---o---
At this point, Chris was grinding his teeth hard enough to chip them.
A Cogboy pulling an outrageous stunt — that didn't surprise him. If he was being objective, Cogboys as a species probably couldn't out-stunt an Inquisitor even if they tried.
But a Cogboy who could pull this kind of stunt — he had read through enough dossiers and case files in his career that he'd lost count, and he had never once come across anything like this.
If he'd known from the start that this Cogboy was capable of pulling something this catastrophically absurd, he never would have trusted him in the first place.
And in that moment, Chris also arrived at a realization — he had misjudged 010 Omega at every single turn.
At first he'd assumed the man was just a washed-out Tech-Priest who refused body augmentation, sitting around nursing a grudge. Then he'd been wrong — he'd discovered the man carried a depth of knowledge that was genuinely extraordinary. So perhaps it wasn't failure that drove him out, just that the mouth on him was absolutely atrocious.
But now Chris was beginning to suspect he'd been wrong about that too. It wasn't the mouth. A foul mouth got you isolated, nothing more — and if necessary, it could even be put to productive use during an Academic Exchange between Forge Worlds, delivering a sustained and devastating output against fellow Cogboys operating under the same Imperial banner.
No. This man had been struck from the rolls because he had pulled something so staggering, so utterly unprecedented, that it had shaken an entire Forge World to its foundations. And because his raw capability was sufficient that the Forge World couldn't actually do anything about it — he'd just walked.
The Forge World, left seething in humiliated fury, had struck his name from every record they had.
Right now, if it weren't for the enemy pressing in on every side, and the very real possibility that he couldn't actually take down three Kastelan Robots in a straight fight — not to mention whatever incomprehensible artifacts this man might produce from his person if provoked — Chris would have already pressed a bolter barrel against the man's skull.
He was willing to bet good money that those three Kastelan Robots, whatever they looked like on the outside, had something deeply, profoundly strange packed inside them. This man would absolutely have done it.
He wasn't wrong. Two of the three were Zhou Ye's handmade units — one equipped with a replica melta gun built on a modified Hellfire Judgment frame, one fitted with a replica Seven Thunders of Purgation, and the last carrying a replica Star of Eden......
"So why is this thing covered in golden light? I just heard the Ecclesiarchy's Sacred Unguent went missing. Those corrupted types probably hate the stuff, but they wouldn't just pour it out once they had it — they'd have stored it somewhere. Am I right?"
"BINGO. I soaked it in the Sacred Unguent."
Watching the Inquisitor teetering on the very edge of a complete breakdown, Zhou Ye gave him a thoroughly satisfied pat on the shoulder. The Inquisitorial Tribunal commanded fear in most places — but in front of him, it was about as threatening as a baby chick by the roadside.
"Then why are those Necrons......"
"This is clearly the boundless power of the God-Emperor. SQUAWK!!!"
"......"
In an instant, the Inquisitor fell completely silent. He found, to his considerable irritation, that there wasn't actually a logical flaw he could point to. Only the boundless power of the God-Emperor could produce this kind of change in a xenos creature. Yes. It had to be the God-Emperor's power....
Like hell it did!!!
He was absolutely certain this man was sitting on a private stockpile of secrets — the kind that might even earn him a seat at the same table as the Dark Angels.
The Dark Angels...
That thought made the Inquisitor's whole body flinch. Because it brought him straight back to the memory of watching this Cogboy locate a Thousand Sons sorcerer's exact breaking point with surgical precision.
The Burning of Prospero — he knew about that. It was an ancient secret, buried deep. He himself had only ever seen the briefest passing mention of it, scratched in fading ink on ancient parchment. That had been the Wolf King's masterpiece. People said now that Leman Russ had been purging a Traitor Primarch — but if you looked at it from the perspective of what was actually known at that moment in time...
Whether it had truly been the right call was a question that genuinely could not be answered. And the Thousand Sons sorcerer's fury at that taunt was understandable enough. But the lines that had completely shattered him — those came afterward.
Look, these are your brothers. Want me to mail your brothers to Ahriman?
Brothers. Dust. Ahriman.
It was only now that Chris fully registered it: this was not something an ordinary person should have known. This Cogboy was very possibly like Belisarius Cawl — an ancient Tech-Priest of genuine antiquity. One who had simply become lost in the Warp for a time, and then emerged here.
As for what he might have been in that ancient era — probably a Magos of Mars of considerable standing. Simply unwilling to go back. Understandably. Given what the current Imperium had become, who would want to return to that environment? Better to exile yourself entirely. But if an existence like this were to go back to Mars — even Mars, with all its reputation for calcified academic factionalism and hidebound conservatism, would probably roll out a ceremony for the occasion.
With that thought, Chris quietly stepped back.
He didn't want to say anything more. If the man standing before him was genuinely an ancient-era Tech-Priest...
He might very well have served alongside the God-Emperor himself. Might even have spoken with him directly.
"I need to go through the Martian archives when this is over. See if there's any record of this one."
But Zhou Ye had no idea whatsoever what storm was brewing inside the Inquisitor's head. He was too busy putting on a performance.
In his former life, he would never have done something like this in a thousand years. But it didn't matter — right now he was wearing a suit. An Adeptus Mechanicus suit. When some people put on a mask, there's a very real sense in which they've taken their own face off. That was precisely the state Zhou Ye was in now.
Great Lord of Laughs above!!!
"So praise the God-Emperor!!!"
Zhou Ye spread his arms wide — just like the Onion Knight in Dark Souls from his previous life — and the golden radiance poured down around him.
The three Kastelan Robots that had been making Chris distinctly uncomfortable with how suspiciously intelligent they seemed also cooperated flawlessly in that moment, bathing him in streams of warm golden light.
Zhou Ye might have looked a little over-the-top. But never forget — this was Warhammer. A Warhammer where every single person was operating under extreme mental strain and the occasional involuntary twitch. So...
"Praise the God-Emperor!!!"
The Archbishop of Aestia — the Necron Phaeron itself — threw its head back and roared at the sky.
And then, as though something infectious had swept through the crowd, it wasn't just the Archbishop. Every single PDF trooper on that field joined in.
"Praise the God-Emperor!!!"
"Praise the God-Emperor......"
"PRAISE THE FOUR-ARMED GOD-EMPEROR!!!"
BANG.
Chris blew on the smoking muzzle of his bolt pistol, a faint look of relief spreading across his face. Finally. Finally a chance to vent. About time.
The small interruption did nothing to stop the tide. If anything, the chant seemed to carry a contagion of its own — one voice became ten, ten became a hundred, and in moments it had swept through the entire hive city of Aestia.
The God-Emperor. In a galaxy burning at the edges, the last and only hope for humanity.
A debt to the God-Emperor that no human life could ever repay in full.
And so, with each cry rising and falling through the hive city, inside what remained of the Ecclesiarchy — where the White Scars warriors had just finished tearing the coverings away from the Emperor's icon — the golden statue blazed.
It was worth noting: the Tzeentchian infiltrators, even during their period of dominance, hadn't dared swap out the Emperor's idol for an image of a Lord of Change. Doing that quietly, without detection, was simply beyond them. So they had simply draped a cloth over the original and put up a notice saying it was "undergoing maintenance."
Now the idol of the God-Emperor stood revealed once more. And in the tide of voices calling his name, it suddenly erupted in radiant, blazing light.
At the same moment, Zhou Ye felt it with absolute clarity — a gaze, descending from somewhere inside the Warp, fixing directly onto this place.