A Senju in the Stars, Chapter 13

The mortal stepped forward with caution, his cloth still stained by the soot and oil of some manufactorum long since emptied by war. Around him stood the survivors—men and women in ragged uniforms, a few in battered flak vests, others clothed in little more than tattered shifts. All of them looking to him for answers. He carried a lasgun, muzzle tipped toward the ground, more a burden than a threat.

“You’re the one who saved us?” he asked, voice low, uncertain. He shifted his stance and glanced at Batu’s war-plate, then at Hashirama. The markings on his tunic showed him as a factory worker once, not a soldier, yet clearly these people saw him as a leader. A dozen or so huddled behind him, eyes wide with a mix of exhaustion and relief.

Hashirama met the man’s gaze, but as ever, he did not speak the local tongue. He turned to Batu, a curious expression in his dark eyes. “What did he say?”

Batu’s helm inclined. 

“He thanks you,” he told Hashirama, in that old, near-forgotten language they shared. Constantly speaking with Hashirama allowed him to learn more of it than any old scroll ever could’ve done. And now, Batu dared to consider the possibility that his grammar was no longer atrocious. “He says you are the reason they still live.”

Hashirama offered a small smile in reply, lifting one hand in a gesture of peace. The worker nodded, swallowing hard, his own relief evident in the way his shoulders sagged.

The man cleared his throat. “What do we do now, Lord Astartes?”

That brought Batu’s thoughts to a hard stop. The Hive City called Red Hope was free, for now. The traitors were gone, or dead, or fled. But the planet was still burning in a dozen other warfronts, and he and Hashirama were bound for the Imperial Palace. They could not stay. And without Hashirama’s strange power—his living trees, his unstoppable legion—there would be nothing to keep another wave of traitors from marching right back in.

Batu turned to Hashirama. “Could you… seal them as you’ve done to the other survivors?”

Hashirama folded his arms, glancing at the crowds in the distance. There were thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions in total. People from the lower levels, the gutters, the manufactorums, all saved at the last moment from what seemed certain death. He drew a long breath and nodded. “I’ll have to craft something bigger. A new scroll. But I must release the Bodhisattva Legion to do it. I can’t keep both the legion and the survivors sealed at once, not without losing control.”

Batu said nothing at first, only studied the battered men and women clinging to each other. Some bled from half-treated wounds. Others cradled children swaddled in torn blankets. All of them watched with eyes too tired to hope.

He placed a hand gently on the worker’s shoulder, gauntlet scraping tattered cloth. Then he turned back to Hashirama. 

“It must be done,” he said. “We cannot leave them here to face another onslaught. Better they rest within your seals than be slaughtered in their own streets.”

Hashirama gave a slow nod, already forming a plan in his mind. And the people looked on, silent, waiting for a salvation stranger than anything they had known. 

Hashirama brought his hands together, fingers weaving through a sequence of shapes that Batu had begun to recognize, though he could never quite grasp their purpose. The last shape lingered a moment, held steady. And in the space between breaths, every single one of the wooden warriors stilled. The great constructs, so recently awash in motion and blood, froze in place. Their limbs ceased to creak. Their roots stopped twitching. They became statues again—hulking silhouettes of bark and ironwood and quiet power, standing among the ruins like guardians from some long-forgotten myth.

The wind passed between their legs and arms and up through the city’s broken towers, keening through the gaps with the thin voice of something ancient. And the people—those battered survivors who had lived beneath the shadow of the hive and the horror alike—watched it all in silence.

Hashirama stepped forward, knelt beside a clear space of scorched stone, and made a second seal. This one with just the right hand, fingers curled tight save for the fore and middle digits, which pressed together like the jaws of a needle. Then he placed his palm against the ground.

There was a flicker.

Then paper poured forth—an enormous scroll, thick as a man’s thigh when rolled, but unwinding now like a serpent of ash-colored parchment. It unfurled over the debris and blood, curling through fallen beams and around the corpses that still lay broken and forgotten in the open. Symbols began to form across its surface, dark lines of ink that appeared as if etched by fire, shifting and growing with slow deliberation.

Hashirama breathed in deep. He did not speak at first. His hand remained against the scroll and his eyes shut.

“This’ll take time,” he said finally, voice low. “No sealing like this has ever been done. Not at this scale. Not by me or anyone. Give me fifteen minutes to formulate this whole thing.”

He did not look away from the scroll.

“While I work,” he added, “tell them. Tell them what must be done. I’d rather not force anyone.”

Batu gave a sharp nod. His helm was still clipped to his side and the air bit cold against his skin. He stepped forward, the ground cracking beneath his boots, and raised his voice.

“Mortals,” he called, and his voice rang loud and harsh across the square. “Listen.”

The people stirred, shifting like birds startled from stillness. Some flinched. Some leaned closer. All of them turned to him, their eyes hollow and rimmed in soot. Men, women, children. Clerks. Scribes. Forge workers. The broken remnants of what had once been a city.

“You cannot remain,” Batu said, and the words felt heavy in his mouth. “This place is not safe. The traitors we drove out will return. And when they come, we may not be here to stop them.”

He let the words settle. The silence afterward was not empty. It carried the weight of everything they had seen and everything they feared still to come.

“My ally,” Batu said, gesturing toward the kneeling figure beside the scroll, “has a power unlike any you’ve known. He can seal you all away. Not in death. Not in stasis. But in safety. You will not feel hunger. You will not feel pain. You will not know fear. You will sleep through the fire of this war and wake again when it is done. Alive. Whole.”

Someone stirred in the crowd. A child coughed. An older man muttered something. The murmur began to rise, thin and uncertain.

“You will not die,” Batu said again. “Not while he stands. Not while I draw breath.”

He turned to Hashirama, who remained knelt with his hand upon the parchment, the air around him bending, shimmering slightly as if beneath a great weight.

The scroll had grown longer. Wider. Symbols now circled in rings, black script bordered by lines of red ink that gleamed with chakra. Paper rustled as it continued to unfurl, like dry leaves blown by a wind that did not move.

“Trust him,” Batu said. “Trust us. And you will see the sun again.”

And in that moment, they began to understand. Or at least, to hope. None among them raised their voice in protest. There were no shouted questions, no grasping hands, no wild-eyed refusals. The stillness that took them was not resignation, but something quieter. A kind of surrender. The tired kind. The kind born not from fear but from the slow erosion of everything else.

Fourteen minutes passed like the tolling of a distant bell. The wind pulled ash across the open square. Rubble settled. Smoke thinned. And Hashirama stood.

He brushed the dust from his hands, slow, methodical. His robe caught the breeze and curled gently around his legs. The scroll at his feet now stretched from one end of the square to the other. A river of parchment, pale and wide, its surface alive with ink. Symbols written in a script that Batu had never seen, curved and sharp, pulsing faintly as if they had breath of their own. Glyphs older than the city itself.

Hashirama turned toward him.

“It’s done,” he said.

Batu nodded once.

“Tell them to hold each other’s hands. No gloves. Skin must touch skin. They all need to be connected. This seal—” he paused, his eyes narrowing, “—can only be used once.”

Batu stepped forward and relayed the instructions. His voice carried through the square, not loud, but deep. He repeated the words as needed. Not everyone understood at once, but enough did. The rest followed.

Mothers took the hands of children. Workers linked arms. Soldiers removed gauntlets and pressed palms against palms. The wounded were helped by those who still stood. Fingers trembling, they reached for one another. Lines formed, knots of humanity strung together in makeshift chains. A broken people bound by nothing more than the feel of another’s flesh. The air was heavy with silence. None asked what would happen next.

Hashirama walked to the nearest one. A boy no older than ten, face smeared with soot, eyes too wide. The shinobi moved with the calm of a man who had done this sort of thing before, though not quite at this scale. From his back extended wooden tendrils, thin and smooth, each one trailing from the edge of the scroll behind him. They twitched and flexed in time with his steps. Like roots seeking soil.

He knelt before the child. Reached out his left hand and placed his palm gently against the boy’s forehead. The boy didn’t flinch.

Then, with his right hand, Hashirama formed a symbol.

The motion was simple. Quick. 

“Seal,” he said.

The symbols on the scroll glowed. A pulse of light, faint but sharp, ran across its surface like a vein catching fire. The wooden tendrils snapped taut. For a moment, everything held still.

And then, as one, every single person linked to another disappeared in a great plume of white smoke. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, disappearing in a single instance. 

Batu stood still. Watched it happen.

The scroll pulled them in. Folded them down into the ink. 

Hashirama let his hands fall.

He stepped back. His breathing was slow and measured. His eyes lingered on the place where the boy had been. There was no mark. No shadow. The black symbols on his face, around his eyes, flickered and almost disappeared; instead, they dimmed in intensity, but were still present. The biggest difference, Batu noted, was in the sudden shift in the tone of Hashirama’s skin as it became several times paler than it had been before the sealing. Did he use too much of his power for this divine act? 

Hashirama’s eyebags and cheeks darkened.

“It’s done,” he said again. His voice was heavy. Tired. All the survivors were gone. Breathing in. Hashirama rolled up the giant scroll and then sealed it in another, much smaller, scroll. 

Batu nodded. “Do you need rest?” 

Hashirama shook his head. When he did, the remnants of the black marks on his face disappeared entirely and he let out a slow breath. “Drained a good chunk of my chakra there. But, nothing to worry about. I can recover this on the move. I’ve been through way worse.” 

“As you say.” 

With the last of the survivors sealed and stored within the scroll, the Hive of Red Hope stood empty behind them. Not silent, not truly—fires still burned in its deeper levels, and the bones of ruined engines still groaned against the shifting wind. But the people were gone. The breathing, the broken, the barely-living—all of them folded away, their weight pressed into ink and will. There was nothing more to do here.

So they turned from it.

They left the city behind as the sun vanished behind the haze. No banners flew from its towers. No signal was sent. No message of triumph. Just the long shadows of trees that now grew from stone and metal, their branches brushing skyward in place of spires.

They passed through the gates and did not look back.

Ahead of them stretched the dead lands between the hives. A wasteland carved by fire and tread. Trenches carved so deep they swallowed men whole. Smoke curling from broken tanks like incense over a grave. The land here was churned black with the tread of ten thousand war machines. Hills flattened. Forests burned to their roots. Craters layered atop craters. Miles of nothing but rusted wreckage and the dead. No birds. No beasts. Only war.

They moved without rest.

Armies clashed across the horizon. Waves of flesh and metal driven into one another, guided by flags and vox-signals and the madness of gods. Lines of men marched into fire without pause. Regiments of armor rolled over the corpses of the last hour. Gunships screamed overhead, vanishing into clouds of ash. Titans moved in the distance, great machines walking like towers with legs, each step shaking the ground. They loomed like gods made of furnace and steel, flanked by lines of tanks and thunderous artillery.

And still the fighting never ceased.

There were no fronts. No flanks. No lines to hold. Only open slaughter. The war bled in all directions, a tide with no shore. Those who died were trampled by those who followed. Those who lived were already dying.