**Chapter 1: The Echo of Rust**
The rain didn't taste like water.
It tasted of rust, airborne chemical pollutants, and the faintest, coppery tang of atomized blood. Each drop that slid past the gorget of his battered plate armor and onto his tongue was a sacrament of the Trench Crusade. Aki Likas Reyes let the foul taste ground him. It was a familiar poison, a constant reminder of where he was: a water-logged trench on the Shroud world of Baal-Secundus, a meter of mud and plasteel away from damnation.
He was still. A statue carved from compressed muscle and Ceramite, his 6'10" frame folded into a firing step alcove that was never designed for a man of his size. His helm was off, clipped to his belt, allowing the toxic drizzle to trace paths through the grime on his sun-kissed skin. The ANITO Protocol, the silent, semi-sentient engine fused to his soul, was running its ceaseless, cold calculus in the back of his mind. It monitored the trench for seismic shifts, analyzed the ion-trails of distant artillery, and cataloged the heart rates of the twenty Concordat soldiers hunkered down in his section of the line. All of it was subconscious, as natural to him as breathing was to the men around him.
But the conscious part of him, the soul of a 50-year-old Filipino man who had died in a sterile hospital bed half a universe and a lifetime away, was focused on one thing: the echo.
It wasn't a sound. It was a feeling. A psychic itch just beneath his sternum where the Stigmata was branded into his flesh. The brand, a complex knot of what looked like scar tissue, was a keyhole into the Maelstrom. And right now, something was trying to peer through it. A low, predatory hum that made the fillings in a normal man's teeth ache. For Likas, it was a whisper.
*…flesh…warm…break…unravel…*
He flexed his gauntleted hand, the micro-servos whining softly. The whispers were getting stronger.
"Anything, Stigmator?" The voice was a nervous squeak.
Likas turned his head slowly. Private Roric, a boy of no more than seventeen standard Terran years, barely old enough to grow the patchy scruff on his jaw, stared at him with wide, terrified eyes. The kid was clutching his las-rifle so tightly his knuckles were bone-white under the mud. He was the newest replacement, fresh from a Feudal World where the biggest predator was a rock-lion. Here, the predators had names that burned the tongue.
"Easy, kid," Likas's voice was a low baritone, calm and steady. It was a voice designed by the ANITO Protocol to soothe, to command, to disarm. "Just the usual ghosts. They're loud tonight."
He lied. These weren't the usual ambient whispers of the Maelstrom, the psychic static of a billion tortured souls. This was focused. Hungry.
The echo in his mind sharpened. A memory, unbidden, surfaced. Not from his life as Aki Likas, the Concordat's living weapon, but from the life of Reyes, the blue-collar worker. It was the memory of the cancer, the slow, gnawing beast that had devoured him from the inside for thirty-three years. He remembered the dull, constant ache in his bones, the weariness that clung to him like a shroud. This Maelstrom-hum felt like that pain given intelligence. A sentient malignancy.
*…so much life in one place…a feast…a banquet…*
The ANITO Protocol shifted from passive monitoring to active threat assessment. In a picosecond, it analyzed the resonance of the psychic hum, cross-referenced it with ten thousand known Maelstrom entities, and presented its conclusion to Likas's consciousness not as text, but as a sliver of ice sliding down his spine.
*Classification: Carrion-Kind. Vector: Sub-terrestrial. Proximity: 80 meters and closing.*
"Up," Likas commanded. His voice had lost its gentle edge, replaced by the crackle of honed steel. "All of you. On the firing step. Now."
The soldiers, veterans who knew to trust the instincts of a branded Knight, scrambled into position. Roric fumbled, nearly dropping his rifle in the slick mud. Likas's hand shot out, the motion a blur of impossible speed, and steadied the boy's shoulder. His grip was firm but not crushing.
"Breathe, Roric," he said, his eyes scanning the churned, corpse-strewn no-man's-land before them. "Fear keeps you sharp. Panic gets you planted. Find the difference."
He vaulted onto the firing step himself, his immense frame unfolding with a lethal grace. He unclipped his las-cannon, a heavy, brutalist weapon that normally required a two-man team. He held it in one hand like a rifle. The rain intensified, plastering his black hair to his skull. His eyes, deep umber pools, scanned the terrain. They saw more than the others. The ANITO Protocol fed his optic nerves a stream of enhanced data—thermal signatures, air-pressure variances, subtle shifts in the near-infrared spectrum.
The ground 50 meters out bubbled.
It wasn't a dramatic eruption. It was a slow, sickening churn, like spoiled milk curdling. Mud and splintered bone were pushed aside as something hauled itself out of the earth. It was a mockery of a man, a grotesque fusion of rotted Concordat armor and bloated, pallid flesh. A single, rheumy eye, the size of a fist, swiveled in a face that was a melted mass of sinew and weeping sores. Rusted metal spikes jutted from its back, and one of its arms had been replaced by a length of sharpened rebar, pulsing with a sickly green light. A Pox-Drudge. A footsoldier of the All-Consuming Bloom.
The whispers in Likas's head coalesced into a single, gurgling thought that emanated from the creature. *…join…us…be…one…*
"Open fire," Likas ordered, his voice cutting through the hiss of the rain.
A volley of laser fire, brilliant ruby lances, stitched across the no-man's-land. Several beams struck the Pox-Drudge. They didn't pierce; they hissed and steamed, boiling away patches of necrotic flesh that immediately began to regrow with a squirming, maggot-like motion. The creature let out a wet, gurgling roar and began to charge, its gait a lurching, unnatural shamble that was terrifyingly fast.
More bubbling patches appeared across the field. Two, five, a dozen. More Drudges clawed their way from the mud. The true assault had begun.
"Concentrate fire! Don't let them build momentum!" Likas bellowed, the authority in his voice absolute. He raised the las-cannon, the weapon seeming to weigh nothing in his grip. The ANITO Protocol painted a targeting reticle in his vision, calculating for wind, rain, and the Drudge's lurching advance. He didn't aim for the center of mass. He aimed for the knee.
The cannon boomed, a deafening crack of energized light. The beam, thicker than a man's arm, struck the lead Drudge's leg. There was no sizzle, only explosive vaporization. The creature's lower leg vanished in a flash of green-white light and superheated steam. Its momentum carried it forward, and it crashed face-first into the mud, still trying to crawl forward with its one good arm.
Likas didn't waste a moment admiring his shot. He was already shifting his aim. The ANITO Protocol was a blur of calculations in his subconscious—target priority, power-cell consumption, structural weaknesses. *Target Two: exposed spinal column. Target Three: unarmored cranium.* He fired again. Another boom, another Drudge falling. He was a machine of perfect, deadly efficiency.
But there were too many. They swarmed forward, a tide of rotting flesh and rusted metal, their gurgling cries joining the whispers in his head. A las-bolt from a panicking soldier went wide, striking the mud near a Drudge. The monster turned, its single eye fixing on the soldier's trench position. It lunged for the parapet.
Likas was already moving.
He dropped the las-cannon, letting it fall into the mud. In the space of a single human heartbeat, he had crossed ten meters of trench, shoving past terrified soldiers. He reached the parapet just as the Drudge's rebar-arm slashed down. Likas didn't block. He met the strike head-on.
His right fist, wreathed in a shimmering, barely-visible aura of pure Aethel, connected with the sharpened rebar.
The sound was not of metal hitting metal. It was the sound of a church bell cracking, a deep, resonant *GONG* that vibrated through the air. The rebar, a tool of the Maelstrom, shattered into a thousand rusted shards. The Pox-Drudge's arm recoiled, a stump of splintered bone and weeping flesh. It stared at its ruined limb with its one dumb eye, a flicker of what might have been confusion in its alien mind.
That was all the time Likas needed. His left hand shot out, grabbing the creature's head. His grip was absolute, the chitin-laced myomers in his arm locking down with the pressure of an industrial vise. He ignored the foul, sticky ichor that coated his gauntlet. He looked into its single, hateful eye.
And for a moment, Reyes, the tired old man, felt a flicker of something akin to pity. This thing was a perversion. A corruption of life. A prisoner in its own rotting flesh.
Then Aki Likas, the Stigmator, asserted control. He squeezed.
The creature's skull imploded with a wet crunch, like a melon dropped from a great height. He pushed the headless corpse back over the parapet and turned, his face a mask of cold fury. The whispers in his head screeched, a chorus of rage and pain at the loss of one of their own.
*…KILL…HIM…CONSUME…THE…LIGHT…*
"They're at the wire!" a soldier screamed.
Likas vaulted back onto the firing step. The first wave was upon them, clawing and tearing at the razor-wire barricades. Their bodies were heedless of the damage, pressing forward, creating ramps of their own dead and dying for others to climb over.
The battle devolved into a desperate, close-quarters butchery. Las-fire flashed in the gloom. Men screamed as rebar claws tore through armor and flesh. The air grew thick with the stench of ozone, cooked meat, and the sweet, cloying odor of demonic ichor.
Through it all, Likas was a whirlwind of controlled violence. He moved with a speed that seemed to defy physics, his every action ruthlessly efficient. He tore the heavy machine-gun from its pintle-mount when the gunner was decapitated, using it as an assault rifle. The weapon roared, spitting heavy-caliber rounds that tore the Drudges apart. When it ran dry, he used it as a club, the hardened metal crushing skulls and shattering bone.
He was everywhere at once. Pulling a wounded soldier back from the lip of the trench. Firing a sidearm with pinpoint accuracy to detonate a pustule on a Drudge's back, showering its comrades in corrosive acid. His movements were a blur, a dance of death guided by the cold, perfect logic of the ANITO Protocol.
To the men of the Concordat, he was a demigod. A living saint wreathed in the holy light of battle. They saw the impossible speed, the inhuman strength, the calm at the heart of the storm, and their flagging morale surged. They fought with renewed ferocity, inspired by the giant figure at their side.
They didn't see the truth. They didn't see the tired soul of Reyes, who felt every blow, every death, as a weight on his spirit. They didn't feel the Stigmata on his chest, burning like a hot coal, a constant, agonizing interface with hell. They didn't hear the whispers that clawed at the edges of his sanity, promising him power, peace, release, if he would just… fall.
*…you are so tired…let go…we can end the struggle…be one with the great work…*
"No," he grunted, slamming his armored boot down on the head of a Drudge trying to climb into the trench. His mind flashed back again. The quiet beep of the heart monitor. The slow, inevitable march toward death. He had fought that for thirty-three years, a slow, grinding war of attrition in his own body. He had lost. He would not lose this one.
A new sound cut through the din of battle. A low, guttural roar that was deeper, more resonant, than the cries of the Drudges. The ground shook.
A massive shape blotted out the dim light. It was easily twice the size of Likas, a bloated mountain of fused Carrion-Kind. Dozens of bodies were melded into its form, their limbs twitching, their mouths moaning. It had three immense legs, and its main body was a gaping maw lined with sharpened fragments of plasteel and bone. A Bile-Titan. A living siege engine of the Abyss.
It opened its maw, and a torrent of glowing, corrosive bile arced through the air, aimed directly at the center of the trench line.
There was no time. The ANITO Protocol confirmed it: evasion for all soldiers was impossible. The attack would vaporize a ten-meter section of the trench and everyone in it, including the terrified Private Roric.
In that frozen nanosecond, Reyes, the man who had spent his entire first life sacrificing himself for his siblings, made a choice. Aki Likas, the weapon, executed it.
He didn't run. He planted his feet.
He roared, a sound that was not human but not demonic either. It was the sound of pure, untamed Aethel, of a soul refusing to break. The Stigmata on his chest blazed with white-hot light, visible even through his chest plate. He thrust his hands forward, palms open, towards the incoming torrent of acid.
"**ENOUGH!**"
A shimmering dome of translucent blue energy erupted from his hands, a perfect half-sphere of pure will. It was the Aethel made manifest, a shield forged from the very fabric of reality.
The bile torrent slammed into the barrier. The impact was immense. The ground beneath Likas's feet cracked. The air sizzled, and the rain turned to steam. The acid, a substance that could melt Ceramite, washed over the Aethel shield, unable to find purchase. Likas's muscles screamed, the myomers in his arms strained to their absolute limit. Blood trickled from his nose. The whispers in his head became a deafening, unified scream of fury.
*…BREAK HIM! TEAR THE SOUL FROM THE FLESH!*
For a long, agonizing second, the universe was just the shield, the bile, and his will. He remembered his sister's graduation, the proud look on her face. He remembered paying for his brother's first real set of tools. Small victories from a forgotten life. He poured those memories, that selfless love, into the shield. It was the only fuel he had against the all-consuming hate of the Maelstrom.
The shield held.
The bile torrent subsided. The Bile-Titan roared in frustration. Likas stood his ground, trembling with exertion, the Aethel shield flickering out of existence. His arms felt like lead.
He was vulnerable. Exhausted.
The Bile-Titan seized the opportunity, lurching forward, its massive leg raised to crush him.
But the Concordat soldiers were not idle. Inspired by his stand, emboldened by his sacrifice, they unleashed everything they had. Las-fire, grenades, the desperate shot from a shoulder-mounted krak-missile launcher. The explosions blossomed against the Titan's hide. It staggered, wounded but not slain.
Likas's vision swam. The ANITO Protocol was screaming warnings at him—catastrophic energy expenditure, micro-tears in muscle tissue, imminent biological failure. He ignored them. He had one shot.
He looked at the terrified face of Private Roric, who was staring at him with a look of pure, unadulterated awe. He saw his younger brother in that face.
With the last of his strength, he pushed off the ground. It wasn't a jump. It was an explosion. Emulating the spring-loaded club of a mantis shrimp, a trick of biomechanics he rarely used, his legs unleashed a hypersonic burst of power. The ground beneath him shattered. He shot through the air like a cannonball, a streak of black armor and grim determination.
He flew directly towards the Bile-Titan's gaping maw.
Time seemed to slow. He saw the individual shards of bone and metal that served as its teeth. He saw the undulating flesh of its gullet. He saw the hateful, ancient light swirling in its depths.
He cocked his right fist back. The Aethel, drawn by his Stigmata, coalesced around it one last time, not as a shield, but as a spearhead of incandescent white light.
He struck the roof of the Bile-Titan's mouth.
The impact was silent for a fraction of a second. Then, a shockwave erupted outwards. A wave of pure kinetic and Aethel-energy. The Bile-Titan's head didn't just explode; it was annihilated from the inside out. The wave of force continued downwards, flash-boiling its internal fluids and shattering its bio-structure. The massive creature stiffened, then simply… disintegrated, collapsing into a mountain of steaming, inert sludge and vaporized ichor.
Likas fell from the air, landing hard in the mud, the last of his energy spent. He landed on one knee, his head bowed, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
Silence descended on the battlefield, broken only by the hiss of the rain and the groans of the wounded. The remaining Pox-Drudges, their pack-leader destroyed, seemed to shrivel. They broke, shambling back into the darkness of the no-man's-land.
The battle was over. They had held the line.
Likas remained on one knee for a long time, the whispers in his head fading back to their usual, maddening hum. The adrenaline drained away, leaving only a profound, soul-deep exhaustion. The pain from his strained muscles and the burning of his Stigmata crashed down on him. This body could do incredible things, but it was still flesh and blood. And his soul… his soul was just so very tired.
Footsteps squelched in the mud behind him. He didn't need to look. The ANITO Protocol identified the gait, the weight, the scent of sanctified oils on the armor.
"Report, Stigmator." The voice was crisp, female, and held an unshakable authority.
He looked up. Sister-Sergeant Elara of the Order of the Argent Shield stood before him. Her armor was immaculate, polished silver and white, somehow deflecting the mud and grime. She held her helmet under one arm, revealing a severe face, sharp cheekbones, and eyes the color of a winter sky. She was not a Stigmator, but a commander of the regular forces, tasked with supporting them.
"The line is secure, Sister-Sergeant," Likas rasped, forcing himself to his feet. He towered over her, but in that moment, he felt small. "Carrion-Kind incursion. Repelled. Heavy casualties."
Elara's gaze was analytical. It swept over the carnage, the dead soldiers, the steaming sludge that was once a Bile-Titan. Then her eyes settled on him. It was a gaze he was familiar with. It was not one of admiration, not truly. It was one of assessment. The way a rancher might look at a prize bull.
"Your performance was… exemplary," she said, her tone precise. "The Tithe-masters on Forge-Primus will be pleased. New recruits are always needed."
There it was. The unspoken truth of his existence, laid bare in the sterile language of logistics. The Sanguine Covenant. He wasn't just a weapon; he was a genetic treasure. A walking, talking vessel of blessed blood, a hope for a stronger generation.
"Just doing my duty, Sister-Sergeant," he said, his voice flat.
Her cool eyes softened, just for a fraction of a second. A flicker of something human, perhaps even sympathetic, crossed her features. "The blood you spill on the battlefield saves us today, Knight. The blood you carry in your veins could save us tomorrow. Do not forget that. It is a sacred trust."
She gave a curt nod, then turned to organize the medics and recovery teams, her voice barking out sharp, efficient orders.
Likas watched her go, the weight of her words settling on him. A sacred trust. To him, it felt like another chain. He was Project LIKAS. He was Stigmator Aki Reyes. He was the hero of Baal-Secundus. He was a genetic repository for the survival of the species.
He was all of these things.
But as he stood there, the rain washing the blood and ichor from his armor, all he felt like was Reyes. A tired old man who had wanted nothing more than to see his family safe, now tasked with protecting a family of billions he would never know, in a war that would never, ever end.
He looked down at his hands, the instruments of such impossible violence. He clenched them into fists, the servos whining in protest.
One more day. He had survived one more day. That was the only victory that mattered.