Warhammer 40: Shattered Steel Soul

Chapter 411 Back and forth

"The existence of sin does not depend on the voluntary or active consent of the will: as if there is no sin as long as the will does not admit its own sin." - "The Book of Lorgar"

Lion El'Jonson followed the Second Primarch in the corridor of the Queen of Glory. Occasionally, Space Marines walked past him along the way, giving him looks that were more fearful than respectful.

He cared little for these warriors: if they were real, he would not get a finger hurt even if every Space Marine in the corridor rushed at him at once; if they were a figment of some psychic power, then the Primarch before him would be the heart of it all.

The corridor seemed to stretch endlessly, and the light and temperature remained stable.

Leon frowned quietly, realizing that after he memorized the scents of dozens of Space Marines, the scents of more warriors around him became less distinguishable. This gave him a warning of crisis, causing a slight pain in his brow.

"Where are we going?" the lion asked coldly, listening to the slight metallic sound of his scabbard hitting the dark leg armor. Again, this was no different from any detail in his memory.

Duncan turned around and said, "Meeting room?"

The lion nodded indifferently, glancing over Duncan's entire body. He was wearing a robe like a wilderness traveler, covering his shoulders to his ankles, revealing a pair of tan leather gloves on his wrists and a pair of suede boots on his feet. He revealed very few details, and this caution itself was enough to be suspicious.

He deliberately rubbed the sword out of the scabbard again, making the sound of metal friction clearly audible. In an instant, almost all the Space Marines in the surrounding corridors turned their helmets towards him.

"It's okay." The Second Primarch calmed everyone with one word, "The First Primarch can be trusted."

"Can I trust you?" Leon asked. "You're not going to attack me?"

"Of course." Duncan replied simply, raising the corner of his mouth. "You guys are fighting outside, even if it's just for us to get rescued, I will believe you."

Leon narrowed his eyes and let the sword slide naturally back to where it should be.

"Nice to meet you, Duncan Elho." He added a little softening to his cold voice, which he was forced to learn before he could truly understand human emotions. The jungle relies on fighting for survival, but human society does not.

Duncan responded with equal joy, his eyes seeming to light up slightly at this possible spark of trust.

"Oh, me too," he whispered, "Lion El ..."

Then, the Lion extended his left hand to the Second Primarch, waiting for Duncan's handshake.

The second Primarch's complexion, which had just improved, suddenly became a little strange, even a little tired, Leon thought. A burning and consumption of patience.

"You still don't believe me," Duncan concluded, his earlier smile disappearing in an instant.

He still responded to his handshake, his hand wrapped in tan leather was completely cold and as icy as ice.

Leon held the other's hand tightly, refusing to let go, feeling the direction of the bones of the hand. Something was wrong, he thought - no, this hand had been reconnected twice.

"Why?" Duncan said. "Did I offend you?"

Lion held the second Primarch's hand tightly until the expression on the other side began to change, and a hint of vivid emotion appeared on the tired, slightly dark face - anger, but not pain.

"Let go." Duncan frowned, staring at him with dark eyes. The wound on his neck had just healed a little and began to bleed again. "It's not that I won't be angry, Lion El'Jonson. We saved you from the universe, but we can't even get a word of thanks?"

The lion looked at him, and then spoke, his voice as low as the growl of a wild animal: "Let's fight, my brother."

"Why?" Duncan asked again.

But Lion El'Jonson had leapt to his feet and pressed down on the unprepared Second Primarch with his bare hands, pressing his shoulders to the corridor and pulling him up with his knees, and as he bent unconsciously from the blow to the abdomen, he pressed down savagely on the Primarch's back with his elbows.

The second Primarch reacted immediately after being surprised, blocked his attack, and once again increased his psychic power, trying to hold Lion in place. Lion howled, unable to tell whether the roar from his mouth was the roar of a lion or the cry of a wild wolf in his memory.

Sometimes Ruth is right, and a fight will solve sixty percent of the world's problems.

He summoned the psychic energy he had accumulated during his walk and pushed it outward angrily, like a raging fire burning from his skeleton and internal organs. Wings of Fire, he thought, six-winged celestial army, the Emperor's hunter.

The indoor environment fluctuated violently due to the psychic contest between the two sides. The furnishings on the cabinets in the corridor fell to the ground one after another. The sound of shattering glass was everywhere. Each sound seemed to be the explosion of some kind of soul, crackling, tearing a cold and dark line on the edge of human will.

"Why!" Duncan shouted, "Why on earth do you doubt me?"

He seemed almost desperate and sad, and this obsession with communication gave Lion the opportunity to hit him hard in the chest and ribs, causing something to crack and break inside the Second Primarch.

The other Space Marines around tried in vain to join the Primarch's fight and protect their Gene-Father, but were easily knocked away and kicked away by the lion one after another, like weak small animals being expelled, and cried out in pain.

Leon turned a deaf ear to all the noise. He focused everything on the battle. His blood was as hot as lava, burning his muscles, making his consciousness clearer and suppressing the painful damage to his untrained brain caused by the fluctuations of psychic confrontation.

He grinned and let out a low hissing growl from between his teeth, continuing his swift attacks with a series of continuous punches hitting the Second Primarch's body, tearing apart the psychic protection with his bare hands, until the opponent lost his balance, then he suddenly drew his sword again, swinging his hand and stabbing the long sword into the Second Primarch's armpit and side.

No blood.

The sword reached into the air.

No, not air, there was a real object there, but it was too fragile for the Lion King's sharp blade, so the curtain was easily torn apart.

Everything in front of him was like a painting that had been split apart, splitting in the direction of the sword and falling to the sides. The corridor twisted and spun, and the Primarchs and Space Marines all melted into the vortex of the picture. The storm of psychic energy howled wildly, and the terrifying aftermath swept towards the entire world fiercely.

In that brief, heart-beating moment, Lion El'Jonson vaguely saw another scene - short, blurry, not enough to be clearly identified, and as chaotic as a fog covered by his heavy breathing.

A man, a Primarch, looked up at him, his dark eyes like rusty black knives, sad and painful, reflecting a fleeting light in an instant.

His face was the only clear and bright part. From the shoulders down, the Primarch's body was tightly bound by countless arms, fingers digging into his flesh like thick hooks, blood dripping from the broken nails, falling into the darkness in all directions, swallowed by the cold and boundless blackness.

"No——" A breath came out from the Primarch's dry lips. It was like a crucial code, a key to open a mysterious door. Lion El'Jonson felt the darkness under his feet suddenly crack, causing him to fall freely, and his consciousness was deprived in the process.

...a kind of sadness that comes and goes, and goes away as soon as it is touched...

…What is my name? Who am I? Our respective names?
The moment Lion El'Jonson regained consciousness, he drew his sword and pointed it at the throat of the man standing in front of him, with the tip of the sword penetrating half an inch.

Opposite him, a face with similar features to his was facing him, and his eyes were so sad.

Who is this? Leon thought, they are of the same blood.

"Are you Lion El'Jonson?" The Primarch took the initiative and asked tiredly, forcing a polite smile: "Nice to meet you, I am the Second Primarch, Duncan Aihe."

A trickle of bright red blood flowed from the second Primarch's throat along the sharp blade like a tear, staining the deep red ruby ​​inlaid on the sword.

-

"Ah!" Jack shouted, attracting the attention of his fighting brothers. Although a second later, everyone's attention was drawn away by the surrounding battle. They raised grenade launchers and other weapons such as snake guns, and banged away the various Randan alien creatures that pounced on them.

On the Silver Angels' base planet, they have maintained the purity of their species very well, and most of the attackers are just Silver Angels of varying sizes.

Of course, the homogeneity of the species has nothing to do with whether they are easy to deal with. The Silver Angels are the most team-oriented alien family on the entire Randan front. Fighting them always gives commanders a headache, and some of them may even change their hairstyles.

But as the Luna Wolves approached the area indicated by Jack, the surrounding enemy environment changed significantly. The species richness increased rapidly, and all kinds of hairless birds and scaly monkeys began to rush out from the flesh and blood land.

Jack howled just now, and was suddenly bitten to death by a legionnaire - well, a dark angel. Jack recognized the dark smell on them, and he suddenly received a very fresh memory of the Dark Angel.

This really stimulated Jack's heart, and he still had phantom pain in his waist.

But really, that's not the point, nor is it what's causing Jack to try to figure out what he's seeing while trying to avoid being killed by distraction in battle.

The golden hair on top of the purple robe. Jack thought, scratching a small yellow-haired thing that flew towards his face. He could not mistake that huge, majestic head, Lion El'Jonson, he really had passed by here before.

He immediately sent the message to the channels of squad leaders and above to ensure the timeliness of the information. Not long after, another Moon Wolf howled miserably. Fresh memories are more stimulating than old dreams.

"East," Jack recalled the direction he saw Lion El'Jonson heading. The team immediately adjusted their direction and closely followed the target they needed to find.

Before my eyes, a relatively flat and low bone mountain was slightly raised on the plain. It was about tens of kilometers long and slightly narrow in width. It looked like a layer of skin with a few layers of flesh stuffed inside, and then a layer of bone armor on the outside, and then wrapped with some boiling hot air. It was sloppy and casual, and everything seemed so hurried.

Gunshots rang out one after another as Jack searched for a foothold among the bone structures on the ground, crushing some of the brittle bones and stepping over others that were too large.

The bone structure here reminded him of the rib plates of a Space Marine, which covered each other to form a natural layer of hard armor to protect the flesh and internal organs underneath.

After a while, he confirmed that this was not a guess - this was an enlarged version of the Astartes' ribs, even the number of bones was exactly the same. Well, who doesn't know that some of the Randan angels came from the Second Legion?
This was an accepted fact from the moment Horus ran into a few Luna Wolves discussing this matter, but they were not reprimanded by the Wolf God.

Suddenly, he fell into a new memory. This fragment was more vivid than any other fragment he had ever had. It was more like a branding iron engraved in his memory. Its mere existence made his brain ache.

But strangely, he saw nothing in this memory except a blank scene of flesh and blood wriggling. Jack was confused, but his intuition told him that he couldn't let go of this precious information easily.

He stepped back slightly, letting his comrades protect his back, and tentatively used part of his energy to explore this particularly uncomfortable psychic fragment. He had never been so eager to play with psychic power in his life - he was one of those people who followed the caliber of the Empire and was always unhappy with psychic power.

Then, he saw it. His vision spanned a thousand meters and he found the side of the Bone Mountain in front of him. A notch on the edge that looked like a growing black mold proved to be a narrow passage leading into the interior of the Bone Mountain. The rolling hot air coiled around the middle of the mountain, and the gray-yellow fog was like a mist made of ghosts, blocking a clearer observation.

Right at that entrance, a dark speck that looked so small from a distance, a figure wielding a sword, fighting endlessly with a whole nest of enemies, once stood on the edge of Broken Bone Mountain.

His blond hair reflected such a tiny glimmer of gold that it was only for the briefest of blinks that the angled silver edge of the sword was visible.

"There--" Jack blurted out, then calmed himself and described in detail the location of the place he saw.

After a brief memory fragment, the Dark Angel who had been where he was shot forward like a bomb or a hunter's arrow, running out of this place at a very fast speed, just like running out of his body, chasing Lion El'Jonson away in the distance.

Jack was thrown out of memory fragments dizzily and fell back to the present reality. He still didn't understand why such a small clue could cause the Dark Angel such a headache, as if a hot nail pierced into his head, and wet and hot blood was still flowing out...

Oh, he knew, Jack thought, and the truth made him feel a little helpless for some reason.

It was not the Dark Angel that was in pain, but himself, Jack, who had no name in Cosonia and had casually given himself a simple name while queuing up in front of the recruiting officer and chatting with other candidates. His own brain was aching.

His helmet gave him a series of emergency warnings, telling him that part of his temporal lobe was nearly pierced by a bone spur, and that he was being urgently injected with drugs to maintain his condition.

Fortunately, he has always had excellent luck, and this minor injury is far from enough to take his life. It may just cause some minor problems with his language and memory.

Well, he admitted it, he shouldn't have been distracted during a battle. It must have been the work of a weird spider angel that had just jumped onto his neck. If he hadn't been trying to track down those memories, he wouldn't have made such a careless mistake.

He ran forward with the soldiers, and an unlucky brother fell down at his feet. This time they brought a group of pharmacists to deal with the aftermath, so Jack just moved his brother slightly to the side with his feet to prevent him from being accidentally stepped on by the soldiers coming from behind.

He didn't know if it was his illusion, but he felt that the temperature around him had risen again. The environment near the Bone Mountain was hotter than other places. He didn't know if this place was once a crater or something. There was a special, dim and dull light flashing everywhere, and moist blood soaked into their outer armor, flowing continuously, as if something had condensed into substance.

Suddenly, an extremely strong wave of psychic energy mixed with grief came crashing down like thunder, twisting the earth between the cracks of the world. Everything was turning over and reshaping, and even worse excruciating pain grabbed him and pinned him to the ground.

A rare panic rose in Jack's heart. He shouted in the communication channel, trying to wake up other battle brothers who were also knocked down and more sensitive to psychic energy.

No one responded.

(End of this chapter)