A Senju in the Stars, Chapter 10

When Batu and his brothers were given the order, none spoke against it aloud. A hundred White Scars, born from the gene-seed of the Khan, tempered in ash and ice and fire. Sent not to wage war, but to ferry the weak through hell. To a place called Red Hope. A hive city lost before the first shell had fallen, overrun by daemons and the laughing traitors who still dared to call themselves the Emperor’s Children, the hedonistic bastards of the traitorous Fulgrim.

They had known what awaited them. They’d seen the augurs, heard the transmissions break into screams and static. The city was gone. Not in name, not yet, but in truth. What remained was a spire of corpses, a tangle of shattered steel and desecrated shrines, soaked in blood and worse things. There would be no ground gained there. No glory earned. Only the dead and those still clinging to life, buried beneath ruin and filth.

Many of Batu’s kin had wished to stay behind, to take their places on the walls of the Imperial Palace, to die in the defense of something they could still believe in. But the Khan’s word was law, and his voice had been clear. There was no nobler duty than the preservation of humanity. Not Terra. Not the Throne. Not even victory itself. Just one child carried free from the fire was worth the life of a Legionnaire.

They mounted their bikes in silence. Checked their bolters, their sabres, the weight of their war-plate. Batu remembered the quiet among them, broken only by engines howling as they sped from the Palace gates. None among them had spoken of returning. That was never the point.

So they rode, down into the depths of Terra, toward the open maw of the Hive that had once been called Red Hope. A name that now lay twisted under the boot of the enemy. The skies were black when they arrived. The walls burned. The streets crawled with daemons and madmen. The air tasted of copper and incense. And still they pressed on, a hundred warriors against a city gone to ruin.

They fought without expectation. They fought without rest. And in their wake, they pulled civilians from wreckage, from cellars and sewers, from beneath the boots of the damned. Every soul they found was wrapped in fire and carried away like an ember plucked from the coals.

It had never been about winning. Only about saving what could still be saved.

They had saved close to two hundred. Not all at once. Not in a single sortie. But pulled one by one from cellars and trenches and caves dug into the filth. Civilians half-mad with fear. Infants clutched in rag-wrapped arms. The broken and the burned and the blind. They loaded them where they could. Half the company turned back, escorting the rescued toward the Palace through corridors of fire and ash. Batu remained with the others, those who stayed behind to keep searching. To keep digging.

And then the ambush came.

He remembered almost nothing. Just flashes. The shriek of incoming shells. The sudden quake beneath his boots. One of his brothers roaring, then a silence broken by the thudding of heavy boots and the rattling hum of sonic weapons. The Emperor’s Children had descended like vultures, too fast and too many. There had been no warning.

He remembered charging forward. He remembered reaching for his blade. He remembered light, and then dark.

Rubble had fallen. Steel and stone and the shattered bodies of the dead. He had tried to rise and could not. He had lain there, vision swimming, listening to the dying cries of his kin echo through the corridors of ruin. His armor was cracked at the chest and split at the helm. Blood had dried in his mouth. His hands would not move.

And then came the stranger.

A man of lean build and calm step. He did not speak at first. He moved the rubble like one might scatter dry leaves. His hand glowed with energy, but it was not of the Warp. It had no scent. No sting. No hum of daemonic breath. He called himself Hashirama. He wore no armor. Only robes marked with a red flare at the collar. His hair was long, dark, bound back. He carried no bolter. No blade. And yet he was not afraid.

Batu remembered blinking. And then he was whole. The wounds were gone. The pain erased. 

The stranger could grow trees from dust and stone. His powers were not like those of sorcerers. No flickering Warp-light. No madness in the eyes. He summoned power from nothing, and it came to him clean. The gifts of his strange art came wrapped in paper tags and hand gestures, in seeds that burst into forests and wires sharper than razors. The trees he summoned did not rot like those birthed by the Warp. They did not scream when they died.

Hashirama said he was no sorcerer. Batu believed him. He said he used to be an Assassin. Batu believed that too. The man moved too silently and too fluidly–even more so than a son of Corax. 

For all the stranger’s strength—and he was strong, terrifyingly so—there was no scent to him. No warp-taint. No shadow in the soul. He did not reek of the Great Powers. Not like psykers did. Not like daemons. Not even a trace. It was as if the power came from some other realm entirely, a place unknown to the galaxy and untouched by the ruinous hands that shaped it. Something older, maybe. Something quiet.

Now the man walked beside him, light-footed, calm as ever. He moved with the stillness of a blade before the strike. Not a warrior like the Astartes. But not lesser. Batu had seen his kind before in ancient stories, heard of men who carried forests on their backs and storms in their veins. But none had ever stood beside him. Until now.

The man was strange.

And he was very, very strong.

“Can we save the city from them?” Hashirama asked in that same dead language that he spoke with such unnatural fluency it boggled Batu’s mind. The Astartes learned, however, and he was becoming more fluent as well. 

Batu paused for a moment. Saving the city was a far off dream. The Hive City was too large and the Emperor’s Children had gathered here in force, alongside other traitorous bands, and, of course, their pet daemons. The only way to save the entirety of this Hive City was to divert forces from the Imperial Palace, which was impossible. “Brothers and I tried. Too many. Scattered. Hive City too big. Other legions not coming. Need army to hold key positions. Have to find communication relay. Send message. Maybe others come. Probably not. Can try.”

“If numbers are what we need,” Hashirama brought his hands together. The movement was smooth, practiced. His fingers pressed into a symbol, unfamiliar to Batu though he had seen it before. Each time the man invoked one of his strange arts he made such signs. Sometimes with one hand. Sometimes with both. Always deliberate. Always exact. “Sage Art: Bodhisattva Wooden Legion of Enlightenment.”

The air bent.

Batu felt it ripple first in his teeth. Then in his armor. Something deep and ancient passed through the marrow of him. He straightened without meaning to, like a man caught in the shadow of something divine. The earth groaned. The wind drew inward like a breath held too long.

And then it came.

A great surge of light broke loose from Hashirama’s frame, not bright like fire or steel or starburst, but clean and terrible and wide. White light without warmth. It swallowed the ruins whole. Batu raised an arm to shield his face. The world vanished for a breath, erased in that single sweep of brilliance.

Then silence.

And then came the sound of timber.

He opened his eyes to behold them.

Figures stood where nothing had been a moment before. Rank upon rank of warriors carved not from flesh but wood. Not splinters or bark or crude trunkwork but ironwood, thick and dark and grain-smooth as stone. They loomed tall—taller than any man, perhaps equals to the genewrought Custodians of the Throne. Nine feet from heel to crown. Shoulders like felled beams. Limbs like carved columns. Their faces were snarling masks, half-beast, half-god. Teeth and tusks and furrowed brows carved with a cruel precision. Their eyes burned. Not with flame, but with a light that pulsed from within, a fire old and patient and full of judgment.

Each bore arms, not of steel but of themselves. Clubs knotted from their own sinewed branches. Spears honed from limb and bark. Bows of woven branch and arrows like flying stakes. Weapons of war drawn not from forge but from forest. Their bodies were living battlements. Their backs curved with rooted spines. Branches sprouted in arcs above their heads, forming halos of twisted bark, and crowns of thorn-ringed wood hovered as though hung from the heavens. Each of them were unique, each of them a work of art that would’ve taken even a great artist months to carve out of wood. 

Batu turned and saw them stretch as far as the ruin allowed. Ten thousand at least. Perhaps more. A legion grown in an instant. No sound but the wind through their wood. No breath. No speech. Just stillness. Ready.

Hashirama stepped forward. The earth creaked beneath him. His eyes still glowed. Marks curled under his lids and across his brow like ink worked by gods. He breathed in and released a heavy sigh, and he held a look that looked close to tired, though not quite. Batu looked from him to the army he had made, and said nothing. There were no words to describe what he felt. The legion of wooden demi-gods stirred and marched forward.

Hashirama smiled. “Let’s save as many people as we can.” 

Now that, Batu mused, was something he could definitely do. 

—-------

He had crafted the technique in solitude, long ago. A labor not of necessity but of curiosity. A question asked to the world and answered in bark and root and breathless form. He had named it the Sage Art: Bodhisattva Wooden Legion of Enlightenment. Too long a name, maybe. He had never much cared for the naming of things and neither was he good at it. It was the work that mattered. The shape. The use.

But it had never found a place.

The constructs were strong. That much was certain. They could bear the weight of punishment, deliver it in turn, withstand fire and steel and jutsu both. Their bodies healed from wounds that would tear apart a man or beast. Split one and it would regrow. Shatter it and it would pull itself together again. They were made for endurance. For war.

But they were not quiet.

They moved with the grace of stone, not shadow. Their footfalls cracked the ground. Their limbs groaned like trees in storm wind. And though they struck with great strength, they struck too slow. A Jounin with keen reflexes would see them coming and be gone before the blow landed. Their mass made them easy to track, easy to anticipate. Shinobi were not meant to fight that way.

Hashirama had always known this.

He had walked the path of subtlety. Smoke and mirrors and blades unseen. That was the way of the hidden. And these constructs, for all their might, were made for open battlefields. For trenches and ramparts and cities brought to heel. They were weapons for armies. He had never needed such things.

So he had buried the technique. Practiced it only in the woods. Watched it come to life beneath the open sky and then left it to rot. No scrolls. No records. Only memory.

Until now.

Now the world burned. The sky cracked with fire. The ground was ash and the air was filled with the songs of the mad. And the old ways no longer served. Silence no longer mattered. Subtlety had no weight here.

So he brought them forth.

And watched them stand like saints over a dying city. 

“Let’s save as many people as we can.” 

And then, he unleashed them upon the enemy.