The word “morning” meant virtually nothing in the depths of the underhive.
In this hellhole, day and night were indistinguishable.
Over half of the atmospheric and lighting recycling systems had broken down thirty years ago, and the few industrial light tubes that still worked emitted a sickly yellow glare, flickering endlessly twenty-four hours a day.
Kaelen was woken by his own gnawing hunger.
He rolled over, bumping his lower back against the base of a turbine.
Wincing, he spat a curse, only to see Horus still sitting there in the exact same position as last night.
“You didn’t sleep all night?” “A Primarch requires little sleep.” Horus’s voice sounded better than yesterday—at least it no longer sounded like sandpaper grinding against a throat.
Kaelen pulled two bars of compressed ration from his pack, broke off a piece, and passed it over.
The Wolf God took it, holding the grayish-brown brick between two fingers.
He turned it over and inspected it, his expression identical to someone studying a specimen of some newly discovered xenos creature.
He took a bite.
His jaw muscles worked for three full seconds.
Then his entire face scrunched up into a grimace.
“Even the field rations of the Legions during the Great Crusade were ten times better than this,” Horus rasped, forcing down the dry grit.
“Is this meant for mortals to eat, or for patching up bulkheads?” “Get used to it, my noble Warmaster,” Kaelen said, rolling his eyes.
Horus went silent for two seconds.
Frowning, he shoved the rest of the ration into his mouth and chewed stubbornly, his Adam’s apple bobbing several times before it finally went down.
“I ate worse on my homeworld of Cthonia.” Kaelen tilted his head, thinking for a moment.
“How about compared to Rogal Dorn?” Horus blinked.
Then he let out a chuckle.
“This ration brick is still far friendlier.” *—Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, was infamously rigid and dull,* Horus thought.
He had found Dorn quite insufferable back then.
Hadn’t Dorn gotten into a clash with El’Jonson right after the Lion was found?
He and Fulgrim had been present too, thoroughly infuriated by that stubborn stone of a man.
Kaelen chewed on his ration bar while taking in Horus’s condition.
A thick, dark red scab had formed over the scar on his chest, and the dark purple lines of corruption had largely receded, though they weren’t entirely gone.
The healing salve had dragged him back from death’s door, but he was still far from fully recovered.
“I’m taking you somewhere today,” Kaelen said, swallowing his last bite.
“Where?” “The Spire’s mid-levels.
An Ecclesiarchy cathedral.” Horus studied his face, asking no questions.
“You need to see it with your own eyes,” Kaelen said.
“This era…
an era where religion reigns supreme, and reason and science are all but dead.” To move around more easily, Horus had shed his Terminator armor.
Even without power armor, the Primarch was still a 3.5-meter giant, his muscular physiology completely alien compared to that of a mortal.
Kaelen tossed him yesterday’s stealth cloak, and its nanofibers automatically expanded to cover his entire body.
“Let’s move.” The two climbed along a rusted freight elevator shaft.
The mechanism had been scrapped long ago, leaving only a bare iron framework.
Kaelen scrambled up on hands and knees while Horus casually followed in broad strides, reaching out now and then to catch Kaelen whenever he slipped.
En route, they passed a factorum worker zone enclosed by barbed wire.
Hundreds of emaciated laborers crouched before assembly lines, putting together ammunition.
No one spoke.
The metronome of a mechanical arm ticked every three seconds; anyone whose hands couldn’t keep pace received a lash from an overseer.
A young female worker had two of her fingers severed by a stamping machine, yet she bit her lip without uttering a sound.
The person next to her dragged her aside, and another stepped in to take her place.
The entire process took fewer than ten seconds.
The assembly line never stopped.
Horus paused.
Kaelen looked back at him.
The hood concealed most of the Wolf God’s face, but Kaelen could see his jaw muscle clenched tight.
“This is considered mild.
At least they’re still alive.
On some worlds, workers don’t even have names.
Once their serial numbers are spent, they’re recycled directly—including their bodies.” Horus said nothing.
When he stepped forward again, the beam beneath his boot bent under his weight, leaving a deep curve in the iron rung.
— The air quality in the mid-levels was an order of magnitude better than in the underhive.
At least there was no smell of rotting corpses here.
In its place was a strange mix of incense, heavy promethium motor oil, and body odor.
The Ecclesiarchy cathedral stood grandly at the end of the mid-level main thoroughfare.
Its Gothic vault stretched impossibly high, with black stone pillars rising into the darkness beyond the candle glow.
The flickering light of hundreds of candles cast unsteady shadows across a thirty-meter-tall golden statue of the Emperor.
The statue was sculpted into the image of a deity wielding a flaming sword.
Its gold-cast visage was solemn, cold, and immensely lofty.
Thousands of worshippers knelt on the floor.
“The Emperor is the only god of humanity!
Faith is our armor!
Doubt is heresy!” The unison chanting of dogma created a low, echoing resonance beneath the vaulted ceiling.
A priest stood on a high platform, waving a skull-encrusted crozius, screaming at the top of his lungs with saliva flying.
Horus and Kaelen stood in the shadows of the colonnade outside the cathedral.
Horus did not enter.
He merely watched from afar.
Watching the thirty-meter golden statue.
Watching the worshippers kneeling on the ground, slamming their foreheads against the stone until they bled.
Watching the priest screeching “The Emperor protects!” in that hysterical pitch.
His breathing grew shallow and rapid.
The old wound on his chest began to throb with pain.
“Father hated being worshipped as a god.” His voice was barely a whisper, forced through gritted teeth.
“The *Imperial Truth*…
he wrote it himself.
Promulgated it himself.
For every world conquered during the Great Crusade, the first act was to dismantle the local religion.
He once told me to my face—’I am no god, and I will never be a god.
Humanity’s future relies on reason and science, not bendings of the knee.'” “And yet, ten thousand years later, the entire Imperium worships him as their supreme god.” Kaelen leaned against a pillar, arms crossed.
“Irony at its finest, isn’t it?
What’s even more of a dark joke is that the Ecclesiarchy’s core scripture is adapted from the *Lectitio Divinitatus*, written by your brother Lorgar.
The Great Word Bearer turned coat outright over what happened at Monarchia.
If I were him, I would’ve just endured Monarchia.
Who knows, he might be the Ecclesiarch right now.
Talk about missing the bigger picture.” Speaking of the Word Bearer Primarch, Kaelen recalled a funny incident.
During the Heresy, when Lorgar was laying waste to Guilliman’s Realm of Ultramar, he arrived on a world and found religious zealots who happened to be worshipping the very *Lectitio Divinitatus* he had written.
In the end, they debated, and Lorgar couldn’t even out-argue the locals.
Utterly furious, he had his Legion slaughter every living soul on the planet.
Lorgar really should have learned a thing or two about patience—just tough it out and keep your head cool!
Who knows, he could have been the Ecclesiarch today!
“Though you have to admit, the Ecclesiarchy isn’t entirely bad.
In an age infested with Chaos gods and xenos, faith is the only spiritual pillar holding ordinary mortals together.
Without it, the common folk wouldn’t even have a reason to stay alive, and rebellions would blow the Imperium sky-high in an instant.” The veins at Horus’s temples throbbed.
He closed his eyes and let out a long breath, forcing down his rage.
Right then, the floor shattered.
Without warning.
The flagstones in the center of the cathedral bulged upward violently before bursting open like an eggshell.
Dozens of hideous creatures swarmed out of the fissure.
They had humanoid skeletal structures, but their limbs possessed extra joints, their heads were mutated into beetle-like chitinous exoskeletons, and each dragged a barb-covered tail.
Genestealers.
The screams of the worshippers instantly drowned out the chanting.
The crowd stampeded like a breached dam, fleeing in all directions.
The priest on the high platform managed only half a shout—”The Emperor prote—”—before a Genestealer’s talons sliced through him from his left shoulder to his right hip, tearing him in two and splashing blood across the pedestal of the golden Emperor.
The leader was different.
A Purestrain Genestealer Patriarch.
More than twice the size of an ordinary Genestealer, it wielded four razor-sharp claws, each as long as an adult man’s forearm.
The moment it clawed its way up from underground, it opened its fanged maw and emitted a psychic screech.
A wave of psychic shockwaves blasted outward with the creature at its center.
Kaelen’s head exploded in pain, blood instantly pouring from his nose.
He stumbled back two paces, bracing himself against a pillar to keep from falling.
Horus merely tilted his head slightly.
The psychic barrier of a Primarch was not something a mere Genestealer could break.
“Wait here.” He ripped off the stealth cloak.
And stepped forward.
The flagstones at the cathedral entrance shattered under his boot.
A 3.5-meter tall, bald giant emerged from the shadows, his exposed torso scarred by countless battles, every muscle looking as though forged from meteoric iron.
The Purestrain Patriarch was startled by the sight, but it lunged nonetheless.
All four claws struck out at once, cutting through the air with a deafening shriek.
Against any mortal soldier, there wouldn’t even be time to react.
Horus side-stepped.
Exceedingly composed.
His right fist drove forward.
The fist struck the Patriarch square in its chitinous chest.
The creature’s torso ballooned outward from the point of impact before bursting apart.
Chitin fragments, organs, and acidic fluids sprayed in a radial splatter across half the cathedral wall.
One punch.
Just one punch.
Immediately, seven other Genestealers pounced on the Wolf God, seeking to tear him apart.
Don’t make the Wolf God laugh.
In the blink of an eye, these seven Genestealers were ripped in two by Horus’s bare hands, effortless as tearing scrap paper.
The remaining Genestealers screeched in terror and turned tail, attempting to burrow back into the fissure.
Kaelen wiped his bloody nose and hurriedly redeemed a melta pistol from the System—two thousand points, an agonizingly steep cost.
He squeezed the trigger repeatedly at the fleeing Genestealers.
The melta beams instantly vaporized flesh upon impact, turning three Genestealers into smoking cinders that collapsed into the rubble.
“As expected of a Primarch…” Kaelen murmured, holding the still-radiating barrel.
“Absolute beast even without armor.” “We’re set from now on!
With the Warmaster backing me up, why should I give a damn about any enemy in realspace?” Silence settled over the cathedral.
Most of the candles had been extinguished.
The right arm of the Emperor’s statue had snapped off during the melee, crashing down and smashing the front prayer pews to splinters.
Pits melted by acidic ichor emitted foul green fumes.
Rubble, severed limbs, and green Genestealer blood littered the floor.
Surviving worshippers peeked out from behind the rubble.
A little girl, her face smeared with blood and grime, staggered over.
She was probably only five or six years old, her clothes too tattered to stay on her body properly, but her large eyes shone bright and clear.
She tilted her head back, looking up at Horus.
“Are you…
an angel sent by the Emperor?” Horus looked down at her.
The Wolf God’s lips moved, the voice catching in his throat.
Then he dropped to one knee.
A knee hit the rubble with a heavy thud.
“I am no angel.” His voice was softly spoken.
“Just a man…
who owes many debts.” The little girl tilted her head, not quite understanding.
But she reached out a dirty little hand and touched the back of Horus’s hand.
The Wolf God did not pull away.
Standing a few paces away, Kaelen felt a sting in his nose.
It wasn’t a lingering effect of the psychic shock.
The System’s status for Horus had been [Dying / Uncorrupted].
The soul-node on Davin’s altar.
The slice of time before the corruption of the Four Gods of Chaos.
This was the true Lupercal.
Warm yet sharp, proud yet never arrogant.
Aside from an idealist like Guilliman, Kaelen couldn’t think of anyone else who possessed such charisma—except, perhaps, Jaghatai Khan.
A man like this deserved a second chance.
Kaelen holstered his pistol, walked over, and patted Horus on his lower back, since he couldn’t reach his shoulder.
“Let’s go.
We can’t stay here much longer.” Horus rose to his feet.
Taking one last look at the one-armed statue of the Emperor, he turned and followed Kaelen toward the exit.
They had barely taken a dozen steps.
Kaelen froze in his tracks.
His eyes fell upon the System interface visible only to him.
A red warning he had never seen before was flashing frantically— [High-intensity psychic signal detected scanning the area!] [Signal signature match: Imperial Inquisition · Ordo Xenos · Psychic Tracking Protocol!] [Estimated lock-on time: 10 minutes.] Kaelen’s face went dead white.
Horus noticed.
“What is it?” Kaelen swallowed hard and tucked the gun back into his waistbelt.
“That Purestrain Patriarch didn’t just show up out of nowhere.
Someone was hunting it, and we just took down their prey.” He looked up at Horus, the urgency in his eyes impossible to hide.
“Shit.
The Inquisition is coming to check our water meter.
We’ve got ten minutes.
We need to haul ass right now.”