Warhammer 40k: Shattered Steel Soul

They sat down in the middle of the street in RA-124. The mud mixed with flesh and blood and the fragments of dead bones were crushed by the ceramic armor, and some dark fragments stuck in the gaps of the armor under the squeeze.

"The Primarch Rogal Dorn has left," Jaeger said, feeling downcast. "I wonder...are we doing something wrong? Are we violating the will of the Emperor and Father?"

Several World Eaters looked in the direction of the street in unison, their sights extending among the ruins, deep into the rain of blood and fire falling from the sky in the smoke and dust, all the way to the darkness composed of the collapsed steel and immaterial energy of the city wall on the horizon. Technology fortress.

Just now, after Rogal Dorn's speech, he walked towards the collapsing fortress. The nameless golden skull and the recently replaced giant chain sword "Storm Fang" were hung on both sides of the giant's body. The primarch in golden armor left traces of his dazzling light in the blood mist of burning sand. Even though he had walked out of the sight of the World Eaters, his figure seemed to still be here, bright and constant, It penetrates the mind through the senses and lingers for a long time.

"Father." This crucial word for an Astartes was painful in Mago's mouth. The steel cloak given to him by the former Legion Master spread out behind him and hung on the ruins.

"We should remember that Father doesn't want us to kill without honor. Maybe we should start to change."

"As you have been persuaded, Centurion?" Hanno asked. "Seeking glory in fighting rather than killing?"

Mago nodded and dug the blade of the long ax into the soil next to her. He had actually been the one to speak out against the senseless slaughter, but he didn't defend himself in front of Rogal Dorn.

"Margo." Garland Sulak called the centurion's name. He stood beside several people without sitting down.

He is the unquestionable elite among the World Eaters apothecaries. Some say he was the apprentice of an apothecary named Fabius Bayer, one of the few surviving members of the Third Legion, while others say there must have been a personal grudge between them. Regardless, there is no doubt about his professional ability.

"What do you think?" Margot asked, looking up at the pharmacist.

Garland's helmet was held in his hands, and the smile on his broad face looked false due to the twitching of his mouth: "Are you still pursuing glory, Centurion?"

"We are the hounds of the Skyhawk," Margo said calmly. "You brought the arena into the Fortitude Resolve. Isn't it a manifestation of your pursuit of glory?"

Garland laughed: "Hounds of the Skyhawk? Margot, do we look so noble? No, we are just a group of creations based on mortals, gifted, and improved from technology, appendages of technology and miracles born in batches . We don’t have any inherent glory.”

He pointed to the fortress in the distance: "We and those fortresses are the same thing. Creations of technology. Weapons of war. I don't understand what kind of glory we need to pursue."

"The speech of the primarch Dorn didn't touch you at all? Garlan?" Magog frowned in the armor and rubbed her hand on the ax handle. "You really went crazy in the laboratory. Those halls are ours. With Father's approval, you dismantled six cabins, threw our military cargo out of the room, replaced everything with your chattering cogitators and cold, disgusting jars, and had Martians and medical slaves keep you company. What are you thinking about?"

"What about you, Centurion?" Garland raised his eyebrows, "Are you going to use your words to stop the pharmacist's normal research, and use your ax to kill your battle brothers?"

"I will report all this to Angron." Jaeger reminded, his eyes falling on Garland as he spoke.

"Then do it, Jaeger." Garan replied coldly, taking Jaeger's words as a clear threat, "Then let the original body prohibit my research. I have known for a long time that we were unfortunately in trouble. What a cowardly father.”

"Some insults are not easy to say, Apothecary."

"Oh, Jaeger." Garland said, "You are so old-fashioned. You don't even dare to listen to a bad word from Angron. Are you agreeing with it in your heart?"

Jaeger jumped up and knocked Garland into the rubble. His heavily armored arm pressed firmly on the pharmacist's chest, and he shouted face to face with him: "Apologise! Repent!"

Garland coughed heavily, looking for an opportunity to break free. Then Mago's tomahawk handle pressed against his hand, forcing him to stop.

"What did I say wrong?" Garland said coldly, "A father who is full of troubles, bound by absurd morals, and blinded by weak illusions. Is this what you want?"

"Look at Rogal Dorn, how he rebuked us mercilessly! Look at Perturabo, how he used tools to make one-tenth of his descendants disappear into thin air, taking full advantage of our role and value! The Imperial Fist and the Iron Warriors, these two legions are the true conquerors who have achieved the great cause of the Emperor! And what about us? Why do we have to play free and follow a slave..."

Jaeger was so angry that he swung out his fist and smashed Garland's head into the ruins between the wooden boards and the mud. In an instant, dust flew up and blood splattered. Garland's fingers twitched, and Margot grabbed his hand and pulled him out of the ruins. His whole body was thrown to the ground, his head covered with blood.

"You deserve to die!" Jaeger roared and threw himself at Garland again, but was forcefully held back by Mago. "Calm down, Jaeger, let's leave and suspend the killing. From today on, Garland Sulak is no longer our brother."

Garland lay quietly, letting the blood flow out, and his face twisted into a contemptuous sneer: "Pause? Do you remember why we want to kill? The ruler we are chasing comes from a planet full of witchcraft energy, and here There is also the potential for witchcraft in the air... It's too late, brothers."

The pharmacist looked at the sky. The scorching air was trembling. The last screams of the war dead echoed in the rain of fire. The ruins of flesh and blood burned again, and coke and brass spread in the blood.

Jaeger and Mago suddenly stiffened, and Garland could see the shock and regret of the two centurions from the performance of their armor.

Their conflict with Rogal Dorn caused a small amount of incommunication between the two parties that did not affect the overall situation, leaving a Primarch to face the Old Night alone without knowing anything about it. Technology and sorcery tricks that border on betrayal.

The centurions opened the communicator and tried to contact Rogal Dorn. After a few seconds, Mago nodded to Jaeger, took Hanno and started running wildly, praying that the Primarch did not run away, and tried to catch up with Dorn. pace.

In the distance, eight dazzling red lights suddenly lit up in the crumbling fortress. An extreme anger and desire to kill arose in Garland's heart. He enjoyed the perfect sharpness and purity, and happily accepted this rage that seemed to be able to conquer the world.

In the laboratory of the Resolute Resolve, he made several attempts to imitate the Butcher's Nail. This is the most satisfying of Nuceria's many technological inventions: pure anger is enough to offset all the remaining excess humanity and useless conscience.

This would help them become the best tools to rule the galaxy, which he believed was what the Emperor wanted. Brilliance and glory are built on the cornerstone of victory. Without conquest, there is no justice.

Unfortunately, his attempt was never successful. There were many factors that blocked his research path. If he was given another period of time or more experience, he would definitely be able to make better use of this tool to get rid of unnecessary pity and supplement it. All Astartes were mutilated. He felt sorry.

"You can't leave." Jaeger kicked Garland down as he tried to stand up, his voice filled with barely suppressed anger.

The next moment, Jaeger fell in a whirlwind. He grabbed a piece of brick to prevent himself from kneeling. He pulled out a thin needle injected with black medicine from his neck and felt that his heart was melting.

Garland put away the needle gun. "The annoying Fabius gave me this thing when he last met me. Goodbye, Jaeger."

——

Bloody figures and copper-like black clouds increased in front of Dorn's eyes, and flames burned on every collapsed house. The streets were littered with corpses, some in pedestrian robes and some with armor. The smell of gunpowder smoke in the air became thick, strange and familiar.

He recalled the same bloody, fiery metallic scent he had smelled while in orbit on Genna, waiting for the execution of the rebellious aliens. In later battlefields, he would smell this smell from time to time after he ordered an attack.

Rogal Dorn wasn't sure if this was a recurrence of the same hallucination. He walked forward.

The crumbling road gradually turned into a dark red color like a furnace, and some thoroughly burned materials turned into white-hot flowing metal, shining with the light of disaster. The half-collapsed tower in the distance erupted with a red blood light that could not be seen directly. The cooling mud under his feet began to heat up, and the crystals and metals on the surrounding buildings and facilities that had been used to fix some non-material energy began to melt. Collective resonance.

This planet is undergoing some kind of transformation, from a ruins of a battlefield to a conceptual microcosm of countless ruins of battlefields. Another scene is like a thick cloth, covering the surface of the original world, adding a new bloody image according to the original outline. Red sand poured into the soles of his feet, and everything from the wreckage of a chariot dating back dozens of millennia to the detached hatch of the latest Stormbird vehicle was twisted in sand and fire.

Likewise, he would sometimes see visions of the battlefields he had fought in, disturbing phenomena that would disappear around Perturabo. Dorn thought that this might be born from the same aversion to the battlefield as Angron's disturbing hallucinations, so he overcame it all in silence. He realized now that it wasn't psychological. He may have been secretly watched by some force.

Donn believed that he would be able to effectively identify this anomaly the next time he encountered something similar.

Atomized sulfuric acid and dirty fireballs rose from the surrounding gleaming metal debris, and ferocious and wild noises ignited primal like flames. Sulfur and black fire collided on the soles of Dorn's boots, and sharp sounds and roars seemed to Summoned, the shocking power is sweeping the world.

He didn't know where this was. He doesn't like it here. But Dorne still moved on.

Within sight, the number of corpses with twisted spikes on their armor was increasing. He saw several bodies chopped to pieces with axes and blades, sprinkled on the erected flagpole, the broken blood-red flag, the black wooden wheels of the chariot and the A pile of spiked wooden stakes driven into the sand. The dead bones were penetrated, torn apart, and fell together with the bolts and rusted copper pieces. The richer sharp blood baked all the dead bodies, statues, animal claws, and leather. Then, to his surprise, the dead bones began to gather from the broken bones.

It started with a hand bone, picked up a round shield wrapped with copper edges, and pieced it together with the round shield on the upright skeletal remains. Then, when he saw the deadly red light shining in the eyes of more bones, Dorn raised his sword.

It had been a while since Rogal Dorn had been personally involved in battle. In fact, his last bloody battle was chasing orcs. This is not only because he is in a commanding position, but also because his son Sigismund is always guarding him with a sword.

But his strength will not be diminished.

The teeth of the storm swept away a fragment of skeleton bones, which reunited after a brief separation and emerged from the thick dust and firelight. Their notched blades slashed at him. Dorn calmly smashed the skull into pieces again, trying to carve out a path among the gathering eternal weapons. He doesn't know where he's going yet, but he won't stop.

Unhappiness came to him sooner than fatigue or anger. Dorn frowned as a skeleton struck the golden skull at his waist. He took off the golden skull from his waist and held it in his palm, protecting its delicate appearance, the shape held up by his palm, and the oval gold-copper gem that really drove the operation of the skull.

Then, he discovered that the golden runes on the gem had started to flicker on their own at some point.

"Your skin is burning with the flames of war." The head made of steel was embedded in the gilded palm of the stone carving. The upper and lower jaws of the head vibrated and the teeth rattled, telling the story of what Perturabo had done before coming to Nuceria. The same sentence he said jokingly.

Dorn looked at the skeleton and replied: "But Inwit is a world of ice and snow."

The sound it used was a combination of Perturabo's voice and the voice of his own words, a repetition of words of steel and stone, complementing each other in all accents and long sentences, each completing the other.

When Rogal Dorn heard these words, a certain kind of stable and cold calmness supported his consciousness, like pouring rain, making him feel a kind of inner feeling in this blazing brass world. The coolness and tranquility outside.

Those complex runes worked faithfully, and in the cold golden light emitted by the golden skull, the brown and yellow bones that were chopped off by Dorn took three times as long to revive again. The cold and clean air blew over Dorn, and the fire and flowing lava beneath his feet cooled into a tiny piece of nothingness and darkness, barely allowing him to stop.

The gifts given to him by Perturabo and Morse unintentionally played a strange role. Dawn knew she would thank them for it when she got out of the field.

"You are me," Dorn said to the skull. "You are my other voice."

"You want to hear our voices," the skull said. "Through me, you talk to yourself."

Dorn held the skull with his left hand and held the sword with his right hand. The tail feathers of the sky eagle created a space on the outside of the sword hilt, acting as a guard to protect his limbs.

"I need to get out of here," Dawn said.

In the frantic light, some kind of bright red monster, thin but full of muscles, carrying a black sharp blade and an armor-like horn-shaped blade, crossed over the elementary bones and rushed towards him in groups. These monsters are gleaming with blazing fire, harnessing beasts that combine demons and machines. Flames instead of blood support their bodies, and turn into thunder to become the sound of their attacks. The erosion of hatred and violence follows them.

"Fight then," the Skull answered, speaking in the voice of both Primarchs.

I originally wanted to write about war in Dorne, but this was really included in the just-released Dead End 2, so I decided not to follow suit.