Chapter 378: The Knight Duel, Part 3
The powered lance drove out through the Cerastus's side, punching clean through, the tip breaking out the far side of Luca's chest.
Catastrophic damage like that left no way to know whether the pilot was dead, alive, or if the strike had crippled the power core itself. The whole machine's limbs began twitching in strange, uncontrolled spasms.
Frales watched his brother, run through by his own hand, and something flickered across his eyes, a kind of daze. Had he finally gotten what he'd waited for, this easily?
"Brother... brother? Are you still alive?"
Frales asked cautiously, his voice strange, equal parts a fevered excitement at finally reaching this moment and some warped, lingering reluctance underneath it.
Whatever remained of him behind that Warp-corrupted mass fused into the command throne, his emotions had long since twisted into something unrecognizable.
Luca himself had no idea if he was alive or dead. The lance had struck off-center, missing the command throne itself but passing close enough that the shockwave alone might have been enough to pulp him.
The Cerastus kept twitching, irregular and jerky. Frales stared wide-eyed at his brother's Knight, waiting for the answer to reveal itself.
The twitching went on for a long moment, then suddenly stopped.
The gauntlet snapped shut around the lance still lodged in its chest, disruption field flaring, clearly intent on crushing the weapon apart entirely.
At the same time, the chainsword in the other hand roared to full power, tearing into the Preceptor's armour in a shower of sparks.
Luca had exploded back to life, and it startled Frales badly.
The faint, strange sorrow that had briefly crossed his warped face vanished instantly, replaced by fury and revulsion.
"Not dead! Lucky bastard!!"
Still impaled on the lance, Luca had closed the distance to point-blank range, and with the Preceptor's two weapons both built for reach rather than close quarters, Frales had no good answer for him at this range.
Luca's gauntlet crushed the lance, visibly bending the shaft out of shape.
The chainsword tore into the Preceptor's waist armour, the spinning teeth already carving a deep gouge into the plating.
Panicking, Frales fought to break free.
He roared and spun the Preceptor in place, trying to fling Luca off.
But with the lance still skewered through his body and his gauntlet locked around the shaft, there was no shaking him loose no matter how hard the Preceptor spun.
"GET OFF ME! GET OFF, DAMN YOU!!"
Frales's roar carried across the whole field through his vox, the massive steel body spinning faster, and faster still.
Past a certain speed, even a Knight suit couldn't fight centrifugal force forever.
Luca's gauntlet finally lost its grip on the lance, torn free, and his whole body was flung outward like a cannon shell.
This throw carried him the farthest yet, over four hundred meters, slamming into a field and burying itself half-buried in the earth.
Kian, mid-skewer-fest with his impaled Chaos "kebabs," was startled badly by the violent tremor rolling through the ground, and behind him, several of his staked, screaming trophies toppled over in a row.
He'd just finished cutting down the cultist who'd stepped up to challenge him, and he turned toward the source of the tremor.
The instant he spotted Luca's Knight, half-buried and barely moving, his pupils shrank.
Right then, another cultist rushed up and shouted at him.
"I challenge you!!"
"Challenge THIS!!"
Kian cut him down in a single stroke, cleaving him clean in two.
Then, like a tiger unleashed, he threw himself straight into the wall of cultists surrounding him, hacking and slashing without restraint.
He'd been fighting one at a time until now, and the sudden shift caught the cultists off guard, but they didn't hesitate to swarm him with weapons raised regardless.
Kian felt blows raining in from every side, war-axes, mauls, spiked hammers, clanging off his armour from every angle.
He didn't care. He just kept swinging in a wild, unbroken frenzy, cutting down anyone in his path, driving forward.
Luca's Knight had come down over two hundred meters ahead. He tore through the crowd to get there, to see what state his friend was in.
Swinging at that pace burned through his stamina visibly fast.
He didn't care about that either. When his stamina bar bottomed out, he ordered his suit's voice system to dose him with stims, topping it right back up.
He drove forward like a tunnel-boring machine, cutting a straight path through everything in his way.
Finally, drenched head to toe in blood, having burned through every stim reserve he had left, his power sword's charge running dry and its edge already dulling, Kian broke through the last of the cultist crowd and reached the spot where Luca had come down.
The cultists hadn't dared approach the Knight suits at all, terrified of their overwhelming power, and with two Knights locked in a duel, none of them wanted to interfere either. They'd kept their distance, which, conveniently, cleared Kian's path straight to Luca.
Half of the Knight's body was buried in the earth, surrounded on all sides by rolling golden wheat.
The wind stirred the field into rippling gold waves around the fallen suit, its face-plate turned skyward, motionless.
Kian, breathing hard, pulled off his helmet, sweat pouring off him in sheets.
He waded through the golden wheat to reach the Knight, climbed up onto its frame, and looked at the massive metal head.
A huge gash split the side of that head, a wound that had punched clean through the entire suit.
The sight of that wound sent a jolt of dread through him. Don't tell me he's actually dead.
He crouched down and rapped his knuckles against the metal skull, right by the massive optic lens, big as a washbasin.
"Luca! Luca! Are you still with me?!"
Nothing. The Knight lay silent, motionless, as if asleep, cradled in the golden wheat.
Kian glanced up toward the distance and saw the Preceptor, still radiating menace, advancing on them with slow, deliberate, aggressive strides.
He struck the optic lens again.
"Luca! LUCA! Are you alive? The enemy's coming!"
Still nothing. Silence, dead as the grave.
The Preceptor kept closing, and a ring of cultists was gathering around them now too.
Kian let out a heavy sigh. "Luca. Is this really it, then? May you find your rest..."
Before he could finish, the massive optic lens suddenly contracted, like a camera snapping into focus.
"Static... I'm not dead yet... static... but... static, the frame's taken serious damage..."
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