Chapter Ninety: Battle Iron Man

Plasma and melta fire whirled through the air, all of it converging on the combat automaton. In an instant, it was engulfed by the blazing storm. The heat from the detonating plasma and melta washed past the travelers, and even through their power armor they could feel that horrifying temperature.

“Did we get it?” Wu Xuan stared at the smoke-choked blast door, trying to use the Dreadnought’s optical sensors to see whether the machine had been destroyed.

The moment he craned his neck to peer inside, a red beam lanced straight for his face. Unlike the laser cannons used by the security automata before, this thing actually melted the Dreadnought’s adamantium armor plate.

The beam punched straight through Wu Xuan, striking the flesh within the Dreadnought. What had once already reduced him to a mere torso was now left with nothing but his upper half.

“I only just got this Dreadnought repaired! You blasted it half to scrap with one shot!” Wu Xuan felt the absence of his lower body and saw the damage warning flashing on his tactical lenses. Enraged, he swung his power claw and charged.

This Dreadnought of his had been painstakingly completed by the First Engineer Company over the course of several months. He had only been driving it for a few months, and now it was broken again.

One had to understand that making a new Dreadnought for Wu Xuan’s type was a tremendous hassle. It had to be built entirely by hand by the First Engineer Company.

After his first one had been wrecked by Magnus, Wu Xuan himself had insisted on continuing to enter a Dreadnought. The First Engineer Company had originally wanted the convenience of simply stuffing him into a cast-iron pattern Dreadnought, but under Wu Xuan’s fierce opposition, they had no choice but to custom-build one for him.

“If this Dreadnought blows up again, then if you want another one, you’ll probably have to wait a few more months,” Xu Zheng, the captain of the First Engineer Company, had told him at the time.

Now Wu Xuan furiously charged the combat automaton that was about to rob him of the chance to drive a Dreadnought for months. He meant to tear it to pieces with his power claw.

The combat automaton turned toward the charging Wu Xuan. A shoulder-mounted cannon, similar to a plasma gun, snapped around and fired.

There was no sound. That sphere of deep-blue plasma struck like a drop of water, melting through the adamantium plate and reducing the flesh inside Wu Xuan to ash. Once the plasma entered the Dreadnought, it triggered an internal detonation as well.

The flames of the Dreadnought’s explosion filled the entire metal corridor. Shards from the blast slammed into the walls, the crackling rain of impacts never ceasing.

Wu Xuan’s death took less than a second. The travelers were dumbstruck. A Dreadnought forged of adamantium had been taken down so easily. And this was only one of them. If one was this strong, then what of the hundred others on this ship?

“Damn, and that was just one!”

Wang Ming stared at the wreckage of the Dreadnought, hefted his golden power sword, and charged the automaton, still marveling at its ferocity.

The combat automaton rotated the red-glowing camera lenses in its head to track Wang Ming. Wang Ming’s speed was now so great that even the travelers, as newly forged Space Marines, could no longer clearly follow him. Yet the automaton’s optics kept pace with him perfectly.

Just as Wang Ming was about to reach it, the automaton moved at last. A long blade flashing with a disintegration field sprang from its right arm as it rushed him, while the auxiliary thrusters on its back ignited, making it even faster than Wang Ming by a hair.

Wang Ming looked at the great iron lump rushing at him and held his golden greatsword across his waist, ready to bring down a sweeping cut once he was in range and split the thing in two.

When the combat automaton reached him, Wang Ming unleashed a horizontal slash. But it did not go as he had imagined, cleaving the automaton in half with a single stroke.

His sword was blocked by the power blade on the automaton’s arm, though not truly stopped. Wang Ming’s overwhelming strength still bent that arm out of shape.

The mechanical components inside the arm were forced loose by the deformation and flew outward, clattering to the floor with a string of metallic impacts that reached Wang Ming’s ears.

But by then Wang Ming’s full attention was fixed on the combat automaton. Its shoulder cannon was aimed squarely at his head. Seeing the blue glow gathering at the muzzle, Wang Ming did his utmost to raise the golden greatsword in front of his face.

The automaton fired its plasma at point-blank range against Wang Ming’s power sword. The plasma burst exploded upon the blade at zero distance, and Wang Ming’s vision was instantly flooded with blinding blue light.

Even with his sight obstructed, Wang Ming did not stop attacking the combat automaton. He slashed again toward where he remembered it standing. The strike was swift as lightning, but before it could land, the automaton used the auxiliary thrusters on its back to increase its speed and deftly evade the blow.

By the time Wang Ming recovered his vision, the combat automaton was already on him again. A power blade sprang from its left arm and stabbed straight for his head.

The automaton had clearly noticed that Wang Ming’s sight had just been impaired. Whether by its built-in combat systems or the AI controlling it, it had plainly exploited that opening for a surprise attack.

But for Wang Ming, this was also an opportunity. The automaton was already close enough. At that instant, the reaction speed of his Primarch-like body reached its peak. He snapped his head sharply to the right, while the power sword in his hand rose in a flash and, from beneath the automaton, split its body in two.

The combat automaton’s wreckage, severed by the power sword, collapsed to the floor. Still shaken, Wang Ming kicked the remains, sending them flying.

Just as he was about to tell the travelers to come over while he stepped inside the blast door to take a look, a burst of plasma suddenly shot out from within and struck his left shoulder plate.

Just as before, when it had punched through the Dreadnought’s adamantium plate, that plasma pierced Wang Ming’s shoulder armor, struck his shoulder, and exploded. His entire left arm was swallowed by the plasma burst, and both arm and attached power armor were instantly vaporized.

The agony made Wang Ming recoil at once. He was not about to take another hit like that.

As Wang Ming retreated, the travelers rushed forward. Seeing Wang Ming missing an arm, they each drew their power swords and prepared to charge into the blast door to avenge their leader.

“Brothers, charge them to death! For the Emperor!”

Wang Xiaofa looked at Wang Ming, who was also down an arm. Just as before, he grinned with malicious delight at Wang Ming’s misfortune, then took the lead and rushed into the room.

There were a thousand travelers aboard this time. The entire group flooded into the chamber. The instant they did, explosions erupted, the crackling of disintegration fields rang out, and the firing of unfamiliar weapons filled the room.

Flashes of detonations and all manner of fragments kept flying out from the chamber. Sitting on the floor, Wang Ming watched the hail of gunfire inside the blast door and took out several adamantium ingots. He pressed them against the damaged arm of his power armor, and the nanomachines rapidly broke down the repair materials to restore the armor.

Wang Ming gazed thoughtfully at the arm that had been burned by plasma down to a bare skeleton, and watched as flesh slowly began to regrow.

Looking at the tissue growing over the limb, Wang Ming began to ponder the system’s so-called trait of being undying and unextinguishable. He had died once already. That had been his first death. He had arrived in the Warp and seen the Emperor, and after a brief conversation the Emperor had slapped him back into the material universe with a surge of psychic power.

Now, with this limb-level injury, his body was once again displaying the traits of an immortal. That only deepened Wang Ming’s confusion about the system’s gift. Was it the Emperor who had resurrected him in the Warp? Did he possess the body of an immortal? Or was it something else entirely?

He had asked the travelers about it before, asking them what their own resurrection was like.

“After dying, my consciousness went all hazy. When I came to, I was revived at your side.”

That had been Wang Xiaofa’s answer at the time.

“Boss, how come you can regenerate too?”

Back in the present, Wang Xiaofa had just been hacked to pieces by a combat automaton’s power blade. Now he had revived beside Wang Ming, and seeing the arm Wang Ming was steadily restoring, he asked in curiosity.

“Maybe it’s some immortal tr—”

Wang Ming stood up and, while watching the battle inside the blast door, answered him. But before he could finish, Wang Xiaofa had already grabbed his power sword and charged back into the room, where the gunfire was still raging.

“I should have brought Hu Jin this time...”

Watching the fierce fighting within the blast door, Wang Ming could not help but sigh. He looked at the severed limbs, armor-clad fragments, and metal parts that kept flying out, and took a bottle of “Happy” brand soda to drink.

He was a resurrection beacon now. The travelers only had to keep charging. Wang Ming was their respawn point; once revived, they could keep going straight away. Your robots would run out sooner or later, but our huge Astartes brutes were endless.

Now let us look at the battle inside the room.

The travelers had already used a mobbing tactic to hack one powerful combat automaton after another into scrap iron. They were like fans at a concert, waving their glow sticks, their power swords, and swarming toward the star they adored.

Facing the locust-like horde of travelers, the AI in the ship’s computer core aboard the Starlight, along with the crew hiding there, had fallen into complete despair. These people were like something that could never be killed, fighting the combat automata without end.

As the crew stared at the scenes on the screen, watching one combat automaton after another be chopped to fragments, despair utterly consumed them. They knew they could no longer escape the fate of death.

Just then, after that complete collapse of hope, a voice suddenly appeared in their minds. It was brimming with temptation, filling their thoughts.

“Despairing? Want to live? Then believe in me. I will give you the power to survive. I will give you hope. Believe in me.”

As it had once tempted Darcy Oak, that entity appeared again when the crew’s defenses were at their weakest, using “hope” and “power” to draw them into faith.

The crew, trapped in despair, could naturally no longer dismiss these things as mere illusions as they had before. In their hopelessness they clutched at every last straw. They answered the voice, began to believe in the entity, and started to pray to it, seeking salvation and power.

The AI projection in the core looked at the crew members before it, each of them muttering prayers and words about gods and faith into the air, while clawing at their own skin and flesh or at those of others.

The AI aboard the Starlight did not understand. Had these humans not been perfectly normal just moments ago? How had they turned into this?

“Uh, Colonel Gore?”

The AI cautiously addressed its current commander.

A man rose from the mad crowd. His blood-soaked face wore a deranged smile as he looked at the AI’s holographic projection.

“What’s the situation, Lostin?”

He asked the AI. His voice was as hoarse and ragged as an old radio. Using the core’s cameras, the AI observed Colonel Gore. Around his neck was a hideous wound, freshly torn open by several crazed travelers and by his own hands.

The wound kept leaking blood, but he seemed utterly unfazed, speaking to Lostin through vocal cords that continued to bleed.

“Colonel Gore, are you and the others all right?” the AI asked, looking at the crew who continued to pray and mutilate themselves and one another.

“Fine! We’re better than fine! Never been better! Hahaha!”

Hearing the AI’s question, Gore answered while laughing madly. When he was done, he threw himself back into the crowd and resumed praying and offering sacrifice to that great existence.

The AI looked at the humans before it, its CPU endlessly calculating the data. From the travelers’ senseless slaughter after boarding, to Darcy Oak’s mutation, and now to this present state, it combined the evidence and seemed to understand why the travelers had been slaughtering the crew.

There was something wrong with the people aboard this ship. In truth, the AI had noticed the changes in them long ago: bodies growing distorted, minds becoming inexplicably excited and then inexplicably listless, unconscious acts of self-harm, and so on.

The AI had noticed these things for a long time. It was only that both its database and the ship’s doctors had explained them away as some kind of mental illness caused by prolonged exposure to the Warp.

Now the AI finally understood. These humans were not behaving this way because of some ordinary mental disorder. Something far more eerie was influencing them, little by little.