Chapter 384: The Graduate Corps
Over the next two days, Kian and his men stayed near Throne Mountain, recovering Knight suits.
One Cerastus, one Preceptor, three more loyalist Cerastus-class Knights, and eight squire-suits. All told, a genuinely staggering haul.
The eight squire-suits in particular, damaged to varying degrees, could according to the chief tech be cannibalized and reassembled into three fully functional units.
Excellent news. Kian gave the order immediately, and the tech-priests set to work stripping and rebuilding.
Squire-suits were smaller, only six meters, single-pilot machines, and nowhere near as demanding to operate as the larger Knights, relatively speaking anyway.
A pilot just needed to wear the mechanical crown-interface, and that was it. Essentially a standard neural headset, anyone could strap it on and drive one without much strain.
Full Knight suits were a different matter entirely. Those ran on the command throne, an enormously complex neural-bonding system that demanded not just a strong will and sound character from the pilot, but a matching bloodline as well.
It was, at its core, a biometric lock. The earliest Knight pilots had wanted to monopolize control of the machines, so they'd built in bloodline verification from the start.
Originally, back when the colonists first stepped off the pioneer ship, these things had just been called general-purpose construction rigs, and anyone could operate them. But as society regressed into feudalism over the generations, certain people had, essentially, locked the company car.
Monopolizing machines that powerful meant monopolizing military force, and from there it was a short road to founding feudal dynasties.
Point being, the five Knight suits currently in Kian's possession were genuinely difficult to make use of. With no direct-bloodline pilot available, they'd have no choice but to sit in storage gathering dust. Best bet was probably to find a skilled tech specialist at the Forge World later who might be able to hack the bloodline lock.
While Kian's crew worked the salvage operation near Throne Mountain over those days, the toxic gas around the mountain gradually dispersed enough for people without respiratory gear to approach.
A column of roughly three thousand crossed the Golden Bridge and made their way over. They headed straight for Kian, and the moment he spotted them, he recognized them immediately: Luca's personal retainers.
When Luca had led his forces across the bridge earlier, these men, positioned further back in the column, had never reached the front line, and had spent the fight maintaining order among the civilians instead.
Once the civilians had all evacuated and the Chaos army pressed in behind them, they'd had no choice but to fall back themselves.
Now that the Inquisitor's forces were sweeping the surface clean of cultists across the whole world, these men had come looking to check on Luca's fate, recover his remains if possible, and figure out what came next for themselves.
Their commander was a Knight named Reyes, a powerfully built man in his forties.
He was a mortal knight who'd sworn loyalty to Luca and led his men to serve at his side for life. With Luca dead, he'd lost his purpose entirely.
But arriving back at Throne Mountain and spotting Kian changed that.
Reyes approached, dropped to one knee, drew the sword at his hip, and offered it up in both hands.
"My lord, I pledge my loyalty to you. Please, take me with you."
Kian asked, puzzled. "You're sure about this? Do you even know where I'm headed? Staying at my side is dangerous work. And once you're out among the stars, there's a good chance you never come back."
Reyes answered firmly. "My lord, our master Luca told us, before he died, that he meant to take us out among the stars, to see its splendor for ourselves. We are ordinary men, no land, no holdings on this world, no wives, no children left behind. We severed those ties long ago, our hearts set on following our master into the void. He is gone now, but our will to make that journey is not. You serve an Inquisitor, my lord. We ask to serve you in turn, as blades for you to wield. All we ask is a place at your side, and food and shelter."
These men had planned their departure from Glory long before any of this, selling off their titles and land, converting everything into gear, deliberately cutting every tie that might hold them back. Now that Luca was dead, that plan couldn't just stop. They still meant to go among the stars, or else everything they'd sold off would have been for nothing.
The chief maintenance tech approached Kian and said quietly.
"My lord, if you have room, take them. Anyone who followed Lord Luca was mortal nobility in their own right. Even the least accomplished among them holds a Level 6 education."
Kian sucked in a breath at that. Level 6 education, in the Imperium, was roughly equivalent to a graduate degree.
Three thousand people, and every single one of them a graduate-level scholar-warrior. Pull any random one out of the crowd, and they could step in and command a company without missing a beat.
Made sense, really. Luca had been a prince. Anyone in his personal retinue would naturally be held to an equally high standard, even the lowest-ranked grunt among them practically overqualified.
As for the ones with actual doctorates among them, no need to even ask.
A guy with a middling second-tier degree bossing around a graduate corps like this, Kian thought, was basically borrowing the tiger's might to strut like a fox.
Kian accepted Reyes's oath on the spot, and formally established the Glory Company, with Reyes as its commander.
Given that these men were all genuinely high-caliber personnel, Kian resolved to find a chance to fully outfit them in powered armour as soon as possible. Losing even one of them would sting for a while, so he'd protect them properly, and groom them into officers down the line.
Reyes and his men were already combat-capable, no need for Kian to arm them from scratch. They'd already equipped themselves with the weapons recovered from the Baron's underground vault, laser weaponry and heavy gear across the board, combat capability comparable to a standard Astra Militarum infantry regiment already.
On top of that, they'd brought along Kian's own psychic beacon.
While Kian checked over the beacon, Reyes spoke up.
"My lord, I've heard word through the grapevine about where your sword and armour ended up. Would you like to reclaim them?"
Kian's eyes lit up.
"Oh? Where are they?"
"My lord, your sword and armour are held by a Chaos warlord, in a mountain roughly twenty kilometers from here. It's a large mountain, thick forest, riddled with caves, impossible terrain for large formations or heavy equipment to enter. It used to be the royal family's hunting ground. Now it's held by cultist rebels. Clearing it will take an elite strike team."
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