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Morning, as a concept, doesn't mean much in the underhive.
This godforsaken place has no day or night. The cyclic lighting system mostly broke down thirty years ago. The few industrial lamp tubes still flickering cast a shit-yellow glow, strobing nonstop around the clock.
Karen was woken by his own hunger.
He rolled over, banged his lower back against the turbine base, and cursed through gritted teeth. Then he saw Horus, still sitting in the exact same position as last night.
"You didn't sleep at all?"
"A Primarch doesn't need much sleep."
Horus's voice sounded better than yesterday. At least it no longer resembled sandpaper dragged across a raw throat.
Karen dug two compressed rations out of his pack, broke one in half, and handed it over.
The Wolf Herder God took it, pinching the grayish-brown brick between two fingers, turning it over and examining it from every angle with an expression identical to a researcher studying some entirely new xenos specimen.
He took a bite.
His jaw worked for a full 3 seconds. Then his entire face scrunched together.
"Legion field rations during the Great Crusade were ten times better than this." Horus forced the mouthful of grit down with visible effort. "Is this actually meant for mortals to eat, or for patching hull breaches?"
"Esteemed Lord Warmaster, you'll get used to it." Karen rolled his eyes.
Horus was silent for 2 seconds. Then he furrowed his brow, shoved the entire ration brick into his mouth, and chewed hard. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down several times before he managed to swallow.
"I once ate worse things on my homeworld of Cthonia."
Karen tilted his head, thinking it over. "Worse than Rogal Dorn's cooking?"
Horus paused.
Then he laughed.
"This ration is still a bit friendlier."
Rogal Dorn, Gene-Primarch of the Imperial Fists, was notoriously rigid and dull. Horus reflected that he'd found the man quite insufferable back then. Wasn't it after Johnson was first recovered that Dorn had clashed with someone? He and Fulgrim had both been there, and that blockhead's words had infuriated them no end.
Karen chewed his rations while assessing Horus's condition. The chest wound had scabbed over with a dark red crust. The dark purple toxin marks had mostly faded but weren't fully gone. The healing balm had dragged him back from death's door, but he was still far from healed.
"Today I'm taking you somewhere." Karen swallowed his last bite.
"Where?"
"The mid-hive. A Sanctuary of the Imperial Cult."
Horus studied his expression but didn't ask why.
"You need to see it with your own eyes." Karen said. "This era. An age where this religion flourishes, where reason and science have been extinguished."
For ease of movement, Horus removed his Terminator armor.
Without power armor, a Primarch was still a three-and-a-half-meter giant, his musculature an entirely different species from anything mortal.
Karen tossed him yesterday's Cameleoline Cloak. The nanofibers automatically extended, wrapping around his entire frame.
"Let's go."
They climbed up the rust-streaked cargo lift shaft. The lift's mechanical structure had long since been scrapped, leaving only an iron skeleton. Karen scrambled up using both hands and feet. Horus followed in two or three bounding steps, occasionally reaching out to yank Karen back when he was about to slip.
Along the way, they passed a labor zone cordoned off by barbed wire.
Hundreds of gaunt, sallow workers crouched before an assembly line, putting together ammunition.
No one spoke. A mechanical arm's metronome clicked once every 3 seconds. Anyone whose hands couldn't keep pace got lashed by the overseer's whip. A young female worker had two fingers crushed off by the stamping press. She bit her lip and made no sound. The people beside her dragged her away, and another worker stepped into her place.
The entire process took less than 10 seconds. The assembly line did not stop.
Horus halted.
Karen glanced back at him. The hood concealed most of the Wolf Herder God's face, but Karen could see the muscles along his jaw clenched deathly tight.
"This is still one of the better places. At least they're alive. On some planets, laborers don't even have names. When their serial numbers run out, they get recycled — and yeah, that includes the bodies."
Horus said nothing.
When he resumed walking, his foot left a bent dent pressed into the iron rung beneath him.
The air quality in the mid-hive was an order of magnitude better than the underhive. At least the stench of rotting corpses was gone.
In its place: incense, machine oil, and sweat, all mixed into something strange.
The Imperial Cult Sanctuary stood at the end of the mid-hive's main thoroughfare.
The Gothic dome was absurdly high. Black stone pillars stretched upward and vanished into darkness beyond the reach of candlelight. Hundreds of candles flickered unsteadily, casting the 30-meter-tall golden statue of the Emperor in shifting light and shadow.
The statue had been sculpted as a deity wielding a holy flaming sword.
The face, cast in gold, was solemn, stern, and toweringly aloof.
Thousands of believers knelt prostrate on the ground.
"The Emperor is humanity's one true god! Faith is our armor! Doubt is rebellion!"
The chanted doctrine resonated in a low hum beneath the dome.
A priest stood on the high platform, brandishing a skull-inlaid scepter, shouting himself hoarse, spittle flying.
Horus and Karen stood in the shadow of the colonnade outside the Sanctuary.
He did not go in.
He only watched from afar.
Watched that 30-meter golden statue.
Watched those believers kneeling on the ground, knocking their foreheads bloody against the stone.
Watched the priest howl "Emperor protect us" in that hysterical, shrieking tone.
His breathing quickened. The old wound on his chest began to throb.
"Father hated being worshipped as a god."
The words were pressed extremely low, squeezed out through clenched teeth.
"The Imperial Truth. He wrote it himself. Promoted it himself. On every planet conquered during the Great Crusade, the first order of business was to overthrow the local religion. He once said to my face: 'I am not a god, and I never will be. Humanity's future relies on reason and science, not kneeling.'"
"And now, ten thousand years later, the entire Imperium has enshrined him as the greatest god of all."
Karen leaned against a pillar, arms folded across his chest.
"Ironic, isn't it? What makes it an even grimmer joke is that the Imperial Cult's doctrine is adapted from the Lectitio Divinitatus — written by your brother Lorgar. The Great Word Bearer rebelled over the Monarchia incident. If I were him, I'd have swallowed that one and moved on. He might've ended up Pope of the Imperial Cult. Really failed to see the bigger picture there."
Mentioning the Great Word Bearer reminded Karen of something almost funny.
During the Heresy, when Lorgar was ravaging Guilliman's Five Hundred Worlds, he came to one planet and found religious believers there. Believers who were worshipping based on the very Lectitio Divinitatus he himself had written.
They held a debate. Lorgar couldn't even out-argue the locals. He broke down and ordered his Legion to kill every living soul on the planet.
Lorgar really should have studied Sima Yi. Endurance. Just accepting things, holding firm. Who knows — you might've ended up Pope afterward.
"But you have to understand, the Imperial Cult isn't entirely bad. In an era full of Chaos gods and xenos, faith is the only spiritual pillar ordinary people have. Without it, the underhive wouldn't even have a reason to keep living. Uprisings everywhere would make the Imperium implode on the spot."
Horus's temples throbbed visibly.
He closed his eyes, let out a long breath, and forcibly suppressed his fury.
Then the ground split open.
No warning whatsoever.
The stone floor at the very center of the Sanctuary heaved violently upward, then shattered like an eggshell.
Dozens of malformed creatures surged from the fissure. Humanoid skeletal frames, but with limbs that had multiple extra joints, and heads deformed into beetle-like exoskeletal structures. Each one dragged a tail bristling with barbs.
Genestealers.
The screams of the faithful instantly drowned out the chanting.
The crowd scattered in every direction like a breached dam. The priest on the high platform had just gotten out half of "Emperor prote—" when a Genestealer's talon cleaved from his left shoulder to his right hip. He was torn in two, his blood splashing across the feet of the golden Emperor statue.
The lead one was different.
A Purestrain Genestealer Patriarch. More than twice the size of an ordinary Genestealer, with four talons, each as long as a grown man's forearm.
The instant it emerged from underground, it opened its fang-filled maw and unleashed a psychic shriek.
A shockwave radiated outward from it as the epicenter.
Karen's skull buzzed and exploded. Blood streamed immediately from his nose.
He staggered back two steps, catching himself on a pillar to avoid going down.
Horus merely tilted his head.
Primarch-grade mental fortifications. A mere Genestealer couldn't pry those open.
"Wait here."
He tore off the Cameleoline Cloak.
One step forward.
The stone floor at the Sanctuary entrance shattered beneath his foot. A three-and-a-half-meter bald giant stepped out of the shadows, bare torso covered in battle scars, every muscle looking as if cast from meteoric iron.
The Purestrain Patriarch showed some surprise at the sight, but still lunged.
All four talons struck out at once. The sound of claw tips slicing through air was sharp and piercing. Any mortal soldier wouldn't have had time to react.
Horus sidestepped.
Unhurried. Almost contemptuous.
His right fist punched out.
It struck the Patriarch square in its carapace chest. The entire torso expanded outward from the point of impact, then detonated.
Carapace fragments, viscera, and acidic fluid sprayed across half the wall in a radial burst.
One punch.
Just one.
Immediately after, seven more Genestealers pounced at the Wolf Herder God, trying to tear him apart.
Don't make your Wolf God laugh.
In another blink, all seven were torn in half by Horus's bare hands, as easily as ripping up scrap paper.
The remaining Genestealers let out terrified hisses and turned to flee back into the fissure.
Karen wiped the blood from his nose and urgently redeemed a meltagun from the system — 2,000 points. That stung.
He pulled the trigger repeatedly at the fleeing Genestealers. The melta beams hit their targets and instantly liquefied flesh. Three Genestealers were reduced to smoking char, collapsing among the rubble.
"As expected of a Primarch." Karen held the still-radiating barrel. "This fierce without even wearing armor."
"Things are secure from now on! With the Warmaster covering me, what enemies in the material universe do I even need to worry about?"
The Sanctuary fell silent.
Most of the candles had gone out. The Emperor statue's right arm had been severed during the melee and crashed down, crushing the front-row prayer pews.
Acrid smoke rose from pits corroded by acidic fluid. Everywhere lay rubble, severed limbs, and green Genestealer blood.
Surviving believers poked their heads out from behind the wreckage.
A little girl, her face smeared with blood and grime, staggered over.
She might have been five or six years old. Her clothes were so tattered they barely hung on her body, but her eyes were very large and very bright. She tilted her head up, gazing at Horus.
"Are you... an angel sent by the Emperor?"
Horus looked down at her.
The Wolf Herder God's lips moved. The sound in his throat caught.
Then he knelt on one knee.
His knee struck the rubble with a dull, heavy thud.
"I am no angel."
His voice was very soft.
"Just a man... who owes a great many debts."
The little girl cocked her head, not quite understanding. But she reached out a small, dirty hand and touched the back of Horus's hand.
The Wolf Herder God did not pull away.
Karen stood a few paces back, his nose stinging.
Not from the aftereffects of the psychic blast.
The system's tag for Horus read: Near-Death / Uncorrupted State.
The soul-node at the Davin moon altar. A time-slice from before the Chaos Gods' corruption had taken hold.
This was the true Lupercal.
Warm and refined yet sharp-edged. Proud, but not arrogant.
Aside from Guilliman the idealist, Karen couldn't think of anyone else who carried that quality. Maybe Jaghatai Khan.
A man like this deserved a second chance.
Karen holstered his gun, walked over, and clapped Horus on the shoulder, more accurately, on the lower back, since he couldn't reach the shoulder.
"Let's go. We can't stay here long."
Horus rose to his feet. He took one last look at the Emperor statue with its broken arm, then turned and followed Karen toward the exit.
They had barely walked a dozen paces.
Karen's footsteps stopped dead.
His gaze locked onto the system panel only he could see. A red warning he had never seen before was flashing frantically,
[High-intensity psychic signal detected scanning this area!]
[Signal signature match: Imperial Inquisition · Ordo Xenos · Psychic Tracking Protocol!]
[Estimated lock-on time: Ten minutes.]
Karen's face went pale.
Horus noticed.
"What is it?"
Karen swallowed and tucked the gun back at his waist.
"That Purestrain Patriarch didn't show up here for no reason. Someone was hunting it. We just killed someone else's prey for them."
He looked up at Horus, the urgency in his eyes impossible to hide.
"We're screwed. The Inquisition's coming to check our water meter. Ten minutes. We need to run."
➤ Next: The Undocumented Primarch Must Stay Low