From the east, out of the blasted reliquary ruins where once a thousand saints had been entombed, charged Saint-Captain Hema.
Her hammer was cracked along the haft.
Her armor was more ruin than plate, scorched black and leaking holy vapors from every blessed weld.
Blood caked one side of her jaw where no helmet remained.
But her battle-cry shook the ruined earth itself:
"FOR THE GRAVE! FOR THE FLAME! FOR THE DAMNED!"
She led what remained of her flank, half of them limping, all of them singing, and tore into the exposed Heretic rear ranks like a wildfire given breath.
She paused for a split second mid-charge.
Long enough to see Aaron.
The Saint.
Marching naked, arms wide, burning faintly with fading, stubborn light, a vision of divine embarrassment.
There was a beat of pure silence between them, just long enough to kill a man or save him.
Saint-Captain Hema tilted her head, considering.
Over the vox, she muttered dryly, her voice a gravel-rough drawl:
"Well... I've followed worse into battle."
And with a short, barking laugh, she spun to face her troops and roared:
"FOR THE GRAVE! FOR THE—uh—GLORY!"
The Sisters and Pilgrims behind her screamed in ragged agreement and plunged forward, relic-blades flashing.
From the west, down the crumbling trenches lined with rusted, blood-stained relics, came High Cruciger Lueth.
He carried the ancient Iron Lantern overhead like a mad prophet carrying the last light of a dying world.
The relic pulsed with raw, untamed fire, its glow carving holy paths through the mist and smoke.
Behind him staggered a knot of surviving soldiers, stitched together by adrenaline, whispered hymns, and the knowledge that if they stopped, they would never rise again.
Lueth saw the battlefield tilting toward salvation, or damnation, and found Saint Grave at the center of it.
He took in Aaron's appearance, the once muscular now skinny, naked, slightly glowing form, marching like a trench-rat Christ, and he sighed.
It was not a sigh of disappointment.
It was the long, world-weary sigh of a man who had seen too much madness to be surprised anymore.
Over the vox, voice crackling with battered amusement, he declared:
"THE SAINT NEEDS NO CLOTH! ONLY FAITH!"
Several Redemption soldiers wept openly at the proclamation.
Others tore off what rags they had left and hoisted them on broken rifles like holy standards.
Some kissed their weapons, others screamed prayers so hard they tore their throats.
But they charged, following Lueth into the fray like a river of wounded, burning wolves.
And from the south, from the ruined grave of the Ember Line, came the last.
Confessor-General Holwen, smoke trailing from his scorched greatcoat, stumbled into view.
His pistol was empty.
His sermon-banner was torn to bloody ribbons.
His face was smeared with soot and blood and something that might have once been laughter.
He led a wedge of survivors who had no right still standing, men and women too stubborn or too furious to die.
Holwen caught a glimpse of Saint Grave's pale, arms wide, butt naked, dangling freely in the cold trench-wind like some divine prank given terrible power.
He gave a rasping, barked laugh, the sound of a man too broken to care anymore and too holy to stop.
Over the battered vox, Holwen crackled with savage joy:
"HA! I knew sainthood stripped a man of everything but dignity!"
He lifted his broken banner overhead, the fabric little more than shredded prayers, and roared:
"MARCH, YOU BEAUTIFUL BASTARDS!
MARCH NAKED INTO GLORY!"
And his soldiers, laughing and sobbing and screaming battle-prayers in one tangled cacophony, followed.
The three broken forces, Reliquary Flank, Saint's Reach, and Ember Line, smashed into the disorganized Heretic ranks like a second apocalypse.
What had been a retreat turned to rout.
Heretic Elites screamed and fled as Redemption Corps soldiers drove relic-bayonets into their cursed armor.
Anointed Heavies toppled as Crucible Walkers slammed relic-flamers into their joints and burned them from the inside out.
War Wolves howled in panic and bolted into the mist.
Goetic Warlocks tried to weave protective sorceries, only to be swallowed by waves of chanting Faithful.
Even the Heretic Choristers choked on their own songs, their corrupted hymns withering in the face of something older, something stronger.
Aaron could feel it.
The fire inside him, the miracle that had stitched him back together from death and despair, was flickering out like the last match in a hurricane.
His vision swam.
The world tilted and stretched at the edges, turning the trenches into a nightmare watercolor.
Every step became a prayer stitched together with pure stubbornness.
Every heartbeat felt like a miracle duct-taped to a dying battery.
His body screamed at him to stop.
His bones begged for mercy.
He was seconds away from faceplanting straight into the mud, and, frankly, part of him was almost ready.
Maybe if he collapsed real dramatically, the faithful would think it was some kind of profound Saint ritual.
They'd chant about "The Humble Bow of the Ash Saint" or some nonsense, and he could just nap for like... a week.
Then the ground cracked open ahead of him.
With a sickening wrenching sound, the no-man's-land split wide, vomiting ash and blood and memory.
The air twisted inward like a black hole, dragging relic-scraps and broken banners into the yawning fissure.
From the ragged wound in the earth, a thing crawled.
A thing born wrong.
It moved in jerks and spasms, like a puppet operated by a drunk puppeteer.
Its flesh was a patchwork of melted relics, bone, and screaming faces.
Dozens of broken voices wept and moaned from its body, begging for salvation, mercy, or simple silence.
And at its core, from somewhere deep inside its butchered soul, came a small, delicate voice:
A girl's voice.
A whisper behind a cracked door:
"He comes... he comes... the Saint who burns but does not die..."
The creature, the Woundwalker, shivered, torn between instinct and orders.
Inside its twisted mind, panic raced:
Father said wait.
Father said feast after victory.
Not yet, not yet.
Be careful of the Fake Saint.
Father said he cannot see his path.
He is a mistake. A fracture. An anomaly.
We are not to feast yet.
But he is right here... so weak... so close... so bright...
Meanwhile, Aaron was just trying not to pass out.
One foot shifted slightly to keep himself from toppling over, and the Woundwalker flinched hard, like he expected a devastating Saintly counterattack.
Aaron's brain, meanwhile, was pure chaos:
STAY UP. STAY UP, YOU NAKED IDIOT.
LOCK IN.
LOCK IN.
Aaron squeezed every exhausted muscle into something resembling stability.
His arms spread wide again, fingers trembling only slightly, as he forced himself into a half-decent Prophet Pose.
He LOCKED IN.
Expression dead serious.
Posture full messiah mode.
Chest out. Chin up.
Inside, he was screaming.
Outside, he looked like the second coming of righteous doom.
The Woundwalker, thoroughly confused but still magnetically drawn forward by instinct, took one slow, cautious step toward him.
Aaron, brain melting from exhaustion and terror, blinked blearily at the nightmare creature, and, without thinking, without planning, just popped off with the first meme line his pop-culture-addled mind could dredge up:
"Oh? You're approaching me? Instead of running away, you're coming right to me?"
The battlefield froze.
The battered faithful, already running on fumes and faith and whatever hallucinogens battlefield relic-smoke produced, gasped.
To them, it was a challenge.
A divine callout.
A Saintly Duel Declaration.
The Woundwalker hesitated, twitching.
Aaron saw the hesitation.
Saw the confusion.
And, realizing with a desperate flicker of mad instinct that he might be able to bluff this nightmare into submission, he committed.
Locking eyes with the abomination, Aaron barked:
"Oh, what's wrong? Why'd you stop?
I can't beat the shit out of you without you getting closer, you know!"
Across the trench lines, across the blood and the mud and the relic-littered no-man's-land, an explosive ROAR went up.
The Redemption Corps screamed.
The Crucible Walkers slammed relic-flamers against their broken chestplates.
The Trench Pilgrims threw their relic-banners high into the air.
Men and women wept openly, clasping their hands in prayer.
To them, it looked like their Saint, still naked, still glowing faintly with the last guttering embers of miracle, was calling out the nightmare without fear, without hesitation, without doubt.
Aaron, inside his own mind:
DON'T TRIP.
DON'T TRIP.
IF YOU TRIP EVERYONE DIES.
LOCK IN, BROTHER.
LOCK. IN.
Trembling slightly, he began to walk forward.
Each step a battlefield of its own.
Mud sucked at his bare feet.
Shell craters yawned like open mouths.
But Aaron moved like he meant to.
Deliberate. Unyielding.
A one-man army of blind luck and stubborn idiocy.
The Woundwalker twitched, backing up, its grotesque flesh shivering in confusion.
The Heretics watching from their broken lines panicked, thinking the Saint was about to unleash some unimaginable holy catastrophe.
The faithful behind Aaron?
They howled in adoration so loud the very trenches shook.
"THE SAINT ADVANCES!"
"HE FEARS NOTHING!"
"HE WILL STRIKE DOWN ALL THE ABOMINATION OF THIS WORLD!"
Aaron locked eyes with the Woundwalker, or at least one of its many weeping, misshapen faces, and, with all the arrogance he could muster, said:
"Come on, ugly.
You think you're the worst thing I've seen today?
I died, came back, and lost my pants.
You? You're just Tuesday."
The Woundwalker, its mind twisted by too many orders and too much fear, broke.
It howled, a keening, broken sound, and lashed out with a tendril of liquefied relics and black faith.
Aaron, purely on accident, shifted to one side to avoid a patch of burning debris, and the tendril missed him completely.
The faithful lost their collective minds.
"HE DODGES WITH EASE!"
"HE MOVES WITH DIVINE GRACE!"
"THE SAINT DANCES UPON THE WOUND!"
Aaron, blinking and barely upright, realized the Woundwalker was...
Backing off.
Backing away.
It was retreating.
From him.
From a half-dead, naked man running on zero sleep, and the lingering willpower of a guy who once spent nine straight hours painting a Warhammer army in a caffeine-fueled haze.
Oh my God, Aaron thought. I'm winning.
Oh my actual God.
I'm winning by being too stubborn to die.
He advanced another shaky step.
The Woundwalker screamed again and fell back toward the shattered fissure it had crawled from.
Its flesh writhed.
Its many mouths babbled nonsense and prayers and curses.
It turned, and fled.
Saint Grave stood alone at the edge of the cracked earth.
Arms wide.
Eyes blank.
Junk freezing in the cold wind.
The burning faithful screaming their lungs out behind him.
And as the Woundwalker fled into the poisoned mist, the Heretic lines broke completely.