Seraphs of the Emperor’s Judgment

Chapter 221: The Mysterious Stranger

There were over two hundred steps leading up to the temple. The squad encountered no resistance along the way; the entire structure was deathly silent.

Upon passing through the colossal gateway carved with leering gargoyles, the first thing to greet their eyes was an absolutely massive statue of a raven. Pitch-black from beak to tailfeathers, with eyes as crimson as fresh blood, the raven had its head reared back and its wings fully spread, making it look as though it might launch into the sky at any given moment. Beneath its monstrous talons lay a mountain of severed skulls, the vast majority of which were clearly misshapen, xenos craniums.

"Iron."

Armin stepped forward, rapped his knuckles against the statue, and delivered his verdict.

"To prevent a repetition of what just happened, only Soshyan and I will proceed inside. The rest of you string out and secure the entrance. Let no one in or out."

Sol suddenly announced this decision, which utterly surprised Soshyan.

It wasn't the tactical soundness of the decision that surprised him, but rather the fact that Sol had never before presumed to issue orders on his behalf. Today, however, the veteran was acting uncharacteristically dominant.

The other warriors immediately looked to Soshyan. He nodded, signaling his agreement with Sol's tactical deployment.

After that, Soshyan and Sol stepped past the statue and into a corridor wide enough for two Land Raiders to drive abreast.

It was incredibly dark inside—an unnatural, suffocating darkness. It felt as though they were wading through thick, viscous ink, forcing them to rely entirely on their helmets' auto-senses just to detect movement within a few meters.They advanced for over a hundred meters without encountering anything, until the pair passed through a heavy stone archway.

The moment they crossed the threshold, faint threads of light began to trace along the walls. Soshyan's augurs indicated this light carried localized, trace amounts of radiation.

It was a double-edged sword, but at the very least, his visual clarity vastly improved. Being able to physically see their surroundings saved them from the arduous task of blindly fumbling through the gloom.

But the more he analyzed his surroundings, the heavier the knot of confusion in his gut grew.

Viewing the temple's main structure from the outside, it had been glaringly obvious that the exterior stonework was crude, roughhewn by hand. The outer corridors and walls had been uneven, completely lacking the precise, uniform cuts of heavy machinery.

But now, the pitted, uneven flooring and jagged rock walls had entirely vanished. Through the soles of his boots, Soshyan could feel the decking possessed a rhythmic, perfectly uniform slope, smooth to the touch. The stone walls were polished to a mirror's sheen.

An environment like this could absolutely only be the result of advanced machineries. Yet whether this had been achieved through painstaking engineering over a vast period of time, or forged instantly through some darker, far more malevolent Power of the Warp, was impossible to determine.

Eventually, they arrived at a descending stairwell.

The stairs were just wide enough for the two Astartes to descend side-by-side, but they lacked handrails entirely. Soshyan accidentally kicked a loose stone over the edge, listening as it clattered and clicked against unseen walls before fading into a seemingly bottomless abyss of darkness.

Without a doubt, this was a suspended causeway, hanging precariously over a chasm.

But having come this far, turning back wasn't an option. After a brief discussion, Soshyan took the point position with Sol covering their rear, advancing in a standard staggered formation to cover each other's blind spots.

Throughout the descent, Soshyan remained constantly vigilant, half-expecting the shadow-assassin to launch a sudden ambush, utilizing any conceivable method to exact revenge upon them.

However, the attacker never materialized, leaving the two Astartes to simply march steadily downward.

After a while, Soshyan suddenly realized that perhaps their heavy, ceramite footfalls were merely being masked by a sound drifting up from below.

It was singing. A woman's singing voice echoed up from the abyss. The melody rose and fell, ebbing and flowing like the tide of a vast ocean, and the surrounding stone seemed to be deeply saturated with the sound.

Complex, interwoven harmonies twined together. Soshyan realized this wasn't an auditory hallucination; it was a genuine choral arrangement.

He vaguely recognized the style... he'd heard something similar within Astropathic choirs.

"Why would the song of an Astropath choir be echoing down here?"

"We'll find out once we reach the bottom."

Detecting an odd tenseness in Sol's tone, Soshyan glanced back, but he could only see the portions of the veteran's silver-grey armor illuminated by the ambient glow, and those utterly black eye-lenses staring unblinkingly back at him.

"Very well."

After descending for over a hundred more steps, Soshyan's boots finally struck solid, level ground.

They had breached the temple's interior sanctum, or rather, its lowest depths.

It was equally dark here, but he could faintly detect the low hum of electrical current and the rhythmic, thumping echoes of heavy piston pumps. Soshyan also caught the distinct, metallic scent of ozone.

And, unsurprisingly, the moment they hit the landing, the singing immediately ceased.

"Hold on, vox-communications are being jammed."

Soshyan attempted to hail the squad holding the entrance, only to find the link dead.

Just then, a dry, rattling chuckle echoed from the darkness, immediately followed by a sibilant whisper.

"Why have you come here?"

"We are here to protect the territory and citizens of the Imperium."

Knowing the speaker was close, Soshyan advanced several paces toward the source of the voice. Bolter raised and ready, he angled the blade of his sword slightly to the side to parry any sudden strike.

He pushed his helmet's auto-senses to the absolute limit, his eyes constantly darting, piercing the gloom, tracking even the faintest atmospheric disturbance and scouring the floor for any usable tracks.

It was only then he noticed the area was littered with heavy machinery, and thick bundles of cabling and pipes lined the walls; it looked like a miniaturized manufactorum.

The voice echoed again a moment later, this time sounding paradoxically further away.

"Which Chapter do you hail from?"

Suddenly, a faint scrape, as soft as a breath, scratched across his aud-receptors. Soshyan instantly spun on his heel, his finger tightening on the trigger while whipping his blade upward.

In that exact split-second, a gleaming claw lunged for Soshyan's chest, the pale light of the cavern illuminating Soshyan's snarling visage.

Amidst the swirling vortex of detonating bolt rounds and buzzing blue arcs of disruption lightning, one set of claws swept across the Holy Flame Sword, batting the blade aside, while the second set lashed directly over Soshyan's face, drawing a fresh spray of blood from his brow.

Then, the entity vanished once more, exactly like a ghost fading into the mist.

Soshyan felt hot blood trailing down his right cheek. He pivoted again, holding his sword perfectly level.

"Have you lost your tongue?"

Soshyan brutally suppressed the instinctive urge to turn toward the voice, guessing it was a deliberate feint.

As the cutting gale rushed him again, combat instinct took over. He immediately swept his blade in a vicious arc to the right.

Yet he struck nothing but air, burying the tip of his sword nearly half a meter deep into the solid stone floor.

Just as Soshyan wrenched the blade free, that abhorrent, freezing touch ghosted against the back of his neck once more.

But this time, he was saved by another blade.

The Hatred of Solomon bloomed with brilliant, lethal grace in the darkness, violently banishing the bone-deep chill from Soshyan's neck. Before he could react, Sol's blurring form and the unknown entity vanished simultaneously into the gloom.

"Hah!"

Soshyan drew a deep breath, violently ripping his sword entirely from the stone.

Turning around, he heard the frantic, ceaseless ringing of metal clashing against metal echoing from the darkness, accompanied by the occasional eruption of brilliant sparks.

In those split-second flashes of illumination, Soshyan saw Sol, wielding twin blades, locked in combat with a towering figure draped in a black cowl. He also caught glimpses of the deadly talons striking from the shadows—a pair of massive Genestealer claws, surgically bolted directly onto the attacker's forearms.

As the massive figure lunged and retreated, Soshyan also realized the black 'cowl' was actually a billowing cloak that flared out like wings. Fashioned entirely from the flayed skin of Genestealers, the permanently twisted, abhorrent visages of the xenos were clearly visible woven into the macabre garment.