3.4
The silver, sleek transport glided through the air with nary a sound. It was a smooth ride, lacking any jostling from winds.
Most of Sanctuary's aircraft was like that; soft as silk even if the outside was a hurricane.
"You're all in luck." Redgrave said, arms spreading wide. "You six are going to the plateau."
The plateau. As far as the Alphas' training grounds go, it was exactly what the name suggested.
A plateau.
That was it. It was just like a normal plateau. There wasn't anything special about it, save the fact that the Alphas used it as training grounds. It was big, it was flat, it was high. Simple and straightforward.
All the other training grounds had a gimmick. The lake was wet, the desert was sandy, the forest was full of trees, the ruins were full of ruins, blah blah blah. They were just environments to fight in. It let the Alphas get experience with those places.
The plateau was just a big, flat piece of ground.
That also meant there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
The air in the room was, despite that, full of anticipation. The graduates all appeared calm, professionalism ensuring that, but I knew them inside and out.
They were eager. The reasons varied; two wished to prove themselves, fully. Two wished to kill Daemons, pay back the source of their suffering. One was simply happy to finally be where they felt they could be doing the most good for Sanctuary.
And Timaeus wanted to come face to face with what he knew as an enemy to all that was good. Curiosity was his sin, the desire to see for himself, with his own eyes, the world as it was. Singleton had tempered this with caution, and so he waited until he felt that the full preparations had been made.
Naturally, I was also here, though much like Redgrave, I'd be an observer.
"You all know the drill." Redgrave continued. "Kill every Warp Entity you find. You get points for the type that you kill. Minor Entities-" Minor Daemons, mostly unaligned. "-count for one, Beasts-" Daemon Beasts. "-for three, Moderates-" Actual Lesser Daemons, though also including Daemonic Steeds. "-for five, Majors-" Heralds. "-for ten."
Left unsaid were the Extremes- Greater Daemons, of which killing one was an automatic hundred.
Assuming they got to it before Redgrave himself did, that is. The man was about the most powerful Psyker in Sanctuary, and stood at the top of Alphas because of it. Skill, practice, and an unspeakably vast hatred of Daemons kept him there despite the attempts to dethrone him.
"How you go about this is up to you." Redgrave continued. "However, since Timaeus here has a soul as strong as it is, he's going to be prime bait, so if you want any action, I'd suggest going with him."
"Oh, there'll be no problem with that." Kia said, eyeing him up and down with a sultry tone.
Timaeus offered a smirk, playing along as shifting his body- and letting the form-hugging armour he wore ripple alongside his muscles.
The thing with Alphas? They're all pretty powerful Psykers. And, in turn, they've all got pretty powerful Symbionts, too. This, combined with the bleeding edge genetic and cybernetic augmentations they received, made for particularly strong, tough, and agile people. All of them could expect to take a tank shell to the face and walk away from it without a whole lot of trouble.
Which had a small problem. Armour that was strong enough to be useful to them was also heavy and thick enough to impede their agility, something that was good enough that it actually meant they took more hits, because they couldn't dodge properly.
Most of the protection from Alpha-class Armour was therefore offered by energy fields, combining Conversion Fields, Refraction Fields, Reductor Fields, and Void Shields together into a layered system that was designed to not impede their physical mobility at all. What little shots actually hit them had to punch through all four, and then their native durability and Symbiont protection on top of that.
And then pressure had to be kept up because they all regenerated with extreme speed, too.
Being an Alpha on the battlefield was an exercise in being as much of a disruptive asshole as possible. Suggestions for dealing with them typically only had two answers; deploy another Alpha, or nuke the entire area.
The rest of their armour was devoted mostly to expanding their awareness of the battlefield. By design, it impeded mobility as little as possible- Which made for form-fitting armour.
It wasn't indecent, or anything. On most, it wasn't even that noticeable.
But, on Timaeus' physique...
Eye Candy wasn't too bad a descriptor.
The others chuckled, spirits buoyed by the interplay. Even Redgrave smirked, though you wouldn't be able to see it underneath that armour.
He did the reaction more for amusement than anything else. So had Kia, really, more interested in fucking with people than actually interested in them. Over the months, the two had formed something of a routine.
The craft began to slow, the plateau visible from the holowindows. It came closer with considerable speed.
"Alright." Redgrave nodded. "Serious faces for the moment, people, I want you all to remember something."
He reached up, pressing at his neck. The seals of his suit came undone, and he pulled his helmet off, slowly.
The graduates blinked, startling briefly.
Redgrave's face was a portrait of scars. Old, yet still pronounced.
"I got these from a Daemon." He said, holding a hand just in front of his face. "Happened when I was a young kid. My tribe was just living life, and then the Daemontide happened and ruined everything. One of the big ones came after me."
Greater Daemon, he meant. In this particular case, a Keeper of Secrets. The one that got away, a fact which still grind my metaphorical teeth.
"It turned my tribe on itself, ruined the minds and souls of my friends and family. It toyed with me, and everybody I knew. Only thing was, it was dumb enough to draw it out, to torment me, and it wasted enough time for the Shroud to come in and save everyone who was still sane. That day, I saw grown adults turned insane with a flick of a finger. I saw brother mutilate brother, sister slaughter sister, parents killing their own children. These scars, I kept as a reminder." He turned the helmet over, looking into the faceplate for a moment. "They're a cancer, on reality. They pervert sense, destroy sanity, obliterate all that is good. They are cruel, selfish, horrible creatures. When you kill them, you cut out a tumor, and save countless lives from the cruel fate they inflict. You make the galaxy a better place."
He put his helmet back on, and gestured to the door. On cue, it opened, ramp extending downwards. "But I'll tell you something I've learned from experience. They hate it when you disrespect them. So get out there and bring some peace and quiet."
The first night, they'd done it professionally. They went through the horde that was summoned by Timaeus' presence like a knife through butter- or like a bunch of murderhobos through a survival gauntlet. Teamwork made the dream work, and they covered each other efficiently and with great effectiveness. They were a squad of killers, not one movement wasted, not one moment given up. They were a terrifying, quiet force.
They were done by dawn, earned their hundred points.
The second night, on the other hand... They had not. Professionalism gave way to... amusement.
Juliana laughed uproariously as she swung a Daemon Beast left and right, using it as an oversized and unwieldy hammer.
Kia, behind her, repeatedly smashed her fist into a Bloodletter's face, which was helpless to fight back on account of missing both of its arms.
Louis, using said arms as improvised flails, was beating the crap out of another.
The other two, Jak and Yayu, were playing a game of Punt the Daemon. Jak was winning, on account of having punted a Warp Beast thirty centimeters longer than Yayu.
And as for Timaeus...
He walked slowly, calmly, great strides crossing distance with inevitable movement.
The Daemon he was walking towards tried to crawl away. Tried.
Timaeus reached it, and with one foot, kicked it over onto its back. It looked up, hate in its nine eyes.
Then Timaeus held up a small, wooden spoon, and it screamed in fear, having seen firsthand what he'd done to its cohort, and knowing without a shadow of doubt what was also going to happen to it.
And that's not even mentioning the third.
The stains never did come out...
Still wasn't as bad as what the engineering corps got up to, though. Specialists got bored, designers got creative.
Good times.