Chapter 17: A Path to Getting Stronger
The choice was deliberate.
Of the five Death Warriors, Number 5 had consistently shown the sharpest spatial awareness in close-quarters fighting. In every engagement so far, he had demonstrated an almost instinctive ability to read positioning and slide into the gaps left by his squadmates at exactly the right moment.
A power shield in his hands would deliver its maximum tactical value — absorbing a killing volley at a critical moment and keeping the shooters behind him alive.
In addition to the shield, Number 5 also took a lasgun and a chainsword.
As for Rosen himself.
He went through the remaining weapons carefully.
He settled on two.
A standard Imperial bolt pistol for his right hand, with his knife in his left — the standard Catachan close-quarters configuration.
And a plasma pistol.
That one gave him pause.
Plasma weapons could melt through ceramite armour and punched through targets that bolts and las-fire couldn't touch. But they came with a well-known and very final downside: sustained fire caused heat buildup, and if the weapon overloaded, it exploded in your hand.
The Mechanicus called it the Gift of Martyrdom. If your plasma gun went up, the Emperor was testing your faith.
Rosen had no particular interest in being tested.
But then he thought about the twenty or thirty Chaos Space Marines aboard this hulk, walking around in full power armour, and he clipped the plasma pistol to his hip anyway.
Standard weapons might not scratch the paint on a suit of power armour. A plasma round would melt straight through the chest plate.
Worth the risk.
Equipment distributed. Rosen pulled up his system interface to check his current Life Point reserves.
[Current Life Points: 163.]
Enough for another Death Warrior.
He didn't hesitate.
[Consuming: 100 Life Points, 1 cubic metre Refined Steel.]
[Summoning: Catachan Jungle Fighter x1.]
Inside the weapons bay, the air warped and compressed in that now-familiar way. Refined Steel dissolved into raw material. Bone took shape first, then muscle, then skin, then uniform and equipment, all of it forming simultaneously.
Point one of a second.
Another Catachan standing one ninety-five, right fist pressed to his chest.
"Loyalty!"
"Number 6," Rosen said.
Then he made an arrangement that might have looked odd on the surface.
"Number 6, you're staying here."
Number 6 offered no objection. He saluted.
Rosen looked at the substantial amount of equipment still remaining on the racks.
One cubic metre of Armoury storage was workable for their current scale of operations, but nowhere near large enough to carry everything in this bay. The shelves still held lasguns, charge packs, grenades, demolition charges, and various components and spare parts. Left unguarded, it was only a matter of time before the greenskins stumbled across it or the warp contamination crept back in.
But if someone stayed to hold it...
"Number 6, your job is to guard this weapons bay. While we're out operating, the Armoury's stored ammunition will be drawn down. Every time space opens up in storage, you load the remaining weapons from the racks into the Armoury for purification and restocking."
Rosen picked a lasgun and three magazines off the floor and handed them to Number 6. "Stay alive."
Number 6 took the weapon, slung the lasgun across his chest, and pushed the magazines into his webbing.
"Loyalty, sir."
While the Death Warriors finished organising their kit, Rosen leaned back against a weapons rack and used the quiet to work through the new data on his system interface.
He started with the resource earned from killing both Imps.
[Warp Energy: 2.]
A third resource type, separate from Life Points and Refined Steel.
Two Imps, one point each.
Beside the Warp Energy entry, the system had added a block of explanatory text.
[Warp Energy notes:]
[Source: Pure warp energy extracted from warp entities — daemons, Chaos organisms, and similar — following system purification. Raw, unpurified warp energy is extremely dangerous and will cause Chaos corruption if used directly. The system completes the purification process automatically to ensure the output is clean. Residue produced during purification is transferred to the Scrapyard.]
[Application 1 — Host augmentation:]
[Cost: 1,000 Warp Energy. Effect: one comprehensive physical augmentation of the host. Augmentation includes but is not limited to: muscle fibre density doubled, skeletal structure reinforced, neural reaction speed increased, metabolic efficiency optimised.]
Rosen stared at that entry for a long time.
One thousand Warp Energy for a single round of full augmentation.
He had two points.
One Imp per point. That meant he needed to kill a thousand Imps?
Or maybe higher-tier daemons would yield more.
The Life Point economy already followed that logic — one Gretchin yielded one point, one Ork Boy yielded ten before the thirty percent Waaagh loss brought it down to seven. Warp Energy almost certainly scaled the same way. One Imp was worth one point. What would a Bloodletter give? A Bloodthirster?
This was a route to actually getting stronger.
It was a long one. The gap between where he was and where he needed to be made the distance from Terra to the galactic rim look short. But the route existed. That was more than he'd had an hour ago.
He found himself wondering what the ceiling looked like. A Catachan's baseline physiology was already at the upper limit of what an unaugmented human body could achieve. One full augmentation cycle on top of that foundation — where would that put him?
The thought of ripping apart a daemon prince or putting a boot through a Primarch might not stay in the realm of dark humour forever.
He shut the thought down. Early days. Don't get ahead of yourself.
He closed the interface.
The immediate priority wasn't long-range planning. It was moving a fully armed six-man squad through a three-million-greenskin death maze and finding a way to survive it.
The Death Warriors were ready.
Compared to what they'd been carrying a few hours ago — a handful of knives and a boltgun with two rounds left — the firepower this squad could now put out was in a different category entirely.
"Number 6, seal the door."
Number 6 lifted the metal panel that Number 1 had torn free earlier and set it back into the frame. He found a length of heavy pipe in the weapons bay and drove it horizontally through two brackets on the back of the panel, securing the entrance from inside.
The external concealment was restored as well.
From the outside, it was still a featureless dead wall.
"Move out."
Rosen clicked the safety off his bolt pistol. The plasma pistol sat flush against his hip. The Catachan Fang rode in a reverse grip in his left hand.
Five fully armed Catachans stepped out into the dark corridors of Deck Seventy-Five and disappeared into the shadows.
Behind them, the resealed weapons bay door stood silent in the dark.
Number 6 held it alone.
One man, one lasgun, one knife, and several hundred weapons that no one else knew were there.