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Chapter 87: The Situation is Dire
🕑 Added 2025-08-13 14:53:36 +0000 UTCChapter 87: The Situation is Dire
Ramesses's decision was decisive, and the result was undeniably good.
He had dropped Ka'Bandha's landing zone right on top of the planet's southernmost hatching pool. He let out a heavy sigh of relief. The lives of his partners were on his shoulders, a pressure sufficient to crush a man. But he had held up.
'I won the strategic game. All that time spent squeezing daemons wasn't for nothing. I've learned so many fancy spells, and I finally seized the most critical opportunity. With the Four Gods in a stalemate, the rest is easy.'
The Four Gods had limited opportunities. They were here to hunt souls; they couldn't just endlessly project their power into reality and the ritual's interior.
Reason dictated a countdown in Ramesses's mind, calculating the arrival time of the final Greater Daemon.
"I have found you, nameless Thousand Son," a voice echoed through the Warp.
In the Empyrean, Kairos Fateweaver had finally found the collectible the Lord of Change sought.
As the ancient, two-headed blue eagle tore a path through the Thousand-Eyed Rift and entered this domain, the sorcerer who had made a fool of the Blood God's champion did not turn to fight, but immediately turned and fled.
He ran so decisively that even Kairos was taken aback. He was not one of Khorne's berserkers; he wasn't going to just start killing. And according to the habits of the Thousand Sons, he should have stood his ground proudly, using his wisdom to carve a path of hope. Who just turns and runs at the first sign of trouble?
In that single instant, Ramesses had actually managed to flee beyond the range of the Thousand-Eyed Rift.
Kairos clearly saw the Thousand Son throw something out of the rift, his own soul-projection visibly fading.
"Decisive," Kairos said with a laugh. His crystal staff glowed faintly, and the rift, filled with fangs and eyes, enveloped the area.
In the blink of an eye, eight Lords of Change appeared. The nine Greater Daemons surrounded the Thousand Son, who had not yet completely escaped.
"Tzeentch really thinks highly of me," Ramesses quipped. He looked around and saw that Kairos was the only one he recognized. He had been hoping to put some pressure on Magnus or Ahriman, but now he couldn't be bothered to run anymore. He produced a Go board.
"Care for a game?"
Kairos approached the board. Within the board was a teleportation spell, an inscribed ritual that would allow the winner to leave. Hmm, and there was something else hidden within it, something he couldn't quite see. It would require careful study.
The nine Greater Daemons all stayed their hands and gathered around the board, showing their interest.
Unreadable. Good. That's what makes it worth playing.
None of the Greater Daemons had any intention of fighting directly. They were not Khorne's berserkers. Since their goal was to recruit a new colleague, they would use the methods of the Lord of Change to simultaneously teach their future colleague a lesson.
Don't be greedy. Getting a part of it is enough. Why must you have it all?
You like to gamble? Be careful, you might lose everything.
Kairos held a stone and was the first to make a move. He didn't mind playing a game with the Thousand Son. And there was one anomaly that was truly surprising. The Anathema had, from somewhere, produced another collectible that even Kairos could not see the past or future of. For the first time in a long time, his gaze was fixed on the present. He didn't know how long it had been since he had witnessed the present change.
Ramesses rubbed his hands together. He wasn't actually very good at Go, but winning or losing wasn't important. In the end, it would all come down to who had the better off-the-board tricks.
He monitored the battlefields of his three partners, controlled the flow of the game, and waited for the next opportunity to change the course of the war.
"You guys have to hold on! I'm holding off nine Greater Daemons by myself!"
CRACK!
A bolt round embedded itself in a skull, and a Tyranid Warrior fell. A five-man Space Marine squad breached the ruins, quickly executing the node-creatures that were entrenched there. These xenos, which the lords called "Tyranids," were endless, and they fought as if they had no fear. Only by wiping out their node-creatures could they sow some confusion in their ranks.
A continuous barrage of cannon fire echoed from outside the building. It was the fire support from the artillery positions. Having lost their node-creatures, these xenos could no longer receive targeting data from their scout-organisms and were naturally exposed to the artillery's killing field. The annihilation mission was a great success. Next was to completely incinerate this biomass with promethium.
But just then, the ravaged building suddenly lurched to one side, and the squad members were thrown from their formation.
"More enemies! Alert!" the squad leader shouted, sensing the danger. But his warning came a fraction too late.
CRACK!
Ceramite was shattered by the tip of a sharp claw. From the gaps in the overlapping steel framework, countless shadows darted out.
In an instant, blood and dismembered bodies flew through the air. Even an Astartes's reaction time could barely keep up with an attack of this frequency.
The squad leader, still able to fight, quickly returned fire. A burst of bolter rounds tore off the body of one of the enemies. The figure fell, and the Astartes's keen vision quickly captured the creature's form. It was a creature with four scythe-like claws.
His pupils dilated. Another species he had never encountered before.
Fortunately, the squad leader's reaction speed was fast enough. After creating an opening, he quickly evaded the creatures' leaping attack. Before these assassins could launch a second assault, a rain of bolter fire came from behind them.
The ghost-like figures vanished. They had suddenly appeared, killed three Astartes, and then vanished again, leaving only a few corpses and a gaping hole in the floor.
"These filthy, shameless xenos!" Orlando cursed, arriving a step too late. He was held back by the Chaplain before he could charge in, and could only wait as the Apothecary collected the remains of their battle-brothers.
"Move quickly," Tyberos said, tossing aside the head of a Lictor. These new assassin-units were causing huge problems for the army. But even more troublesome were their larger variants, which were exceptionally lethal to the mortal command structure and were a priority target for the Astartes.
The unit quickly moved on. Beneath their feet, another kind of vibration could be felt. It was the sewers. The enemy was maneuvering through the complex pipe network of the underhive. But the Astartes paid it no mind. They quickly arrived at the rendezvous point, the main structural pylons of the buildings within their defensive perimeter, which had a higher load-bearing capacity.
FWOOSH!
With the sound of hot air frantically beating against the ventilation ducts, the promethium that had been poured into the underhive passages was ignited, turning that entire section into a sea of fire.
Screech—
The entire steel framework groaned under the strain. The scattered Astartes squads quickly regrouped, silently watching the scenery below them collapse.
After fighting these Tyranids for over two months, the entire Upper Hive had sunk by an average of nearly a thousand meters. The bugs were digging down, and the humans were frantically pouring promethium down after them, turning large areas into molten lava pools.
Humanity had once again achieved a great victory in its clash with the xenos.
And yet, the enemy was inexhaustible.
Looking at the new swarm of bugs pouring from the ruins towards the Forge-World, everyone knew that this was just the tip of the iceberg of this massive xenos force.
And fortunately, they only had to face the tip of this iceberg.
Everyone looked up.
The sky was filled with a constantly proliferating green dust cloud. Looking up from below, you could see the brilliant white glow of high-temperature combustion. The top of the Shrine, which reached into the clouds, was already glowing red-hot. Molten metal flowed down the walls and into the pre-built isolation layers. This was the work of a Mortalis-class atmospheric incendiary missile.
It was the most powerful of the phosphex weapons. The phosphine gas it produced after detonation would expand exponentially, quickly covering the entire planet's atmosphere. During the Great Crusade, the First Legion had a large stock of these exterminatus weapons.
With the aid of Archmagos Cawl's computational power, a weapon that should have been used to exterminate an entire planet was precisely deployed, igniting the atmosphere above the hive city.
Faced with the enemy's swarms of drop-pods and a fully formed air force created from the planet's biomass, Lord Romulus had naturally employed this combat plan, directly cutting off the enemy's idea of attacking with air superiority, as if he had known from the start that this plan would achieve the best results.
Just like before.
The enemy's combat units, their combat doctrines, the countermeasures... Romulus, the overall commander, knew everything clearly and had made a perfect response to everything, as if he had experienced such a battlefield countless times.
And the enemy was not simple either.
"Our casualties are increasing," Te Kahurangi said, using the "synapse meltdown" technique taught to him by a certain anonymous Thousand Sons sorcerer to annihilate a scattered Tyranid swarm. The effect was gratifying, but the Carcharodon Librarian was not happy. Before, this spell could have destroyed several command nodes in a row. Now, because the enemy had added a conversion process to each node, the spell could only target one.
The enemy was also adapting at high speed. The back-and-forth between the two commanders had been seen many times. Neither side was simple.
But it was clear that the weak forces of the Imperium were limiting the elders' performance. Aside from the elders who accompanied them, the other "Deathwatch" troops and their automata were deployed in other areas to hold back the Tyranid swarms, and the intensity of the war in those areas was even more terrifying.
It wasn't that the Carcharodons and the Black Templars didn't want to help, but look at the situation now. They looked around at their comrades, their numbers already reduced by nearly a quarter. How could they possibly interfere in the elders' battlefield?
"Continue. Casualties are not an excuse for us to fail to complete our mission objectives," Tyberos's gaze pulled away from the collapsing armed faithful. The briefly gathered unit then dispersed again.
At the same time, countless questions filled the minds of the various commanders.
Such a terrifying xenos... if it had entered the Imperium's sight, it would surely have been recorded, even ten thousand years ago.
But why did the Imperium know nothing of it? And why were these warriors from the ancient past so incredibly knowledgeable about them?
(End of Chapter)
