The warrior was moving through Zeppelin's household guard the way a blade moves through water — entering without resistance, passing through, erging unchanged.
Astartes-grade lethality. The assessnt wasn't hyperbole. Three thousand years of combat experience, five hundred of them in active service, distilled into a fighting body that processed threat response faster than the humans around her could complete a thought.
The guards' lasrifles couldn't track her. The garden was full of bodies — their own as often as not, friendly fire in the chaos — and every ti a cluster of them tried to establish a firing line, she was already sowhere else, already cutting.
Then she ducked behind a glass fragnt and ca up with the shuriken pistol.
Six hundred rounds in the magazine. The weapon cleared it in three seconds.
The monomolecular discs didn't care about powered armour. Standard plate was rated against ballistic and las-fire, not against a hundred and fifty slicing discs per second moving at that velocity. The ceramite cracked and separated along stress lines. The tissue inside was not protected by cracked ceramite.
A burst. Several guards went down. Another burst. More.
Then —
BOOM.
The glass fragnt she was using as cover exploded outward. She moved on pure reflex, clearing the position in a single bound.
The second shot hit where she'd been standing, leaving a smoking crater in the garden floor.
She looked up at the wall.
Kian Voss had a bolt carbine aid at her, already tracking for the third shot.
She was airborne when it fired — committed to the jump, nothing to push off, no way to change trajectory.
She changed trajectory anyway.
A pulse of psychic energy, precisely applied, shoved her two tres laterally in the fraction of a second before the bolt would have connected. Newton's third law expressed considerable displeasure. She landed in a roll.
Kian stared at where the bolt had gone.
She moved in mid-air. With nothing to push off. She moved in mid-air.
Then his training caught up with his surprise and he started shooting again.
What followed was an education in the limits of both of them.
Kian's Focus score was fifty-one. His marksmanship rating was two hundred and thirty. His infiltration armour's thermal optics gave him a clean target lock that the darkness couldn't defeat. He could see her. He could track her. He could predict her next position with accuracy that would have seed impossible a year ago.
And he still couldn't hit her.
She was three thousand two hundred years old. She had been a warrior for five hundred of those years. The physical reflexes were biological fact — muscle mory accumulated over centuries of continuous refinent, operating below the level of conscious thought. Her dodge responses didn't go through deliberation. They just happened.
But she felt the pressure.
The other weapons in the engagent — the lasrifles, the heavy stubbers his soldiers were working on the wall — those she could ignore. They were noise. Threats she could process as background.
Kian's shooting was different. Each bolt was precisely aid, compensating for her movent, predicting her patterns. The Grade 8 rounds demanded complete attention — one hit, anywhere on her body, and the mass-reactive charge would detonate inside her armour.
She couldn't ignore him and handle the guards simultaneously. She had to choose, and she was choosing survival.
Kian burned through one magazine, caught the loaded weapon Shiv slid into his hands without looking, kept firing. He'd kept all ten bolt carbines for himself — not vanity, pragmatic calculation. He was the only person on this wall who could make her flinch. Giving the weapons to anyone else was wasting them.
Second magazine. Third. Fourth.
Lasrounds were connecting with her armour now — charring the white wraithbone black in patches, burning scoring lines across the surface. Wraithbone healed itself, but not instantly. She was taking costic damage from the volu of fire.
She was running out of room to maneuver.
And then she found her solution.
She read his firing rhythm, moved to a specific position, and waited for his next shot.
He took it.
She stepped aside. The bolt flew past her, continued on its trajectory, and hit a household guard who had been standing behind her.
The round penetrated the man's chest armour as though it wasn't there. The delayed detonation activated inside his thoracic cavity. The lower half of his body remained standing for a mont, then fell.
Kian lowered his weapon.
She tilted her head up at him — a deliberate, unhurried gesture of challenge — and moved to position herself in front of another cluster of guards.
The firing from the wall dropped off. His soldiers had seen the friendly kill. They understood what she was doing.
She's using our own people as a shield.
The suppression fire died to scattered individual shots, then stopped.
Kian gripped the bolt carbine and ran the problem.
He could hit her. Given clean sight lines and no friendlies in the way, he was confident he could eventually connect. But the garden was full of Zeppelin's guards — and every bolt round he fired was potentially a bolt round through four armoured bodies before it reached her.
I need to get her out of the crowd.
He was still working through options when the garden changed.
The steward appeared at the doors of the palace, supporting a figure — General Zeppelin, upright but barely, uniform drenched in blood. A head wound that had exposed sothing that shouldn't be visible. One shoulder completely destroyed, the arm hanging at an angle that arms don't naturally achieve.
"Soone help — the General is injured — help—"
The warrior saw him.
Her helt's targeting system registered: primary target. Still alive.
Rage moved through the war-mask. Not hot rage — the mask didn't allow that — but cold, thodical fury. Objective confirmation. Target was alive. Target would not remain alive.
She started walking toward him.
The loyalty of Zeppelin's household guard had been tested comprehensively in the last hour. What remained was the core — the people who had signed up knowing what the oath ant. A hundred of them ford around the General in overlapping protective layers, raising weapons, putting their bodies between him and the approaching blade.
She emptied the shuriken pistol into them in three seconds.
And then she was inside their formation, the power blade working.
Kian was already off the wall.
He hit the garden at a run, vaulting the parapet and dropping six tres, the powered armour's servos absorbing the impact. He pushed through the edge of the lee, shoving guards aside, trying to get a clear angle—
Every shot he could take went through friendlies first. The guards were packed around the General in a mass. She was in that mass.
If I shoot, I kill our own people. If I don't shoot, she kills Zeppelin.
He watched the blade work. Another guard down. Another. She was thirty seconds from the General.
He made a decision.
"If you take one more step," he said, loud enough to cut through the noise, "I will destroy every soul stone your people are carrying. Every single one."
The power blade stopped.
☆☆☆
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