Chapter 114: Title Eaten by Guilliman (Supplement 1) (Patreon)

Seeing the two men seated in the room, Titus and Leandros immediately snapped to a salute.

Though Heydrich's methods left them more than a little speechless at times, these Ultramarines were still grateful to him.

Truthfully, if you looked closely at what Heydrich had actually done, you couldn't really call it blasphemy.

After all, the Imperium had never once declared that reverse-corrupting Chaos xenos was blasphemous — no one had ever managed to pull it off before, so by what standard could anyone call it that now?

In any case, during the stretch of time Heydrich knew nothing about, the Ecclesiarchy of at least the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar had reached a quiet consensus regarding his conduct.

Namely, that what Heydrich did was not blasphemy, and the reasoning behind that conclusion was solid. First, every one of his methods was aimed squarely at xenos and heretics, and none of it caused the worst kind of corruption. Second, in ten thousand years no one across the entire Imperium had ever accomplished anything like it — so who had the standing to call it blasphemous?

In the end, amid the Ultramarines' characteristic bureaucratic gift for turning black into white, combined with the plain necessity of compromise, the matter simply settled itself.

After all, you could hardly go to war with Heydrich. Others might not know it, but Belisarius Cawl certainly did — this man carried something of terrifying power in his hands.

A weapon capable of punching clean through an entire sector was simply too horrifying to contemplate. A planet, after all, was not a warship, even if it did have some defenses of its own.

But a planet-wide void shield was out of the question — the power draw alone would be staggering. If Heydrich ever found the right angle, he could wipe out more than half a sector with a single shot.

What's more, though Heydrich did restrict the Ecclesiarchy, all that restriction amounted to was a ban on public preaching. If you wanted to raise churches or statues, he didn't care either way.

The Ecclesiarchy grumbled plenty about it, but the point stood: whatever else, Heydrich had at least given them a way to save face.

As long as you believed in the Emperor, everything else was negotiable.

So, without Heydrich ever knowing it, this batch of Ultramarines who understood the value of compromise had quietly cleared up a great many procedural headaches on his behalf.

Of course, Heydrich also meant to have Guilliman bring a Flower Sprout along, so that once he returned to Holy Terra he could simply use the tavern to travel there directly.

After all, neither Irena nor Celestine — the two Living Saints — had raised any objection, and for what it was worth, both of them spent most of their time these days holed up in Heydrich's own territory.

Compared to a world crammed full of religious fanatics, Heydrich's domain counted as remarkably sane by comparison. After her connection to the Emperor was severed, and after she'd personally watched Heydrich summon the Khorne Bloodthirster Skarbrand right in the middle of an anti-corruption ritual circle, Irena had pulled herself out of that fanatical state entirely.

As for Celestine, being a woman from ten thousand years past, she'd never been all that fanatical to begin with. She followed the Emperor's commands faithfully enough, but she still exercised judgment of her own, and so she got along just fine here.

Even that great fanatic Greyfax had mellowed a good deal — mostly because she'd seen so much borderline-blasphemous nonsense by now that she'd simply gone numb to it. None of it was Chaos, in any case, so it hardly mattered.

"So, next I'll head for Holy Terra. With your help this time, the strength I have in hand should be more than sufficient. These days the Imperium itself has grown considerably weaker — and even its enemies aren't the scale they were ten thousand years ago."

Guilliman glanced over at Titus and Leandros as they approached, and gave a nod.

Just then, though, Leandros beside him could hold his tongue no longer.

"Great Ancient Sage..."

He knew this might come across as presumptuous, but he felt he had to speak up regardless.

"What is it?"

Heydrich looked at him with mild curiosity. In truth he held no particular ill will toward the man — or rather, in a world where everything and everyone was fair game to be worked like a beast of burden—

it really was possible to keep the vermin so busy they had no time left for corruption, and no time for their usual petty scheming either.

After all, if you still had spare hours to embezzle, that just meant your workload wasn't heavy enough yet — time to pile on more.

So naturally, as far as Leandros was concerned, Heydrich simply meant to work him a little harder. No great matter.

Now that the Tyranid War Veteran Company had been formed, Titus held command, with the Chaplain effectively serving as his second. Both men's records held up well enough that no one raised any complaint.

What's more, as Chaplain — the single most vital line of defense a company had against corruption — Leandros was more than qualified for the post. Even the report he'd once filed against Titus had really only cited a procedural error, not any fault in the action itself.

That particular incident had simply gone too far: Titus had torn apart, bare-handed, a Daemon Prince on the very verge of full ascension to daemonhood, then crushed a Warp relic to pieces with nothing but his grip. None of that was any trouble at all for Heydrich, of course, but for an ordinary Space Marine it was outrageous.

"Those... Word Bearers of yours, I mean — they're a little too naive."

Leandros finally lost his composure at that, scratching his head with a look of pure despair the instant his students — the ones Heydrich had foisted on him — came up.

When he'd first learned they were Word Bearers, the news had gone down about as pleasantly as swallowing a Nurgle spirits. To an Ultramarine, after all, that name was practically a plague god's curse.

Simply being handed a flock of Word Bearers to train had already tested his composure badly enough. What truly broke him, though, was how the lot of them actually behaved.

Innocent to the point of naivety, with a faint tinge of outright silliness besides.

This batch, he could say without exaggeration, was the most headache-inducing group of Word Bearers he'd ever led — and strangely, they weren't even particularly fanatical about faith. If anything, they leaned hard toward reason and outright skepticism.

In other words, they didn't behave like Word Bearers at all — they behaved more like the XVII Legion before Lorgar's return: the Iconoclasts.

That Legion had originally been designed for the express purpose of stamping out messy religious troubles — only to end up, under Lorgar's influence, becoming the most fanatically devout Legion of the lot.

All one could say to that was that fate had a cruel sense of humor.

"Uh..."

Heydrich rubbed his nose at that. His recruits, after all, all came out of his own academies. Given the timing involved, most of them had arrived at his side before they were even old enough to remember much of anything — or else had simply been born aboard his Ark outright, which meant none of them had ever really grasped just how brutal the Imperium truly was.

In other words, by Warhammer-universe standards, they were more than a little spoiled — practically overgrown children.

"You've sheltered them far too well. Chaos corruption is everywhere."

Leandros drew a deep breath, feeling it his duty to remind Heydrich of this. Back in the era when this ancient Dragon Emperor had lived, the Eldar hadn't yet pulled off their spectacular act of self-destruction — the Eye of Terror hadn't opened yet, and corruption had naturally been far less of a problem.

"Hm. How should I put it. What if you factor them in — what do you think?"

"Mimi!!!"

With a snap of Heydrich's fingers, the pink mammal creatures materialized once more. At the sight of them, Leandros's eye twitched.

Not that he held any ill will toward the little sprites — quite the opposite, he was genuinely grateful for them.

After all, it was these creatures who'd handled the corruption cleanup across the whole of Ultramar afterward — without them, it would have meant a full-scale purge of the entire region instead.

So Leandros knew exactly what these creations of the Path of Remembrance were capable of. Excising the corrupted portion with surgical precision was the best possible method for anyone still in the early stage of Chaos corruption.

As for cases where too much soul got stripped away and the subject ended up reduced to something like a servitor — that just meant the person had already sunk deep into corruption; in other words, they'd already been a Chaos cultist by that point.

With creatures like these around, there was truly little need to fear Chaos corruption anymore. The real danger of corruption had always been how impossible it was to guard against — like a disease with far too long an incubation period. If it simply erupted outright, that was actually the easy case, since corruption could be spotted with the naked eye once it took hold. It was the early, hidden stage that caused all the trouble.

"That's enough. I have my own plans for handling Chaos corruption."

Heydrich wasn't in the mood to belabor the point. Yes, his population had grown a great deal of late, but the necessary safety measures hadn't been neglected either — otherwise his numbers wouldn't be sitting at a mere few hundred million; he could easily have driven growth dozens of times higher.

"Speaking of which, if it truly comes to it, you're welcome to use my gene-seed instead. Better to rely less on stock from the Traitor Legions."

Guilliman couldn't resist adding the warning — he knew perfectly well just what a motley menagerie of monsters Heydrich had stockpiled.

All nine Traitor Legions, without a single one missing. The reason was simple: every scrap of that gene-seed had come from Trazyn. The Ultramarines' own gene-seed, meanwhile, had been drawn directly from Guilliman himself after the Battle of Macragge concluded.

After all, a single vial of a Primarch's blood could yield a staggering quantity of gene-seed. The technology wasn't difficult, and the Imperium hadn't lost it either — the main reason it went unused now was simply that there were no gene-Primarchs left to draw from. Nothing to be done about that.

As for the matter of a Primarch's pull over his own sons, Heydrich had already sorted that out long ago. A Primarch's hold over his sons, after all, had its limits — plenty of Space Marine followed their own will down paths quite different from their father's.

That held true on both sides, loyalist and traitor alike, and there were no shortage of examples either way.

"I know—hm?"

But just as Heydrich was about to say something more, his expression shifted.

"What's wrong?"

Seeing the look on Heydrich's face, the others tensed at once. Whatever could put that expression on Heydrich was, without question, no small matter.

"That troupe of Harlequins, along with a trader of mine, have run into a Tyranid swarm attack out in the Imperium Nihilus. They're sending us a distress signal right now."

"What scale of Tyranids?"

At Heydrich's words, Calgar — the one among them with the most combat experience against the Tyranids — was the first to respond.

"Judging by the scale, it's probably not a major arm of the main swarm. But it would be more than enough to overwhelm a feudal world."

Heydrich sighed inwardly at that. He did have a means of deploying troops quickly — going straight through the tavern to reach different worlds.

But the tavern wasn't the Star Rail, after all — the doors' throughput was quite limited. If Heydrich wanted to move a large army through, it would take a long, slow while.

So without confirming whether this really was the Tyranid main force, Heydrich wasn't about to send anyone through blind.

As for his super budget-tier A-Ruan Pouch, and his own mustard-seed dimension besides, both shared one glaring problem: neither could carry living things. Anything alive that went in would simply be killed outright by the strange space within.

So under these circumstances, he had no way to blindly hurl an army through. Nor could either of them carry warships, for that matter — Warhammer-universe warships had one major drawback: from the day they were built to the day they were finally blown apart, they basically could never get too close to a planet's surface.

Because of how they were constructed, these warships had a terrible time breaking free of a planet's gravity well. So even if Heydrich could ferry a warship through, he'd still need a safe, stable pocket of open space to release it into, then ferry troops up from the surface to orbit step by careful step.

If the world in question were safe, that would be one thing — but a world already under Tyranid invasion? Forget it. There simply wasn't the environment for it.

Of course, if the world at stake were Baal, or even the Netherworld star region, Heydrich wouldn't hesitate to do it regardless.

"How much longer until we finish preparations to head for Holy Terra? Give me an exact time frame."

At that, Guilliman shot to his feet, his eyes brightening noticeably.

"About another week, Father. Are you thinking of going to see the Tyranids yourself?"

Watching Guilliman's expression, Calgar spoke up with some hesitation.

"Yes. I've already laid eyes on the space Necrons, and during the Great Crusade I dealt with plenty of Orks — but I have never truly seen a Tyranid swarm with my own eyes."

At Calgar's words, Guilliman answered with unmistakable excitement.

He was full of curiosity about the Tyranid swarm — and besides, this was a chance to properly witness, firsthand, the greatest enemy the Imperium currently faced.

After all, in ten thousand years, these creatures were the only threat that had ever come close to bringing down the entire Sol star region.

"Come with me, then."

Heydrich raised no objection. He simply snapped his fingers, opening a door directly in front of himself.

"Oh, right — Titus, bring along a few Tyranid War Veterans, plus a hundred of my new recruits. That should be force enough to hold the line. Once the Tyranid swarm decides the exchange isn't worth it, they'll pull back on their own."

Privately, Heydrich already had a good idea what this was — most likely a fragment of the Leviathan fleet scattered when the Great Rift tore open. Whether it was the splinter that had broken off en route to Baal, or simply a fresh batch spat back out after being swallowed by the Rift, there was no telling.

Not that it mattered much either way. If the scale wasn't large, they'd simply treat it as a training exercise. And it wasn't only Guilliman who'd never laid eyes on a Tyranid swarm — Heydrich himself hadn't either. As it happened, he could use the encounter to buy himself a little research time, since biological experiments couldn't run on guesswork alone; it always helped to have live specimens on hand.

Call it a warm-up match for the coming Battle of Baal — let him get a first look at the Tyranid swarm now.

So, before long, Heydrich and Guilliman stepped through into the tavern in its own pocket dimension. Taking in everything around him, Guilliman couldn't help but voice his admiration.

"I already knew you had this tavern, but seeing it with my own eyes is still hard to believe. It won't solve the Imperium's underlying problems, no, but it can certainly put out the fires right in front of us."

Though it was his first time here, Guilliman still noticed a great many remarkable things.