40k: Midnight Blade

Chapter 275 46. Rebellion in Olympia (7)

Perturabo grabs a body.

His fingers clenched tightly into the assassin's shoulder. The assassin was lifeless and cut in half.

The flesh and blood was deeply wrapped in the dark ice that transcended reason, and the blood that should have spurted out spread like ice edges on the two separated parts of the body, forming a strange sight that was hard to find.

There was no detail in the clothes the corpse was wearing that could help us find the truth. It was just the most ordinary black cloth. But what allowed them to sneak in while the parliament was in progress?

The guards on duty outside the door did not react at all. Although they were not Astartes, they were definitely not blind.

After a few seconds, Perturabo let go and dropped the body.

He glanced back at Callifon, who was holding a light golden copper-headed cane and looking at him worriedly. A pain that he didn't want to admit immediately came up - she was being tortured by the fate of a mortal.

"Are you okay?" Perturabo asked in a normal tone.

Callifon's right hand holding the cane tightened immediately, and obvious shock appeared on the female tyrant's face.

It took her a few seconds before she responded in confusion: "I - uh, I'm fine, Abo. I'm fine."

"Where are your guards?" Perturabo stiffened for a moment, then immediately frowned.

His current expression made the little concern he just showed seem like a joke, but Califon calmed down because of it. Obviously, she was more accustomed to this appearance than Perturabo's concern.

And Perturabo knew this, how could he not?

"They should be right outside the door." The female tyrant replied slightly confused.

Khalil stood aside and observed the interaction between the siblings, feeling interesting from the bottom of his heart. However, he couldn't look at it for too long, so he walked into the darkness and picked up a translucent gun still stained with blood with his toes.

The Lord of Steel's voice immediately reached his ears: "My design."

"You sound like you're going to kill someone, my lord," Khalil said.

"If the guards of Lokos Tyrant don't appear here in the remaining thirty seconds, indeed I will." Perturabo replied coldly.

"This group of assassins have not undergone any strict training, and many of them are even farmers. Their hands and rough faces can prove my point. In this case, how did they touch it without alerting any guards? From inside the council chamber? What’s more, it’s been a minute since the gunfire started, so why haven’t they sent anyone in to observe?”

"Invisibility cloak?" Khalil threw out a guess in response to his first question. He still had his back to the original body and the female tyrant, and neither of them could see his face.

"Impossible." Perturabo immediately refuted this conjecture, his tone was surprisingly calm, as if he was conducting academic research. "They don't have any technological devices on their bodies. Even if they did, they wouldn't be thin enough to be implanted under the skin or worn close to the body without any clues being revealed."

Khalil did not answer this sentence. He dropped the gun and walked straight to the front of the door. His figure gradually entered the natural darkness caused by the stone pillars and design.

Perturabo didn't know what he was going to do, but he knew that Khalil Lohars wouldn't do it without aim. So he lowered his head and looked at his sister again.

"You have opponents in the city," he said in a determined tone. "Your guards have either been incited to rebel, or they have been outsourced, Califon."

The female tyrant's face turned a little pale as a result, and Perturabo could see her pretense of calmness but her deep inner uneasiness.

His sister was smart, always had been, but had little political talent. After all, she's not just smart, she's also stubborn. She doesn't like and won't use her talents for dirty political drama.

Some people are like that, if something makes them unhappy, they won't do it even if they die.

"How much blood will Lokos shed for this?" Callifon asked after a while.

She seemed to be smiling, or at least the tone of her voice suggested so. Unfortunately, her expression ruined it perfectly.

"It depends on the situation," Perturabo said. "But you don't need to feel uneasy about this. People need to decide their own destiny. I made a choice, so I have been a joke among the stars for decades. If even I cannot escape the consequences and punishment of my choice, Why can they?"

Callifon looked at him at a loss. Old age seemed not to have allowed her heart to grow enough. Or maybe it was because what Perturabo was describing was so horrific that she simply couldn't understand it. After a while, she responded.

"That instructor—" The female tyrant took a deep breath, and the primarch heard her lungs begin to torture each other again. "——What did he do?"

"I have no idea."

"Is there anything else you don't know, Abo?" Kalifon curved her mouth and tried to smile, but failed.

Yes, there are too many.

"I don't know much about this man. I have never seen anyone like him." Perturabo slowed down his tone so that Callifon could calm down word by word. "I couldn't even tell you whether he walked out of here to kill people or to investigate."

"You spoke of him too horribly."

Perturabo did not respond to this statement. On the one hand, he did not want to explain to Callifon the reason why he said this. On the other hand, he was more concerned about another thing now.

He moved and blocked Callifon from the main entrance: "You don't understand what I just said, do you?"

"Which sentence?" Callifon asked slightly uneasily. She was not sure whether Perturabo asked this sentence to laugh at her stupidity like before.

"Star Sea."

".Yes." Callifon bit her lip.

"I don't understand. You are born to be better than us. I even think the person who took you away should be called a god. If the gods take you away from us, they will take you to fight among the stars. How can you become a joke in the war of all mankind?"

Perturabo was silent for a moment. These short seconds were so long in his perception that he could clearly perceive every thought in his heart at this moment.

He wasn't angry, at least not because of Califon's words. This would have been impossible in the past. If it had been in the past, he would have started to angrily scold her now.

He's not angry, he's just sad. Every time he thought about it, he remembered a name, and he remembered the name.

"Because of stupidity." The Lord of Steel said slowly. "I am not the only one in the galaxy called Primarch, Califon. I have many brothers, many. None of them are worse than me, but I want to prove that I am the best of them all. I was so blinded by this thought that I couldn’t even see the reality that was so close to me.”

"Aren't you the best of them all?"

Callifon didn't know what to say. She even tried to comfort him with a smile that coaxed a child. Perturabo was not comforted, he just smiled.

"Maybe," he said. "But now is not the time to think about that."

He took a step forward and placed a hand on the back of Callifon's head.

His sister mistakenly took this as a precursor to a hug, but it was good news for what Perturabo was about to do. A thousandth of a second later, a bullet penetrated the thick wall of the parliament building and hit the back of his hand.

Blood splattered.

"Don't look back," said Perturabo.

He did not make the same mistake again. His concentrated hearing easily captured a gunshot hundreds of meters away. It was clear but distorted, like the sound of a whip hitting the ground.

So now he stood here, with blood oozing from the back of his hand, and a specially modified powerful bullet stuck between his bones and flesh. Callifon looked up at him with a pale face.

"After a while, I'll have someone take you to the track." Perturabo said in a slower tone again. Somehow, he seems to be somewhat comfortable doing this now.

"I'll take care of things here," he said. "I promise you that."

——

Khalil walked out of the darkness with his knife in hand. He could go into the darkness if he wanted to, but not now. He didn't come out of the council chamber to kill, even if he was carrying a knife.

The sky in Lokos is still blue, the city is quiet, and there seems to be no disturbance. This was not the case on the road directly in front of the parliament. Blood and broken limbs were everywhere, turning the originally bright red carpet into dark red.

Thirty-five people died, all wearing guard robes. There was a look of calm on their faces, apparently not aware of anything at the time of death. There was no 'strangeness' left on their bodies that could be called evidence.

Khalil ran his eyes across theirs, his shadow beginning to boil.

"Stop," he warned softly. "Their blood is not your food."

Then the shadow returned to silence, not daring to make any more movements. Khalil began to stride forward. At the same time, a man in a dark green cloak slowly appeared at the end of the carpet.

He noticed Khalil's presence immediately. His walking posture was inevitably stiff for a moment, but he soon returned to normal. At the hem of the cloak, there is a silver arm looming.

"Ser Luther," Khalil greeted. "I didn't expect you to be here."

"Me too." The visitor took off his hood, revealing an increasingly older but energetic face. "Long time no see, instructor Khalil."

Khalil looked at him for a moment, and Luther accepted the observation graciously. The old knight no longer has the high-ranking temperament he once had. He looks older, with a gray beard covering the lower half of his face, and three or four dangerous scars on his forehead and eye sockets.

But it was his eyes that were the focus, and those eyes now shone with something he had never wanted before.

So Khalil smiled slightly: "It seems that you are doing well."

Luther grinned slowly: "Oh, I couldn't be better."

Also, code.