Chapter 151: Word Bearers: The Imperial Truth Is a Good Thing (Patreon)

Just as the Tyranids fought war to sustain war, daemons could do much the same.

The situation with the daemons was similar. Those they killed were as good as sacrifices on an altar, funneled straight to Khorne. But the swarm, as always, had no souls to offer.

Or perhaps a synapse creature carried a trace of something, but to a daemon that scrap of soul was like a single grain of rice — having it or not made no real difference.

Without a steady supply, Ka'Bandha had no way to sustain his presence in the physical universe for long.

So all things considered, this one had already loyally bought Heydrich time and relieved a great deal of pressure — otherwise Heydrich would never have been able to redirect his main forces here.

"May Ka'Bandha's soul return to the Brass Throne. Prepare for battle."

Just then, Heydrich let out a helpless sigh and fell silent.

…

Meanwhile, on the frontline battlefield, Dante and Azrael both looked more than a little bewildered.

"These people…"

They were, after all, people of this era — they'd never encountered the Solar Auxilia. And Heydrich's troops weren't just elite; their equipment was extravagantly advanced. Such complex gear was beyond the grasp of any ordinary grunt, let alone someone expected to stand toe-to-toe with a Space Marine against the main strength of a Tyranid swarm.

Given the raw capability of Heydrich's soldiers, a single squad-level unit could reliably take down an ordinary Space Marine.

An ordinary Chaos Space Marine, of course — the named and storied ones were another matter entirely.

Heydrich had even equipped them with no small number of deflagration weapons — brutal can-openers, those. And as for the squad leaders, that went without saying: every one of them carried a monomolecular stance shield.

That shield could withstand two or three direct melee strikes from a Space Marine. Heydrich had essentially maxed out their equipment.

Gear like that was reserved for nobility within the Imperium. Even the Astra Militarum's Kasrkin, for all their reputation, weren't equipped so lavishly.

Europe, after all, had a long tradition of soldiers paying their own way to serve — a custom traceable back to Roman times.

Heydrich, of course, would never do anything like that. Who ever heard of paying to be a soldier?

But with equipment this good, the people operating it had to be top-tier. Like modern fighter pilots — only the elite could truly handle it.

So now, watching the soldiers assembling before them, both Chapter Masters found their brows furrowing.

As keen hunters, they could clearly sense danger — and that alone was rare. A few of these soldiers, they felt, might even be their equals. That instinct wasn't wrong, either.

These were people who had stepped onto a Path — mostly the Path of Destruction.

When they let loose, they truly weren't inferior to a Space Marine. Combined with their squads, even a Chapter Master could suffer badly with one careless mistake.

After all, there had been Space Marines taken down by pitchforks, and Custodes killed by excavators — setting aside the nonsense some brain-dead writer might invent. Even the toughest Space Marine's defenses simply couldn't keep pace with the offense these soldiers packed. One slip, and disaster followed.

"The Dragon Emperor's strength truly is terrifying. I can feel the echo of Grand Cathay at its absolute peak. No wonder it once stood against the Eldar at their height — one hand holding down every alien horror in the galaxy, the other pinning the daemons of the Warp."

Dante couldn't help but marvel at this. He'd already learned of Heydrich's past from the Harlequins.

If Grand Cathay still existed today, there might be no Imperium of Man to speak of at all.

Then again, if Grand Cathay still stood, would the Emperor simply be that nation's regent? As for the Dragon Emperor, he had gone deep into the Warp searching for something — and according to the Harlequins, he'd apparently already found it.

A power capable of directly opposing the Warp, even granting immunity to Warp corruption. For humanity, that was good news.

The one regret was that Grand Cathay no longer existed — undone by the Emperor's own reckless choices, and by the combined torment of three of the Dark Gods (Nurgle, Khorne, and the fourth still unnamed then, since Slaanesh had not yet been born).

As for why only three — because Slaanesh hadn't been born yet at that time.

According to the Eldar's own speculation, the storm that once swept the entire Warp — the storm before Slaanesh's birth — had been aimed specifically at Grand Cathay by the Dark Gods.

Because if a nation like that still existed, the Dragon Emperor's return would mean the four Dark Gods would have no room left to maneuver.

So to bring down that empire, they wove together a conspiracy ten thousand years in the making, aimed squarely at the Dragon Emperor and Grand Cathay.

And the more the Eldar archaeologists studied it, the more they came to suspect the Emperor wasn't even human — and that Grand Cathay's legacy was still, to this day, being used by the Imperium of Man.

The dark technology the Mechanicus had collected, along with the STC templates, still helped the Imperium produce weapons even now. And Grand Cathay had also left behind specific countermeasures against the oil-guzzlers, to keep them from ever spiraling out of control.

Take, for instance, the steel sphere where Heydrich had once deployed the Iron Curtain Virus — the oil-guzzlers there had suffered terribly.

Their mechanical bodies plunged straight into internal civil war — the cerebrum striking the cerebellum, the heart attacking the kidneys, so to speak. And that was Heydrich holding back.

The Iron Curtain Virus he'd deployed there was only running at fifty percent output. And that half-strength dose alone had done that much damage.

Push it to full power, and the pressure wouldn't just double — it would be catastrophic. The steel sphere itself might well have been destroyed by Heydrich outright.

Against something as purely physical as the Iron Curtain Virus, the oil-guzzlers' usual trick of just smashing their heads against the problem did nothing at all.

What they really needed to do was match computational power with Heydrich and keep updating their programming — but that, unfortunately, was exactly what the Mechanicus lacked most.

"Grand Cathay's Southern Legion — comparable to the Great Crusade's Solar Auxilia, but stronger in combat power. Some of their elites can even solo a Space Marine."

Watching the bewildered Blood Angels and Dark Angels around him, Titus stepped forward to introduce the troops himself.

He dealt with Heydrich often enough to know exactly how capable these soldiers were. And since they were about to fight side by side, the Ultramarines felt it only right to brief the others.

"Right, I'm going to go talk to the Dragon Emperor."

Just then, something occurred to Dante. He left at once and quickly found Heydrich.

He asked that all attendants be dismissed, leaving only the two of them to speak alone.

No one objected, of course — after all, in a straight fight, Dante against Heydrich would go roughly seven-three in Heydrich's favor.

Heydrich could kill Dante at least three times, maybe more, in seven seconds. So naturally, no one had anything to say about it.

As for Dante…

"Lord, do you happen to know about the genetic flaw in us Blood Angels?"

"The Red Thirst? The Black Rage isn't a genetic flaw — it's a curse born from the death of a god at the top of the food chain."

"Uh…"

Hearing this, Dante drew his neck in slightly. He didn't dare press further on whether Sanguinius counted as a god — Heydrich clearly knew far more than he let on.

"Then what about our…"

"Those already lost to the Red Thirst and the Black Rage — there's nothing I can do for them. Their souls have already been badly corrupted by the gene-seed. I could excise the corrupted parts, but that would be no different from killing them."

Heydrich recalled that in old Warhammer lore, the Dragon Emperor supposedly had a method to purify corruption. Heydrich had his own method too.

It involved combining the Path of Remembrance with the Path of Destruction, directly burning away the corrupted consciousness or soul.

But there was a limit. Under normal circumstances, the person might remain dazed for a while afterward. Push past that limit, though, and you'd end up with something worse than dead — a vegetable.

So this was probably why Dante had come to him — though Dante already had his own solution in mind, most likely.

Heydrich had two ideas of his own. The first was to directly use powers of the Path — Remembrance, Abundance, Erudition — to remake the gene-seed. The second was… well, harder to rate favorably, even by Heydrich's own admission.

Dante, after all, had access to Nurgle's The Purge — a power devoted to Nurgle's death-aspect that, oddly enough, looked deceptively clean. So Dante had taken a sip through his Red Thirst, and immediately gagged awake from the stench.

The stuff worked like a miracle cure, but Heydrich didn't think he was quite ready to make an entire company of Blood Angels eat feces to fix it.

That was just too filthy…

Just picturing a whole crowd of Space Marines eating feces gave Heydrich a feeling he could barely suppress.

"Fight well. Going forward, you can send out the ones lost to the Red Thirst and Black Rage. They're going to need to be put down eventually anyway — might as well give them a glorious end while you have the chance."

"Understood. That puts my mind at ease."

Hearing this, Dante finally relaxed. If anything went wrong, Heydrich would be there to back him up — that alone lightened the burden considerably.

Dante had already decided to deploy those afflicted. The Black Rage wasn't so bad — it could pass for a berserker buff of sorts. But the Red Thirst was another matter entirely.

Still, since Heydrich had a way to handle it, it wasn't such a big problem after all.

"Alright, all of you come in. I don't want heavy losses this time."

Heydrich sighed once more. He genuinely dreaded seeing his own forces take heavy casualties.

He wasn't some bald commander who'd throw lives away without a thought — but honestly, no matter how many Imperium troops died, even Cadian regiments, it didn't trouble Heydrich in the slightest.

That was simply how things were. But if his own people suffered heavy losses, that would genuinely hurt him.

Of course, even hurting for them wouldn't stop him from putting them in the most dangerous positions — after all, they were equipped so well for exactly that reason…

…

Meanwhile, atop the cathedral, Heydrich's Space Marine chaplains were preparing the zealots.

If the front lines couldn't hold — or rather, even if it wasn't truly about holding — these zealots would become the real main force soon enough. Even trading several of them for a single Tyranid Warrior would be a bargain.

"The Emperor's light calls to us. The Emperor's truth is calling…"

"What are they saying — Imperial Truth?"

Asmodai watched, expressionless, as the Cathayan priests worked to rouse the soldiers' morale, while beside him Leandros wore an equally blank expression.

These were, without question, Word Bearers — and, no less, his own students.

As a teacher, watching his students embrace something resembling the Imperial Truth left him with rather mixed feelings.

Of course, this wasn't the original Imperial Truth — Heydrich had revised it, stripping out the parts that forcibly defined Chaos, or the more idealist notions the Emperor had originally baked in.

"We must view all things through an objective lens. Disaster stands before us now, and we must…"

"They're speaking High Gothic. These people can't understand a word."

Leandros said this flatly. These priests were using Heydrich's own native language. And as someone from the Eastern realms, once he'd claimed a craftworld and built his own nation, he'd unified the language to cut down on communication costs.

Naturally, learning several languages was trivial for a Space Marine — they could pick one up quickly.

But while Asmodai and Leandros could learn fast, these mortals simply couldn't.

As for Heydrich's own language, they defaulted to calling it High Gothic — mostly because Low Gothic tended to be crude, imprecise. Like the language of a certain peninsula nation, for instance.

Ask them to draft safety protocols or legal documents in their own tongue, and it would be a disaster — so much so that even the upper echelons there, especially in the legal field, had to learn Chinese.

"They know exactly what they're doing. And unlike the Ultramarines — what are they, exactly?"

Clearly, as fellow Space Marines, there was no way they didn't understand Low Gothic. It was obvious these people were doing this on purpose.

Even asked to recite some of the Ecclesiarchy's teachings, they refused — they were, after all, products of Heydrich's own education system.

Heydrich himself found it a bit cringeworthy watching them, and the two of them felt much the same.

But they also knew that if they let these priests actually preach the Imperial Truth to the wrong crowd, it would cause an uproar — so they simply used Chinese instead, since no one would understand it anyway.

And really, no one needed to understand it. All that mattered was being seen.

After all, no one expected a noble Space Marine — especially a foreign one — to speak the local tongue.

"Word Bearers…"

"…"

Hearing that, Asmodai's look toward Leandros changed entirely. What kind of shock must it have taken for him to agree to bring along a group of Word Bearers?

After all, the whole sordid history between the Ultramarines and the Word Bearers was common knowledge across the Imperium's Space Marines. For the Loyalist Word Bearers, this sort of thing wasn't even strange.

But an Ultramarine leading a squad of Word Bearers? That, he never would have guessed.

"…"

As for Leandros, he chose to stay silent. This was, in truth, the aftermath of him reporting on Titus.

Guilliman had originally intended to punish him for it, but Heydrich stepped in with a suggestion of his own. So Leandros ended up dealing with a bunch of foolish college students, since Heydrich had no seminary of his own. He didn't even allow any religious content in his education curriculum — so these priests needed a local guide.

After all, Heydrich's real reason for setting up these chaplains wasn't to have them monitor his own people — it was so they could take point whenever contact was made with certain factions within the Imperium.