Chapter 283: The Duel, Part 4
The Howling Banshee. Elite among Aeldari warriors. Inside their war masks, a psychic amplifier converts the wearer's battle-scream into something that operates on two levels simultaneously: a physical shockwave capable of rupturing eardrums and liquefying internal organs at close range, and a psychic assault that bypasses armour entirely to strike the soul directly, inducing overwhelming vertigo, terror, or complete disorientation.
In formation, a squad of Banshees screaming in unison could shred a Space Marine's combat effectiveness in seconds. At the range she'd deployed it, less than thirty centimetres from Kian's torso, the intent was to simply obliterate whatever was left of his coherence.
The physical component hit the power armour's helmet dampeners and was absorbed. The psychic component hit the Emperor's protective influence surrounding Kian and lost ninety percent of its force before it touched him.
He staggered back two steps, head swimming briefly, then cleared.
"Oh, come on."
He brought his boot up and drove a full-force kick into her crouched body.
She went airborne. Ten metres at least, tumbling across the dirt trailing dust before she came to rest.
She got up slowly, wearing the expression of someone trying to work out where their certainty had gone. By every law of physics and biology, a point-blank Banshee wail at that range should have ended this. Why was he still standing?
Kian drank another energy bottle and reset his stamina while she was still processing.
She was spent. The fight was over on any objective assessment. He could close the distance and finish it.
He did not close the distance.
Instead, he linked his helmet's vox to the broadcast feed and checked in on the commentary.
The presenters were losing their minds with excitement, falling over each other to declare victory, counting down to the xenos' imminent execution. Mankind triumphant, justice delivered, historic moment, and so on.
Kian watched for a moment and made a calculation.
He'd been dominating this fight almost completely from the start. It looked too clean. Too easy. A victory without any apparent cost would invite scepticism, and scepticism was the enemy of the narrative he was building. If he walked out of this valley looking like he'd done nothing harder than morning exercises, the political value of the whole exercise would be cut in half.
He needed to bleed a little.
"Time to put on a show."
He charged back in, and this time he held himself to seventy percent output.
The effect was immediate. The Aeldari warrior, who had been running on pure rage and the dregs of her reserves, suddenly found herself landing hits. Her technique began flowing again. Within a few exchanges she was pushing him back.
In the commentary booth, one of the presenters went quiet for a moment and then said what everyone watching was thinking.
"It's his stamina. He burned everything pushing her back at the start. Now it's catching up with him."
The other presenters picked it up immediately. The narrative wrote itself: the brave champion who had given everything to protect his people was running out of road.
Across Hive Tenebris, ten billion people leaned toward their screens.
A small girl in Mid-Hive clutched her stuffed toy and yelled at the television. "Don't give up! The sword man! Don't give up!"
Kian, inside his helmet, was grinning. He felt the blade pierce his shoulder through the armour plating, felt it grind through bone, heard the armour crack. An ordinary man's arm would have been useless from that moment forward. He'd applied his Sacred Coolant Oil before the duel and felt almost nothing beyond a dull awareness that the damage was there.
The girl with the stuffed toy screamed.
He decided he needed to make it worse.
The Aeldari warrior surged forward and discharged another Banshee wail at close range.
Kian threw himself backward as though it had hit him full-force, stumbling and staggering, arms flailing. A candle in a hurricane. A rowboat in a storm. Sympathetic and helpless and clearly running out of time.
She saw him reeling and drove forward immediately, power glaive aimed at his chest, at the heart.
He let her come in, raised his sword in what looked like a desperate off-balance block, and redirected her blade downward instead of stopping it.
The glaive missed his heart and drove through his abdomen instead.
The blade went through him completely, the scorched and blackened tip emerging from his back.
The entire Hive made a sound.
Someone wept. Someone else swore. The small girl buried her face in her stuffed toy.
Inside his helmet, Kian was still grinning. He could feel the blade through him and felt only faint curiosity about how the wound looked on camera.
In the Red Lady's bar, the Captain had stopped watching the screens and was looking at his personal terminal. He raised it to his ear.
"Great Ivan. Macro-cannons to ready. Await my command."
In low orbit, the freighter rotated its port side toward the planet's surface. Six 500-millimetre macro-cannons tracked downward, charging.
They were modest weapons by void-warship standards, built for self-defence rather than ship combat, but against a single target on a planetary surface they were more than adequate.
Inside the Great Ivan's armoured gun deck, the battery commander's voice filled the chamber.
"All non-essential personnel clear the gun deck. Port battery, all six guns, standing by for fire order. For the Emperor. We are going to kill that xenos."
The gun crews roared.
Six trigger officers stood at their stations, hands on the old-fashioned but extremely reliable firing lanyards, ears open for the command.
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