Chapter 18: Lonely Victory
The battlefield was silent now. Smoke drifted lazily across the scorched plains, where once the screams of dying men and alien warcries clashed in a furious storm. Lucien Artor Vale stood alone among the wreckage, his once-pristine uniform torn and bloodied, his armor scorched and pitted. The faint hum of broken lasguns and the stench of ozone and burning flesh lingered like ghosts in the air.
His squad was gone.
What remained of them lay scattered across the fields, some reduced to charred husks, others simply... gone, vaporized by xenos plasma. The last stand had been desperate, a delaying action to give the retreating Guard regiments time to pull back to the fortress line. They had volunteered. Or rather, Lucien had volunteered, and the others—bound by duty or admiration or fear of breaking cohesion—had followed.
It should have been a suicide mission.
But Lucien was still standing.
He staggered forward, each step a monumental effort. His body screamed with pain—cuts, burns, bruises, fatigue—but something deeper ached more profoundly. Guilt. Loneliness. That same old feeling of isolation, like the universe had singled him out and forced him to survive. Again.
The Ork warband had fallen not to overwhelming firepower or elite tactics, but to an improbable chain of failures and accidents. One Nob's power klaw had snapped mid-swing. A Gretchin had tripped and detonated its own bomb pack. A looted tank had inexplicably spun out of control and plowed through a group of charging Boyz. And the warboss… the towering brute had slipped on the viscera of his own kin and impaled himself on a wrecked Sentinel's metal beam.
Lucien had simply watched. Firing where needed, but rarely hitting anything vital. He hadn't needed to.
Luck had done the rest.
He collapsed beside a broken vox-caster, its casing dented, but the power indicator still glowing faintly. With trembling fingers, he pressed the transmit rune.
"This is… Lieutenant Lucien Vale. All enemy hostiles eliminated. Position secure. Send retrieval for wounded and remains." A pause. Then, softer, "If there's anyone left to send."
He dropped the receiver and slumped against the metal wreckage, eyes fluttering shut. But sleep didn't come. Only the quiet buzz of static, and the howling wind across the empty battlefield.
---
They called it a miracle.
When the retrieval team arrived hours later, they found Lucien still conscious, guarding the bodies of his fallen comrades. Word spread fast—an entire Ork assault force, broken by a single platoon, with one survivor. The higher-ups demanded reports, commendations, even commendation ceremonies.
But Lucien refused them all.
He stood in the basilica mortuorum as the names of the fallen echoed off the stone walls, face unreadable, eyes focused not on the chaplain but on the closed caskets before him. He didn't speak when the generals offered medals. He didn't smile when the Commissar offered a personal salute.
When it was over, he left the ceremony without a word.
He returned to his quarters and sat in silence. No drinking, no celebration, no prayer. Just the steady hum of his luck—faint, but still there, whispering at the edge of his thoughts.
Why me? he wondered.
Why always me?
---
It wasn't long before the stories spread.
Tales of the lone survivor who crushed a xenos assault. The noble-born Lieutenant who had survived every mission he was sent on. The man who never seemed to bleed long, whose enemies always stumbled at the wrong time, whose allies narrowly avoided death under his command.
Some called it fate. Others whispered about witchcraft, or the Emperor's divine protection.
And somewhere far away, hidden in the shadows of the Imperium, an Inquisitor's eyes narrowed over a report stamped with the sigil of the Departmento Munitorum.
Subject: Lucien Artor Vale Designation: Probable Anomaly. Surveillance Recommended.
---
Lucien's next assignment came faster than expected.
He was summoned to the command spire by a Magos Strategos, a Tech-Priest with glowing eyes and a voice that clanked with mechanical reverberation. The mission was simple—lead a reconnaissance force into the deep ruins of a dead Forge World, scouting potential xenos activity. Low risk. Low reward. But Lucien knew better.
Luck didn't come without cost. The more he used it, the more it twisted reality around him. And the more eyes noticed the pattern.
He stood before the briefing room hololith, watching red markers bloom across a map of shattered manufactorums and slagged ferrocrete towers. His new squad was already assembling—green soldiers, some veterans, all strangers.
He didn't learn their names.
He never did anymore.
They would either die, or survive because he lived. That was the pattern. And the guilt of that survival was beginning to weigh like a second flak vest on his chest.
But still, he would go. He always went. Not because he wanted glory, or out of some naive love for the Emperor.
He went because fate wouldn't let him do anything else.
Because luck, twisted as it was, had chosen him. And now, it would shape everything that came after.
Even if it meant he had to walk alone.