issar Ciaphas was a uded Hero of the Imperium. One of, if not the most famous and iial one currently alive. Imperial propaganda had spread word of his deeds far and wide, and food reason. For a man who had only his sword, spistol and charisma to rely on, he had survived some enters Astartes would have fallen in.

  He was also suffering from a severe case of impostor syndrome, a result of his entire career being built upon the ‘fake it till you make it’ mentality. Which was kinda funny sidering all the crazy stuff he’d survived.

  To the Imperium, he truly was the epitome of a patriotic hero every young guardsman should aspire to imitate. He himself was likely his owest critique though, never believing a single word of the praise sent his way to be deserved.

  As far as I khough, he was retired and living out the st few decades of his life on the p of Perlia after nearly three turies of service to the Imperial Guard. So, what was he doing here? Perlia was oher side of the Tau Empire, beyond the Damocles Gulf that housed its border with the Imperium.

  It was clear from his few fragments of thoughts I’d subsciously caught that he would rather be fag an argant han spend another minute on this p.

  Sounded like a fun story. A perfect distra.

  Also … I held myself back from narrowing my eyes lest he somehow caught wind of a much darker idea popping into my head.

  Fate was something I still couldn’t be sure was real. If it was, it was a fair bitch to both me and this poor man it led before me. Because, what better way was there to test whether Fate and plot-armour was real than to try killing the man who seemed to be saved by both every other day.

  Every single novel I’d read with him as the main character, he survived mostly through dumb lud a handy little pocket-Bnk that followed him around.

  Could I kill him, or would Fate somehow save him by some extremely unlikely happenstance, just because he was a ‘named character’? Would a meteor nd on top of my head? Would the Bnk w as his attache somehow give me enough of a problem to allow him a small window to escape?

  I was just dying to figure out the ao all those questions.

  “Provide a distra, is it?” He chuckled. “What kind?”

  Nuh-uh. I thought, barely holding back a rueful roll of my eyes at the suggestive edge that entered his tone. I’m taken. Not that you o know that.

  “Stories, maybe?” I offered, my gaze jumping down knowingly at his scarred arm and the the barely visible holster at his hip, hidden under a baggy overcoat. “I’m sure you’ve collected quite a bit. You don’t seem like the kind to live a b life.”

  “I’m afraid the kind of stories I have aren’t fit for this atmosphere,” he said with a sad shake of his head. “Nothing ruins your appetite quite like hearing what a dead man smells like.”

  “’t be much worse than that tea you’re drinking,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “And I live without the gritty details … tell you what! I’m sure you haven’t heard the news, but I’d bet you’d find the little tidbit I’d heard iing. The whole capital is in turmoil, it’s dht chaos over there. You tell me a fun story and I tell you all about what’s happening over there?”

  “Chaos … ?” He mumbled, and I could almost hear the panic arms going off in his head as he rubbed his palms on his thighs. “What kind?”

  “Nuh-uh.” I waggled my finger before his face. “Fun story first. Like … how about the story of how you ended up all the way over on this backwater p?”

  “By hitg a ride on a voidship of course,” he said with fake calm, and the only reason I didn’t believe his charming smile was that I could feel his emotions. “Thought it would be a nice, calm pce to retire.”

  “That wasn’t much of a story, was it?” I tsked, giving him a mild gre before letting up. “Oh, well. I’ll take some pity on you. Some strange monster fought a floating sorcerer right outside the royal pa the capital. Hundreds died in the crossfire and apparently half a dozen city blocks had been levelled. Some say the Eternal Queen was among the victims.”

  “A strange monster?” He asked, swallowing slowly.

  I rolled my eyes as if to let him know I was indulging him just this once. “Yep. A t humanoid creature, described as both beautiful and horrid to look at in the few moments when it was moving slow enough to be seen by a bystander.”

  I almost let out a giggle as his face went pastel white, his thoughts devolving into panic. Thanks to that though, I caught a tiny s of curious information.

  It was just a brief fsh of worry that stood out from the rest only because it was not worry aimed at himself, but at another. His on-and-off again girlfriend, who also happeo be an Inquisitor.

  I raised an eyebrow and dug in ever so gently, and caught another s of information. The woman was in the capital, and had gone radio silent just about when I had sent Val down to deal with the daemon prince.

  Did we actually do anything to the media and unicatioworks? Hmmmm. I didn’t remember it, but it ossible Val did something or that Zedev found it prudent to fry it from orbit.

  This p had space travel after all, so the fact that what happened in the capital wasn’t all over their loews was surprising. It would have been even more surprising if they had no global news reports.

  ‘Look what I found!’ I tugged at the telepathid I had with Selene, pushing through the sight of the panig man before me. ‘A Hero of the Imperium in the flesh.’

  ‘He looks familiar?’ Sele back musingly, with a hint of a question at the end.

  ‘issar Caiphas ,’ I sent, putting a tle cap and the red sash characteristic of their offi the mental image I was transmitting. ‘Seems like something iing was happening on this p even before we got here. I’m going to py around a bit to figure out what exactly.’

  ‘Please do take some time away to talk with Valenith,’ Selene asked in a weary tone. ‘He’s been sulking … well, he calls it meditation, but you know what I mean. And do something with your experiments! I don’t want that weird monkey of yours blowing up the ship while you bully that poor man.’

  ‘I’m not going to bully him.’ I huffed. ‘Okay. I’ll hahe rest … through a drone.’

  ‘Good enough,’ Selene sighed. ‘And don’t take too long … ‘

  ‘I won’t.’ I sent reassuringly, sending happy thoughts aions through the bond. ‘I promise. I won’t disappear for a month again. I’ll either be ba a day or two, or I’ll somehow get you involved in the fun.’

  ‘Alright.’ Selene said ruefully. ‘Have fun.’

  ‘I will!’ I sent, thehe e dim after a quick round of goodbyes.

  was on his feet as I came back to the present, trying to sculpt an apologetic expression on his face as he said. “My si apologies, but I’m afraid I must go. We will have to tihis versation some other time.”

  “You still owe me a story though,” I said, and was about to e up with an excuse to tag along with him, wherever he nning to go to meet up with the rest of his cohort, but for once luck was on my side. I had to hide the rueful grin behind an i smile as I felt scores of slightly tainted souls followed by a handful of actual daemons speeding dowreet just outside the cafe.

  I swept over them with my aura and saw the lot of them ride in a small voy of vehicles. I’d have called them vans, or jeeps, but they weren’t really either. They were also loaded up with more explosives than a whiment would need in a year. Gently, I sent some telepathiudges into every civilian’s mind within a kilometre of me to get away from the cafe and hide iheir houses.

  It was taxing, but I’d been training my psychic power to allow for more trolled applications of it. I wasn’t a brute. Even if I brute forced the mental tration part of the requirements with my thousand mind-cores, nobody had to know that.

  I sent out questing tendrils of my aura further across the p and found simir ses pying out in some of the rger poputiores. The cultists left behind were being sore losers by the looks of it, and pnned on going balls to the walls on scorched-earth tactics.

  That was less than ideal if I really wahe popution of this po bey citizens, so that would have to go. Plus, I would have been an eveer hypocrite to allow civilians to die when I could stop it from happening with fairly little effort than I already was.

  With a slight grimace, I made a drohat looked exactly like my Avatar and quickly switched it out with myself as I Blinked back to the ship with my Avatar. That drone would do its best to stick to the issar while I hahe cultist outbreaks, and I’d retake its pce that was done. I didn’t see it taking all that long with no Greater Daemons among the attackers as far as I could tell.

  Not that those things usually just popped up out of nowhere. Rituals to summoook exorbitant sacrifices to facilitate, and anything of the sort wouldn’t have slipped past my attention.

  *****

  Life was such a fragile thing, a single mistake or a moment’s hesitation could put ao ohat had sted turies. It didn’t matter that he had survived Orks charging at him by the hundreds, that he had snuck through a waking Ne Tomb and nor did it matter that he had fought off traitor Astartes and a Warboss with just his sword.

  If took just a single seore to spot the vehicle rolling dowreet, or more accurately, the idiot dressed in vibray clothes leaning out its side with a s-rifle held in her hands, he would have died then and there. Right in the doorframe of a quaint little cafe on a backwater world on the very edges of the known gaxy.

  As it was, his instincts fred up the moment he saw the round barrel of the sgun. It was never a good sign when you could see into its dark belly, it usually meant the on was aimed right at you. He just had a moment to catch a bright e light blossom in the barrel before he threw himself on the ground.

  The familiar hiss of the sbolt flying past his head reached his ears, along with the smell of burnt hair. That was far, far too close for fort.

  He would never really call what he did ‘scampering bato the cafe on all fours’, rather, it was a tactical repositioning of himself while keeping his tre of mass strategically close to the ground. That sounded much better, even if it essentially meant the same thing.

  Baside, he watched another few sbolts fly in through the open door and sptter across the back wall, scorg fist-sized holes into it. Gss shattered around him as the bolts struck the front windows and all the remaining ers inside screamed in fright.

  By some astronomical luone of them got hit. Not even the beautiful white-haired woman he had been chatting with just moments ago despite one bolt smashing the chair she’d been sitting on into smouldering fragments.

  He once agaiertaihe thought that she was that Sorceress-turned-Daemon-Prin disguise that had been trying to eat his soul for a better part of a tury.

  He dismissed the thought again, catg the woman huddling uhe table with a fearful expression on her face. Emily would never have acted like that. That woman had a p’s worth of pride even when she was just a mortal Sorceress. It had only gotten worse when she ‘asded’ into that horrid monstrosity she now was.

  His back pressed up against the wall of the cafe which was blessedly built of bricks and not wood, hastily extracted his spistol from its holster and pressed the -bead hidden in a pocket into his ear.

  He only heard statibsp;

  He allowed himself only a sed to ment his fate and curse his past self freeing to this ‘little excursion’ as Amberly had called it before he huffed in a quick breath. His eyes snapped open and fixated on the door leading into the babsp;

  He had to get the frak out of here and quick. If those lunatics had a Krak missile uncher — with his luck being as it always was, he was sure they did — he o get out of here yesterday if he didn’t want to be blown into a hundred bloody bits.

  How he was going to get back to the safe house with the cultists hunting him, he had no idea, but he would have to do it somehow. The alternative was death or being stu this backwater while the others fled.

  Something had gone horrendously wrong in the capital if what that woman had said was true. Her story didn’t sound feasible, but if it was, the p’s entire cultist popution was about to start running amok like a bunch of headless chis.

  He had to either get off the p, or hide somewhere to wait it out.

  Grimag as another sbolt struck the wall he had been hiding behind, he psyched himself up and unched into a croug sprint for the back door. He just hoped his luck would hold out for long enough to see him to safety one more time.

  P3t1