Chapter 9: First Fire, First Blood
The roar of engines filled the sky like the cry of titans. Dropships screamed overhead, casting long shadows across the mud-streaked valley below. Lucien Artor Vale stood among a line of fresh recruits, each armored in the faded grey of the planetary PDF reserves. His lasgun felt too light in his shaking hands, his stomach twisted in tight knots.
Seventeen years old. A boy beneath a helmet.
He hadn't meant to enlist early. The orders had come from House Vale's patriarch—his father—under pressure from the local Governor-Militant. There was glory to be earned and quotas to be met. And so, fourth son or not, Lucien was pressed into service, his noble blood offering no shield against the Imperium's hunger for war.
"Cassian," barked a voice beside him—only his squadmates used the false name now, his middle name, meant to shield his noble lineage. "Keep your eyes forward. You look like you're going to vomit."
Lucien blinked and turned to face Corporal Draeven, a grizzled brute with a half-bionic jaw and one remaining eye. Draeven gave a crooked smirk and slapped the back of Lucien's helmet.
"This is your first op," Draeven said. "You'll be fine. Just remember what I taught you—stay behind cover, don't aim heroic, and if your lasgun jams, hit it and curse. That works half the time."
Lucien gave a tight nod. Humor didn't reach him today.
The enemy wasn't just rebels or pirates. It was something worse.
Heretics.
The scout reports were vague. Insurgents had taken hold of a ruined manufactorum just beyond the valley. PDF patrols vanished. Survivors—those that returned—spoke in whispers of robed figures chanting in binary, of cultists screaming with blood-caked mouths, of machines turning against their makers. Tech-heretics, maybe. Or something darker.
The Imperium was sending in cannon fodder to see what stuck. That meant Lucien.
The order came, and the line of recruits surged forward, boots slapping against churned mud. Lasfire cracked in stuttering lines across the grey hills. Smoke bloomed where grenades landed. The manufactorum loomed ahead like a rusted corpse, a broken cathedral to forgotten industry.
Lucien ran.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears, drowning out Draeven's commands. He ducked behind a half-buried hab-crate as return fire hissed over his head—too precise, too cold. Someone screamed and fell to his left, clutching a cauterized hole through their chest.
He dared to peek up.
Figures emerged from the fog ahead—tall, robed, their faces masked in copper visors. Skitarii? No. Their gait was wrong. Heretek constructs, patchwork and twitching, moved among them—multi-limbed horrors bristling with tools, whirring and sparking.
Lucien aimed.
His lasgun clicked.
Jammed.
Panic clawed up his throat, but something stirred—familiar now, like a warm pulse in his chest. Luck. His only weapon.
He ducked just as a beam of searing light cut through the crate, narrowly missing his head. The metal box exploded behind him, splinters flying, but none struck him. He landed hard, rolled, and came up behind a shattered wall.
His weapon worked again without him touching it. He fired.
A lucky shot hit a servo-arm on one of the heretek monsters, sending it into a spinning frenzy that tore through its allies.
Lucien stared.
Not me, he thought. That wasn't me.
The battlefield twisted into chaos. An enemy grenade bounced oddly off a rock, landing back in their trench before detonating. A charging cultist tripped over nothing, landing right into the path of Lucien's squad's return fire. Draeven turned to him with a bark of surprise.
"You got a golden aquila hidden under your flak, Cassian?"
Lucien didn't answer. He didn't know.
His body moved on instinct. He ducked under fire, reached a wounded comrade, dragged them back with strength he didn't know he had. His heart raced, but every decision—every movement—was touched by an invisible thread. His enemies missed by inches. Friendly shots struck truer than they should have.
His luck was no longer just coincidence.
It was alive.
And it was growing.
By the time the manufactorum was taken and the hereteks were retreating under heavy fire, Lucien stood amid the wounded and the dead, his uniform charred and stained with mud. Corporal Draeven clapped him on the back.
"First fire," Draeven muttered. "First blood. You did good, kid."
Lucien didn't feel good.
He looked down at his hands, barely trembling now. He'd survived. No—more than survived. Around him, others had fallen. Better trained men. More experienced. Smarter, even.
But he was still standing.
He looked toward the burning ruins of the manufactorum. Among the smoke and twisted wreckage, a single piece of shrapnel landed near his foot. A bent cogwheel, scorched and cracked—almost slicing into his ankle before stopping short.
An inch closer, and he'd have lost the leg.
He picked it up slowly.
Why me? he thought. Why do I survive when others don't?
No answer came.
But he could feel the ring again—still buried under skin and soul, pulsing faintly like a second heartbeat. It had awakened.
And so had he.
---