Chapter 156: Hive Mind: Loyal Tyranid Subjects Must Remain Pure (Patreon)

Heydrich's plan was actually very simple. Or rather, he had never been one for profound, unfathomable schemes.

After all, having read his history thoroughly, he knew that so-called elaborate battle plans usually turned into a steaming pile of garbage once executed. The truly powerful conspiracies were always the ones in plain sight.

He was simply using these War Engines to force the Great Devourer to fight him to the death… probably.

Something about that nagged at him, though he couldn't say what. He had originally wanted to damn Tzeentch over it, but the thing in question was the Great Devourer, and by the look of it, a would-be dark powerhouse of the Warp. Tzeentch probably couldn't do much about that.

"Forget it. Fuck Tzeentch anyway."

This was Warhammer, after all. If something felt off, cursing Tzeentch was never wrong. All in all, no big deal.

"Roar!!!"

In that instant, with violent convulsions, the bodies of the five Norn Emissaries began to change. Heydrich had started out with the ordinary Memetic Virus, but once a crowd of them had walked straight into the War Engine, everything changed.

That raging Destruction energy had given Heydrich a new idea: to assemble his own antimatter legion fleet. So he had refined the Memetic Virus program, routing it through Destruction before injecting it.

To make them even stronger, he had also given these Norn Emissaries an extra dose of Destruction energy right away.

So the Tyranid swarm now came in two varieties. The first was the Tyranid units that had received the high-concentration Memetic Virus, like the Norn Emissaries before him.

The second was the ones that hadn't…

"Emperor above, what blasphemy is this!!!"

The moment Heydrich detonated the power of the Path, more than half of the Tyranids on the field began to shudder violently.

At the same time he ordered the War Engines, artillery and Titan legion in the rear to cease fire, because a wondrous change was taking place.

The bodies of countless Tyranid Warriors turned blue in an instant. Unlike the Norn Emissaries, which had been directly Destruction-ized, these Warriors carried mostly the ordinary Ultramarine Memetic Virus. One after another they swiftly turned blue, each of them stamped with a toilet seat emblem.

Titus, already experienced in this sort of thing, was fine. The Blood Angels, however, looked ready to have their eyes pop out of their heads.

And then…

"For the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar!!!"

The instant the memetic Ultra-fication completed, the swarm turned around and attacked the Tyranids beside them that hadn't been Ultra-fied.

The battle immediately became a one-sided slaughter. Countless Tyranid Warriors were cut down before they could react, and those that did react were no better off. They simply couldn't beat Ultra-fied units of the same grade.

This wasn't because Heydrich had added anything. The Memetic Virus he used on the swarm didn't increase their combat strength. The real reason for this explosion of power was that Guilliman walked the Path of Harmony, one of the Four Apocalypse Paths.

What's more, the Paths Heydrich had obtained were, strictly speaking, the Paths of the era the players had come from. So the Path of Harmony carried another terrifying concept: the swarm concept inherited from Propagation.

The more that gathered, the stronger they became. The Ultramarines had already begun to feel its influence. In practice it wasn't much, since Guilliman hadn't embraced Harmony madly, nor had he studied Harmonics, the basic ability of the Path of Harmony that Heydrich had given him. So the Ultramarines only had a few passive boosts.

Second, and most important, the Ultramarines were human, after all. The swarm concept worked on humans too, but in essence it suited a swarm far better, and that was exactly the case with the Tyranids now. In that moment the concept had a profound effect on them, making them noticeably stronger than ordinary Tyranids of the same grade.

And since Heydrich hadn't added the Voracity element, the hunger that burned down to their very souls was gone as well.

Faced with all this, Titus and the Lion could do nothing but quietly cover their eyes. At Macragge they had watched with their own eyes as Heydrich corrupted a Great Unclean One, and compared to corrupting Chaos, this was almost mild.

Heydrich kept insisting it wasn't corruption, but in their hearts they had long since tacitly agreed that it was exactly that.

Still, their reactions were fairly mild. Chaos had been screwing over the Imperium's armies every single day, so this time the world had been turned upside down.

*

Meanwhile, out in space aboard the Invincible Reason, Dante and Azrael stared at the scene before them in slack-jawed disbelief. Even Loken's eyelid twitched. He had been brought back by Heydrich and the power of the Path of Remembrance, but his memories and personality remained intact, so he found it hard to comment on some of Heydrich's methods.

But at least they were effective. He couldn't shake the feeling that most of the things they had fought during the the Great Crusade were a mess left behind after Zhendan's fall. Looking at it now, the Emperor's problems seemed even bigger.

Of course, none of Loken, Azrael or Dante had time to dwell on that. Several bio-ships had suddenly released dazzling light.

At the same time, a golden phantom appeared in space, and the glowing bio-ships began to convulse even more violently.

Heydrich didn't hesitate. He poured even more Destruction power into them. The ground forces had only been for fun.

What he really cared about were these big ones, the way to get the fleet he had been longing for.

It wasn't that he looked down on the Imperium's ships. The real problem was that the Warp was simply too unreliable. The only fast, stable teleportation resource Heydrich could count on was the Necron Blackstone portals scattered across the galaxy, but ordinary flesh-and-blood creatures couldn't withstand them.

These Path-born creations could, though. With a little modification, and paired with the discount A-Ruan Pouch he had built, they would do the job. The discount version was no match for the original A-Ruan Pouch, of course, since the original could theoretically hold an entire universe. But it was far too unstable and might even trigger a collapse.

Heydrich's version couldn't compare to that, but it won on price. In his understanding, high technology meant something ordinary people could use, and his discount War Engine had been born from exactly that line of thinking.

In the end, though, his creation turned out too cheap. Even an ordinary Planetary Governor could afford it.

It could hardly even be called affordable. It was practically a giveaway. Heydrich certainly didn't dare make it widespread. One careless slip and the whole universe could go up in smoke, because he couldn't be sure what would emerge from a Path's rampant growth beyond his expectations.

Besides its decent capacity and low price, the A-Ruan Pouch was also quite durable. If it could withstand the acceleration of a space Necron, then everything afterward would be easy to handle.

Now Heydrich only had to solve one more problem: building a super inertia-free device.

At the very least, building one for a room was nowhere near as hard as fitting one onto a starship, which would leave far fewer problems for him to solve later.

So under the touch of Heydrich's power, the bio-ships were swiftly fused and overlaid, one after another.

In the blink of an eye, a perfectly standard antimatter legion warship appeared out of nowhere. The people aboard the Invincible Reason were numb at the sight.

The good news was that this time nothing had been Ultra-fied. The bad news was that this might be an even more outrageous technology.

Just how much did the Dragon Emperor of Cathay have under his control? Snatching the enemy's units and giving them a quick wash to use as his own was terrifying.

Was this the method of an ancient human on a par with the Emperor? As expected, true blasphemy still depended on these old geezers.

"Done! Time to knock off!!!"

Heydrich smiled, and the next moment he teleported, with no regard for reason, straight into the Invincible Reason's bridge.

He no longer needed to worry about the war below. With a force of this scale turning on its masters so swiftly, the swarm had no reserves left, so his main goal now was to destroy that fleet utterly.

As for the one Norn Emissary he hadn't finished off, it now faced the combined siege of five enhanced versions of itself, because Heydrich had filled those five with the power of Destruction.

Their combat strength now rivaled that of top-tier Greater Daemons, and in a sense they were his own daemon army.

"Coordinate according to the plan. This time I'm going to wipe out the entire Hive Fleet."

"Yes, sir!!!"

*

Meanwhile, in the Warp, the Great Devourer was utterly baffled, because only one thought filled its mind.

What happened, what happened, what happened…

The Great Devourer would say there was nothing it hadn't seen, but this it truly had never seen.

However powerful it was, the Great Devourer was only one of the gods of the Warp. The Warp and the physical universe naturally repel each other, which was why the Death-Fearer had smashed the Aeons, guardians of the physical universe, along with the Old Ones, guardians of the Warp.

Otherwise the Warp wouldn't have turned into such a cesspit. But Heydrich, arriving with a physical-universe power rooted in philosophy, had shattered many of the Warp gods' assumptions.

For example, someone had stolen their servants. That was normally their own trick.

In Warhammer Fantasy, it was basically like washing the Chosen of Nurgle into your own Stormcast Eternals. The Warhammer Fantasy setting might be small, but it was never short on gods.

Then something happened that left it speechless. The Tyranid bugs that had been corrupted at some unknown point began attacking its loyal offspring.

"This is blasphemy! What blasphemy! And why is this happening? What on earth is going on???"

The Great Devourer let out a stream of Warp obscenities. It had no idea what was happening.

These things didn't even have souls. How had they been corrupted?

"I need a specialized unit. I need to produce Tyranid priests!!!"

At that moment the Great Devourer began sorting through its memories, and it soon found the Imperium's method of fighting corruption.

That was to found the Ecclesiarchy, using praise and prayer to the Emperor to resist corruption, with a unit called priests to lead it.

So it needed bug priests to resist corruption by praising itself, since it couldn't think of anything else that might work here.

It had no time to dwell on it, either, because only one thought filled its mind now.

Retreat!!!

The war was beyond any hope of resistance. All it could do now was pull as many units back as possible.

It no longer wanted Sanguinius or the Dragon Emperor of Cathay. This world was too damned weird.

Of course, what it didn't know was that even with Heydrich's blood, it would have gained nothing, because his genes were perfectly normal. Heydrich wasn't some Perpetual of this world, nor did he have psychic power. He was a purely ordinary human, at least on the genetic level.

Belisarius Cawl, the creator of the Primaris and a super Space Marine in his own right, had studied that blood.

Belisarius Cawl spent ten years studying Heydrich's blood and genes and reached a single conclusion: an utterly unremarkable ancient Terran.

That drove the Archmagos into depression, because he couldn't tell whether the blood was truly useless or his own technology simply wasn't enough to unlock its secrets.

So from the very beginning the Great Devourer was destined to gain nothing. Heydrich's dragon form was essentially an energy body, not flesh and blood.

But soon…

Boom!!!

A huge explosion roared out, because the warships Heydrich had converted, working with the Imperium's fleet, had launched a savage bombardment on the Tyranid mothership it had left.

"Blasphemy! This is blasphemy!!!"

In the Warp, the Hive Mind let out a series of shrill sonic booms, and at the same time every bug across the galaxy, no matter what it was doing, froze for a moment.

Soon afterward their hive ships began to change, and a brand-new unit was bred.

It was a bug wearing a special crown, with one and only one task: to check whether these Tyranid subjects were loyal.

Of course, that was for later. Meanwhile, Heydrich was already excitedly preparing to teleport.

"My lord, in our experience, a Boarding Action on a Hive Fleet is suicide."

Looking at Heydrich before them, Dante and Azrael tried to stop him.

"It's fine. If you think it's dangerous, you don't have to come. Let's go, Loken, you're fighting alongside me. Time for some fun."

Heydrich didn't force the other two. He had already decided to take Loken along for a delightful Boarding Action.

Dante and Azrael fell into silence. What did it mean, that it was dangerous over there and safe here, so you don't have to come?

This was nothing less than…

Naked bullying!!!!