Darkness pressed in, then broke open into a memory.
He was a boy again, kneeling in the gravel of a training yard. His knuckles were bloodied from drills, his arms trembling from exhaustion.
A shadow loomed over him—his father, dressed in the crisp black coat of a Commissar.
The man's fist was split open too, skin torn from striking a practice dummy until it shattered.
"You will be shaped," the Commissar said, his voice as hard as iron.
"Shaped into the perfect instrument of the Emperor's will."
"Like I was. Like my father, and his father before me."
"We serve, we command, we endure."
—
Then the Commissar stepped aside. From the shadows, guardsmen dragged a prisoner forward.
A young woman in tattered fatigues, her wrists chained, eyes blazing with defiance.
"Now. Kill her." His father pressed a stub pistol into his small, shaking hands.
—
The boy looked between the weapon and the woman. Her lips curled into a grin despite the blood at her temple.
"Go on, little pup," she whispered, her voice oddly calm.
"Obedient little puppet. Just like daddy."
—
His father's voice cut in, sharp as a whipcrack."Do it!"
—
The boy froze, every muscle trembling.
The woman leaned forward, temple pressing against the barrel, her eyes burning red for a moment too long.
"Or…" her whisper slithered into his skull,
"be free."
—
For a heartbeat, it was as if her voice wasn't hers at all—something deeper, hungrier, pressing into his mind. The same cadence as his father's words, but twisted.
—
"Shoot!" His father's voice thundered.
—
"Break the chain." The daemon's whisper purred, overlapping.
—
BANG!
The shot rang out, echoing against the walls. The body fell flat to the gravel, smoke curling from the stub pistol in the boy's trembling hands.
Her lifeless eyes did not close. They stared upward, glassy, unblinking—her lips frozen in a faint grin, as if she had won.
His father gave a single, curt nod.
"Good. Remember this. Hesitation is weakness. Death is mercy. The Emperor's will is done through us alone."
—
He turned away, already finished with the lesson. To him, it was nothing more than another drill, another tool forged.
But the boy couldn't move. His gaze was locked on the corpse. The words his father had spoken clanged in his skull
—instrument, will, obedience—
yet they mixed with something else.
—
"You are weak."
A whisper, faint but unmistakable, curling beneath the silence.
—
The boy gasped, but no one else seemed to hear. His father barked another order in the distance,
but the voice lingered, warm and patient.
"I'll wait. Through bloodlines, through oaths, through fury unspent. You are mine already."
"All of you. The perfect instruments."
—
Later, his father noticed his hesitation. Without a word, he dragged him to the whipping post.
Each strike fell with precision, not to break him, but to harden him.
"Serve."
"Command."
"Endure."
But in the dark between blows, the whisper coiled closer.
"Bleed."
"Rage."
"Break."
—
A Few Years Later
The years blurred into drills, lashes, and lessons.
One day, in the barracks of the fortress-world, a report was delivered. A Commissar had fallen in the line of duty.
His father.
Jaeger stood there as the words were read aloud. The cadets around him shifted uncomfortably, waiting for a reaction.
He gave none. His face was stone, his eyes glass. Inside, there was nothing. It was exactly what his father had expected of him.
"Emotion is for the weak"
—
By right of blood, he was taken into the Schola Progenium, as his father had been before him. To be reforged into a tool of the Imperium.
At first, he excelled.
His discipline was absolute, his body unyielding, his mind sharpened by cruelty.
The masters praised his precision, his ability to obey, his talent for judgment.
But something else seethed beneath the surface.
Jaeger was merciless. He turned drills into punishments, sparring into bloodlust.
His "victories" left other cadets broken and trembling, sometimes hospitalized.
In his mind, showing weakness is against the law he uphold, none of them were fit to serve.
—
Then came the day he nearly killed another boy, not in training, but in his own resolve.
The instructors pulled him off, prying his hands from the cadet's crushed throat.
His victim's face was purple, jaw shattered.
—
That night, his masters deliberated. His cruelty was not born of discipline but hunger. Not the Emperor's will, but something else.
"Your merciless knows no bound, you are unchained and dangerous."
"Unfit for Commissariat or any service."
The judgment was swift.
—
Jaeger was expelled from the Progenium. Stripped of his path, cast out into the Imperium's underbelly, where soldiers without uniforms became mercenaries, and rage found purchase in coin and blood.
—
And in the quiet after his expulsion, when he sat alone with his failure, he looked at his blood soaked fist, the whisper returned.
"A leash without a master."
"A tool unused."
"When your father died, I saw you smiled."
—
And so the boy who had been shaped, the youth who had been broken, became a man with nothing left but bottled up emotions.
"Then I just need to find someone to use me."
He muttered to himself, a solution of a tool.
—
When the Xarcarions came, they did not see Jaeger.
They saw a weapon already forged—an instrument waiting for a new hand.
And in the silence, the whisper laughed.
—
Back to present, surrounded by his failure once again.
The forest reeked of iron and smoke. Ash clung to the air like a shroud, drifting in coils through the clearing where men had fallen.
Jaeger's open palm was drenched in blood—not his own, but his soldiers'. It dripped between his fingers, warm and tacky, soaking into the dirt beneath him.
He stared at it for a long moment, then curled his hand into a fist. The nails dug so deep into his flesh that fresh blood welled up, mixing with the others'.
His blood became theirs. Theirs became his. No line remained between them.
The wind carried the stench of charred flesh, a bitter reminder of Bergelmir's wrath, of the men who had followed him into oblivion.
Broken bodies lay half-buried in mud and ruin, their eyes glassy, their mouths frozen mid-scream.
Jaeger lowered his head, breath steady, voice breaking through clenched teeth.
"What do you want from me?" he asked the daemon.
—
His words carried no anger, no defiance—only a hollow demand, scraped raw by failure.
The silence that followed wasn't silence at all. It pressed in, thick and suffocating, until it was filled by the whisper.
—
A voice like rusted chains sliding across stone, like fire licking the edges of his soul.
"To use you," it whispered, savoring the words,
"like you always wanted."
—
The sound coiled tighter, threading through his skull until it felt as though it wasn't only in his ears but in his blood.
Every scar on his body, every lesson beaten into him by his father, every lash and order at the Progenium—all of it rang hollow next to that promise.
A tool unused.
A leash without a master.
A perfect instrument waiting for a hand.
The daemon's voice slithered deeper:
"You begged to serve. To endure. To be forged. And yet they cast you aside."
"I have been with you since the beginning and i will never leave you."
"With me, you are not a weapon forgotten—you are a weapon unleashed."
—
The air grew heavy, almost wet, as though the trees themselves were leaning closer to hear. The corpses of his men seemed to stare at him, their glassy eyes reflecting crimson in the dim light.
Jaeger's fist trembled, blood dripping from his palm. His lips parted, breath hoarse.
"What… do I have to do?"
—
Jaeger's bloodied palm clenched tighter, his knuckles splitting, crimson dripping down to mingle with the dead around him. His breath came ragged, every inhale tasting of iron.
The daemon's voice came again, like rusted chains dragged across bone:
"There is another puppet here. A tool of the coward. The changer of ways."
The sound burrowed deep into him, hotter than fire, colder than void.
"Bring me his head."
—
The air thickened around him, heavy as iron, tasting of copper. Jaeger staggered, clutching his skull as the daemon's laughter rattled his bones.
Then he heard it.
Thump.
A heartbeat.
Not his own. Too distant, too steady.
—
The world blurred into a haze of crimson smears, shapes and faces dripping into rivers of red. His subordinates' corpses bled into the ground until everything was a tide of blood.
In that ocean, a single current pulsed stronger than the rest. A rhythm pounding, mocking, alive.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
The daemon's voice slithered through the beat, rust on steel, fire on oil.
"There. Do you hear him? The coward's puppet. His blood sings of witchery."
—
Jaeger's vision sharpened. His eyes burned, veins crawling crimson across his skin. Every nerve screamed with direction, an unholy compass pulling him forward.
He gasped, falling to one knee. His bloodied fist slammed into the ground, splattering red into the dust.
—
"Bring me his head," the daemon purred.
"Follow the blood. You cannot lose him now. He is yours to kill, mine to claim."
—
The Exitus lay half-buried nearby, receiver scorched, stock split. He picked it up, weighed its length, listened to the daemon breathe behind his eyes.
"Coward's reach," the voice hissed, almost amused.
—
Metal groaned. He bent the barrel across his knee until it shrieked and folded, then let the ruined weapon fall into the ash.
From the corpse at his feet, Jaeger reached down with blood-slick fingers.
Bones cracked under his grip as he tore the spine free in one savage pull.
The soldier's body convulsed once before collapsing into the ash, hollow and broken.
Hot arterial spray splattered across his face, his chest, his arms—then vanished.
The crimson was not wasted; it hissed against his skin and sank inward, drawn into him like fuel into a furnace. His veins burned with it, his breath steaming in the fire-choked air.
He held the dripping length of bone aloft, and with a subtle twist of his wrist, the vertebrae locked, straightened, hardened. Blood ran along its length, shaping into a jagged edge. The thing stretched, warped, until what he held was no longer a spine but a sword, long, cruel, serrated by vertebrae.
Jaeger strapped the monstrous weapon across his back. His shoulders rose and fell once, steadying his breath, the phantom heartbeat now pounding in perfect rhythm with his own.
He moved.
—
The heartbeat pulled him between burned trunks and crater lips, through curtains of heat where the air wavered like oil.
Blood on leaves lit up to his new sense like wet, red sigils; footprints smoldered with their heat-ghosts, each step a glowing brand in his vision.
When the trail crossed a splash of pale ichor, his lip curled—another promise to collect.
He paused at the edge of a churned gully, head cocked.
The drum quickened, doubled, there, farther north, beyond the fireline. A thin ribbon of cold cut through the heat in his mind's map, a Null's shadow moving beside the witch-scent.
"Closer," the daemon purred. "Take the path their fear carved."
Jaeger rolled his shoulders once, set a back, and started up the slope at a steady, merciless pace.
The jungle closed around him in bands of smoke and red light. With each step, the phantom heartbeat grew louder, syncing to his own until the two were one and the same.
"Got it," he said again, quieter this time—more to the drum than the voice.
Then he vanished into the trees, hunting.