As Angar strode to the door, I caught up with him, our footfalls echoing in the hollow gloom.

  We emerged from the strange structure together, the weight of its decayed sanctity lifting from our shoulders as we stepped into the thin and ashen air.

  Once we had cleared the exonarthex, I halted him with a raised gauntlet. "Hold," I commanded. "Remove your helm."

  He complied without protest, unlatching the seals with a hiss of pressurized release, revealing a face unmarred by the pallor of infernal taint.

  I inspected him meticulously, peering into the depths of his gaze, the lines of his features, even the subtle veins beneath his skin, ordering him to lift his eyelids as I scrutinized their undersides for unholy sigils.

  There was nothing. Oddly, disconcertingly so.

  No tracery of corruption's web, no shadow of infernal influence.

  Unconvinced, I commanded him to divest himself of his armor entirely, to strip away every layer of clothing until he stood bare before me in the crimson light, exposed to my unrelenting scrutiny.

  Still, nothing. No blemish, no sigil etched in hidden script, not even the slight pallor of the profaned.

  But there had to be something, a sign, a flaw, a fracture in his sanity.

  Defiance of logic bothered me, so despite the exorbitant cost, I deployed a Taint-Orb from my arsenal. Its crystalline facets stayed dim as it touched his form, probing with ethereal tendrils for corruption undetectable by other means.

  It revealed nothing, its glow remaining pure and untainted, a verdict that mocked reason.

  I resorted then to the ancient rites, with vials of Holy water dashed across his flesh, then a benediction, next intoning sacred scripture as I pressed a Trey pendant against his forehead.

  No reaction stirred, not a hiss of steam, not a convulsion of rejection, not even the slightest recoil.

  Somehow, in defiance of all immutable reason, he was either utterly unblemished by corruption's touch, or it had burrowed so profoundly, so swiftly, as to evade detection entirely, becoming a Herald or Emissary.

  Both prospects were as inconceivable as his apparent purity.

  Perplexing.

  I despise perplexity, that insidious fog that clouds reality and certainty.

  "You bear no signs of corruption," I stated flatly. "Your resistance to its insidious grasp is uncanny."

  Before he could muster a response, the edifice behind us, the strange church or cathedral, succumbed to its wounds.

  It collapsed in a billowing shroud of dust, the arches buckling inward, stones cascading in a muted avalanche that further choked the ashen air.

  We both turned to regard the ruin for a lingering moment, the haze swirling about us like ghosts, before Angar broke the silence. "As my vow demands," he stated matter-of-factly, "my soul is incorruptible. I have shrugged off much worse from far mightier adversaries, not least Azgoth himself."

  There was zero chance Azgoth had tried to corrupt him. Zero.

  I nearly retorted that no oath, regardless of conviction, could serve as an arcane ward, some magical aegis, and that his frayed Resilience should have consigned him to defeat and darkness. But I bit back the words, letting them dissolve unspoken on my tongue like a bitter pill.

  I burned to demand why he had permitted the Gatekeeper final communion with whatever foul kin lurked beyond in the abyss, but I clamped my jaw shut, stifling that question and the swarm of others roiling in my mind.

  Instead, we proceeded in silence toward my battlecycle. Besides the thunder, the crunch of our steps on the barren ground was the only sound accompanying our withdrawal, the horizon's perpetual haze blurring the line between victory and the shadows that ever nipped at a Crusader’s heels.

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  Over comms, my crew relayed a report as we trudged back through the forsaken streets, informing of the grim tally of repairs needed for both ship and shuttle alike.

  The harms inflicted by Osenas’ onslaught were not terrible, but expensive to address.

  As this was a Crusade, ordained under the Three's unyielding gaze, my chapter would shoulder the lion's share of the burden. Even were that not the case, my coffers brimmed anew, swollen with credits sufficient to stave off concern for years to come.

  Ash, that sinister schemer with his cold machinations, had always known what levers of mine to pull, his boundless wealth and connections dangling like baited hooks.

  The majestic, rare battlecycle was one such lure for me, coupled with the hefty stipend he proffered alongside it, temptations I couldn’t resist.

  In my customary solitude, roaming alone, the cycle's upkeep would prove an irksome addition to my list of duties, but the exhilaration riding it granted outweighed such labor, by a fair margin.

  And while I was bound to nursemaid these three through the Crusade's duration, they’d shoulder that load, making up for their great annoyance.

  Both Garioch and the Layman had brought havoc upon many Hellspawn in our absence, their efforts evident in the strewn carcasses littering the ichor-soaked township's fringes.

  As our paths were now entwined for the foreseeable grim march, it struck me that I ought to invest some modicum of effort in learning the Layman's name.

  As ever, mere proximity to Garioch ignited a spark of irritation within me, fanning it into a low simmer of rage that frothed in my gut like a heady brew.

  I loathe the fool. His accent grates on me like nails on a chalkboard, and there's an indefinable womanly quality about him, one that eludes precise articulation but clings nonetheless, like a subtle Heresy tainting a sacred rite.

  And what manner of man braids his locks? United Front traitor scum.

  Someone proclaiming that the Lord Himself speaks counsel in his ear galls me to the marrow, that such blasphemy could be tolerated.

  Such a fool ascending to Sainthood, becoming a blight upon my exalted Holy estate, was a sin in and of itself.

  This estate was supposed to be reserved for the Holy Empire’s mightiest warriors, not the likes of such a dunce.

  I despise him utterly, and harbor a fervent desire to kill him, to consign his prattling mouth to the Underworld with a single, purifying strike.

  Prudence and my soul’s eternity stay my hand. Thus, I must endure him, though I nurse a silent prayer that the battlefield snuffs his life in some ignoble and horrific and extremely painful fashion.

  We devoted what remained of that second day to purging the abandoned township, methodically scouring its shadowed corners and crumbling structures of any lingering infernal filth, our weapons singing until the thin air was chocked full of the reek of death and rot.

  Then, with the sun's feeble light waning behind the perpetual haze, we pressed some ways northward, toward teeming Hellspawn hordes and a pair of gateways.

  The hordes proved a motley rabble of lesser dregs and middling scum, bereft of true challenge or worthy adversaries to test my wards’ mettle.

  But even in this banal slaughter, the fool Garioch contrived to accumulate fresh breaches in his armor, his suit becoming a patchwork of rents that spoke more of incompetence than valor.

  The Layman performed decently.

  The young Knight acquitted himself with commendable ferocity again, hewing through Hell's legions with reckless abandon, reveling in the carnage like a machine of destruction, the battlefield his home.

  But an anomaly intruded upon the fray, a peculiar affliction that seized the boy as we advanced toward a gateway.

  When he drew within maybe five or ten meters or so of the swirling vortex of its portal, it was as though the rift itself seized his mind, ensnaring him in an unyielding trance.

  He stood frozen as a statue amid the chaos, unresponsive to hails or the violence of battle, compelling myself and the Layman to dispatch the swarming fiends that converged upon him, their claws and fell powers only thwarted by our vigilant wrath.

  I could fathom no cause for this strangeness but one, and that one certainly didn’t fit, nor provide an answer.

  Gateways exert no dominion over the pure of heart, only those already lost to darkness heed their siren call, and such wretches bear visible Hellsign, the stigmata of corruption writ upon flesh and soul.

  Powerful Heretics enslaved or bound to mighty entities of Hell, devoid of overt marks, react as any untainted soul might, not this catatonic allure.

  Then recollection stirred. Ash had claimed the boy's hands had pierced a gateway, enduring the infernal breach and somehow emerging free of mind and body, not an abomination forever lost to the infernal.

  I had dismissed it, as it's ridiculous, an impossibility, Ash only toying with me. I knew it to be a fabrication woven to embellish the enigma of those peculiar hands, just the spewing of impossible nonsense.

  But could it be truth? That a mortal's flesh had violated the veil and survived?

  There exists impossibility, and then there is the utterly inconceivable, a defiance of reality and the iron law of sanity and reason.

  Contact with a gateway's essence meant death, utter corruption. It is axiom, always.

  It simply is.

  But what if, in this instance, it was not? What aberration had spared him, and at what unseen cost?

  He roused eventually, shaking off the stupor like a hound shedding water. He spoke of ancient evils crooning to him, insidious demands to step through the threshold, their compulsion a tidal force nigh impossible to defy, a struggle that taxed him to the center of his being.

  I resolved then to steer him clear of gateways henceforth, preventing such incidents.

  For the most part, at least. I was curious to probe the phenomenon when his Resilience mended, to gauge if it had a different effect, or any effect at all.

  Time was our ally in this endeavor. Four months remained of unrelenting butchery before the subterranean bunkers unsealed their vaults.

  Four months to bathe the boy in unending slaughter, to temper him further.

  Or witness his shattering.