The ceremony's noise was sealed outside by the fortress gates the mont they closed.
Duvette declined the overtures and carefully aid complints from other Astra Militarum officers he had no intention of maintaining relationships with, and brought the 112th back to their assigned temporary billet.
The tent's interior was dim. A single portable brass lamp produced a steady cold light.
He sat on the edge of the campaign bunk with the master-crafted power sword Calgar had given him resting flat across both hands.
He ran his thumb along the blade's spine, back and forth, feeling the temperature of the tal and the precision of what the Mars artisans had done with it. The blade's alloy had a depth to its dark blue color that standard-issue weapons did not produce. The balance was exact, not close, not adequate: exact, the kind of adjustnt that requires soone who has made enough weapons to know the difference. Near the guard, etched in High Gothic with the clean cut of dedicated work, were his na and the inscription Honour of Macragge.
His face communicated nothing. It never did.
His internal response was considerably more direct. In a universe where being a front-line command officer ant regular close-quarters combat against organisms that could shear through standard armour without slowing down, a weapon that would not fail when it was needed was not a luxury. It was a asurable improvent in the odds of staying alive. He had lost one chainsword to a chainaxe in direct contact, a second to accumulated battle damage that had left the blade too warped to cut reliably. He had ended the Battle of Macragge using borrowed equipnt to finish the job.
A sword that could cut through alien heavy carapace and ceramite armour and would not notch.
He would have found a way to trade significant things for this.
He slid it back into the scabbard and hung it on the chair behind him. His gaze moved to the campaign table.
The Macragge Honour dal rested there exactly as the attendant had placed it. Finely worked gold, the weight of it visible even at rest, a deep blue gemstone at the center representing the Ultramar realm. More than an award: an official endorsent with the Ultramarines' authority behind it. A political docunt cast in tal.
He reached out with his right hand to pick it up for a proper examination.
The mont his fingertips made contact with the dal's surface, the System produced a notification he had not been expecting.
[Object bearing imnse weight of faith and history detected.]
[Legion Relics module unlocked.]
[Every relic is a battle hymn that humanity sings in defiance of despair.]
Duvette pulled his hand back and looked at what had just appeared in his field of vision.
The new interface rendered in semi-transparent dark gold. Within an otherwise empty grid of slots, four item icons had already populated automatically.
The Macragge Honour dal. The master-crafted power sword. The master-crafted plasma pistol. And one item that he had not anticipated at all: the Tyrant Skull.
He stared at that last one for a mont.
Then he focused on the first icon. The display expanded.
[Macragge Honour dal]
[Grade: Epic]
[Aura: Gaze of Ultramar]
[Effect: The bearer is permanently immune to Fear and Terror. All friendly forces within the bearer's range will not break or retreat due to morale damage or excessive casualties.]
Duvette took a slow breath through his teeth.
An equipnt system. The System had just given him sothing analogous to the lord equipnt chanics he knew from Total War, nad items with specific effects that equipped to the commander and produced active field advantages. He had not known to expect this. He should have.
The practical implications of the dal's effects registered in sequence.
Permanent immunity to Fear and Terror ant that the psychic pressure effects that apex organisms projected, the Hive Tyrant's Synapse field, the Warp-corrupted presence of Greater Daemons, would no longer produce involuntary physical incapacitation in him. The shaking hands, the involuntary retreat response, the biological reaction his body generated when sothing at the top of the universe's predator hierarchy made its proximity known. Gone.
And the aura effect.
He had been running Burn the Boats at critical monts since Farrak IV, a skill that required Emperor's Wrath to activate and a continuous point drain to sustain, locking morale, stability, and loyalty above eighty percent for the duration. This dal's aura replicated that protective function as a passive effect. Zero cost. Active at all tis within range.
The coverage was range-limited rather than regint-wide, but the cost was nothing. Nothing at all.
He moved to the power sword icon.
[Master-Crafted Power Sword]
[Grade: Epic]
[Description: A masterfully crafted weapon. The disintegration force field surrounding the blade has been calibrated to the extre by Martian artisans, sufficient to cut through the heaviest alien carapace and reinforced ceramite armour with minimal resistance.]
He read through the description twice. The weapon was assessed as Epic grade, but beyond the description there were no passive bonuses or aura effects listed.
Then he noticed the small option in the lower right corner of the interface. A prompt indicating that he could spend one hundred Emperor's Wrath to perform an initial enhancent on this relic.
He spent the points without extended consideration.
Three enhancent branch options resolved in his field of vision.
[Option 1: Disintegration force field efficiency 20%. Improves baseline armour-penetration and damage output.]
[Option 2: Property -- Siphon. When killing enemies with this weapon in close combat, drain vital energy from the target, recovering a portion of the bearer's physical condition.]
[Option 3: Property -- Eternal. The weapon's material structure will be permanently stabilized. Cannot be destroyed by conventional physical force or energy discharge. Durability locked indefinitely.]
He held that third option in his mind.
The first was straightforward improvent. The second was sustained combat utility, draining recovery from kills would matter in long engagents. But the third.
He thought about the chainsword that had been sheared through by a chainaxe's direct impact in an underground square on Farrak IV. He thought about the sa sword accumulating enough battle damage through the months following that it had eventually been too warped to function, and had been abandoned on the floor of an underground passage beneath Macragge City.
In this universe, weapons failed. Weapons shattered against Daemon blades or were dissolved by Chaos-touched weapons or were simply worked past their structural tolerances in combat that exceeded what they had been built for. A commander who lost their weapon in the middle of close-quarters fighting did not generally have good options afterward.
An unbreakable sword was not a convenience. It was a guarantee that the last line of defense between him and whatever was trying to kill him would remain functional for the duration of any engagent he was likely to survive.
"A sword that can never be destroyed," he concluded internally, "is the most reliable thing I can carry."
He selected Option 3.
The enhancent registered. He picked up the power sword, drew it from the scabbard, and looked at the blade in the lamp's cold light.
It was barely visible. A faint pale gold sheen moved through the dark blue of the tal's surface, not bright enough to be obvious, fine enough that it could be missed entirely if you were not looking for it. The alloy's grain appeared to have been fixed in place, the molecular structure rendered permanent in a way that had no analogue in standard manufacture.
He checked the interface. A second enhancent on this weapon would cost three hundred Emperor's Wrath. He noted it and moved on.
He focused on the plasma pistol icon and spent another hundred points.
The enhancent pool for the plasma pistol did not produce anything at the level of Eternal, but what it offered was sothing he could use directly.
[Enhancent Complete: Overload threshold 20%.]
Plasma weapons were suprely lethal tools with one significant operational problem: they could explode and kill the person using them. The heat generation built toward a threshold, and past that threshold the containnt failed catastrophically. The standard practice was to manage firing rate carefully to avoid approaching that threshold, which ant not using the weapon at its maximum capability precisely when maximum capability was most necessary.
A twenty percent increase in the overload threshold substantially reduced the probability of a catastrophic failure during ergency overcharge firing. For a weapon in that role, that was exactly what was needed.
He closed those two interfaces and opened the last one.
The Tyrant Skull icon. He was still slightly uncertain what to make of its presence in the relic interface.
He had killed the Hive Tyrant. Apparently the System had registered the organism's skull as a war trophy with properties worth cataloguing.
[Tyrant Skull]
[Grade: Epic]
[Aura: Instill Fear. The bearer radiates the savage aura of an apex predator in combat, creating profound psychological pressure on enemy lower-tier units, with a probability of causing morale collapse and flight. Ineffective against certain races.]
[Trait: Giant-Slayer. When this legion engages the Tyranid faction, all unit weapon effectiveness 5%, morale and sanity values fixed 10.]
He read it twice.
The Giant-Slayer trait was notable for its specificity and its permanence. The anti-Tyranid modifier was not a skill with a cooldown or a point cost, it was a persistent trait, always on, applying to the entire legion whenever they faced Tyranids. Given how many tis the 112th had been deployed into Tyranid-related engagents, the practical value of a sustained five percent weapon effectiveness increase and a ten-point morale and sanity floor against that specific faction was not theoretical.
He closed the Legion Relics interface and let out a long breath.
He sat with the lamp's light and the silence of the tent.
The Battle of Macragge had cost the 112th nearly half of the soldiers he had brought from Parnio. The losses stacked on top of everything before, Farrak IV, the Eternal Lant, the Shrine World, had reduced the regint repeatedly, rebuilt it repeatedly, and reduced it again. The soldiers who were still standing had been through things that had no equivalent in any standard military service record. Veteran's Fra and Indomitable had pushed their physical capability beyond what mortal bodies were ordinarily expected to achieve. What remained of the 112th was, without qualification, sothing different from what had existed when this had started.
On the other side of that ledger: eight hundred Emperor's Wrath. The Ultramarines' formal recognition and official endorsent, which carried political weight in the Imperium that could open doors that nothing else would. A new relic system that enhanced the items he carried and would presumably continue generating additional relics as the engagents ahead produced them. And the four Epic-grade items already catalogued, two of them enhanced.
The Macragge campaign had not been wasted.
He stood, settled his greatcoat, and walked out of the tent.
The camp was cold, the wind moving steadily across it. The 112th's soldiers were doing what soldiers did between engagents: maintaining equipnt, running training evolutions, existing in the particular way of people who know that rest is temporary. The faces he could see had the quality of soldiers who had already lost the capacity to be surprised by the size of what was put in front of them.
The Great Devourer's shadow had retreated from this system for now. The galaxy would provide other shadows without asking for his opinion on the timing.
When the next deploynt order arrived, they would go to et it.
****
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