The Inquisitor certainly acted like he had an unknowable Daemonic entity interested in him and appearing periodically to mess with his life. Taking Emia’s glowing faith in stride, he simply inserted her into a Tempestus squad as a backline sniper and gave her the equipment to do that. A tight, armoured bodysuit and a helmet with interesting internals inside it, along with a well crafted sniper rifle that she could feel was going to get a lot of use. Inquisitors had all the best toys.

Though deployment wasn’t going to be something they just rushed into, so the Inquisitor deployed troops to the surface and made his presence known, but conversed with what was left of Command on the ground. The PDF were fighting in the Hive at this point, which was leading to casualties ramping up. While the Hive’s defences had not been activated, the enemy was considerable in number and the PDF weren’t exactly known for their training or their equipment. So the Inquisitor sent out an edict to call in half the garrison of the planet rather than just the local one, using the weight of numbers to crush the insurrection. Such a thing did not happen immediately and there were a few days before transports started to arrive.

The Astartes milled out, some interacting with the people and others just standing around on guard for hours on end. The Tempestus Scion, however, were far more human despite their discipline, and quickly dispersed into the camp for a soldier's pleasure. No man was so disciplined his commander didn’t have to look to the morale of his men, so dice and cards and lho-stick gambling was given a blind eye.

In this time, Emia ran a few C rank dungeons for XP and money, not wanting to risk a B-rank with her current equipment. She was drastically understatted for combat of her level and needed to avoid that till she got some better stuff. Through the dungeons she got a feel for her armour and the rifle she was wielding, so when the PDF reinforcements started to arrive in droves, she was well prepared for the push that they were going to go through with. Planning a multiple pronged assault, Emia moved in with her squad and joined up with the frontline while the flanks were reinforced and the rear was secured. The Hive defences were slagged with scrapcode and it would take a while for the Inquisitor’s Tech-Adept to chew through it, so until then they would need to hold the line.

The Heretics didn’t seem to mind that the enemy had stopped their advance and was now digging in, they still threw themselves at the line with a disturbing glee. Emia went through magazine after magazine of rounds splattering heretical brain juice on the floor but there were always more who were prepared to clamber over the bodies of their fallen brothers and sisters to get shot at some more. The war of attrition was not going well for them, as there were more enemies than there were bullets, and the supply line out of the Hive was strained with the demand. The planet’s production wasn’t designed to sustain such a vigorous assault without the Hive supporting them, and there were days where the Heavy Emplacements simply didn’t get used from a lack of resources. The Scions were able to shore up the lack however, recharging laspacks were a godsend from a supply point of view, and Emia seemed to always have more rounds to fire regardless.

When the Heavy Emplacements were silent, Emia and a few others were sent on patrols to ensure that if the enemy did send a large wave at them, they would be forewarned and able to enter into positions capable of dealing with them with ‘acceptable losses’. A term Emia disliked but she couldn’t deny its accuracy here. On one patrol, they found what looked to be moving corpses scavenging the dead bodies. Twisted, cadaverous mutants, they looked like life had started terribly and gotten worse from there. The other members of her squad were ready to open fire on them and clean the Hive of their taint, but Emia felt the need to give them a flash of The Emperor’s light. When they were unaffected by such a thing, she stepped forward and spoke.

“Stop. These are the Emperor’s children just as you are. They do not deserve such heartless execution” Emia told them. The two PDF guardsmen looked at her like she was deranged, but it was enough to give them time to flee. Something that she caught flak for the whole way home, though the loud and vigorous insults gave away their position cleanly enough for a Heretic ambush. With Emia’s shield and rifle, she managed to clear away the six hostiles, and the rest of the march back was in silence.

Morale in the redoubt was dropping. The Men wanted to push on and take the fight to them rather than just waiting around to be killed, and supplies were dipping to a point of stealing the heretics' weaponry and ammo after they had been killed. But no, the orders were to stay and hold the line till the Tech-Adept finished his work. Emia, however, soothed this with her words and presence, leading them in a prayer to The Emperor. Not truly for anything, but to give them something to occupy their minds and calm their hearts.

She liked it here, because while the individual xp was not much, quantity had a quality of its own, and she was popped off heads left, right and center. Bullets from the shop were cheap and she could shore up her lack of money selling some of the guns they looted from the heretics. They too were in vast supply. This gave her fifteen levels in the three weeks she was deployed here, and from that a new, burning delight as her quest had finished. The stat spread was thought about and eventually she dropped a hundred into stamina and got a new set of buffs, and twenty into dexterity and agility to better her movement. The remaining forty went into precision so she would miss less shots and waste less ammo.

For traits, she got Celerity to move faster, a lovely one called Prey-Sense that let her have a preternatural capability to sense the enemy around her, and two scavenging traits that gave her more loot. In this time of scarcity, they were important. It took her a few hours to master the new physical changes her stats had given her, but when she got the grasp of it, they were delightful boons. The mission that, once level 75 had been ticked, just telling her to ‘Die’ was less of a boon, but that was the way of the world. Unfortunately, the Galaxy did not play by any rules, and the delightful boon she had gotten was soon to be remedied.

Communication had been spotty for a few days as a storm was gathering. The Hive disrupted the ecosystem and so electromagnetic storms and other hazards occasionally gathered around its discharges, which in turn messed with the Vox relay. This lack of the Vox meant they did not get the report of a large force bursting past the left flank and moving in behind them so that when the next assault came, they were hit from two sides. The lack of heavy emplacements to their rear allowed the Heretics to carve their way through the camp and execute all the support staff. When Emia’s new Prey-Sense picked this up, she ditched the rifle and rushed in with her pistols to support the beleaguered defenders and try to stem the flow. It went really badly, with her killing a good chunk of the Heretics, but taking a total of eight bullets to varying places as she fought.

These bullets eventually brought her down into a Critical Wound, and she collapsed to her knees. Her whole body feeling like...well, like she had been shot eight times. And the Daemon seemed to be wanting to come out and play from her weakened state. But before it managed to take over her body, someone came and drove a foot into her back.

“...Damn it, I had something for this. Brain always goes blank right when you need it most” the man with the foot on her back seemed to be having his own troubles, and soothed them by putting a bullet in the back of Emia’s neck. When she was hit with that final round, the world went black, and there was nothing. No pain, no Daemon, no exhaustion. Just the void.