Chapter 117: Silent King: -1-1-1+1, Silent King: ?!! (Supplement 2) (Patreon)

"You two call yourselves Living Saints? Could you actually do something for once? Freeloading here day after day, mooching food and drink off me — and now the Ecclesiarchy of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar has..."

Right now Heydrich was scolding the two of them with the frustrated exasperation of someone watching good material go to waste. It reminded him of the funniest scene he'd ever caught in an American comic, once upon a time.

A whole crowd of Vikrum had landed on Earth, and within a month every last one of them had turned into stand-up comedians.

These two were more or less the same story now. All he could say was that in a world this deranged, finding even one halfway normal corner was a rare miracle.

Honestly, forget the two of them — even the rest of the Imperium gave Heydrich a headache just to look at. Fortunately, he himself was an ordinary man, so as long as he wasn't standing next to a Space Marine or a Primarch, nothing about him seemed out of place.

Understanding was one thing, of course. Right now he still had every intention of yelling at them.

He'd never imagined that two perfectly good Living Saints would turn into complete layabouts the moment they landed in his territory.

Irena and Celestine stood there taking the scolding without complaint. Celestine, for her part, still wanted to say something in her own defense.

But Heydrich shut her down with a single line about the Emperor whoring around Commorragh for a few centuries, and after that she didn't dare say another word.

"Hm?"

Just then, though, Heydrich paused. Pearl had sent him a message, urging him to come take a look right away.

"I've already frozen your accounts. Get back out there and start earning your keep, both of you. Guilliman's leaving soon too — Celestine, you're going with him back to Holy Terra."

Heydrich frowned one last time at the pair of them before turning to leave. Irena and Celestine both let out a breath of relief and immediately got moving.

Life under Heydrich's roof had admittedly been comfortable, but at the end of the day this was still Warhammer 40K — a universe absolutely stuffed full of bullshit.

Before long Heydrich arrived at the far end of the Ark's city, where he found — somewhat to his surprise — Pearl and all of his Men of Stone, or rather, the Necron machine-intelligences he'd remade, gathered together.

"What are you all doing?"

He looked over the crowd in some confusion. Every single one of them was present, Pearl included.

Even though Heydrich had remade them into what they now were, their original memories hadn't vanished. It was the same even for the Flayed Ones — once Heydrich had healed them and satisfied whatever their souls had been craving, they'd settled back into something close to a normal state.

But today…

"My lord, you already know the trouble with our people."

A Man of Stone who looked to be middle-aged stepped up beside Heydrich, his voice trembling slightly.

"Right, wait. Don't tell me you're..."

Heydrich nodded along — and then, all at once, realization hit him.

In Star Rail, after all, the so-called machine-intelligences counted as a form of life. They could even reproduce. Marriages between humans and machine-intelligences were rare, but not unheard of.

Granted, it was a 12+ rated game, so certain details were never spelled out very clearly.

But in practice these machine-intelligences really could bear children, and for Heydrich, an artificial womb wasn't any great difficulty. On top of that, when he'd first built them, he'd modeled them almost exactly on humans in nearly every respect.

Add the boost from the power of the Path on top of that, and — well, even one of the Twelve Emanators had shown as much before, its true body turning out to be nothing more than a chain of mechanical terminals, something like a Lokhust.

Honestly, even Heydrich wasn't entirely sure what to classify them as anymore.

Which meant…

"They're about to give birth………"

It struck him as more than a little surreal, but Heydrich asked anyway, somewhat at a loss for words.

"Yes.……" "Mm…"

At that, Pearl turned to look at him with a strange, expectant gleam in her eyes, which made him a little uneasy.

"Grand Duke Kadir and Lady Miltri are about to have a child. This may be the first newborn our people have had in sixty million years — but we have no experience with this at all."

"Neither do I. But going by the physical durability I built into all of you, there's almost no chance of anything going wrong."

Even as he said it, Heydrich felt a bit helpless. He'd already worked out roughly what was going on.

If neither of the two parents were flesh-and-blood beings, then the process had to work by fusing their two consciousness-cores together in something like a merging, giving rise to a new sprout of a core.

Their so-called pregnancy, then, was simply the process of reconstructing a complete body around that newly sprouted consciousness.

It might look just like human pregnancy and childbirth from the outside, but at its core the process was quite different. Still, that wasn't really a problem — things were fine as they were. There was no need to worry; with the durability he'd built into their bodies, nothing was likely to go wrong.

Of course, the child's later development would resemble that of a human or any other organic being — it would keep taking in food, letting both its body and its consciousness grow, until eventually it became a life indistinguishable from an ordinary Man of Stone.

"Whew.…"

Hearing this, Pearl let out a breath of relief — and then the way she looked at him turned strange.

Heydrich, for his part, didn't notice the look at all. He was already turning his mind to something else entirely.

"Come to think of it, if the Silent King ever found out about this, would he lose his mind? Ah, whatever — I'll deal with that if it ever comes up."

That thought brought to mind something else: that mysterious and formidable figure, the Silent King.

"Right — make sure the newborn stays safe. And this whole matter is strictly confidential. No one breathes a word of it."

"Understood."

Pearl nodded at his words. This was a major event, after all, and she knew exactly how wild the space Necrons would go if they ever found out.

"I refuse to believe anyone could be so incompetent they'd let their own newborn get snatched right out from under them — say, by some Black Sprouts raiding the nest."

The thought crossed Heydrich's mind before he shook his head. His own domain wasn't likely to have that problem, but the child certainly couldn't be raised the same way as an ordinary infant born under his roof.

He understood exactly what this meant, after all. As always: while he did have the means to flip the table on the space Necrons using the Iron Curtain Virus, the cost of doing so would be far too steep. Down the line, even if it came to negotiation, he'd need enough strength to make the entire space Necron race afraid of him first.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, somewhere deep within the galaxy.

The Silent King sat wordlessly upon his sickly green throne, idly scrolling through his display panel.

"Sigh……"

Technically incapable of speech, the Silent King, Szarekh, nevertheless let out a weary sigh.

He had smashed the Master Control Protocol the Aeon had granted him — the very thing that let him command absolute authority over every space Necron. The trouble was that this same protocol had also been the Aeon's gift, and he had no way of being certain the Aeon hadn't left a backdoor in it, one that could turn around and seize direct control of all the space Necrons.

The price had been the current state of fragmentation, but at least this way there was no risk of the Aeon sweeping them all up in one stroke. After all, they had shattered the Aeon and permanently erased a portion of it.

But one Aeon remained whole and alive. If that one ever stirred, there was no way the space Necrons, in their current strength, could shatter it on their own — it would likely take the entire galaxy, even Chaos and the Tyranids together, to face it.

A whole, intact Aeon was simply too terrifying to contemplate. Even their earlier success had only come from a surprise strike launched in the final moment of the Aeon's decisive battle against the Old Ones.

But compared to the Outsider, what really left Szarekh feeling helpless was something he saw every time he checked his panel.

It recorded the population figures of the Necrontyr — numbers like the ones displayed in front of him right now.

-1, -1, -1, -1

"This wretched race is going to die out sooner or later."

Watching a population that had been steadily shrinking for sixty million years straight, Szarekh couldn't help but feel weighed down with worry.

The Necrontyr still had considerable numbers stored away, being the galaxy's former overlords, after all. The problem was that their population could never grow again, and the race as a whole had once been vast. In fact, most of their dynasties and subjects had simply slept themselves to death over the course of those sixty million years.

There was nothing to be done about it. He had once left the galaxy entirely in search of a solution, but sixty million years had come and gone, and outside the galaxy he'd found nothing at all — nothing but that seemingly endless swarm of bugs.

Now, with his Great Sleep Protocol reaching its limit and that swarm creeping ever closer to the galaxy, he'd had no choice but to return.

What was more, with the Great Rift now torn open, he had a plan of his own: activate the Soul-Banishing Death Field to carve out a sector that belonged to the space Necrons alone, then gather as much of the scattered space Necron strength as he could into it.

As for the Imperium of Man, it already had its hands more than full elsewhere. He only needed a single sector, and a remote one at that. The Imperium might fight him over it when the time came, but it would never commit to a fight to the death for the sake of it.

So as long as he weathered their fiercest opening assault, the Imperium would more or less come to accept the matter as settled.

But the Silent King also had plenty of headaches to deal with right now. Having lost the Master Control Protocol, he could no longer bind every space Necron faction into a single unified force, and he knew full well that some contingent among them might rise up against him.

For now, there was no remedy for that — it would have to wait until the Soul-Banishing Death Field was up and running. So, with nothing else to do in the meantime, the Silent King went back to staring at his panel.

-1, -1, -1, +1, -1

In that instant, the Silent King froze.

His metal-plated body shot upright, and he reflexively reached up to rub his eyes in disbelief — before quickly remembering that his hyper-advanced metal frame had no way of rubbing anything at all.

An instinct born of flesh, one that had been absent for nearly sixty million years, came roaring back in that moment. And then…

WHAT THE FUCK

In that same instant the Silent King rose to his feet, and the entire Tomb World erupted into uproar.

"Triarch Council, hear the summons! The Silent King has issued a decree………"

In the span of a single heartbeat, Szarekh's own dynasty — and every dynasty under his control — erupted into a frenzy.

"What's happening?"

Elsewhere, Trazyn the Infinite, who had been admiring his collection with great satisfaction, gave a start as well. The exhibit before him at that moment depicted the Battle of Cadia.

The exhibit showed the Lord Castellan of Cadia — the man whose defiance had made even Abaddon feel despair, an obstacle he could never overcome — captured at the very instant he'd hurled the Blackstone Fortress down like some massive firecracker as his final act. Trazyn had reached out at that moment, saved him, and preserved him within a stasis field.

But right now he had no time to spare for any of that. He immediately switched bodies and shifted his consciousness, rushing toward the Triarch Council — he was, after all, merely a Necron Overlord of Nihilakh, the wealthiest of the dynasties, and since his Phaeron had chosen to follow the Silent King, he too had to answer the summons.

So, before long......

"Ah, a newborn Necron. How utterly sacred. If only I could add it to my collection…"

Trazyn was just as stunned by the scene before him, and the thought slipped out almost before he could stop it. But he strangled the idea in its crib almost immediately, because countless cold, razor-sharp stares had already locked onto him.

None of them knew exactly what he'd been thinking, but they were all old acquaintances of his by now. Nearly every one of them turned to look at Trazyn on reflex — they knew this particular character's habits far too well.

"I didn't do anything.……"

Trazyn blurted it out at once, though anyone could hear the lack of conviction in his voice.

……

While the space Necrons held their council, up in the Fortress of Hera on Macragge, Heydrich was looking over something in his hands.

"So this is the supplementary clause you drafted for the Codex Astartes? Hm. Thorough, I'll give you that."

Heydrich was reviewing the anti-Tyranid supplement Guilliman had brought for him to look over. It wasn't entirely complete, granted — this particular swarm hadn't included any Hive Tyrants, Norn Emissaries, or Zoanthropes, the kind of super-heavy units that would demand their own countermeasures.

But then, those units were only ever spawned by the larger tendril fleets in the first place, and even then they were rare. When facing something like that, a field manual wasn't going to do much good anyway — you'd need elite forces of your own to bring it down.

"Anything that needs fixing? The Codex Astartes has been running for ten thousand years now — it's fused completely into the fabric of the Imperium. There's no way I could simply scrap it outright."

"No, nothing. You're better at this sort of thing than I am."

Clearly Guilliman had come, at least in part, to seek this elder's guidance — but just as clearly, Heydrich had nothing much to offer him.

He did, however, make himself a copy while he was at it, and relabeled it a combat reference manual.

Watching him do it, Guilliman felt a pang of envy. He genuinely wanted to scrap the whole Codex — but abolishing it outright would blow up the entire Space Marine system across the Imperium.

"There's nothing fundamentally wrong with your Codex Astartes — it's just outdated. Funny thing is, even Chaos still uses your Codex Astartes."

Heydrich genuinely had nothing to say when it came to this man's talent for running an army — he simply couldn't match it. At the very least, his own thinking could never be as rigorous and airtight as Guilliman's, and besides, not every Space Marine actually followed the Codex to the letter anyway.

As the saying goes, for every policy from above, there's a workaround from below. Aside from Chapters like the Salamanders, who simply didn't have the manpower to spare for creative interpretation, pretty much every other founding Chapter had worked out some way or another to get around it.