Chapter 86 - Konrad Curze's World (2)
~ Every 100 Power Stones = Bonus Chapter! Your votes keep this climbing. Thanks!
Konrad Curze's world?
Then it made perfect sense.
Kaelen slowly set the youth down. He'd expected it, but the sight still hit him hard.
Extreme.
That was the only word he could come up with.
The beautiful youth stood off to the side, studying Kaelen with open interest.
"I can tell you don't actually hate using methods like this, Kaelen." The Emperor's voice was light, almost weightless. "You just think the way they look is too ugly."
"Bullshit!" Kaelen shot back.
"Don't be in such a rush to deny it." The Emperor folded his arms. "It's the most cost-effective way to keep a society running. I think you'd appreciate the saying: for a society to be absolutely fair and rarely err, it must inevitably wield the most terrifying punishments. We call that efficiency."
Kaelen clicked his tongue.
"And the price of that efficiency is choking off a society's entire potential for growth! Stripping people of their nature and their freedom!" He jabbed a finger at the hollow-eyed civilians around them. "Humans aren't livestock for you to lock in a cage!"
The Emperor polished off the last of his cone and dusted his hands.
"But in Konrad's eyes, humans really are livestock — the kind that need a savage whipping before they'll behave."
Kaelen's reply died in his throat.
The anger that had just surged up was crushed flat by a wave of helpless, suffocating frustration.
He couldn't bring himself to fully blame Konrad Curze.
Environment shaped everything.
Nostramo. A world of sin locked in eternal night. Gangs ran wild, plutocrats squeezed the world dry, and murder for profit wouldn't even register as a parking violation. Human life was cheaper than the filth in the gutters.
A Primarch born with an overwhelming sense of justice and the gift of foreseeing future disasters had been dumped into that hopeless cesspit as an infant.
In slums where nobody cared about morality, what was Curze supposed to do? He couldn't reason with anyone. His only option was to become worse than the worst, to use raw physical terror to grind every gang into the dirt, and brute-force a society that looked clean on the surface.
"It's the planet he grew up on that did it." Kaelen sighed and shoved the irritation back down.
He turned his head toward the ancient Greek beauty beside him.
"Suppose he hadn't been dumped on a hellhole like Nostramo." Kaelen started laying out the hypothetical. "Suppose he'd landed on Macragge instead. Let Guilliman's adoptive father, King Konor, raise him."
"With Curze's zero-tolerance instinct for evil, plus Macragge's complete legal and educational system? Konrad Curze would have become the most just, most beloved magistrate in the Imperium's entire history. He'd have recited the Imperial codex backwards in his sleep. He'd never have needed to flay a single person."
The beautiful youth spread his hands in a thoroughly indifferent shrug.
"This universe doesn't run on that many hypotheticals, Kaelen. I can't steer Warp storms. Which planet my sons landed on came down to pure luck."
"Found one, looked usable, pulled him into the Great Crusade to keep working. Simple as that. The Crusade's schedule didn't leave room for me to give them all individual therapy sessions. Most of the time I was just the Emperor — not a qualified father."
Kaelen rolled his eyes so hard it nearly hurt.
A textbook scumbag-foreman rant.
Finding sons was just recruiting more draft animals for the project. Mental issues? As long as he could still swing an axe at the front line, not a problem.
That finally explained why Angron had been the one to lead the charge into rebellion. Anyone saddled with a boss who only cared about KPIs and not whether you lived or died would snap eventually.
As for Lorgar? He'd done that one all by himself.
The beautiful youth couldn't have cared less about the contempt on Kaelen's face. He picked up the thread again.
"Besides — in my view, Curze's worldview is only a little extreme in how he acts on it. Set that against the Chaos of the Warp, and it's barely worth mentioning."
"Think it through, Kaelen. Chaos can dig into every thought and selfish urge in your heart and twist your emotions until they're unrecognizable. When you feel angry, you'll lose control and butcher innocents. When you want to indulge yourself, you'll set off a terror attack in the street just to drink in the horror on strangers' faces."
The youth's tone cooled by several degrees.
"Compared to that, do Konrad's methods still strike you as unreasonable?"
"All Konrad has ever wanted is absolute justice. Toward others, and toward himself. The day he believes he's wiped every last evil from the world, he'll turn the blade on himself without hesitating for a heartbeat. Because in that closed loop of his logic, the man with the bloodiest hands left standing is the world's last and greatest evil."
With that, the Emperor strode toward the intersection ahead.
Kaelen let out a helpless sigh and fell into step behind him.
"Kaelen, you said it yourself, harsh times, harsh laws. The Imperium needs Curze to enforce things with extreme methods right now. That's how Guilliman gets a real grip on the Imperium faster."
"I'll grant Curze his usefulness. Doesn't mean Guilliman is going to like him," Kaelen muttered.
"On a personal level, of course he won't. But right now he wears the title of Lord Regent. The same way ordinary Horus and Horus wearing the title of Warmaster are not the same concept at all."
Round and round they went, and in the end they still couldn't escape the cold political tags. Any private thought, any private feeling, was nothing in front of that suffocatingly vast Imperial machine.
Even the lofty Primarchs were just irreplaceable heavy gears in the works.
A complicated tangle of emotion churned in Kaelen's chest. But that was a Primarch's fate.
"Still, since you're going to fetch him, I'd like you to do me a favor and talk Curze around while you're at it." The youth suddenly turned his head and dropped the bomb. "See if you can get him to dial down the extremism going forward."
Kaelen stopped dead and jabbed a finger at the tip of his own nose.
"Me? You want me to coach him?" Kaelen's voice spiked. "And my contract is just to drag him back to Terra! That clause was definitely not in the deal when I signed on! Don't go writing me extra scenes!"
This damn geezer demanded way too much!
There was no way in hell he was working for free out here. The 13 Iron Men he'd negotiated were the delivery fee. Psychological counseling? That was a high-difficulty rush job, no question.
"You turned down Celestine, you turned down the Commorragh membership card, so what exactly do you want?" The youth sighed. "Or maybe you'd like me to turn into a curvy, ridiculously voluptuous mature beauty to butter you up?"
The words had barely landed.
Kaelen's head snapped around on instinct.
The Greek youth who'd been standing there a second ago was gone. In his place stood a tall, devastatingly alluring, mature woman whose presence flowed soft as water, the platonic ideal of an older beauty, every curve where it shouldn't legally be.
The dress was tailored so close to the skin it left nothing of those criminal-grade curves to the imagination.
First glance: stunning. Second glance: Kaelen was certain that if Horus walked in right now, he'd geyser blood from his nose and faint clean away. That, finally, explained why Horus had been practically panting the day Russ was first brought back into the fold.
Too damn big!
Tsk, no, wait.
Kaelen shook his head hard, force-flushing the garbage out of his brain.
Pretty faces couldn't hold a candle to the black-tech goodies Old Yellow had buried in his underground vaults. And for all Kaelen knew, Old Yellow had spent the past few millennia getting up to all kinds of shapeshifting mischief.
He was a clean-living transmigrator with standards, thank you very much. No way he was getting dragged down to the level of that eternal pervert of an Old Yellow.
"Hmph." Kaelen flicked his gaze away and let out a flat, scornful little laugh. "Save it. You'd do better just handing over more of those out-of-print goodies you've been hoarding."
Not the slightest tremor at the top-shelf bait in front of him.
"Hah. Boring boy. I really thought you'd bite." The Empress sighed in mock disappointment. Her outline blurred, and in a heartbeat she was the white-toga'd Greek youth again.
"Fine. Down to business. You said you pulled me into this dream to show me Curze's world, so you're planning to fish Curze out of the dream itself?"
Kaelen folded his arms.
"Mm. The dream is the key. That planet you're on, Dareth, the churning, erupting magma all over its surface? It's pure psychic misdirection."
"Don't strip that barrier away, and you could orbit the place for a hundred years without ever finding Konrad's real body."
"So how do we strip it?" Kaelen pressed.
The youth's expression turned suddenly, gleefully nasty. His mouth split into a grin loaded with bad intent.
"To break the illusion, you have to forcibly wake Konrad Curze out of this layer of the dream."
"And how do I wake him?"
"Fight him. Win. That's all."
Kaelen went still as he pointed at his own chest.
"Me? Fight that psychotic flying rat? You're sure?!"
➤ Next: Night Haunter, I Have Come for You!
— .—— .—— .—— .—— .——
Enjoying the story?
Read 60+ chapters ahead on Patreon.
Join the free community tier for early access to the latest updates:
patreon(.)com/DarkGolds