A week had passed since the altercation in the Midtown Tech cafeteria. A week of heavy silence, fleeting glances in the hallways, and an isolation that Valerius Aurelian had deliberately reinforced. At school, he was nothing more than a golden shadow gliding between the rows, ignoring the suspicion of Scott Summers and the silent concern of Jean Grey. He had walled himself in total silence, cutting short any attempt to approach him. Teenage distractions no longer had a place in his existence.
Far from the flashy neon lights of Manhattan and the artificial effervescence of the golden youth, it was in a dark and forgotten corner of Queens that the future of humanity was being forged in secret. Valerius's studio was an insult to modern comfort, a sanctuary of concrete and scrap metal located under the roof of a decrepit building where the heater clattered more than it heated. The single room, battered by the icy drafts of this 2008 winter, housed only the bare minimum: a worn mattress placed directly on the floor of the alcove, a rough wooden table salvaged from the street, a single chair, and a stack of black-covered notebooks, methodically aligned.
This destitution was not only the result of his meager income as an emancipated orphan, surviving on state allocations. It was a choice. An iron discipline. Every dollar saved on food, comfort, or clothing was a precious resource hoarded for the future phases of his project. The Imperium had not been built on luxury, but on the sacrifice of billions of souls. Valerius applied this doctrine to his own flesh.
It was in this dim light, illuminated only by the pale glow of a bare bulb hanging from an electrical wire, that the young man pushed his current body to its absolute limits.
Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine. One hundred.
His striated and hyper-dense muscles trembled under the effort of his hundredth single-arm pull-up, performed on an exposed metal beam on the ceiling. His marble face, of an almost unreal symmetry, remained impassive despite the sweat pearling on his temples. He only allowed himself to come down when the pain became an intolerable burn, a bite of acid in his muscle fibers. This was not a simple high school athlete's workout; it was a desperate and methodical attempt to prepare his human shell for the cataclysmic violence of the upcoming genetic changes. His iron will was the sole fuel for a body that the System still refused to fully modify.
Once his feet touched the dusty floor, a slow breath, controlled by a strict martial discipline, calmed the beating of his heart. Before his golden eyes, the System interface shone with its familiar translucent glow:
[ BEHAVIORAL MODEL SYSTEM: IMPERIUM ]
'Cadian Soldier' : 90% [Final transfer phase...]
'Space Marine' : LOCKED
'Custodes' : LOCKED
??? : LOCKED
??? : LOCKED
??? : LOCKED
Ninety percent. The transfer of raw information was finally approaching its conclusion. Over the past few days, the command structures of the Imperial Guard, the holy logistics of the Mechanicus, the rigid organization of the Astartes Chapters, and the ruthless methods of the Inquisition had permanently anchored themselves in his memory.
Now, the System was tackling the final piece of the puzzle, the most massive, the most sacred... and the most dangerous: the history of the Emperor, the secrets of the Conquest of Terra, and the encrypted files on the Primarchs. Valerius sat down at his wooden table and opened one of his black notebooks. His fingers brushed against pages covered in a tight, geometric handwriting, devoid of flourishes. The System possessed a rigid characteristic: it transmitted factual data, streams of historical events, and pure technical schematics to him, but it never provided moral explanations or philosophical contexts. The System poured out the raw truth; it was up to Valerius, and him alone, to understand the why.
At first, when he had received the data concerning the end of the Unification Wars on Terra, Valerius had felt a deep bitterness, a visceral disappointment toward the Emperor. He had read the clinical and cold report of the massacre at Mount Ararat, the precise moment when the Master of Mankind had ordered the first Custodes to exterminate every last one of their own allies, the Thunder Warriors—those prototype super-soldiers who had nonetheless spilled their blood to grant him victory over an Earth ravaged by techno-barbarians. To a 21st-century mind, it looked like the worst of disasters, a monstrous ingratitude committed by a heartless tyrant.
But Valerius was no longer an ordinary human. By dint of analyzing the biometric and psychological data of the Thunder Warriors, re-reading their autopsy reports, and studying their combat behavior, he had eventually understood the terrible, the implacable necessity of this act.
The Thunder Warriors were an evolutionary dead end. They were physiologically unstable, prone to sudden cancers and uncontrollable fits of psychotic rage. Their life expectancy did not exceed a few decades before their own overdeveloped organs gave out in excruciating agony. They were weapons of mass destruction designed for an era of pure barbarism, completely unfit to live in the pacified, civilized, and ordered Imperium that the Emperor wanted to build. Worse still, their mental instability and insatiable bloodlust would have made them perfect prey for the whispers of the Blood God, Khorne. If the Emperor had not eliminated them at Mount Ararat, Chaos would have infallibly turned these monsters against a nascent humanity, docoming the species before it could even raise its eyes to the stars.
This realization had definitively consumed whatever naivety remained in Valerius. Order demanded cruelty. The survival of the species justified the sacrifice of individuals.
It was this same cold lucidity that dictated his behavior at Midtown Tech. His distance toward Jean Grey, his coldness in the face of Scott's provocations—it wasn't hatred. It was preservation. Through the System's data, he knew perfectly well that a Space Marine aged with extreme slowness, spanning centuries of war, and that a Custodes was virtually immortal against time. Attaching himself to mortals was a sentence of long-term mourning. He would see them all grow old, wrinkle, wither, and rot in the grave while he remained unchanged, an eternal sentinel. Furthermore, the Astartes transformation surgery would deprive him forever of the ability to father children. His future did not belong to civilian life; it belonged to the duty of the Imperium.
He cast a scornful glance at his school bag sitting in a corner. The next day, he would return to that sanctuary of little science geniuses. For him, high school had become a grotesque joke. His teachers marveled at his perfect grades, his systematic "A+" in all scientific subjects. The examiners thought they were dealing with a prodigy of modern physics or biology.
The truth was far more ironic: how could Valerius fail a test on the inner workings of the human heart or chemical bonds when, the previous night, his mind was calculating the genetic compatibility required to implement 21 additional organs into a human body to create a Space Marine? How could he be impressed by 21st-century physics when he was studying the magnetic confinement equations required to stabilize the hydrogen core of a plasma reactor within a heavy rifle? Modern science was to him nothing but a set of primitive and stumbling mathematics.
He stood up and walked toward the back of the room. There, concealed under a thick plastic tarp, rested the first true material milestone of his ambition. It was still nothing more than an inert assembly of copper tubes, secondhand fermentation tanks, and electronic circuits gleaned from the dumpsters of Midtown Tech.
Thanks to the schematics of the Imperial Guard and the biochemical principles of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Valerius had designed a nutrient synthesizer. Far from the infamous "corpse starch" used to feed the laboring masses of the Imperium, his machine only needed basic organic compounds—cultured algae, cheap cellulose, and recycled industrial proteins—to press dense, gray, and perfectly tasteless ration bars, capable of sustaining a man through more than sixteen hours of extreme physical labor. For a homeless person in the slums of New York, a single one of these bricks would represent the equivalent of several days of sustenance. Yet, the machine remained turned off. Valerius firmly refused to launch production for now.
He knew that timing was a crucial tactical datum. In this early part of 2008, with his seventeen years and his mere stature of an athletic young man, he had neither the security necessary to protect such a technological secret, nor the natural authority to lead crowds. The desperate were unpredictable; if hunger pushed them, they could turn against their benefactor, rob him, or attract the attention of local authorities and secret services. To build the foundations of his order, Valerius would wait for the unlocking of the higher model: the Space Marine.
He needed this biological metamorphosis. The physique of an Astartes, that colossal stature bordering on two and a half meters, that widened rib cage, that voice like the rumble of thunder, and that terrifying post-human majesty were indispensable political tools. Faced with an angel of death, criminals would hesitate, skeptics would fall silent, and the miserable would listen. Authority was not negotiated with a teenager's face; it was imposed by the mere physical presence of those who were born to command.
It was also in the silence of this studio that Valerius struggled to adjust the spiritual concepts he would have to instill into the hearts of his future subjects. Through the System's data stream, he had analyzed the inner workings of the Imperial Creed. But unlike the fanatical ecclesiarchs of the 41st millennium who burned heretics, Valerius had chosen to modify this faith. This choice did not stem from a desire to adapt to the sensitivity of his world, but from a profound respect for the memory of the Emperor himself.
Thanks to the archives of the Great Crusade, Valerius knew how much the Master of Mankind had hated religion, fighting with all his might against ignorance and those who elevated him to the rank of a deity. The Emperor was not a god, and he had always refused to be worshipped as such. On the other hand, he had never forbidden being worshipped as a martyr.
Entombed on his Golden Throne, enduring an unspeakable psychic agony for ten thousand years to maintain the beacon of the Astronomican and protect the human species from the predators of the Warp, the Emperor was the ultimate Martyr. It was this fundamental nuance that Valerius was going to preach to the poor and forgotten of New York. Not a distant god demanding blind sacrifices, but a father, a master who bled every second in the shadows so that his children might survive in the darkness of the universe. Worshipping a man for his supreme sacrifice was not violating the spirit of the imperial truth; it was recognizing its burden.
Valerius knew that this distinction would preserve the truth of the Emperor while exploiting the devastating power of faith. For he had understood, from observing human misery since his childhood on the docks of Brooklyn, that humanity had a visceral need to believe. Whether it turned toward science, toward money, or toward metal idols, it refused the void of existence. Faith was the only cement capable of keeping an empire standing in the face of the horror of the cosmos.
It was much easier for a man to endure hunger, cold, and degradation if he was convinced that his misery was a trial, a sacrifice consented to in order to rise and honor a Master who was already suffering for him. Understanding the raw reality—admitting that one is dying on a frozen sidewalk simply because of a bad streak of indifferent coincidences, in a chaotic universe that couldn't care less about your existence—was a truth that the normal human mind could not bear without sinking into madness or nihilism.
By offering them the figure of the Martyr Emperor, Valerius would not only give them food when the time came; he would give them a reason to suffer, and therefore, a reason to fight under his banner. They would pay for their nutrient bars with their time, listening to his words until some began to pray sincerely. These first faithful would become his heralds, propagating the word in the shadows of the city in his place, creating an army of the shadow loyal to the point of fanaticism.
Suddenly, Valerius froze in the middle of the room.
A massive thermal shockwave shot through his synapses. His golden eyes widened, shining with a blinding glare, while his veins became prominent, a burning purplish-blue beneath his thin skin. In his mind, the System counter went wild, breaking past the 90% barrier to climb at a breakneck speed.
92%... 95%... 98%...
The last block of data, the heaviest, had just collapsed into his brain. The visions of the Conquest of Terra materialized with absolute clarity: he felt the fury of the Warp storms, saw the glare of the Emperor's gold armor walking on the peaks of the Himalayas, and heard the oath of allegiance of the first Custodes. The total sum of the fundamental knowledge of the Imperium had just fused with his soul. He understood the deep nature of his existence, the ultimate goal of his System, and the dream of seeing humanity reign as absolute master over the galaxy.
A golden pulse, invisible to the outside world but of tectonic power, vibrated the very foundations of the Queens building. The countdown reached completion.
[ BEHAVIORAL MODEL SYSTEM: IMPERIUM ]
'Cadian Soldier' : 100% [SYNCHRONIZATION COMPLETE]
-> Unlocked Capacity: Summoning of Cadian Flak Armor & Laser Rifle (Standard Laspistol/Lasgun)
-> Status: Cadian Soldier profile fully assimilated.
'Space Marine' : 5%
-> Unlocked Capacity: Summoning of a MK I Space Marine Armor & a Bolt Pistol
-> Status: Space Marine profile currently assimilating.
The assimilation of the Astartes model began immediately, without transition, and the human reality of his body shattered into pieces.
Valerius collapsed to his knees on the concrete floor, his fists driven into the floorboards so as not to scream. An unspeakable pain, like a storm of white-hot blades, took his rib cage by storm. Inside his chest, his tissues tore, his blood vessels reshaped and duplicated themselves in a perfect surgical chaos. The System was creating his second heart, the secondary organ of the Astartes. The double and disordered pulsations crushed his sternum, sending jolts of pure adrenaline through his entire nervous system.
The biological torture did not stop there. His bones cracked, breaking microscopically to elongate. His muscles densified, thickening visibly. The pain of this accelerated remodeling was an agony that only his iron will learned from Cadia allowed him to endure in silence, his teeth clenched until they bled.
In less than an hour, the storm calmed, giving way to the dull and heavy rumble of a dual cardiovascular system. Valerius stood up slowly, his joints popping under his new weight. The physical transformations were blatant, almost monstrous for a civilian: he had just gained 20 centimeters in height, his silhouette now towering well over two meters, while his build had become twice as wide as that of a normal person. His civilian clothes were strained to the breaking point over his massive shoulders and his chest, which had become a block of dense muscle. The Midtown Tech teenager was fading away. The post-human was emerging.
An hour or two later, the old television set sitting in a corner of the studio static-hissed, turning on to a rolling news channel. A presenter with a grave tone announced a breaking news flash:
"...We are just learning, the billionaire and weapons genius Tony Stark has just taken off aboard his private jet. His destination: Afghanistan, for an exclusive demonstration of Stark Industries' brand-new weapon, the Jericho missile..."