"In the grim darkness of the 41st Millennium, there is only war..."
Superman chuckled. "Oh, that's just ridiculous."
Aiden raised an eyebrow at his mentor. "After seeing what these humans have been fighting for the past 10,000 years?"
"It's precisely because of the fact that humanity has survived for the past 10,000 years that I don't buy that propaganda for a second."
Currently the two were sitting in a dirty (Clark preferred "rustic"), run-down ("weathered"), smelly ("down-to-earth"), old (even Clark had to concede on that point) tavern, tucked away on a remote agri-world, light-years away from the nearest warzone. Aiden had no idea why in the hell Superman would decide that they needed to stop here, of all places. Barely a month ago had Kal utterly disassembled an Imperial armada, telling Aiden that they had "a lot of work to do." Precisely what part of that "work" involved sitting here, in this filthy place?
Aiden had to admit, it was remarkable how disjointed and unorganized the Imperium of Man was. There was no shortage of planet-sized cities, urban growth which had covered whole worlds like blankets of steel and rust. But there was also no shortage of worlds like this one: primitive hovels that seemed practically pre-industrial at times. The tavern they were sitting in even had kerosene lamps, of all things! Aiden eyed the anachronistic devices with suspicion, as if expecting these relics to explode at any moment. Of course, that was nothing compared to what this rickety hole lacked: no air conditioning, no running water, not even indoor plumbing. If you had visited this world and then visited one of those ghastly "Hive Worlds," and somehow managed to not see any of the inhabitants, you'd be forgiven for assuming these were two different societies from two completely different species.
It was at this moment, of course, that a reminder of the reality of the situation barged in. The door to the tavern burst open, and in came a dozen soldiers, all dressed in uniforms and all fully geared for war. Both Clark and Aiden furrowed their brows, but they made no move in response otherwise. The two aliens sat in an isolated corner of the room, their dark green cloaks obscuring their features. Aiden's blood-toned skin was disguised under an illusion which Superman had conjured with his ring to keep anyone from crying "xeno" while they were traveling through. They sat together, two mugs of untouched mead between them, quietly observing.
The soldiers weren't of the Imperial Guard, that was for sure. There was no reason for Guardsmen to be stationed on a backwater world such as this (though, as far as Aiden was concerned, every Imperial world was a backwater). More likely they were some sort of planetary defense force. Which meant there was probably no reason for them to walk into a tavern and order food while armed, unless they were intending to intimidate the locals. Which, desired or not, seemed to be the effect.
The tavern fell deathly quiet the moment the doors had been thrown open. It was a late summer day, right on the cusp of evening, so everyone in town had come here to relax, eat dinner, and spend time as a community. There had been laughing, drinking, flirting, and occasionally even eating, but all that had come to a halt as soon as the soldiers came. The musky scent of dirt and hay which the nostalgic Clark had called "down-to-earth" was instantly punctured by the sharp scent of oil and powder these men brought with them, and everyone's eyes turned towards the soldiers for a split second before instantly turning downward, trying their best to not look, to not be noticed by these heavily armed intruders.
Of course, a certain tavern owner didn't have the luxury of being able to ignore them. She approached the men with an outward confidence, asking them take a seat so she could take their order. One of the men, who looked to have the rank of a sergeant, looked her over from head to toe. She was a pretty little thing, if a tad dirty from working all day. She was a short woman of robust build, her plain dress reaching all the way down to her ankles and smudged with dirt, along with her fingernails and face. She was armed with only a stoic expression and a washcloth.
The sergeant, a powerfully built man of greying hair and a wide sneer, told his soldiers to take their seats before turning to join them. However, as he did so, his left hand left the grip of his sidearm so he could place his palm directly onto the tavern owner's left buttock. He grasped her flesh firmly and without hesitation, whispering something into her ear which only she could hear. Well, unless you had Kryptonian super-hearing like a certain alien, whose eyes began to glow a subtle red.
"What did he say?" asked Aiden.
"You don't want to know," responded Clark, in a tone that made it clear that just repeating the sergeant's vile words would exponentially increase the risk of Heat Vision.
Aiden started to rise out of his seat, only to be stopped by his mentor's hand grasping his arm. The young Lantern looked the veteran in the eye.
"You brought me here because you wanted me to learn about humanity, didn't you?" guessed Aiden. "You brought me here because you thought that I should learn about these people, what makes them tick. Their strengths, their weaknesses. Well, what was the point of bringing me here if it wasn't to learn how to save them?"
As Superman opened his mouth to respond to his pupil, however, the tavern owner responded for him.
SMACK!
The sound of her hand impacting her assaulter's face seemed to snap everyone out of it. Suddenly, no one was looking down in shame anymore. Now, they looked up with fury. The owner of the tavern looked at her harasser, not even attempting to disguise her disgust. The sergeant was surprised, though only for a moment. He walked closer to her, arms wide. After all, no didn't really mean no, right?
"Sometimes they don't need to be saved," responded Superman, whispering to his young pupil, "Sometimes they just need a little help."
"Leave her alone creep!"
"Hands off!"
"Pick on someone your own size!"
"Go date your right hand, wanker!"
A number of patrons started shouting, many cursing and swearing. One of the children, an overly-enthusiastic boy who couldn't have been more than eight, hurled a red fruit which Aiden briefly recognized as a tomato, which struck the sergeant on the side of the face. The younger Lantern briefly tried to activate his ring before realizing it suddenly wasn't there. Clark smiled at him as he pocketed his student's weapon.
"You don't use jewelry in a bar fight," remarked Clark, handing Aiden that classic saloon-brawl staple: a beer bottle.
.
.
.
The resultant melee was brief and confusing. Several of the garrison forces went for their guns, but each time they tried the grip of their weapons became unbearably hot to the touch, scorching their skin and forcing them to abandon them. In the end, the fight had come down to beer bottles, stools, wooden furniture, and good old-fashioned fisticuffs. The fight had been so intense that several of the soldiers swore they had seen one of those hick farmers tossing men over his head like they were ragdolls. When it was over, all twelve of them had been kicked out, several of them via the tavern window. The sergeant had gotten the worst of it. That damned wench, the same broad he'd copped a feel from, had managed to clock him in the face with a metal jug that knocked loose several of his teeth. Not that he'd ever admit that. As far anyone else was concerned, this retired veteran of the Imperial Guard had been overwhelmed through sheer numbers.
"How disappointing Sergeant," said a man dressed in a long, black jacket, which lay atop a similarly colored suit of Power Armor. He carried three items at his side. The first was an ancient tome which held within it hundreds of pages recording all manner of heresies and their appropriate punishment, ranging from cruel to depravedly draconian. Next was a simple bolter pistol, one which had condemned hundreds, perhaps thousands of heretical souls to the fires of Hell. Lastly and most importantly was a simple, marble-colored amulet in the shape of a capital "I", inscribed with a single, stylized skull. He kept his Inquisitorial Rosette, his final and most dangerous weapon, tucked away, close to his heart.
The NCO looked at his superior with a desperate plea in his eyes. The Inquisitor looked down on the man with utter indifference.
"Please sir, they got the drop on us. Allow me to prove to you-"
"Oh shut up," said the Inquisitor, waving his hand as if sweeping dust off his leg. The innocuous gesture sent a powerful pulse of telekinetic force, instantly snapping the Sergeant's neck in half like the most brittle of twigs. The soldiers looked at the corpse which used to be their boss and gulped in fear, understanding that a single scream of abject terror might just tempt the Inquisitor to add one more person to the body count.
"I sensed a presence on this world, a source of great power," said the Inquisitor, mostly to himself. To the relief of the soldiers, he seemed to ignore them and the cadaver. "But I never would've imagined that it would be concealing itself in this dirty, run-down, smelly old tavern. I had hoped that you soldiers would be able to flush this being out into the open.
I suppose I should've simply handled this myself," remarked the Inquisitor off-handedly, reaching out with his hand and his mind. No matter how powerful it was, whatever it was, there was no way that an Alpha-level psyker like him wouldn't be able to handle it.
A tendril of power reached out, tentatively probing the inside of the tavern, searching for his quarry. Enough psychic power to crush a Baneblade into a thin plate of sheet metal flooded the wooden shack and, for a moment, every single mind, from the feisty tavern wench who had started this whole mess to the simplest of ants, was frozen in place.
Well... that's one way of saying hi.
The Inquisitor paid no heed to this being's supposed friendliness. He sensed a great power locked away inside, something he had never felt before in all his years. It was matched by an equally extraordinary intellect, a mind perhaps unrivaled in the galaxy.
Hi, I'm Clark. What's your name?
The tone of this being's mental voice seemed to imply he was reaching out, waiting for the Inquisitor to shake his hand, as if that were even possible in a psychic conversation. The Inquisitor pressed onward. Somehow, despite the palpable strength of this stranger's mind, he couldn't sense a single shred of psychic potential.
So... are you just going to keep rummaging around in there or...?
It was almost a shame. If this stranger had had the Gift he could've perhaps rivaled a Primarch in power. But, as it was, it was only a matter of time before this trained psyker broke through this unexpectedly stiff resistance.
Well... you asked for it...
For a moment, the Inquisitor hesitated. The stranger's voice, the one calling itself "Clark," almost sounded apologetic, as if it were concerned for the Inquisitor. How foolish. If anyone should be concerned, it should be...
Ba-thump... Ba-thump... Ba-thump...
What was that? It was a sound, hauntingly familiar, like a lullaby from a lifetime ago. Steady as a drumbeat, but as gentle as rain on a stained glass window. The Inquisitor shook his head, both physically and psychically. A common technique to resist a psychic probe was to repeat some sort of tune or rhythm. That was probably it. A childish trick being used to waste his time.
Ba-thump. Ba-thump. Ba-thump.
The sound was speeding up. His opponent was probably just trying to drown him out with white noise. The Inquisitor smiled to himself. How pathetic. Was this the best that this "Clark" could do? He was almost disappointed. He had been hoping for a challenge.
Ba-thump! Ba-thump! Ba-thump!
No. He was definitely disappointed. He had hoped that this being, for all its power, would be able to do more than just the mental equivalent of a child putting their hands over their ears and humming loudly. His smile grew to a grin. He'd have this creature lobotomized and obedient within minutes.
Ba-thump! Ba-thump! Ba-thump!
His expression faltered for a bit. He kept pushing, but for some reason with every inch he pushed the sound just kept rising in volume and tempo. But he steeled himself once more. This was, after all, an exceptional mind, even if its psychic defense was crude and unsophisticated. He just had to keep pushing...
BA-THUMP! BA-THUMP! BA-THUMP!
Something was wrong. He could actually, physically feel the strange sound now, as if it were reverberating within his very own body! But this was just a mental construction, wasn't it? So how could it...
BATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMPBATHUMP
Something was very wrong. Something was terrifyingly, indescribably, inconceivably wrong. He had to leave.
Oh no you don't.
A sharp pain, a spike driven through his mind's eye, directly into his skull! He tried to leave, to sever the connection between their minds, only to discover that he couldn't. His eyes flooded with energy, green and verdant. The soldiers looked to their Inquisitor with concern, asking, futilely, if he was alright. He answered, whispering to his psychic adversary.
"What is this?" he asked, even as he himself came to realize the answer.
It's a heartbeat. Yours. Mine. Everyone's on this planet. Your mind couldn't handle the sensory overload at first, so it tried to shield you from it initially. But you kept pushing, so gradually you started to hear the rest. Every person. Every animal. Every creature that crawls, swims, and flies. And that's just their heartbeat. Wait till you hear the rest of it.
And suddenly he did. He heard the breeze rustle leaves on the other side of the planet as if the roaring gale of a hurricane. He heard snails propelled on carpets of mucus, as loud as stampeding elephants. From a single blade of grass he heard the sound of growing, the echoing gasp of atmospheric intake through microscopic pores, the crashing boom of carbon dioxide, oxygen, water, and solar energy colliding to form glucose, and the rasping sigh of carbon dioxide being released back into the air. He heard couples having sex, the sound of conception, the cries of a birth, and the moan of a dying man's last breath. And above it all, he heard his voice, gentle and soothing.
Ready to hear the rest of the universe?
He heard the collision of atoms, hydrogen and helium, at the heart of stars. He heard the roiling of molten iron and nickel beneath the surface of planets. He heard a cloud of hydrogen and helium, whose diameter would dwarf the whole of the Imperium, collapse in on itself, a rush of power lighting the fuse of nuclear fusion, a spark to herald the birth of a new star. He heard a world of pure gas, swirling in constant storm, lightning to cleave a warship in half and thunder to shatter a continent.
"No more..." he said, his lips pleading against his own will
But you haven't even opened your eyes yet...
Vision began to accompany sound. Colors he had never seen before, shapes that should not have been possible. All of reality seemed to bend and warp around him. That which was solid proved to be vapor, temporary constructs of mere atoms to eyes which could see the frail bonds, thin as a whisper, holding it all together. The dirt, the air, his own hands, he saw the world as it truly was, as a collection of atoms held together by the barest strings of probability, clouds of possibility feigning permanence. He saw the entire electromagnetic spectrum, in all its infinitesimal variety. He beheld the atoms themselves, a sea of planetoids in an ocean of physics. He observed their components, their functions, and their purpose. He saw their existence, and their non-existence, their massless mass and formless form. He saw the strings within that pulled and pushed towards a destiny unknowable, and within those...
He blinked. All that was before him was a dirty, run-down, smelly old tavern.
The Inquisitor fell to his knees. What he had just seen was indescribable in its reality and terrible in its infinity. It was...
"So beautiful..." he whispered, tears forming in his eyes.
Good-bye Inquisitor.
No. No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO, NO! He had just seen it! The truth! The true reality of the cosmos, in all its wonder, in all its beauty. He had seen through eyes which could see observe the ebb and flow of space and time, heard through ears which throbbed with the pulse of the universe. All his senses, all his dull human senses, his ludicrously limited faculties, seemed like pale imitations, mockeries of the true reality. It was as if he had seen color for the first time, heard a symphony of muses all around him, and now he was condemned to shamble through life blind and deaf. And, perhaps most vital of all...
"I saw it! I saw how to save the world!"
The voice was silent as it contemplated that declaration. And then the tavern door opened.
The soldiers stiffened as this man approached. He was a giant of a man, his green cloak torn and flapping in the gentle breeze as another man followed. But the Inquisitor simply smiled, bowing his head in awe and reverence. He had seen what the world looked like through those eyes, those piercing blue eyes that he knew had seen more in a blink than all of humanity had seen in its collective existence. He had seen that truth. He had seen it. He needed to see it again.
"If it had ever mattered to you Imperials... you could've saved the world... all the worlds... a long time ago."
Like that, Kal-El took a single finger, and tapped the Inquisitor gently on the forehead. The impact knocked him unconscious, and he collapsed, asleep and, for perhaps the first time since before he had become a servant of the Imperium, at peace with himself and the universe.
The soldiers, who had observed all of this helplessly bemused, looked on in horror at this colossus who had put this Alpha-level psyker to bed as a mother did to her child.
Clark ignored them completely as he turned to his pupil.
"Come," commanded Superman, banishing his cloak and revealing the bright green aura of a Green Lantern.
"Finally!" Aiden smirked as he did the same. "Where to next?"
"The Tau Empire," answered the Man of Steel, before lifting up, up, and away into the darkening sky.