The roar reached them before the sight did.
From inside the cockpit, Nolan watched through the viewport as the thing below transford. What had stood on the foundry floor like a dormant statue now erupted into motion, Antarctic vibranium limbs extending outward in four pairs, the chassis rising and reconfiguring into a low, wide-legged shooting platform. Hatches along its flanks snapped open one after another, and Whirlwind missiles climbed free of their racks in rapid succession, their exhaust trails crossing the air in pale streaks before arcing down toward the battlefield below.
The Kastellan ch t them head-on. Sage Neil had clearly done sothing to it, modified its balance or its response circuits, because it moved faster than a Knight of that pattern had any right to. It read the missile trajectories before they arrived, shifting its mass and sweeping both power sickles in wide deflecting arcs while driving forward into the wall of automatic servo robots surrounding Reditus's creation. tal rang against tal. Laser beams cut across the foundry floor in competing directions. Debris scattered across the wet earth in glittering waves.
It looked, Nolan thought, exactly like a civil war between two factions of the Adeptus chanicus. Which was precisely what it was.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Each detonation lit the scene below in brief orange pulses, the rising firelight catching the bronze of Nolan's face as he watched without expression. A corner of his mouth pulled into sothing that was not quite a smile.
"David," he said, not turning his head, "is this the 'minor friction' you ntioned? Because from where I'm standing, both sides are trying to kill each other."
He did not wait for an answer.
His hand found the vibranium helt on the cabin wall and pulled it down, the seal locking around his neck with a firm click. The Warscythe followed, lifted free of its mount with one smooth motion. He held it at his side, looked at the battlefield once more, and then activated his magnetic boots.
Dong. Dong. Dong.
The hatch opened beneath him and Nolan stepped off the edge without hesitation, the boots pulling him forward into a steep, controlled drop toward the ground below.
He was a long way up. He used the fall.
The Ten Rings left his forearms in a spreading orbit, ten bands of tal shimring with purple energy, rotating in overlapping paths around his body and stacking beneath his boots in rapid succession, shaving speed from the descent in asured intervals. The foundry floor ca up fast. He let the last ring catch his weight at the final mont, and his magnetic boots drove down into the mud with a sound like a hamr strike.
Shrapnel and broken machine parts crunched under the impact. The wet earth held the impression of each boot. He straightened, pulled the Warscythe from the magnetic lock on his power pack, and felt the faint green energy along its blade sharpen as it cleared its housing.
He looked up through his eyepiece. The Kastellan ch was already turning toward him.
He turned faster.
The Warscythe ca around in a single flat arc and caught the Kastellan through its midsection. The decomposition field did not even need a second pass. The heavy Knight fra buckled at the cut, tipped sideways under its own mass, and fell into the mud with a shuddering crash that shook the ground beneath his feet.
He was already moving.
The Ten Rings ca off his forearms and surged forward in a tight column of rotating violet light, crossing the distance to Sage Neil in less than a second. The impact was precise: the toothed power axe in her grip shattered at the haft, pieces spinning away into the dark, and the chanical arm at her side buckled and went dead, sparks jumping from the severed connections.
He didn't look to see if she fell.
He gripped the Warscythe with both hands and lowered his head and charged.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
The servo robots in his path had nowhere to go and no ti to adapt. The Warscythe moved through them the way a blade moves through paper, each one dropping in two or three pieces before it could even redirect its targeting. He crossed the width of the battlefield in seconds, the formation dissolving around him, and ca to a stop in front of Reditus's construction.
"Lord Primarch! Spare my life! Don't dismantle it! Please, don't dismantle it! Do you know how long this took to build?"
The servo skull's voice ca from sowhere inside the machine, thin with distress. Nolan heard it clearly through his helt.
He raised the Warscythe and cut.
The blade went in three tis before the outer shell fractured and the whole upper structure peeled away. What it revealed was a skull: yellowed bone housed in a casing of original vibranium, smooth and undamaged despite everything that had just been done to the machine around it. Reditus, exposed, fired its anti-gravity engine and drifted up and away from the wreckage with the slow dignity of sothing that had run out of better options.
Nolan took one step back and let it rise. He planted the tip of the Warscythe in the mud and looked at the servo skull hovering before him, then at Sage Neil standing motionless in the distance, her sparking chanical arm hanging loose at her side.
"You don't like conflict?" His voice ca out low and even through the helt, carrying across the ruined foundry floor. "Then fight directly. I can go all day. A week, if you want."
He let the silence sit for a mont.
"You're calling yourself a Primarch's subordinate, and you couldn't find it in you to face personally. But you had no trouble starting a war the mont my back was turned. Truly impressive courage."
"Primarch, I swear on the Omnissiah, this is entirely the oil woman's doing! She provoked ! If she had kept her mouth shut, my treasure would still be in one piece! It's over. It's completely over."
Reditus let the lant hang in the air, its red optical sensors flickering.
"Both of you. Enough." Nolan's tone dropped to sothing flat and final. He picked the Warscythe up from the mud. "I don't want explanations right now. David, you're taking over foundry production managent until further notice. The Tech-Priest and the engineer will maintain the lines. As for these two: all positions and all benefits, terminated effective today."
He turned away from both of them.
His magnetic boots carried him toward the bridge and the lights of Primogenitor Isle beyond it, each heavy footstep pressing down into the sodden ground, and he did not look back.
The tal round table was quiet except for the sound of a knife against a plate.
Nolan sat with his helt set to one side, working through a al with thodical attention, the interior light of the room catching the short gray of his hair. Across the floor, at a distance of at least ten ters from each other, Sage Neil stood in her red chanicus robes, the broken chanical arm still trailing sparks at irregular intervals, and Reditus hovered in silence nearby, its optical sensors dimd to a low amber. Both of them waited.
He finished a cut. Set the knife down. Wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of one hand.
"You can start talking now. Tell what required live weapons to resolve." He looked at them steadily. "And if you're going to tell it was a doctrinal disagreent, I'm happy to let you continue until at least one of you isn't breathing. I've certainly seen less reasonable disputes handled that way."
He leaned back slightly.
"I'll be honest with you both. There are a lot of people at this base. Of all of them, the only ones who manage to cause a new problem every other week, without fail, are the two of you. Every other departnt finds ways to disagree like adults. What is it about chanicus training that makes this impossible?"
Sage Neil was the first to speak. She stepped forward and inclined her head toward him.
"Respected Primarch. The responsibility for this incident lies with . I attempted to ease the tension that had been developing between myself and Reditus, but a failure in our language processing protocols caused a miscommunication, and the situation escalated beyond what either of us intended. I accept whatever consequence you decide is appropriate."
Her voice was asured. The sparking arm betrayed nothing.
Nolan raised an eyebrow. He turned to look at Reditus.
"Your turn. And think carefully before you decide how much to leave out."
The amber light in Reditus's optical sensors shifted, cycling back and forth several tis. Then it began to speak.
The account it gave was straightforward and complete. During a conversation that had begun as a tentative attempt at cooperation, Sage Neil had ntioned, almost in passing, the planetary exploration mission that Reditus had survived years ago: a mission that had gone badly, that it had barely walked away from. She had not stopped there. In the sa breath, with what Reditus described as a tone of faint amusent, she had said sothing dismissive about Dominant Sage Fastinias: the chanicus senior who had guided Reditus, who had been the reason it joined the order in the first place, who had functioned as sothing close to a teacher.
That was the mont the accumulated frustration of weeks snapped.
Reditus had gone back to its workshop. It had taken out the Micro-Knight Titan: the creation it had built alone over months, the one it had told no one about, the one it privately considered its finest work. And it had started a fight with the full intention of seeing it through to the end.
The logic, as Reditus described it, had been simple. If it won, Neil would be dead, and Nolan would destroy Reditus afterward. If it lost, it would be dead, but Nolan would not allow Neil to go unpunished for long either. Either outco resolved the problem. The Micro-Knight Titan had always been built for sothing worth spending it on.
Nolan listened to all of it without changing his expression.
What struck him, sitting there in the quiet room, was not the absurdity of it. It was the other thing: that Reditus, who had spent its entire existence in this base calculating every risk and angling every situation toward its own survival, had looked at those odds and decided they were acceptable. Not for resources. Not for a project. For the na of a dead Sage who had ant sothing to it once.
For the first ti since Nolan had known it, Reditus had chosen to bet its life on sothing it simply refused to let pass unanswered.
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