Chapter 307: Son of the Drake
Kian grabbed the helmet and tried to pull it free of the throne.
It didn't budge. Several attempts later, still nothing.
He figured some piece of the throne's rebar structure had locked it in place, drew his power glaive, and started cutting away the surrounding scrap.
A good amount of junk metal later, something felt wrong.
Underneath all that welded rebar and plating, there wasn't just a helmet. There was a breastplate. An Astartes breastplate, visible now beneath the scrap.
"...No way. Did this Warboss kill a full Astartes and weld the entire body into his throne?"
He kept cutting, methodically clearing every excess piece of structure that didn't belong.
Half an hour of work later, he'd finally separated everything extraneous and exposed a complete Astartes — full armour, intact, fused into what had been the throne's foundation.
The chestplate showed several massive gouges, deep enough to expose bone underneath. Presumably the cause of death.
Kian grabbed the shoulder pad, dialled his armour's servo-assist to maximum, and put every ounce of strength he had into hauling the body free. Close to two tonnes of dead weight. By the time it came loose, every muscle in his body had been recruited for the job.
He sat down in the middle of the corpse pile and just breathed for a while.
Voice command to the armour: a Regen-Bolt, straight into the strained muscle groups. Then he turned his attention to the unknown Astartes properly.
This was a fully gene-forged specimen, close to 3.3 metres tall, lying there like something out of a myth.
Green power armour. Honour markings Kian couldn't begin to interpret. On the massive curved shoulder pad: a Chapter icon — a green serpent.
He didn't recognise the heraldry. No way to identify the Chapter from what he had.
But the height alone confirmed it. This was a Son of Vulkan.
The armour told a story of violence — scoring and impact craters across nearly every surface. The chestplate, the thickest part of the suit, had a massive gash torn through it, exposing dark skin underneath.
That tracked. Vulkan's gene-line ran tall, broad-built, dark-skinned, with eyes that burned red, in keeping with the Primarch's draconic heritage. His sons carried the same traits — skin like graphite, built like furnaces.
The Salamanders were known, famously, for being the most approachable Chapter in the Imperium — a Chapter that reportedly helped local farmers with the harvest on their home world. In a galaxy of Astartes Chapters that ranged from rigidly militaristic to outright unhinged, that counted as remarkably down-to-earth.
Kian looked over the suit — the broad frame, the massive power pack — and clicked his tongue, thinking how nice it would be to own armour at that tier.
Then something caught his eye.
The wound across the chest. The exposed dark skin underneath.
No decay. No sign of rot at all.
"...No. Bird's-eye, full life scan. Now."
"Scanning. Please wait...
...
...
Scan complete. Two faint heartbeats detected. All vital signs trending toward dormancy. Subject assessment: critical injury or induced stasis."
"Holy— he's ALIVE!!"
Kian's expression went through several distinct stages of disbelief. A living Space Marine. A living demigod. Right here.
He was shaking, genuinely, and had absolutely no idea what to do with himself for a few seconds.
"Okay. Okay, calm down. He must be critically injured — Astartes have an emergency stasis response built in for exactly this. The Warboss cut him up badly enough to trigger it, assumed he was dead, and welded the body straight into the throne. And now here I am."
He forced himself to focus, ran the helmet's bird's-eye scanner over the chest wound repeatedly. The scanner could penetrate solid matter — with the right calibration, it doubled as a diagnostic tool.
The results: the entire sternum plate had been split clean through. Three lungs total — one of them critically damaged. Two hearts, one of them badly compromised, function visibly degraded.
Kian thought it over for a moment, then started dragging the Astartes toward the exit.
Two hours of dragging later, completely spent, having drunk every drop of the emergency nutrient supply built into his own armour, he finally got the dormant Astartes loaded into the shuttle.
The hatch sealed. Life support cycled on. Atmosphere flooded the cabin.
He pulled off his helmet, dug through the medical compartment, and found an injector gun — a pressure-driven device built to drive a specialised needle through skin too tough for a standard syringe. Astartes muscle density alone would defeat a normal needle, to say nothing of the synthetic subdermal plating they called black carapace.
He loaded a Regen-Bolt's contents into the injector's reservoir, lined the needle up against the gap in the Astartes's torn chestplate, and pulled the trigger.
A sharp hiss. The pressure mechanism drove the needle straight through skin and black carapace alike, delivering the full dose directly into the wound site.
Then Kian dug out his anointing oil and applied it carefully across the exposed flesh, marking him under sanctified blessing to accelerate the recovery.
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