The Gray's projection hovered in contemplative silence, then probed Angar once more. “What was your Resilience tally before and after that exertion?”

  “Full at the outset, 141 modified, then 77 after.”

  Eeshek’tik's mind-voice sharpened. “A modified Resilience of 141 in the third Tier? Unheard of, even for my kind. And a depletion of 64 Resilience exceeds the toll of any manifestation I know of by orders of magnitude. If you speak truth, grant me full access to your mind and its stored memories.”

  “Of course, Venerable One," Angar assented without hesitation. He wished no one ever doubted him, but he loved proving those who did wrong. "How might I facilitate this?"

  Eeshek’tik's astral projection offered no words in reply. Instead, the Gray's ethereal, slender, nubby appendages extended, almost like they were stretching, closing upon Angar's helm, beginning a psychic incursion that bypassed flesh and burrowed into the center of his being.

  Angar's whole mind dissolved in an instant, his consciousness hurled into a maelstrom of fragmented visions, whirling vortices of alien memories and half-glimpsed truths, cascading through his mind like shards of broken reality.

  He beheld colossal entities striding across the stars, armor veiled by shadowed robes, wielding weapons that unraveled the fabric of existence, and crimson tides drowning worlds in cataclysm.

  Sensations assaulted him endlessly, the gravitational crush of black holes at the galaxy's heart, the psychic screams of species long extinct, the inexorable pull of entropy.

  It was a profound and disorienting torrent, each layering impressions upon his soul until the deluge overwhelmed him, casting his mind adrift in blackness.

  When coherence returned, Angar found himself sprawled upon the blighted soil, his armor half-sunk into the foul earth amid clusters of scrub that shuddered with vicious hunger.

  Confusion fogged his thoughts. His breath came ragged and nervously while his eyes stuttered as they recalibrated against the sullen twilight.

  The visions lingered, but at the edge of perception, of understanding, just flashes of afterimages leaving him disoriented.

  He felt as if his very self had been flayed away and reassembled incorrectly.

  Eeshek’tik hovered above him, the projection's giant head set in what looked like contemplation.

  The mind-voice sounded once more, filled with intrigue. “Stranger and stranger still. Though many of your recollections are obscured, such as this elusive hub-plane, you emerge as true anomaly, Skre’eek. In all my long vigil, never has Holy Theosis levied an experience penalty upon a soul. Such defies precedent. And…”

  The Gray cut the words off. A moment later, it continued. “You tread a razor's edge, balancing between hubris and pride justly earned, between the unyielding faith of a zealot and the delusions of vainglory unbound. But I am no confessor come to weigh your character, nor redeem your soul.”

  Angar pushed himself upright, his gauntlets sinking into the ashen ground, his hydraulics whining as he stood. Disappointment upon hearing those false words filled his chest, but he held his tongue, awaiting the ancient's decree.

  “You still have not truly achieved the Mindscape,” said Eeshek’tik, “not by the true path. Both incursions were wrought through aberrant conduits.

  “Moreover, I cannot fulfill the three lessons pledged,” the Gray continued with an unyielding tone. “I may instruct in the arts of arithmetic, but if the pupil demands the summation of two and two is a violent collision and numbers crumbled to dust, and they cling to that form of addition, then I can teach them nothing. I know only true arithmetic.”

  The words struck harshly, but Angar's pride blunted them, his accomplishments providing plenty enough rebuttal.

  “As my word and honor are beyond reproach,” Eeshek’tik added, “I shall bestow, instead of lessons, a gift of greater worth. It will require some time, and shall be dispatched to your master, the Star-of-Fate.”

  Where anticipation had burned in Angar’s chest, resolve settled. That was fine. He’d improve and refine his method on his own. And a gift greater in worth than three lessons in psionic manipulation by the acknowledged master of such was something he was definitely interested in.

  He knelt and bowed his head. "My gratitude, Venerable One," he said. “Thank you very much.”

  Eeshek’tik's projection offered a final inclination of his massive head. “Farewell, Skre’eek.”

  With that, the ancient's presence disappeared, and Angar added the Gray to his list of entities to prove wrong, alongside Mother Mi and Divine Theosis.

  He crouched in the fleeting stillness, praying for a bit, the ash-laden wind of Abyssalhome licking at his armor, hissing against the plates.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  In his current mood, the solitude was a mercy, a moment to breathe, to settle his mind before returning to his companions, the eternal churn of duty.

  Angar didn’t pray as lesser men did. He didn’t grovel for Divine favor or beg boons like some mewling beggar whining for scraps of grace.

  To him, such entreaties were absurd, a one-sided farce, as if the Lord might deign haggle individually with specks of mortal dust. Or even notice their bleating.

  No. Existence in this brutal realm was solely for duty, a relentless tithe of blood and battle, a ledger of slaughter offered up to God until the final, ragged breath was spent. And that breath tributed too.

  Only then, in death’s embrace, his soul torn free, would he claim his due. If he’d sacrificed enough, tithed enough slaughter, he’d be granted eternal bliss in Heaven, a seat beside the King of Kings, alongside his gloried ancestors.

  When Angar prayed, it wasn’t simpering pleas. His mind turned to wars fought, to the bitter sting of errors made, each misstep and how he might hone his edge for the next.

  He envisioned conflicts yet to come, foes unknown, their sorceries twisting the battlefield. He weighed tactics, calculated angles of assault, envisioned the arcs of his hammer and lightning against such titanic horrors.

  It filled resources just as well as sniveling for benedictions and meditating on nothingness or emptiness or whatever nonsense other fools did.

  Where was Spirit? Her absence ate at him, a constant splinter in his thoughts. Had she forsaken him for truth? Was a short moment of her presence too great a demand? Were a few words such a horrible thing?

  Her absence bothered him terribly, and filled his mind with worry.

  What if she never returned?

  What if it was his own fault if she didn't?

  Another ship blazed past, a larger one, headed out of atmo and south to Fort Acre, though he couldn’t see it above the clouds.

  When finished with prayers, he reached into a sealed pouch at his belt, his gauntleted fingers finding the worn edges of Fella’s letter.

  He drew it out, careful as if handling a Holy relic, and pressed it to his helm’s olfactory grille. The scent was faint, now as much ink and parchment as perfume, but still there.

  He conjured her form. Or tried to. Her features and shape wavered in his mind, bleeding into something similar to Iyita.

  Similar, but not her, so it wasn’t coveting a married woman, only an imaginary one. Still a sin, but not nearly as grave.

  He exhaled, the sound muffled within his helm, and tucked the letter back into its sanctuary.

  His gauntlet closed around the haft of his maul, the weapon comforting in his grip.

  Rising, his cybernetic feet ground into the cracked earth, and his gaze swept the horizon, optical lenses whirring as they pierced the crimson haze.

  There, to the northwest, a distant mass of hulking brutes, their lumbering forms unmistakable even through the dust-shrouded twilight. He’d spotted them earlier as he sought a foe to demonstrate his powers on for Eeshek’tik, much farther off in the distance.

  He’d faced them before, during his earliest days walking this Glorious Path, when he had no gear and far less strength.

  They’d nearly broken him, their clubs hammering his resolve as much as his body. Only Sergeant Optio Mikhin and his men, toppling an avalanche of boulders, had spared him from death.

  And that caused another thought to nag at him, pulling him from slaughter’s call. Mikhin. The promise to petition for a military outpost on Tribute, a world no enemy would bother striking.

  Perhaps when its population swelled, and its significance waxed, that’d change.

  Still, a promise was a promise. He fished his battered notepad from a belt compartment, its pages dog-eared and stained with ash.

  A quick glance confirmed the task was scrawled there, and the request submitted through Jon.

  Simo often mocked him on his use of notepads over slates, but he had a sole reinforced slot on his belt meant for one, and the slate he carried brimmed with ancient Terran texts, though he’d devoured them all soon after arriving on this world.

  Slates were brittle, costly, and limited in function, poor for quick notes. Back when he’d lacked a thigh and had plenty of storage there, he could stow a dozen of them.

  Now, he had no such luxury, and the armor’s back-storage compartment was ill-suited for quick access. A notepad served perfectly for his needs.

  Eeshek’tik hadn’t specified how long his summons would claim him, so Salvador wouldn’t be expecting him back.

  The brutes, spawned from Moderated-rated gateways, were no true threat. Not to him. Not any longer. He’d purge them before returning to camp, an offering of tribute to a thirsty Lord.

  He strode forward, the ash swirling in his wake, going to cleanse the unholy, forging northwest through the blighted lands, his cybernetic feet crunching over the tainted earth.

  The terrain was rocky slopes and infernal flora, serpentine trees with thorned branches that shuddered as he got near, their needle-like leaves snapping at the air as he passed.

  He skirted the densest thickets, avoiding the hassle of fighting foliage that gave no experience, his senses constantly scanning for threats.

  Only twice, Hellspawn stragglers pounced from the shadows. Angar dispatched each with brutal swings, his hammer cracking skulls in bursts of plasmatic fury, leaving their smoldering husks to dissolve into the ashy ground.

  Then, ahead, crowded the horde of brutes, their hulking forms massed along the edge of a vast canyon that Salvador named a gorge. On Tribute, it would’ve been named a chasm.

  Whatever its true name, it was a deep, long, and narrow-ish wound in the earth, its sheer walls plunging into shadow, stretching far to the north and south, carving a natural barrier between Angar’s sector and the one to the west.

  The brutes clustered along its lip, their numbers thinning as they spread out, the horde moving along it further and further south, each desiring to claim its own spot on the lip, gazing westward with an animal fixation, drawn by some unseen beacon beyond, stymied by the impassable drop.

  The brutes were towering behemoths of gnarled hides, a sick meld of dark green and brown, scarred and rough as diseased bark.

  Their massive jaws bristled with jagged teeth, some long as a man’s hand, while beady eyes glowed with malevolent hunger from deep within fleshy sockets.

  Sinewy arms, thick as tree trunks, hefted crude, giant clubs, and their clawed feet left deep gouges in the earth as they shambled around.

  As Angar drew closer, the brutes seemed diminished, their once-titanic presence now shrunken.

  No longer did they stand so tall above him, nor did they loom as such harbingers of doom, as they had when he’d first faced them.

  Their size, though still formidable, felt far less overwhelming. Their malice, too, once a suffocating weight, now failed to register, or barely even registered.

  The dark whispers that had once dug at his mind were now quiet, easily dismissed by the fortified bastion that was his colossal will.

  He tightened his grip on the hammer, its counterbalanced core shifting its weight, and advanced to slaughter.

  I love being a Crusader, he thought.