King returned the copy of my own interview with a single correction: where I had written “he said in a firm voice,” he crossed out “firm” and wrote “trembling.” Then he asked me not to tell anyone he had corrected it.
He is the most honest man I have met on this crusade.
And the most frightened.
I have been reassigned to the IX Legion.
The Blood Angels are beautiful in a way that is a little embarrassing to look at.
Their Primarch, Sanguinius, has real wings.
I asked him whether they were uncomfortable to sleep with.
He told me it was the most sensible question anyone had asked him in a century.
Our destination is a world where people fight for fun.
Not for money, nor for land, nor for gods: for fun.
Captain Dante says that can’t be all bad.
The Chaplain says it can.
I.
The Man Who Smelled of War
Yujiro Hanma sensed it before anyone else.
He was sitting on the terrace of a luxury restaurant in Tokyo, eating a two-kilo steak without cutlery, when he raised his head and sniffed the air like an animal.
The other diners, who had spent an hour pretending not to look at him, stopped pretending.
“Something big has arrived,” he said, and smiled.
That smile had made presidents tremble.
The United States had signed a friendship treaty with him—with him personally, as if he were a country.
No one in that world had ever been able to stand up to him.
Yujiro had been bored for years.
In orbit, the ships of the IX Legion moved into formation above the Pacific, red and gold like a badly painted sunrise.
On the bridge of the flagship, Sanguinius gazed down at the planet with his hands behind his back and his wings folded.
“My lord,” reported Captain Dante, “the augurs are registering an anomalous biological signature in the capital.
A single man.
His muscle mass is…” he checked the slate, “…offensive.”
“A psyker?”
“No. Just muscle. And, according to the Mechanicus, ‘a density of bad attitude never before measured.'”
Sanguinius gave the faintest smile.
“Then I shall go down and say hello.”
* * *
The Angel descended on a square in central Tokyo at midday, the sunlight streaming through his wings.
People knelt without knowing why.
Some wept.
An old woman offered him a tangerine.
He accepted it with a bow of his head, because his father had taught him that power is no excuse for bad manners.
Yujiro was already waiting for him in the middle of the square, shirtless, his back tense.
The muscles of his back formed a face: the famous “demon back.” Those who knew him knew that when that face appeared, someone was going to end up in the hospital.
“Finally,” said Yujiro.
“Something worth the trouble.”
“I come in the name of the Emperor of Mankind,” said Sanguinius.
“This world will become part of the Imperium. I have no need to shed blood for that.”
“What a shame,” Yujiro replied.
“I do.”
And he attacked.
It was a blow that would have brought down a building.
Those in the square felt it in their chests, like thunder two meters away.
Yujiro’s fist stopped a hand’s breadth from Sanguinius’s face, held by an open palm that had made no visible effort.
Yujiro’s eyes went wide.
Then his smile grew.
He threw a kick.
An elbow.
A knee.
A combination he had learned across twenty different martial arts and perfected on the bodies of the best fighters in the world.
Sanguinius dodged all of it without moving his feet, leaning just slightly, like someone stepping aside from a fly.
“Fight for real,” growled Yujiro.
“I am fighting for real,” said Sanguinius.
“Just not against you.”
“Then against who?”
“Against the urge to hurt you.”
That enraged Yujiro more than any blow could have.
He launched himself with everything he had: his whole body turned into a projectile, an attack that had made armies tremble.
Sanguinius took one step forward, laid his palm on the Ogre’s chest and pushed.
It wasn’t a blow.
It was a shove, like a father moving a child away from a puddle.
Yujiro Hanma went flying across the square, through a fountain, a bus stop and the display window of an appliance store, and ended up sitting among the washing machines, staring blankly, with a television switched on above his head advertising weekend deals.
The square fell silent.
* * *
From different points across the city, the best fighters of that world had seen it all.
Baki Hanma, Yujiro’s son, was on a nearby rooftop.
He had spent his whole life training to surpass his father.
He had just watched someone push him.
With one hand.
Without even trying.
“That…” he murmured, “…is unfair.”
Jack Hanma, Baki’s half brother, who stood nearly two and a half meters tall on the strength of steroids and willpower, watched from the street with his jaw hanging open.
“I’ve broken bones to get where I am,” he said.
“He didn’t even break a sweat.”
Doppo Orochi, the karate master who had lost an eye fighting Yujiro, adjusted his eyepatch.
“Forty years of karate,” he remarked, “only to discover that the ultimate karate was having wings.”
Retsu Kaioh, the Chinese master, watched with his hands pressed together.
“Four thousand years of Chinese kenpo history,” he said, very gravely, “and not one of those years prepared me for this.”
The elderly Gouki Shibukawa, master of aikido, was the only one who laughed.
“He didn’t use strength,” he said, delighted.
“He used the other man’s! That’s aikido! That angel knows aikido!” Find the original chapter at novelping.com.
Beside him, Katsumi Orochi, Doppo’s adopted son, was frantically taking notes in a notebook.
“What are you writing?” his father asked him.
“New technique,” said Katsumi.
“‘The Angel’s Shove.’ All I need now is to get some wings.”
* * *
Yujiro got up from among the washing machines.
His shirt—which he wasn’t wearing—was in tatters anyway, out of sheer narrative habit.
He walked back to the center of the square, unhurried.
People moved aside.
No one breathed.
He stopped in front of Sanguinius.
He looked him up and down for a long while.
“I accept defeat,” he said at last.
There was a murmur of astonishment.
No one had ever heard those words from the Ogre’s mouth.
“For now,” Yujiro added.
“That seems fair,” Sanguinius replied.
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t kneel before your Emperor. I kneel before nothing. But I’m not going to waste my time fighting a wall with wings either.” He turned his back on him.
“Train my son. If he ever catches up to me, he might catch up to you too.”
“And if he never catches up to me?”
Yujiro shrugged.
“Then at least it’ll have been entertaining.” He stopped at the edge of the square, without turning around.
“We’ll see, angel.”
And he walked away, leaving behind an entire city that didn’t know whether to applaud or hide.
II.
An Angel Who Teaches
The annexation of that world was the calmest of the entire crusade, partly because the only person capable of opposing it had accepted defeat “for now,” and partly because its inhabitants discovered very quickly that the Space Marines were the best martial arts show they had ever seen.
Tokyo’s underground tournaments became legal, regulated and broadcast.
The Blood Angels took part as guests.
A veteran sergeant, Brother Castiel, lost a sumo bout to a two-hundred-kilo wrestler and celebrated it with more joy than any victory.
“Nobody’s knocked me down in three centuries,” he said from the ground.
“Thank you, friend. I needed that.”
Baki asked to train with Sanguinius, and Sanguinius agreed.
The sessions began at dawn and ended when Baki couldn’t get up.
He never managed to touch the Angel, but every day he took a little longer to fall.
“Why won’t you teach me to hit harder?” Baki asked one morning, sprawled on the sand, looking at the sky.
“Because you already hit hard enough,” said Sanguinius.
“What you don’t know is what for.”
“To surpass my father.”
“And after that?”
Baki didn’t answer.
He spent a long time staring at the clouds.
Chronicle, entry number forty-seven.
I asked the Primarch Sanguinius whether he truly believed Baki could ever surpass him.
He replied that he wasn’t worried about Baki surpassing him.
He was worried that, when he did, he wouldn’t know what else to do with his life.
Then he asked me to pass him the old woman’s tangerine, which he still kept in his pocket.
He said he felt bad about eating it.
III.
The Mansion and the UN
Several weeks away—or several days, or several minutes; in the Webway you could never tell—the XIX Legion reached a world with a very peculiar problem: one part of humanity had been born with powers, and the other part was afraid of them.
Corvus Corax, the Lord of Ravens, did not arrive with ships in the sky or with speeches.
He simply arrived, in a hallway of the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, in Westchester, at three in the morning.
Professor Charles Xavier detected him instantly.
Not because he saw him, but because, for the first time in his life, he tried to read a mind and found a well.
Corax was standing in the library, leafing through a book of poetry.
“Good evening, Professor,” he said without looking up.
“You have an excellent collection. Although your science fiction section greatly underestimates the size of starships.”
Within seconds, the library was full of X-Men in pajamas.
Cyclops with his visor on backward.
Storm with her hair electrified, literally.
Wolverine with his claws out and a cup of coffee in his other hand.
“I don’t know who you are, freak,” growled Logan, “but you’re in the wrong house.”
“I am in exactly the right house,” said Corax, closing the book.
“I have come to talk about your enemies.”
“And who are our enemies?” Xavier asked calmly, holding back his students with a gesture.
“That is what I have come to find out.”
* * *
Corax spent three days at the mansion.
He listened.
He asked questions.
He watched the youngest students practice in the Danger Room and eat cereal at three in the afternoon.
He found that his Legion, in his own universe, had been founded from men enslaved in the mines of Lycaeus, persecuted for being what they were.
He didn’t say it aloud.
But it showed.
On the fourth day he asked to attend a special session of the UN General Assembly, where a mandatory mutant registration law was being voted on.
Xavier, who had been invited to speak, brought him along.
Corax sat in the back row, invisible to everyone but the Professor.
He listened to the delegates talk about “threat,” about “control,” about “reasonable measures.” He listened to a senator propose Sentinels—giant robots—to watch over mutant neighborhoods.
He listened to another suggest “relocation” camps.
He heard applause.
When it was Xavier’s turn to speak, they interrupted him three times.
The fourth time, they booed him.
He made no sound.
He was simply, all of a sudden, at the podium, and the light in the chamber seemed darker around him, and every camera in the world was broadcasting him.
“I have spent three days listening to children who are afraid to go out into the street,” he said.
“And one afternoon listening to you. You speak of protecting humanity. But those children are humanity too. They are the same blood, with a couple of changes to the script.”
“Security!” someone shouted.
“In my universe, I too was locked up for being different,” Corax went on.
“The men who locked me up also spoke of reasonable measures.”
He looked over the entire chamber, slowly, row by row.
“Hypocrites!”
The word rang out like a gunshot.
What happened next, the Imperial archives describe as “an operational and non-voluntary dissolution of the Assembly.” Corax’s ravens—the Raven Guard—emerged from the shadows of the chamber, from behind the curtains, from the ventilation ducts, from places where no one could possibly have hidden a giant in black armor.
In less than a minute, every delegate who had voted in favor of the camps was handcuffed with a black hood over his head.
The Sentinel senator was found hours later hanging by his own belt from the flagpole at the entrance, alive, furious and wearing a sign that read “Reasonable measure.”
The archives, this time, do not exaggerate: no one died.
Corax was far too angry to give anyone the pleasure of becoming a martyr.
* * *
That same night, the Raven Guard opened the mutant detention centers on three continents.
The Sentinel factories were dismantled by Tech-priests who, for once, didn’t have to ask permission to hate a thinking machine.
“Potential heresy detected,” a Magos announced in front of a deactivated Sentinel.
“I know,” Corax replied.
“Take it away.”
On the island of Genosha, Magneto, the Master of Magnetism, received the news on his metal throne.
He sat in silence for a while.
Then, to the astonishment of all his followers, he burst out laughing.
“For forty years I’ve been saying humans would never accept us,” he said.
“And the first one to defend us before the whole world is an alien with raven wings who isn’t even a mutant.”
“Does that make you happy, Master?” asked an acolyte, confused.
“It makes me happy to be half right,” Magneto replied.
“That’s more than I usually manage.”
Corax went to see him the next day.
They talked for hours.
No one knows about what.
When they parted, Magneto shook his hand, and it is said that the metal of Corax’s armor did not move a single millimeter, which for Magneto was the highest form of respect.
IV.
The Third Option
At the X-Mansion, on the other hand, there was no celebration.
The X-Men gathered in the war room.
The mood was split in two like a badly cut table.
“He saved us,” said Storm.
“He did in one night what we couldn’t manage in twenty years.”
“He saved us by force,” Cyclops shot back.
“What he did at the UN was a coup d’état. And now what? We obey his Emperor?”
“Better an Emperor who defends us than a government that wants to put us in cages,” said Rogue.
“That’s just swapping one tyrant for another,” Jean Grey said quietly.
Everyone turned to Xavier.
The Professor was gazing out the window at the mansion grounds, where several black ravens had settled in the trees and didn’t seem to have any intention of leaving.
“All my life I have dreamed of humans and mutants living together,” he said.
“I never imagined the dream would come true because someone more powerful than all of us would force us to do it.”
“And is that bad?” asked Kitty Pryde.
“I don’t know,” Xavier admitted.
“That’s why I’m afraid.”
Logan, leaning against the wall, lit a cigar.
“You people think too much,” he growled.
“The guy delivers. If he stops delivering, I stick my claws in him. Simple as that.”
“Logan, your claws bounced off the galley door on that man’s ship,” Hank McCoy reminded him.
“It was a really tough door.”
* * *
That night, Corax returned to the mansion library.
Xavier was waiting for him.
“Your students don’t trust me,” said the Primarch.
“Some do. Others don’t.” Xavier smiled sadly.
“I taught them to distrust anyone who offers them protection in exchange for obedience.”
“It’s a good lesson.”
“Then you understand why some of them won’t stay.”
Corax nodded slowly.
“My ravens will keep watch over them,” he said.
“Not to stop them. To know if they need help.”
“And if what they’re looking for is a third option? Neither the old world nor your Imperium.”
Corax was silent for a while.
“Then I hope they find it,” he said.
“I never did.”
Weeks later, a small group of mutants disappeared from the X-Mansion during the night, without violence and without goodbyes.
The Raven Guard reports call them simply “the Absent.” There has been no sign of them since.
Corax left orders not to pursue them.
No one, not even his captains, knew whether he did it out of respect or because, deep down, he envied them a little.
* * *
Chronicle, entry number forty-eight.
I received two reports on the same day.
In the first, the Primarch Sanguinius refused to force a man to kneel because “it wasn’t worth humiliating someone who had already understood.” In the second, the Primarch Corax hung a senator from a flagpole because “he hadn’t understood anything.” I wonder what each of them would have done in the other’s world.
I suppose that’s why the Emperor sends them where he sends them.
Tomorrow I depart with the XVI Legion.
Horus Lupercal, the First Found, has asked me to document “a lesson about false gods.” I’m glad.
I have spent weeks watching people who think they’re gods; it would be nice to see a real one take a fall.
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From that point onward, the release schedule will change to one chapter per day.