A Senju in the Stars, Chapter 17

“You’re with the one who’s been slowing the enemy’s advance?”

The voice came crackling through the vox, low and rasped, broken slightly by distance and interference. Batu stood still, helm tilted to the sky. Dust clung to his warplate. Behind him, the ruins of a shattered outpost stretched into the haze. Half a wall remained standing, scorched black. A flagpole leaned like a broken spear. Fires guttered in the rubble, low and stubborn.

That he was able to reestablish some form of direct communication with a superior was nothing short of miraculous.

“Yes, Noyan-Khan,” Batu answered. “We fought together and I stand with him.”

In the distance, past rusted barricades and the twisted wrecks of tanks, Hashirama moved among the wounded. He knelt beside a man with half his face missing, hands glowing with faint green light. Another soldier, legs crushed beneath a collapsed hab structure, whimpered as Hashirama pressed his palm to his chest and muttered something inaudible, given their distance. The man's cries fell away. He did the same to a wounded child. 

Peace rolled from him like tidewater.

The survivors had numbered in the hundreds when they arrived. Soldiers mostly. A few civilians in bloodied coats, carrying wounded on stretchers of tarp and steel poles. Most could still stand. Many could not. A few had already given up.

Batu watched the work in silence. The same hands that had raised forests from concrete and torn apart war machines now pulled shrapnel from the lungs of children and bound wounds with glowing vines.

“He calls himself Senju Hashirama,” Batu said into the vox. “He is human. And not a psyker. But I have never seen power like his. Not among Librarians. Not among the Thousand Sons. Not even from the Emperor himself.”

There was a pause. Vox-static throbbed between words.

“Can he be trusted?”

Batu turned his head slightly. Behind his visor, his eyes traced the way Hashirama stood between two dying soldiers, palms pressed against their foreheads, not with command, but care. The wounded bled less. Their breathing slowed. Some slept. Others merely stared.

“I trust him,” Batu said. “He fights with us. He saves where we could not. He does not hesitate.”

Another pause.

“Very well,” the Noyan-Khan said at last. “Do not return to the Palace. Your orders are changed. Stay where you are. Strike where they do not expect. Cut into their lines. Bleed them from the flanks. Sabotage their advance. Delay them. Dismantle them. Make them pay for every inch of ground they take.”

“I understand,” Batu said. His voice was firm, his eyes locked forward.

The line cut with a final crackle. Silence followed. Not quiet. Just silence. The wind moved through the broken teeth of the wall. Somewhere distant, a man coughed and did not stop. A child wept. The embers of a fire popped and curled low smoke into the grey sky.

Batu turned. He walked across the broken yard toward Hashirama, who now crouched beside a woman missing both arms, murmuring to her in that calm tone he always used. She stared at him like he was made of stars.

The First Hokage looked up. Sweat clung to his brow. His sleeves were torn. Dirt smudged his jaw. But he was still moving.

Batu stopped beside him. “Change of plans.” 

Hashirama nodded. “I figured that.” 

“We stay,” Batu said. “A commander told me that we’re better off attacking the enemy from behind than joining the defense of the Imperial Palace.” 

Hashirama did not speak. He only nodded once and turned again to the wounded. A young man lay at his feet, eyes open and watching the sky without blinking. One side of his face had caved in from some explosion or impact. Blood pooled in the hollow of his neck. Hashirama knelt and placed his hand over the man’s chest. A breath passed. Then another. The man blinked. And then he wept.

“I’ll heal as many of them as I can,” Hashirama said. His voice was low. Barely above the wind. “Then you can guide me. However and wherever. Whatever else we can do to bleed this enemy, I will do.”

Batu nodded once, helm shifting just slightly. “Do you plan on sealing them away as well?”

The shinobi sighed. He stood and wiped the sweat from his brow with the edge of his sleeve. His hands trembled faintly. His robe clung to him with dust and dried blood.

“It’s not safe for them out here,” he said. “Too many to protect. Too few of us to try. I don’t know if safety even exists anymore. If we leave them, they’ll die. They’ll be found. Butchered. Or worse.”

“Do you still have the strength to do it?” Batu asked.

A pause. Hashirama looked out over the field. The wounded lay like fallen leaves, scattered and quiet. Some still stirred. Some no longer did. He watched them for a moment.

“If I’m not using my chakra to save them,” he said, “then I’m not worthy of it.”

The words struck a chord within the astartes–for what greater purpose did he serve other than the preservation of humanity? Another nod from Batu. He looked down at his gauntlets. Ceramite stained in blood. Dried gore in the joints. Hands made for war. Not healing.

“How can I help?” he asked.

“First aid,” Hashirama answered. “Anything to stabilize those close to the edge. Slow the bleeding. Keep their hearts going. Long enough for me to reach them.”

“Understood.”

Batu turned and scanned the ruined outpost. Most of the supply crates had been blown open or melted. Ammunition spilled across the floor. Burned ration packs. Torn bedrolls. But near the back wall, beneath the sagging frame of a crushed hab-unit, lay a medicae locker still sealed. The white paint blackened with soot but the mark of the double-aquila still visible across its face.

He moved to it and cracked the seal. Inside, rows of glass and metal and cloth, all wrapped in wax-paper or rubber pouches. Tools he did not know the names of. But he had seen medicae use them before. Field dressings. Sealing foam. Coagulants. Burn balms. Tubes with faded lettering. He took what he could carry and stepped back into the ruin.

The first soldier he came to was young. No more than twenty. One arm gone from the elbow. The wound seared black at the edge but not clean. A field tourniquet wrapped around the stump. Blood soaked his chest and belly. Batu knelt beside him. The soldier looked up and whimpered. His eyes went wide at the sight of the White Scar leaning over him.

“I am not here to hurt you,” Batu said. His voice flat. No gentleness. Only fact.

He cut away the ruined sleeve. The flesh was torn ragged. He took a spray canister of clotting foam and emptied it into the wound. The foam hissed. The soldier shivered. Batu wrapped gauze tight around the arm and tucked the edges under. He checked the pulse. Weak, but there. He moved on.

He found another man half-buried under a piece of the outer wall. Only his chest and one arm were visible. The rest pinned beneath stone and steel. He was still breathing. Barely. Batu called for help. Two nearby survivors limped over. Together they lifted the wreckage and dragged the man free. Batu examined the leg. Crushed flat. Bone exposed. He sprayed more foam. Wrapped the thigh. Injected a stimulant from one of the labeled tubes. The soldier moaned. Batu moved on.

A woman had lost her jaw. A mortar shell had taken half her face and the rest of her squad. Her eyes met Batu’s as he knelt. He had nothing that could repair what was gone. Only a cloth to stem the bleeding. He wrapped it around her head and soaked it with salve. Her breath came in rattling draws. But she did not look away from him. She held to his gaze as if it were the last anchor left in the world.

He gave her a small vial of morphic suppressant. Something to dull the pain. She drank it without question.

Elsewhere, Hashirama had summoned thin vines tipped with glowing leaves, wrapping them around chests and shoulders and broken arms. His hands moved quickly now, less like a healer and more like a worker fixing a machine he knew well. Crack, bind, press, seal. His shoulders hunched. Every breath longer than the last.

They worked without speaking. Side by side, across the field. When Batu ran out of foam, he tied makeshift splints. When Hashirama found a wound beyond chakra’s touch, he called Batu over to wrap the body and mark it for sealing. They found twenty more who could be saved. Fifty who could not. Some cried. Some prayed. Most said nothing.

Eventually, the wounded were seen to. The walking helped the still. The children sat in a row, quiet and wide-eyed. Hashirama crouched at the center of it all and drew a scroll large enough to cover the outpost square. The paper unrolled with a sound like silk tearing. Symbols spread across the page, ink forming as if poured from his thoughts alone. He knelt and placed his hands on the center of the scroll.

“You sure?” Batu asked.

Hashirama looked up. His face pale. Eyes sunken. 

“I can do it,” he said.

He touched his fingertips to the ink.

The symbols blazed.

Wind burst outward from the scroll and the people vanished. One by one. They were there. And then they weren’t. Gone. Stored.

The paper shuddered. Folded in on itself. And then it was still.

Hashirama leaned back and exhaled. His chest rose and fell. His hands trembled. He didn’t speak. Batu placed one gauntlet on his shoulder and stood beside him, watching the dust swirl around the place where once a hundred people had waited to die. The wind moved on. The sky darkened.

They would keep moving.

And they would keep bleeding the enemy.

“I may need some rest,” Hashirama said. Batu nodded. With everything Hashirama had done, thus far, rest was something he’d already earned a thousand times over. 

“I’ll keep watch over you while you sleep,” Batu said. “Focus on recovering. We need your power.” 

Hashirama stared at him for a long moment. No words passed between them. Then he lowered himself to a squat, knees drawn in, elbows resting atop them. He brought his hands together and formed a symbol. Fingers locked like gears. His eyes fell shut.

The air never stilled. Even here, away from the lines. It carried with it the faint weight of ash and the sound of artillery echoing across broken ground. A soft tremble beneath the dirt every few minutes, like the world itself exhaling in pain. Somewhere far away, a mountain cracked. Somewhere else, something screamed and did not stop.

But here, for now, there was no enemy. No fire. No death. Only the sound of breathing and the grind of rubble beneath armored boots. Batu turned from the shinobi and began his watch.

He did not sit. He did not rest.

Twelve hours passed by his reckoning, though reckoning meant little now. The sky had not changed once. There was no sun. No stars. No sense of shift. Just the dull haze overhead, lit faintly from behind by the storm-rot of the Warp, and the thick black smoke that curled over the horizon like the arms of drowning giants.

He stood sentinel over Hashirama’s still form. At times, he moved to higher ground and scanned the outlying wastes through the lenses of his helm. In the distance, he saw shapes. Not titans. Not yet. Perhaps artillery constructs. Perhaps wrecks. The battlefield was littered with the corpses of gods and machines alike. The dead did not stir. The living did not come.

He found no movement. No enemy. No patrols.

Twice, he passed a mound of bodies. One piled high with mortals wrapped in broken flak armor. The other filled with what might have once been Astartes, their armor bloated and twisted by the ruinous powers. Neither pile moved. Neither breathed. He did not linger.

He returned to the outpost, sometimes pacing the perimeter, sometimes standing still. He watched the line of Hashirama’s shoulders, waiting for a shift, a breath too sharp, a tremor. None came. The shinobi remained in that squat, as unmoving as stone, the seal formed by his fingers held with the precision of a statue.

Even at the twelfth hour he had not swayed.

And then, finally, he moved. It was a small movement at first. The symbol broke. Hands fell open. Fingers flexed. Hashirama opened his eyes and rose to his feet in a single fluid motion.

His robe fell back into place. Dust shook free. He turned to Batu.

“Let’s go,” he said.