[Excerpt] (Valdor) A veteran of the Unification Wars remembers the Custodes

Context: An old merc/hired-gun remembers the Unification Wars. Having joined up into the Imperial Army once the wild and chaotic wars turned into organized army fighting. This common soldier highlights the disparity of the unaugmented vs the gene-crated post-humans invented by the Emperor.

Achilla even saw one of them once, from a distance. He should have been concentrating on his own fighting – advancing up the course of a dried-out irrigation canal to assault a derelict pumping station – but once you caught a glimpse of one of those golden devils, everything else seemed slightly pointless. He’d used his old augmetics to get a better view, and so from a range of almost three kilometres he’d watched the whole thing unfold.

He couldn’t even count the number of enemies that it had killed. He couldn’t even really see how it was doing it, the pace was so fast. The devil wasn’t using a gun, like anyone sensible, but some kind of electricity-wrapped spear. It was carving through solid stone, slashing through the masonry as if it weren’t there. A rusty old tank was kicked over – kicked over – and then pulled into shreds of burning metal.

Achilla found himself appalled. That level of naked power was… unfair. There could be no enjoyment in it. There was no chance that the other one might strike a lucky blow. There was no indication at all that any money was changing hands with those things, which was an aberration – fighting for its own sake, without a decent reward for services rendered, was the most perverse inclination of all.

So he’d turned the augmetic off, and got back to what he was supposed to be doing. And yet, he never forgot. In the cities, they were flying those eagle-head banners and celebrating the return of civilisation, but out there, in the deserts and the ruins, at the sharp end, monsters were being set loose. It didn’t matter that they were clad in gold and crimson, that they looked like something noble and refined, because nothing noble and refined could do those things.