61. Rain of Salamanders

"How did it feel?"

It was a calm male voice, carrying a convincing power. Bile could not see his face, but his long-unused stomach began to spasm instinctively—in the distant past, he had heard someone speak to him in that tone.

"Who are you?"

He asked it with a fear even he himself had not noticed. Bile interpreted his trembling as a kind of bodily instinct, not an emotional conflict beyond his control. He refused to admit that, refused to let himself bow his head in this battle where he had already fallen into the weaker position.

"Someone you probably don't particularly want to see." The male voice continued, echoing around Bile. "But that doesn't matter. After all, I don't particularly want to see you either. Fabius Bile, your existence is truly interesting."

Interesting?

The corner of Bile's eye twitched with rage. He completely lost that air of effortless control, his face wrinkling into a knot. At this moment, he finally looked somewhat like an Astartes, rather than a base creature even more devoid of a bottom line than Demons.

"Oh? You actually still retain a certain degree of humanity? That is beyond my expectations. I thought you would care only about your research."

The scene around him abruptly distorted, like a ball of paper crumpled by a hand. The ground rushed closer, and in Bile's vision, he was back—back on that ship he had not even named, with the corpses of the psyker and the trading partner still lying on the cold metal floor, foul, bloody fluid slowly spreading.

He raised his hand, trembling. The excessive Psionic power had already shifted his internal organs. At least one lung had ruptured. Bile collapsed to the floor beyond his control, every inch of muscle twitching. In an instant, he lost everything