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Chapter 148: Your Past Has Come for You
🕑 Added 2025-09-14 12:56:40 +0000 UTCChapter 148: Your Past Has Come for You
On the rain-swept world of Optus.
Within the ancient fortress, now fused with xenos architecture.
Warsmith Idriss and his commanders stood before the auspex, which was constantly updating with the enemy's deployments, waiting for the attack that was slow to come.
"What are these sons of Dorn hesitating for?" Idriss asked, his eyes filled with confusion as he simultaneously directed his troops to deal with the damned Eldar xenos in the depths of the fortress. He watched as the Imperial forces did not, as he had expected, launch an assault on his defensive lines.
The scale of this Imperial crusade fleet was truly absurd. He had never imagined that the Imperium could gather such a massive fleet anywhere other than the Eye of Terror.
"Are the daemonhosts and daemon engines still unusable?" Idriss turned his head and looked at his second-in-command.
"They are," his second-in-command replied, shaking his head, his tone laced with gritted teeth.
Who knew how many times he had had to listen to the blasphemous words of "Iron decays, the Stone endures" and "Iron Warriors? I feel they are not as good as the Iron Circle robots" while trying to repair these hybrid creations of the Warp and machine. It was truly torturous.
Their fleet had been annihilated with the speed of a whirlwind. Besides knowing that the Eternal Crusader had arrived, they didn't even know the details of the battle.
"They probably don't know what we're doing. They intend to gather their strength and then launch an all-out assault on the fortress," Idriss analyzed, his gaze falling on the Eldar xenos who were gradually being surrounded and annihilated. "But they don't know that with every moment they hesitate, every inch of steel in this fortress will become even more deadly."
These minions of the Laughing God, who called themselves Harlequins, had intended to steal the gift he was going to offer to the Lord of Iron. They had brought him no small amount of trouble. Unfortunately for them, they were isolated and without support. In the grinding teeth of iron, they would only be slowly shredded into pieces.
His cold gaze fell on the soldiers who were engaged in a brutal exchange with the Eldar xenos. Idriss continued to issue commands for a fierce assault. The losses of these fast-bred troops, created from the seed of the Imperial Fists, meant nothing to him. On their slave-planets, they had countless gene-thralls who were using their bodies to produce these inferior gene-seeds for them.
"Yes, just like on Sebastus IV. We will give the sons of Dorn their most painful defeat," his second-in-command said.
"Correct." Idriss clenched his fists in excitement. The fall of his fleet, the death of his men—none of it mattered.
"In another thirteen hours, our ritual will be complete. The Lord of Iron will receive our gift and will watch as we win an unprecedented victory for him."
As long as... as long as I can win back the favor of the Lord of Iron, everything will be worth it...
WHOOOOSH—
A sudden, violent wind arose, so strong that people could not stand. The men who were directing their troops and coordinating the defensive lines all stopped. Especially Idriss. The moment he felt that familiar frequency, he looked up in horror.
At this moment, the scene in their eyes was difficult to describe in words.
The gray sky was swirling, as if a vortex had appeared. Like a stone dropped into water, the sky visibly rippled, one wave after another, spreading out from the center.
Every creation that came into contact with it, even the indestructible architectural remains of the xenos, was vibrated into a hazy cloud of dust.
Just one look was enough to make one's whole body go cold, a shiver running straight to the brain.
BOOM!
As if the protection of the void shield had vanished, a tactical squad that was maintaining the defensive facilities disappeared on the spot. The military formation that had been engaged in a bloody slaughter with the renegade daemon engines also disintegrated in an instant.
A corridor, nearly ten meters wide and over ten kilometers long, just appeared in the fortress.
The mortal soldiers, looking at the suddenly cleared area before them, scrambled to flee towards the interior of the fortress, trying to find shelter. But then, a massive roar came from behind them, turning their bodies into a canvas of gore, smeared across the walls.
Thirteen Deathstrike missiles, loaded with concussion warheads, entered the corridor in single file. These missiles, guided by a Tech-Priest using a laser, could, in the event of electronic equipment failure, still have their trajectories calculated directly by the Tech-Priest, who would then input them into the missiles' Machine Spirits. So, in the face of the Great Enemy of Chaos, these missiles could still be effective.
However, for the Imperium, rather than going through the trouble of wrangling with the Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus to get a limited batch of strike weapons, it was more convenient to just conscript a few million Astra Militarum and throw their lives at the problem.
And the war philosophy of the transmigrators had always been to use armored advances and superior firepower whenever possible. They would never resort to a human-wave assault.
The rain of fire was continuous. The frequency of the Tiamat Ordinatus Majoris destroyed all sound transmission. As the violent explosions filled the interior of the fortress, the main structure of that area directly collapsed.
"Lord, what is this!" the second-in-command shouted, holding onto a protruding metal railing.
The fortress structure had been destroyed. Even their carefully selected command center had been greatly affected.
"Impossible," Idriss said, not answering. He just stared blankly at the breach in the imaging system, a breach caused by their own Ordinatus Majoris, and kept repeating the same phrase.
The sudden destruction had shattered his confidence.
In the vox-system, a continuous "whining" sound echoed. The sky grew dark, and visibility dropped rapidly.
"This is impossible," Idriss said, pointing at the breach, his voice filled with disbelief. "How can they use the Ordinatus Majoris? The key to unlock it has been lost for ten thousand years!"
He wanted to go out and see, to see if some daemon had possessed the machine and was tricking him. But he didn't dare. He could only nail his body to the ground and glare at the screen.
If Idriss was like this, the others just felt a shiver run through their bodies. They didn't even have the spare mental capacity to think about what kind of weapon this was, because just thinking about how to deal with such a weapon was already taking all their effort.
No one could answer him.
It was illogical. How could the current Imperium decipher an ancient war machine in such a short time?
They couldn't even remember where those weapons were buried.
Idriss hid in a trench that was buried deep within the fortress, watching the violent wind storm that was howling outside, at the deep gashes that had been carved out, as if in fragile porcelain.
He watched the war machines that had begun to advance with the appearance of the breach in the fortress. Their silhouettes were so familiar, so completely different from the current Imperium.
Idriss had a faint feeling.
His past had come for him.
