Chapter 41: Chapter 40 – Crude Blade, Unbreakable Will
Chapter 40 – Crude Blade, Unbreakable Will
The underground chamber was silent.
No machines. No chirping insects. No distant voices. Just the quiet hum of Warp energy circling through the smooth rock, and Hajime's slow, steady breathing.
He had spent three straight days building himself.
Training harder than anyone should be able to, lifting massive weights, running with gravity-enhanced cuffs, pushing his body until it trembled… then healing it back to perfect form with psychic power.
Three days of pain. Three days of growth.
His muscles were now like sculpted stone, dense, coiled with power, packed tight around reinforced bones that had grown like living armor.
The Biscopea had worked perfectly.
Now he stood at the edge of what that organ could achieve alone. If he wanted more growth, he'd need more organs, or time, time to let this body mature fully into adulthood. Twenty-seven, maybe thirty. That was when he'd reach his true peak.
But Hajime wasn't frustrated. He wasn't impatient.
He was ready for the next step.
He needed a weapon.
Something worthy of the warrior he was becoming.
Not a shinobi's blade.
Not a scalpel or staff.
But a symbol.
A Nemesis Force Halberd.
Even if he couldn't forge it with Imperium-grade alloys or use real Techmarine tools, he'd still make it.
With his hands.
With his will.
With the Warp.
He closed his eyes, focused, and dropped his mind into the earth.
His psychic power reached deep, meters below the surface, past stone and clay, touching the hidden skeletons of the world: mineral veins, crude iron ore, pockets of nickel and magnesium. The earth trembled, reacting to his will. Bits of metal, stone, and sediment broke free from the crust and began rising in a spiral around him.
Chunks of raw ore floated through the chamber like broken moons orbiting a star.
He extended his hands.
And began to crush them.
Not with fists, but with thought.
Telekinesis wrapped the ore, condensing it, pressing it together layer by layer. The metal groaned as air was forced out, as the pieces fused into one solid mass.
He didn't stop there.
The halberd would need to be dense.
The materials were crude, impure, unrefined, not worthy by Imperium standards. So he had to overcompensate.
He crushed the metal further, atom by atom, compressing it with psychic force until it weighed as much as stone blocks. Every piece that would have been brittle or flawed was layered over, buried under sheer mass.
When the raw materials had become impossibly heavy and tightly packed, Hajime started shaping them.
First the pole: two meters long, thick, reinforced. It looked like a spear shaft made of jet-black steel. The surface was smooth and slightly textured with a cross-wrapped grip, forged from chakra-woven leather taken from a wild boar he'd hunted days ago.
Then came the head.
Twin blades. One facing forward, one back.
Sweeping crescents of sharpened, mirrored steel, each shaped like the wing of a hawk. Not ornate, but beautiful in form. Practical. Elegant in a brutal way.
And strong.
The entire head was layered with folded metal, Hajime mimicked the folding process from the memories of Tech-Astartes, even if this wasn't high-quality material. Fold after fold, layer after layer, compressed, sealed, bound by psychic threads into a hardened core.
He carved designs into the blade's surface, Imperium runes mixed with chakra-flow patterns. Not real languages. But the blade responded to them, glowing faintly where the lines intersected, as if they were circuits for energy.
When the halberd was finally complete, Hajime stepped back.
And smiled.
It was... crude.
Not a work of art.
But it had presence.
It stood over two meters tall, almost as long as he was. The shaft was thick, the blades wide and deadly. Its color was a dark, gunmetal grey, with a bluish tint where the psychic pressure had burned the metal into place. Every inch of it looked solid, like a weapon made not in a forge, but under the weight of a mountain.
He grabbed the halberd with one hand, and nearly staggered.
The weight was massive.
This weapon wasn't meant to be lifted by a normal man. It was absurdly dense, far heavier than any shinobi sword or polearm. Not because of size, because of compression. It was forged by psychic pressure at a density far beyond steel.
To anyone else, it would be unusable.
To Hajime?
It was perfect.
He gripped it tighter.
And let his mind flow into the weapon.
The Warp surged from his palm into the core of the halberd.
And it answered.
The whole weapon lit up.
Blue light ran across the blades