Chapter 116: Guilliman: A New Codex, a New Roll of Toilet Paper (Patreon)

"Great Ancient Sage, when it comes to a Tyranid swarm — killing their synapse creature is the simplest, most effective way to wipe them out. The moment the synapse creature dies, the whole stretch of swarm it commanded becomes nothing more than a pack of beasts — worse than beasts, even."

Titus had clearly noticed the utterly speechless look on Heydrich's face, and took the moment to explain himself.

"Don't worry, I'm no Goldie. I'm not about to micromanage your tactics."

At those words, Titus didn't dare answer with so much as a syllable. He had no idea what a 'Goldie' actually was, but he understood well enough that whenever Heydrich used the term, he generally meant the Emperor.

"Do well out there. I need to watch how you fight so I can put together a supplement to the Codex Astartes."

Guilliman clapped Titus on the shoulder at that, and Titus nodded back, eyes bright with excitement.

As for Heydrich, he decided to keep his mouth shut — even though the whole scene left him aching to make some snide remark. But there was nothing actually wrong with Titus's plan, either in tactics or in personnel. Akurduana's specialty, after all, was brute physical breakthrough. And Loken's Shadowmoon Wolves doctrine had always been built around letting other Legions hold the line while they forced their way straight through.

Both men were well suited to the job. And once the synapse creature went down, the entire Tyranid swarm would become no better than beasts — stripped of command, that was exactly what they'd be. A beast's instincts would drive it to avoid danger, which meant the threat would essentially neutralize itself.

It wasn't as though the Imperium had never captured Tyranids alive or gathered up their corpses before — it had simply never managed to develop any Tyranid-derived technology from the effort. The main problem was that Tyranid corpses rotted and broke down within days, leaving them essentially worthless — not even useful as raw material.

By the same token, most ordinary Tyranid organisms had short lifespans, generally under a year. And if one reached the end of its life without dying in battle first, it would simply dive into a digestion pool — the recycling efficiency of that process was remarkably high.

So once the synapse creature was killed, or the Hive Fleet withdrew, whatever remained of the swarm would collapse and die off in short order. Only a rare few would survive, and by then they'd have simply become part of that world's local ecology — still somewhat dangerous, sure, but roughly on the level of the threat modern bears posed to Japan: nothing that could actually destabilize the broader structure of society.

As for Guilliman, he'd already begun revising the Codex Astartes. Heydrich's own opinion of the thing was that it amounted to little more than a combat reference manual — and while he did require all his own Space Marines to read and study it, he'd simply retitled his version the Space Marine Basic Combat Reference.

But Heydrich was a one-man operation, building everything up from scratch himself. He could afford not to care about the Codex. Guilliman couldn't.

The thing was bound too deeply into the Imperium itself; all he could do was amend it piece by piece — he had no way to simply scrap it outright.

Take the most recent round of army-building, for instance — call it a Primaris rebuild, or call it a rebuild pushed to the absolute limit, whichever you liked. Even then, Guilliman had only made certain revisions to the Codex Astartes rather than doing away with it entirely.

Now he needed to observe the fighting firsthand so he could draft fresh tactical doctrine against Tyranid swarms. Heydrich wouldn't let him onto the battlefield itself, but he could still watch everything through the instruments in front of him.

Only Heydrich left for the moment — this engagement would serve as a kind of advance reconnaissance.

As for reaching Baal and the Cryptus System, that remained somewhat difficult for now — mainly because the flow of time in that region didn't match the normal rate.

If he connected the two sides directly, causality would most likely force the time flow on both ends to equalize.

So until he was properly prepared, Heydrich wasn't about to let anyone casually open a passage to Baal.

After all, no one could afford to hold any illusions about the Imperial Navy. Time and again, the pattern had been the same: before the ground war had even fully begun, they'd already gotten themselves killed off, manipulated by the mysterious hand of GW.

But before long…

"Hm, what's with that reaction?"

When Heydrich got back, he found the entire hall thick with a grim, tense atmosphere.

That left him a little puzzled. As far as he knew, no war had broken out recently — did they really need to look this serious?

"Well... how should I put it. It's a big deal, and also not really a big deal. Someone robbed your unified exam convoy."

"Huh?"

Heydrich blinked, momentarily stunned. Given how sparse his population still was, and how well-developed short-range teleportation technology was within his territories, he'd always arranged for all his exams to be held at a single, unified site.

Which meant he'd assigned plenty of manpower to guard the place. He had three worlds under his control — the Ark, the Garden World, and the forge world.

So each world had its own exam site, and he'd posted a squad of Men of Iron, a squad of Men of Stone, and an entire company of Space Marines to guard each one.

There were even a few Imperial Knights on standby — that was about as high a level of protection as it got. And besides, it was just exam papers. What actual value could there be in stealing them?

"Your security measures are excellent. And that's exactly the problem — they were so good, they drew someone's attention."

"Hm?"

Heydrich's brow twitched. He still wasn't quite following what had happened.

"Some Thousand Sons Chaos warband got wind of it from who-knows-where and figured there had to be some secret hidden inside."

Hearing that, Heydrich felt something close to constipation coming on. These people were genuinely bizarre. Why did everything happen to him? A Chaos warband storming his exam hall to steal test papers, of all things.

"And then…"

The warband, counting Rubric Marines, numbered over five hundred strong. Every one of them stayed behind except the Chaos Lord leading it — that one made off clutching your exam papers, and nobody knows where he's gotten to since. But it's not really a problem. Your Time Chamber can accelerate the flow of time inside to dozens of times the outside rate over a short span — meaning one day out here is dozens of days in there. That should be more than enough.

"Are you insane…"

Heydrich stared at Pearl, dumbfounded. Sure enough — there was just no understanding anything Tzeentch had ever touched.

Meanwhile, somewhere within the Warp…

"That's it?"

Ahriman looked over the bedraggled, thoroughly beaten Thousand Sons Chaos Lord in front of him with open contempt. Because of the Rubric, he mostly kept to himself these days, running solo with his own Rubric Marines.

He was on bad terms with practically every Thousand Sons warband out there, and had even clashed to some degree with Magnus's own direct followers, the Crimson Scribes. He did have his own warband, but he'd only built it up himself after his exile.

This time, he'd sought out this small warband and tricked them into striking at that mysterious, unnamed presence.

Ahriman had discovered that his target had dispatched a squad of Men of Iron, a squad of Men of Stone, and even an entire company of Space Marines to guard something.

There had to be some secret worth all that, he'd reasoned — but he hadn't wanted to move against it himself. So he'd talked some fool among the Thousand Sons into doing it for him. The result: the idiot had gotten his entire warband wiped out, and all he'd come away with for it was this scrap.

"Ahriman, I've already told Father! You'd better watch yourself!!!"

The warband's leader was livid with fury — his entire warband was gone. And the Thousand Sons' numbers had always been scarce to begin with; the force he'd just lost had counted as a genuine pillar of strength within the Thousand Sons faction.

Now all of it lay wasted, a loss substantial enough to leave even Magnus grieving for a long while.

Granted, given their psychic strength, the losses shouldn't have been this catastrophic to begin with. But who could have guessed that partway through the fight, a Sisters of Silence would show up and simply blow them apart.

"Useless trash…"

Ahriman didn't bother saying anything more to that. Considering that what stood before him was only a psychic projection, killing it would accomplish nothing anyway. So he simply left. As for the warband he'd just gotten wiped out on his behalf, it meant nothing to him at all.

That warband had only been founded within the last thousand years or so, after all. As far as Ahriman was concerned, only those who'd been there from the very beginning counted as his brothers.

Back aboard the Ark, Heydrich found himself deadpan-faced, one hand pinching each cheek of two stunning women.

"Seriously, the two of you Living Saints have basically turned into complete layabouts."

Having temporarily cleared his desk, Heydrich went to track down Celestine and Irena.

He knew perfectly well the two of them were staying with him. After all, if a pair of Living Saints walked openly through the Imperium proper, you'd witness an utterly spectacular sight — someone would inevitably mutilate themselves to express their devotion to the Emperor.

Most commonly, they'd gouge out their own eyes — while staring straight at the Saints as they did it. In their minds, that way the very last thing their eyes, their will, ever preserved would be the Living Saint's holy image.

This was exactly why Heydrich insisted the Emperor counted as a Dark God in his own right. After all, human sacrifice had been gradually stamped out back in China ever since the Duke of Zhou's era. The Shang dynasty had been the absolute peak of that practice — and who would've guessed 40K era would bring it roaring back?

Naturally, once the two of them discovered how much saner things were over here, they'd both holed up on Heydrich's turf and never left.

And then the two of them proceeded to show Heydrich exactly what being a layabout looked like. He hadn't actually known Celestine all that well before this. But when he arrived and found the pair of them sprawled every which way across the room, watching television and munching on snacks, his temper exploded on the spot.

He was busy enough to work himself half to death, without even enough spare time for his little inventions anymore. Lately he'd been pursuing a research project — trying to see whether the power of the Path of Erudition could alter the physical constants, and what kind of reaction that might trigger — but he hadn't had time to keep working on it. Part of that was because it had stalled with no progress for the moment, sure, but either way, he'd been run ragged.

There were limits to how much of a Goldie a person ought to be — or at least, they shouldn't imitate one quite this closely. So Heydrich showed no mercy, grabbing one cheek in each hand without hesitation.

Strictly speaking, Irena was his own Living Saint. Celestine wasn't — but Heydrich would smack even a Goldie without a second thought, so a mere Living Saint hardly gave him pause.

"Pearl, freeze both of their accounts. If this keeps up, they'll be completely useless."

Even as he hauled the two of them up by the cheeks, Heydrich had someone freeze both their accounts on the spot. Back when they'd first come to him, he'd figured that after fighting for humanity for so long, the least he could do was set them up properly.

So he'd opened an account for each of them and paid them a monthly stipend. Not that either of them was hurting for cash to begin with — Celestine in particular could draw on the Ecclesiarchy's resources freely. It wasn't exactly wealth on a grand scale, but neither of them ever wanted for money — and so they'd simply settled in here and turned into a pair of hardcore shut-ins.

All Heydrich could say to that was: no wonder — truly the Emperor's own Daemon Prince through and through. Though he honestly couldn't tell whether that was just how the Emperor had always been, or whether it was something the Emperor had picked up along the way and passed down.

The Ecclesiarchy had already been lodging complaints about this for a good long while — what exactly was it supposed to mean, having one of their Living Saints camped out at his place day after day? Irena was still a relatively new Living Saint, so nobody who'd been hanging around Heydrich's circle for long had much to say about her. Celestine, though, was a different matter entirely — the woman had been active for ten thousand years.

"Mmph mmph mmph…"

At Heydrich's words, the two of them — Irena especially — bristled instantly, but with their cheeks still caught in his grip, all they could manage were muffled, garbled protests.

"Mimi…"

Just then, the little pink creature that had followed Heydrich for years came zipping out again, circling around Irena and making faces at her the whole time.

That made Heydrich's eye twitch. He couldn't help but wonder if he'd raised the thing wrong somehow — why did it have such an impish, troublemaking streak to it?

While Heydrich took a brief breather, on that world out in the Imperium Nihilus, the small-scale Tyranid incursion was already drawing to a close.

Titus's tactics were crude to the point of being almost embarrassingly simple — but the cruder and more direct the approach, the more effective it turned out to be.

With Loken and Akurduana forming a three-man strike team under him, they located the synapse creature in short order and cut it down.

As for this small Hive Fleet, it simply didn't have the resources to birth a Hive Tyrant in the first place. After all, even the Behemoth fleet from the First Tyrannic War, and the Leviathan fleet at the Battle of Baal—

—even those two enormous fleets could only field a small handful of Hive Tyrants. Basic units like Hormagaunts and Termagants were cheap enough that losing them never hurt, and their corpses recycled into biomass efficiently enough.

But the cost of birthing a Hive Tyrant was an astronomical sum by comparison — under those conditions, the swarm weighed every single decision carefully. And this small fleet, quite clearly, didn't have anywhere near the resources required.

Both Loken and Akurduana, whom Titus had brought along, were individually strong enough to take on a Hive Tyrant one-on-one. Akurduana especially, enhanced as he'd been by Heydrich, could go toe-to-toe with — and kill — a Norn Emissary solo.

Sending a squad capable of hunting down a Norn Emissary against a swarm that couldn't even birth a single Hive Tyrant was, frankly, complete overkill. The swarm was cut to pieces in no time, and with Heydrich's Titan legion backing up the main front, the Tyranid presence on this world was suppressed swiftly.

Titus even organized a direct Boarding Action against the Tyranid bio-fleet itself. Starved of biomass, the Hive Fleet was all but wiped out entirely, and whatever scraps remained posed no real problem.

As for Guilliman, he'd spent the whole time writing furiously — and after his battlefield observations and analysis, his new work was finally complete.

Codex Astartes: Tyranid Warfare Supplement