The red warning line on the system panel was still flashing, but Kaelen was already bolting.
“Let’s move!” Horus didn’t budge.
He turned around, facing the hole dug out inside the sanctuary by the stealers, as if assessing the tactical situation.
“The Inquisition,” the Wolf God murmured, rolling the word over his tongue.
“What kind of Imperial organization is this?
There were similar bodies during the Great Crusade, though back then they answered to Malcador.
How many are coming?” “You don’t understand.” Kaelen ran back and yanked on his cloak, but couldn’t budge him.
He switched to pushing, still to no avail.
Craning his neck, he stood directly in front of Horus and looked up.
“The Inquisition doesn’t come to rescue people.
Their standard operating procedure: Step one, eliminate the xenos.
Step two, purge all witnesses.
Step three, burn the entire zone to ash.
A few hundred cultists in the sanctuary just saw you—a three-and-a-half-meter-tall bald giant tearing stealers apart bare-chested.
How do you think the Inquisition is going to classify you?” Horus frowned slightly.
“I am a Primarch.” “Right, go explain that to an Inquisitor.
‘Hello, I’m Horus Lupercal, the Imperium’s number-one traitor, but I’ve turned over a new leaf.’ Guess whether he shoots first or calls down an Exterminatus first?” The Wolf God’s scowl deepened.
“Big brother, we’re off the grid right now!” Kaelen raised his voice an octave higher.
“You have no Legion, no warships, no logistics—you’re just an injured guy with his shirt off!
Think bigger picture here: keeping a low profile and laying low is the ultimate win!” Three seconds.
Horus remained silent for three full seconds.
A war of emotions played out across his sharply chiseled face.
Pride, unwillingness, logic—and finally, logic squeaked out a narrow victory.
“Move.” A single word squeezed through his gritted teeth.
*Thank goodness this ancient ancestor finally saw reason,* Kaelen thought.
The two slipped along a drainage trench on the side of the sanctuary and ducked into a mid-level freight passage.
This passage was a main artery for transporting ammunition and industrial raw materials through the hive city, wide enough that Horus didn’t need to hunch his neck.
Red emergency lights flickered rhythmically.
The air reeked of ozone and scorch marks, while the ventilation system shrieked harshly overhead.
Kaelen scouted ahead, stopping at every junction to check the tracking countdown on his system panel.
Nine minutes.
Seven minutes.
Five minutes.
At the fourth junction, he froze.
Fifty meters ahead, the corridor was blocked by a makeshift barricade.
Two humanoid silhouettes stood behind it.
Their black storm armor swallowed most of the light, leaving only the T-shaped red visor slits visible on their helmets.
Inquisition Storm Troopers.
One held a device that emitted a continuous high-frequency hum—a psionic scanner, probing every organism passing by.
Kaelen yanked Horus into a side maintenance alcove.
“Damn it, faster than expected,” he cursed in a whisper, rapidly pulling up the System Shop.
[Psionic Interference Beacon (Single Use): Emits a false psionic signal, luring tracking protocols in a designated direction.
Duration: 15 minutes.
Price: 3,000 points.] Buy.
A thumb-sized metal clasp dropped into his palm.
Kaelen poked his head out to survey both sides of the passage, his eyes locking onto a mutated giant rat gnawing on cable insulation at the base of the wall.
It was half a meter long, its tail thicker than Kaelen’s forearm, with fist-sized tumors bulging beneath its fur.
Kaelen snapped the beacon onto a crumb of dry ration and slid it toward the rat.
The rat snapped up the scrap, and the beacon wedged into the folds of its neck.
Kaelen grabbed an iron pipe near his feet and smashed it hard against the ground behind the rat’s tail.
*Clang!* Spooked, the rat bolted, dragging its half-meter tail as it sprinted madly in the opposite direction down the corridor.
Five seconds later, the high-frequency hum from the scanner behind the barricade abruptly shifted pitch.
“Signal shift!
Northwest direction, moving fast!” The two Storm Troopers exchanged glances and took off in pursuit.
Kaelen yanked Horus by his cloak as they rushed past the now-unmanned barricade.
The sight of a Primarch being dragged along by a mortal was absurd in itself, but Horus offered no complaint.
Leaving the freight corridor, they ducked into the interstice between the hive’s mid and lower levels—the Grey Zone.
This sector had no administrative designation and fell under no jurisdiction.
Shacks made of corrugated iron and plastic sheeting were stacked layer upon layer, leaning precariously all the way to the ceiling.
Beneath their feet lay densely packed garbage.
Mutated fungi pushed through every crack in the walls, their luminescent green caps casting a faint light.
This was the Grey Zone’s only illumination.
The air was humid and stifling, thick with the stench of overcooked synthetic protein mixed with industrial wastewater—enough to turn a normal person’s stomach inside out.
Horus paused outside a corrugated iron hut.
The door was open.
An old woman sat on a tattered mattress, clutching an emaciated boy in her arms.
The boy was already asleep, but the old woman continued to whisper softly: “The Emperor above, grant us tomorrow’s rations…
The Emperor above, protect our souls…” Her voice was dry and raspy, like wind scraping against rusted metal.
Horus stood outside the door, unmoving.
Kaelen didn’t urge him to move.
Three seconds.
The Wolf God averted his eyes and kept walking.
Seven or eight steps later, his voice came low, barely audible: “Father indeed never intended to be prayed to like this.” He paused.
“Though if these prayers can help them survive the night, let them pray.” Kaelen glanced at him sideways without saying a word.
But he remembered those words.
It was the first time Horus hadn’t flown into a rage over the Ecclesiarchy.
The Grey Zone dead-ended at a structural walkway bridge.
Or rather, half of one.
The middle section had collapsed, leaving a gap at least fifteen meters wide.
Below was a bottomless pool of industrial runoff, emitting surges of green, toxic steam that stung the eyes.
The other side opened into an abandoned industrial district of the lower level; once across, they would be safe.
Kaelen leaned over the edge of the breach, looked down, and pulled back.
“Can’t jump that.
You can, I can’t.” As he wracked his brain for a solution, a voice sounded behind them.
Very close.
“In the name of the Emperor.” Kaelen felt a cold chill at the back of his head.
The muzzle of a hellpistol was less than twenty centimeters from his skull.
“Xenos and their accomplices shall be executed on the spot.” An Inquisitorial agent.
He had snuck up on them without making a sound.
Kaelen’s blood ran ice-cold.
In the split second before the trigger was pulled— Horus moved.
He didn’t bother with the agent.
His right fist smashed into the walkway’s load-bearing pillar.
The reinforced concrete pillar, 1.2 meters thick, snapped down the center, its upper half collapsing backward.
A chain reaction immediately followed—three floors of decking, drainage pipes, and ventilation conduits all caved in together.
The sky fell.
Quite literally.
An avalanche of rubble, rebar, and pipe fragments slammed down, creating a three-meter-thick wall of debris between them and the agent.
The gunshot was smothered on the other side of the cave-in, the bullet plunging harmlessly into the pile of rubble.
The shockwave sent Kaelen tumbling.
He scrambled up covered in dust, his mouth twitching as he stared at the still-expanding collapse zone.
“You tore the place down!
That’s even louder than the Inquisition!” Horus flicked the concrete dust from his knuckles, his voice excessively nonchalant.
“I am simply not used to running away.” He bent down, scooping up Kaelen by the back of his collar with one hand.
Before Kaelen could scream, “What are you doing?”, he was already tucked under the Primarch’s arm.
Horus took three steps back, gathered momentum, and leaped.
Across the fifteen-meter gap, toxic steam blasted their faces.
When they hit the ground on the opposite side, the landing cratered the floor half a meter deep.
Kaelen felt like his internal organs were about to be jolted out of his mouth.
“Put me down!!” Horus set him on the ground.
Kaelen clutched his knees, dry-heaving twice, then stood straight and bolted.
“Don’t just stand there!
That agent isn’t dead—he’s gonna call for backup!” They ran for another fifteen minutes, passing through three abandoned blast doors, before finally making it into a derelict Mechanicus shrine.
The half-meter-thick lead walls bore faded gear emblems of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
A scrapped forge crouched in the corner, surrounded by rusted mechanical limbs and shriveled bottles of sacred oil.
Overhead was a palm-sized vent through which the low-frequency thrum of distant atmospheric recyclers echoed faintly.
The lead walls shielded against psionic scans.
This was one of the few safehouses Kaelen had uncovered during his three months of scavenging.
Kaelen collapsed onto the ground and pulled up his system panel.
[Points: 91,900] [Psionic Tracking Signal Status: Target Lost] He closed his eyes and let out a long breath.
Horus sat back against the discarded forge.
Its iron casing retained a lingering trace of warmth that pressed against his bare back.
Silence stretched between them for a moment.
“Your judgment far exceeds that of ordinary mortals,” Horus said, his tone devoid of empty pleasantries.
“If that interference beacon had been thrown three seconds later, we would have been surrounded.” “Survival comes from keeping a low profile, not picking fights,” Kaelen waved off.
“You’ll get it eventually.” Horus didn’t respond.
However, his gaze shifted from Kaelen’s face to the melta pistol tucked at his waist.
Yesterday it was the repair fluid.
Then the projector.
The stealth cloak.
Today, a psionic interference beacon and a pistol.
All appearing out of thin air.
The Primarch’s brain was processing at high speed.
The timestamp of every item’s appearance, Kaelen’s hand movements, the brief loss of focus in his eyes—every detail was categorized, filed, and cross-referenced.
Some kind of external supply system.
Non-psionic origin.
Trigger conditions tied to Kaelen’s conscious activity.
Horus didn’t ask.
Not because he didn’t want to.
The timing wasn’t right.
This mortal had saved his life, and when he had tried to end it, the mortal had lunged forward, grabbed his arm, and called him a coward.
Trust took time.
The same went both ways.
The Wolf God closed his eyes, stowing every question into the deepest filing cabinet of his memory palace.
Locked tight.
But he didn’t throw away the key.
Leaning against the wall, Kaelen stared blankly at the palm-sized vent overhead.
The Inquisitorial agent wasn’t dead.
The guy would definitely report back—”Suspected transhuman organism.” Those three words were enough for the Ordo Xenos to jack the search priority to its maximum level.
Next time, it wouldn’t be just a couple of advance scouts.
It would be an Inquisitor in person.
Running alone wouldn’t last long.
He needed to forge an identity for Horus.
Or find a place where even the Inquisition hesitated to reach out their hands.
Did such a place exist on this planet?
Yes.
The underground black market.
A lawless territory where even the Planetary Governor turned a blind eye.
Kaelen rolled over and pulled his cloak tighter.
“Tomorrow, we head to the black market,” he muttered.
“Black market?” “Yeah.
If we don’t fix your lack of ID, we’re meat on a chopping block.
We can’t keep running every single day.” Horus didn’t answer right away.
After a quiet moment, Kaelen heard a soft chuckle.
“Laying low to survive,” the Wolf God murmured, tasting the phrase.
“A novel philosophy.” “That’s because you used to roll over enemies with an army of a hundred thousand.
You’ve never experienced the budget player style.” “Are you questioning my credentials?” Horus’s deep voice held a rare touch of levity.
“Before Father found me, back on my homeworld of Cthonia, I was nothing more than a gang leader.”