Chapter 145: The War Forge Activates!!! (Patreon)

With a furious roar, Ka'Bandha led his host straight into the swarm.

He himself leapt ahead of the rest, soaring out in front of the swarm before slamming down with tremendous force.

BOOM!!!

A single strike turned several thousand Hormagaunts to ash, while the Termagants' return fire did nothing at all — it didn't even break his skin.

Sensing Ka'Bandha's strength, the swarm's assault visibly faltered for a moment.

It wasn't as though they'd never faced a Khorne Bloodthirster before, but those had always been ordinary ones.

A Bloodthirster of Ka'Bandha's caliber was another matter entirely — even a Hive Tyrant wouldn't be enough to kill him alone. It would take a Norn Emissary, and this time that clearly wasn't going to happen.

Or perhaps a Hive Tyrant as a base, backed by a massive diversion of strength. But the Hive Mind's thoughts stuttered for a brief moment, because this time Ka'Bandha wasn't alone — a vast host of Khorne daemons had come with him.

"..."

Ka'Bandha's eye twitched as he took in the sight of the Tyranid swarm before him.

He could sense the great number of Blood Angels within the hive, but his hateful beloved was right there before him, and still he could not reach them.

So...

"You damned bugs!!!"

In that instant his fury swelled even further. These soulless vermin disgusted him.

And what disgusted him even more was that these bugs actually thought they could destroy the Blood Angels. In this whole galaxy, only one being had the right to destroy the Blood Angels...

And that was him!!!

Ka'Bandha!!!

The Hive Mind, for its part, found the encounter equally revolting — every one of the countless bodies Ka'Bandha slew now bore the taint of Chaos corruption.

It wasn't that the flesh was inedible to it; it was like a modern human eating rotten meat — swallow it and something would surely go wrong. If you were lucky, it'd just give you the runs, and that would be a mercy from the heavens.

Edible, but not worth the risk. So in that instant the swarm queued up to assault the hive was forced to turn aside.

"We cannot let these Chaos-tainted things contaminate our biomass!!!"

At that moment the Great Devourer let out a furious roar, and behind the swarm's ranks a stretch of open, empty space actually formed.

Then the massive swarm surged forward against Ka'Bandha and his Khorne daemon host — and it should be noted that even the Battle of the Lion's Gate had only seen eight Khorne daemon hosts deployed.

This time it was one-eighth of that number, but their leader, Ka'Bandha, was far stronger than any ordinary Bloodthirster.

And it was at that very moment...

"Everyone, move out!!!"

A cluster of bugs suddenly transformed into a group of Alpharius look-alikes — and don't bother asking why they could turn into bugs in the first place.

The answer was simply their special ability, and the fact that these particular Alpharius agents carried more than a trace of the Path of Enigmata within them — they were, after all, among the Path of Enigmata's Pathstriders that Heydrich had painstakingly cultivated.

Of course, these were only the most basic of them, nothing worth calling advanced Walkers.

But for a task this simple, that was more than enough. Now was the time for them to act.

So the group of Alpharius agents quickly moved from biomass pool to biomass pool, dropping in the Memetic Virus one by one, then withdrawing fast enough to leave no trace.

...

Meanwhile, within the hive, Heydrich watched everything unfold in silence.

The Shadow in the Warp cast by the swarm inadvertently shielded the scene, so no human could sense what was happening outside the hive.

But Heydrich, as a Pathstrider of the Path, could feel the Warp's violent turbulence with perfect clarity.

"The Khorne host has finally made its move. My dear Khorne, reliable as ever."

Snarking to himself, Heydrich immediately gave the order...

"Activate the War Forges!!!"

The instant the command left him, several War Forges roared to life.

Sure, these things were the budget of budget models, not remotely comparable in strength to Voidranger.

But for a scene like this, they were more than sufficient. After Heydrich's modifications, the boost to combat strength was almost secondary — the real point was that these things exploded on death, and the blast was even nastier than a melta... and cleaner.

Cleaner in the sense that nothing was left behind at all.

"For the Emperor"

With that furious cry, the War Engine activated, and tens of millions of people were thrown straight into it.

In that instant, John — a Netherworld laborer whose worth had nearly been ground down to nothing — felt a surge of power flood into his body, and his ruined form snapped back to wholeness in an instant.

At the same time, every one of his vital stats began climbing at breakneck speed, surpassing his old peak in the blink of an eye. Plates of armor rivaling Space Marine ceramite began forming over his body, and for a moment he felt something.

With the strength he now possessed, he might just be able to hold his own against a Space Marine — but almost immediately he realized something was wrong.

"This power..."

John sensed it then — the energy coursing through him was far too violent. It had already begun devouring his mind, and all Heydrich could say about that was: this was simply what happened when someone suddenly gained power beyond their capacity to hold it.

Take, for example, the most basic units in Honkai Impact 3rd — the Zombies. A Valkyrie could absorb Honkai energy and convert it into her own strength.

But an ordinary person exposed to the same energy would simply become a Zombie. These people's situation was much the same, even though what Heydrich was using wasn't Honkai energy.

Pure Destruction energy worked the same way. Anyone whose capacity wasn't large enough would quickly slide into the abyss of Destruction, becoming nothing more than a tool for whatever Aeon or Emanator stood at the top of that Path — their own will worn away in short order.

That was exactly what was happening to these people now, and of course, Heydrich wasn't the least bit surprised by it.

"Send them straight into the heart of the swarm. Burn yourselves for the Emperor."

With a priest's furious roar, the transport mechanism inside the War Forge activated at once.

The distance wasn't far — only a few kilometers — but that was more than enough.

So all John saw was a flash of light before his eyes, and then he found himself standing in the middle of the swarm. The Tyranids, mid-charge in their frenzy, froze for an instant at his sudden appearance.

"For the Emperor"

With another roar, John used what little reason he had left to seize a Tyranid Hormagaunt and tear it clean in half with his bare hands.

ROAR!!!

At the sight, a Tyranid Warrior let out a bellow of its own, circling behind John while he was distracted and slashing a blade deep into his back.

The blow's sheer force drove him to the ground, though it failed to cut him fully in two. Countless more of the swarm surged toward him, seizing his limbs and head, trying to tear him apart.

But right at that moment...

BOOM!!!