What Are You Doing Here?!
The war raged on.
Andrallo, Maen, and Charlotte kept moving from battlefield to battlefield, the threat from both the World Eaters and the Emperor’s Children still far from over.
With their ship destroyed, the Emperor’s Children had no choice but to stay grounded on the planet, and starved of comfort and supplies, they grew desperate for distraction, hungry to capture slaves and torment them just to fill the emptiness inside.
As for the World Eaters, they still had a ship they could have retreated to, and the planet’s defenses couldn’t have touched it even if they tried.
But for whatever reason, these lunatics just kept throwing themselves at the defense force’s lines, showing no sign of pulling back at all.
Nor could the Emperor’s Children bring themselves to swallow their pride and beg passage on a World Eaters ship.
Any time the two sides crossed paths, not fighting at all would have counted as a miracle.
Andrallo spent this stretch of time fighting across the region, and wherever he went, the local population found itself liberated, to the point that ordinary people now raised their fists and cheered the moment they spotted that violet mist rolling in.
After enough time spent living alongside him, not a single local doubted who Andrallo was anymore.
Everyone was convinced he truly was the God-Emperor’s herald.
Whenever the violet mist swept across a battlefield, every traitor and daemon caught inside it let out horrifying screams, wailing like livestock at the moment of slaughter.
The defense force soldiers and crew wrapped in that same psychic power, meanwhile, felt something like boundless strength.
The world around them lit up in shifting color, every enemy’s weak points, movement, even their physical state, laid bare at a glance.
Some of the veteran crew, buoyed by that violet power, could even track the movements of Chaos Astartes with their bare eyes, and a number of mortals started taking out these near-demigods with precise, heavy-weapon kills.
Seeing all this, Andrallo became certain it was a psychic aura effect, debuffing the enemy while buffing his own side to swing the fight in their favor.
Compared to the aura that could blanket an entire star system in Stellaris, though, Andrallo was still far too weak.
He could only cover a small stretch of any given battlefield.
But it was more than enough to lift people’s spirits, because Andrallo had given them something to hope for, the ability for mere mortals to kill both terrifying Warp horrors and demigod-like warriors alike.
To the soaring hymns of Ecclesiarchy priests, Andrallo and his mortal fighters beat back the enemy time and time again, retaking lost ground, and the overall situation began to look genuinely promising.
But even as the fighting went well, Andrallo grew more and more disillusioned, not with the planet’s people, but with the Governor, the man who claimed to own this world.
While the fighters bled and died on the front lines, the Governor squeezed everything he could out of the rear.
Every time Andrallo retook a district, the Governor’s private troops and enforcers descended on it like sharks catching the scent of blood, driving the local population straight into the factories.
They didn’t care whether the people were badly wounded, didn’t care whether conditions actually allowed for work at all.
The enforcers had only two things to offer the population: shock batons and shackles.
People who were sobbing with joy over getting their homes back one moment were being beaten with a factory owner’s or enforcer’s baton straight into the production line the next.
Andrallo had seen far too many scenes like this by now.
At first, wary of the Governor’s heavily-armed forces, he hadn’t dared push things to open confrontation, and had simply asked the man to ease off, to give the local population a little breathing room.
What he got back was a long, self-important reply full of nothing, glory to the God-Emperor, fulfilling his sacred duties, how difficult things were for him too.
Boiled down to a single sentence, it amounted to this:
I’m going to keep squeezing them regardless.
Andrallo’s anger built steadily until it finally boiled over completely.
It happened at a food-processing plant.
He’d barely finished clearing out the cultists there when one of the Governor’s overseers came rushing in to read out an official decree.
“By order of the Governor, this facility will resume production immediately.
All outstanding debts must be paid in full by next month.
Violators will be punished to the fullest extent of the law!”
The arrogant officials looked over the wreckage of the plant with nothing but contempt in their eyes.
“This facility is the Governor’s own property.
Losing it to the enemy was your crime, and every cost of rebuilding it falls on you.
Payment will be collected in full next month.
Anyone who falls short will be reduced to a slave without exception!”
The moment those two decrees were read out, the crowd fell utterly silent.
Whatever joy had filled the air a moment ago collapsed into a deathly despair, and that same numb sorrow settled back over every face.
“My lord, this place was only just torn apart by heretics and traitors.
Getting production running again is going to take time.
Please, allow us…”
Before the old man could finish, the enforcer backhanded him across the face.
The power-assisted gauntlet sent him sprawling, teeth flying from his mouth in a spray of blood.
“Filthy trash!
Losing the factory was already a death sentence.
You’re only alive because the Governor was gracious enough to allow it.
And now you dare try to bargain with me?”
The enforcer pulled out his shock baton and flipped the switch.
Blue lightning crawled up and down the length of it, the raw energy crackling and snapping through the air around it.
This wasn’t some tool meant to subdue a criminal.
It had been built for one purpose alone: to kill.
The enforcer swung it back with full force.
Everyone watching flinched with pity, and Maen and Charlotte covered their eyes, unable to bear whatever was about to happen.
But the expected sound of impact never came, and neither did the smell of scorched flesh.
Instead, they heard armor shattering.
A large hand had caught the enforcer’s wrist mid-swing, and his expression flipped instantly from contempt to fawning terror.
“My lord!
Lord Andrallo!
What are you doing?
I was only carrying out my duty!”
“Look at the state they’re in.
Does it look like they’re in any shape to hit a production quota?
Does the Governor really not have even that much mercy in him?”
“My lord, please!
They’re all children of the God-Emperor, and every task they perform is done in His name.
The Governor is nothing more than the God-Emperor’s own shepherd.
Failing to complete the work is an insult to His glory itself.
You…”
The enforcer wasn’t finished, but Andrallo had already heard enough.
He flung the man aside like a piece of garbage.
The enforcer’s body flew in a nearly straight line and slammed into a nearby armored vehicle.
The force of the impact drove him straight into the hull, cracking his armor open and exposing a tangle of cables underneath, while the man himself was knocked out cold on the spot.
The sudden turn terrified everyone present.
The rest of the enforcers looked at their unmoving colleague, then at Andrallo glowing with violet light, and immediately chose to run.
Andrallo had just saved the workers’ lives, and in doing so had effectively burned every bridge with the Governor.
He simply couldn’t stand by and do nothing in the face of oppression like this.
Once the enforcers had fled, the people began rebuilding their homes under Andrallo’s direction.
From here on, Chaos Astartes wouldn’t be the only enemy he had to worry about.
Night fell, and Maen and Charlotte found Andrallo.
“My lord, even if you’re an Astartes, you still don’t have a Chapter or a warband standing behind you.
What you’re doing is too risky.
We’ll need to be more careful going forward.”
“I know,” Andrallo answered, setting down the map in his hands and fixing his eyes directly on Maen.
“So what do you two think?
As nobility yourselves, you must be pretty familiar with how a Governor like this operates.”
Andrallo’s tone was perfectly calm, almost amused, but both sisters caught the chill hiding underneath it.
He was drawing a line between them and the Governor himself.
Maen’s chest tightened.
A bitterness rose in her throat, and she answered, a little wounded:
“My lord, we’re women of House Westminster.
The only real purpose our family ever saw in us was as tools for marriage alliances.
Besides that—!”
The pale-haired girl stepped forward, her voice rising with feeling, both hands closing around the necklace at her throat, the very Warp-stabilizer Andrallo had given her himself.
“If it weren’t for you, my lord, Charlotte and I would already have been used up and thrown away by that Chaos warband by now.
You’re the one who gave us our lives back.
How could we ever betray you?!”
Charlotte nodded fiercely beside her.
“Lord Andrallo, you’re the God-Emperor’s herald.
Whatever you choose is the God-Emperor’s own will.
My sister and I will stand behind you, no matter what!”
The God-Emperor.
There it was again.
Andrallo had lost count of how many times he’d heard that name by now.
He genuinely couldn’t wrap his head around it: a man who’d actually existed ten thousand years ago, and who’d clearly made his share of mistakes, somehow turned into an actual god by the present day?
But he had no intention of arguing the point.
The title of “God-Emperor’s herald” still had plenty of use left in it, and Andrallo wasn’t about to stop milking it for all it was worth.
Andrallo looked at the two of them, their eyes steady and their faces still stung with hurt, and found he had nothing to object to.
In the end, all he could do was let out a long sigh and reach out to ruffle both their hair.
The sudden gesture caught both sisters completely off guard.
A moment later, warmth and genuine care settled over them, more than even their own father had ever shown them.
Once he’d offered what small comfort he could, Andrallo moved on to business.
“Everything around here’s rubble right now, and we need building materials badly.
Do you two know where we could get our hands on some?”
Maen and Charlotte pulled out a stack of intelligence recorded on parchment.
“There’s a mine and a factory nearby that could produce exactly what we need.
The problem is, both have already been taken.”
“Taken?
By who?
The Governor, or one of the Chaos warbands?”
“Neither.” Both sisters shook their heads.
“A rebel force took it.
Led by a mutant named Kaides.”
Andrallo: “Who?!”