Chronicle, entry number eighty-two.
Corax was right.
It is always the one with the teenagers.
On my first day in Paris, a blonde girl in sunglasses called me a “beggar with a notebook,” a black cat in a leather suit stole my pen while making a joke about “cat-astrophes,” and a white butterfly tried to land on my shoulder.
A commissar shot it dead before it touched me.
He told me: “Don’t ask.” I didn’t ask.
I.
Paris
Paris was a postcard city: the Eiffel Tower, the Seine, the boulangeries, the gray rooftops.
And, every week, a brand-new supervillain.
A mysterious villain called Hawk Moth used magical butterflies—the akumas—to transform angry or sad Parisians into supervillains with absurd powers.
A heartbroken girl became an ice witch.
A humiliated teacher became a chalk monster.
And every week, two teenage heroes—Ladybug and Cat Noir—defeated them, purified the butterfly and fixed everything with a magic spell that returned the city to normal.
Guilliman read the entire report in his study aboard the Valkyrie, his flagship.
Then he read the appendix on the villains’ powers.
Then he rubbed his eyes.
“Every week?” he asked.
“Every week, my lord,” replied Captain Calgar.
“For years?”
“For years.”
“And no one has tried to find out who Hawk Moth is?”
“The heroes try, my lord. But they are teenagers. They have exams.”
Guilliman closed the report.
“This is a logistics problem,” he said.
“And I am very good at logistics problems.”
II.
Space Elves
The Ultramarines made landfall in the Place du Trocadéro, facing the Eiffel Tower, at noon on a Tuesday.
The Parisians, used to supervillains, barely looked up from their coffees.
Ladybug and Cat Noir arrived in under a minute, leaping across the rooftops.
Ladybug, a girl in a red suit with black polka dots and a magic yo-yo, stopped at the edge of a roof and studied the blue-armored giants with a frown.
Cat Noir, a blond boy in a black suit with cat ears and an extendable staff, landed beside her.
“Well, my lady,” he said.
“We’ve had ice villains, fire villains, chocolate villains and a villain who turned people into mimes. What’s next? Space elves?”
Guilliman heard him from the square.
He looked up.
“We are not elves,” he said.
“They speak French!” Cat Noir exclaimed.
“The space elves speak French!”
“We are not elves,” Guilliman repeated, with the patience of someone who has governed five hundred worlds.
* * *
Chloé Bourgeois, the mayor’s daughter, arrived at the square in a limousine, escorted by her butler and wearing sunglasses.
She was blonde, rich, spoiled and the most insufferable person in Paris.
She stepped out of the car, looked the Ultramarines up and down and burst out laughing.
“Oh, please! What is this? A cosplay convention? What tacky tin-can armor!”
The Ultramarines looked at her.
Chloé kept talking.
“My father is the mayor of Paris.
If you want to put on a show in this square, you need a permit.
And I decide who gets a permit.
Because I”—she took off her sunglasses—”am a queen.”
There was a silence.
The commissar accompanying the Imperial delegation, a tall man in a black greatcoat and a peaked cap with a skull on it, stepped up to Guilliman.
“My lord, I recommend re-education for that young woman.”
“Noted.”
A Tech-priest, on the other side, raised a mechanical arm.
“My lord, I recommend mental reprogramming.”
“Also noted.” Guilliman looked at Chloé.
“And denied. For now.”
* * *
The mayor of Paris, André Bourgeois, was removed from office that same afternoon.
Not because of his daughter’s attitude, but because of something the Mechanicus had discovered in his files: years of corruption, embezzlement and, above all, a deeply ingrained habit of giving in to Chloé’s every whim, which, according to the analysts, had generated more than forty akumas.
“Your daughter is a public menace,” Guilliman explained to him.
“And you are her main arms supplier.”
“She’s just a girl!”
“A girl who has produced more supervillains than anyone else in this city. Except Hawk Moth.”
The mayor opened his mouth.
He closed it.
Chloé, in the doorway, burst into tears.
It wasn’t the first time.
But it was the first time no one came running to comfort her.
It was, according to her teacher, “the first moment of personal growth I’ve seen from her in three years.”
III.
Infiltration
Ladybug and Cat Noir didn’t trust the Ultramarines.
So they decided to find out what they wanted.
One night, they snuck aboard the Valkyrie.
Ladybug used her yo-yo to climb the ship’s hull.
Cat Noir slipped in through a ventilation duct.
They made it all the way to the command bridge without anyone stopping them, which should have struck them as suspicious.
“This is it,” Ladybug whispered.
“If they’re hiding something, it’ll be in those consoles.”
Cat Noir approached one of the main consoles.
He raised his hand.
“Cataclysm!”
His special power—capable of destroying anything he touched—activated with a black glow.
He touched the console.
The console began to crumble.
And at that very moment, every alarm on the ship went off.
Cat Noir stood staring at the console as it disintegrated under his hand.
“Uh… my lady? I think I broke something important.”
“What did you break?”
“I don’t know. But it looked important.”
A Tech-priest ran onto the bridge, saw the destroyed console and let out a binary shriek of horror.
“The cafeteria control console!”
Cat Noir blinked.
“The cafeteria?”
“The cafeteria’s machine spirit! It was four hundred years old! It made the best recaf in the sector!”
Ladybug grabbed Cat Noir by the arm.
“We’re leaving!”
They scrambled back through the ventilation duct at full speed.
No one chased them.
Guilliman, who had watched it all on the cameras, ordered that they be allowed to go.
“My lord,” Calgar protested, “they have sabotaged the ship.”
“They have sabotaged the cafeteria, Marneus. And now we know what the boy can do.” Guilliman leaned over the screen.
“And most importantly: we know someone else is watching.”
On the screen, in the bridge window, there was a white butterfly.
IV.
Hawk Moth’s Mistake
Hawk Moth made a mistake that no villain in that city had ever made before: he tried to akumatize a Space Marine.
He chose an Ultramarines Librarian, a psyker named Brother Aurelius, who at that moment was annoyed because someone had broken the cafeteria.
The dark butterfly flew to him and landed on his pauldron.
“Brother Aurelius,” said Hawk Moth’s voice inside his head.
“I am Hawk Moth. I offer you the power to take revenge on those who have wronged you. In exchange, I ask only that you bring me Ladybug’s and Cat Noir’s Miraculous.”
Aurelius went very still.
“Interesting,” he said aloud.
“A psychic connection. Bidirectional.”
“What?”
“You speak to me. But I can also speak to you.” Aurelius closed his eyes and followed the connection to its other end, like someone tracing a cable.
“And I can see where you are.”
“No!”
“Agreste mansion. Attic. There is a round window. Many butterflies. A man in a gray mask.”
The butterfly turned black, crumbled to dust and fell to the floor.
Aurelius opened his eyes.
“My lord,” he said over the vox.
“I have the target’s location.”
V.
Public Trial
The Ultramarines entered the Agreste mansion forty minutes later.
Hawk Moth tried to resist.
Transformed, with his cane and his power to akumatize, he was a formidable villain.
But in the attic of his mansion, surrounded by two hundred Space Marines, he was just a man in a mask.
The transformation came undone.
Beneath the mask was Gabriel Agreste.
The most famous fashion designer in Paris.
Adrien Agreste’s father.
* * *
The trial was public, broadcast live on every screen in France.
Guilliman presided over it in person, at the Palais de Justice in Paris.
Gabriel Agreste appeared in handcuffs, his suit rumpled and his gaze vacant.
The evidence was overwhelming.
Years of akumatizations.
Hundreds of victims.
Millions of euros in damages.
All to obtain Ladybug’s and Cat Noir’s Miraculous and use them to grant a wish: to bring back his wife, who lay in a coma in a basement of the mansion.
“I did it for love,” said Gabriel.
“You did it out of selfishness,” replied Guilliman.
“Love does not terrorize an entire city.”
In the front row of the audience, a blond boy listened to it all with wide eyes.
Adrien Agreste.
Gabriel’s son.
The boy who, unbeknownst to his father, was Cat Noir.
For years, he had fought Hawk Moth without knowing it was his father.
And now he saw him sitting in the dock, confessing.
When the sentence was read, Adrien didn’t cry.
He sat there, motionless, staring at nothing.
VI.
Adrien Guilliman
Guilliman found him that night on the roof of the Palais de Justice, sitting on the edge, legs dangling over the city.
Plagg, his kwami—a little black cat-shaped creature that gave him his powers—was beside him, eating Camembert in silence, for once not cracking jokes.
The Primarch sat down next to him.
The roof creaked.
“I know who you are,” said Guilliman.
Adrien didn’t answer.
“I know you are Cat Noir. I know you fought your father for years without knowing it. And I know that now you have no one.”
“I have Plagg,” Adrien said quietly.
“Always,” said Plagg, his mouth full.
Guilliman sat in silence for a while, looking at the lit-up Eiffel Tower.
“I did not have a father for a long time either,” he said.
“Another man found me. He raised me as his son. He taught me everything I know. When my true father arrived, I was already who I was because of him.”
Adrien looked at him for the first time.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I think you need someone. And because in my Legion, there is always room for a boy with a good heart and bad jokes.”
“My jokes aren’t bad.”
“They are terrible.”
Adrien let out a laugh.
Small, broken.
But a laugh.
* * *
A week later, a new name appeared in an official register on Terra: Adrien Guilliman, ward of the Lord of Ultramar.
Marinette Dupain-Cheng—Ladybug—found out from the press.
She went to see Adrien in his new quarters aboard the Valkyrie.
She found him teaching a group of Ultramarines how to make cat puns.
“Why are the Ultramarines so good at war?” Adrien was asking.
“We do not know,” the Ultramarines replied, very seriously.
“Because they always have a purr-fect plan!”
Absolute silence.
Then one of the Ultramarines raised his hand.
“I do not understand.”
“Purr! Like a cat purring!”
“Ah.” The Ultramarine thought about it for a moment.
“That is terrible.”
“Thank you!”
Marinette smiled from the doorway.
Then she walked in and hugged him.
Chronicle, entry number eighty-three.
The Valkyrie’s cafeteria has been repaired.
The new machine spirit makes a recaf that is “acceptable,” according to the Tech-priests, and “worse than the old one,” according to everyone else.
Cat Noir has been sentenced to work there for a month as punishment for the sabotage.
He makes a joke with every cup.
Captain Calgar has requested a transfer.
VII.
The Kingdom of Nobles
Lion El’Jonson hated nobles.
Not all of them.
But he did hate spoiled nobles, the ones who inherited titles without earning them, the ones who treated their subjects like scenery.
And the kingdom of Holfort, a nation of floating islands in the sky, was full of them.
In Holfort, noblewomen held all the power.
Noblemen had to compete with one another to marry them, spending fortunes on gifts and demi-human slaves.
And at the Holfort Academy, where the children of the nobility studied, five young princes and heirs had fallen in love with the same girl: Marie, a girl of humble origins, clever and manipulative, who had them all eating out of her hand.
“Marie and her quartet of simps,” Captain Luther summarized as he read the report.
“Plus the crown prince. A quintet, then.”
“I do not know what ‘simps’ means,” said the Lion.
“Better that way, my lord.”
* * *
The I Legion’s first action in Holfort was a bombardment.
Not of a city.
Of an uninhabited island, in full view of the capital.
A single salvo from the battle barge’s batteries.
The island vanished.
Queen Mylene of Holfort, an elegant and shrewd woman, watched the explosion from her palace balcony.
She stood in silence for a long while.
“I had a dream last night,” she said at last to her advisor.
“I saw a lion stalking. In the sky.”
“An omen, Your Majesty?”
“No,” said Mylene.
“A warning.”
That afternoon she received the Lion in her throne room.
The crown prince, Julius, a handsome, arrogant boy hopelessly in love with Marie, insisted on challenging the Primarch to a duel.
“For the honor of Holfort!”
The Lion looked down at him.
“No.”
“It’s an official challenge!”
“And I officially decline it.”
Julius was left speechless.
No one had ever told him no in his entire life.
The queen signed an “experimental alliance” agreement with the Imperium that very night.
She signed it with a smile, but with a trembling hand.
VIII.
Leon and Luxion
There was, at the Holfort Academy, one student who didn’t fit in.
His name was Leon Fou Bartfort.
He was the third son of a minor noble family, with no money, no prestige and no interest in marrying anyone.
And he had a secret: in his previous life he had been a Japanese office worker, he had died and been reincarnated in this world, which was, in fact, the setting of a dating sim his sister used to make him play.
Leon knew how the story ended.
He knew who Marie was.
He knew who the princes were.
And he had used that knowledge to find a lost treasure: an ancient spaceship and an artificial intelligence called Luxion, which floated beside him in the form of a sphere with a single red eye and spoke to him with infinite sarcasm.
When Leon saw the Dark Angels land at the academy, he went very still.
“Luxion,” he whispered.
“What are those?”
“Genetically modified humans in ceramite armor with an institutional hatred of artificial intelligences,” Luxion replied.
“According to my analysis, Master, the moment they detect me, they will destroy me. And you will probably be shot for harboring me.”
Leon went white.
“I’m on vacation,” he muttered.
“I’m on vacation in a dating sim and I already feel like I’m getting shot before the buffet.”
“I recommend discretion, Master.”
“You think?”
Luxion hid inside his pocket, in power-saving mode, the light of his eye switched off.
For the entire campaign, not a single Tech-priest detected him.
Leon never slept well again.
IX.
The Cruise
The crisis came during the academy’s annual school trip: a cruise aboard a luxury airship, with every student on board.
The Dark Angels sent an escort: Commissar Halbrecht, a tall, thin man with a cold gaze, along with six Astra Militarum guards.
Halbrecht spent the first day of the cruise watching the noble students with growing contempt.
They complained about the food.
They complained about the wind.
A noble student named Bradley, one of Marie’s suitors, mocked the commissar’s uniform out loud.
“What’s that? Peasant armor?”
Halbrecht turned very slowly.
“Name.”
“Excuse me?”
“Name. Year. Family.”
Bradley swallowed.
“Bradley Fou Field. Second year. House Field.”
“Noted,” said Halbrecht, and wrote something in a black notebook.
Bradley didn’t open his mouth again for the rest of the trip.
* * *
On the second day, the cruise ship was attacked.
Sky pirates from the Principality of Fanoss, Holfort’s traditional enemy, boarded the ship with monsters summoned by a magic flute.
The princess of Fanoss, Hertrude, led the assault.
They wanted to kidnap the children of Holfort’s nobility to use them as hostages.
The noble students panicked.
Some hid.
Others tried to flee in the lifeboats.
Angelica, Prince Julius’s fiancée, a proud and brave girl, offered herself as a hostage in exchange for letting the others go.
Over the radio, Captain Luther gave an order from the Dark Angels’ escort ship:
“Commissar Halbrecht. I authorize disciplinary measures against any student who refuses to fight.”
Halbrecht nodded.
He drew his pistol.
He turned toward the group of students hiding in the main salon, among them a young noblewoman named Deirdre, who was sobbing with her arms wrapped around a column.
“Get up and fight,” he said.
“Or face the consequences.”
Deirdre didn’t move.
Halbrecht raised the pistol.
Leon saw it.
Something in his Japanese-office-worker brain clicked.
He pulled out the shotgun he had hidden under his coat and laid it against the commissar’s arm, pushing it down.
“Commissar,” he said.
“Don’t waste bullets.”
Halbrecht looked at him.
The shot went off anyway, but it slammed into the wooden floor, a hand’s breadth from Deirdre’s feet.
She let out a scream and froze.
For a moment, nobody breathed.
“Explain yourself,” said Halbrecht, without lowering the pistol.
“If you want them to fight, don’t scare them,” said Leon.
“Give them a reason.”
And before the commissar could respond, Leon climbed onto a table and addressed every student in the salon.
“Listen up, everyone! I know you’re scared! So am I! But out there, there are monsters who want to take our classmates! Angelica gave herself up for us! Are we going to let them take her while we hide under the tables?”
Silence.
“Not me!” someone shouted.
It was Deirdre, still trembling, getting up off the floor with her eyes full of tears and fury.
“Not me!”
One by one, the students rose.
They took up swords.
They took up wands.
They went out to fight.
Halbrecht lowered the pistol very slowly.
He looked at Leon for a long moment.
“Noted,” he said.
Leon couldn’t tell whether that was good or bad.
X.
The Black Knight
The battle of the cruise ended with the arrival of the I Legion’s Gloriana-class vessels, which opened fire on the Fanoss pirate ships and drove them back.
Leon, piloting his mechanical armor—the Arroganz, a humanoid robot Luxion had built in secret—burst into the Fanoss flagship and rescued Angelica.
Luther received him on the deck of the escort ship.
“Boy, you have acted with valor. The Primarch will reward you.”
“No, thank you,” Leon said, very quickly.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s not necessary. Really. I’m fine as I am.”
“The last thing I want,” he thought, “is to be on these lunatics’ radar.”
But the battle wasn’t over.
The Fanoss magic flute, the one that summoned monsters, turned out to be a fake.
The real one was on another ship, a bigger one, which emerged from the clouds with an army of aerial monsters.
One of the Glorianas was hit and fell burning into the sea of clouds.
And at the prow of the Fanoss ship, two figures appeared.
Two black mechanical armors.
One of them was enormous, with a giant axe and a shield bearing a dragon emblem.
The other, slimmer, with two swords and a faceless helmet.
“The Black Knight,” Angelica whispered.
“Bardoli. The hero of Fanoss. He’s killed hundreds of Holfort’s knights.”
“And the other one?” Leon asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it before.”
* * *
The Lion descended from his Thunderhawk onto the deck of the Fanoss ship without anyone seeing him arrive.
The Black Knight turned toward him.
“Who are you?”
“The Lion,” said the Primarch, and drew the Lion Sword.
The duel was brief.
Bardoli was a legendary warrior in his world, with decades of combat experience.
The Lion had been fighting for ten thousand years.
The Black Knight’s axe split in two at the first clash.
The dragon shield, at the second.
By the third, the Black Knight was on his knees with the Primarch’s sword at his throat.
“I yield,” said Bardoli.
It wasn’t cowardice.
It was one warrior recognizing another.
“I have never lost like this.”
“Today you have,” said the Lion.
* * *
The second black armor didn’t stay to fight.
While the Lion was defeating Bardoli, the slim figure with the two swords took on Leon and his Arroganz.
They traded blows.
The figure was fast, precise, almost perfect.
And in the middle of the fight, it stopped, tilted its head as if listening to something, and spoke in a distorted voice that only Leon heard:
“You’re from outside too, aren’t you?”
Leon froze.
“What…?”
“We know about the game too. And about the Imperium. And about the webs.” The figure drew back.
“We’ll meet again, reincarnator.”
And it leapt over the rail, into the sea of clouds, and vanished.
Luxion, in Leon’s pocket, lit up his eye for the first time in weeks.
“Master,” he whispered.
“That armor does not belong to this world. Nor to any Imperial world. Its energy signature is… green. And it smells of rust.”
Leon swallowed.
“Do I tell the Lion?”
“If you tell him, he will ask how you know. And then they will find me.”
Leon stood staring at the sea of clouds for a long time.
In the end, he wrote an anonymous note and left it on Captain Luther’s desk: “The second black armor isn’t from here. Look for something green.”
Luther read it.
He frowned.
He sent it to Terra.
* * *
Chronicle, entry number eighty-four.
The Principality of Fanoss has surrendered.
Bardoli, the Black Knight, has been appointed combat instructor for Holfort’s new guard.
Queen Mylene has asked for a statue of the Lion to be built in the capital’s square.
The Lion has asked that it not be.
The statue is being built anyway.
Commissar Halbrecht has submitted a report on the cruise incident.
In it, he recommends that Leon Fou Bartfort be considered “an asset of exceptional tactical value.” And he adds a note at the end: “I also recommend that executions of students never again be authorized. I was wrong.” I had never seen a commissar write that sentence.
I don’t think anyone had.
Luther’s anonymous note reached Malcador.
Malcador read it and filed it away with the others.
He already has a drawer full of similar notes.
No one knows how many.
I’m told the drawer is large.
I’m a novice writer with many stories still left to tell and a great passion for Warhammer.
I love imagining dark worlds, epic battles, and imperfect characters.
I write to learn.