40k: Midnight Blade.

Chapter 797 18. The vengeful one

It didn't take long to look through the documents; the hardest part was finding the words to describe how he was feeling.

Fear? It was unlikely to be fear, but he did feel a little short of breath, as if someone had stabbed him in the windpipe with a knife.

When he thought of this, he raised his hand and touched his throat. There was a huge, rough scar there, which felt almost like stone.

This was left by a Tzeentch wizard during the defense of Temperus forty-one years ago. It suddenly appeared in front of him, with feathers and scales on the face, and no so-called human features or anything else that could be identified.

Now thinking back, he felt that the bastard's face looked like a whirlpool that kept spinning. It didn't have a staff in its hand, but a knife with a curved handle and a thin blade that glowed evilly. The tip of the knife was dark red, like rust.

At that time, he knew the correct decision - to stop casting spells and deal with the opponent first, but he couldn't do that. Hundreds of brothers around him were using their lives to buy time for him to complete the ritual in the midst of the army and summon the spirit of destruction in the warp.
For this reason, he stood there, not taking a single step back, and let the knife stab into his throat.

He managed to get through it a second before the pain hit, and he woke up four days later, still unable to speak.

The evil magic on the knife took half of his life, and the ceramic steel neck guard failed to play its due role - he was already used to this. The defensive properties of ceramic steel were very effective against most physical damage, but compared with those supernatural things, it seemed a little pale in comparison.

It is always so, he thought. We and everything we have are often helpless in the face of these things.

Esper Balagash put down the documents in his hand and took a deep breath.

He still seemed to be sane and calm, but the other man behind the desk knew that was not the case.

To him, suppressed anger is still anger, and the smell of its burning is enough to spread thousands of meters. He has been dealing with it all his life. In this sense, anger is his old friend.

If you take away the fact that he hates it.

Angron raised his hand and placed it on the shoulder of his Librarian, without using his ability, and simply spoke softly.

"It doesn't have to be this way."

Just one sentence, and Esper Balagash calmed down, but it was not because the speaker was his genetic father. There was some connection, but he was sure that this was not the main reason.
Angron always seemed to be able to do this—to smooth over someone's anger with a look, a word, a gesture, or an action.

The think tank director clenched his fists and forced himself to remain calm.

"We should impose martial law on the entire planet, no, the entire system." He said slowly, and he felt that thinking had never been so difficult as it was now, just like reaching out to find a special drop of water from the waves. "And quickly, Primarch, the story of Barasto has been spread for a long time. Even twenty years later, it will still be a topic of conversation."

Angron shook his head and dropped his hand.

He looked very handsome sitting under the light in his light white, neat uniform, which was completely different from what the public imagined him to be.

In the minds of all those who have heard the stories of the Lord of Red Sand, the King of Gladiators and the Liberator, he should be a strong and violent bull. It would be best if he would tear down the palace of the previous tyrant and build a new one for himself, then sit on the throne and rule everything with his absolute power until the end of time.
Instead of sitting in an antique office and whispering about my ideas like I do now.

"Don't overreact, Esper." He told his offspring very patiently and gently. "Even if half of the empire is blocked, how can it help this matter? If they want to escape and hide their identities, I think the legion will probably not be able to find them - after all, they have been hiding on Nuceria for so long, right? Although this is also related to my disappearance some time ago."

The think tank director gritted his teeth and suddenly said loudly: "Maybe we are indeed incompetent, but now we have--"

He suddenly pointed to a group of men in black standing nearby.

They were men, women, young and old, some with smiles on their faces, some expressionless like corpses in a cemetery, the only thing they had in common was their black clothes and the emblem on their chests. If it were in some slightly ignorant world, this face would probably be immediately mistaken by the villagers as a group of death gods traveling together.

"--With the help of the Inquisitors, yes, I know." Angron took over. "But this matter."

He paused for a moment, frowning slightly, as if he was thinking carefully.

This is interesting, because he hardly looks like himself at this point, and instead looks more like a mixture of Robouti Guilliman and Konrad Curze: Guilliman's rationality and Curze's dark coldness.

After a few seconds, which seemed very long to the Primarch, he spoke again, but this time his voice had become quiet.

"The most pressing issue is not the Soul Reaper Needle," he said thoughtfully. "Not even this suddenly emerging sect."

The think tank director looked at him in confusion.

Angron turned to the group of black-clad men, his eyes fixed unerringly on the tallest man standing at the end.

The latter raised his eyebrows, pointed at himself in surprise, and then pointed at the other person beside him - as if asking: Me? Why don't you look for him?
Angron replied with a smile: Yes, I am looking for you.

So Yago Sevitarion left the team, left the leisurely state where he could daydream, and instantly became the first and only chapter master of Nightblade.

"Sir." He stopped in front of the desk, lowered his head, and bowed slightly. "What can I do for you?"

Angron didn't care whether there was some dissatisfaction hidden behind his unusual respect. He just pretended not to notice it. After all, this was indeed a suitable occasion for official business. Besides, it was normal to have dissatisfaction. If not, he would be worried.

"Those old skills of yours, are they still there?"

"Which one do you mean?"

“Torture,” Angron said. “The kind that would make the dead scream and beg you to stop.”

Sevatar looked up and grinned.

A few minutes later, he appeared in a cold dungeon.

It is at least thousands of years old, but has hardly ever been used - the Nuceria do not like to put prisoners in prison, partly for historical reasons, and partly because they believe in the concept of punishment for crime.

They believe that anyone who has committed a crime should apologize to the person they hurt and make amends in person, rather than counting the days in a dark stone coffin and becoming a mummy. Of course, if it involves a serious crime such as premeditated murder, then blood should be returned with blood.

Therefore, Sevatar felt that this dungeon might have been opened only recently.

However, this had nothing to do with him, although he felt it was a bit of a waste of resources.

Hmm, typical Nostramo thinking.

He walked in with a knife in hand.

Inside the dungeon, ninety-two cultists exposed in the aftermath are waiting.

Each of them had a bruised face, broken hands and legs, probably caused by their captors. The war dogs had self-control, unlike the enraged gladiators and law enforcers. Since being captured, they have spent many days in this freezing cold place, shivering in fear, hunger and pain.

However, they actually know nothing about the real fear.

It doesn't matter, Sevatar will teach you one by one. "Actually, I don't think Yago can dig out much useful things." Khalil said in a stone building outside the dungeon.

"Really? You sound like you have no confidence in him." Angron chuckled, with a hint of mischief between his eyebrows.

"Of course I don't question his skills. When he was training, Van Cleef taught him torture himself." Khalil shook his head. "I just don't think those people can say anything useful."

"Of course they can't."

Angron said, bending his one arm slightly and placing it across his chest.

The afterglow of the setting sun shone onto his face through the ancient windows of the stone building. The butcher's nails trembled slightly, but made no uncomfortable sounds, as if they had lost their original function. Even the trembling at this moment was just a natural thing that followed life, like heartbeat or breathing.

Khalil watched the scene in silence, and a question popped into his mind.

"What color was your hair originally, Angron?" he suddenly asked.

The Son of Red Sand turned around in confusion and almost shock.

".What?" he asked slowly.

Khalil decided to be honest.

"I just wonder what you, your legion, and Nuceria would be like if you hadn't been poisoned by this thing."

“Good question,” Angron said. “I wondered about that a long time ago, but I couldn’t come up with the answer—yes, black.”

He raised his hand and touched the steel that had become one with his flesh and blood, and smiled slightly.

"I used to have dark hair."

He said, his tone hard to tell whether it was nostalgia or hatred, maybe it was a mixture of both.

"At that time, the slave owners would have people dye my hair red with blood before I went on stage, and then separate it and tie it up tightly, so that I looked more like some kind of inhuman monster. The audience liked it, but later this trick didn't work anymore, and the slave owners also found that people actually preferred to watch their own kind kill each other."

At this point, his smile faded a little.

"So they started to study new ways to increase attendance. At first, they used propaganda, such as putting my name everywhere in the city. At that time, I hadn't gone underground yet. I lived with Oinomaus and others in a place outside the arena, with iron walls and soldiers patrolling day and night. It was actually very easy for me to escape, but the slave owners knew this, so they put collar-type bombs on everyone except me, and threatened that if I dared to leave, they would blow them all up immediately."

"Anyway, they made up an identity for me, saying that I was the wandering half-beast offspring of some barbaric god—"

He burst out laughing.

"--How ironic!" Angron said, laughing. "And the result? The attendance rate increased dramatically! I also started to fight various things, and dressed more like a human. For a while, they even liked to put aristocratic robes on me to make me look more noble. These slave owners."

The tone of his voice when he said this was almost a sigh.

"Do you still hate them?" Khalil asked.

"Why?" Angron asked, looking him in the eyes. "If I saw something like this again, or saw their ghosts, I would rush over without hesitation. But hate them? No, no."

He let out a genuine sigh and stared up at the window, looking out from the inside, observing the last rays of the setting sun on the far side of the horizon.

"My hatred is far from being so petty," said the one-armed man. "If someone shot you, you should hate the person who shot you, not the gun itself, right?"

Khalil nodded and stood up.

"You are very tolerant, unlike me, who is vindictive." He said half-jokingly. "For this reason, I plan to go to the warp, drag out the bastard hiding in the back and drown him in his own blood - what do you think? Anyway, he can't resist, at least not yet."

"I think this is totally unnecessary and you are overreacting."

"No," Khalil said. "I just can't stand it."

Angron frowned, and Khalil could see he was choosing his words, so he got a head start.

"Listen, Angron - I am a little tired of intrigues, but everything I have encountered since returning seems to be like this. Ordinary days hide great dangers, and once something changes, it will destroy everyone's peace and swallow up countless lives. The monsters who designed these things can hide behind the curtain without any scruples, calculating to their heart's content, and will not be punished."

"Kill all the remaining members of the Pleasure Dancer Cult, destroy the Soul-Taking Needle, and find out the mastermind behind the scenes. And then what? It's just passive after all, and the things hiding behind these people's faces will still be unharmed. Just like you said, we should hate the person who fired the gun, so I can't allow this person who fired the gun to still run to his shiny floor without blood and dust every night of rest, jump happily and celebrate his victory. In the final analysis, I don't want to destroy only guns, weapons and puppets."

He raised his hands and slowly clenched them in front of the Lord of Red Sand, who pursed his lips with a complicated expression.

"But I can really rush into his house now," Khalil said in a low voice. "I can smash his ballroom into pieces, I can make him scream in agony in the ruins, and then drag him from the ballroom to the porch and hang him on his pillars. I can really kill him once and for all. He is not as strong as the other four. At best, he is just a slightly larger piece of dust. Maybe you will say this is bullying, but this is the style of the Eighth Legion. We have always loved this."

Angron waited a moment, until he was sure Khalil had finished speaking, before he finally responded to the cold words.

"I don't think I can stop you anymore," he said.

"Yes," Khalil nodded. "I'm going to flip the table—I always do."

"Then please call Conrad out."

Khalil took a step back and did not move. A ray of moonlight slowly descended in the gradually darkening sky.

The Night King asked curiously, "How did you know I was here?"

"Now is not the time to talk about this. Khalil, please make a promise to me and your son, okay?"

When it was really dark, they left the stone building.

The thin and pale Inquisitor was gone, and at this moment, the man wandering with Angron in the wilderness outside Barasto looked more like a ghost wearing a crown.

"You worry too much," the ghost said gently.

Angron glanced at him. "Which of us is his son?"

"If you want, I can be your boss," the ghost laughed.

(End of this chapter)