Warhammer: Empire Reboot

His power armor still retains the structure from 10,000 years ago, with many places having been roughly repaired. The old legion insignia on his left shoulder armor has been sanded away, leaving only dark marks.

The right arm servo cable broke twice, the hydraulic pipe below the kneecap was exposed, the backpack reactor was slightly unstable, and it emitted a small noise after each high-intensity movement.

He hadn't seen a complete set of repair equipment in a long time.

The armor is still movable thanks to experience, salvaged parts, and Astartes' almost instinctive understanding of the equipment.

The patrol on the mountain path consisted of more than twenty cult fighters, followed by three horned beastmen.

Those mutated green-skinned creatures had iron chains nailed to their backs, with the other end of the chains tied to the hands of cult members.

They were restless, snorting heavily, and dragging their machetes across the ground with a screeching sound.

Zabrel raised his hand.

Several ordinary people behind him held their breath.

Among them were miners, deserters, an old man who had once repaired water pipes for the governor's mansion, and two very young children.

The child's hands were too small to hold the Imperial laser rifle steadily; he could only pull the tripwire.

Zabril held up two fingers, then pressed them down.

On the left side of the mountain path, a thin line was being pulled.

The first homemade bomb, buried under the rubble, exploded. It wasn't very powerful, but it just happened to sever the iron chain that was pulling the Broken Horned Beastman along.

The three mutated orcs immediately lost control and turned to crash into the cult's armed forces.

The second bomb exploded at their feet, shrapnel hitting the orc's calf and the cultist's chest and abdomen behind him.

The Chaos Patrol's formation was disrupted.

Zabril stood up from behind the rock and fired his old-fashioned bomb gun.

The mortal resistance fighters also opened fire.

The laser beams were erratic and poorly aimed, but the distance was close enough. One cultist fell, another was hit in the shoulder, and before his screams could finish, he was cleaved in two by the enraged horned orc behind him.

Zabril rushed down the hillside.

His powered armor joints emitted an unstable noise, yet his speed still far exceeded that of ordinary people.

His chain blade was already damaged, and he was now using a power sword he had picked up from next to the body of a defense officer. The energy field of the blade was intermittent.

He crashed into the center of the patrol, smashing the ribs of a cultist with his shoulder armor, and then slicing open the waist armor of another man with a backhand slash.

The horned orc pounced with incredible strength, its serrated axe slicing a deep gash into his breastplate.

Zabril gripped the orc's wrist with his left hand and pressed his bomb gun against the orc's jaw with his right.

With one shot, the mutated orc's head exploded backward.

Once the mountain road quieted down again, Zabril quickly gave the order.

"Take rations, ammunition, and water bags. Don't touch anything with runes."

The old man who used to fix the water pipes immediately led a group to search the body. The two children ran towards the fallen communicator, trying to drag it away as well.

Zabril reached out to stop them.

"Don't move."

The child froze.

Zabril crouched down and used the tip of his sword to pry open the communicator's casing, revealing an eye-shaped metal plate inside that was slowly rotating.

He took out a bomb, pressed it into the crack in the communicator, and then pushed the two children behind him.

The explosion shattered the communicator and the eye-shaped metal piece together.

"From now on, if you see moving eyes, call me first."

The younger child nodded, his lips pale: "Yes, Lord Astartes."

Zabril did not correct the way he was addressed.

He used to hate that title.

This group of people needs it now.

They need to believe that an Astartes is on their side, even if the Astartes' armor is so tattered it looks like a relic dug out of a grave, even if, once his true identity reaches the ears of the Dark Angels, what comes after him is likely not reinforcements, but judgment and chains.

Zabril.

Veteran of the First Army Corps.

He used to belong to the Destroyer Squad.

During the Great Expedition, they did many things that respectable soldiers were unwilling to talk about: radiation weapons, phosphorus bombs, poison warheads, clearing underground bunkers, burning alien lairs, and contaminating enemy water sources and supply depots.

He had met the emperor.

In the dust of the Great Crusade, I saw with my own eyes the monarch standing before the human legions.

At that time, the emperor promoted imperial truth, denied the gods, and demanded that mankind use reason and an iron fist to reclaim the stars.

Zabril remembered it very clearly, and it was precisely because he remembered it so clearly that when he arrived in the forty-second millennium and saw the State Cathedral for the first time, he stood on the street corner for a long time without moving.

The emperor was enshrined on a divine altar.

The priest used his name to burn the innocent.

The court used faith to question fear and burned at the stake to resolve doubt.

The mechanics recite prayers to machines, ordinary people kneel before icons seeking an answer, and many parts of the world disguise suffering as piety and ignorance as loyalty.

It was then that Zabril realized that the empire he knew had become something else entirely.

Ironically, he can no longer go back to the past.

At the moment of Caliban's destruction, he was just a lowly soldier.

The officer ordered them to open fire, and they opened fire.

The lower-ranking soldiers had no idea what had really happened between Luther and the Lion King.

When he opened his eyes again, the warp storm had thrown him ten thousand years into the future. They had become fallen angels, his brothers had become hunters, his old sins had become shackles, and all explanations had lost their weight.

He had been a wanderer.

He worked as a mercenary.

He had killed orcs for border caravans, cleaned up the remnants of gene stealers for a small world, and hid in the bottom of a hive for seven years, just to avoid a dark angel interrogation team.

He could have continued to hide.

Given Astartes' physical abilities and experience, it wouldn't be difficult for someone to hide in the Kamas wilderness.

The Chaos Fleet won't search the entire planet for a single armored veteran.

Even if the Thousand-Eyes Chapter knew there was a wandering Astartes here, they might not be willing to pay the price to hunt him down unless he took the initiative to attack.

But he saw the first group of civilians being led up the sacrificial tower.

I saw children in the mine dragging scrap iron baskets that were bigger than their own bodies.

I saw cultists pinning an old man to the ground simply because his clothes had an imperial eagle emblem sewn inside.

The veteran told himself that saving these dozens of people wouldn't save Kamas.

But they are citizens of the empire.

They are the people that Astartes was supposed to protect after it was created.

Even if he is a fallen angel, even if his name is written on the list of judgment in the secret chamber of the dark angels, even if today's empire has placed the emperor on a divine altar and burned reason to ashes, the organs, bones, training and glory in his body still come from the same source.

Astartes did not exist to hide in caves and watch mortals be slaughtered!

When those words echoed in his mind, he knew he could no longer hide it.

That night, Zabril killed seven cult overseers, blew up the engine of a slave wagon, and took nineteen survivors who had not yet been sent to the altar into the Grayridge Mountains.

Later, the number of people increased from nineteen to forty.

Later, the number of forty became more than two hundred.

He wasn't born to comfort ordinary people.

But he knew how to keep people alive.

He converted abandoned water pipes into passageways, divided old air-raid shelters into residential areas, wounded personnel areas, and ammunition areas, dismantled mine supports to make traps, and cut the looted rations into daily portions.

Zabril taught them how to fight.

How to lay tripwires.

How to remove a magazine from a corpse.

How to determine who is the communications officer in a cult patrol team.

How do you bury your bloodstained clothes downwind before the Broken Horned Beast gets close?

These people learn very slowly.

They were just a group of miners, peasant women, deserters, teenagers, and the elderly. They were afraid, they pulled the wrong trigger, and they vomited so badly they couldn't stand up after their first close-range killing.

Zabril did not scold them.

He simply shoved the guns back into their hands.

After the ambush, the team returned to camp with the loot they had seized.

The camp was hidden in a collapsed bunker on the north side of the Grey Ridge Mountains.

The entrance was blocked by rubble and dead wood. Inside, it was damp, the walls were seeping water, and the air smelled of mold, blood, and fuel.

Dozens of civilians were crammed into different cabins, the wounded lay on old canvases, children were responsible for sifting out edible grains, and several deserters from the defense forces took turns guarding the passageway.

As soon as Zabril entered, a young woman came to greet him.

Her name is Marie, and she was originally a registrar in the agricultural zone, but now she is in charge of food distribution in the camp.

She breathed a sigh of relief when she saw the food rations she had brought back, then looked at the crack on Zabril's breastplate.

"Sir, you are injured."

"Minor injury."