New skills have come into stat sheet due to his advancement in telepathy.
---
The corridor outside the Captain cabin smelled of hot steel and ship oil, every step vibrating faintly with the Dauntless's movements. Cassian moved down it alone, boots scuffing black ribbed deck plates still tacky with soot.
No escort. No guards. Just a quiet summons from the Admiral himself.
When the door hissed open, the Captain cabin felt larger than it should: vaulted arches in ship forged steel, walls traced with lumen wires that pulsed low and in intervals. Hololithic stars drifted overhead, painting shifting constellations across the battle scarred metal.
And there he stood: Spire.
Back to the door at first, coat draped like a funeral banner, silver thread catching the dying light from the viewport. Outside, the wreck of the Plagueclaw still glowed twisted metal bleeding flame into the void, drifting like a rotted lung.
For a moment, neither man spoke. Just breathed the air, the faint tick of cooling metal, and the distant groan of the ship shifting under damaged mass.
Then Spire turned, slowly towards him. Eyes sunken with exhaustion, but sharp as ever. His voice was quiet. Almost calm.
"You slew them."
Not a question. A statement, heavy as a macro shell.
Cassian said nothing at first. Let the silence stretch, measured, deliberate. A tactic, maybe. Or maybe he just needed a heartbeat to frame the lie he could live with.
"It was them or us," he said finally. His voice came out rougher than he meant. His voice edged with finality.
Spire stepped closer, boots whispering across the deck. Close enough that Cassian could see the salt at his temples, the lines at the corners of his mouth not old lines, but deep, carved by hard decisions and harder regrets.
"My Breachers speak your name in a way I've heard before," Spire murmured. "The same way men speak of the Emperor, or the Astartes. I have seen mortal heroes before, Cassian. Brave men. Skilled men. But not this."
Cassian's jaw worked, silent. His eyes flicked toward the viewport, buying time. The wreck burned there, silent testimony to what they'd done.
"You shouldn't care how," Cassian said, voice low. "Only if I'm still on your side."
A flash of something not quite amusement in Spire's eyes. It died quick.
"You're wrong," Spire answered. "I do care how. Because if you did this with Chaos's hand on your shoulder, then I'll kill you myself, and burn this ship around your corpse to see it done."
Silence again. The ship groaned, metal straining in the distance.
"Then ask," Cassian said, finally. Voice softer now. Almost tired. "Ask what you want to ask."
And Spire did. Directly:
"How does a man, any man as a matter of fact carve down Astartes like wheat? How do you do what even a full kill‑team of our finest couldn't?"
Cassian's breath caught. The truth balanced on the tip of his tongue: rebirth, memory, the warp's silent poison in his veins, the sum of other lives, STC.
But the truth was a door best kept closed.
"I made myself to fight them," he said instead. Not quite lie, not quite confession. "Every scar, every hour, every breath since the hive desoleum. Chaos took everything from me. I swore I'd return it in blood."
A lie that fits his persona perfectly, no matter how little attachment he had with that hive world as a whole.
Spire didn't look away. Didn't even blink.
"Oaths don't break ceramite. Hate doesn't dance around bolter shells. How, Cassian?"
Cassian's gaze hardened, voice sinking quieter:
"You've seen what the warp can do. What it does to them. It can do worse to us. Or better."
Spire's face twitched. Only a little, but it was there: the taste of fear, and understanding.
"You walk the edge," Spire said, voice flat. "So, you do use warp. Constantly being a risk of getting corrupted. Despite being daemon possessed in the past."
"I have not been corrupted yet," Cassian admitted. Honestly. "And never, if I can help it."
"So you are a psyker."
"Among other things," Cassian said. His lips twisted, bitter. "I didn't choose it. But it's mine to use."
Spire turned away then, pacing slow. Gloved hands clasped behind his back, bootheels knocking rhythm on the iron deck.
Cassian didn't flinch. Just watched. Waited.
Spire stopped. His voice dropped low, barely a rasp above the hum of the hololiths.
"I don't care what you are. I care what you do. Are you loyal?"
"To the Imperium?" Cassian said, testing the shape of the words. "To burning Chaos from every hole it festers in? Yes. I am."
"Not to the God‑Emperor?"
"I am loyal to Him," Cassian answered, quiet but firm. "But I fight for the Imperium. And the Imperium and I share the same enemy."
A heartbeat. The hololith flickered, green blue motes drifting across Spire's tired face.
"That may have to be enough," Spire murmured. "For now. And I cannot risk alienating you now at this juncture, especially with the coming chaos."
"It will be," Cassian said. Voice harder now.
Cassian didn't answer. Just stood there, breathing, sweat chilling on his back.
"Go," Spire said, voice returning to command. "Rest. The Gothic sector isn't done with us."
Cassian nodded once, turned to go. His boots echoing on the iron.
At the threshold, Spire spoke one last time, low, almost to himself:
"Just remember, Cassian. Even primarchs have fallen before."
Cassian didn't look back.
"Maybe." he murmured, half under his breath, stepping into the dark corridor beyond.
The door hissed shut. The ship moved on, wounded but unbowed. And in the void between stars, a new reckoning waited.
---
The aftermath tasted of burnt steel, oil smoke, and something sweeter: relief.
Through the damage vessel of the Dauntless, the news had already spread. The Plagueclaw the rotted leviathan, the thing that had haunted comm screens and prayer choked nightmares was gone. Dead. Burned out from the inside, gutted by macro batteries and a collective will of mankind.
It didn't matter, for the moment, how it had happened. Only that it had.
In the mess decks, the celebrations began rough edged and small: a half laughed prayer, a tin mug knocked against another, a voice cracking on a hymn to the God Emperor. Then louder. Voices rising. Laughter raw from throats that had spent too long shouting orders and prayers over the thunder of bolters and macro shells.
Some men wept, heads bowed over dented mugs. Some clapped each other on the back, curses and blessings bleeding together. Someone produced a battered deck of cards; another, a contraband bottle that tasted more like cleaning solvent than amasec no one cared.
They were alive. The Plagueclaw was not. That was major win for them.
---
In the lower forges, Magos Farron limped between scorched cogitator banks and servitors slumped in silent ruin. His mechadendrites flickered, some sparking from overstrain. Even steel had limits.
"Purge the code chains," he rasped to a trembling junior Enginseer, voice stripped raw from hours of binary warfare. "Tear out every circuit that so much as touched daemonic virus."
The youth swallowed, nodding quickly, fresh oil smearing his cheek where he wiped sweat.
The ship itself groaned around them: a wounded beast trying to remember how to breathe. Power couplings bled sparks; fractured conduits hissed steam, venting precious heat into cold steel corridors.
Farron allowed himself just for a moment to lay a scarred steel hand against a bulkhead. "Endure," he whispered. "Endure."
---
On the bridge, the hololith flickered with damage reports. Whole decks were marked in dull red, vox relays burned out, weapon batteries slagged.
Admiral Spire read each line with a grim, tight eyed focus. Repairs would take weeks, maybe months, and the Gothic sector didn't wait. But for now, they had bought something rarer than time: belief.
Morale was high this time around and that was more important.
He didn't say it aloud, but it was in the set of his jaw, the way his gloved hands rested not clenched on the brass rail: They had done an incredible deed after all.
---
Elsewhere, the Breachers gathered in the armory, stripped of helmets and battle plate, faces gray with exhaustion and streaked with sweat and blood. They spoke in low voices, laughter breaking through hoarse and ragged. Some spoke Cassian's name, in raw, simple gratitude the kind men kept close to the ribs.
"Saw him cut through plague hulks like they were fucking ration crates." "A man like that, Emperor damn, we might just live to see home."
They didn't call him hero. But the way they said his name had changed.
---
And Cassian himself?
He moved through it all like a introvert who had his daily fix of interacting with people, nodding to men who met his eyes, offering a word here, a clasp of forearm there. But he felt the bruises under his skin, the ache of power spent and nerves strung raw.
Later, he found Faevelith by the observation blister: a narrow slit of adamantium framed glass, cracked at one corner from a torpedo's near miss.
She stood silent, hood lowered, pale hair a smudge against the dark glass. The ruin of the Plagueclaw drifted beyond, still burning in slow motion, flakes of molten steel trailing like dying stars.
Their eyes met. No words.
She stepped close, the flicker of the wreck fire catching on the line of her jaw, the curve of her lips. Cassian's gloved hand brushed her wrist, and she didn't pull away.
They returned to their quarters, a cramped space of metal walls, battle scarred and smelling faintly of incense and oil. Neither of them spoke.
Armor fell away piece by piece, clinking to the deck: ceramite scuffed by daemon claws, cloth torn and sweat-stained.
In the silence, flesh met flesh scarred, imperfect, human. The flickering lumen light turned everything softer, shadows hiding old wounds, old fears.
It wasn't tenderness, exactly. It was something older, fiercer, primal the need to feel alive, to prove in sweat and heartbeat and the scrape of teeth on skin that they had survived.
Words had no place there, only the sharp gasp of breath, the low growl of need, the press of bodies remembering what it meant to be more than weapons.
And when it was over, breath slowed, sweat cooling on bare shoulders, neither spoke still. Faevelith rested her forehead against Cassian's, eyes half lidded, and Cassian's hand lay quiet at her waist.
For that moment, there was no war. No gods. No monsters.
---
Outside, the ship worked on: servitors dragging scrap from blasted corridors, Enginseers murmuring litanies over scorched circuits, medicae teams carrying the broken and dying from the decks.
Victory had come at a price it always did. The Dauntless bore new scars to remember it by.
But the fires had gone out on the Plagueclaw.
And aboard the battered cruiser, men and women found themselves lifting their heads a little higher. Laughing a little easier.
It was not peace. The Gothic sector would still burn across the stars.
But for a night, battered steel rang with laughter, and hope smoldered like an ember that refused to die.
And somewhere in the quiet after, Cassian and Faevelith lay close in the dark.
---
Cassian Vail — Status Page
Age: 233
Race: Human (Imperium)
Occupation: Survivor of Hive Desoleum
Stats:
Physique: C (58/80)
Dexterity: C (44/80)
Intelligence: C (57/80)
Wisdom: C (32/80)
Affinity: C (29/80)
Perks:
Bodily- Kinesthetic Awareness
Advanced interpersonal discernment
Machine spirit obedience
Controlled Assimilation and Adaptation
Chaos Resistance (from being possessed by daemon)
Skills:
Lexicon Proficiency — Level Max
Astartes weapon training – Level 89
Physical Conditioning — Level Max
Doctrine of flesh engine – Level 98
Marksman Creed – Level 78
Basic Mental Discipline — Level Max
Basic Telepathy — Level Max
Intermediate Telepathy — Level Max
Advanced Telepathy — Level 14
Arch Enginuity – Level 75
Warp Empowerment – Level Max
Electrokenisis – Level 70
Pryokinesis – Level 65
Technopathy- Level 60
Biokinesis- Level 51
Precognition- Level 16
Mind Partitioning- Level 1 (New)
Dream Walking- Level 1 (New)
Astral projection- Level 1 (New)
—-
Word Count: 1994
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