Chapter 06: Holy Knight

Olympus Mons - Temple Hangar

Their path wound through rows of dormant war machines. Two towering Skitarii guards stepped aside without a word as the colossal adamantium doors hissed open. A wave of incense-thick steam billowed out into the chamber.

And then it stepped forward.

It wasn't the biggest thing Rex had seen. There'd been something even more massive tucked away in the hangar, but this one had decor and style. The Paladin-class Knight, nearly nine meters tall, had deep blue armor that gleamed with faded heraldry, the sigil of House Taranis barely legible through battle scars and carbon scoring.

But for all its majesty, the Knight was broken.

Its right knee shuddered mid-step, held together by exposed tension cables and hasty battlefield welds. An exhaust port belched thick black smoke, far more than it should. Its Reaper Chainsword hung limp, frozen at the elbow. Cables dangled from one shoulder mount, and scorched panels revealed internal mechanisms. The whole thing looked like it had been kept alive by hope and scrap metal.

'Talk about red-neck engineering…' If this was his time, he would expect to see more duct tape. Rex stared up at it, taking it in and hearing soft chants of the Tech-Priests flanking it. "Damn," Rex muttered under his breath. "So this is what Six felt when he first saw me in that giant form."

"Omnissiah." Magos Ferris-Keph stepped forward, bowing slightly. "This is a Knight Paladin, a relic from the time when mankind still strode the stars with pride. She is called Valoria Unbound. Her Machine Spirit has been dormant for centuries."

Rex circled the massive frame, his gaze lingering on the cracked armor, the burn marks, and the half-erased warning glyphs. "Looks like it's been through hell."

Dominus Ikar-Vohn nodded solemnly. "It has. As did all of Mars."

Rex turned back toward the council. "Yeah… I'm getting that impression."

Fabricator-General Arkhan Valus stepped forward then. "I was but a youngling during the era of war. It was passed down through remnant logs that Mars was once terraformed during the height of the Dark Age of Technology. Images depicted fabled expansions of water called oceans. The sky was supposedly blue. But when that golden age collapsed, so too did our world." He gestured toward Valoria Unbound. "We were left to fend for ourselves against Psyker-mutants and Silica Animuses."

Rex blinked at one of those sentences. 'Did he just say psychics…?'

Magos Lexir-Kor chimed in next. "We retreated underground. Sealed the forges. Waited out the chaos."

Ferris-Keph continued. "And when we rose again, the Knights led the charge. Bonded to noble pilots, they marched at the head of our reclamation. They burned out the Animus nests. They cleansed the mutant hives."

'Mutants…' Rex imagined something along the lines EVOs. Rex's gaze returned to the Knight. "So you're saying this thing helped take Mars back?"

Magos Ryza-Tal responded firmly. "It liberated Mars. Without the Knights, the Mechanicum would have been lost to the ash."

Valus nodded. "And from the ashes, we forged the Cult Mechanicus. This sacred technology kept our people alive. The Machine God gave us purpose. Structure. Survival."

And then Lexir-Kor's voice rang out again, filled with zealous pride. "Valoria Unbound has fought for House Taranis across generations. She was forged in the heart of war and sanctified by fire. Her Machine Spirit slumbers… and we cannot rouse her."

Ferris-Keph stepped forward. "But you can. We believe the Omnissiah can restore her. Speak to her. Wake her. Please…"

Rex exhaled. Slowly. He looked up at the slumbering titan and shook his head with a half-smile. "What's one more today?" He stepped forward, past the priests, past the staring Skitarii, up to the Knight's damaged knee. He ignored the weight of their stares and focused on what he could do. He stopped before the blackened chestplate

Then he placed his hand on the damaged hull. "Let's see if she remembers," he murmured. Rex hesitated for a moment. Then, he spoke in a moment of misguided flair. "Machine, heal thyself." The moment the words left his mouth, he winced. 'God, that sounded ridiculous.'

A surge of blue circuitry flared from Rex's palm, pulsing like glowing vines as it spread across the Knight's battered armor. Streams of nanites followed, cascading outward in luminous arcs that crawled into every fracture and seam, seeping into the war machine's dormant systems. The light bathed the chamber in an eerie glow as his nanites dove deep, threading through the ancient, rust-choked internals like surgical instruments searching for a pulse.

Then the link formed.

Rex staggered as a neural bridge snapped into place. Data slammed into his mind with the force of a tidal wave. Blueprints, diagnostics, and maintenance logs unspooled through his thoughts faster than he could consciously process. Three-dimensional schematics blossomed behind his eyes: actuators compressed under centuries of strain, servos misaligned by the barest degrees, hydraulic conduits cracked and bleeding fluid into forgotten recesses.

The Machine Spirit stirred. Not hostile. Not afraid. Just… waking. Curious. It was vast, old, and quiet. Like a being stirring from a coma.

Rex gritted his teeth and forced himself to focus. His nanites split into clusters, moving with clinical precision. One group reinforced the shattered limb scaffolds, sealing cracks and fusing metal at the molecular level. Another slipped into the machine's corrupted logic cores, rebuilding broken software from raw memory fragments. Assimilator strands merged with the Knight's dormant subroutines, evolving in real time, syncing with its forgotten language of command and purpose.

Each breach of a firewall gave them more. More structure. More understanding. It was like watching a corpse remember how to breathe.

The Knight trembled.

Its legs began to straighten, the jerking of the knee joint fading. Pistons hissed. Power relays thumped back to life. And in the cockpit buried deep within its armored heart, the noble pilot gasped. His neural interface flaring to life as long-dead systems suddenly blinked awake.

He moved. The Knight followed.

The pilot raised the war machine's foot, testing it with quiet disbelief. No resistance. No grinding. No stiffness. Just smooth, seamless motion like it was new again.

And all across the hangar, the Tech-Priests froze. Servo-limbs hung suspended mid-gesture. Servo-skulls hovered in place. No one spoke. No one dared move.

The Paladin was alive.

For the first time in centuries, the Throne Mechanicum pulsed with harmony. Restored systems surged with energy, conduits humming with strength. With a hiss of pneumatics, the Paladin took a full step. Then another. Thunder echoed through the sanctum.

A mechanical breath escaped its vents, long overdue.

And then, like a wave breaking across a shore, the Tech-Priests fell to their knees. One by one. Chanting in rising Binary. Awe turned to worship.

The Knight Valoria Unbound stood tall once more.

From his perch above, the Fabricator-General said nothing. But the light in his eyes, the pause in his breathing, said everything.

But the Knight was whole and alive.

And though the miracle itself was complete, every gaze in that sanctum had already shifted. Not to the machine. But to the one who had awakened it. To the Omnissiah.

#

As Rex's nanites surged deeper into the ancient war machine, something unexpected happened.

While repairing the Paladin's broken internals, they also began to assimilate software and hardware. There were blueprints, subroutine structures, neural command lattices. These entire frameworks of the Knight's function and memory streamed into Rex's mind. Combat protocols. Weapon loadouts. Power systems. Every inch of the Paladin's design was copied, analyzed, and understood at a level that would make even the most devoted Tech-Priest weep with envy.

And then… they started building.

The nanites poured outward. Using the Knight's original design as a base, it was synergized with Rex's Nanite architecture.

Alloy plating unfolded from his back, snapping into place with sharp, magnetic precision. A skeletal exo-frame grew across his body, forged from ultralight adamantium laced with nanite composites. Hydraulic pistons and flex servos anchored to his joints, sculpting his form into something new.

Within seconds, he was encased.

A Knight-class warform had taken shape around him.

Armored plating formed across his torso and shoulders, sculpted to deflect high-impact rounds and absorb kinetic force without compromising agility. Nanite mesh filled the joints and crevices, giving him the flexibility of a combat suit with the durability of a tank. From his shoulders to his calves, every surface moved in harmony with his muscles.

A sleek black helmet descended, its edges traced in pulsing blue light. The moment it locked into place, he felt the entire system sync with his thoughts.

He was the cockpit.

Weapon systems came online in sequence. A plasma disruptor blade extended from his right arm, its edge shimmering with lethal coronal energy. From his left shoulder, a railgun unfolded built for surgical long-range strikes.

Defensive systems followed. An ion-shield generator anchored to his back, its emitter nodes tracking potential threats and readying interception angles. Nanite-repair clusters within the armor were already humming, self-healing on reflex.

Then came the unexpected: stealth subsystems. A micro-mesh of energy-dampening filaments wove itself just beneath the plating. Rare, even among the Mechanicus. It dulled his heat signature, scattered scans, and quieted the sound of his movement. The air around him warped faintly, like heat haze in a desert.

Rex felt it all settle around him, something inherent. This armor wasn't heavy. It didn't restrict him. It felt like it had always been his. Because it was.

He looked down at his armored hands and flexed. Blue light shimmered across the plating as his systems stabilized. "…Well," he muttered beneath the visor, "this is new."

It reminded him of his giant EVO form but even better.

Beside him, the once-shattered Paladin now stood tall. The noble pilot inside said nothing, stunned as the Throne Mechanicum thrummed with life.

And next to it was Rex clad in an evolved Knight-warform.

Beside Rex, the pilot of the restored Paladin dismounted and dropped to one knee to Rex.

One by one, the faithful of Mars knelt, and Rex stood alone.

Clad in the radiant armor of his newly-formed warform, he looked like something forged from myth. Where the restored Paladin was a titan of reverent tradition, Rex's armor was something different. A seamless extension of his will.

The chamber stood still, stunned by what had just unfolded. Two miracles. Back-to-back. Impossible. And yet real.

Magos Ferris-Keph was the first to break the silence. "He repaired the Knight… and replicated it… from within."

Ryza-Tal stepped forward as she studied Rex's armor. "Look at it. Only the Omnissiah could improve upon perfection."

Lexir-Kor's tone trembled with reverence. His mechanical gaze didn't waver from Rex. "I saw it with my own optics. He became the armor."

Ikar-Vohn, once the most skeptical of the Council, smiled faintly through the static of wonder. "This is unprecedented. And glorious."

From the dais above, Fabricator-General Arkhan Valus rose. His servo-limb extended slowly toward Rex's glowing silhouette. "A new Knight pattern… not from an STC, but from the divine."

His words struck the chamber like a thunderclap.

Several Tech-Priests dropped to their knees all over again. The toaster was set aside for their Omnissiah.

This design was new. Never recorded. Never conceived in the hallowed vaults of Mars. A name began to take shape.

Knight-Adeptus Dominus Rex Pattern.

And already immortalized.

Rex stepped forward. Then, with a faint pulse of energy, the warform dissolved. Armor plates folded back into streams of nanites, slithering into his spine, his limbs, his chest. Bit by bit, the entire construct disappeared.

The room exhaled.

Several Tech-Priests staggered, clutching their chests. Others stared in stunned silence. A few wept because it was gone. But the faithful knew of Rex's previous constructs. Much like them, the Knight Armor could return at any moment. All it would take was a thought.

Rex, still catching his breath, wiped sweat from his brow and looked out at the crowd. His voice came dry, edged with sarcasm. "Well… That's something for me to test out later."

The Council of the Mechanicum remained frozen. Because if this man could restore a Knight…

What about a Titan?

A flurry of whispered Binary surged among them.

"The Archives must be opened."

"Impossible. Only the High Magi may access the sealed cogitators."

"It matters not. Our laws bend before a living miracle."

"The Fabricator-General must decide."

All eyes turned toward Valus.

The Fabricator-General didn't hesitate. He stepped forward, optics aglow, and spoke with the calm certainty of a man whose faith had just been made manifest.

"Let this be the final trial. Let the Central Cogitator, the very heart of our city, receive him."

Rex shifted slightly, uncomfortable under their collective gaze. "…What the hell is a Cogitator?"

#

AN: Special thanks to Seana, Jebest4781, vividlearner744, OmegaDelta, Henry Stickman, fearmegu, Kitsune Robyn, Dragon lord, Shooter1344, Ajax Roranson, trey, Asaf, DJC, Alex, nighnight, SpeX, Smoking_ash12, AF360, Adam, yosief, VaneixusPrime, Bowsmen, JamPoe81, Lord McDeath, Alex, Mystbornwolf, A Nameless Hobo, BigTyson, Andr, A Vlogs, Nezih, Giorgie, Mahomed, puggle, Awesomesauce, Blacklionpride24, eric, Space core, asdo, Satan King, Dale, Elemental Lord, Rad Bman, Tyler, Spartano, THEREAL, Peter, Jose, WeirdoNerdo, Adam, Gage, Anthony, Louis, Homicidalbunny, Mariom, Jonas!

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