40k: Midnight Blade.

Chapter 662 44. Belated Judgment (XVII)

Before the Dark Angels took over the responsibilities of the Order and officially became the Protectors of Caliban, the Beastial Contamination was a thorny and difficult problem to deal with.

It takes at least five years for a child to grow from an apprentice to a reserve knight, and the war against the behemoths can easily cause dozens or even hundreds of casualties. Caliban has many knight orders, each of which will regularly announce that they will launch a crusade against the behemoths. Unfortunately, before Lion El'Jonson became famous, they always lost more than they won.

Some old knights who survived the war would even tell the young people self-deprecatingly that the reason they were able to survive had nothing to do with their superb martial arts, strong will and excellent equipment.

The above three points are just the prerequisites for facing the giant beasts. The only reason they can survive to this day is just because they are lucky or cowardly enough.
Despite facing such a dire situation, the Calibans continued to throw themselves into this seemingly unwinnable war.

They are martial and not afraid of sacrifice. What's more, they are now fighting against evil - dying for this is simply the greatest honor.

However, no matter how much they despised death, no matter how much they respected honor, they had to admit one thing: before Lion El'Jonson appeared, even Luther, who was known as the "greatest" knight, could not turn the situation around.

By then, the situation had gotten so bad that it had reached its limit.

Let's take a very trivial example: the placement of corpses. A young man who has gone through a lot of hardships to become a knight dies in a war to face evil and protect the innocent. For this, should he get a cemetery and a coffin?
This was of course a matter of course, but the Knights were simply unable to afford these two simple things. The beasts were contaminated, and the dead who were torn to pieces by their claws were naturally to blame.

In order to avoid more horrific things happening later, these brave dead were often dismembered on the spot and then burned together with the corpses of the enemy. If the Knights in charge of this matter were lucky enough to have promethium, then this matter would be much faster.

But if not.
The lion had heard Luther say at the wine table that the flames burning the dead and the corpses of the beasts could last for half a month, and even the sky would change color. Even if the flames were extinguished, the charred smoke would linger for a long time, like the last breath of the dead.

He stared expressionlessly at the sea of ​​fire in front of him, watching the twisted pieces of flesh struggling and twisting in the flames, staring at their cursed forms, without uttering a word for a long time.

On the contrary, Luther, who was standing behind him, was humming a happy song. The bad smell spreading from the horrible hellfire had already occupied every inch of the air around him and the lion, but Luther seemed unaffected.

The lion couldn't help but take a second or two to think about the difference: Is he truly immune to the influence, or has he already gotten used to it?

He looked at Luther deeply and found that the old knight actually looked very happy. This was not common, as Luther was never one to show his emotions.

He once admired the chivalry and elegance, but after some changes, he turned to mysticism. To this day, the lion is too lazy to even guess how many secrets he carries.

He turned around, faced Luther, and swung the lion sword in his hand, sword and scabbard together. The weathered weapon penetrated deeply into the soil, and fine stones and dry soil flew everywhere. The lion's cloak fell silently to the ground in the firelight.

He looked at Luther, still without saying a word. The filthy flesh of the giant beasts was melting in the flames at an extremely slow speed, but the billowing smoke caused by the chain reaction had completely covered the sky at the top of the forest.

Soon, the stench of burning corpses will seep into the back and drift into the depths of the forest.
Luther smiled and nodded slightly to him, and faced with the silent questioning, he finally gave an explanation.

"We have to wait, Leon."

"What are you waiting for?"

"Wait for two people and one thing to appear." Luther said slowly. "The first person is your son Zabril. If nothing unexpected happens, he will follow my footsteps and come here to find us."

"The second man is also your son, but he has betrayed you and is full of sin. He will come here to beg for your forgiveness. Of course, before that, he will tell you that he has done his job and he is not a fool."

"I will only give him death." The lion answered with an incredible calmness.

"You can give him anything, even forgiveness." Luther said nonchalantly, blinking mysteriously. "The most important thing is not how you face him, but how he will arrive in front of you and me. Now let's talk about the last thing."

As soon as he finished speaking, the old knight's smiling face suddenly turned cold without any warning. This change happened in just a moment, and even the lion couldn't help but feel a little surprised.

"Can you imagine what it is?" Luther asked emotionlessly.

That face. No matter who he was, what kind of feelings he had, what kind of identity he had, or who he had met, these things are irrelevant.

The moment this question was asked, the identities of knight, grand mentor, father, brother, friend, betrayer, and spy completely disappeared along with everything they represented.

His face was as deep and ruthless as stone, and there was something primitive and cruel in his eyes, a deep malice.

Staring at them, the lion actually felt cold all over.

His intuition suddenly broke free from the shackles of reason and easily brought him back to a certain moment in human history. At that time, the first city-state had not even been established, but a group of people in the darkness had already raised their knives and spears against the beasts.

They hunted them, not for food, not for clothing, not for fun, they just did it. They killed until the continental shelves were drowned in blood and at least thousands of species became extinct.

At this moment, it was this kind of malice that was boiling in Luther's eyes.

"The answer doesn't really matter." Luther said slowly. "We only need to do two things with it: enslave it, or kill it."

"If it agrees to the former, then the latter does not need to be done. If it refuses, then we must grind it to dust at the end of time. We must keep killing it until it can no longer be summoned or used in any form."

But why? The lion wanted to ask. The question was stuck in his throat for a long time, but it could never get rid of some kind of shackles that locked the question tightly.

The lion suddenly realized that he didn't need to ask, because he already knew the answer - the answer to this question was born before the word history was invented, when those crazy primitive people gathered in groups with torches lit in the dark and hunted groups of wild beasts with spears in hand.

But what exactly is the problem?
The lion lowered his head, and sticky blood from his nose slowly dripped down. His beard was dyed red, and it traced along the lines on the armor, leaving dark red marks. Waves of needle-like pain surged from the depths of his head. He clenched his teeth with all his strength, and heard a clattering sound and an indescribable vague cry.
cry?

No.

On the dividing line between illusion and reality, Lion El'Jonson, with his gradually sinking sanity, discerned the truth of the sound: it was not a shout, but a cry.

The crying of babies.

The cold wind blew, and his senses became sticky and filled with anxiety and fear. His legs seemed to be filled with lead, but this did not stop him from running. In the dim wilderness, he ran towards somewhere.

He used his bare hands to tear off some kind of animal skin covering the stone pestle, wood and mud, with such strength that he himself could hardly believe it.
A roar was heard, and a shape quickly passed by him and escaped into the darkness with a strong smell of blood.

He had no time to care about anything else but rushed into the blood-stained wreckage and carefully picked up a blurry body that had been ripped open.

Only after this did sadness consume him.

Then, more shouts came, not just one person, but many people came from outside the tent. Full of anger, full of hatred, someone pulled him up, someone took away his children, someone stuffed a spear into his mouth, someone smeared his cheek with blood.

Dozens of eyes were burning, and the malice flowing in them was exactly the same as Luther's. This malice was born from anger, hatred, and sadness, but it was far beyond the scope of what they could describe - these things alone could not drive a tribe or a group to spend several generations to commit genocide.

Only the noble quality of "protection", which is completely opposite to them, can give birth to it.

In order to protect newborns and young offspring, primitive people could chase from the northernmost part of the continent to the coast with spears in hand, kill every beast they could see, and then pass on their habits from generation to generation, hanging their bones on the top of the tent, inside and outside the territory.
If this creature reappears one day in the future, their descendants will be able to pick up the spear again.

What kind of pure malice is this?

The lion pursed his lips and finally made a few muffled sounds.

"Yes," Luther said. "That's what I came for."

He smiled with satisfaction, revealing his white teeth. His wrinkles were smoothed, the coldness melted away, and only pure and simple joy remained. The flames burned fiercely, and the corpses and pieces of meat of the giant beasts twisted in it, but the old knight laughed so hard that he even bent over.

"Ouroboros is a very powerful supernatural entity, Lion. It can do far more than you can imagine." Luther said very gently. "From an occult perspective, it is no different from Caliban."

“We can even say that it is Caliban itself. However, the relationship between it and Caliban cannot be guessed by common sense. There is no such thing as a relationship between them where one prospers and the other suffers together.”

“Even if Caliban is destroyed, the Ouroboros will still exist, and this is exactly its purpose. Caliban is like a prison that has trapped it tightly. It certainly won’t be willing to be a prisoner, so it will make Caliban bear some unbearable costs at all costs. The pollution of the behemoth and the civil strife in Caliban are just one part of it.”

"After the Terran rebellion ended, it seized the opportunity, and it was almost successful. Unfortunately, I am here."

Luther stood up, took a step, walked past the lion and stepped into the raging flames.

"I am here, Ouroboros!" he shouted. "And you have only two choices, kneel or die, choose!"

His voice could not cross the boundary set by the fire, and naturally could not enter the depths of the forest, but the lion saw it clearly.

He looked up and saw layers of surging darkness rushing towards him from the other side of the sky dyed red by the fire, flapping its wings and opening its beaks. He instinctively drew his lion sword, but snakes began to rain from the sky. One after another, spitting poisonous snakes slipped from the sharp claws of the birds and fell to the ground with a dense thumping sound.

Luther's laughter turned into a wild laugh, as if he had achieved a certain goal and was very happy about it. Even when the lion put his hand on his shoulder, this wild laugh did not stop.

In the darkness created by the snake rain and bird clouds, the lion slowly exhaled a breath of air that carried the smell of decaying giant beast corpses.

Suddenly, he asked, "How do we kill it?"
-
The shuttle's hatch slowly opened, and the smell of blood flowed into the fourth hangar of the Edge of Reason along with the high-temperature steam. Twelve dark angels filed out, silently carrying the huge iron box wrapped with iron chains and walking away quickly.

As their footsteps sounded, the people who had been waiting in the hangar since early morning vaguely heard inhuman roars coming from the boxes.

The servants lowered their heads in fear and immediately began to silently recite the Emperor's Prayer. Several veteran Sword Guards stared coldly at the iron box until it disappeared into the deepest darkness, then they withdrew their sight.

It was also at this time that Caryl Rohals walked out of the cabin.

He was still holding the knife, with no intention of taking it back. His hands were stained with blood, and the hem of the judge's uniform was shining, already soaked with blood. Seeing this, the servants immediately stepped forward to tidy up his appearance, but they only received a silent and firm refusal.

"Go down."

A cold voice ordered the servants, and a giant followed closely out of the darkness. He was not wearing a knight's robe, and his armor had many scratches and welding marks.

He has a rather broad and ruthless chin, his lips are tightly pressed, the line is almost like a sharp blade. He has a hooked nose, high cheekbones, no flesh on his cheeks, and a pair of gloomy eyes, with pupils like two small dots without focus.
"Raphael."

Khalil greeted him as the servants left.

The Chapter Master of the First Army - no, the First Regiment, 'Sword of Repentance' Raphael nodded to him with a complicated expression as a brief greeting, and then immediately raised his hand and made a quick and complicated gesture.

The veterans standing around him immediately dispersed, dispersing into the shadows as if they had never existed. For a moment, only Khalil and the Chapter Master were left in the fourth hangar.

The cold and pale light shone above their heads. The shuttle's engine was still slowly dissipating heat and making a buzzing noise, but the air was as cold as ice.

Khalil did not let the silence last too long. He shook his hand, slashed the blade across the edge of his coat, and asked, "What are the results of the analysis?"

"It's very bad," Raphael said. "That ship has become a hotbed of chaos. The three priests I found almost died during the ceremony. Their rosaries and statues were all broken. The think tank responsible for maintaining the ceremony told me that if it weren't for their devout faith, they would probably have been possessed by demons by now."

Khalil shook his head and used a rare serious tone: "You should have been more careful, Chapter Master."

Raphael did not respond to this, but frowned, his expression becoming more gloomy. After a few seconds, he spoke again: "I must admit that I made an empirical mistake in this matter. I should have listened to your advice."

"Now is not the time to talk about this, and I am not in a position to stand here and listen to your self-examination. Now I am issuing an order as the Grand Inquisitor of the Inquisition, Captain Raphael. I believe that the Blade of Truth must be destroyed immediately, and I will bear all the consequences arising from this."

Raphael nodded and said briefly and crisply: "The artillery array was preheated ten minutes ago."

"No one will be left alive." Khalil replied softly.

He turned around and boarded the shuttle again. There was no one on board. The machine soul had been programmed with logic in advance so that the shuttle could fly forward.
The starry sea was dim, and a blazing beam of light brushed past it soon after, setting off the alarms in the instruments and creating a huge explosion on the blasphemous hull of the Blade of Truth, swallowing Khalil's face in a sea of ​​white.

There was no sound in a vacuum, but he seemed to hear a howl and a calm and contented sigh.

The former came from the renegade flagship of the Ten Thousand Eyes, the Blade of Truth, and the latter came from the Warhound, the Mountain. Taken away, trampled, and twisted by Chaos.

A revenge was accomplished, just as he had promised.
But this was just the beginning. The shuttle continued to fly, the engine outputting steadily, unaffected by the outside world. Caril came to the back of the cabin with a knife in hand and turned to look at the monitor on the side. In the bright blue light, a scarlet spot of light was flashing rapidly.

That was the Ten Thousand Eyes, a whole fleet, the wealth that Serafax had accumulated over ten thousand years. They were leaping out of Mandeville Point near Kamas one after another, rushing into this trap that had been set at all costs.

From a tactical point of view, this was undoubtedly suicidal.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to resort to some unconventional tactics." Khalil lowered his head and spoke to his shadow.

"You never follow any rules, father," his shadow replied. "Do what you want. I just hope Lion El'Jonson doesn't come back to see a burning Kamas."

(End of this chapter)