NOVEL NEXT B2 Chapter 1
Angar emerged atop a stairwell. An icon flashed, indicating his suit's auto-tuning had adjusted to the station's artificial life support and gravity as he gazed into a vast hall teeming with pirates and cultists, their weapons ready and leveled at him, new turrets whirring to life in the hall's corners.
Radio static crackled in his ear, indicating he was cut off from his operator, Deli. His new HUD suite poured far too much information into his sight to handle or understand, distracting him more than helping.
The Omnivis Interface flashed from one Heretic to the next, lighting up with unneeded information. He squashed it with a thought.
Void Reapers were pirates, dregs of humanity, vile scavengers of the stars, their existence a blight upon the Holy Empire. Telling them apart from Heretical cultists wasn't easy, not even the visible Hellsign making the latter distinct in this unholy rabble.
All those before him dressed in a parody of martial glory, clad in mismatched, battered, and filth-encrusted armor from a dozen plundered battlefields, a blasphemous collage of cracked plates torn from imperial warriors fused haphazardly with strange pieces of various Heretical factions.
One bore a single pauldron of Crusader Armor stamped with the faded sigil of the Wistful Litany Knightly Chapter – a cloaked figure dissolving into smoke, a curved dagger gleaming in its grasp. It was bolted onto far lesser armor with crude rivets that oozed rust like blood.
Another's breastplate, dented and scorched, bore a defaced Trey, the chapter sigil unknown, while their greaves groaned under the weight of ill-fitting metal with broken hydraulics, smeared with oils and crusted with decades of unwashed filth.
Their helms were no less profane. One man with a tattered cloak of flayed hide, wore a visorless helm, its faceguard mangled, clearly showing a snarling mouth beneath, with monstrous horns welded to the top of it.
Many bore no helms at all, exposing scarred faces corrupted with Hellsign, eyes gleaming with the feral hunger of those who had forsaken the Lord's grace.
Chains and crude fetishes dangled from their armor. Skulls, both human and alien, clattered against their chests, trophies of their Heresy.
Their weapons, clutched in gauntleted fists, were as scavenged as their armor. One of the largest men, wearing a mechanized suit, wielded a massive turret-like weapon in his hands, its casing covered with profane glyphs, connected to a large mechanical backpack covered in spikes.
Angar had assumed some of these men would be aliens, but they looked only to be Terrans. Or had started off as so. None looked remotely like a Reptiloid or Gray. A few were tall enough to be Pleiadean, but these were far too bulky to be off that species, no matter how Hell had twisted their frames.
Many of these dregs carried melee power weapons, defying Angar's expectations too. In a galaxy of blasters, lancers, and turrets, many of these Heretics took a different path.
One man swung a glowing axe, its head giant and ravenous, while a another brandished a heavy sword, its connected power cell flickering, probably filled with unstable energy.
These men were all traitors and Heretics, their very existence a festering wound upon the Holy Empire's sanctity. Their numbers filled the hall to the brim, a seething mass of corruption that mocked the righteous with every breath they drew.
Spirit, like her gospels, would preach of compassion for this scum, urge their salvation with pleas for redemption, sermons to drag their blackened souls back to grace.
Angar saw things differently. These men had made their choices.
They chose wrong.
He was a Crusader, not a shepherd of lost flocks.
His goal was to bathe the galaxy in a crimson tide of unholy blood, to scour the stars until fear of the righteous overcame the seductive lure of Hell's fell power.
The Lord's judgment in the hereafter may weigh their sins, and He might forgive them, but in this temporal realm, Angar had none within him, nor mercy.
Saint Hidetada and Angar agreed on many points, one being that the Holy Empire was too soft. Many believed the Ninth Galactic War would be the last, and the Empire's end.
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They sought to change that.
The smallest of sparks, rightly placed, could ignite a conflagration, an eruption large enough to purge every hint of the profane.
Wherever they tread, the blood of the unworthy would flow. Angar's maul would fall without hesitation, without remorse, on those needing purging. It would fall unforgivingly, unerringly, strengthening this Holy Empire, until its light pierced every shadow, until Hell's taint was burned away from this galaxy, and no corner harbored it.
A grim smile twisted Angar's face as a muffled explosion roared behind him, the charge he had dropped thumping against the steel door he had phased through moments before.
I love being a Crusader, he thought, ready to unleash Holy wrath, his soul alight with the ecstasy of impending battle.
His sense of danger and his instincts warned the stairwell's summit was rigged with explosives. The HUD probably gave a proximity alert about the same before he squashed its feed. If so, he hadn't noticed with all the garbage it filled his vision with. He needed to spend some time adjusting and finetuning the setting, especially when facing a large group like that arrayed before him.
As the turrets began spinning, before the stairwell's explosives could be ignited and the Heretical scum opened fire, he gave a quick prayer – a new tribute of sacred slaughter for You, Lord.
With that thought, Angar activated Ground Current. The world blurred, his body surging through space in a crackling arc of wrath.
He reappeared down in the hall, bolts of lightning erupting around him, sizzling into the nearest Void Reapers and cultists.
The bolts forked, chaining through the rabble, searing mismatched armor as shrieks of pain rang out. Sparks danced across the hall, the air thickening, its sick stench now masked with that of burnt flesh.
He had materialized as close to the nearest turret as the Ability would take him, their whirring barrels already spitting fire in a ceaseless barrage.
The stairwell above exploded in a deafening roar, sending shrapnel raining down, but Angar was already in motion.
His Trivident Maul, its graviton conduits humming with latent power, arced wide, held in one hand.
The hammer's head smashed into a cluster of Heretics, their bodies crumpling under the amplified force of the graviton pulse. Bones shattered, armor buckled, and three men were hurled backward, crashing into their comrades like ragdolls.
With his free hand, Angar seized the head of a snarling Void Reaper, his gauntlets sinking into flesh, and flung the man into a nearby gaggle, toppling them in a heap of flailing limbs.
The turrets' relentless streams of energy tore through the hall, their lack of friend-or-foe designators turning the Heretics' own defenses against them.
Angar activated Lightning Strike as he infused his maul with crackling energy and dove through the chaos, the Eye of the Storm Upgrade enveloped him in a shimmering shield, absorbing the unyielding turret fire that tracked him.
He plowed through another knot of enemies, his maul a blur of destruction, each swing sending bodies reeling.
Reaching the first turret, he channeled an Energy Point into the hammer's graviton conduits. The air warped, a micro-gravitational well forming at the point of impact.
The blow landed with a thunderous crack, the whole turret exploding in shower of sparks and twisted metal as the lightning from Lightning Strike and graviton amplification tore into it.
Angar rolled forward, the blaster and turret fire that landed soon ended the absorb-shield of Lightning Strike. He brought the biomechanical feedback, cooldown timers, injury and resource trackers, and predictive status effects timer for the Omnivis Interface back online.
And he continued making his way to the second turret.
His Crusader Armor absorbed stray blaster bolts with barely a dent, the same with the Abilities these Heretics directed at him. The Scutum Radians mod helped too. His HUD flashed minimal damage was being taken, even from the relentless turrets, probably thanks to the three seconds of 50% mitigation lingering from Eye of the Storm.
Still, Angar knew better than to soak unnecessary hits. His focus locked on the next turret, his maul and free hand carving a bloody path through the crowd.
A large Void Reaper, his helm adorned with children's skulls, lunged with a glowing ax. Angar sidestepped, the ax's edge grazing his pauldron, and countered with a brutal punch.
The Reaper's armor caved, blood spraying as Angar yanked his fist free, kicking the corpse into another foe.
He sprinted toward the second turret, its barrels tracking him through the chaos as he flipped and dove around the fire. Seizing its glowing barrel with one hand, he redirected its fire into the Heretics, their screams drowned by the turret's roar.
His cybernetic leg was a sleek fusion of polished steel and intricate hydraulics, a skeletal framework of durable metal alloy going all the way to his hip, with pistons and servos shifting as it moved, like mechanical sinews. A storage compartment surrounded the upper thigh, where the meat of it would be.
He imbued an Energy Point into the Digiti Terebrantes toes of his implant, hearing a high-pitched whine as they began to spin like drills, and he drove his metal foot into the control box.
The kick hit the box with such force, smashing the metal, silencing the machine in a burst of sparks, he cursed wasting an Energy Point on the unneeded drill-toes.
The hall was a chaotic storm of violence, the Heretics' numbers seemingly endless, strange lights flashing as Abilities and fell powers were unleashed.
Angar's HUD sent warnings that his armor had taken hits, registering minor stress from a concentrated volley.
Originally, there were five turrets, now there were three. The massive hall was mostly square, but one corner was notched out. There was a turret in the four main corners, and one near the far exit at the back of the hall.
He took off sprinting, zigging and zagging, to the closest, the one near the exit in the back, tearing into foes, avoiding what damage he could.
Then, his body locked up, his muscles seizing as if encased in iron.