Chapter 380: Luca's Flute
Kian's eyes snapped open, pupils struggling to focus, and the instant they did, a splitting, tearing pain tore through his skull.
It felt like half his soul had been burned away, spent forcing psychic power through Khorne's own domain by sheer willpower.
His brain felt like someone had shoved a blender into it and hit the switch, thoughts reduced to soup.
The collision between the two Knights had thrown him clear from the impact, and he'd hit the ground and blacked out completely, no memory of anything after that.
When his blurred eyes finally managed to focus, what he saw was a ring of cultists surrounding him.
They stared down at him with strange expressions, some eager, some stunned, some almost reverent.
Lying on the ground, Kian's right hand twitched, and he realized he was still gripping his sword.
He grabbed it and swung it wildly around him, and the startled cultists scattered back in a wave.
Struggling, both hands braced against the ground, he hauled himself unsteadily to his feet.
The overuse of his psychic power had left his willpower completely drained, and now his soul and body felt out of sync with each other.
It felt like playing a game on a computer with brutal input lag. He could barely control his own limbs.
Once upright, he took stock of his surroundings.
Night had fully fallen now, the world gone dark around him.
But a ring of cultists still surrounded him, torches raised, watching him with unreadable expressions, making no move to attack. Just watching.
Kian pressed one hand to his skull, sword raised in the other.
He pointed the blade left, and the cultists on that side scattered back. He pointed it right, and the same happened there.
With the crowd pushed back, he spun around to check behind him.
Behind him, the wreckage of both Knight suits lay tangled together.
The Preceptor's lance had punched through the Cerastus's shoulder plating.
The Cerastus's chainsword was buried deep in the Preceptor's chest, the tip protruding out the back.
Both machines lay collapsed together on the ground like the corpses of giants, twisted into each other.
The Preceptor was thoroughly, completely dead. Its entire chest had been pierced clean through by that massive chainblade, the cockpit obliterated a hundred percent. No one could have survived that.
But Luca was different. The lance that had struck him earlier hadn't hit dead center, it had caught him slightly off to the left. He should still be alive.
Kian staggered toward the wreckage, climbed up onto the fallen Knight, and made his way toward the cockpit.
The cultists around him just watched the whole time, making no move at all.
He reached the front of Luca's Cerastus, where the armour had shattered entirely, exposing the ruined machinery underneath.
"Luca! Luca! Are you still with me?!"
Kian called out, standing atop the Knight's chest.
But no answer came, no matter how long he waited. The optic lens on the metal skull never refocused again.
Kian cursed under his breath, raised his power sword, activated the disruption field, and started hacking at the machinery below.
His sword had taken so much punishment through this fight that its charge was nearly spent, the blue field flickering weakly, on the verge of failing.
But on that last dying flicker of power, Kian managed to cut a path open into the Cerastus's chest.
After a while of hacking, the sword finally lost all power entirely, and Kian tossed it aside, hooking both hands into what looked like a raised hatch panel instead.
Bracing his legs against the frame, he threw everything he had left, muscle and armour servos both, into forcing it open.
A shriek of grinding metal followed, and the Cerastus's cockpit hatch finally gave way under Kian's raw force.
A wave of dizziness hit him, and with his head already splitting from earlier, he nearly blacked out again.
He slumped forward into a tangle of complex machinery, and it took a long moment before his vision cleared enough to see straight.
The instant it did, he looked into the Cerastus's cockpit, and found it completely empty.
Kian froze. Where was Luca?
The cockpit interior was scorched black, every console and control surface looking like it had taken a direct hit from a white phosphorus round, some sections melted down entirely.
The command throne was ruined, its whole backrest nearly liquefied.
That earlier lance strike had grazed right past the edge of the cockpit itself, close but not a direct hit.
But even without a direct impact, the energy bleeding off the lance's disruption field, combined with the searing heat generated by the armour tearing open, had been more than enough to vaporize whoever sat inside instantly. Not a trace of flesh or blood remained.
Luca was dead. He'd died the moment that lance struck him.
His body had been vaporized in an instant, in heat fierce enough to melt steel itself. Nothing left behind at all.
What had kept fighting after that was Luca's data remnant, a kind of electronic ghost.
His body had died, but the command throne itself hadn't been fully destroyed. Before his flesh vaporized, his consciousness had already been synced to the Knight, uploaded into the machine itself.
The reason Luca had said he felt cold wasn't blood loss. It was because his warm, living body no longer existed at all. His soul had nothing left to feel except the cold steel around it.
He'd left nothing behind. He'd simply died, completely and utterly, without a trace.
Kian stood there for a moment, stunned, mind blank.
Then, in the scorched wreckage of the cockpit, his eyes caught a faint glint of gold.
He reached into a gap in the ruined seating and pulled out a small flute.
Luca's flute. The one he'd play from time to time, pretending to be some wandering bard.
Kian held the flute, stood up, and looked out toward the distant Golden Bridge.
A million civilians, and countless loyal soldiers besides, had made it across.
The Chaos army, with their supreme commander dead, hadn't pressed the pursuit. They stayed put at the foot of Throne Mountain, waiting for a new leader to emerge and decide what came next.
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