This was where they were truly reborn, where the skin of their pasts fell away. Not beneath the chirurgeon’s blades or in the gene-changes wrought on their flesh, but here in the heat and stink of battle. Here they were remade.

An officer came at him out of the smoke, a glowing power sword in her hand. Saduran felt himself smile as lightning sheathed the human’s blade. This was joy, and glory, and life balanced on a razor edge. The officer lunged. He pivoted to the side, switching grip on his gun to fire point-blank into her gut. The bolter clacked empty. The blade stabbed into the air where he had been. She was fast – very fast – and dazzlingly fluid.

Saduran punched forwards, but the officer’s sword flicked aside. The blade whipped across his forearm. Ceramite parted. Blood poured out, flashing to smoke as it met the blue haze around the cutting edge. Saduran felt the stimms thump into his blood as his physiology cut the pain away. He rammed his weight forwards. The officer moved aside, and her sword slashed across the plate under his arm…

Fresh pain and the reek of burnt meat inside his armour.

This was the gap between the old and the new. He had been a killer for most of his life, but a warrior of the Legion for only months. He was transhumanly strong and had all the skills that six months of battle hypnosis could give. But he, like his newborn kin, lacked finesse, the honed skill to match their ferocity and strength. This human was just a human, and legionaries should not bleed to the cuts of mortals. He was faster and stronger, but at some level he was still just a youth with the desire to kill, hot-housed into something more than human, but far less than a god.

He dropped his bolter and pulled the combat blade from his belt. The human officer was coiling back, spinning her blade to cut at the vulnerable join at the back of his leg. He reached for her, the fingers of his left hand open to grasp a limb, his knife coming up in his right hand to slam into her gut. Not fast, and not as elegant, but it would still spill her entrails onto the deck.

He did not see the warrior in yellow come for him until it was almost too late.