Chapter 494 - 494: The Mountain's Trial

Ferrocore, stumbling and broken, crawled to the sealed hatch and pressed himself against it.

Through a hand-wide reinforced viewport, he watched the two Adjutants leading Kian deeper into the cockpit's depths.

He let out a furious, anguished roar:

"I SERVED YOU FOR TWENTY YEARS! A FULL TWENTY YEARS!! Do you truly have nothing to say to me? Not one word?

Just one word. That's all I ask. ONE WORD, PLEASE!!"

The two Adjutants supporting Kian paused, turned back, and regarded the hysterical Ferrocore with calm, unmoved eyes.

Since the Titan's interior was fully sealed off, their voices couldn't carry through the hatch, so they answered him instead in lip-read silence:

"We are components."

"A component does not think."

"It only functions."

With that, they led Kian on through the interior isolation door, which sealed shut behind them, cutting off Ferrocore's desperate, pleading gaze entirely.

He slumped down onto the Titan's armour plating, eyes vacant, hollow.

A massive mushroom cloud bloomed in the distance, but it wasn't enough to trigger even the faintest pupil contraction in his mechanical eyes.

When the shockwave rolled through and knocked his worm-like body off the Titan's plating entirely, sending him crashing down onto the rail tracks below, he didn't move at all.

He wasn't dead. But he felt as though he might as well be.

He simply lay there on the tracks, head tilted back, staring up at the towering Titan with numb, unfocused eyes.

The surviving tech-priests and templar-guard nearby gathered around him, waiting in silence for orders.

Once Kian had climbed aboard the Titan, the Astartes retrieved the bodies of their fallen brothers and withdrew.

Their escort mission was complete. Now they turned to face the greenskins on the front line directly.

Grief and rage burned in their hearts, but that fury belonged to the true enemy.

The Astartes joined the fighting, unleashing everything they carried on the greenskins, cutting down enormous numbers of them in the process.

But the ground kept shaking, that same relentless tremor, as the mountainous Gargant continued its slow, inexorable march toward the pyramid.

Reaching the third wall, and amid Blackiron's wild, mocking laughter, its eye flared crimson once more, melting the fourth wall entirely.

Only the last wall remained, standing directly before the pyramid.

"OLD FART KIAN!! I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE! COME OUT AND FIGHT ME, ONE ON ONE!!"

Blackiron's booming, arrogant challenge blasted out through the Gargant's vox array, the towering machine advancing step by step, about to breach the final wall.

Inside the Titan, the two Adjutants guided Kian to a massive iron throne and settled him into it.

They were now inside the Titan's colossal mechanical skull, and Kian, seated upon the throne, was about to become the Titan's mind.

Once the Adjutants had secured him into the chair, they drew the cable from the back of his skull and plugged it directly into the throne.

The neural connection completed, but the throne itself had yet to power on. Kian looked to the two Adjutants and asked:

"What do I do now?"

Below Kian's seat sat two smaller, lower thrones, meant for the Adjutants themselves.

They connected their own neural cables into place and answered in unison:

"You need do nothing. The Titan will test you."

With that, the two Adjutants, the Titan's living memory-modules, completed their own neural connections.

Then, their long, slender fingers began adjusting a series of switches on the console in front of them, gradually bringing the Titan's various systems online.

The Adjutants weren't merely living memory storage. They also served as central regulators.

Their minds absorbed a portion of the Titan's data overflow, and in turn fed it a set of baseline autonomic commands, its heartbeat-equivalent, its breathing, its internal maintenance cycles, and so on.

But the true mind responsible for deciding when the Titan took a step forward, when it launched an attack, that fell entirely to Kian.

Once the Adjutants had finished their sequence at the console, the neural pathway opened, and an overwhelming flood of information surged straight into Kian's mind, his entire body locking rigid in an instant.

If connecting to a squire-suit had felt like fighting a child, and connecting to a Knight had felt like fighting an overgrown internet cat, then connecting to the Titan felt like standing before an insurmountable mountain range.

Inside his own mind, a mountain rose up before him. An overwhelming, colossal mountain.

Kian's mental projection stood at its base, looking up, unable to see the peak at all, as though the summit stretched up infinitely.

But somehow, he sensed something sitting atop that peak, looking down, watching him, evaluating him.

Kian's spirit understood instinctively: this was the Titan's trial. Climb the mountain, however impossibly tall it might be, all the way to the summit.

He drew a deep breath, approached the base of the mountain, and began to climb.

He climbed, and climbed, and climbed, endlessly upward. He had no way of knowing how much time had passed, or how high he'd truly gone.

Clinging to a cliff face, he looked down, and saw nothing but a bottomless void below.

He looked up, and the summit still stretched up, piercing the sky, seemingly no closer than when he'd begun. It was as though this mountain simply kept extending itself, endlessly, forever out of reach.

Kian kept climbing. He climbed through wind and scorching sun, through summer nights and winter days.

He climbed for a year. Two years. He lost all sense of how long it had truly been.

The flow of time inside a mental construct and the outside world aren't fixed to the same rate. If the Titan wished to compress an entire year of mental time into a single second of real time, all it needed to do was scale up its own processing throughput.

And what Kian's climb consumed wasn't physical stamina, it was pure psychic force, locked in an unrelenting struggle against the Titan's overwhelming neural onslaught.

The Titan's ancient machine spirit was testing him, testing the toughness of his mind, testing whether Kian was truly worthy of commanding its body.

Kian had no idea how long he clung to that cliff face. Numbly, mechanically, he kept jamming his fingers into rock crevices, grabbing at whatever outcroppings he could find, dragging his body ever upward.

There was no rest to be had. All he could see was sky above and earth below.

A year seemed to pass. Or perhaps ten. Kian's hands and legs ached down to numbness, but he never let go, gritting his teeth, forcing himself upward, one agonizing step at a time.

If he let go now, fifty billion people on this world would die. And Captain Doron, and every Astartes who'd fallen alongside him, would have died for nothing.

But in this mental realm, entirely shaped and controlled by the Titan itself, no matter how many meters Kian's soul climbed, the summit remained infinitely, impossibly far away.

As time wore on, every step upward felt like a hammer strike to the back of his skull.

Kian understood, with growing, bone-deep certainty, that he was reaching his limit. There was no way he could keep climbing forever.

His own psychic reserves were finite. The Titan's data-torrent was not.

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