Lynn Definitely Counts as a Hero

Lynn charged out from behind the rocky hill like a reckless bull, heading toward the front of the Prospecting Station.

The cultist footsteps were drawing closer. The cultists behind him had already reached a few hundred meters from the rocky hill.

Fight!!! Fight like a man!!!

Steady, steady, steady. Don't fall.

The Chaos Cultists in front of the Prospecting Station spotted him and chased after him, firing as they ran.

Now.

"Raise the shield!!!" Lynn roared as he activated the new skill he had just obtained.

[Temporary Shield activated.]

With a whoosh, a layer of translucent light expanded around his body like an upside-down bowl, standing beside him.

The moment Lynn activated the Temporary Shield, countless dark-red beams shot out from the pursuing horde behind him, blanketing everything in front of his eyes.

Lynn instinctively closed his eyes for a moment.

It feels like I'm about to be shot full of holes.

...But he wasn't.

Fortunately, the shield was incredibly sturdy, firmly blocking this wave of dense gunfire and psychic attacks.

The Cultists' attacks burst into fireworks against the shield, their dazzling light making them especially conspicuous.

The cultists' buzzing turned into screams. "He's a powerful psyker! Capture him—!!!!"

A psyker capable of raising a shield that could block so many guns had to be an extremely powerful psyker.

Psykers could be sacrificed. A powerful psyker above a certain level was worth a hundred ordinary people.

Lynn didn't look back. Taking advantage of the three seconds the shield would last, he ran straight toward the rugged rocky area outside.

How could the Chaos Cultists in front of the Prospecting Station let him leave? They charged after Lynn in a surging horde.

The pursuers behind were blinded by the dust kicked up by the people in front and couldn't see how many people were ahead. Assuming all three of them were already out in front, even the Chaos Cultists lying in wait followed after Lynn.

No one noticed that there were still two people behind the rocky hill.

The Chaos Cultists had been lured away.

Cecilia and Iron Hammer ran out.

Iron Hammer urgently unlocked the spaceship, rushed into the cockpit, and started the engines.

The spaceship let out a deep roar, and its entire hull began to vibrate.

The Prospecting Station took off.

Iron Hammer packaged the map and scanning data on the data slate, intending to immediately send them through the ship's communications equipment to the nearest Imperial outpost to call for help and report what had happened.

Perhaps after sending the message, they could turn back and try to take Lynn with them.

But once the communications equipment was turned on, there was nothing but static.

The Warp energy gathered on Istvaan III interfered with the signal.

Cecilia stood at the spaceship's entrance, watching in the direction Lynn had gone.

The tide of cultists had become tiny, with Lynn at the very front looking like a distant star.

She really wanted to jump down and protect Lynn.

But she couldn't. She had to protect Iron Hammer and make sure they could break through any possible blockade by the cultists in orbit around the planet, so they could get the news out.

The Warp energy on Istvaan was already extremely powerful. Combined with the sacrifices and rituals of tens of thousands of cultists, it was enough to tear open the rift and allow Chaos forces to enter Realspace.

Once the Warp Rift opened, Chaos armies and Chaos Daemons would pour into Realspace.

Istvaan System would be the first to suffer, followed by the surrounding systems, and then the entire sector.

Tens of thousands of Imperial worlds would be swallowed by Chaos, and billions of humans would die.

Because Istvaan III was an Imperial forbidden zone, it had no Imperial garrison. The nearest Imperial forces were two sectors away.

They had to find the regular army as quickly as possible and report that cultists here were attempting to open a Warp Rift.

Once the cultists succeeded and the rift was opened, Istvaan Sector would become a daemon region. The entire sector would fall, eventually becoming a beachhead for Chaos forces invading Realspace, and the whole world would become a fallen death world.

"Go!" Cecilia said in a low voice.

"But...!" Iron Hammer clenched his fist.

"Go!!!" Cecilia rasped. "You are our only hope now. We have to find reinforcements as quickly as possible so we can come back to save Lynn and everyone here."

"..." Iron Hammer clenched his fist, unable to speak.

It wasn't that he didn't understand the bigger picture.

But, but...

He remembered Lynn reaching out his hand when he could no longer run.

Iron Hammer suddenly began to tremble.

He slammed his fist into a button on the control console.

The Prospecting Station suddenly turned.

Then it shot rapidly upward, flying out through the atmosphere of Istvaan III.

*********

Lynn wasn't actually in quite as heroic a situation as they imagined.

Istvaan III was enormous. Alone on the planet, Lynn was like a pebble tossed into a desert, and there were plenty of places to hide.

Besides, he had already become very skilled at crawling into holes and the like.

He found a tricky place to hide and temporarily shook off the Cultists searching for him.

Then he found a small cave on a rocky hill where he could fit. The entrance was concealed, while the open wasteland outside made it easy to observe the movements of the Cultists nearby.

He had already been crouching in the cave for a while.

After escaping the group of cultists, he had circled around the wasteland several times before finally finding this rocky hill.

From the outside, the rocky hill looked like a massive gray stone with several cracks in it.

Thinking that the cracks might be big enough to hide a person, Lynn crawled inside.

After crawling in, he discovered an unexpected bonus: there was a small inner space inside the crack.

It was tiny, only large enough for him to lie down.

The view outside the cave was excellent. An endless gray plain stretched out in front of him, and he could spot any cultist approaching from several kilometers away.

This'll do. I can lie low here for a while.

Lynn crouched in the crack at the cave entrance and looked outside.

Gray rocks, gray sand, and a gray-white sky.

The distant mountains were gray as well, bare and desolate.

The entire surface of Istvaan III looked as though someone had polished away every color with sandpaper, leaving only gray.

Everything on the surface of Istvaan III had been destroyed during the Exterminatus back then, and Fulgrim's subordinates had bombarded it all over again in 42k.

Orbital bombardment, ensuring that not a single corner of the ground escaped the artillery fire.

Still, he had to thank the Third Princess for the second bombardment. It had burned away the poisonous fumes gathered on the planet. Otherwise, Lynn probably would have died the moment he landed.

...The topic had gone too far. Back to the point.

The cultists wore white bone masks. On the gray wasteland, they looked like a cluster of moving white dots, making them easy to spot.

Lynn crouched at the cave entrance for a while. Only after confirming that no white dots had appeared did he lean against the rock wall and sit down.

He took off his backpack and dumped out its supplies to see how much he had left.

There were still several pieces of dried food, a few packets of protein bars, and two water skins in the pack.

Before he ran out, Iron Hammer had grabbed a handful of something from his own pack and stuffed it into Lynn's. Lynn hadn't seen what it was at the time. Now, after rummaging around, he found a packet of energy bars.

Iron Hammer had made the energy bars himself. They smelled like machine oil and tasted like chewing wax, but one could keep a person going for an entire day.

Lynn counted them. There were more than twenty.

He gave a slightly disgusted laugh.

Sigh. If even the food isn't tasty, what is there to look forward to in life?

...No, no, no. That thought was way too depressing. He had to cheer up.

He turned his head to look at [Throne Liberation] on the roulette wheel.

All right, I'm fired up! Looks like I can take another shot!

...But now he was alone again.

He saw Iron Hammer's Prospecting Station take off, with Cecilia and Iron Hammer escaping aboard it.

Lynn looked again at the gray-white sky outside the cave.

He didn't know how far Iron Hammer and Cecilia had flown, when they would find reinforcements, or whether they would come back.

Sometimes he wondered whether Cecilia and Iron Hammer would simply leave like this. But then he thought about it: being surrounded alone was still being surrounded, and being surrounded by three people was still being surrounded. If even one of them could escape, that was good enough.

The wind picked up outside the cave. It poured in through the entrance, cool and carrying sand. Blowing against his face, it felt like sandpaper rubbing against his skin.

Look on the bright side. A five-star cavern hotel, panoramic view of a sinkhole, excellent ventilation, and rugged, natural industrial-style decor.

...That worked.

[Danger Sense] remained active in the background. There were no hostile signals within a radius of three hundred meters.

Although Istvaan III was a holy site for Chaos pilgrims, the planet's surface was simply too vast. The main force of the cultists was also busy working on their Warp Rift, so they wouldn't spare much attention for a minor nobody like him for the time being.

Lynn huddled farther inside, raised the collar of his leather armor, and blocked the wind.

This feels a little miserable.

There were several thousand cultists across the entire planet waiting to capture him.

Sigh.

The 40k shithole.

There was no one else around. To keep himself from thinking himself into a corner, Lynn chatted with the system.

"System bro, it's so big outside."

The system replied mechanically:

[The surface area of Istvaan III is approximately 0.8 times that of Earth.]

Lynn said, "I'm not talking about the data. I'm talking about the feeling."

[What feeling?]

Lynn thought for a moment. "The feeling of vastness."

A wasteland with no visible edge, a sky with no visible top, mountains with no visible end—the feeling of vastness.

He was like a tiny pebble crouching in a tiny cave, looking out at a huge world.

But the system was a real mood killer: [Of course it's vast when there's nothing there.]

...That was true, too.

Haha.