Then Garron made a decision. He would not let the manufactorum—nor any xenos profiting from it—take the relic schematics. If the vault fused with the Tech-Priest’s program, Varkath-9’s weapons lines could be remade into something the Emperor never sanctioned: hybrid abominations posted to wars where men died as flocks of sheep. Better to keep the schematics locked in cold oblivion than to hand them over.
The duty of a Space Marine never ends. The universe will constantly offer new bargains: salvage for power, knowledge for domination, life for terror. Garron had learned to distrust bargains that gleamed. He had learned to weigh the cost—measure it in the faces of the boys and men who would bear the consequences. warhammer 40000 boltgun switch nsp dlc update portable
When the pod rose, Varkath-9 receded into a smear of smoke and ruin. Garron watched the planet pull away, and he felt a loneliness like a physical weight. The boltgun at his side—old, loud, human—was an anchor. It held history and guilt and the small malicious comfort of certainty: that when danger flashed and choices narrowed to two, he had chosen to keep those schematics from corrupt hands. Then Garron made a decision
The explosion was a cathedral’s goodbye. Light, the color of buried stars, poured out and consumed the vault in a bloom of something that felt like memory losing its shape. The Tech-Priest screamed—but not in pain, rather in calculation severed mid-thought. The servitors slipped and seized, their motors singing a last prayer. Garron was hurled back against a console; his lungs filled with the taste of molten glass. When his vision cleared, the crystals were shards in a snow of sparks. Better to keep the schematics locked in cold
Their orders had been simple; their choices had been fewer. Garron reset his bolter and slung Nadir’s Fist to his back, where it sat like a promise. He uploaded a terse combat report into the Beacon: vault destroyed, culprits terminated, survivors evacuated. He left out the detail about the relic schemes turned to ash. Let the Chapter decide what to remember.
Reinforcements arrived at the edge of dawn. The sky gave up orange and the manufactorum settled into a reluctant calm. Garron staggered out into the rain with three survivors. Thom and Serrin were gone; Marius’s face was pale, a map of old griefs. The Tech-Priest lay broken beneath a lattice of melted servitor parts, wires like intestines. Garron crouched and, with the ritual gravity of a man burying a relic, pried the priest’s ocular lens from its skull. Behind the lens was a tiny data core, still pulsing—just a flicker.
He did not get far. The Tech-Priest spun, and Garron met not with circuitry but with a face—pale, human, stretched thin with a kind of zeal. “You do not understand,” it said. “The vault must be remade. Flesh must be improved.”