Chapter 314: The Demon-Cleaver
"Right then, that's the cut done. Get it to forging — I want a mechadendrite leg out of this, adamantium-cored."
Antonius gestured at a stack of conveniently-sized adamantium chunks lying on the ground.
"Hold on a second."
Something felt off to Kian. He walked over and looked at the pile more closely.
"Wait. This doesn't look right. This looks like a third of it's missing."
"Probably vaporised in the cutting process. Perfectly normal. Anyway — let's get moving, shall we?"
Antonius, deflecting smoothly, was already waving his assistant toward the truck.
The assistant climbed in and pulled away in a hurry — gone in seconds.
Kian's eyes narrowed. Something about the way those tires had been sitting low to the ground on the way out hadn't been normal.
"You absolute—"
It clicked instantly. The bastard had skimmed his own cut.
He went straight for Antonius. The two of them went down in a tangle, robes tearing, fists flying.
Nor'n finally intervened, picking up each combatant with one hand and pulling them apart bodily.
"Enough, both of you. Just take me to the crust already — there's clearly more than enough adamantium left for everyone."
"Then I get a third too!" Kian snapped.
He made a call. Shiv showed up within the hour with a fleet of trucks and a crane, loaded up most of the remaining pile, and hauled it off.
Even with a third skimmed off the top, what remained was still substantial — more than enough to keep Nor'n forging non-stop for the full four months without exhausting it.
The three of them loaded the gear and the remaining adamantium into a heat-shielded elevator and descended to the deep observation station built into the planetary crust.
Nor'n had stripped down to a simple linen robe, smith's hammer slung over one shoulder. The moment the elevator doors opened onto that wall of heat, his expression relaxed into something close to genuine contentment.
"This kind of heat feels like home. Reminds me of my Chapter's world — volcanic, lava fields everywhere.
...Although." He paused, something flickering across his face. "Strange. I get the sense something significant happened here recently."
Kian felt a small spike of guilt. Right. The whole summoning-a-daemon-with-Silentium incident. That happened right here.
"Ahem — Nor'n, no time to dawdle. Let's get the forge started."
He changed the subject fast, before the giant could pull on that thread any further.
Forging ran deep in the gene-line of Vulkan's sons — instinct deep enough that the mention of it alone was enough to redirect Nor'n's full attention onto the work ahead.
Working adamantium required extreme heat and pressure to soften the material enough for shaping. Forge Worlds maintained industrial furnaces capable of artificially generating those conditions — but the cost of building and running one was enormous, well beyond what most worlds could justify for anything short of full-scale shipbuilding.
For smaller-scale adamantium work, the more economical route was simply lowering the raw material into the planet's crust and letting natural geothermal pressure do the job.
This particular observation station had been built, from the beginning, with that exact contingency in mind — small-scale special-metals processing.
Nor'n clamped a chunk of adamantium in a specialised holding rig and fed it directly into the chamber wall. A sequence of mechanisms drove it down into the geothermal layer.
Roughly half an hour later, he withdrew it. The block had gone half-molten — workable.
He melted a batch of supporting alloy and folded it together with the adamantium, then got to work.
Within minutes, a mechadendrite leg, adamantium-reinforced, came off the forge and landed in Antonius's waiting hands.
Antonius's eyes crinkled into pure crescents of joy. He hugged it to his chest and refused to let go.
A while later, a second piece emerged — a massive two-handed greatsword — and landed in Kian's hands.
"The blade core carries a modest adamantium reinforcement throughout," Nor'n explained. "The cutting edge is essentially pure adamantium — gives it unmatched edge retention and hardness.
Even without activating a power field, this blade alone will cut through most light armour cleanly."
Kian took the sword and ran through a few practice swings, blade flashing through the air.
The thing weighed over eight kilograms — genuinely heavy by any normal standard. But with his current physical conditioning, swinging it felt closer to handling a two-kilogram training blade.
In powered armour, he'd be able to move it at speeds that would terrify anyone watching. The weight wasn't going to be a limiting factor at all.
The blade ran 1.6 metres overall, with a heavy counterweight at the pommel housing a built-in force-field generator. Built to last, built to perform, and visually unmistakable — anyone who saw him carrying this thing would understand immediately that he wasn't someone to mess with.
"I'm naming this one the Demon-Cleaver," Kian announced, raising it overhead. "I'm going to use it to kill every xenos and heretic that crosses my path."
He held the blade aloft.
A wash of golden psychic fire rippled up the steel.
It was, genuinely, a striking sight.
Nor'n stared at the golden flame wreathing the blade, completely transfixed.
He was somewhere north of a hundred years old, closer to two hundred. He'd fought through thousands of engagements, stood on hundreds of worlds. Once, on an Ecclesiarchy shrine-world, he'd witnessed an actual Living Saint — a person of genuine moral weight, who'd glowed with gold during a sermon and personally dispelled Chaos corruption across hundreds of thousands of panicking civilians.
That Saint had functioned as an anchor point for the entire planet's faith — a critical defensive asset against Chaos incursion in its own right.
A thought surfaced in Nor'n's mind, unbidden: should I try to recruit this man into the Chapter?
Too old for gene-seed implantation, obviously — he could never become an Astartes himself. But a Chapter wasn't just Astartes. There were ships, mortal auxiliary forces, sometimes entire Chapter-allied Knight Houses with war machines of their own.
Bringing a near-Saint like this home could meaningfully strengthen the Chapter's mortal auxiliary command structure.
The idea genuinely excited him, for about four seconds.
Then he watched Kian use the golden flame wreathing the Demon-Cleaver to light a cigarette, and take a long, satisfied drag off it.
The idea died instantly, and without ceremony.
What in the Emperor's name was I thinking. Give this one two years back at the Chapter and we'd be running a void-pirate gang with extra steps.
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