40k: Midnight Blade

Chapter 108 11. Source of Anger

Robert Guilliman frowned as he stared at the twitching face.

He glanced anxiously at the braid-like cables that created hideous bulges and mutilated edges on his brother's scalp. Every shaking of the extended steel cable was a torture to him, but Angron seemed to have become accustomed to it.

He was breathing calmly, sitting on the medical table with his hands on the edge, trying to stay calm, but he couldn't stop shaking because of the pain caused between breaths.

"Hello, Angron." Khalil spoke first.

Now, there are only three of them left in this medical room, and everyone else has left here. Lord Macragge's orders are absolute, and no one will ever disobey him.

"."

Angron didn't answer, just breathed heavily. All his wounds have been sutured, and they will all heal in less than an hour. However, the pain would not let him go; after all, he refused the use of narcotics.

After a while, he finally spoke, his voice still sounding like two files rubbing against each other.

"I'm sorry," he said lowly. "I don't want to hurt you, or them."

He raised his head, glanced at Guilliman quickly, and then looked at Khalil: "Does he understand what I say?"

"He didn't understand," Khalil said. "But I can translate for you."

"Please."

Before Angron could finish his words, his lower left eye began to twitch, and half of his cheek began to tremble. As a last resort, he gritted his teeth and took a deep breath.

The Butcher's Nail on the back of his head began to squirm as if it were alive at this moment. Guilliman suddenly clenched his right fist and suddenly felt the urge to pull out all these things.

He had to admit, it felt awful to watch his brother's life being devoured by something like this.

"Please tell him that I am sorry for hurting those people." Half a minute later, Angron finally finished his words.

But Khalil did not tell Guilliman immediately. He asked in Nucerian: "Do you know what their relationship is with him?"

"I don't know, but they all have the same emblem on their armor, just like the rope of triumph that we gladiators all have. And he obviously has an unusual identity. They all listen to him, I can tell."

Angron answered very quickly, his voice unclear, as if he had just bitten his tongue, and a little scarlet emerged from between his teeth.

Khalil turned his head and looked at Robert Guilliman: "He is apologizing to you for hurting four of your warriors."

Guilliman looked at his brother. Angron felt his gaze and raised his head again. His eyes glanced back and forth on Robert Guilliman's face and armor, erratically, but never meeting his gaze. See.

The Lord of Macragge sighed softly and said: "It doesn't have to be like this, brother, I can see that you were deliberately holding back."

Angron looked at Khalil.

"He said there was no need to apologize. He knew you were holding back at the time. I want to ask you, how did you do it, Angron?"

"What?" Angron asked vaguely, swallowing the blood in his mouth. "What?"

Khalil looked at him patiently and gestured: "Butcher's Nail."

He didn't say more, but that was enough.

Then Angron smiled.

The way he smiled was even more terrifying than when he was silent, and the muscles on his face twitched, making this supposedly gentle expression look extremely grotesque.

"I've been fighting it."

The gladiator said this in his incomplete voice, and there was a calm will in that voice that was completely opposite to his appearance at the moment. "It wants to bring me to my knees, I know that. But I won't stop until I'm really dead. It doesn't deserve to bring me to my knees."

Khalil nodded slowly.

He turned his head and relayed to Guilliman exactly what Angron had just said, and the latter's expression quickly changed from gloomy anger to a vague shock.

Angron looked at him, taking in all his expressions, and his smile began to become more exuberant and terrifying. It looked like a threat, but Guilliman could see the kindness underlying it.

"Angron." The gladiator looked at his brother and introduced himself in his language. His face twitched ferociously, but his voice was calm. "My name is Angron."

"I know, Angron." The noble son replied softly. His Gothic language was difficult to pronounce and noble, but his expression contained anger born of sympathy. "My name is Robert Guilliman and I am your brother."

Khalil shook his head.

He stretched out his hand and put it on Robert Guilliman's shoulder, a cold blue light flashing in his eyes.

Angron roared suddenly and bent his body, but still restrained himself. Guilliman looked at all this in astonishment and wanted to speak, but a strange instinct in his body urged him to use another language.

So he blurted out: "What did you do, Khalil?"

"I made you learn the Nucerian language." The instigator stared at Angron and answered Guilliman's question softly.

"No, I'm asking-"

"——I'm fine." Angron lowered his head and said. He was panting, the cable behind his head was gnawing at him, Guilliman could see it, he could even hear the faint squeezing sound.

"That thing is psychically sensitive," Khalil said thoughtfully. "I made some guesses at first, and the information you collected also proved my guess."

"Then why are you still doing this?" Guilliman asked very quickly.

Khalil didn't answer the question. He just pursed his lips, shook his head, and said softly: "Sorry, Angron."

"I'm fine." The giant lowered his head said. "I've long been used to this kind of pain."

Guilliman frowned sharply. "This kind of pain?"

Angron looked up and grinned. His face was ferocious, but his eyes were calm.

"They call me Angron Talco. But I don't like this name. Angron is my first name and I don't have a surname, just like all the other gladiators."

"The Tarco family is the owner of the Daishea Arena. They own this arena, and the reason why they gave me this name is just to declare a kind of sovereignty. I hate this, so I have been resisting."

"A normal fight would take twenty minutes to an hour to let the damn audience get their catharsis. But I'll only spend two minutes."

"Glarefighting requires me to kill, but I will only let my opponents go all out, then take away their weapons one by one, and then throw them into the sand pit."

"Sometimes I will fight with ferocious beasts. Some were captured like us, and some were created by slave owners. I will make the former unconscious and let the latter rest in peace."

"The Tarco family was very dissatisfied with me at that time, but considering the money I brought, they still didn't do anything. Until Oinomouth and I planned to unite everyone to launch a riot and fight in the next gladiatorial battle before resisting them."

Angron paused for a moment, breathing heavily as the nails squirmed, urging him to use violence. He stared at the floor of the medical room, showing an emotion completely different from anger.

sad.

Even though it looked so out of place on his face, it was there.

"That was seven months ago, and it was also my sixteenth year in the arena."

After the silence, Angron spoke again in a low voice, and he could tell them. When he was calm, he still had the complete ability to think, but he would keep breathing in a low voice between words. The pain tortured him, and everyone could see it.

Even a blind person can tell through the terrible sound how painful its owner is at this moment.

Guilliman could see more. For example, Angron should rarely speak at such long lengths. There was too much evidence to prove this. The most obvious thing was the pause between Angron's words.

He is not just resisting the Butcher's Nail, he is thinking, and this will bring more and greater pain.

Guilliman gritted his teeth angrily. Didn't that nail even allow him to think, he thought?

"But it got leaked." He paused again. "A traitor, Dallio. No, maybe I shouldn't say he is a traitor. He was a slave owner from the beginning, a villain who was placed between us."

A ferocious smile appeared on the ferocious face.

"He told the Tarco family about this, and the scheduled fight was cancelled. I sensed something was wrong and wanted to resist in advance, but the guards had already used their silver vines to capture all of my brothers and sisters.”

"I still remember that day, it was a sunny day. They asked me to fight two Ogryns with Oinomouth, and we had to kill them. For the lives of our compatriots, I took action, and then, after that "

Guilliman waited in silence, unwilling to say a word. He just remained silent. Khalil also remained silent, but slightly different. He kept his eyes squinted, folded his hands, and tapped the forearm of his left hand with the index finger of his right hand.

"...They asked me and Oinomouth to fight each other, and one of them must die." Angron said calmly.

He talked about it as if it had nothing to do with him, as if he was talking about someone else's life. But his face said otherwise. What existed in that twitching, trembling, forced-to-mutilate face at this moment was an extreme sadness.

"I disagree," the gladiator whispered. "But Oinomouth agreed, and he wanted me to agree too. Maybe he already knew what the Talco family would do to me at that time."

"We were taken back into the cave and then pulled out again and put in a cage in the middle of the sand pit. They put a knife to Oinomouth's neck to make me agree to something. I I asked them what it was, but they didn't say anything. They just took out a tube of injection. I asked them again what it was. They still didn't say anything. They just used the knife to wipe the blood on Oinomao's neck little by little. .”

"I agreed, and then, when I woke up, Oinomouth was already dead."

He stopped talking, finally.

His words chilled Guilliman, wondering how the Emperor's son could be treated like this, and the story was also torture for those who listened.

The narrator himself slowly let out a roar from his throat, whether it was ridicule or a roar of sadness.

Guilliman saw that his brother had clenched his fists, and blood was flowing between the fingers of those two hands. The Butcher's Nails still writhed and dug in, but their victims clung to themselves with an inexplicable force of will.

Guilliman looked at Khalil, knowing he had the answer. Khalil turned around and looked at him with a look so complicated that Guilliman could hardly understand it.

"He was killed by my own hands. After that, I wanted to kill them all, so I tore apart the iron cage and ran out. However, I only had time to pinch the neck of one of my guards before I was stopped. The pain made it impossible for me to continue.”

He raised his head and glanced at Khalil.

"Psychic energy," Khalil said softly. "There are psykers in the Tarco family, right?"

"I don't know what it is. In short, the pain is no different from the pain caused when your eyes glow, it just hurts more."

Angron grinned, making a joke in his own way that sounded almost accusatory, but Guilliman had the odd feeling that his brother didn't seem to care.

"You said you were used to it?" Guilliman asked in a deep voice. "They often tortured you with psykers?"

"It was like this for the next seven months," Angron said. "As long as I didn't agree to play, I would feel pain. Sometimes I could resist, sometimes not. When I could resist, they threatened me with the lives of other gladiators."

"Gladiators didn't live long. Seven months was enough time for all the people I knew to die. But I knew that they shouldn't have been treated like this. So I would always agree, but , at this time, I can no longer control myself well."

Angron was silent for a while, then said a number with trembling fingers.

"Four hundred and seventy-one." He gasped in pain. "I killed four hundred and seventy-one people. I just remember that I killed four hundred and seventy-one people."

——

"I'm going to execute them all!"

Guilliman roared angrily, his voice echoing throughout his own study.

"If you just want to vent your anger, you can play a few more rounds of mock battles with me, Robert."

Standing in front of the porthole, Khalil turned back and glanced at the Lord of Macragge, his expression calm. "As for those slave owners, this is Angron's home planet, isn't it? Capture them and leave them to him to make a decision."

"Where can he see bloody scenes with his own eyes now? That thing has had an indelible impact on him." Guilliman covered his face in despair. "I should have set out earlier. If I had come earlier, maybe he wouldn't have."

Khalil didn't answer him, just turned his head back. He stared at the planet below the orbit, observing every observable detail, soothing and relaxing his way of thinking.

Then he chuckled.

"It's better to inform the Twelfth Legion first." He said softly. "As for the Butcher's Nail, it's not impossible."

"You have a solution?!" Guilliman stood up in disbelief.

"Yes." Khalil said. "But I have to go down first."

"What?"

"Judgment."

The instructor of the Eighth Legion answered softly, his voice as soft as a whisper in the wind. Looking at his back, Robert Guilliman suddenly felt a chill.

4.2K, the remaining 800 will be paid tomorrow.

Don't worry when I see some readers speculating whether Khalil will give away part of his power again. It's too tacky to write like this.