Chapter 303: Shared Suffering (Patreon)

“You look…” Yoan glanced at the rain cloak draped over Chen Ye’s shoulders. It was visibly hand-stitched, the seams crude and uneven, the fabric patched from multiple sources. “…like one of those pit-fighters I saw when I was a kid, brawling in the underhive’s illegal arenas.”

“Clothes make the man, and the saddle makes the steed, brother,” Chen Ye said, giving a short, helpless shake of his head.

A fully armoured Space Marine walking openly through the lower hive would have drawn immediate attention from enforcers, gang lookouts, sanctioned informants, and things far worse than any of them. That was why Chen Ye had stitched the rain cloak himself, accepting function over concealment.

If it hadn’t been an acid rain day, he wouldn’t even be wearing that; he would have used a plain black robe instead. That garment too was self-made, utilitarian rather than discreet, and no less poorly crafted.

The acid rain of the hive city was not merely corrosive; it was laced with industrial runoff, promethium residue, and airborne toxins vented from manufactorum stacks kilometres above. Yoan’s bio-processor had already initiated an automatic shutdown of his respiratory intake.

But to a transhuman warrior who had undergone nineteen separate gene-forging surgeries, the toxicity of Beisu I’s rain was little more than a mild irritation, at most a faint numbness in Chen Ye’s fingertips.

“Come,” Chen Ye said, jerking his chin over his shoulder. “I’ll buy you a drink.”

Yoan followed in silence.

They moved through the winding alleys of the lower hive.

Here, the hive’s vertical immensity pressed down from above, hab-blocks stacked upon one another like rotting strata, their upper levels lost to smog and flickering lumen-globes. As they walked, the sounds of hive life pressed in from all sides.

From the ramshackle habs lining the passageways came the sounds of shouting arguments, whispered negotiations for illicit trades, and, not infrequently, the crack of gunfire as gangs clashed over territory the Administratum had long since written off as economically irrelevant.

It all stirred a deep sense of familiarity in Yoan.

This was exactly how the underhive of Talon I had been before.

Back then, conditions had been even worse, with ganger clans entrenched like petty fiefdoms, bounty hunters stalking the shadows, and information brokers selling lives for a handful of thrones…

The only places where one could find anything resembling peace had been the settlements of the genestealer cults, and even that peace had been a lie carefully cultivated to mask slow damnation.

Another unremarkable gunshot rang out.

This time, however, a fresh hole appeared in the wall beside Yoan’s head, showering him with pulverised ferrocrete.

Chen Ye instantly turned his gaze to a pitch-black side alley. That was where the shot had come from.

Just as both men assumed they had merely wandered into another routine gang skirmish, a small figure stumbled out of the darkness.

It was a little girl.

Her mouth had been surgically replaced with a crude respirator unit, the metal casing rusted and ill-fitted to her face.

“Help me.”

The voice that emerged from the device was flat and mechanical, synthesized and emotionless, but that didn’t mean she felt no fear. The components embedded in her face were simply too cheap; the vocalizer was likely an afterthought to basic air filtration and toxin screening.

Moments later, two men armed with Agripinaa-pattern autoguns emerged from the alley after her. Their coats bore faded gang sigils, barely visible beneath layers of grime and chemical burns. Both wore external respirators, cracked and poorly maintained.

When they saw the girl dart behind Chen Ye, they froze for a split second, then raised their weapons at him.

“Mind your own business.”

“Go back to your pit fights and keep breaking bones for coin.”

Chen Ye turned his head slightly and looked back at Yoan.

“Do I really look that much like a underground boxer?”

Yoan spread his hands in a helpless shrug.

Chen Ye sighed and turned back to the gangers.

One of the most obvious traits of lower-hive dwellers of Beisu I was that everyone wore a respirator, whether implanted or worn like a mask. Without it, the air alone would kill you within hours.

Chen Ye locked eyes with the ganger on the left and took a single step forward.

“You—”

The threat was never finished.

Chen Ye crossed the distance in an instant and drove his fist straight into the man’s face.

The respirator and jawbone shattered together. Metal fragments and splintered bone mixed with blood and sprayed across the wall behind him.

As the second ganger began to pull the trigger, Chen Ye struck him as well, another full-force blow to the face.

This punch was not restrained.

A baseline human head met a fully committed Astartes strike, like a melon struck by a bat.

There was a dull thump and then it burst.

Chen Ye walked over to the one ganger who was still barely alive, grabbed him by the head, and dragged him out from under the shelter of the overhang so the acid rain poured directly onto his exposed flesh.

A harsh sizzling filled the air as blackened lesions spread rapidly across the man’s face, flesh eaten away by the corrosive downpour.

“Tell everyone you meet,” Chen Ye said calmly, hauling the ganger upright and slamming him against the wall, “that this is what happens when they follow your example.”

He punched through the ferrocrete wall beside the ganger, tearing free the largest slab, and wedged it in place, pinning the man there beneath the burning rain.

Only then did Chen Ye turn back.

The girl was crouched beside a refuse bin, shaking uncontrollably.

As a child of the lower hive, she had surely seen horrors worse than this.

But she had never seen someone like him.

“If you still have family,” Chen Ye said gently, placing a gold coin into her trembling hand, the Aquila stamped upon it worn smooth by countless exchanges, “take them and go to District Hundred.”

He closed her small fist around the coin.

“Hold onto your life the same way. Don’t let go until you see food or a weapon.”

The girl nodded frantically and ran, looking back every few steps before vanishing into the maze of alleys.

Chen Ye glanced at Yoan.

“Are you in a hurry for that drink?”

“Alcohol doesn’t do much for me,” Yoan replied, tapping his skull.

Chen Ye nodded, picked up the two bloodstained autoguns from the ground, checked their ammunition out of habit, and continued on.

For the next stretch of their walk, whenever screams or cries for help echoed through the streets, Chen Ye charged toward the sound and opened fire on gang members or would-be killers.

When one autogun ran dry, he took another from the dead and kept going.

Even without power armour, without a helm to assist with targeting, every shot landed true. In a century of warfare, Chen Ye had fought enemies far faster and far deadlier than hive scum.

Eventually, the entire district fell silent. Those who preyed on the weak hid themselves away, too terrified to emerge.

Only then did Chen Ye discard the weapons and resume walking with Yoan toward the bar.

“Ten minutes after we leave,” Yoan said, “someone innocent will die here again.”

Chen Ye nodded calmly.

“As you say,” Chen Ye replied, his voice level, “even I know what I did changes very little. But if I can save even one life, that is one soul spared. I’ve done what I can, no more, no less.”

Yoan nodded.

“I’ve only been here a week,” Chen Ye continued, “and I already feel like I’m going mad. I don’t know why, but every tragedy here feels like it’s happening to me. I hate every form of evil. Sometimes I want nothing more than to put my armour back on, take up a bolter, and cleanse the entire hive of its filth.”

Chen Ye paused, staring in the endless sprse of the lower hive above.

“That girl… she reminded me of myself. If a Space Marine had descended from the heavens back then and killed the people who harmed my parents, I wouldn’t have spent my childhood starving in the streets. I wouldn’t have grown so weak that I nearly failed the implantation trials.”

Listening to him, Yoan realized that Chen Ye possessed an unusually strong capacity for empathy.

That had been evident on Agripinaa as well. Most Space Marines cared little for mortal lives. Even among the sons of Sanguinius, only rare Chapters like the Lamenters truly mourned humanity’s suffering.

“I heard you were once an underhive dweller,” Chen Ye said suddenly, stopping and turning to Yoan. “Conditions there are worse than here… but you don’t seem to pity these people.”

“Yes,” Yoan said plainly. “I don’t.”

Chen Ye had assumed it was merely cold temperament and was ready to drop the subject, but Yoan continued, and his words stunned him.

“I feel no shared suffering for anyone except the nulls. To me, the rest are no different from most underhive scum. Because the person beaten today may have been the one who beat me yesterday. The one crying for help now may have been the one who crawled through my window, planning to strangle my daughter while I was gone.”

Life in the lower and underhives was brutal, Chen Ye, born on Beisu I, had always known that, even after a hundred years as one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death.

But the lives of the soulless were worse still.

For a moment, Chen Ye imagined himself in that endless misery and felt the urge to say something, anything to comfort Yoan.

But Yoan no longer cared about the past.

Without another word, he kept walking forward, disappearing deeper into the hive’s shadows.