her knuckles were white.

“Again,” I said.

She moved. Faster this time. Holding myself to human reaction times was not hard. I had exceptional control of my motor functions. It was the only way to teach them, else I would seem like a blur if they were lucky.

The practice knife stabbed forward with purpose. I caught her wrist, twisted, and pivoted with a hip-check that sent her tumbling to the floor. She rolled back up, scowling.

“You’re overthinking,” I said, stepping back. “Fighting’s not chess. It’s speed.”

“I am trying,” she snapped, brushing grime from her elbow. “You just don’t go down. And what the fuck is chess!”

“I’ve a few advantages... And chess is a turn-based strategy board game— You know what. I will show it to you soon.”

Alexander. Primarch of the Second Legion. Reinventor of Chess... At least in Athenia.

She came at me again without waiting. That was better. Instinct, not overthought. Her blade flicked out low, then high, this time I let it graze the padded armor over my ribs. She saw it land and lit up with hope, which I immediately punished by catching her leg mid-kick and slamming her to the mat.

She groaned, lying there for a breath. “I hate you a little.”

“You’ll hate me more if I don’t teach you right,” I said, offering a hand.

She took it. Her grip was firm.

I had managed to secure some mats for this and a few mannequins for target practice.

I walked her through the motions again. Footwork first, heel turns, sidesteps, weight shifts. Then knife drills. Cut, slash, redirect. I corrected her stance with a tap here, a shove there. She started out sharp, but grew frustrated the more I adjusted her. That stubborn flick of the chin meant it was getting to her.

She threw the knife down eventually. “What’s the point? I’ll never be as good as you.”

“No,” I said. “You won’t.”

That hit her. Her eyes narrowed.

Mount Ariana is about to blow!

I stepped in closer, tone gentling. “But you don’t need to be. You just need to be better than them. You learn to strike before they do. Or you don’t come back. That’s the point.”

She stared at me. Her arms dropped to her sides.

“You're doing better than most of the other recruits,” I added. The last month had been hard for me, training recruits, factory work to mislead the Xenos, guerrilla by night... Penelope half naked when I got home... “But if you want to fight, if you want to survive, then you have to stop trying to be perfect. Start being dangerous.”

“I am dangerous.” She winked at me cocking her hip.

“Your mouth moved, but your aunt spoke.” I chuckled.

That pulled a smile from her, barely. She picked the knife back up.

We circled again. I let her take the initiative. This time she feinted left, slashed low, then pivoted into a shoulder slam. I let her do it. It was rough, sloppy, but the knife scraped along my hip, and her elbow cracked against my ribs. I let out a grunt, stepping back.

She blinked. “Did I…?”

“You did.”

A beat. Then she grinned, wild and triumphant. I nodded. She needed more confidence in herself, and fighting a primarch wasn’t giving it to her.

“You’re learning.”

She pulled her sweat-soaked hair back and tied it. Something was hardening in her now. A core of tempered steel was slowly replacing all the raw grief and rage I’d seen in her before. She was building herself, brick by broken brick.

I remembered the first time I met her, eyes wide and terrified. Now she stood across from me, sweat running down her spine, chest rising and falling, blood on her training vest. Still not a warrior. But something closer.

I tossed her a water flask. She caught it, gulped, then wiped her mouth on her wrist.

I stepped closer. “Again, Ari. If you can hit me, I will convince Penelope to give up some of her caff.”

She held my gaze. “You are a dead man.”

Dramatic much?

She picked up the knife again, spun it once in her fingers.

I moved to the center of the ring. “Come on then.”

She charged. Her foot planted hard, her shoulder dipped. Then she actually managed to surprise me; she threw some dust at my eyes, and her elbow arced in fast and low. This time, I couldn’t stop the hit while limiting myself to human speeds. The blade came up under my ribs, not deep enough to wound, and even if it had, she did not have the strength to penetrate my skin and muscle tissue deeply. But she had actually managed to get a hit without me giving it to her...

I froze. She held the stance. Her breath hitched.

Then she smiled. And started jumping up and down.

She is so damn cute.

She was getting better. They all were.

In a few nights, we would hit our first target as a team. And the Burning Chain would stop being a one-man army.

Then and there I made a desition.

"Ari, pick your gear. We are going hunting."

"But... I thought the hit would not be in another two days?" She said as she stopped jumping up and down.

"You get to join me tonight. Do you not want to?"

"Yes!" She ran to get geared up.

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We crouched beneath a ruined overpass, shadows dancing along the concrete above us from distant lights. The checkpoint was fifty meters up the road, three Derenik footsoldiers and a hovering drone that clicked softly every few seconds as it rotated its sensors.

I held up two fingers, then a third. Ariana nodded. She’d memorized the rhythm already.

Three targets, one drone. Standard sweep team. No exosuits, no heavies, no witches. They weren’t expecting a fight.

I pointed to the xeno and drew a line in the air, then a short vertical stab. Her nod was slower this time.

Knife kill.

It would be her first.

We circled out, using the wreckage of a flipped transit truck for cover. Broken glass glittered on the asphalt. I stayed low, scanning for proximity fields, but the checkpoint was lazy. Probably set up after the last riot.

We reached the edge of the concrete berm, and I tapped her shoulder twice. She moved, smooth and silent. Her breathing steady. She slid into the dark behind the furthest xeno. Its back was turned, posture slack.

I watched. Rifle and knife ready to save her if something went wrong.

One step. Two.

Then the flash of metal.

Her arm went around its throat, knife driving in deep at the base of the skull. The thing spasmed, legs jerking. She held it firm, a grunt escaping her as she twisted the blade. It dropped. Silent.

I moved before the second one turned.

My blade punched up under its chin, splitting the mandibles wide. I grabbed the body as it twitched and dropped it with a wet thud.

The third spun, too slow. I pulled my rifle and fired. The silencer hissed and its eye socket shattered inward as its brains shot to the wall. It collapsed without a sound.

The drone rose fast, sensors pinging red.

Ariana took cover behind a pillar. I ducked low, aimed, and sent two shots into its core. It screamed, then sputtered, dropping sparks. Wounded.

“Ariana!” I called out.

She looked up. I pointed to the drone.

“Yours.”

She hesitated for only a second, then bolted from cover, rifle raised. The drone flared in her direction, trying to rotate a damaged cannon mount. Too slow. She fired once, missed, then again.

The shot hit the exposed core. The machine detonated with a crackle of heat and plasma. Metal shards clanged off the ruined overpass.

Silence returned.

She stood there, chest rising fast, rifle still up.

I approached and put a hand on the barrel, guiding it down.

“It’s dead,” I said.

She nodded slowly.

She didn’t answer. Just knelt beside the alien she’d knifed, eyes distant.

“You did good,” I said.

Still no answer.

I crouched beside her and started stripping the bodies, plasma guns, a functioning scanner, a granade. Ariana had not said anything yet and she just stared at the dead bodies. It began to worry me.

"Ari... Are you—"

“YEAH!!! TAKE THAT!!” She shouted before she started to kick the alien corpse.

Weren’t you in shock a second ago?!

She holstered the pulse rifle and began checking the xeno gear with fumbling fingers with me.

I planted the symbol of the Burning Chain in the scene. The legend was getting bigger and bigger.

I checked the time on my slate. Three hours until curfew shifted. We had a window to get out clean.

If all my soldiers were half as eager a Ariana. Then I would have no problem kicking the xenos off-world.

They were a rowdy bunch.

As we walked back to our hiding spot, I remembered the first time I taught them all how to shoot.

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The sun bled low across the fractured skyline, casting the city in a haze of rust and smog. Fires flickered on the horizon where some block still burned from last night's reprisal.

We were deep inside the husk of a collapsed manufactorum, a place long forgotten by anyone who mattered. A crumbling third floor, half-caved and open to the smog-choked sky. The perfect place to teach a handful of desperate people how to kill.

There were ten of them. Ariana stood out, the first to show up and the last to leave every night. The others were a rough lot: two brothers from the Ironclad camps, Dren and Letho, barely out of adolescence but already scarred from whips.
Mira, a mechanic-smuggler who’d smuggled ammo in grease cans for years into different parts of the Hive, I had learned a lot from her about the different groups that conformed the Hive's dark underbelly.
Garran, a failed preacher who now preached revolt, and the rest, silent, angry, hungry.

Survivors all.

“Alright,” I said, kicking the tarp to unfurl it. “Pick your poison.”

Weapons clattered into place. A xeno plasma rifle, sleek and humming faintly. A human las-carbine. A ballistic pistol, ugly and heavy but reliable and few magnetically accelerated weapons.

One of the brothers, Dren, whistled. “Never seen a plasma gun this close before.”

“Get used to it,” I said. “You’re going to be stealing them off corpses soon.” He looked at me with determination and nodded.

Ariana stepped forward and pointed. “That one. The pistol.”

“Good choice.” I handed it to her. “You learn on this, everything else gets easier.”

She gripped it wrong, too high. I adjusted her fingers.

“Relax your wrist,” I said. “You’re not strangling it.”

“I don’t want to drop it either,” she muttered.

“If you’re dropping it, you’re already dead.”

That earned a chuckle from the others. Mira picked up the las-carbine and gave it a suspicious look. “I snuck a few of this to the Velvet Hand a year ago. They always feel like they’ll fall apart in my hands.”

“It might,” I said. “The federation's tech was reliable but this ones have not been in production since the fall.”

"We killed a whole lot of xenos during the war, according to my grandmother. So it will do." She replied.

Gerran knelt beside the xeno rifle. “You ever see what one of these does to a man?”

“I’ve seen it open a man from spine to sternum with two shots,” I did not tell them that I was the one who had fired the shots, or that the man was a collaborator going through the city in his hover car. “And I’ve done worse with it to the xenos scum. You’ll get your turn.”

They sobered at that.

I set up the targets, salvaged drones, a melted statue from some plaza. It looked like a bird, half its face blown off. I hung it from the ceiling. “That one’s our friend. Say hello.”

Ariana raised the pistol, lined up her shot, and fired. It cracked loudly and missed wide.

Letho snorted before I shot him a glare. Making him want to melt into the ground.

“Too fast,” I said. “Don’t shoot just to shoot. Breathe. On the exhale. Let the gun do the work.”

“Again,” she muttered and fired. This time, it hit the edge of the statue’s wing. Sparks flared.

Dren took a shot at a drone. The recoil nearly took his shoulder out.

“Fuck!” he shouted. “Why’s it kick like that?”

“That one is not a lasgun, it uses chemichal propellant to fire the munition at mach five.” I barked. “Plant your feet.”

He nodded sheepishly. The next shot landed.

For an hour we practiced in rhythm, aim, fire, reload. I moved among them, correcting posture and stance. Mira adjusted fast. Gerran liked to talk, muttering prayers before each shot. I let him. Whatever helped. Ariana didn’t say anything. She just kept shooting. Improving.

Then I called out, “Time to move. Grab your gear.”

A few groaned.

“This ain’t a firing line,” I snapped. “You don’t get to pick your perfect moment. You shoot while running, bleeding, scared out of your mind. Let’s go!”

"Sir, yes, sir!" They responded. Discipline was one of the first things I had begun to teach them.

They followed me through the circuit, down rusted stairs, across sagging catwalks, through blown-out corridors. I led them fast. Turned corners into sudden targets. I yelled as they stumbled.

“Contact left!”

Ariana spun and fired, two rounds, both hits.

“Cover your corners!”

Garran ducked behind a column, too slow.

“You’re dead, preacher!”

He cursed and reset.

“Stay low!” I shouted. “Your head isn’t bulletproof!”

By the time we circled back to the ruined floor, they were spent. Most collapsed onto broken crates or sat on the floor, panting. Mira lay back, arms stretched wide.

“Holy Apollion,” she groaned, “this is worse than pulling power cores from drone guts.”

“You did well,” I said. “Some of you might even survive the first real fight.”

Garran snorted and grinned. “Now there’s a vote of confidence, sir.”

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We lay on our bellies across the skeletal remains of an old transit bridge, overlooking the target.

A xeno outpost squatted in the ruins of what had once been a commuter station, its original purpose lost to dust and collapse. Now, it served as a resupply node for patrol drones and recon flights. A staging point.

Twenty of them, we’d counted. Maybe more inside.

“Everyone in position?” I asked over the vox.

Clicks answered in my ear. Ten of them, all present.

Ariana was next to me, plasma rifle snug against her shoulder. Her face was streaked with soot, her breathing even.

“Third shift’s ending,” Garran whispered from the south flank. “Looks like two guards by the gate, three coming off the patrol circuit now. Timing’s clean.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Final checks. Weapons green. Suppressors on. We start quiet. Then we make it loud.”

Mira’s voice crackled in. “Charges placed. One beneath the shed in the swers, two on the drone housing bay.”

“Wait for my mark,” I said. “Ariana, you’re with me. Close assault team. Everyone else, bleed them from the dark.”

She nodded once.

Below us, the xenos moved with that too-smooth gait, all sharp joints and armor.

I raised a closed fist. Breathed in. Held it.

Then dropped it.

Crack.

The first xeno guard at the gate collapsed, a hole punched through its eye socket. A moment later, a las-round dropped the second. A third xeno spun in confusion, tried to shout, and vanished in a flash of blue as Mira’s charge tore the drone shed apart in a plume of smoke and fire.

I stood and sprinted down the incline.

“Move!” I shouted. “Everyone in!”

The night lit up with gunfire and shouting. Energy bolts hissed past us like burning hail. Ariana fired on the run, her rifle shrieking with each shot. One xeno tried to rise from behind a broken barricade, its torso blew apart as she stitched it with a full burst.

We cleared the ridge and hit the courtyard. A xeno snapped its rifle toward us, I rammed into it shoulder-first, slammed it into the wall, and drove my knife up beneath its chin. It spasmed and dropped, dead before it hit the dirt.

To the west, the Ironclad brothers laid down suppressive fire, shouting curses as they advanced. One of them took a grazing shot to the shoulder but didn’t stop, blasting two more xenos into shredded heaps.

“Charges on the drone bay going hot!” Mira called.

Another explosion rocked the compound, smoke flooding the center. Screams, alien and human, cut through the chaos.

“Watch left!” Ariana shouted.

Three xenos burst from the smoke. One of them glowed with a faint psychic shimmer.

Psyker.

It raised its clawed hand. The air warped, pulsing with pressure and light.

But Ariana was faster.

Her rifle shrieked. The bolt slammed into the psyker’s head like a comet. Bone and brain matter sprayed the wall behind it. The shimmer collapsed.

“Nice shot,” I muttered.

I ducked behind a collapsed pillar and scanned the field. Half the compound was in ruins. Xeno bodies littered the ground, some still twitching. The rest had regrouped near the north bunker, eight of them, forming a defensive wedge.

“Push them,” I ordered. “Now. Don’t give them time to call reinforcements.”

Garran emerged from cover with a grenade in one hand and his las-carbine in the other. “In the name of those who have nothing, burn! Athenia will be free!”

He lobbed the grenade near the bunker entrance. Fire roared up in seconds.

“Flank right!” I called. “Ariana, twins, with me!”

We broke from cover. I fired on the run, two rounds striking a xeno in the leg and throat. It stumbled. Ariana finished it.

The brothers charged low, hurling shrapnel grenades. The explosion threw two xenos into the air, flailing and screaming, or just in pieces.

Another turned, weapon glowing, but I was already inside its reach. My fist cracked across its jaw. Bone split. It reeled, and I snapped its neck.

One of the last remaining defenders, a towering brute in command armor, bellowed something guttural and charged. Ariana stepped into its path. Her hands didn’t shake.

It raised its blade.

She ducked and fired point-blank.

The burst blew a hole the size of a fist through its gut. It dropped to its knees. She finished it with a shot to the face.

Silence fell, broken only by the crackle of fire and the wind whistling through broken walls.

“Clear,” I said.

The others emerged one by one. Mira limped, blood seeping from a cut on her thigh. One of the brothers was cradling his arm. But they were all alive.

Ariana stood over the dead psyker, breathing hard.

“You alright?” I asked.

She nodded. “That witch tried to get inside my head. I felt it… pressing. Like a voice inside my head.”

“But you didn’t break. That’s what matters.”

She shook her head and grinned. “I killed it.”

She is turning into a murder happy girl... I don't know if I should be proud or not.

We regrouped in the center of the compound. The fires burned low now, casting long shadows over the smoking bodies.

“We’ve got ten minutes tops,” Mira said, checking her watch. “Any longer and we’ll have drones here.”

“Strip everything,” I ordered. “Ammo, power cells, armor plates. Burn the rest.”

They moved fast. The adrenaline hadn’t worn off yet. We took crates of munitions, sealed rations, data slates, even xeno tech where it looked portable.

Garran raised the xeno commander’s helmet high over his head. “Let them know,” he roared to the dark. “We are the fire you tried to starve!”

I let a bit of my aura out and shouted. "Athenia!"

The others joined in, voices hoarse but rising.

“Athenia!”

Ten rebels, bloodied but standing, their eyes lit with something more than survival.

Conviction.

A good start.

The next few months would be very interesting indeed.

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Between the towers and the skeletons of hab-stacks, the streets pulsed with slow, grinding life. Workers moved in clusters, boots echoing over ferrocrete. Neon signs flickered weakly overhead, advertising a bit of everything that was not banned by the regime.

Nobody paid them any mind.

A line snaked outside the nutrient paste dispensary near Alley Sector M-27. Locals stood hunched and silent, eyes wary, shoulders bowed from years of labor and smoke. The city devoured everything.

But lately, something had changed.

“They hit another checkpoint last night,” one man muttered, voice low, barely audible under the thrum of a passing skimmer.

“Where?” asked a hunched woman beside him, arms wrapped around a filthy coat.

“Near the rail junction, southside. Two xenos dead, plus a collab officer and a whole auxiliary unit of twenty, the dirty traitors.”

A boy behind them, maybe fourteen, looked up. “The Burning Chain?”

The older man glanced around, then gave a cautious nod. “Had to be. What does that make? Five attacks yesterday all over the city?”

“They say they took the drone controls in sector 13B,” added another voice from deeper in the line. “Turned half the security patrol on each other. Hundreds of xenos died before they managed to regain control.”

Hidden smiles passed between them.

The woman in the coat looked down the line, toward the flickering light of the dispensary booth. “You really believe that? Freedom fighters?”

“Don’t care what they are,” the man muttered. “They’re killing the bastards. That’s good enough for me.”

A moment of silence passed. Even the air seemed to hold its breath. A train screeched in the distance, wheels grinding along a decayed track. Somewhere above, a drone buzzed by, scanning every person in the street. Yhe xenos were getting more paranoid every day.

“They are fighting back,” said a gray-haired worker near the alley wall, “they told us fighting back was suicide. Xenos bombed Gutteng Hive, wiped out half a sector just to show they could. My brother died in that purge.”

He spat.

“But now? Look at them." He pointed at a xeno patrol, their plasma rifles out, looking nerveously in all directions. "Now they’re scared.”

Another man leaned in. “You hear what they say about their leader?”

“Who?”

“Apollion, like the godling who fell from the sky! They say he killed three witches with his bare hands when he landed.”

“Bullshit, that is just a story,” the gray-haired worker said. But not with conviction.

Then it happened

A sound like the sky tearing open.

A low whump, followed by a wave of heat and pressure that threw half the line to the ground. Fire bloomed in the middle distance, bright orange behind the silhouette of a patrol tank hovering over the street.

The machine teetered, its armor buckled, and then it exploded, violently, in a rising column of light and debris that shattered the windows on both sides of the avenue.

People screamed. Sirens wailed. A red flare burst overhead, painting the streets in bloodlight.

“DOWN!” someone shouted.

"For Athenia!"

A second tank across the intersection shuddered, turret spinning wildly before detonating in a thunderous chain reaction. The entire sector lit up as if a second sun had risen behind the steel bones of the city.

The boy scrambled to his feet, face pale, ears ringing.

The old man grabbed him and pulled him into cover behind a collapsed rail barrier. “Don’t look! Don’t think, just move!”

Drones began screeching from rooftops, their searchlights slashing the ash-thick air. Shots rang out in the chaos, short, surgical bursts. Somewhere nearby, a xeno trooper was barking commands in their guttural, clicking tongue, just before his head exploded in gore after an armor-piercing round hit it.

The street was rubble. The tanks were nothing but slag.

And hanging above it all, painted across a banner hanging from the façade of a burned-out hab-block, was a new mark.

A chain.

Burning.

The Burning Chain had struck again.

By nightfall, it would be all everyone whispered about.

By morning, it would be a story told with lowered voices and eyes full of cautious hope.

By the next night, it would be old news, after sixteen similar attacks were performed all across the Hive.

Chapter Text

Chapter 7 — The Chain Grows

I stood near the edge of the spire's roof, wrapped in a long cloak that snapped behind me like, my hands resting steady on the stock of my rifle, nearly as long as I was tall.

Setting the scope without moving anything had been difficult, but I had managed.

Bolt-fed, hypercoil augmented. It had become my baby. Most in the Burning Chain used lasguns and plasma weapons, but the magnetic rifle could also cause significant damage. I’d rebuilt it myself, piece by piece, then enhanced it.

Standardizing weaponry for my forces would have to be one of the first things I would do once we had access to our own manufacturing. That and professionalizing our forces...

Hive Athenia stretched far below. A sprawl of rust and smoke and shadow, a city devouring itself in silence. The towers rose like fingers clawing for light. And somewhere beneath all that rot, the Burning Chain thrived.

It had been two months since we first struck back. Two months of fire and steel and blood.

And a whole lot of dead xenos and collaborators.

We were no longer a whisper.

Through the scope, the hive was revealed in ghostlight orange. I swept the lens across the skyline, scanning. A half-demolished manufactorum smoldering from yesterday’s raid. A power relay station pulsing erratically after sabotage teams cut half its lifelines. Gunfire flickered in a distant alley like fireflies caught in a bottle.

Every spark was ours.

Hundreds joined our ranks each week. Some came barefoot, limping through sewage with broken hands and butchered families. Some carried rusted shotguns and guns from the glory days of the Federation, others nothing at all. Former prisoners. Broken workers. Betrayed former auxiliaries. All of them are human. All of them are hungry for something more.

And we trained them. We turned their fire into discipline.

Makeshift camps rose in forgotten places, deep maintenance warrens, shattered tram stations, underhive graveyards. Garran broke recruits into killers. Mira taught them to bleed quietly and strike fast. Letho drilled ambushes till their bones ached. Dren armed them with looted plasma weapons and taught them how to kill their machines.

Ariana just beat them black and blue and told them to do better. Who could have thought that being personally trained by a primarch would make you into a little beast on the battlefield?

It worked.

At least a dozen assaults a day. Every rail convoy that burned, every patrol that vanished, every Derenik officer who fell to a knife in the dark, they all whispered the same thing.

We are not afraid of you. We are here to stay. We are the Burning Chain and we will not stop until we are free.

And the people listened, every day came reports up to me of people fighting the xenos without our input, of makeshift rallies being brutally suppressed, the spirit of invincibility of the Dereniks was broken, and now the people knew that there was another option.

Fighting back. The thousands of recruits we had proved it. Now we needed to prepare for a big push. The fighting spirit was introduced into the populace like gasoline; now we need the spark.

Something that completely changes the tide… Something that turns ten thousand rebels into a billion-strong army…

Our very own Bastille.

We were still waiting for our organization to grow more before we lit the whole place up. Before an opportunity arose to make the whole planet, the whole system rise up in arms.

Still... the retaliation came, and it came hard. The xenos executed thousands in the streets. Whole hab-blocks had been butchered. But for every person that died, two more picked up a weapon.

That was the nature of rebellion; if you had the momentum, then it was not possible to stop it with fear.

The xenos would kill millions before this was over. Billions. But as long as we proved they could be beaten, then more would join us.

I adjusted the scope. Zoomed in. The eastern spires came into focus. The Derenik command greeted me. One window on the upper level was clear crystal glass, lit gold from within. I steadied my breath and waited.

That was the place.

The rifle’s coil capacitors thrummed low as they charged. One shot. Hypervelocity round. I’d only have one window.

They’d tried to break us. Burned our homes, choked our skies, turned our people into cattle. But fear had its limits. We’d found the edge of it and crossed over into rage.

Our cells communicate through underground relays now. Supply chains moved in shadow. We had even started a rebel radio that people with some knowledge could tap into. Millions of bullets in hidden caches. Food. Medicine. Plans. Maps. Names. We knew who the xenos feared. We knew who led their wars.

And today, one of them would die.

There.

Movement in the scope.

A figure entered the lit room. Broad, tall, covered in the segmented armor of Derenik command. Arms folded behind his back. Elongated skull crowned with regalia. Blue gems lined his throat, symbols of conquest etched into his reptilian face.

Admiral Therzek. Butcher of Hive Haloras. Overseer of the Athenian orbital shipyards, once the pride of the Federation, now churning Derenik ships.

He stepped into the light.

I held my breath.

The rifle chirped softly as the coils hit peak charge.

One heartbeat.

The crosshairs settled at the base of his skull.

Another.

Wind: negligible. Drop: zero. Distance: just under three kilometers. The round would hit before sound reached him.

Final breath.

Then I pulled the trigger.

A thunderclap cracked the air behind me as the round fired, shattering the stillness like the first shot of a new war.

The round moved much faster than sound. It punched through the glass without shattering it, just a neat, black-edged hole, and tore into the back of the admiral’s skull. His body jerked forward, arms spasming, before he collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.

With no head.

Dead.

The first of the high command we’d slain.

The next day, the xenos executed ten thousand 'rebels' as a show of force in retaliation.

They broadcasted the executions on the holo and forced billions to watch as innocents died.

The next week, we had thousands of people joining us.

The necessity of it made my stomach churn.

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The flickering lights cast long shadows across the cluttered confines of Mira’s workshop. But I could see in this near-darkness almost as well as in bright daylight.

Thankfully, while my senses were a hundred times better than any man's, I could control them better, too. No loud sound or smell could incapacitate me.

A half-disassembled plasma rifle lay on the workbench between us, its coils still hissing faintly as they cooled. Mira leaned over it, sleeves rolled back, skin smeared with black grease and ash, a smoldering cigarrette pinched between her teeth.

“This one came off a dead Derenik guard,” she muttered. “Custom grip. Energy regulator’s been modified, bastard had taste. Still, I did not know they allowed them to customize their weapons.” Mira commented without looking up at me.

"They don't, he might have hidden it well." I said.

My arms were crossed, gaze drifting across the racks of stolen weapons, coils of wire, bombs, vox-units, and components scavenged from a thousand raids. This was one of dozens of such hidden nodes now, underground workshops turning the hive’s forgotten depths into the forge of a revolution.

Mira sometimes worked on weapons. But her main job had become Intelligence this days; she was setting up information nets all over the hive.

“You’re thinking too loud again, sir,” Mira said, flicking the spent cigarette into a tray. “What’s on your mind, sir?”

“Other groups,” I said. “It is time to start integrating them. We aren’t the only ones fighting. And stop smoking that bullshit, it is going to kill you…”

She grunted, wiping her hands on a rag. “We’re not. The xenos cracked the hive open like a nut, and every rat in this place grabbed a knife, most of them are disorganized. Cells of ten, maybe twenty fighters, running on panic and rage. We’ve absorbed a few already. The rest will either die or come crawling.”

I stayed silent for a moment. “You mentioned a gang.”

“The Velvet Hand,” she said with a nod. “They operate in the Midhive, lower sectors. They used to run security rackets, escort rings, and smuggling lanes. Real 'gentleman thief' aesthetic, slick bastards. They took out a Derenik patrol that came too close to their base of operations last week. I think the current leader is the grandson of the one who saw the Death of Athenia.”

I frowned. “Ideologies?”

She snorted. “Hard to say. Their leader calls himself Lucien Vass. Word is he’s calm, smart, not the kind to go in guns blazing, but he’s kept them alive. He fights the xenos and helps the people, so that's all good. And they’ve grown. A few thousand strong, armed and trained.”

“Which makes them valuable,” I replied. “If they’ve held the midhive lows against the xenos this long, then they’re doing something right.”

She shrugged. “Or they’re waiting for the right moment to backstab the rest of us. You know how this works, sir.”

The hate for the collaborators runs ever stronger…

I stepped forward and picked up the worn leather jacket from the bench.

“I’ll speak to this Vass myself.”

Mira raised an eyebrow. “Alone?”

“I won’t come unarmed,” I said. “But yes. If he’s rational, he’ll see what we’re building. And if he isn’t…”

I didn’t bother finishing the thought. The pistol on my hip spoke for me.

I turned to leave, but her voice stopped me at the edge of the hatch.

“Boss.”

I glanced back.

“Be careful. Velvet’s just a texture. Doesn’t mean there’s no blade underneath.”

A faint smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.

“There’s always a blade underneath.”

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The midhive never slept. Nowhere in this hellhole ever slept. Traffic might go down after the curfew. But the xenos could not be everywhere.

Not even now, with rebellion gutting the Hive from below and above.

I moved through Velvet Hand territory with the silent weight of purpose, flanked by two of their own.

Unarmed, at least visibly.

Every alley had a lookout. Every stairwell a sniper’s nest.

We passed under a flickering holosign: The Gilded Orpheum. Once a palace of vice, now a fortress wrapped in scavenged armor plating and steel shutters. The double doors opened with a soft hiss, drawing me into a world of gold trim, slow jazz, and worn velvet.

The old casino floor still had the bones of its former life, roulette tables, slot machines, and crystalline fixtures. It was nice to sometimes see what Athenia was like before the ocupation.

Now everything had been gutted, repurposed. Tactical maps were pinned to felt-covered walls. Vox relays buzzed on tabletops. Cables ran across marble like veins beneath skin. Men and women in tailored suits coordinated supply runs and sabotage strikes as if it were just another game of high-stakes cards.

There was order here. Efficiency. The Velvet Hand wasn’t playing around.

A man waited for me by the central roulette table, leaning on a cane topped with silver. Tall. Immaculate suit of charcoal gray with blood-red lining.

White hair slicked back like a nobleman's, face pale and sculpted, marked only by a few thin scars along the jaw. His eyes were violet. Calm. Calculating.

“Alexander,” he said. His voice was smooth, deliberate. “So the Falling Star does walk among the rats.”

I didn’t smile. “Lucian Vass, I presume.”

He must be the oldest man I have seen in this world.

I had been blasting my aura around for a while. Not a full force in a way the xenos witches could feel it. But enough for humans to feel it when they were close.

I could see how he stopped in awe for a second before he recomposed.

He gave a shallow nod. “Guilty... Welcome to the Orpheum. I’d offer a drink, but we’ve traded our liquor for antiseptic these days; we have clean water at least. Come, let’s speak where the walls don’t listen so well.”

His head pointed at the men all over the room, looking at us. .

He led me upstairs to a lounge above the main floor. Real lamps lit the room, expensive things. A single decanter sat untouched. The window had been shattered long ago, but someone had framed it with heavy drapes anyway.

He gestured for me to sit and he did the same.

“So,” he began, tapping the head of his cane, “you’re the voice behind the fires. The name they whisper before raids. Alexander of the Burning Chain. Apollion come again.”

“So they say. You’ve built something here,” I said. “Organized. Disciplined. But isolated. That won’t last.”

“No,” he agreed. He walked to the broken window and looked down on the chaos. “Every day more knock on our doors. The terrified. The bitter. We shelter who we can, but supplies dwindle. The Dereniks tighten their patrols. Your actions haven’t made it easier on the people.”

“It will get worse before it gets better, Vass. Freedom has a cost.”

“Freedom,” He folded his arms. “You say that like it’s simple. I’ve lived long enough to know this doesn't last long. A man like you comes into the scene, rattles things up, and then dies. They try to get everyone to fight, and the people stay silent.”

“They are afraid, Lucien. Afraid for their lives, afraid for their families, afraid for what little they own. They don't think we can win. So I will teach them. ”

He raised an eyebrow. “Like children?”

“No,” I said. “Freedom cannot be taught. It is forged. In hardship. In resistance. In the fire of consequence. You say the people stay silent, but that’s because they’ve never known anything else. The Dereniks have carved obedience into them.”

I sent him feelings with my powers, defiance, a deep tiredness of hiding, of kneeling. A drop of water that shatters a glass instead of spilling it.

He didn’t reply immediately. Just stared at me, lips slightly parted. I stood and started to walk around the room before pressing on.

“Freedom isn’t clean. It’s not safe. It’s not orderly. It’s earned. One drop of blood at a time. We don’t tell people how to live; we show them that they can, that they have a choice. The Rebellion will happen anyway, and people like you and I will be its leading voices, Lucien Vass.”

He paused and looked at me. I wasn’t the greatest at speeches; I was sure that when I met Fulgrim or Sanguinus, they would be able to run circles around me. But I didn’t need to be the best when I could just go full awe aura on people.

“Indeed…” He turned back toward me. The wind outside howled through the gaps. Distant gunfire echoed on the walls.

Finally, he sat and poured himself a glass of water. “You know,” he said, voice softer, “It wasn’t always like this. My grandfather told me stories. Born in the upper spires. Son of bureaucrats. Schooled in finance, logic, all that sterile doctrine. When the xenos came, it didn’t matter... His parents got vaporized in their tower. He survived because the lift he was in jammed.”

He took a sip. “Down here, He became what was needed. A smuggler. A protector. Built the Hand to help people, to survive... But I’m tired of surviving, Alexander. I want to fight.”

I nodded once. “Then fight with us. As one. One chain.”

He rose, extended a gloved hand.

“Then let’s seal our alliance.”

I clasped it.

“The Velvet Hand,” he said, voice hardening with conviction, “stands with the Burning Chain.”

Outside, the hive burned on. But now, the fire had found new fuel.

That day, Lucian Vass became the first leader of a big group to join the Burning Chain. Dozens like him followed in the next few months.

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Three new crimson Xs burned on the surface of the holo map.

I leaned forward, resting both hands on the edge of the table, and stared at them. The sounds of celebration came from the other rooms.

Three prisons. Three broken chains. Ten thousand souls freed in a single coordinated sweep.

It might not be the great victory in Gurania, near Hive Vern, that Penelope had told me about. But it was our greatest victory yet.

The numbers felt surreal. Ten thousand men and women stolen back from death, snatched from concrete tombs and underground furnaces. They had crawled out sobbing or broken. And then the rage had set in. We were there to guide it.

Behind me, footsteps sounded, measured, deliberate. I didn’t need to turn. I knew Garran’s gait.

He stopped beside the table and placed something down with a quiet clunk. I turned, slowly. A small box sat there, wrapped in a strip of red cloth worn soft from time and friction.

I undid the knot and lifted the lid.

Inside, resting in the velvet dark of the box, was a single piece of salted meat.

I stared.

It shouldn’t have felt holy, but it did. My hands hesitated above it, fingertips trembling. Meat. Real Meat. Salted, cured, heavy with fat and flavor. Not protein sludge. Not vitamin bars stamped by machines.

Meat.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, voice low.

“An outpost in the outer hive,” Garran said, calm as ever. “Probably a supply cache for the collaborators. We took it during the raid.”

I reached in, picked up the meat. It was dense, cool, slick with spice and salt. My throat tightened. I brought it to my lips and bit down.

My jaw stopped moving.

It hit like a thunderclap, fat, smoke, muscle, blood. Flavor erupted across my tongue like I’d never tasted food before. My teeth sank into it like they’d forgotten how real things chewed. Heat rushed down my spine. My eyes closed. For just a moment, I wasn’t a Primarch warlord.

I was a man. A hungry man.

“I’d forgotten,” I whispered.

Garran slid a flask across the table. “Wash it down.”

I took it. The burn of real alcohol lit a fire in my throat. I coughed, eyes watering, and laughed like a bastard.

“I think I love you,” I muttered.

Garran raised an eyebrow, laughed, and sat across from me. “You are not the first man this week to say that, sir. Without counting the whole platoon that took the outpost with me when I gave them leave to open one of the meat boxes.”

We passed the flask back and forth in silence; it could not intoxicate me, but the flavor was amazing. The chamber around us buzzed with quiet energy; outside, I could hear the roar of celebration. Distant music, clanging pipes, the stomp of boots on concrete.

I took another bite, slower this time. My fingers were slick with oil and brine. “How are the men feeling? Today was a big victory for us. The seven thousand who joined after the raids?”

“At least that many,” Garran said. “Might be more. Some didn’t even wait for orders. Picked up whatever they could find and started hitting patrols the same night. Checkpoints. Convoys. Bastards fought like they were never caged.”

“Adrenaline does that to a man,” I said, chewing on a strip of meat. “And the thought of vengeance is one hell of a drug.”

He grunted, then pulled a tin cup from his satchel. He poured out the last of the flask into it and raised it.

“To the ones who came out swinging.”

I raised my own half-empty cup and clinked it against his. “To the ones who never stopped fighting.”

We drank.

I stood and moved toward the broken edge of the chamber wall. Bombardments had cracked the stone long ago, leaving a jagged hole that opened to the hive’s underbelly.

I looked at the streets. They swarmed with new patrols. Men and women in armor, carrying las-rifles. They moved with purpose. With formation.

We were an army.

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I found myself walking alone through the alleys. Ariana had decided to sleep in the hiding spot tonight, it was closer to her factory job. We had just hit a munition factory this night and killed the two collaborators who were visiting the alien overseers.

The others would be counting guns and ration tins, tallying another victory, but my blood hadn’t cooled yet.

Then I saw it.

A flicker in the fog, too smooth, too fluid. It passed from one rooftop to another without a sound, a glimmer of movement that defied the gravity of this ruined place. Human limbs didn’t move like that. Not even mine.

My pulse shifted. Instinct took hold.

I darted into the service stairwell of a gutted hab block, boots slamming against rusted grating as I climbed. At the top, the world opened to the rooftops. There, far ahead, something slipped between chimneys, graceful, cloaked.

I ran.

My legs devoured distance, steel bending beneath each stride. I vaulted over vents and ducked under drooping power cables, never losing sight of the silhouette ahead. Tall. Thin. Their cloak shimmered faintly, like oil on water.

The figure disappeared down a maintenance shaft.

I followed without hesitation, dropping into a crawlspace thick with dust and damp with forgotten leaks.

I emerged into a corridor where old cogitator banks blinked. No sign of them. But I could feel it. A pressure. As if the very walls held their breath.

What…? I can barely feel it’s soul…

I scanned the tunnel again, but I was alone.

I waited five minutes before moving, straining every sense for motion. Nothing. No footsteps. No breathing. Whoever it was, they were gone.

The way it moved. That perfect grace. Fluid, predatory, unburdened by mass or fear. The shimmer of the cloak, refracting light like a thin sheet of polished gemstone. No human wore something like that. No human could move like that.

Then, the moment on the rooftop… that flash.

A mask. Pale, painted, smiling. A smile that mocked and welcomed at once.

The mask of a Harlequin.

My hands clenched into fists.

What the fuck is an Eldar doing here?

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By the time I reached Penelope’s door, the unease from the Eldar encounter still pulsed in the back of my skull like a second heartbeat. Gunshots echoed somewhere far off, but here, at least for a moment, there was quiet.

I knocked once. No response. I was about to knock again when the door creaked open a fraction, stopping just short of a chain lock.

"Well, well," Penelope’s voice drawled from the shadows. "The warlord in the flesh. Should I be worried or flattered?"

"Depends on the stew," I muttered.

The chain slid free, and the door swung wide.

"Stew’s old," she said, turning her back to me, grinning. "But it’s hot. And I promise the nutrient paste won’t kill you faster than the rest of the hive!"

I stepped inside, ducking under a low support beam. Hair pulled into a loose bun, sleeves rolled up.

I took it without comment and sat at the table.

"You look like shit," she said, sitting across from me. "And I say that knowing how high your baseline sits."

"Rough day."

"Factory strike?"

I nodded. "Yes. Picked up a few hundred volunteers in the process."

Factory strike, Penelope was too scared to ever talk out loud about what I was doing, so she used a few code words.

I reached into my coat and placed the small wooden box on the table between us. It clicked softly against the dented surface. Penelope raised an eyebrow, but her smirk faded the moment she lifted the lid.

Her breath hitched.

Inside, neatly wrapped in waxed cloth, were thick, dark strips of salted meat. The kind of food that hadn't been seen in the underhive since before the occupation. A luxury.

She stared at it for a long moment, fingers hovering just over the edge.

“…Falling Stars,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen anything like this since I was a kid. My uncle used to trade scavenged tech for meat from the Central Hive. That smell…”

She closed the box gently, like it was sacred.

“Where the hell did you get this?”

“A Factory strike. Garran found a stash. I figured you’d know what to do with it.”

She didn’t answer at first. Just nodded, her expression unreadable. Then, quietly, she said, “Tomorrow, I’m cooking! Bring Ari. You don’t get to drop something like this and vanish. Meat, real meat... I’ll find a pan that isn’t rusted through.”

Her voice softened, and with it, the mood in the room shifted. The sarcasm faded. The air grew heavier.

She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Listen. There’s something I need to ask.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“It’s about Ariana,” she said.

The stew cooled in my hands.

“She’s been reckless,” Penelope continued. “She rarely comes to sleep here anymore. She just constantly factory str— dammit! She is fighting a fucking war! Pushing herself past the edge. Looking for danger like it’s a damn game!”

Her voice cracked at the edge of the last word, and she looked away, blinking fast. Her fingers tightened into fists on her knees, knuckles pale. The box of meat sat forgotten beside her, sacred and silent.

“I can't lose her,” she whispered. “I already lost her father. I watched my other brother get dragged away. I can't—I can't lose her too.”

I set the tin bowl down and stood, crossing the room without a word. When I crouched in front of her, she didn’t meet my gaze, not at first. Just stared ahead, jaw trembling.

“She’s all I have left,” she breathed. “And now you—you’re out there every day with her. Taking fire. Pissing off every xenos bastard in the city. Every time someone knocks at this door, I freeze. Because I think it’s someone coming to tell me you’re both dead.”

Her composure finally broke. She shuddered forward, and I caught her before she could fall, arms wrapping around her. She clutched my jacket like she was drowning.

“I am not brave like Ariana... I can’t bury one more person I love, Alex,” she said into my chest, voice muffled and raw. “Not her. Not you. I can’t.”

I held her tighter. Strong arms, built to break steel and shatter walls, cradling a woman trying to stay whole.

“You won’t have to,” I said softly. “I swear it. I’ll keep her safe, Penelope. I’ll keep both of you safe. No matter what it takes.”

Her breath hitched against me, but she nodded, slowly, a hand clutching the back of my coat like it anchored her to the floor. We stayed like that for a long moment, in silence, in the dim amber glow of the single lumen strip above.

Eventually, she pulled back, wiping at her face with the sleeve of her jacket.

“You better mean that,” she muttered. “Because if she dies, I will kill you.”

I gave her the faintest smile. “Fair enough.”

She smirked weakly and leaned back, grabbing the box of meat and setting it gently atop the cupboard.

“I’ll make something good tomorrow,” she said. “You’ll both eat. And you’ll both come back.”

“Deal,” I said, and I meant it.

“Oh! And you are sleeping in my bed tonight!”

Say what?

Chapter Text

Chapter 8 — Fire in the Sky

Six months.

That was all it had taken to turn scattered resistance into a firestorm. Athenia bled in a hundred different places now. Six months since Ariana became one of my first recruits. What began as sabotage and whispers had grown into something far more dangerous: an organization.

The enemy still ruled the skies, still held the weapons, still walked our streets with armored boots and xeno pride, but the balance had shifted. We were no longer the hunted. We were the knife in the dark, and we were everywhere.

I stood on the roof of a water processing station, eyes scanning the tangled sprawl of Sector 17. The old industrial quarter stretched in every direction, pipes like arteries and smokestacks like rusted spines. Beneath me, hidden in the maze of factories and transport tunnels, my people moved. Fighters. Saboteurs. Messengers. Guerillas.

Six months ago, half a year, I’d trained ten.

Now we numbered in the tens of thousands.

Cells operated independently. That was the key. Isolation by design, but all tied together through trust and fire. Garran led the northern cell, his fighters hit hard and vanished faster.

The twin brothers, Letho and Dren, ran the south. They called themselves “the Hammer.” even if no one else called them that. Their preferred tactic was ambush followed by overkill.

Mira operated out of the midhive. Her cell was stealth, infiltration, assassination. She’d taken out four collaborators and a major xeno officer just last week without a single casualty. I couldn’t have asked for better lieutenants, though none of them saw themselves that way. They led. They bled. They inspired.

We’d lost people. That was inevitable.

Garran had taken a shot to the side two weeks ago, plasma burn. Would’ve died if one of the new medics hadn’t stabilized him. Dren lost an eye. One of Mira’s runners was captured. She burned the checkpoint he was taken to, but there were no survivors. That was our rule. If you’re taken, you don’t talk. And if they take you somewhere, we erase it from the map.

But for every body we buried, ten more stood up.

That was the power of it. Not just my strength. My presence. But what I represented. A Primarch. A living symbol. The myth made real.

And now? Rumors said we weren’t alone. Other sectors were rising. Resistance groups that once hid like rats had begun calling themselves “the Burning Chain.” Some even sent messengers to join us, crossing whole city-blocks under drone fire and curfew, just to find us. Some carried gifts, ammo, intel, food. Others carried stories. A town leveled, a school saved, a squad of xenos wiped out by farmers with grenades. Pieces of a firestorm, catching from spark to spark.

The Hive was a mess nowdays, a hundred xenos died every hour. Infrastructure was the softest target, power lines, fuel depots, transport rails. A xeno convoy didn’t leave the depot without expecting ambush. Supply drops vanished into our tunnels. Patrols moved in pairs, then in squads, then with drone escort. The enemy was adapting. But we were faster. Smarter.

And most of all, we had nothing to lose.

I crouched low and adjusted the magnifier scope on the battered las-rifle slung across my back. It had belonged to a man named Jorik. One of the first to join me before Ariana. He’d died holding a rail junction in the midhive, covering a group of kids escaping with med supplies.

The rifle still worked. I kept it clean.

Below, a train thundered by on elevated tracks. Armored. Black. Escort drones in tight formation overhead probably headed toward the central Hive. We couldn’t hit the hive proper right now, or the spires, but all around it the fire was growing.

Behind me, the access hatch creaked open. A pair of boots moved up carefully.

Garran emerged. His beard had grown thicker, and he had turned it into a great mustache. It reminded me that I seemed to be unable to grow a beard.

He dropped beside me without a word and offered a strip of dried meat. I took it. Chewed. Stealing supplies had brought my first real meals.

By the Empress this is so good.

“South corridor blew the J-12 relay line,” he said after a while. “Dren sent word. Took out power to the west garrison for six hours.”

“Casualties?”

“Three. One wounded. A drone got lucky. But they made it out.”

I nodded, chewing slowly. The meat was old, spiced with something earthy. Not bad.

“Recruitment’s up,” he continued. “We’re vetting everyone now. Too many show up wanting guns.”

“Good.”

“And bad.”

I glanced sideways. “Explain.”

“Some of them aren’t ready. They come with fire in their eyes, but no idea what it means. They want revenge. Glory. They think this is some kind of story.”

“It’s not,” I said flatly.

He nodded. “I know. So we put ‘em with the quiet cells. Logistics. Intel. Fixers.”

“Smart.”

He grunted. “Still not enough.”

“There never will be,” I said. “But we make do.”

We had been stockpiling weapons for months now. We could arm a million men right now if needed. We just needed to light the spark to start the rebellion.

“We could use more explosives.”

“We’re working on that. There’s a munitions depot under sector H-9. We will hit it next week.”

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A wide metal table stood at the center of the workshop, layered with cables, cracked dataslates, and bits of scorched plating.

In the middle of it all, resting on a worn cloth like an offering to some forgotten god, was it.

My magnum opus.

The device was ugly. Brutal. A hunched mass of pressure vessels, thermal coils, and polymer tubing all wired to a core that pulsed with a sick green light.

It was beautiful to me. And it would go boom.

Ariana stepped into the room, eyes wide. Her hands were still streaked with graphite and grease from hauling crates for the resistance cell, and her hair was pinned up in a way that said she hadn’t looked in a mirror all day.

“You finished it,” she whispered.

I nodded. “Last capacitor went in this morning. She’s crude. But she’ll work. One detonation will vaporize anything within two hundred meters. And if we set it off inside the ship…”

“It will go down,” she said, breathless. “Now, that is a way to send a message to the whole Hive.”

She walked slowly around the table, studying it from every angle.

“You built this in a hole in the ground,” she said. “From garbage and stolen alien tech.”

“We will need a way to deliver this little present,” I said. “I wanted to give them something messy.”

Her smile faded slightly. “They’ve scheduled a rally. Central plaza. Two days from now. They’ll be making an example of some factory ‘dissenters.’” She looked up at me. “They always deploy troops from the command ship for public shows. And they bring them back.”

The xenos had started to randomly execute people to stop others from joining us. It wasn't working, for every one person they executed, ten of his family and friends joined us.

I stepped back from the table, blood humming. “You’re saying we can hitch a ride.”

She nodded. “You could. If we get close enough, if we sneak the device into one of the evac crates—”

“They’ll take it right where it needs to go.”

I turned away and pulled open a metal locker. Inside, I’d already started prepping the gear. Sensor-baffled crates, refitted uniforms, injection masks, and a tightly coiled synthetic rope wound with climbing claws. Ariana joined me, wordlessly picking up one of the crates and hauling it to the workbench. She moved with quiet strength now, like someone who had accepted her place in a machine larger than herself.

She didn’t ask what would happen if we were caught. Or if the charge detonated early. She knew.

A long silence settled between us as we worked. The only sound was the soft whine of the cooling fans in the ceiling and the hiss of sealed crates. An idea started forming in my mind. It was insane... insane enough to work.

When we finished, I sat on the bench beside the main device and leaned against the table’s edge, elbows resting on my knees. Ariana walked over and sat beside me, their shoulder brushing mine.

“That rally… I have an idea, you are not going to like it…”

I explained myself; her face told me everything I needed to know.

“Do you really think we can win? Are we ready? We only have two days...” she asked. Her voice was steady, but there was something fragile just beneath the surface.

I stared at the device. At the cables and tubing, the flickering core.

“I don’t know if we’ll win,” I said. “But I know they’ll bleed. I know they’ll remember us. And I know, one way or another, the silence will end. Humanity will rise.”

She nodded. After a moment, she took my hand in hers. Callused fingers. Burned palms. Strong.

“I believe in you,” she said simply. “For Athenia.”

“For Athenia.”

There was still too much to do, and not enough time to organize it all.

But the weapon was ready. And with it, hope was a bomb waiting to be lit.

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From the shattered remains of a broadcast tower, I watched the city boil. We had spread rumors, and the rebel radio had gone on and on about the rally for the past two days. And the people had answered.

The plaza below teemed with bodies, five million, maybe more, jammed shoulder to shoulder in tight waves of noise, desperation, and fury. Banners stitched from tattered uniforms flapped in the toxic wind. Homemade signs rose and fell like a tide: WE ARE STILL HERE. The crowd chanted in bursts, their voices hoarse, echoing between the blackened towers.

The public execution of a few workers had turned into a massive rally for us. It was the largest rally the city had seen since the Fall.

Illegal. Unpermitted. A death sentence. And they came anyway.

The Derenik shock troops and many of their human auxiliaries stood at the perimeter in phalanx formation, towering in their armor, weapons pulsing with energy. The vox shouted again and again, warnings for the people to go back to their homes. But there was no stopping this.

I counted at least six dropships parked near the platform stage, and a skimmer convoy idling near the outer boulevard.

Down below, a man screamed.

He wasn’t armed. He didn’t charge. He didn’t throw fire.

He threw a rock.

A stupid, ordinary rock. He hurled it with both hands, straight at the nearest Derenik line.

It bounced harmlessly off a helmet.

The alien who caught the hit didn’t hesitate. One bolt from his rifle slammed into the man's chest and cored him like rotten fruit. The crowd froze for one heartbeat.

Then the line opened fire.

Searing white lances tore through the front ranks. Bodies crumpled. Skin boiled. Screams rose in a flood, echoing like sirens between the towers. Panic swept the plaza as the mass surged backward, only to slam into a second perimeter of drones and mech-stalkers waiting in reserve.

Some scattered.

Some dropped to the ground.

Others fought back.

A banner with a Burning Chain was raised in the middle of the crowd.

Molotovs shattered against drone hulls. A concrete pillar fell in a cloud of dust and smoke. Two Dereniks went down under a wave of bodies, their weapons vanishing into the press of hands.

The human auxiliaries doubted, right before one of our infiltrators turned his gun on the xenos.

Then the auxiliaries took a side once and for all and began to fight on the side of the mob.

And amid the chaos, I moved.

I slid down a service stairwell and crossed two alleys at a sprint, cloak fluttering behind me. Alarms blared overhead. A pair of skimmers lifted off and disappeared into the smoke-choked sky. On the east flank of the plaza, a Derenik troop carrier idled with its doors open, driver barking into a comm-link.

I dropped from a rooftop like a shadow.

The driver never turned. My blade punched through the back of his skull and out the front, severing the cranial nerves in a single, clean motion. The comm-link flared with static as I shoved him out of the seat.

Two more aliens inside.

The first caught sight of me and reached for his rifle. I was faster. My elbow caved in his jaw. I spun and caught the second’s arm before his clawed hand could trigger the alarm. A twist. A snap. He howled, then stopped howling when I crushed his throat beneath my knee.

I took one breath. Two.

Then I dropped into the driver’s seat and stared at the console.

Derenik controls were a nightmare, half tactile membrane, half neural-responsive interface. They ran on pressure patterns, electromagnetic imprinting, and a sensory logic designed for alien anatomy. The first time I’d touched one, it had nearly electrocuted me.

This time I knew better.

I reached out and braced my hand on the command sphere. It pulsed once, flickered with resistance, then yielded.

I fed it one command: Launch.

The carrier bucked. My bones rattled against the seat as the grav coils screamed to life and the skids pulled free from the street. I yanked the throttle glyph toward ascent and felt the floor tilt beneath me.

The smoke outside thinned as I rose.

Below me, the plaza had become a warzone. Protesters surged toward the shattered platform, throwing bricks, poles, and whatever weapons they could find. The Dereniks were reeling. Their lines fractured. A second explosion went off near the government hall, someone else had planted a charge.

I smiled.

The carrier broke the upper smog layer and locked onto the ascent beacon above. The alien ship loomed ahead like a black wound in the sky, its underside bristling with bay doors, energy fields, and docking platforms. They hadn’t noticed the hijack yet. My signal signature was clean.

I gripped the controls and angled toward the ship.

I thought of Ariana. Of Penelope. Of the cells preparing to fight and die down there.

I thought of the old man who once gave me a data slate for free, and now learned how to shoot like a soldier.

They had wanted a spark.

I would give them a firestorm.

Enough for the whole planet to learn that we were still in the fight.

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Gunfire split the air like tearing fabric. Mira ducked behind a fallen transit pillar, her knife slick with blood. Confusion. Terror. Now the xeno overseers were scattered, two dead already, three more retreating toward the elevator shaft.

“Push left! Leave no survivors!”

Her voice was ice over fire.

A civilian screamed as a drone arc’d up to fire.

Mira vaulted from cover and buried a plasma-charged blade through its optics. It died in sparks and screams.

Behind her, the crowd surged forward.

And this time, they followed with weapons.

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The train was already on fire.

Garran’s cell had wired the tracks hours ago, but it wasn’t the explosives that mattered; it was what came after. As the mag-rail twisted off-course in a cascade of sparks and wailing metal, he led the charge from the shadows, bullrushing through drone fire with a hammer in one hand and a stolen scattergun in the other.

“FOR ATHENIA!”

The war cry echoed. Tens of thousands followed.

One xeno tried to stand its ground, plasma weapon humming.

Garran didn’t dodge.

He just ran through it.

The weapon seared his armor. The hammer shattered the alien’s skull.

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Letho and Dren were chaos incarnate.

The Burning Chain cells under their command poured into the plaza from three alleys at once, smoke grenades and flare rounds masking their numbers.

“Cut right!” Letho shouted, tossing a fusion charge over a vendor stall.

Dren laughed, pulling the pin on a thermite bomb. “Time to paint the streets!”

The explosion painted them red and molten.

People screamed. People cheered.

The twins advanced over broken tile and glass, leading the vanguard like wolves at the front of a storm.

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A mother pulled a shotgun from beneath her coat and blasted a drone that hovered too low.

An old man in a mining vest swung a pickaxe into the face of a panicking collaborator.

Teenagers scaled rooftops with stolen rifles and makeshift explosives, throwing them from above into xeno patrols. One detonated directly under an enemy skimmer, sending the craft crashing into a hab-complex.

A preacher lit a banner on fire, chanting old prayers in defiance.

“Let steel be the truth, and rebellion the gospel! Apollion is reborn!”

The city had woken up. And it was hungry.

From the sewers came crates of weapons. Distributed by kids in cloaks and masks. Shotguns. Old Federation guns. Las-carbines.

Some barely worked. Others had been modified. Many had been stolen by the Burning Chain in the past months.

They didn’t care.

They grabbed them with trembling hands and ran to the front under the organization of the rebels.

Mothers. Fathers. Elders. Factory Workers. Gangsters. Priests.

A people awakened.

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The landing bay swallowed me like a steel throat.

I brought the Derenik shuttle down fast and hard, skimming under the threshold of the outer hangar shield. The light inside the alien ship was sterile and violet-tinted, buzzing faintly with unnatural hums, like the creature was breathing through its bones. I could see the places where Federation tech was replaced with their xeno equivalent.

I stepped out. Every movement had to be calculated, timed. My eyes darted across the hangar’s interior, rows of other troop craft, overhead gantries, humming power nodes, and drones in motion. No alarms yet. No shouts.

Their systems hadn’t realized the pilot was dead.

A cargo drone trundled past me, blind to what I was. I moved like one of theirs, deliberate, slow, without fear. Fear was the one thing they always noticed. I passed under the docking arch and slipped into the side corridors, where maintenance tubes and loading shafts crisscrossed like veins.

That was when I stopped walking and started hunting.

The Primarch in me awoke fully. Every footstep, every breath, each magnetic pulse from the walls, I mapped them instantly.

I vanished into the gaps between the beats.

Two Dereniks rounded a corner. One checked a data node, the other scanned with his rifle. I dropped from the ceiling and crushed their throats before they could scream. Their corpses slid behind a bulkhead, out of sight. I moved on.

Down a corridor. Past a sealed door covered in alien glyphs. Toward the core.

Or so I thought.

I turned a corner and stopped cold.

The chamber beyond was lined with security pylons, flickering with pale energy. I had expected engineering decks, reactor nodes, venting arrays—but instead I found cages.

Holding cells.

Dozens of them.

Some empty. Some filled with corpses too mutilated to recognize. Others held prisoners, barely alive, slumped in manacles with IV cables in their necks. Derenik techs moved between them with cruel efficiency, harvesting data, fluids, tissue. It wasn’t imprisonment. It was vivisection.

I should have walked away. I had a bomb to plant. A war to win.

But one object at the far end of the chamber stopped me in my tracks.

A cylinder. Black. Eight feet tall, with six stabilizing arms and a circular iris etched in gold across its face. My pod.

My birth-cradle.

It stood untouched, power faint but intact. They had brought it here. But the second I stepped closer, it stirred.

The iris blinked open.

A red glow lit the room.

“RECOGNIZED. WELCOME, NUMBER TWO.”

The voice was mechanical and clear. Terran High Gothic. Not the rasp of the xeno dialects or the bastardized greek of Athenia.

No, this was clean. Familiar for some reason. My mother’s language.

I stepped closer and rested my hand on the casing.

It was warm.

“Vitals confirmed. Cortex resonance at 98.7%. Gene-template stability within optimal margin. Awaiting directive.”

“I need your core,” I whispered. “The ship. Can you interface with their systems? Help me sabotage it? Take control of it?”

“Affirmative. Interface possible. Core integrity sufficient for remote disruption protocols.”

I blinked. This was a tool of the Empress herself. A seed of the old world, one they’d stolen without understanding what they held.

“You can be moved?”

“Yes. The core unit is modular. Extraction will disable automated functions. Proceed?”

“Yes. Proceed.”

The iris retracted fully, revealing the core: a thick spindle of crystal, alloy, and gold filigree pulsing with internal light.

The core clicked loose and slid free into my arms. The lights on the cradle died instantly.

“CORE SECURED.”

I wrapped the module in my cloak and turned toward the door. Behind me, the mutilated prisoners moaned faintly, some trying to lift their heads. I had no time to free them. And there was little to save.

Instead, I would avenge them.

I moved towards the bridge.

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The apartment was silent except for the low hum of the newsfeed in the holo and the soft rattle of distant gunfire.

Outside, the city burned. Red light flickered through the smog, casting long shadows across the cracked floorboards and peeling walls. Penelope sat cross-legged on the old couch, her arms wrapped around her knees, staring at the flickering display hovering above her chipped coffee table.

The anchor on the holo-screen was clearly shaken, her voice tight and professional as she narrated the footage, marches, explosions, riots. People screaming. Buildings burning. Soldiers firing into crowds.

“Multiple simultaneous attacks have been reported across the Hive. Sabotage to transit lines, power grids, and military installations. Rebel cells are believed to be responsible.
Our glorious overlords command the people of Athenia to remain calm and return to their homes.”

Penelope flinched.

She knew who they were talking about.

Alexander.

And Ariana was with him.

She turned away from the screen and walked to the window. Her building sat atop one of the mid-level towers, a rust-colored spire surrounded by taller, more decayed husks. From this height, she could see half the sector.

Firelight bloomed between the factory stacks like new dawns, each one a scream of resistance. Thick coils of black smoke unfurled toward the sky where the alien ship still hovered.

A crack echoed through the distance, then another. She didn’t flinch this time.

“I hope you’re safe,” she whispered to no one. “Both of you.”

Her fingers gripped the window’s rusted frame. The cold metal bit into her skin, grounding her.

She thought of Ariana, reckless and wild, running through alleys with fire in her eyes. She thought of Alexander, always so calm, like a storm about to break. Penelope had watched him walk in from the night too many times, soot-streaked, bloodied.

And yet still standing. Still pushing forward.

And she had done nothing.

She stayed here, in her dusty little apartment, watching the world shift and shake from behind a wall of glass.

Cowardice, that was what it was. She knew it.

“I should be there,” she whispered.

She remembered the first time Ariana came back with bruised knuckles and shining eyes, rambling about how Alexander had taught her to disarm a xeno sentry. Penelope had laughed, called her crazy, tried to talk her down.

But she knew, even then, that there was no turning Ariana away. Not when she had fire in her heart.

And Penelope? She had a lighter, a match, a trembling hand, but no flame.

She turned back to the holo-screen.

New footage now. A Derenik patrol carrier in flames falling into a line of xeno soldiers. Crowds cheering as it collapsed. A dozen rebels sprinting into cover. The image zoomed too far, too fast, but Penelope swore she saw a blur of dark blonde and a familiar stance.

Ariana.

She pressed her hand to her mouth, breathing hard.

“I should’ve gone with you,” she whispered. “I should’ve picked up a gun. I should’ve… said something.”

She thought of the nights she and Alexander had talked, their conversations quiet and strange. She had always known there was more to him than he let on. He had attracted her from the first moment she looked at him, his presence and personality dragging her in. His eyes held too much.

She had wondered, once, if he was even human.

He was hope. Brutal, necessary, human hope.

And she had been hiding from it.

Another explosion lit the sky, this one closer. Penelope staggered back as the shockwave rattled the window. Alarms howled from somewhere above, sirens echoing down the corridors outside her room. The power flickered, died, then returned on backup systems. For a moment, her building groaned like it was going to fall.

She stood there, breathless, heart pounding.

It was happening. The uprising wasn’t a rumor anymore. It was here. Her eyes watered.

She was tired of watching.

She walked to her dresser and pulled open the bottom drawer, digging past old clothes and ration slips. Her hands found the worn satchel she had buried weeks ago. Inside it were gloves, a scarf, a pair of boots. A small pistol with only one clip of ammo. She had kept it hidden out of fear, of the aliens, of other people.

She took it out now and held it.

It felt heavier than it should have.

A minute passed. Maybe two.

Then Penelope straightened her shoulders, slid on her boots, and grabbed the scarf. She wrapped it around her mouth and nose. The satchel went over her shoulder. The pistol into her coat.

She glanced once more at the window.

Smoke. Fire. Sirens. Somewhere down there, Alexander and Ariana were fighting.

And finally, she was going to stand with them.

When she reached the streets, she found a few rebels of the Burning Chain giving lasguns to her neighbors, all bound to the frontlines.

It was time she did her part.

Chapter Text

Chapter 9 — The Fire of Rebellion

The klaxons wailed in the distance, screaming across the spires.

The world had gone crazy.

Exactly as planned...

Ariana crouched in the shadow of a ventilation duct, sweat trickling down her spine as she clutched the plasma rifle tight against her chest. Her eyes flicked to the others, eleven men and women scattered in cover along the derelict loading bay. All wore patchwork armor made of scavenged ceramic plating and hardened workwear.

She might have fought for months alongside Alexander. But never like this.

Though she had to admit... this was very exciting.

One of them, Karu, gave her the sign.

She nodded. The time had come.

Ariana’s heart thudded, but not with fear. Not anymore. That had burned away in the weeks since Alexander showed her the path.

She didn’t feel like the girl who once wept over her father's body or whispered dreams of stars.

Tonight, they would taste blood.

The target was a Derenik relay hub buried under Subsector G-9: a squat structure of black metal, crawling with sensors and guarded by four xeno enforcers and two bipedal sentry drones.

If it went down, communications in this sector would fall down and the Burning Chain and its new hundreds of thousands of recruits could take the sector easily.

The fire had spread through the hive from the plaza. And the Chain was attacking key sections all across the Hive. All the while, arming and organizing the people.

Hopefully, Alexander would make enough of a show for the world to see that the Burning Chain would win this. Enough for all of them to take up arms like Hive Athenia was doing.

Otherwise, they would be crushed.

Ariana didn’t plan to go in loud.

She tapped her microbead. “Team A, ready?”

A faint hiss of static. “In position,” came Tovik’s gravelly reply. “Visual on the drones.”

“Team B?”

“Eyes on the guards. I’ve got the gas bomb.”

“Good,” Ariana whispered. “Wait for the breach.”

She turned to Karu, who was hunched over the power junction with a cutter torch. Sparks danced like fireflies as he pried open the service panel. Inside, colored cables wove in impossible patterns, alien tech spliced into human skeletons.

“You sure about this one?” Karu muttered.

“I studied the diagrams from the depot,” she said. “Green-purple-red. That order.”

He snorted. “If I die, I’m haunting you.”

“Fair.”

She watched as he slid the ceramic cutter through the green strand first. A tremor ran through the walls. Then the purple. A dull thunk echoed from deeper inside the station, internal doors unlocking. Finally, the red.

Ariana’s breath caught.

For a moment, everything held still. The relay tower loomed ahead, silent but aware. Then, lights across its outer shell flickered and died. The drones twitched, lost orientation, and slumped as their signal cut out.

She tapped her bead again. “Go.”

The resistance moved like smoke.

Tovik sprinted from behind a pile of slag, silent as the grave. His blade punched through the back of the first Derenik’s skull, black blood hissed out. Before the second could react, Mirella dropped from the duct above and drove a rusted spike into its neck. The alien spasmed, fingers twitching against its rifle, but never fired.

“Two down,” came Mirella’s voice, steady despite the kill.

Ariana pressed forward. The side entrance clicked open with a manual override. She led her squad down the corridor, moving low.

A pair of Dereniks stood near a biomass conduit, lazily arguing in their click-speech. Ariana raised her hand. Tasha pulled the pin from the gas grenade.

A gentle clink as it rolled down the tiles.

A hissing cloud erupted, yellow-green and fast. The xenos barely had time to react. They gagged, convulsed, and collapsed, black foam leaking from their mouths.

Did she forget to mention it was a poison gas granade? She had once heard Alex mutter about someplace called Geneva after the Chain had started using them.

No idea what that was about.

Ariana stepped over them, rifle us. She didn’t fire.

She and her team advanced deeper, toward the relay’s server heart. Bioluminescent tendrils pulsed from wall-mounted nodes, throbbing like nerves. The biotech of the xenos fully exposed this deep. They passed a cryo-bay full of broken human bodies.

“Eyes forward,” Ariana whispered.

The central relay loomed ahead: a tall, spire-like organ wrapped in cables and resinous armor. It pulsed with coded transmissions, fed directly from orbit or the central spire.

“We hit this, they lose data link across the whole district, their drones become less coordinated or just die,” Ariana said. “Tasha, charges.”

The younger girl pulled two charges from her pack, chemical bombs crafted in Alexander’s workshop. Ariana watched as Tasha mounted one on each side of the tower’s heart.

Outside, a muffled boom echoed.

“Shit,” Tovik’s voice crackled. “One of the drones rebooted early. We had to take it out. They might have heard.”

Ariana spun. “Move fast. Burn it now.”

Tasha primed the detonators.

“Charges set,” she said, panting.

They sprinted back through the corridors, passing the gas-choked corpses of their enemies. Ariana led them into a maintenance chute and slammed the hatch shut behind them.

“Blow it.”

A heartbeat passed. Then another.

Fump.

The detonation was dull and deep, more felt than heard. Ariana could see the blast ripple through the slats in the floor, a wave of dust and blood and energy. Lights flickered out entirely.

The relay hub had died.

They emerged from the chute into the alley behind the structure. Smoke curled toward the starless sky. Sirens shrieked now all over the place.

Ariana didn’t slow.

“Split!” she ordered. “Two by two. Regroup at the Hollow. Leave no trail!”

They kept moving.

At one point, a trio of Derenik scouts passed overhead on a skimmer. Ariana pulled Tasha into a drainage tunnel and held her breath. The hum faded. The shadows returned.

When they reached the Hollow, an abandoned distillery beneath a collapsed tram station, Karu and Tovik were already there, panting and bloodied.

“Any losses?” Ariana asked.

“One,” Karu said, face hard. “Kira didn’t make it.”

A hush settled over the room.

Ariana bowed her head. “We honor her tonight. But we don’t stop. This is war now. We will join the assault led by Letho!”

"Yes, ma'am!"

She looked around at the soot-covered faces. Tired. Ashy. But alive.

And angry.

“We make them bleed for every meter of this city! And when Alexander gives the word, we burn it all!”

They nodded.

“””For Athenia!”””

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The door hissed open when I approached.

Beyond it stretched a vaulted chamber lit by the cold shimmer of a thousand living cables pulsing along the walls.

The bridge. I recognized it instinctively. My mind mapped it in seconds: command interfaces, navigation nodes, tactical displays, and communication stations.

And two dozen Dereniks.

They turned toward me, their mandibles clicking, voices rising in sharp, alarmed chirps.

For a single, shattering heartbeat, no one moved. I stood in the doorway, my sword already drawn.

"Well, this is awkward, isn't it, boys?" I said in a fake jovial voice.

Then I ran.

I crossed the chamber in five long strides, each one pounding with inhuman force. The first Derenik did not even reach for its weapon. I wondered if it looked like teleportation to them.

I cleaved straight through its torso, the blade shrieking as it tore through armor, and spine. The creature crumpled, twitching.

I was already moving.

The second lunged at me, claws raking the air. I caught it mid-leap, slammed it against the wall with a crunch of bone, and drove my sword through its chest. It screamed. I twisted the blade and kicked it free.

The rest reacted, finally. Plasma bolts streaked past me, scorching the walls. I dropped to a knee, rolled under the fire, and surged up into their ranks like a reaper in a wheatfield.

The blade danced in my hands. Limbs flew. Green blood sprayed in arcs across the consoles.

One Derenik tried to activate a defense node. I flung my knife across the chamber. It struck the alien in the throat, and it fell backward with a gurgle. Another came at me from behind, I turned and caught it with a backhand swing, cleaving its head from its shoulders.

They were intelligent. Brave, even. But they weren’t prepared for me.

None of them were.

One tried to speak, to reason, maybe. I didn’t let it finish. My fist shattered its skull against the command console, spraying bone shards and brain matter across a living map of the city below. Two more attempted to retreat through a secondary exit. I reached the door before them, cut them down, and slammed my fist into the control node.

The blast door sealed shut with a thunderous clang.

Alone. For now.

I straightened, letting the silence settle over the carnage. The bridge was soaked in green and black blood. The floor slick with alien ichor. Corpses twitched and steamed on the ground.

I was untouched. As usual.

I stepped over the bodies and moved to the central interface before putting my pods core right on it.

PRIORITY ACCESS GRANTED.

“Override command protocols,” I growled. “Isolate command inputs to this bridge. Lockout all external subroutines.”

COMMAND ACCEPTED. SYSTEM AUTHORITY TRANSFERRED.

The panels lit up with cascading data. I stood at the helm of a monstrosity, a vessel designed to subjugate worlds, burn cities from orbit, and breed war-machines by the thousands. Its systems responded to me now.

It was not a huge ship, barely a torpedo ship, but it was enough for today's purpose.

I raised my eyes.

And there it was. In the forward screen. An impossibility given that the bridge was in the center of the ships. As it was in all Old Federation ships.

The Hive.

Athenia sprawled below in impossible vastness. A landscape of smoke, fire, and steel, hive spires rising ten miles into the sky like the bones of some fallen titan. Riverlines of smog twisted between slums and manufactorums, each block alive with flickering lights and burning chaos. I could see the Space Elevator at the Space Port from here, bringing xeno troops down from its orbital station.

Even from here, I could see the riots spreading like veins of fire. Explosions dotted the horizon. Thousands were dying every minute. Fighting. Rising.

Giving up everything for one breath as free men and women.

They weren’t cattle anymore. They were soldiers.

A flicker of movement at the edge of the console drew my eye. Security feeds, some still operational, showed segments of the revolt in brutal, grainy clarity. One showed xeno skirmishers being overrun by mobs wielding repurposed industrial cutters. Another showed rebels of the Burning Chain handing weapons to civilians and loading them in stolen hover tanks. Another explosion of an armored column in sector 19.

Hope settled inside me.

A low hum began in the walls around me. The ship was stirring, confused by the sudden seizure of its command core. Other systems would awaken soon, auto-defense, possibly drone recall, maybe even an internal purge protocol.

I had little time.

I touched the core on the console.

The interface pulsed. Lights dimmed. Then surged.

INTEGRATION INITIATED.
REWRITING COMMAND TREE…
WARNING: SYSTEMS DIVERGENCE DETECTED.

I smiled.

Let them try to stop me.

INTERFACE STABLE. PRIMARY WEAPONS SYSTEMS ONLINE.

I slid my fingers across the control plate. Alien sigils flared and changed to Athenian, translated in real time by the machine core.

TARGETING ARRAY... ACTIVE.
PRIMARY TORPEDO BAYS... LOADED.
ORBITAL STRIKE CANNONS... CHARGED.
PLANETFALL LAUNCHERS... STANDING BY.

I rotated the main view screen. The city pivoted beneath me as I zoomed in on a single structure, the Central Spire at the city's core, behind the walls that protected the central hive. A jagged column rising ten miles into the atmosphere. That spire was the heart of the Derenik regime in this world. It was where their generals gathered, where their human collaborators cowered and schemed.

The perfect target.

TARGET LOCK ESTABLISHED. The core confirmed. JUDMENT CLASS WARHEAD DEPLOYED.

I stared at the tower for a long time. I didn’t need to see inside to know what lived there. The collaborators. The profiteers. The xenos and their families. The lords in stolen palaces, lounging in comfort built on ash and slavery. I imagined their voices, smooth and arrogant, whispering poison into Drenik ears. Negotiating. Pleading. Condemning. The ones who sold out entire bloodlines for position. The ones who thought the xenos would reward them when all was over.

They were wrong.

The button beneath my hand pulsed with quiet light.

I closed my eyes for a moment and remembered the children burnt alive in the refinery blast. The mass graves of Sector 5. The stench of the dead, the dying, the ones who called for mercy and received none.

The torture and pain for its own sake...

I opened them again.

Then pressed the button.

Silence.

For a heartbeat, the world held its breath.

Then the deck beneath me trembled. The sky cracked open as a lance of white-blue fury screamed from the cannon.

I watched it fall, serene in its arc. Straight down. Center mass. A gift for the tyrants.

It struck the tower.

There was no explosion at first. Just an impossible flash. Then came the column, a rising vortex of incandescent death that punched through the tower’s core and kept going, boring through metal and reinforced alloy as if the hive itself were made of paper.

The upper half of the tower folded in on itself, the skeletal superstructure disintegrating in cascading rings of molten ruin. Its frame began to bend sideways.

Toward the Derenik-held quarters.

The entire spire, thousands of meters tall, millions of tons, tilted and toppled.

It sheared through four sub-districts as it fell and it two other spires.

The scream of collapsing superstructure drowned out everything else. I saw windows explode from the shockwave, entire blocks vanish beneath falling debris. The lower hive trembled as the spire crushed block after block. Derenik barracks, patrol centers, drone stations, gone. The arc of its collapse carved a trench of annihilation through the alien-held sectors, flattening them into flaming wreckage and twisted alloy.

I just hoped I did not destroy any historical building like the old Senate.

Then came the blast wave.

It hit like a freight train.

Even from hundreds of kilometers away, the shock reached me, shook the deck.

COMMUNICATION DETECTED.

The comm crackled behind me. Mira’s voice. Distant, hushed.

“…Was that you?”

“Yes,” I said.

A pause.

“...Holy Apollion.”

Below, the city reeled. Fires blossomed in dozens of places. Derenik air traffic scattered like insects. Civilian comms lit up across our network.

Most… cheered.

The tyrants had been struck down by the hand of vengeance. The collaborators are buried beneath the very tower they once ruled from.

ADMINISTRATIVE HUB ELIMINATED, the machine core said with clinical satisfaction. RECALCULATING LOCAL DETERRENCE MODELS.

I turned from the crater. That was only the beginning.

“All remaining ground batteries,” I said aloud, voice cold and steady. “Sweep patterns. Target known Derenik barracks, checkpoints, armored nests, and surveillance towers across the Hive. Load plasma barrage. Set trajectory arcs to avoid rebel sectors. Fire at will.”

The core obeyed instantly.

The sky over Athenia screamed.

Hundreds of energy lances and plasma bombs rained down across the city. Block-sized checkpoints dissolved in molten glass. Barracks exploded, sending xeno bodies cartwheeling into the air. Surveillance towers cracked and tumbled into the streets, their all-seeing eyes snuffed out by fire and steel. The heart of the city was being carved out by precision-guided judgment.

Reports filtered into my display, compiled from rebel comms I had linked hours ago. Cheers. Cries of wonder. Rally points erupting with renewed courage. Even the xeno transmissions were panicked now, garbled, chaotic, screams of command breaking down.

And I wasn’t done.

“Launch torpedo salvos. Target orbiting Derenik warships... Prioritize troop transports.”

CONFIRMED, the machine core said. INITIATING PLANETFALL-TO-LOW-ORBIT STRIKE PATTERN.

Catch this, you fuckin reptiles.

The ship shuddered again. Dozens of long-range torpedoes burst from the lower decks, trailing afterburn like comet tails. I watched as they arced up through the atmosphere and vanished from view.

Moments later, the first flashes appeared in orbit.

One. Two. Five. Eight.

Alien vessels, some the size of small cities, were struck dead in the void. Hulls ruptured. Plasma cores detonated. Their death throes cast spirals of debris across the sky like fireworks. They did not expect it. They had not even raised their shields.

The Derenik orbital presence around Athenia was hit badly.

“Thirty-two percent of enemy fleet capacity neutralized,” the core said. “Projected destruction of host ship by return fire in six minutes. Recommendation: Escape.”

Of course, they would attack their own ship after that.

It was stupid. Should I manage to fire another volley, something that I could not do without a crew supporting me, it would still not cause much damage after shields went up.

Still, they had no idea that I was here alone. Their communications were completely sealed by the core.

I took a deep breath and leaned on the command rail, sweat beading on my brow.

They had ruled this world for decades. Crushed it beneath claws and boots and

“How centralized is their network?” I asked.

“Extremely. Local Derenik planetary systems rely on core vessel relays. Disruption of current node has paralyzed most regional command.”

"Take everything you can from their systems."

That was it. That was the flaw.

In their arrogance, the Derenik had made their occupation efficient, modular, and scalable. They trusted their ships and administrative centers to manage everything: logistics, troop coordination, and surveillance. All centralized. All automated. All vulnerable.

I took the pod core, it was time to leave this place.

I heard the Xenos trying to open the doors to the bridge, but when they went in, I was already gone, a power conduit opened.

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I crouched by the primary energy shunt and clamped the bomb against its spine. I keyed the primer on my gauntlet and linked the countdown to the machine core interface.

The orbiting ships would probably destroy the ship anyway in fear that it might fire another volley against them. But there was no shame in making sure it blew one way or the other.

“Timer armed,” the device whispered in my thoughts. “Five minutes. No failsafes. No remote abort.”

I stared at the countdown as it began: 04:59… 04:58…

No going back.

Gunfire erupted before I even reached the corridor. Plasma bolts cut past me in glowing streams, sizzling against bulkheads. I sprinted down the hallway, boots pounding the deck. A shot struck my side, staggering me. Another clipped my shoulder. The pain was white-hot, stabbing like knives of fire. I gritted my teeth and kept running.

Behind me, shouts in the alien tongue rose. The walls trembled with movement, and automated defenses began to unfold from the ceiling. Twin-linked turrets scanned the corridor. I moved faster, sliding beneath their sweep, shoulder-checking a bulkhead door open. My rifle made a sweep and took down five of them.

A trio of xeno soldiers waited behind it, blades and rifles raised.

I didn’t stop.

I crashed into the first with enough force to break his spine. My blade flashed, carving the second from hip to shoulder in a blur of wet meat and blood. The third fired wildly.

I used the rifle to crush his throat before he could fire again.

I dropped him and moved forward.

A dozen xenos fell to my fire as I passed another corridor.

The hangar bay loomed ahead. Enormous doors retracted in sections, exposing the launch platforms to the night. Smoke from the city bellow, fires blazed in the streets. Athenia was at war, and I had lit the match.

More Derenik waited here. Two squads with mounted repeaters held the high platforms. Their rifles swiveled toward me. I ducked behind a crashed transport, feeling the shots hammer metal inches from my face. The vehicle I had stolen earlier, still intact, waited near the loading platform, its hatch open like an invitation.

I could make it.

I just had to live for one more minute.

I charged.

Gunfire ripped into the deck around me. Momentum carried me forward. I hurled a stolen grenade, xeno plasma, unstable and shrieking as it flew, and dove as it detonated mid-air. The explosion drowned the bay in light and heat. Bodies fell screaming from the platform.

I didn’t stop to see who had died.

I leapt into the troop carrier, slammed the hatch closed, and activated the systems. The controls flared to life, familiar now, strangely intuitive. I grasped the yoke, angled the engines down, and blasted off the deck in a storm of smoke and flame.

The hangar bay shrank behind me. Alarm klaxons howled across the ship.

And behind it all… the timer kept ticking.

01:12… 01:11…

I angled the carrier low, diving into the planet. Turbulence shook the vessel, but I held steady.

The city pulsed with war. Explosions dotted the skyline. Rebel banners fluttered from rooftops.

I wondered if Ariana was still fighting. If Penelope was safe. If Garran, Mira, and the Twins were okay...

I banked hard, swerving over the eastern slums, now a battlefield of makeshift barricades and shattered xeno mechs and tanks. Resistance fighters swarmed like ants over Derenik strongpoints. I saw humans fighting back with alien weapons and old federation guns.

The rebellion had become real.

Because of us.

Because of me.

I looked back once, over my shoulder.

The ship hung above the city, its hull glowing from the recent barrages. Then, silently, it began to break.

First came the rupture, an internal flash that split the midsection like rotten fruit. Energy bled out in waves. Then, the detonation. It erupted like a newborn star, a fireball expanding outward in every direction, swallowing the upper sky in incandescent flame.

The shockwave rippled over the city seconds later. Buildings trembled. Glass shattered.

I flew on, hands tight on the controls.

The fire behind me cast a long shadow across the ruins. The carrier groaned beneath me as I pushed it lower, into the wounded heart of the hive. Flames licked at its hull, the last remnants of the ship’s power failing one system at a time. Every warning system on the console screamed in protest, but I kept the controls steady, one last time.

Below, the plaza unfurled like a scar carved into the hive’s flesh. It was unrecognizable from the place I’d first stood in a few hours ago. Craters gaped where artillery had hit. Blood slicked the shattered tiles. Smoke curled from burned-out vehicles and collapsed habs. And yet, there were people. Millions of them.

Human fighters, their makeshift banners raised high.

I aimed for the old transit station, a skeletal high-rise overlooking the square. Half its floors had collapsed from the fighting, but the rooftop held. Just enough space to land.

The carrier hit with a shriek of metal, tilted, then settled. Smoke billowed out from its vents as I stood.

I stepped through the breach in the hull, boots clanging on warped plating, and emerged into the night.

And the people looked up.

A thousand eyes. Ten thousand. More.

They saw me. Just the figure who had struck down their overlords. Who had brought the tower down. Who had dared to set fire to the stars.

I walked to the edge of the rooftop and looked down at them. I saw Garran among them, helmet off, his face streaked with soot and blood. Scattered across the crowd were the fighters I had trained, the ones I had bled with, grown beside, and buried friends with. In the distance, I could see fire all over the city. Millions were rising up to fight with us.

They had done this. All of them.

And it was time.

Time to stop being just Alexander.

I reached inward.

For the first time since my arrival in this body, I did not fight it.

I let go.

My mind stretched outward, slipping past the walls of the world.

My soul uncoiled like a storm. My primarch aura at full blast.

The city rushed in, billions of voices, screams, prayers, shouts, gasps, sobs. I touched all of them.

I sent strength into their bones. Courage into their chests. I gave the terrified the clarity of a blade’s edge. I gave the hopeless the weight of iron in their hands. I filled them with the certainty that they could not be broken, that this was their moment, that history bent now under their feet.

Every man, woman, and child who still drew breath beneath that dying sky felt it. Billions.

I heard them gasp.

I saw them straighten.

Their eyes lit with new fire.

The strength of a Primarch poured into the minds of mortals, and they did not collapse beneath it. They rose ever higher.

My voice rang out, raw and unfiltered, carried by power and fury across every corner of the hive.

“Freedom!”

A thousand voices answered.

Then a million.

A tidal wave of sound thundered up from the plaza. A scream of vengeance and hope and rage all at once. The ground shook from the weight of it.

“FREEDOM!”

Weapons raised. Banners lifted. Battle cries torn from throats hoarse with smoke.

And then they charged.

The entire city seemed to move at once. The people surged forward like a living tide, slamming into the xeno lines. The Derenik were overwhelmed in seconds. No formation could stand against that kind of fury.

The last defenders nearest to the plaza were torn down.

As the charge began, I turned toward the darkened sky.

Above, the heavens wept fire as pieces of the destroyed xeno ships fell.

The war had only started, but we had something that this planet had never felt in two hundred years.

Hope.

Chapter Text

Chapter 10 — The Sky Is Falling

The sky was bleeding fire.

I sat in a chair on the rooftop, leaning back. Above me, the atmosphere shimmered with a thousand falling stars. Wreckage. Shards of orbiting warships torn apart by torpedoes I had launched only days ago.

The Derenik command in the city was mostly gone. And with it went the coordination and capability to respond to our insurgency.

Our men were advancing on all fronts. Even if the critical infrastructure, like the Spaceport and the Central Hive past the walls was still in Derenik hands.

The city beneath screamed. Even from many stories up, I could hear it. Sirens. Distant gunfire and our artillery. The occasional thunder of a collapsing structure. And underneath all of it, the low hum of panic that never really stopped.

A few Derenik drones and aircraft could be seen in the distance before they were brought down by some of our anti-air divisions. I had made sure to target most of their air superiority with the ship's guns, and now they could not bomb us to submission.

Ariana sat nearby, curled up in a battered coat too big for her, knees hugged to her chest. Her eyes followed the fire trails above, but didn’t speak.

Footsteps approached behind us, soft but steady. Penelope emerged through the access door, balancing a dented metal tray with three chipped mugs. The smell of warm cocoa hit me like a train.

Her coat was completely drenched in green-black Derenik blood. I had been told that she had fought with all her strength. Ariana and I had been so fucking glad when she had come with the 187th division from the mid hive, victorious in their battle against the Derenik reserves there. I had not seen Ariana so distraught since her father died after not finding her in the apartment...

“I brought the victory feast,” she said. “One part synt-chocolate, three parts questionable water. And one part caff!”

"You must be thrilled to give up your caff, you addict," Ariana said with a half glare and a smirk.

I smirked despite myself. Penelope crossed the terrace and handed her a cup, then leaned over me and offered one without a word. When she sat next to me, she slid her arms around my ribs and rested her head against my back. I could feel the trembling in her fingers, even through my shirt.

Ariana sipped in silence. Her eyes never left the sky. It was a beautiful sight; thankfully, it seemed that most pieces were disintegrating in the thick atmosphere of Athenia, but I already had reports of many falling near the Hive.

I took a long drink, looking up.

The ship hadn’t simply exploded. It had fallen.

When the reactor went critical after the explosion, and its sister ships hitting it from orbit, the vessel had split in two. Half of it disintegrated. The rest, a flaming husk the size of a few city blocks, tumbled down like a god’s hammer and crashed into the west districts.

The plan had been precise. Targeted. Clean.

But war never obeys plans. And I knew that millions, billions would die before this planet was free.

I found myself wondering if it was worth it... if I should have just taken the ship with my men and ran towards the general direction of Terra... But the answer was always the same. These people needed help now, and the Imperium would not come for decades.

And I had no idea where Terra was exactly… with no Astronomican, navigators or even destination my journey would have been a failure before it even began.

Still, the insurrection was getting bad.

I thought of Earth. Of its history, not the mythologized stuff they carved into the bones of monuments, but the real history. Stalingrad, where the streets ran with blood. Hiroshima, where light turned to ash in a heartbeat. Saigon. Berlin. The War of the Beast. The last days of the Golden Age. Terra under siege, not from xenos, but from its own children.

Every age thought it would be the last. Every generation thought its horrors were unmatched... I had seen enough to know better. The galaxy had no end to its atrocities. It only recycled them.

Penelope’s grip tightened around me.

“I saw people cheering,” she said softly. “When the central spire fell. When the ship went down. People in the streets. Crying. Laughing. We finally struck back...”

Ariana spoke at last. Her voice was low, flat.

“I saw a kid today. Maybe twelve. Holding a rifle...” Ariana looked at me finally. “I don’t want that to be normal. I don’t want this to be normal.”

Neither did I. But it already was.

Penelope rested her chin on my shoulder. “Will we? Build something better?”

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “But I know we can’t go back now. There is only forward. We can only do our best and give the next generation a better world to grow up in…”

We sat there in silence after that. The rooftop wind picked up, tugging at Ariana’s coat, scattering ash like snow across the terrace. Somewhere far off, another explosion lit the horizon.

My city was burning. My war had begun.

“They’re calling it the Red Day, you know?” Ariana said beside me. “The pirate feed said riots have hit all three continents. Seven hives are in full revolt. Half the alien orbitals are gone or damaged.”

“The feed says whatever we want it to say, Ari.” I said smiling at her.

“Well, the streets are saying much of the same.” Penelope leaned on me harder. “The lower levels are covered in graffiti. Someone painted a mural of your face on a hab wall near here.”

I blinked. “My face?”

Ariana smirked faintly. “Well, sort of. They made you look like a burning statue falling from the sky, holding a sword.”

Penelope chuckled. “It’s very ‘angry messiah.’”

The war had escaped my hands. That was the truth. I had lit the match, but now the firestorm was running wild.

The Burning Chain would have to organize the resistance into an army. And then push that army to victory.

"The people can have their 'messiah'. But he has a lot of work ahead of him." I said.

For a second the smog over Hive Athenia cleared, and the light of the moon slipped through.

Were those fires?

“At least they are having fun too.” Ariana said with a glare at the sky. As fast as the smog cleared it came back. And the moon was hidden from us.

Eaena, Athenia's moon, a frozen place full of mines and a breathable atmosphere, I had never seen it through the smog in the sky, but the photos from before the occupation showed that it was a very beautiful place, full of mountains and half-frozen lakes.

I nodded slowly. “The system was always stretched thin. The Dereniks built their empire on fear and shoddy logistics. Topple one planet and the whole of Athenia Prime comes.”

“More will come, won’t they?” Ariana asked.

I looked at her.

She didn’t flinch this time. She wanted the truth. It had gotten hard to talk to Ariana and Penelope after unleashing my full aura.

After accepting what I was. It was hard talking to anyone, really. They stared, they revered me, and they felt awe at my simple presence. But I made sure to rein it in a bit and let them acclimate themselves.

“Yes. Reinforcements from the outer system, maybe even farther out. They’ll regroup. Strike hard, fast, and without restraint. They’ll raze cities if they have to. They’ll want to make an example of us. Athenia is too important for them, we make a tenth of their war supplies at least, and we have half their shipyards in orbit.”

Penelope frowned. “Then this was only the beginning.”

I nodded. “It always was. What we need to do now is organize. Create a functioning government and an organized army and kick the xenos off planet. But first the Burning Chain must secure Hive Athenia.”

More flashes erupted in the distance, pale orange blooms along the edge of Sector 9. That had been a logistics hub yesterday. A worker’s quarter. Now it burned like the rest.

Ariana was quiet, then said, “It’s just hard to look down and know we did this. That we set this in motion.”

I turned to face them both.

“Better we burn for something,” I said, “than rot in chains.”

Penelope stared at the skyline. “The few xeno propaganda channels are calling you a terrorist. A criminal.”

“That's funny.” After all of this, I still have not caused more death than a year of Denerik cruelty does. Though it would approach and surpass the number as the war grew.

Ariana shook her head. “But they also call you the Flame of Athenia. The First Rebel. Apollion Reborn.”

I blinked. “The what?”

She smiled slightly. “'Apollion Reborn rises from the dead to lead us.’ It's spreading.”

I closed my eyes and sighed.

“Apollion.” The word echoed in my bones. The hero who had killed the gods for their tyranny. It was fitting, almost too fitting. Not for the first time I wondered if some crazy psycker had not looked to the future and seen me. Before the story turned to myth by the passing millennia.

A riot had become an insurgency. An insurgency was becoming a war.

“We’ll need a lot,” I said. “Weapon production. Propaganda teams. Secure comms. Engineering crews. Medical stations.”

Penelope glanced at me. “You already have a plan.”

I nodded. “Garran, Mira, and I have been thinking of the next steppes for months now.”

Ariana stood up and walked to the edge, her coat flapping like a banner in the wind. “Then what do we do now?”

I looked at her.

“Step one is clear. Secure our areas and then turn to propaganda to spread the revolution to all hearts. Grow and then make the killing blows against the Spaceport and the Central Hive.”

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I sat on the edge of the bed an hour later. The last time we would be in this apartment. Ariana, Penelope and I were moving to the new command bunkers of the Burning Chain. Where I would coordinate the war effort in Hive Athenia until we took the central Hive.  

Penelope entered quietly. She was wearing half half-transparent dress that clung to her generous curves.

I could not help but stare for a second.

She paused at the doorframe, holding something in her hands, a strip of cloth, red and black, frayed at the edges. The mark of the Burning Chain.

“Alex...” she said. “I came to ask something I should’ve asked a long time ago.”

She sat beside me, silent for a moment, the only sound the distant echo of boots on metal and the soft creak of settling girders. Then she turned to me and held out the cloth.

“I want in. Not just in the army. In your fight. For this world. For what comes after. If you’ll have me… I want to stand at your side. As part of the Burning Chain. Truly this time.”

I stared at her for a moment. Then reached out and closed her hand around the scrap.

“You never needed to ask,” I said. “You’ve been with me since the start, Pen. Since the first shot. You gave me a home. To stay in, even when you knew what I was doing… Still, took you long enough.” I finished with a laugh.

Her breath hitched. “Yeah, well. I’m stubborn.”

I smirked. “No argument there.”

She laughed, but it cracked halfway through. Before I could speak again, she surged forward and wrapped her arms around me.

And then she kissed me.

It was clumsy and fierce. Her hands tangled in my hair, her body trembling against mine.

I pulled her closer and kissed her back, no hesitation.

For a moment, the war vanished.

When she finally pulled back, she was breathless, eyes glistening.

“About damn time,” she muttered.

I smiled. “Agreed.”

Her eyes turned smoky.

She moved with a predatory grace, a lioness stalking her prey. "Come here, Alexander," she purred, her voice a husky rasp that sent a shiver down my spine.

"Penelope, I…" I began, but the words died in my throat.

She closed the distance between us, her hand snaking up my chest, her nails tracing patterns against my skin. "Don't think, Alexander. Just feel. I have been trying to seduce you all this time and you have done nothing, so I will make the first damn step."

Her lips crashed against mine, a desperate, hungry kiss that stole the air from my lungs. My arms, acting of their own accord, wrapped around her waist, pulling her closer, molding her against me.

"Holy Apollion, you're so big," she breathed against my mouth, her fingers fumbling with the buttons of my shirt. "I've been dreaming about this."

I didn't respond, my mind a blank canvas as her hands worked their magic, stripping away the layers of clothes. The cool air hit my skin, raising goosebumps in its wake.

She pushed me towards the bed, a tangled mess of sheets. I landed with a soft thud, the springs groaning beneath my weight. Her eyes never left mine, her gaze burning with an intensity that both thrilled and terrified me.

"Lie still, hero, you need your reward," she commanded, her voice laced with a playful tone that sent a jolt of electricity through my veins.

I surrendered to the moment. She knelt before me, her fingers tracing the outline of my arousal, her touch sending shivers of anticipation through my body.

"You're magnificent," she whispered, her breath hot against my skin. "A god among men."

Her hand closed around me, her grip firm and knowing. I gasped, the sensation both exquisite and overwhelming. She began to stroke, her movements slow and deliberate, building the tension with each pass.

She leaned closer, her lips brushing against the head of my cock.

And then she took me in her mouth.

The sensation was electrifying, a shockwave of pleasure that ripped through my body.

I arched my back, my hands gripping the sheets, trying to maintain some semblance of control over myself. But why would I? She was a master, her tongue and lips working in perfect harmony, driving me closer and closer to the edge.

I groaned, my body trembling with the force of the impending climax.

She didn't stop, her pace quickening, her grip tightening. I could feel the pressure building, the world narrowing to this single, exquisite sensation.

And then, I shattered.

A torrent of pleasure erupted from me, a wave of pure, unadulterated bliss that washed away all doubt, all hesitation, all restraint. I cried out, my voice raw and ragged, as I unloaded into her mouth.

She swallowed it all, her eyes never leaving mine, her expression a mixture of triumph and satisfaction. When I was spent, she sat back, her lips glistening with my seed.

"That was… impressive," she said, her voice slightly breathless.

I lay there, panting, my body still trembling from the aftershocks of the orgasm. I felt strangely exhilarated.

"I… I didn't know I was capable of that much," I stammered, my voice barely a whisper. My first orgasm in this body had been quite memorable…

She stood up and looked down at me, her eyes filled with a strange mixture of affection and amusement.

"Now," she said, her voice regaining its playful edge. "Are you ready for round two?"

Before I could answer, she straddled me, her knees pressing into my hips, her eyes locking onto mine. I was still soft, but she didn't seem to care. She grabbed my shaft with both hands, her grip firm and possessive.

"This time," she purred, "it's my turn."

And with that, she lowered herself onto me, her body enveloping mine in a wave of heat and sensation. I gasped, my breath catching in my throat as she took me deep inside her.

She began to move, her hips grinding against mine, her rhythm slow and deliberate. I closed my eyes, surrendering to the feeling, letting her take control. Her breasts jumped up and down in a hypnotizing way. I couldn't stop my hands from going to them, even while being so big, my hands couldn't fully encompass them.

The pleasure built slowly, steadily, until it was almost unbearable. I could feel my body tensing, my muscles coiling, ready to unleash.

"Faster," I groaned, my hands gripping her hips, urging her on. "Faster, Penelope."

She obliged, her pace quickening, her movements becoming more frantic. I could feel her own desire building, her breath coming in ragged gasps, her body slick with sweat.

"Almost… almost there," she panted, her voice barely audible.

And then, we both shattered.

A wave of ecstasy washed over us, a tsunami of pure, unadulterated pleasure that obliterated everything else. I cried out, my voice raw and ragged, as I unloaded inside her, my body convulsing with the force of the orgasm.

She screamed, her nails digging into my back, her body arching against mine. She held on tight, refusing to let go, riding the wave of pleasure until it finally subsided.

We lay there, gasping for breath, our bodies intertwined, our hearts pounding in unison. The silence was broken only by the sound of our ragged breathing.

After a long moment, she rolled off me, collapsing onto the bed beside me. We lay there for a while, not speaking, just enjoying the afterglow of our shared experience.

Finally, she stirred, her hand reaching out to caress my cheek. "That was… incredible," she said, her voice soft and tender.

I turned to her, my eyes searching hers. "It was," I agreed, my voice barely a whisper. "More than I ever imagined."

She smiled, a genuine, heartfelt smile that reached her eyes. "Me too," she said. "Me too."

The city outside flickered and danced in war, shots and artillery were heard everywhere, but inside, everything was still and peaceful.

At least before I put her in all fours and spanked her.

“You need to make up for all those times you came out naked from the shower, Penelope.” I growled.

“Oh my…”

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The panic in the Hive was gone, replaced by purpose.

Fires still flickered in the gutted towers, and the air still stank of blood. But beneath it all, something new had taken root.

Order.

I stood atop a half-collapsed administrative building in Sector 9, once a Derenik oversight zone. Getting power back to the building had not been hard after we had recovered a few plasma generators.

Now it was my forward operations center. Rebel runners moved in and out of the floor below, scribes copying orders onto data slates, messengers carrying them down into the seething streets or shouting them in vox stations.

My map table glowed with activity, outlines of neighborhoods we now controlled, red markers where resistance was thickest, blinking blue where Derenik holdouts still clung to fortified positions.

And across the city, those positions were falling. One by one.

Because we had become an army.

It started with groups of ten. Cell leaders promoted from the bloodiest corners of the revolt: veterans, survivors, those who’d led mobs with nothing but clubs and Molotovs and lived to scream again.

I put names to their faces. Trained them. Drilled them. Then I gave them squads. After squads came platoons. Then battalions. And finally, Divisions of ten thousand men.

Each battalion bore a symbol now. The broken chain aflame.

A brand of fire and freedom that spread all over the Hive.

We operated from strongpoints, abandoned rail hubs, ruined manufactorums, the gutted remains of administrative towers and directed the fighting in this massive city.

It was hard. The Hive stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction and coordinating an urban battle of this size was a nightmare. Especially when we were not a professional army.

But we were getting better at it.  

Xeno tanks were stripped down and rebuilt by human hands were deployed under rebel control. And manofactorums were repurposed for the war effort.

And everywhere I went, I left my mark. Discipline and organization.

I issued codes of conduct. Formed signal divisions, supply chains, salvage crews. We scouted routes, set ambushes, mapped the tunnels beneath the city and used them to strike from below.

We hunted the xenos now. Not the other way around. We were winning ground every day, and the xenos didn't seem capable of stopping us.

Every day the Revolutionary Army grew, became more organized and better supplied with the reactivated manofactorums.

The first two weeks passed like a fever dream of endless motion. I barely slept. I didn’t need to.

Penelope returned to me on the fourth day.

I found her in a corner of the old telecom spire, dragging a ruined vox unit back to life with a team of volunteer techs. She had decided to join the communications division, but I saw that she worked more with the logistics divisions instead. I was sure she would transfer sooner rather than later. But for now she was doing an amazing job.

“How many?” I asked her.

She wiped sweat from her brow and smirked. “Dozens. Maybe more. Hard to say. The city’s full of ghosts playing at war. But when I told them who you were... what you’d done... they listened.”

“So they will follow Apollion… And now?”

“Now they’re listening together. We set up encrypted channels. Relay posts. Signal boosters across the hive. They just needed a reason to stand and you gave it to them.”

She handed me a datapad. It glowed with names. Dozens of them. Each tagged with a cell name and a strength estimate. Some as small as twenty. Others numbering hundreds.

It would take a whilñe to integrate them into out growing structure. But it was necessary if we wanted to win the planet and then hold it.

“They’re ready,” she said. “They want to join you.”

By the sixth day, half the city was in our hands. The Derenik still controlled the spaceport, the fusion grid, the orbital elevator and of course the Centtal Hive behind the massive walls.

Their garrisons were dug in, automated defenses still active. The air was thick with drone activity.

But they were too few. Too fractured.

They weren’t prepared for this kind of war.

And we weren’t done.

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The posters appeared overnight.

Behind the lines, where the xenos still held control, they sprang up everywhere.

No one saw who put them up. They simply were. Plastered to the crumbling walls of ration depots, stitched into the wiring of public transport terminals, projected from hijacked billboards once used for Derenik announcements. The first message was simple:

“THE CHAIN BURNS.”

Two words, painted in red, framed by a blackened circle. The symbol was unmistakable now: a broken chain wreathed in fire. Beneath it, smaller messages followed.

“We are not slaves.”

“The Burning Chain fights for all of us.”

“Your courage is enough.”

For years, propaganda had been the weapon of the oppressors. The Derenik overlords used it like air. Flickering holo-displays blared messages of obedience and efficiency. Children learned hymns praising Derenik order in the few schools that existed. News-feeds announced each new “milestone of production” as if it were divine revelation.

“Peace through dominance,” they called it. “Unity through submission.”

But that narrative was shattering now.

Across the districts of Hive Athenia, stories spread like fire in dry wheat. Whispered first. Then printed. Then shouted in public squares.

Dozens of hives across the world heard the messages spread though the radio.

They said the central spire had fallen brought down by human hands. They said the rebel leader was Apollion Reborn, a figure wreathed in ash and light who had walked unharmed through gunfire and firestorms. Some said he had ripped a xeno tank in half with his bare hands. Others claimed he had come from the stars in a flaming chariot.

The truth was less important than the impact.

Graffiti crawled across walls like vines, faster than the Derenik patrols could paint over it. One particularly infamous stencil, a silhouette of a man raising a rifle, mouth open in a scream, fire in the background, was seen over two thousand times in a single day. The word beneath it was always the same:

“Freedom.”

In the slums, children chanted it in alleys. In factories, workers slipped paper pamphlets into machine housings and toolboxes. In transport hubs, makeshift radio broadcasts hijacked old vox-towers, replaying recordings of rebel leaders shouting over the roar of battle:

“You are not alone. You never were.”

“This is your world. Take it back.”

“Fight! Children of Athenia! Fight!”

The Derenik countermeasures were swift. But fear had lost its edge.

In the lower stacks of Sector 64, a worker named Emil defected after seeing a rebel flyer pinned under his shift clipboard. He’d spent two decades maintaining the Derenik grid, paid in credits he could never spend.

That same day, he led a team of saboteurs into a key relay hub and handed it over to the resistance. The news was broadcast across rebel frequencies by nightfall, his face turned into a digital mosaic and superimposed over the phrase:

“You are not your job. You are your choice.”

The revolutionary army occupied the sector two days later. Pushing back the line further into the Hive.

Elsewhere, in the upper tiers of Sector 2, a former city clerk used his clearance to distribute encrypted rebellious manifests through automated mail dropboxes. He left messages in the system with the subject line:

“Hope is not illegal.”

Even artists, street performers, and old ex-cons joined the cause. Songs were written in dark corners of crowded barracks. Poems scratched onto the backs of ration cartons.

A theater troupe in Sector 125 performed a satire ridiculing the Derenik aristocracy, only to be gunned down mid-performance by a patrol. The massacre only added to the mythos. Their final lines were remembered in blood and echoed across the hive’s networks:

“Better to die standing than live kneeling.”

Penelope oversaw the coordination of the entire effort. She worked from the shadows, linking rebel cells to their public voice. Her network of couriers, tech-savants, and sympathetic workers grew daily. She organized the message as carefully as Alexander organized his divisions.

She understood something critical: the war would not be won only by bullets.

It would be won by belief.

And belief spread faster than fire.

She created pamphlets comparing the Derenik occupation to historical human regimes, showing the people how their grandfathers' grandparents used to live under the Federation.

She distributed simple infographics teaching citizens how to build signal jammers and molotovs.

Her crowning achievement was the “Liberation Protocol,” a guide hidden in seemingly innocent instructional vids about boiler maintenance.

One click and a worker could unlock the full manifesto of the rebellion.

Even in death, rebel martyrs became propaganda. Faces of the fallen were turned into glowing icons. Mira commissioned murals of the dead painted on the hulls of new tanks coming from the reactivated manufactorums.

The most important became the pirate feed, and after the rebels took the communication relays in the city, became the new Rebel Radio. From there, Penelope gave our speeches to be heard by the whole System.

"Citizens of Athenia, hear me now. The Derenik yoke has been shattered. Their towers lie in ruin, their tyrants fallen before the fire of our resolve. This is our Finest Hour, our moment to seize freedom with both hands. The chains of oppression that bound our wrists and stifled our voices are broken. But true liberty is not given, it is won. As our Leader, Alexander Apollion led the charge through flame and shadow, he showed us that courage lives in every heart ready to stand.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Raise your arms, forge your weapons, rally your neighbors. From the ashes of the Central Spire to the depths of the Underhive, from the wastelands to the Spaceport, let the cry of rebellion echo. Your rifles, your blades, your willpower, each is a spark. Together, we will ignite a blaze no tyrant can withstand.

The Derenik regime is no more. The war for our freedom begins this moment. Stand with us in the Burning Chain. Together, we are the storm that will remake Athenia in the light of humanity’s dawn.

Rise now. For every brother and sister who fell under alien guns, for every child born in shadow, for the promise of tomorrow, fight!

Give us liberty, or give us death!"

By the end of the week, the Derenik media organs were in full collapse. Official broadcasts now stuttered with static. Misinformation lost traction. The people didn’t care what the overlords said anymore. They didn’t believe them.

They had their own voice now.

And that voice roared in every street, rang from every rooftop, and echoed in every heart.

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I sat alone in the gutted atrium of an old municipal building, one of the few places left in the city quiet enough to hear myself think.

It made a perfect hiding place.

Outside, the city churned with the slow gears of war. My armies were growing, reorganizing, pressing further with each day. The Derenik were faltering. And I had not slept in two weeks.

Not because of war.

Because of this.

I stared at my hands. Palms up. Still. I felt the pulse under the skin, the drumbeat of blood, the tiny twitch of muscle fibers reacting to breath. I could feel the rhythm of my own body like a song beneath the surface, one I hadn’t been aware of before I opened that door.

Or maybe it had always been open. And I’d just never dared look.

I had used my soul like a weapon once already. I remembered what it felt like, stretching my will across the hive, touching billions of flickering human souls in the moment between despair and fury.

I’d fed them courage. Faith. And they had roared into battle.

But this was different.

I breathed in slowly, drawing in the air and letting it ride the flow of sensation down into my center. I closed my eyes and reached inward.

There. The core. The font of me. My soul was vast, incredibly big compared to the flickering light of normal humans. And there I found its connection to my body.

I began to shape it.

Just a little. A nudge of will. A trickle of energy through nerves and sinew.

My fingers tingled. I opened my eyes and stared.

I made a small cut on my knuckle. It didn’t close. I held it like that for a minute and then let my body do its thing. Skin knit. Blood retracted. No scar.

I hadn’t even concentrated on that.

I frowned.

I did it again. I focused on my wrist, imagined the tendons, the ligaments beneath the skin. I didn’t just visualize them. I knew them. I could feel their texture, their strain, the potential for wear and tear.

I pushed.

Heat flared under the skin, then dulled into a strange, pleasant cool. My joints relaxed. I felt better, stronger, lighter, even cleaner. My entire body hummed with new equilibrium.

Biomancy.

It comes so naturally…

Was it because I had let my soul uncoil?

I had no answer.

So I pushed harder.

I placed my palm flat on the cold stone of the floor and closed my eyes again. Beneath the rock, I felt the roots of a dying tree, gnarled and stunted. I pushed, gently. Just enough to give it a taste of life again.

I opened my eyes. The smallest green shoot burst between the cracks beside me, curling toward the lightless sky like a question.

I reached into the sleeve of my cloak and drew a small rat I had trapped earlier, half-dead from poison gas exposure.

I traced its pain through its twitching heart, its lungs full of fluid, the nerves fraying at the edges.

And then I touched it with thought alone.

The lungs drained. The blood cleaned itself. The nerves rebuilt, like a weaver retracing lost thread.

Then it scurried away.

I sat back and let the silence settle around me again.

Biomancy.

Life.

Was that my specialization?

For the moment it seemed like it.

But it did not feel right. Was I able to do more than this and this was just the first thing I had found out?

Still, whether I was a primarch based around biomancy or soothing else did not matter. I was sure I would find out the truth sooner or later.

But Biomancy opened so many doors for me.

So, so many doors…

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The planning room was growing. Thick armored glass looked out across the jagged skyline, where the ruins of the city stretched.

Power flickered every few minutes. No one flinched anymore when it did.

Even though I heard Garran curse like a sailor every time.

I stood at the head of the table. Around me, my commanders studied the map with grim eyes.

Garran leaned forward, knuckles on the console, his jaw set tight. “We’ve secured the tertiary towers and most of the feeder ducts along the southeast approach. But the outer bastion’s still sealed. They’ve reinforced it with automated sentries.”

“Their Walkers will bottleneck us,” said Mira. She flicked her cigarette between her fingers. “And the ridge line above the causeway gives them free fire over the approach. It’s a kill zone unless we suppress it.”

The Dereniks had always relied on drones to patrol the skies and hunt rebels through alleyways and rubble, but now they had unleashed something far worse: the Walkers.

Deployed from the Hive like armored locusts, these towering biomechanical nightmares moved with eerie, insectoid grace, their six blade-like legs slicing through concrete and steel as easily as flesh.

They reminded me of the Striders from Half-Life, but twice as tall and three times as lethal. Each one bristled with sensor arrays, plasma lances, and organic armor.

I wonder how they would fare against Imperial Knights…

“We hit them from two directions,” suggested Dren. “Flank from the ash-pits. It’s rough terrain but the Dereniks won’t expect us to risk a heavy force through that heat.”

His brother Letho shook his head. “Not with what little armor we’ve got. We lost two tanks in that area yesterday. Our reactor cells are fried. If we burn any more of them before breaching the wall, we’ll be fighting with knives.”

“At least we have secured our backs and reached the wastelands.” Mira said. And we had, our men had secured half the city and we had reached the edge of the Hive city.

The contaminated wastelands were open to us.

Arguments rippled like heat after that. Maps shifted. Voices rose.

I held up a hand. The room fell silent.

“We don’t need armor people!” I said. “We need coordination. Timing. We have enough RPGs and tanks to take the Walkers out. We’ll split the assault into three fronts. Garran, you’ll lead the center and draw their fire. Mira, your division takes the left flank, covert entry through the aqueduct under the wall. Dren, take the ash-pits. Slow and hard, but bring mortars.”

“Sir, Yes Sir!” They shouted.

“So that assault should be enough for you to accomplish our primary objective, sir.” Said Garran.

“Yes, such a massive assault all over the front by the four of you will give free reing to lead our reserves and secure the Spaceport.” I replied.

Hopefully with the spaceport would come many gunships, fighters and bombers. And most of the manofacturums that produced aircraft and voidcraft were near there anyway. It would be the birth of the Athenian Airforce.

It had been almost two months since the ship had exploded, tearing open the sky above Hive Athenia like a second sun.

The rebellion wasn’t a whisper anymore. was reality. And we were winning.

We held more than sixty percent of the city now. Street by street, level by level, we had taken it back with blood and fire.

We had shaped the men and women of the furnace blocks into proper divisions. They guarded the factories, the power conduits, the engine nodes that kept this metal mountain alive.

The factories worked again. What they churned out wasn’t makeshift scrap anymore, it was purpose-built, clean, and hardened for war.

Lasguns came by the hundreds of thousands. Armor and carapace plating were stamped in rows. The forges even rolled out tanks and transports. We cracked open the Derenik databanks and used their own tech against them, adapting it into our production lines.

The result? A real army. Not a mob. Not a rabble. An army.

Around eighty million fighters now bore the mark of the Burning Chain. Though it was impossible to know the exact number.

Many of them had come from the trained xeno auxiliaries that had rebelled against their overlords. With them, we held a core of trained soldiers that joined the rebellion.

Eighty million, just in Hive Athenia. We had uniforms, ranks, communications networks, command posts, and logistics routes. We had artillery and anti-air guns. We had discipline.

Garran gave a tight nod. Mira grinned with bloodlust. The twins exchanged a glance, then saluted in unison.

“If we breach that port,” Garran said, “we take the outer bastions. The Dereniks lose control of the rail net. That means no more reinforcements. No more supply routes.”

“It means we starve them,” Mira added. “Force them to huddle behind their central hive walls like the cowards they are.”

“Not just that,” I said. “We will hold the spaceport and we will be able to move more freely around the planet, even hit the orbital stations.”

Just then, the door banged open.

Penelope entered at a sprint, cloak streaked with soot, hair wild from the wind. She moved like a blade unsheathed.

“I hope this is important, Penelope,” Garran muttered. “We’re aligning the entire strike pattern.”

“It is,” she said breathlessly. “More than important. We made contact.”

The air in the room shifted.

“Contact?” I asked, stepping toward her.

Penelope nodded, chest heaving. “An encrypted signal came through three hours ago. Took us time to verify. It came through a secondary relay in Sector Twelve, then bounced across two old beacons. Hive Vern has fallen to rebel hands.”

Everyone stiffened.

Hive Vern was a Hive to the West of Hive Athenia on the same continent. We had little contact between Hives for now, but we did know that the whole planet was at war.

“You think it’s real?” Mira asked.

Penelope met my eyes. “I know it’s real. They identified themselves as the planetary resistance Flame Undying. They are the same cell that assaulted Gurania Fortress a year ago.”

The room went utterly still.

“What else?” I asked, voice low.

She swallowed. “They say they’ve been in contact with over a dozen regions all across the sea. That they can get us in contact. They said that they want to follow Lord Apollion in rebellion.”

Smiles spread though the room.

I looked up at them all, the war-hardened faces of those who had bled beside me for months. Garran, Mira, the twins. Penelope. Ariana. My first commanders. My first family.

“We take our Hive, and then we free the world.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 11 — The Battle for the Void

The staging ground was packed.

Dull thunder rolled through the walls, artillery and tanks being brought into position, engines rumbling in lines that stretched for miles.

It was amazing to see just how many had taken up arms when we staged like this. This would be our largest operation since the Red Day, and it showed.

The city burned behind us.

Mira and Garran were leading the assault on the outer bastions of the center Hive, and ahead, the great spaceport loomed, a fortress of human and alien alloy and energy fields that had once launched and received fleets of the Athenian Federation.

Tonight, it would fall.

I stood alone in the armory chamber, bare to the waist. My armor rested on the rack before me, its black plates etched with scars from previous skirmishes.

It was a prototype, built for my growing size, my strength. No regular man could lift it, let alone wear it.

But I wasn’t a regular man. It was not the amazing works of the Imperium but it would do for now. I was sure that one day we would reach that level.

I stepped into the greaves first, the inner servos humming as they latched against my legs. Then came the chestplate, a layered thing of interlocked plating and kinetic mesh, a gorget rising to cover my throat. I left the helmet in the table for now.

The powerpack whined to life behind me. I grunted as the armor sealed, adjusting itself around me like a second skin. It was heavy, yes, but I could barely feel it. My body was too strong, too dense.

I was built for war, and now I looked the part of a Primarch.

Footsteps behind me. I didn’t turn.

“I thought you’d already be outside, pretending not to be nervous,” I said.

Ariana’s voice came soft. “And I thought you’d be screaming at the privates by now. You are looking hella imposing Alex.”

She stepped into view, wearing her undersuit, hair tied back in a rough braid.

“Your armor’s over here, Ari.” I said, motioning toward the new sets our units had just finished assembling. Standardized composite plating, sealed helmets, rebreather tubes, visors. Not perfect. But perfect was the enemy of good enough.

She walked to it, running her fingers across the breastplate.

“You’re going to help me suit up, right?” she asked, smirking.

I chuckled. “Of course. Can't have you tangling yourself in buckles and dying before we even get to the front.”

“I only got tangled once!” She rolled her eyes, but stood still while I guided the plating onto her.

Piece by piece, I helped secure the armor to her frame, tightening straps, checking seals, locking vambraces and thigh plates. Her skin was warm beneath the fabric, her breath steady. When I clipped the helmet to her belt, she smiled up at me, face framed by iron and defiance.

“You’re ready,” I said.

She didn’t speak for a moment. Then, quietly: “Am I? I am always so nervous...”

I looked at her.

 “Want to know a little secret? So am I Ari, every fucking time. You’ve earned that armor. You’ve killed for it. Bled for it. You’re not the same girl I met in the low city.” I said.

A small smile curved her lips. “I’d hope not. That one wouldn’t have lasted five minutes out here. It is getting crazy…”

We moved to the weapons racks. She picked up her lasgun, a standard-pattern rifle. I watched her check the charge cell, slap it into place, then prime the firing coil.

I picked out my weapons with care. First the lasgun, slung across my back. Then the modified rifle, a brutal thing with armor-piercing rounds. Sidearm on my hip. Knife on my thigh. And finally, the sword, black steel, long and hard enough to cleave through power armor. It magnetized against the rear harness with a heavy clunk.

“You always carry all of that?” Ariana asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I killed my first xeno patrol with that one,” I said. “I’ve grown fond of it.”

“You just want to look like the depictions of Apollion with his mighty sword…”

“No coment.”

We stood there for a moment. I could hear the tanks repositioning, their turrets adjusting toward the horizon. Soon, a million lives would charge the spaceport in synchronized waves, tanks, infantry, gunships.

The massive assault of Garran, Mira would be enough to distract most of the xenos in the hive. They threatened the Central Hive where they held power.

Enough for us to take the spaceport and open our options a lot.  

 I would be at the front. I had to be.

Ariana stepped closer, fiddling with the strap of her shoulder plate. Her voice turned... lighter. “So, uh… can I ask you something? And you must be honest.”

I tilted my head. “Go on.”

She squinted at me, suspicious. “What’s going on between you and Penelope?”

I froze. Blinked. “Excuse me?”

I may be a primarch but at that moment a very human male instinct took over. When in this situation… lie lie lie!

“You know what I mean.” She narrowed her eyes, poking me in the chestplate. “You’ve been... weird. She’s been weirder. Every time we’re in the same room, she finds a reason to leave...”

I stared at her. Then sighed.

“Yes,” I said. “We’ve been... seeing each other. For a while now.”

Ariana blinked. Once. Then again. Then she made a sound like a hiccup and burst into mock outrage.

“What?!” She threw her hands in the air. “Oh Holy Apollion. I knew it. I knew it! And you didn’t say anything?! That’s betrayal, Alexander. Betrayal of the highest order.”

She peeked at me over her shoulder, grinning despite herself.

“Fuck it! I’m not losing to her,” she added suddenly.

“What?”

A very Penelope-like look entered her eyes.

“I’m not losing to her.” She turned fully, walking toward me with a mischievous gleam in her eye. “You think she’s the only one with fire?”

“Ariana—”

She jumped up, grabbed my collar, and pulled herself up into a kiss.

It wasn’t shy. It wasn’t innocent. It was fierce and hungry. Her armored hands gripped the plating of my back as she pressed into me. When she pulled away, breathless and flushed, her eyes didn’t waver.

“You’re not allowed to die tonight,” she said.

I touched her cheek. “Neither are you.”

Outside, a siren howled. Red lights pulsed across the bunker. The assault was about to begin.

“Let’s go,” I said.

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What used to be a megastructure of xeno and human labor now stretched in ruin, cracked spires, collapsed rail-lines, collapsed hab-stacks. The shadow of the Space Elevator inside the Space Port loomed over us all.

A graveyard of a civilization. The skies above were black with storm cover, but the faintest red glow filtered through, dawn coming, slow and smothered in ash.

But in the plaza and staging grounds below, life surged like a tide preparing to break.

I stood on the edge of a shattered overpass that once fed the city’s upper traffic lanes before the xenos came with their cheap hover tech.

Beneath me, the field was alive. The army, our army, stood ready. Men and women in matte-black armor lined up in battalions, thousands upon thousands. It was not parade ground perfect, not polished like a Terran Auxiliaries formation. But it was ours…

Each soldier wore the same pattern now: a standardized composite plate designed in the forges of the captured manufactorums. Each helmet bore our sigil, the burning chain, symbol of the rebellion.

They were not professionals. They were not gene-bred warriors or drilled PDF. But they were fed. They were armed. They were ready.

The scrap divisions had worked miracles. Crawling through the husk of the hive like ants, they tore apart the bones of the xeno occupation and fed the furnaces day and night. Electrical grids rewired. Water lines rerouted. Weapon components hauled from sunken mag-trains. Civilian factories converted to make ammo, rations, armor plating. Food reserves taken and repurposed. Every part of this army was carved from the carcass of the old world.

We would run out, eventually. That much was certain. If we could take the Hive we could reorganize and make sure we rebuilt. But for now we had to make do.

Today, we had everything we needed to make the stars tremble.

I looked to my side. Ariana stood tall in her armor, visor up, eyes sweeping the ranks. Behind her, the division leaders watched in silence.

The vox clicked in my helmet.

“Everything’s in position,” Dren’s voice came. “Your signal starts it.”

I nodded once.

My eyes moved over the army again. Tank columns rumbled in place, their exhausts coughing steam into the cold air. Artillery platforms rolled into battery lines, each one slaved to firing coordinates triangulated by spotter drones we’d smuggled near the spaceport days ago.

The soldiers below looked up at me. Hundreds of faces. Thousands. Some young, barely more than boys and girls. Some scarred, haunted, gaunt. All of them bound together by one thing: A refusal to kneel.

I stepped forward to the edge.

I let them see me.

I extended my aura and touched all of them once more. Feeling their emotions and their hopes, al represented in my image.

And then I spoke.

“Look at yourselves.”

My voice thundered across the field.

“Look at what you’ve become. You are the sharpened edge of humanity, and we stand now on the brink of our war.”

I let the silence hang, let the wind tug at cloaks and banners.

“Do not tell me you're afraid. I know you're afraid. So am I. We all are. But fear does not rule us. Fear does not own us. We ride into fire with it clenched in our fists.”

A murmur went through the crowd. I raised my fist high.

“Tonight, we take the spaceport! The gate by which the Dereniks enslaved us! The heart of their power on this world! We strike with every ounce of fury they bred in us! We strike together!”

The wind howled. I shouted louder.

“They will come at us with machines. With fire. With the monsters that crawl through their voidships and walk on six legs made of flesh and stee!”

I pointed at them, sweeping my hand across the thousands.

“It is you they should fear! Because for every man they strike down, two more rise! Because we remember our names! Our families! The smoke of our homes and the bones of our dead  Because this is not just a battle…”

I paused, letting the words carve into them.

“This is our hour. This is the day when humanity says, no more!”

Shouts rose. I raised my voice above them, now a roar.

“They may try to push us back. They may shatter our towers. But they will never hold this planet while one of us draws breath! We fight because we chose to. They will never extinguish the Human Spirit!”

They were yelling now. Some screamed. Some pounded fists to chestplates. The wave of voices rose like a storm tide.

I wasn’t done.

“We are not cattle! We are not insects! We are the sons and daughters of Athenia! and this is our Independence Day!”

The cheer was deafening. Thousands of voices surged together, a wordless cry of defiance, fury, joy, grief. I felt it ripple through me like lightning as their souls lit up in fury and defiance against the enemy.

When in doubt, go to the classics… uh?

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From the ridgelines, from hidden batteries behind the scrapyards and scorched-out hab blocks, from every cannon we had managed to weld, scavenge, and reload, we fired.

The first artillery shells shrieked across the horizon. Then hundreds more followed. Within seconds, the world was thunder. The spaceport loomed in the distance, a mountain of black steel and xeno steel, ringed with defense towers, plasma bulwarks, and weapon arrays as tall as cathedrals. And now, all of it burned.

The first salvos hit the outer perimeter, cracking through xeno alloy plating. Blue flame and violet mist burst from exposed power coils. Sections of wall were already sloughing off in molten chunks. Sirens howled. Their shield domes blinked and wavered, shattered by the focused percussion of thousands of guns speaking at once.

I watched it all from atop the command tank, Hammer of Athenia, an old-pattern of the Federation we’d overhauled. It rumbled forward at the front of the spearhead, a wedge of steel and vengeance plunging into the storm.

Then, without warning, the air screamed.

The spaceport launched its answer.

From the interior walls, the xenos released their drones, tens of thousands, maybe more. Metallic things the size of dogs and cars and trucks. Multi-limbed, barbed, with plasma cores and weapon platforms. They poured from silos, crawled up towers, and launched into the sky like a reverse waterfall of death.

The cloud rose like a second night.

“Enemy swarm incoming!” someone called on the command vox, like anyone needed reminding.

But we were ready.

All across the forward lines, our anti-air cannons opened fire. Man-portable rail launchers. Tank-mounted twin autocannons. Gunships rose to meet them, converted haulers turned into death machines, bristling with chainguns and missile pods.

And above it all, our interceptors roared.

The rebel air wing tore into the drone cloud with a vengeance. Explosions painted the sky in fire-orange and alien green. Crippled drones rained down in molten pieces across the battlefield.

Still the swarm came.

I raised my rifle and braced against the tank’s guard rail, ignoring the shaking of the machine beneath me. I sighted the first drone breaking low through the smoke and fired, three quick las-bursts. The first two scorched its side. The third pierced its eye and dropped it in a pile of sizzling meat and wire.

“To the walls!” I shouted. My voice went through the command net. “Advance under fire! First wave, go!”

Our army surged.

Thousands of infantry stormed forward, lasguns, grenade launchers and plasma-carbines held tight. Tank divisions ground into motion beside them, steel treads carving the cratered earth.

I grinned like a wolf. The tank shook as a railgun blast hit thirty meters to our right, carving out a crater where a squad had just taken cover. Their comrades kept moving, not even turning.

Fear had long since been replaced by rage.

Every second, another drone dove from the heavens, some crashing straight into vehicles, detonating in bursts of acidic gore. A nearby halftrack was flipped end-over-end by a divebombing brute-drone, its crew thrown like dolls. Two medics ran toward the wreck without hesitation. Behind them, more men surged forward, stepping over corpses without slowing.

“Left ridge, two o’clock, bunker nest!” Ariana’s voice came sharp through my earpiece.

I turned and saw it, Derenik gunners dug into a half-shattered pillbox overlooking the road, raining plasma into the front ranks. One tank was already slagged, the men inside gone in a burst of flame.

I swung my lasrifle up, adjusting for distance. The armor’s stabilizers compensated as we rolled. I fired six times. Four of the shots glanced off the bunker’s gun shield. The fifth caught one of the xenos in the throat and the sixth melted through its remaining eye.

Ariana’s voice clicked again. “Nice.”

“Focus,” I growled. “We're not there yet.”

She was riding one of the APCs near the front, her own fireteam around her.

More drones poured from the sky. They slammed into our tanks, dug into hulls, screamed as they died. But for every one that fell, we shot down five.

Then we hit the outer minefields.

“Mine patterns ahead!” someone called on the vox.

Too late for some. But we had prepared.

The forward infantry threw down their mine-sweeping drones, tiny box-crawlers that scuttled ahead, pinging signatures and detonating safe paths. Behind them came the heavy tanks, rolling over the craters with armored skirts that shrugged off the concussive blasts.

My own tank lurched as something exploded beneath us, but the armor held.

“Are you all okay there?!” I shouted to the crew. I got a few shouts in return.

We kept moving.

And then I saw it, through the smoke, through the blur of light and shadow and fire. The outer wall.

Rising nearly a kilometer. Defensive guns lined the top, firing madly into the storm. Blue flares from shield relays pulsed along its base. The impact craters from our artillery marked it in dozens of places, but it still stood.

Not for long.

“Breach team, forward!” I barked. “Hit that wall!”

From the rear lines, three siege crawlers rolled into view, hulking machines built to punch holes in planetary fortresses. They fired as one. The earth shuddered.

THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

Each shot tore into the wall like a battering ram of light. The first cratered a section of gunport emplacements. The second blew open a supply hatch. The third punched through.

Cheers went up. “We’ve got a hole!”

I leapt from the tank, hitting the ground hard enough to crack the asphalt. Around me, men surged past, heading for the breach.

The vanguard. The brave. The doomed.

I moved with them.

Ariana joined me at the breach. Her armor was scorched. Blood, alien and human, splattered her helmet. But she grinned.

“This is it,” she said.

“No,” I said, drawing my sword. The edge gleamed white-hot from its power core. “This is only the beginning.”

And then we went in.

The inside of the spaceport was another world.

We charged through the breach and into cavernous, ancient halls.

My boots thundered across hangar decks that stretched for kilometers. Entire warships, human and alien alike, hung suspended in mag-locked cradles above us, silent and dead.

Overhead, the vaulted ceilings arched so high they vanished into smog and ash. From above, mechanical gantries hung like the arms of titans. Conveyors rumbled with wreckage. Cargo lifts screamed.

And beyond the haze, spearing up into the wounded sky, stood the ancient spire of the space elevator, so massive it defied belief. A monolithic column of silver-black alloy that rose higher than the clouds, reaching all the way to low orbit.

We had all seen images. We had all read the records. But nothing prepared me for the sheer size of it as seen only a few kilometers away. That one structure could carry millions of tons of material into space. That more than a dozen of them once existed across Athenia. The xenos had preserved this one and a few more. Their lifeline to the void. With it severed, no more reinforcements would come from the stars.

Take the port. Control the spire. Then assault the Hive’s heart.

Simple. On paper.

Reality was a bit harder.

As we moved deeper into the interior, resistance grew savage.

The xenos were dug in across the hangar bays, squadrons of drones, entrenched gun-creatures, and hover tanks fired at us. My rifle barked over and over as I laid down precision shots into anything that moved wrong.

Xeno gunners exploded into gore. A drone leapt from a second-story catwalk. I caught it mid-air with a burst to the eye, and it fell in pieces.

Around me, tanks poured in through the breach as more vreaches were made along the kilometers long wall. Explosions echoed in the distance. Rebel troopers spread out into squad formations, shouting into comms, pointing, firing. But with so many voices, the vox became chaos as the comms division tried to keep up.

“Sector six, fall back!”
“Tank division three is down! Heavy fire from bay four!”
“Who’s got ammo?! We’re out—”
“Walker! WALKER!”

I ducked behind the shattered husk of a hover carrier just as a plasma bolt screamed overhead. It slammed into a munitions stack thirty meters away, erupting in a chain reaction of fire and shrieking metal. Ariana’s squad flanked left, cutting down a group of xeno foot soldiers hiding behind a control pylon. I lost sight of her in the smoke.

A sound came from my side.

I turned, flinging out my hand almost without thinking, and a bolt of Warp fire leapt from my palm.

It wasn’t like the controlled infection of biomancy. This was pure, searing force, bright as a dying star, and it struck the xeno square in the chest. The creature exploded in a burst of violet flame, limbs flying, its shriek cut off in an instant.

I stood frozen for half a heartbeat, stunned. I hadn’t known I could do that. But this, this was something else entirely.

I need to practice that…

Being a Psyker was awesome!

A group of my men was pinned down by fire from a ridge of cargo towers. I charged the line faster than sound, lasgun on full auto, sword drawn. I sprinted through the crossfire, my armor shrieking with impacts. Bullets sparked against my pauldrons. One of the xeno riflemen tried to swing his carbine at me. I cut him in half mid-motion and crushed his partner’s skull with the butt of my rifle.

“Get up!” I shouted to the pinned men. “Push forward!”

They did. Behind us, tanks rolled in pairs. They fired at will, shells screaming into distant walls and wrecked starships. One of the hover tanks came into view. Its engine hummed with unearthly energy. Its plasma cannon swiveled toward me.

I dove behind cover as it fired.

My tank crews responded instantly.

Two heavy armor units lined up and blasted it with synchronized fire. One shell cratered its front. The second hit its core. It detonated in a blast of green fire, raining molten armor and limbs.

I stood as the heat washed over me. “Forward! Keep moving!”

But the enemy was not finished.

From the far end of the chamber, through clouds of ash and smoke, came the Walkers.

Six-legged monsters of biomechanical horror, the size of three-story buildings. Each leg ended in hooked claws that clanged against the hangar deck. Their heads were long and eyeless, filled with sensors and weapon ports.

Six of them marched forward in a line. One of them fired. A tank was hit dead-center, exploding into a rolling fireball. Men were thrown through the air like ragdolls.

I roared.

“TANKS! Target the Walkers! Full battery fire! NOW!”

The first line of armor responded in sync. Dozens of barrels rotated toward the incoming giants and opened up.

The hangar exploded in thunder.

Missiles, shells, and plasma bolts slammed into the incoming Walkers. The leading one reeled, its left flank torn open, exposing coils of glowing alien organs. But they kept coming. One stepped over the remains of a burning APC, fired its weapons, and destroyed another two vehicles in a single salvo.

I ran.

I vaulted onto a wrecked tank, then onto the shoulder of a burning hovercraft. From there, I leapt.

I landed on the head of the closest Walker with a crash that split the metal shell beneath me. My boots stuck fast. The beast bucked and howled, trying to shake me off. I drove my sword down with both hands, stabbing through its armored skull. Sparks erupted. Viscous black and green fluid poured out as alien circuits failed.

The Walker flailed again.

I ripped the sword free and jammed a grenade into the wound. Then I kicked off the head and fell, landing in a roll on the scorched metal floor just as the charge went off.

The Walker’s head exploded, showering the deck with molten fragments. The machine took three staggering steps, then collapsed in a shrieking pile of steel and meat.

A wave of cheers erupted around me.

Soldiers who had been pinned a moment before surged forward again. They roared as they fired, flanking the second Walker, which now stood isolated after its comrade’s death. The tanks pressed forward, emboldened.

“Apollion took one down!”

“They’re not invincible!”

The momentum shifted.

With fresh ferocity, our forces struck back. Tank shells pounded the Walkers. One of the beasts lost a leg and crumpled, only to be finished by three grenadiers who scrambled up its back and blew out its reactor.

Heros all.

I fought like a fury, cutting through another xeno squad trying to rally near a loading crane. My blade arced and hummed, leaving severed limbs and sliced armor in its wake. A plasma bolt grazed my pauldron, scorching the paint but not the steel. My rifle went dry. I drew my sidearm and kept firing.

Somewhere in the smoke, Ariana’s voice came through the vox again. “We’re breaching the east hangar doors! Reinforcements coming!”

“Hold that line,” I ordered. “Do not let them regroup!”

Another Walker tried to advance, but this time, we were ready. Two tanks bracketed it with coordinated fire, disabling its legs. A gunship swooped down and hit its back with a missile strike. It collapsed in flames, screeching like a dying animal.

And then, at last, the enemy line began to crack.

The remaining drones pulled back, trying to regroup behind a bulkhead shield line that bisected the hangar interior. We kept pressing. The rebel army swarmed the halls, flushing out entrenched defenders, storming catwalks and gantries. Engineers moved up with las-cutters to carve through reinforced doors. Demolitions teams placed charges to collapse control towers and drone nests.

The battle was still far from over. But the breach had become a beachhead.

I climbed onto a service lift and looked over the battlefield. Fires burned across the hangar floor. Dead drones and xenos littered the ground. Dozens of tanks lined the perimeter now, guarding the forward command point. Medics moved from man to man. Repeater guns were set up to cover every corridor. Ariana stood nearby, her armor blackened but her stance proud.

She met my gaze and nodded.

I nodded back.

We had done it.

"You are taking the lead of a squad, Ari."

"I won't disappoint you, I swear!"

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I stood at the edge of the central control tower, high above the main hangar decks, helmet off.

From here, I could see it all. The scarred floors of the massive cargo halls. The flickering lights of repair crews navigate through crushed corridors. Burned-out Walkers being dragged away by half-assembled loaders. Rebel banners hanging from gantries, hastily draped over alien terminals.

The spaceport was ours.

Not just a foothold. We had claimed the whole goddamn thing. The xenos had tried to retreat but we had hit them with everything we had, few had escaped. A few ships had tried to fly off but we had managed to take them down too.

Behind me, Dren walked in with his usual awkward gait, his armor scratched and partially melted.

“I just got the latest from Ariana’s section,” he said. “Last xeno resistance node fell half an hour ago. Clean sweep. We’ve got every hangar, every fuel depot, every drydock and berth on the manifest, boss man!”

“Casualties?”

“Severe. More than ten thousand dead, tens of thousands wounded. But we gave better than we got.”

I nodded, eyes still on the hangars. “And the elevator?”

“The big bitch is still intact,” he said. “We’ve taken the lower control station. Power’s stable, guidance magnetic rails unbroken. We’ll need to run diagnostics to see if the orbital platform’s still manned and hostile, it will be hell to take that, but for now, she’s ours.”

Of course the orbital platform at the top of the elevator would be manned, it was a massive station where hundreds of ships could dock, filled to the brim with orbital defenses. If we took it and pointed them at the enemy…

“We will need to take the orbital platform on top if we want to get the xenos off high orbit, those cannons should be enough.”

But it would be hard, such an entrenched position would take a lot of resources to take intact.

Still.

The sky no longer belonged to the enemy.

“We’ve started cataloguing the ships,” Dren said, stepping up beside me. “You’re going to want to see this.”

He handed me a dataslate.

I scrolled.

Thousands. Thousands of ships.

Sure, they were not massive warships. But they were enough for our purposes.

The inventory list went on and on. Human-pattern warships in drydock. Atmospheric shuttles. Armored landers. Corvettes. Gunships. Entire squadrons of fighters tagged with Federation designations. Even alien vessels. Most of them were inactive, powered down. But they were intact.

“What’s functional?” I asked.

Dren chuckled. “About a third right now. We’ll need weeks just to clear the old security locks and xeno interference systems. But once we do…”

His voice trailed off.

But he didn’t need to finish.

Once we did, we wouldn’t just control a Hive. We’d have a way to hit the bastards in space.

We had industry. Weapons. Millions of troops. And now, a spaceport. A lifeline. A way to spread the war to the skies and beyond.

“I want that inventory locked down tight,” I said. “No looters, no tampering. Get the Engineers started on priority reclamation. Organize secure hangars for immediate-use vessels. Anything flight-worthy gets triple-sealed and tagged.”

Dren nodded. “Already started. We'll have staging areas cleared by the hour.”

I handed him back the dataslate.

“Good work, Dren.” I said. “This is what we bled for.”

He gave a crooked smile, but then his face grew more serious. “What about the next step?”

I turned.

“The Hive,” I said. “We finish this.”

Athenia’s central Hive still loomed beyond the storm clouds, even now. A mountain of steel and spires, kilometers wide, impossibly tall. Humanity’s enemy still ruled from its poisoned throne, deep within that tower. But now they were isolated. Cut off from the skies. From supplies. From reinforcements.

Their doom was sealed. We could take the whole city around them, isolate them and then strike.

Thankfully we had reasons to believe the xenos would not bombard us… we had not intercepted any talk of reinforcements coming from beyond the system. We doubted the wider Empire even knew what had been going on for the last few months.

The xeno commander wished to keep this a secret and try to crush the rebellion by himself. Probably to save his career.

It would not last long, Athenia was a transited system and merchant ships could be turned back or seized only so long before someone noticed. But it gave us time to prepare and grow.

Ariana stepped in, helmet off, her braid hanging loose and tangled.

“We took the western bays,” she said. “Walked through the last holdouts like ghosts. Even the xeno hover tanks were abandoned.”

“You did well,” I said. “Your squad?”

“Lost three. Seven wounded. The rest are already securing the upper stacks.”

I nodded. She moved to the edge and looked out with me.

“Feels unreal,” she said. “I grew up in the dust. Barely had shoes. Used to dream of seeing the stars. Now we own the damn road to them.”

I smiled faintly. “We’re just getting started. You will see your stars soon, Ari.”

She glanced at Dren, who saluted and left, giving us the space.

The two of us stood there in silence for a while, watching the fire crews douse smoldering ships, watching cranes carry away collapsed Walkers, watching the rebel flags rise one by one on every deck.

Ariana broke the silence at last.

“So,” she said, “do I get to pick which ship I want?”

“You planning on becoming a star captain already?”

“I might. Something small and fast. With guns.”

I laughed. “We’ll see.”

Chapter Text

Chapter 12 — The Fields Beyond Iron

The wind bit at the edge of the tower we were currently in, carrying the smell of rusted rebar, spent promethium, and ash. Smog hung low and stubborn, tinting the morning light into a dull amber. We were currently in the bastions near the Central Hive Wall. Garran and Mira had managed to secure it as we fought for the Space Port. We had created the biggest assault since the fall of the Athenian Federation. And we had won the battle.

From this height I could see farther than most.

Below, the Hive still burned in places. Pockets of resistance clung to the underworks and the spire heights, but the heart of the rebellion held. We had taken most of the city. The hard part was only beginning.

The bastion tower groaned under the weight of repair crews and radio arrays as I stepped onto the open-air platform. My commanders were waiting. Mira stood at the edge with her arms crossed, watching the horizon. Garran leaned over a crude map table flanked by senior logisticians. The Twins lounged like cats on a broken wall, flicking scraps of copper between them and betting on how many xenos we would kill in our next attack.

“You’re late, boss,” Mira said when I approached.

“Got distracted,” I answered, glancing over the edge. “The view’s different.”

Garran snorted and jabbed a finger at the map. “Sector Twelve’s sewer warrens are worse than a maze. Derenik snipers hit us again this morning. Twelve lost, two medics among them.”

The xenos were focusing on our specialists. More as the fighting spread, we could not replace them. Engineers we had by the thousands., humans kept everything running in this planet and they were allowed to be trained in it by our glorious overlords.

 Doctors though… not many of them in Athenia.

“We’ll send flamers and drones into the lower levels,” I said. “If we can’t reach them, we’ll starve them out. There is no need to keep wasting good men for such small pockets.”

Mira’s mouth thinned. “They’ve collapsed access points. They’re stalling.”

“They’re dying,” Garran growled. “They just don’t know it. Like Alex said, we just need to wait them out.”

The Twins hopped down and joined the table. Dren tossed a bent stub-round onto the map. “Outer slums are too quiet,” he said. “We doubled patrols. No major movements. Civies keep streaming in, hundreds of thousands.”

“And volunteers,” his brother added. “Veterans, kids, ex-Aux officers. We outfit them as fast as we can, but we need more manufactories online.”

“Let it keep up,” I said. “It’s the tide I want. Clean up the pockets slowly with fire and then start the siege of the Hive walls.”

“That will be a grind…” Letho said. And Garran nodded. The siege of the Central Hive would be tough; we needed to cross its thick, kilometer-high walls before we entered a maze of spires, government buildings, plazas, and gun emplacements.

That would be hell to accomplish.

A dozen field officers hovered behind us. Penelope was absent. She avoided strategy sessions unless Ariana was involved, focusing instead on communications and propaganda.

Lately, she had taken a special interest in logistics, as I had thought she would. She was brilliant at it.

We all have our hidden talents.

Mira tapped the map. “If we clear the sewer nests and reclaim the upper spires, we might secure the lower Hive in two months. After that…”

She flipped the map, revealing the surrounding districts of Hive Athenia. Vast plains lay shaded, dull gray and brown, dotted with faded structures and indistinct icons.

“The countryside,” she said. “The black fields.”

“My grandfather said those used to be wheat plains,” Garran said, bitterly. “Two hundred years back, before the xenos ruined the biosphere. Nothing grows there now but razorgrass and rustmoss.”

Smoke from our burned districts drifted on the wind toward the open horizon. “What’s left between us and Hive Vern?” I asked.

The Twins exchanged a look. “A thousand kilometers of wasteland,” Letho said. “Old rail lines, abandoned waystations, a few dozen middling-sized cities, maybe some farming guilds left.”

By middling cities he meant cities with up to tens of millions of people living in them. They would have been metropolises in my old life. Here they were ‘middling cities’ compared to the billions upon billions of Athenia.

“Also bandits and Derenik scout packs,” his brother added. “Not empty nothing. Dangerous nothing.”

Mira folded her arms. “It’s not a war for one Hive anymore. Take the fields and we can link with other resistance cells. Go global.”

I stepped away from the table and scanned the faces of my officers. They were worn, but their eyes still burned.

“This is not about a single city,” I told them. “The Dereniks did not come here to occupy a Hive. They came to consume, to turn this world into meat and metal for their war machine. Most of their armies are occupied light-years away, but they will come back after they realize what has happened here.”

I let the words hang. Mira met my gaze. Garran’s jaw tightened.

“We held ground. We bled for every hallway. We are still standing.”

I pointed to the map. “Take the black fields and we cut the Dereniks in half. Link up with our brothers and sisters in the west and prepare for a global push after we take the Central Hive here.”

Approval rippled through the officers. My voice rose with the momentum of the plan.

“We are fighting for Athenia Prime. For every settlement, every dome, every family forced underground to wait for someone to want the impossible.”

The wind’s howl swelled for a moment until it sounded like a chorus. My aura swelling.

The officers saluted, fists to chests. I returned it with a hard, proud gesture.

“Get the roads cleared,” I ordered. “Send scouts into the wasteland. Prep strike teams for sewer ops. No delays.”

They moved with purpose. The map table folded. Tactical chatter filled the air.

We had too much to do.

Most of them filtered down the stairs. Mira lingered, watching me with tired amusement.

“You always know what to say, boss.” she muttered, voice low.

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A few days alter I stood at the head of a command room, knuckles pressed into steel, and watched Penelope enter without a word.

She didn’t sit.

“Report,” I said.

Penelope set a small data-slate on the table. “A launch was detected from Ares. Surface-to-orbit, silo-deep. Probably pre-occupation tech. Half the Derenik fleet missed it entirely.”

I read the red text. One word, blunt and steady.

Confirmed.

“What was the target?” I asked.

“One of their transport-warships. Command class.” She folded her arms. “It exploded in low orbit. Visual confirmation came from four sites and debris burned across the upper hemisphere for six minutes to the west.”

There was no satisfaction in her voice. That meant only one thing.

“And the retaliation?”

Penelope’s jaw tightened. “Orbital weapons fired seventeen minutes after the launch. They struck Zarathea.”

The room went quiet, the kind of silence that presses on the ribs.

Zarathea. Near Hive Hadez. Once a trade and refinery hub. Once home to more than eight million.

“Survivors?” I forced the question out.

“Unknown,” she said. She looked down. “It wasn’t a pinpoint strike at the silo. It was a cleansing, Alex. Zarathea is gone from the map…”

Dammit…

The officers along the walls stiffened. On the map table the sector labeled Zarathea had gone dark, blinking grey. Inactive.

I let the quiet sit for a long moment.

“Get a recon team in the air,” I said finally, voice low. “And get them to keep a low profile, I don’t want the xenos to know we can move all throughout the planet just yet. I want eyes on the ground. If one soul survived that bombardment, we find them.”

“Garran is already organizing it,” Penelope answered.

Good. Good officers made me happy.

So, a rebel cell on Ares had somehow reactivated a ground-to-space missile and knocked a Derenik transport from orbit. A huge tactical victory. A nightmare in civilian cost. That transport had carried walkers, tanks, and logistics. The loss cut both ways.

I stared at the dark walls as if they could hand me the answers. They could not.

We could win battles on the surface, overthrow garrisons, sever supply lines, bring hive after hive under a single banner. None of it mattered while the enemy owned the void. A single warship could torch a sector. A fleet could unmake a planet. The stars hung like a blade over our throats, and the Derenik knew it.

They would not do it… they could not risk losing Athenia, but if they got completely desperate?

We needed defenses.

“They’re used to cowing worlds, not losing them,” one officer muttered.

“They’ll escalate,” I said. “They will strike harder and more indiscriminately.”

“Which means we need teeth that can bite back,” Penelope replied, already matching my thought.

I turned back to the table. “The Space Port.”

The Space Port had guns that could fire into space. At least reaching low orbit. And the orbital station tethered to the elevator had many more cannons capable to reach high orbit… we needed that.

For now I would be satisfied if we brought back up all anti-space defenses in the Hive and multiplied them by a dozen.

“We’ve recovered five hundred gunships,” Mira said. “Two hundred are flight-ready. The rest need reactors and grav-lifts. We are short on power cells, but production is ramping. We lose aircraft as fast as we make them to drones and xeno fighters from the central hive, but we are gaining air superiority slowly, they cannot match our production levels already.”

“Push tech crews,” I said. “Triple them on the gunships. Open a dozen more manufactorums for fighters and bombers in the next month. That is a priority alongside void defenses.”

“And the flak towers?” Penelope asked.

“Reactivate every known planetary defense battery,” I ordered. “Two operational before week’s end. Start with Ridge Bastion. It can take low-orbit saturation fire.”

“It has not fired in two hundred years,” Garran warned. “Targeting cogitators might be insane.”

“We will fix them,” I said. I looked at Penelope. “What is the risk of another launch? From us or other cells?”

She considered. “From Athenia, no long-range silos of that caliber have been found. The Ares site was buried under six kilometers of rock and dirt as far as communications told us. I doubt many exist. But the fact that someone found and launched it means the idea is alive. Others may try.”

“It means we are not alone in thinking about the stars,” I said.

“No,” Penelope agreed.

If we could not seize orbit, we would have to deny it. Make every launch a risk. Turn every atmospheric pass into a possible death sentence. Flak towers, rail batteries, gunships. Ground-to-space missiles, atmosphere-to-space fighters and bombers. Anything we could scrape together.

“Begin scanning for old launch sites,” I continued. “Find schematics for those ground-to-space missiles. I want prototypes yesterday. Rebuild our defenses as best we can. While the Derenik own the void, ther ships remain our greatest threat.”

Wouldn’t it be sad if after all this I died to an orbital strike?

“Garran,” I added, “prepare contingency plans to seize the orbital station attached to the space elevator. If we take it intact, we can use its batteries to clean low and high orbit here.”

“Yes, sir,” he answered.

Even so, the future beyond the immediate fight was not here. It lay elsewhere.

“Olyssus,” I said aloud. “The agriworld.”

Penelope frowned. “That is half a system away.”

 “We cannot survive on recycled paste forever. It won’t last forever. If we are to win, we need real food.”

“You want to take a planet we cannot reach yet,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I want to plan now. Or secure alternatives. We have food for a few months... but after?”

Food had never been simple. Billions of mouths burned through supplies like furnaces. Each liberated sector added more hungry mouths, more factories and soldiers to feed. If we kept expanding, we would exhaust this world within the year.

Olyssus had been the answer from the beginning.

Gene-altered grain plains, hydrodome cities, automated harvesters. If we could reach it, we could feed the rebellion forever.

To take it we would have to challenge the fleet. The Derenik still controlled the void. Their ships sat in low planetary orbit. To reach Olyssus we would have to burn a path through them.

I gave a little prayer to the Empress, as usual, no answer came to save me. We needed food, we had no food. We could get it in Olyssus, we had no way to take it and hold it… A solution had to be found or we were damned.

First, we needed to concentrate on problems we could solve; we would secure this planet.

“For now,” I said, “secure every grain silo we can find. Start a food division in logistics. Catalog reserves and begins urban farming. Build vertical farms in any usable buildings.”

That might buy us some time.

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The air down here smelled of damp rot, iron, and faint ozone. Not death exactly. Just life clawing its way out of industrial ruin.

We passed under a corroded arch stamped with the sigil of a long-dead Guild, its lettering flaked away by decades of acid rain and xeno occupation.

Someone had painted a crude Burning Chain over the ruin. The ceiling rose above us like the inside of a rusting cathedral.

Vertical grow-towers stretched up into the gloom, filled with bioluminescent mushrooms and stubborn leafy crops that could survive on the filtered piss of a Hive. A hundred workers moved across gantries and narrow walkways like ants.

“First shaft goes nearly eight hundred meters,” the chief engineer said as we walked. Kass, ex-miner turned rebel-farmer, had a spine bent by labor and eyes that never met mine. “Mostly low-light myco strains. Edible, if you boil ’em long enough.”

He pointed to the next silo, lined with green columns of hydroponic wheatgrass and synthesized nutrient vines. “We reclaimed twenty-four vertical farms like this. Rigs are old, but the bio-lights still work. Found an engineer from Hive Vern, she reprogrammed half the nutrient recyclers with what little cogitator capacity we had.”

“And how much can we feed?” I asked.

Kass hesitated. “With rationing? Fifty million. Maybe seventy, if we stretch it.”

My jaw tightened. Hive Athenia now sheltered billions under our banner, and that number grew every day as the army carried victory on every front. Refugees flowed in, workers and children with ash in their lungs and nothing but broken memories behind their eyes.

“We’ll last a few months,” he said, shrugging, echoing my thoughts. “But not a year. Not with more mouths coming in.”

I ran a hand over the railing, feeling condensation. These people had carved life from concrete and decay, but it would never be enough.

“We need to start expansion,” I said. “Beyond the walls.”

Kass blinked. “You mean the black fields, high commander?”

“Yes. The soil’s corrupted, but there are pockets of fertility near the river veins. If we deploy filtration towers and seed-stocks, we might reclaim zones big enough for open farming. That might give us a few more months.”

He nodded.

We descended to the lower levels where laborers shuffled between racks, harvesting fungi with dull blades and shaking powdered spores into filtration bins. Many had been factory serfs weeks ago, still learning how to plant rather than produce.

I stopped beside a young woman in a re-stitched workcoat. She looked up in awe, then quickly away.

“Your name?” I asked.

“Viola,” she said, voice small. “Unit fourteen.”

“You were a worker before?”

“Assembly line,” she answered. “Pressure seals for coolant drums, sir.”

I gestured to the fungal rack. “And now?”

“Food!” she said, bright as if the word could burn. “For the fighters, Apollion, sir!”

There was that look again, hope edged with disbelief. I turned and raised my voice.

“Most of you never held a rifle,” I said. “Maybe you never will. But what you’re doing here feeds the army. Feeds the rebellion. The food you grow fuels our victories. It keeps your children alive. It keeps the fire burning. You are soldiers, all of you. Make no mistake.”

The laborers stopped and cheered.

Hopefully we will build a thousand of these vertical farms. With rationing we might buy a year before these people started eating each other...

Couldn’t I have been dropped in a world like Ultramar?  That would have been a blessing.

I moved deeper into the humid dark, the engineers trailing in silence. Eventually, I found myself alone in a quiet shaft lit only by the blue glow of bio-lights, giving ultraviolet light to the plants. Rows of mushrooms pulsed gently on the racks. I sat on an overturned crate, metal cold against my skin.

Starvation was an old specter. I had seen what it did on Earth. It stripped people of themselves, turned men to beasts, mothers against their children. When hunger sets in, ideals crack and revolutions fall apart.

I couldn’t let that happen here.

And yet the questions came anyway. What if the flak towers failed? What if the stars rained fire again? What if the food ran out and we were forced to choose who ate and who didn’t?

The silence offered no answer.

I would do what had to be done, for the dream, for the Chain.

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I’d only come up here to clear my head. The briefing chamber below was still full of arguments over troop distribution, fuel rationing, and how many flak towers we could salvage and rebuild. I did not know primarchs could get stressed. But it seemed like we could at a mild level. That explained Perturabo a bit, the man had gotten mad from stress during the Great Crusade, the only primarch to fall from the Crusade instead of before it.

After an hour of talking in circles, I needed a break. A moment of silence.

The corridor was half-lit and narrow, rarely used. It wasn’t the view that stopped me though, it was the voices behind the sealed maintenance room door on my left. Low, close, heated. I paused. Without trying, my ears picked up every word.

“…you always do this,” Ariana snapped.

“Do what?” Penelope’s voice oozed amusement. “Breathe?”

“Take what I was interested in!”

“Oh, for Apollion’s sake. You make it sound like I kidnapped him.”

“You might as well have!” Ariana hissed. “I saw him first, Pen! Back when he came out of the flames, bleeding, half-naked, and pissed off. You were still crying that no one wanted you in that hidden apartment of yours!”

“I was not hiding. I was, err, tactically repositioning!”

“You were sobbing into an empty soup bowl every night that no man wanted to marry you before you saw him!”

There was a pause, then the unmistakable sound of Penelope clicking her fingers.

“You can’t claim dibs on a Demigod, Ariana.”

“Why not?!”

“Because you don’t even know what you’d do with one,” Penelope said in victory. I could almost imagine her grinning.

“I—! I would—!” Ariana stammered.

“Exactly,” Penelope cut in. “Look, darling. You’re adorable. Truly. But you really think you could handle someone seven feet tall, built like a siege tank, and with more stamina than a fusion reactor?”

A long silence.

“…You just looked at my chest.”

What the fuck am I listening to?

“I’m evaluating your survivability,” Penelope sounded entirely too smug. “I give you five minutes before you collapse from dehydration.”

Ariana growled, trying to rally. “You’re just jealous because he actually likes me, not just my body.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” Penelope said. “You’re bubbly, reckless, and have the fashion sense of a blinded drone. Very charming in a small-explosions kind of way.”

“You’re infuriating!”

“And you’re cute when you’re angry… Look, there’s no need to fight. Really. There’s enough of him for both of us.”

A pause.

“…What?”

“Just imagine it,” Penelope continued, unphased. “Us sharing a war-god. You take him Mondays, Wednesdays, and after heavy firefights. I’ll handle the rest. We rotate holidays.”

“You’re insane!”

“Thank you.”

“I—I… will think about it…”

Something metallic clattered, probably Ariana’s sidearm hitting the floor, and the door burst open a second later. She stormed out in a red-faced blur, clutching her pistol and her coat and what little remained of her composure. She nearly collided with me.

I was leaning against the opposite wall now, arms crossed, face as still as marble. Her eyes met mine and froze, then widened.

“…You heard all of that, didn’t you.”

I tilted my head ever so slightly.

Her blush deepened into a kind of crimson normally reserved for reactor warnings.

“I—uh—I mean—I didn’t say—she was—Penelope is—”

I raised an eyebrow.

She made a noise like a dying drone, spun on her heel, and bolted down the hall.

Penelope emerged from the room a moment later and found me laughing my ass off.

“Alex,” she said casually.

“Penelope,” I wheezed out.

“Lovely weather for awkward conversations,” she added, cocking a hip.

I said nothing. I was too busy laughing.

“I am going to go cook some mushroom stew, if you want any find me in a hour. I promise it will not affect your health... too much…”

She winked and ducked back inside.

I stood long after they were gone, staring at the patch of corridor where Ariana had vanished.

The war had many fronts.

Apparently, so did I.

Wait…

Mushrooms…

An idea came and it might actually work. I would have to reward Penelope if it actually did.

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The underbelly of Hive Athenia was my shelter, a place I’d hollowed out with my own hands and my own plans, welded shut from prying eyes.

No one knew this place existed. Not Penelope, not Garran, not even Ariana. That had to be the way of it.

My breath fogged faintly in the cool damp, mingling with the scent of rot and sterilized flesh.

On the table before me lay a Derenik scout, its reptilian skin split, organs exposed like a grotesque flower.

Its body twitched once.

I did not flinch.

I put my hands over the ribcage, fingers spread. The warp braided itself around my thoughts. Tissue pulsed beneath my palms. Something inside the xeno jerked, tore, and then unspooled into coils of fibrous tissue. Pale vines, knotted with thorns, wormed out of the wound and wrapped up through the chest, over the face. They fed, greedy and blind.

Every battle honed me.

Each brush with death tempered the raw things inside, turned sudden biomantic surges into a controlled instrument.

Fire had come first, a flash that answered without command. I learned to hold it, shape it into a blade that seared not only flesh but thought.

Lightning followed, less graceful, more violent, threads of blue that danced across my fingers and cracked in the air. When I fed that energy into a blade, the metal flared and the minds of those it struck frayed like overtaxed circuits.

I would master this. I had to.

I moved to the side table where my experiments after the Penelope driven inspiration lied.

A small tray fungus bulged with spores and grafted strains, harvested from tunnels beneath the Hive. Most had rotted.

One held on.

It glowed faintly. That was a good sign.

I cupped it and willed change at the cellular level, fold proteins, nudge capillaries, stabilize sugars. The tiny structures answered, hardened a fraction, color dulled, but form held. Progress. Not enough. Never enough.

We needed substance, and we needed it now. I could see the calculus in my head: vats and labs, harvesters and rail lines, mouths to feed multiplying like a contagion. A thousand victories on the surface would be hollow without a food base to hold them.

But if I could make a fungus that held everything that a human needing. That reproduced at unprecedented speeds and consumed anything biological, turning it into proteins, vitamins, carbs, sugar, and half a dozen other things humans needed to survive.

If I managed to create a fungus that bloomed in vats for our production and fed everyone…

Permanence was the aim. Survival was only the first step.

The Derenik Armada still ruled the void. Their ships hovered in low orbit like knives. A single wave of plasma could unmake everything we had rebuilt.

And beyond those knives lay hundreds of other worlds. If we were to win loudly enough, their response would be savage.

My eyes drifted to the console on the far wall. Readings scrolled in a pale stream: gene maps, decay coefficients, viral assays. Half of it was theft, stolen fragments of old science from the xenos or the federation.

The other half I had assembled myself. I was not a Magos Biologis. I was something else: a Psykic Primarch.

What could I create if I let myself go further?

Something that targeted what the xenos, that crawled through the alloys and tissues foreign to us and consumed them.

Something that spread silently, perhaps even symbiotically at first, until its balance tipped and it devoured everything of xeno origin. An engineered blight that cleared the field and left new space for humanity to take root.

It was monstrous. It was tempting. The grandfather would be very mad at me, or incredibly glad…

We had enough problems without flirting with a new apocalypse via Chaos God. Yet the logic pressed: a plague against the enemy would spare human industry, spare our fields, open worlds for settlement. A thousand conquered planets, emptied and waiting, ours to seed.

I breathed and pushed the thought away, not because it was wrong, but because it demanded a step I had yet to take. The line between salvation and atrocity blurred when your survival was at stake…

We had to eat, to fight, to hold. We would take the void, one way or another. We would reach Olyssus, or die trying to hold the line.

For now, I would keep practicing in secret. I would refine the fire, sharpen the lightning, teach the warp to obey.

I would tend the fungus, coax more life from rot, plan ration lines and seed stores. I would make the rebellion into an organism that could survive both hunger and war.

And if the day came when the tools of science and war demanded an unthinkable hand, I would be ready to take it.

Chapter Text

Chapter 13 — The Ember’s Edge

The command center in the bastion was growing by the day.

But it was needed to coordinate the fighting in such a big Hive. When one of your divisions was fighting two hundred kilometer from the other, you needed good comms to know what the heck was happening.

Rows of transmission arrays and signal projectors lined the main chamber, each monitored by rebels in dark uniforms, most of them sleepless, many of them gaunt. I could smell caff in the air.

It is going to be a big problem when there is no more Caff… I can already taste the rebellion in my ranks.

Penelope would be devastated.

But still we grew. We are getting ever more sophisticated.

Penelope met me at the bulkhead with a nod, her expression unusually unreadable.

“The transmission is stable; we have managed to protect it from Derenik interception.”

On the far wall, the hololith projector flickered to life as I entered. Static formed shapes, then a face.

A woman’s face. Striking, but not in the way I was sure the nobles of old Terra would’ve admired, her beauty was carved. Harsh cheekbones, eyes a deep green, and crimson hair tied in a utilitarian knot behind her head.

A scar bisected her lower lip, and she bore it with pride.

“Alexander Apollion,” she said. Her voice was deep, sure. “I presume I’m speaking to the rebel lord of Hive Athenia.”

Her use of my name attached to the name of the legendary hero gave me pause for a microsecond. Few used it in my inner circle. Fewer still spoke it with that kind of admiration, as if I were a figure out of myth and not a genetically created man wearing armor and winging it as best he could.

“I am,” I replied, folding my arms. “And you are?”

“My name is Marianna Atropos,” she answered without hesitation. “Commander of the Flame Undying. Sovereign protector of Hive Vern.”

I raised a brow. “Sovereign?”

“Only until the people have a better option,” she said, and the corner of her mouth twitched into a shadow of a smile. “I prefer titles that burn away when you’re done with them.”

Behind her, the projection revealed flashes of battle-torn streets, militia forces raising banners atop hive towers, and crowds cheering in smoke-filled plazas. Her people had won a great victory in Vern.

“You’ve done the impossible, Marianna,” I said, stepping closer to the display. “I heard whispers Vern had erupted alongside us after the Red Day, but I never expected to see it free so soon.”

“I could say the same of you, Lord Apollion,” she replied. “The tales out of Hive Athenia speak of miracles. Ships brought low. The xeno warships falling from orbit were seen all over the world. A Demigod reborn among men.”

I didn’t respond to that directly. The myth growing would serve me, and allowing it to spread would do much of the job of uniting the planet beneath me for me.

Penelope cleared her throat softly beside me. “Signal’s strong. No signs of interference. She’s on a high-gain relay loop, secure for the next six minutes.”

Marianna tilted her head slightly. “Then I’ll be brief.”

She straightened her back. “Hive Vern is ours. We drove the last of the Derenik ground forces into the southern craters in the wastes two nights ago.” The craters beyond the boundaries of Hive Vern were famous in the whole planet, the place where the xenos had deployed their orbital bombardment to cow Hive Vern during their conquest of Athenia. “Their air support fled east in your direction. I expect they’ll regroup, but for now, we have breathing room. We’ve secured all manufactorums and the macrorail yards, the space port is ours, even if the orbital station atop the space elevator remains in the enemies’ hands. Civil control is stabilizing under our army. Resistance cells are forming outside the walls: peasants, scavengers, and ex-factory workers. They’re eager. Untrained. But we can shape them.”

“How is your food situation? It has become a big problem for us here.” I asked.

“Agriplexes six and eight are intact. We’ve got the eastern farms operational again, and water’s coming in from the aquifer wells. It’s not much, but we’ll survive for a few months.”

“You’ve done more than survive,” I said, nodding slowly. “You became the first to take your hive. I congratulate you on that. It is going to be a moral boost for the whole planet; we will make sure to broadcast it planet-wide.”

“How are things in the capital, Lord Apollion?”

“Most of the city apart from the Central Hive is ours aside from a few redoubts in the depths, most of the xeno resistance is in hiding still in their spires behind the walls and we shall assault it soon, for now the battle is in the remaining pockets of resistance and the drones and aircraft that come from the military installations inside the Central Hive. We have turned our eyes to organization and supplies.”

Marianna’s expression softened. Just a flicker. “Good, so the capital will soon be in human hands once more. And now I ask, where do we strike next? I have an army sitting on its ass with no target beyond minor cities in the wastelands.”

A direct woman. Good. And she was already deferring to me for overall strategy.

I stepped beside the console and keyed up the planetary map. The continent spun before us, dotted with hive clusters and the black scars of xeno bombardments. I drew a red line southward from Vern to Helios.

“Not here,” I said, tapping Athenia. “The situation is under control. But south, Hive Helios is still under siege. Their resistance cells never fully formed like both of ours, and Derenik pressure has been relentless on the few heroes fighting and dying every day.”

“Then we will move there,” she said at once. “We’ll take our banners and burn the invaders from the streets.”

“When Athenia’s forges run at full tilt again, we’ll arm and outfit tens of millions of fighters. Then we will be able to secure the continent and exterminate any resistance here, but we need a few months.”

Marianna didn’t argue. She simply nodded. Slowly.

“I see.”

“I need you to be the west,” I said. “To be the anchor. Athenia will be the hammer. Together, we’ll shatter their hold, hive by hive.”

A pause stretched between us.

Then she smiled. “Perhaps you are Apollion, after all.”

The image flickered. A warning tone pulsed overhead.

“Signal dropping,” Penelope said. “Thirty seconds.”

Marianna looked directly at me.

“I’ll hold Vern.  s—strike Helios. When we meet again, i—it will be on the bones of our jailers.”

“I look forward to it, Marianna.” I said, quietly.

Then she was gone.

The chamber dimmed. The hololith faded. The consoles resumed their normal, droning cycles.

Penelope folded her arms. “She’s an impressive woman.”

“She is,” I said. “If only every Hive had the success hers did...”

“No such luck for us, sadly.”

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The fires of Athenia never truly went out, and from this balcony, you could see so many of them.

The sky had always been orange, even during nighttime, but now it glowed with the million fires all over the city that we were hard-pressed to put out.

We will need to get some regulations on air contamination once this is done.

Still, it was quiet right now. For once. No aircraft fighting xeno interceptors or drone swarms coming from the Central Hive, and our own bombardment had stopped this night for resupply and stock piling for the big push. The artillery and bombers going silent.

A knock came at the door behind me, light, almost nervous.

“Come in,” I called, not turning.

Ariana stepped into view and leaned against the edge of the railing, her silhouette catching the glow of the fires below. She wore her uniform half-undone, jacket slung casually over her shoulder. A soldier’s ease with just a hint of ceremony.

“Am I interrupting one of your brooding silences?” she asked.

“You’re interrupting a rare moment of stillness,” I said, glancing at her with a faint smile. “But I’ll allow it, mortal.”

“Ohh… thank your divine majesty for this privilege, Lord Apollion!” She said in a small voice, before laughing.

She smirked and sat beside me, letting her booted feet dangle off the balcony ledge. For a long while, neither of us spoke. We just watched the city breathe.

“It’s strange,” she said finally. “After all the chaos, the firestorms, the screaming. Now… It’s just quiet. I don’t trust it, it’s weird having to trust the Air Force to do the fighting while we prepare.”

“Nor do I,” I said. “But the quiet is not our enemy. Complacency is.”

“Mm. Sounds like something you’d say in a speech,” she teased.

I turned to look at her. “Would you prefer a speech? I have quite a few. I have a dream, a dream that one day this planet will rise up—”

She gave a mock groan, interrupting my copyright infringement. “Oh, no. Just... talk to me. Like a person.”

That caught me off guard more than I’d admit.

So I tried.

“I am thinking about what comes after,” I said. “Too much, maybe. I try to imagine cities where the skies are clear. Children who never learn to fear the sound of footsteps in the dark. I imagine rebuilding... something better.”

I started. Letting a few things off my chest.

“I wonder if what I am doing is right, if I am not leading all of us towards our deaths… if I am enough for this task.”

Ariana stared at me, lips pursed in thought, and then smiled before holding my hand.

“You are more than enough, Alex. The people love you, and with good reason. I don’t know how everything will end; no one does. But I know that it does not matter; only this matters. Only now. What we are doing is good. It is right. And that is all that matters…” She said with a soft voice, looking straight into my eyes.

And I was stuck for a moment looking at her. I had not taken it for the philosophical kind. But she had her moments, it seemed.

Still… her words comforted me.

…

“I imagine myself as Queen,” she said suddenly, nodding to herself.

I blinked.

She grinned, stretching. “I’m serious. Just think of it. I, Ariana, Queen of the Free Hives. Overlord of the Neo Athenian Federation. I’d outlaw paperwork. All council sessions under ten minutes. Mandatory nap hours.”

“Your reign would last six days,” I said, chuckling.

“But what a glorious six days they’d be,” she replied, leaning against me lightly. “And you?”

I tilted my head. “I don’t think I was meant to rule. I was made for war.”

Ruling is more Guilliman’s thing. I was made to be a conqueror…

She gave me a sidelong look before putting a hand on my cheek. “I don’t believe that, Alex. You are good at what you are doing. You are building something here. Something truly great…” Her voice became a whisper.

“Only now matters, Alex…”

The firelight caught in her eyes, and something raw and human stirred beneath my ribs. She’d been with me since the earliest days, bleeding and fighting, never asking for anything.

“Ariana,” I said, voice low.

We didn’t speak.

We didn’t need to.

The kiss was soft. Hesitant. Her other hand brushed my chest, unsure, and I let mine rest on her neck.

When we parted, she laughed quietly. A breathless, stunned thing.

“Well,” she said, cheeks flushing. “There goes that chain of command.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You outrank everyone in your unit, and I outrank everyone else. We’ll manage.”

She lingered another moment, then stood with a half-smile. “Don’t get used to that. I like making you earn your smiles.”

She was still blushing when she left. I heard her mutter something akin to ‘take that Aunt Pen!’ when she closed the door.

I didn’t have to wait long.

The door creaked again, barely two minutes after Ariana’s departure.

Penelope strolled in, tossing her braid over her shoulder with theatrical flair.

“I saw Ariana on the stairs,” she said. “She looked like she’d just outrun a volcano.”

I raised a brow. “Coincidence?”

“Oh, absolutely,” she said sweetly. “Total happenstance.”

She didn’t wait for permission. She never did. Penelope climbed into my lap like it was her rightful seat, arms draping over my shoulders with feline ease.

“Didn’t want to be outdone,” she murmured, brushing her lips against my cheek.

This is not normal.

“You two are coordinating this,” I said flatly.

She grinned. “Schedule-based seduction. Efficient. Revolutionary, even.”

Then she kissed me. Penelope never did anything half-heartedly.

When she pulled back, her breath was warm against my neck.

Both, somehow, had carved a space in my life that neither war nor fate had anticipated.

“Whatever… as long as you both know what you are doing…” I said softly.

Then I closed my eyes.

The storm was almost here.

But for now, I let myself breathe.

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The alarm wailed like a wounded beast through the depths of the barracks.

I was already moving when the vox crackled in my ear, panic, static, then the grim voice of Garran: “East-sector breach. Two squads down. Comms interference confirmed. Witches!”

Witches. Psychic energy was fucking with tech.

How the fuck did they get through the siege of the Center Hive?!

By the time I reached the gunship, the engines of the Free Athenia were already roaring to life. My armor clamped around my limbs, warm and familiar. The weapon slung across my back hummed with restrained power.

As we lifted off, the city rolled beneath us, a churning lattice of steel and fire, but nothing like what waited in the eastern sectors.

The closer we flew, the worse the air became. The manufactorum and residential blocks there hadn’t been the place of war for weeks. The sector was supposed to be clear, and the people had returned to their homes.

But something had returned with them.

The Free Athenia descended in a rapid spiral, hovering above a fractured roadway just outside the shattered shell of a hab-complex tower. The surrounding blocks were a graveyard, twisted wrecks of barricades and rebel corpses strewn like discarded dolls. Dozens, maybe more.

The air buzzed.

My senses twisted as they touched the veil. The warp here was... tainted. Greasy. Wrong.

“Perimeter squads, report,” I said.

A voice crackled. “Confirmed twenty-seven dead. Survivors claim figures vanishing into the rubble. Shadows that... talk.”

“Psykers,” I muttered. “More than one.”

They were here.

I extended my mind like a blade. Plunging into the sea of souls.

The warp bent around me. I felt them, clusters of consciousness flickering like dying stars within the husk of the tower.

Their minds were coils of pain and purpose, shaped into something... other.

Daemons?

The tower itself pulsed with energy in my mind's eye. Symbols daubed in viscera marked its base.

It was a trap.

A ritual.

I could feel the tension in the air, the coiled spring of it. They were waiting for me. Hoping I would storm the place.

But I had no intention of dying in a pantomime.

Some kind of ritual? An explosion? Deamon summoning? I know nothing of these runes… that may be for the best, though.

“Evacuate the bodies. Pull the wounded. Full retreat, now,” I ordered. “Clear the district within ten blocks.”

“Sir?” my adjutant asked, surprised.

“I’m not giving them what they want,” I said.

I called up the command link to the nearest bomber squadron.

“Coordinates locked. Target is a compromised building in the east hive sector. Level it.”

“Confirming... bombardment authorization, sir?” the reply came, uncertain.

“Execute order 66.”

The line went silent for a minute.

Then the sky screamed.

The first strike hit the tower like the wrath of Terra itself as the bombers launched their missiles from miles away. White fire erupted upward, a column of annihilation that tore through ferrocrete and steel. Then came the second, and the third, bombs that tore open the heavens and poured vengeance into the bones of the hive.

I watched from the gunship, arms folded across my chest, unmoving.

When it was done, the tower and the surrounding blocks were a smoking crater. The psychic buzz vanished, snuffed out like a candle beneath a boot.

Yeah, nice try.

“Garran, triple the guard on all siege lines,” I said quietly to my vox. “Particularly the approaches to the central hive. I want no more surprises.”

If they could do this with little preparation… what could they do in the central hive?

We could not give them more free time.

The enemy had made their move.

Now it was our turn.

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From the balcony of the command bastion, I looked out over the staging yards. Row upon row of tanks stretched beyond the horizon. Gunships loomed on their landing struts like great metal carrion birds. Artillery, towed and self-propelled, rested on field-rails beside crated ammunition the size of drop coffins.

We had managed to clear the enemy from the air; now the skies were ours, and it was time.

Overhead, squadrons of bombers and fighters traced contrails in lazy circles.

Even now, more were landing, refueling, loading munitions, and going back to bombing the hell out of the xenos. They would soften the defenses for us.

My boots struck steel as I descended into the yards. The soldiers parted around me like a tide.

“Commander on site!” a voice barked. Officers saluted. Others knelt…

I didn’t slow.

Past the heavy artillery lines, I entered the core of the formation yards, where the armored regiments were gathering. Massive trenchworks had been dug into the fields, old-fashioned but effective. Tank officers stood beside their machines, black grease on their cheeks, hands clutching dataslates or wrenches.

I stopped at the lead vehicle of the 6th Armored Division. A modified federation heavy tank, stripped and rebuilt from prow to exhaust. Now, it bore the sigil of the Chain.

The commander approached, helmet in hand. Young. Nervous.

“Report,” I said.

“Sir! Eighty-four percent of the division is fully operational. Fuel reserves are at their highest. We’ll be ready by dawn, sir!”

I nodded. “Good. You carry the tip of our spear. When the walls break, drive into the heart of the hive and do not stop until every xeno within is ash. Athenia will be free!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

I moved on. Another unit. Another briefing. Thousands of them. These little stops were good for morale, so I made time for them.

Infantry divisions marched in endless ranks nearby. They drilled without hesitation. They screamed their slogans without fatigue. Most of them had never known freedom before this rebellion.

Now, they would die to defend it.

By the millions... the next few days will make Stalingrad look tame.

They were soldiers. An army. My army.

Ninety-three million troops by the latest count. Forty thousand tanks. Over three hundred thousand light and medium vehicles. Millions of artillery shells. Entire city blocks transformed into munition yards. A dozen orbital-capable gunships, fueled and loaded, and hundreds of bombers and fighters.

The largest force assembled on this planet since the fall.

And they waited only for my word.

A demigod of war does not ask for permission. A Primarch does not flinch before the storm.

My eyes turned to the Hive wall in the distance, blackened, cracked, but still standing and full of enemy batteries.

Not for long.

I made my way toward the command room. The soldiers’ eyes followed me, their cheers rising like the crest of a tide. I lifted my las-rifle in salute as I passed, and the sound redoubled, voices thundering against the walls of the hive roadways.

The war room hummed with tension as I entered. Holo-maps glowed red and amber across the circular table, flickering with strike vectors, artillery zones, and logistics pathways.

This is it, the end of the beginning.

I stood at the head of the table, surrounded by my senior generals, engineers, and Penelope. The air was thick with anticipation and I could feel their nervousness in the warp. So I gave them strength.

“Sir! Supply chains,” Garran said, pointing at a series of blue lines crawling through the outer sectors, “have been stabilized. Fuel and munitions convoys will flow uninterrupted for the duration of the battle, sir. Rations are sufficient for six weeks, barring any catastrophe.”

Mira nodded from her corner, her eyes never leaving the map. “The engineering crews are finalizing the siege engines, boss. The missiles and drills will start breaking the walls within forty-eight hours. Trenches are carved deeper, and shielded walkways protect our infantry advances.”

My generals exchanged looks. They knew what was coming.

“The central Hive remains the heart of the enemy. Their command core is fortified beneath the broken spire, protected by shields and sorcery. The densest concentration of Derenik forces is inside: xeno witches, elite shock troops, and the last of their walkers.”

My words hung in the stale air like a warning.

I leaned forward, tracing the lines of attack with my fingers. The central spire stood like a jagged tooth on the map, broken in the ground, circled with red fire zones, and tagged with dozens of drone strike points.

“This is where the war will be decided,” I said quietly. “Not just here in Athenia, but for the entire planet. If we do this, people all over the world will know that this is a fight that we can win. A fight that we will win. The eyes of the whole planet are on us. Will we disappoint them?”

“No!”
“Fuck that!”
“For Athenia!”

“Good! Then let’s do this, you all know where you are needed.” I replied to their exclamations. “And the one that takes their meat supplies gets to give it to their men.”

“Oooh! Hell yes!” Came the word from the twins, they were certainly eager now.

As the meeting broke up, the commanders filing out, I remained behind. The room darkened, save for the glow of the central spire’s symbol on the map.

I placed my hand on the holographic representation of that spire, fingers pressing lightly against the flickering light.

“A few days,” I whispered, voice almost swallowed by the hum of the machines. “A few days, then we break the world open.”

My eyes flicked up, catching a movement at the edge of my vision.

There, in the shadowed corner beyond the holo-map’s light, something waited.

A figure.

I squinted, and my heart jolted.

A mask stared back at me, its stark, white face marked by swirling black and crimson patterns, eyes glinting with cruel amusement beneath a painted grin. The delicate, theatrical mask seemed impossibly out of place amidst the war room’s harsh utilitarian lines. Yet the presence was undeniable and almost invisible at the same time, as if the very essence of shadow and jest had manifested here.

Instinct took over.

I raised my rifle, finger tightening on the trigger before the mind could protest.

The shot cracked like thunder in the enclosed chamber, the rifle’s echo rattling the walls. A tracer of bright light streaked across the room and slammed into the spot where the figure had stood.

But when my eyes darted back, the space was empty.

No mask. No figure.

Only the flickering holo-map and the distant roar of the city outside.

A chill crept along my spine.

I could feel no one through the warp.

I stepped forward, scanning the dark corners where the apparition had vanished. The cold metal floor reflected nothing but my own tense silhouette.

“Show yourself,” I muttered, voice rough. “You want my attention? You’ve got it, servant of Cegorach.”

The silence answered with nothing.

I holstered the rifle and turned back to the map, but the image of that mask lingered behind my eyes.

Fucking Eldar, I will catch you one of these days…