Chapter 160: Tzeentch: What manner of blasphemy... Tzeentch!!! (Patreon)

Heydrich had no reason to rush over the Plague Wars. The armies in the field now weren't Nurgle's main force. All of that fellow's real strength was sunk into the Stars of Calamity, and the Stars of Calamity were a sector roughly the size of Ultramar.

Nurgle had made his move the instant the Great Rift opened. Typhus, at least, was still busy racing around staking out territory. So his main target wasn't even the Ultramarines' Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar. Unlike those iron-clad worlds, the weakly defended ones offered far better returns.

Add Nurgle's fearsome capacity to spread and infect, and the priority was clearly quantity over quality.

Typhus didn't much care either way, since he loyally carried out Nurgle's orders. Mortarion was nominally doing the same.

But he was also sneaking a hand toward the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, and that little hand had been chopped off.

As for the Plague Wars at full scale, they would have to wait until he finished the Stars of Calamity plan. That was how it went in the original story, too.

That fellow had been at it since the moment the Great Rift opened, and he kept dragging it out until Guilliman returned to Holy Terra. Only after Guilliman had cleaned out Holy Terra from top to bottom and launched the Indomitus Crusade did he finally show himself.

In the meantime he had been busy finishing Nurgle's Stars of Calamity mission, and only once that was done could he spare the time to come out.

Then he turned on Ultramar. Of course, halfway through his fight with Guilliman, Nurgle got hit with a righteous 3v1. And after successfully luring Guilliman into Nurgle's back Garden, they ran a Nurgle edition of the Siege of Terra, 4v1.

Back when the Emperor cut Nurgle down, the other three had all pushed things along to one degree or another. After all, the Stars of Calamity had massively strengthened Nurgle, and he had quickly become the strongest of the Warp's Dark Gods apart from the Emperor.

A mere five hundred worlds had been enough to boost Nurgle's power to that level in a short time. You could imagine how far his power had swollen by now.

That guy was only stuck partway through ascending to godhood. If he ever finished, the commotion would be far more outrageous than Slaanesh's. Once he ascended, his power of corrosion and Destruction would flatly crush the other four.

He might even whip up a tide of Destruction through the Warp. That could actually be a good thing for the entire Warhammer universe, but the price would be that humanity was basically finished.

Only now, though…

"Weren't you with Guilliman? Why did you suddenly come to me? Has Guilliman gone back to Holy Terra?"

Heydrich looked down at his own troops, retreating in neat, orderly ranks below, then pulled his gaze back.

The tavern's carrying capacity was far too low, but there was nothing to be done about it. They'd just have to make do. Look at Guilliman, who had to carry an A-Ruan Pouch and put on a set of expensive survival armour to blind-jump supplies through.

At least, thanks to the network Heydrich had built, worlds with a tavern door still had fairly reliable news.

As for casualties, there were some, and supply losses too. But however big those losses got, they were far better than being swallowed by the Warp.

After all, if the Warp swallowed something, you'd never know when it would reappear, or whether it had already appeared in the past. For a polity on the scale of the Imperium, losses were a minor problem. If you lost something, you wrote it off and carried on. It wasn't as if there was a shortage.

The real problem was the uncertainty, and that was just too explosive. Then again, even if the A-Ruan Pouch blew up, its contents would still spill out.

As long as the supplies were still around, they'd at most land in some strange places. You could salvage them slowly, which was better than nothing.

After all, bulk trade in Warhammer was generally in grain. As for water, they had their own internal closed-loop recycling systems, so imports were generally purified water products and the like.

As for how that water tasted, all Heydrich could say was that you wouldn't die right away after drinking it.

But all of these things had the distinctive charm of Warhammer 40K: they were tough and built to last.

Anything that wasn't destroyed could still be used. At worst, recovery was a bit of a hassle, and even if the locals picked some of it up, you could write it off as attrition.

"We ran into an ambush by Tzeentch's chief Greater Daemon, Kairos. Guilliman has already led men on a Boarding Action into the Red Corsairs' Blackstone Fortress."

"A Blackstone Fortress?"

Heydrich's eyes lit up at that. He had always wanted one of those. If he got a Blackstone Fortress and combined it with his technology and materials, he might be able to build something on the scale of a planetary fortress, and its power would surely outstrip the Imperium's mightiest fortress, the Mountain Array.

So Heydrich had always coveted it. He did already have some blackstone, all of it Belisarius Cawl's savings from many years. Apart from finishing the Primaris project and its supporting systems, Cawl had spent the rest of his time trying to decode blackstone technology.

Don't be fooled by how the space Necron play with the stuff every day. The Soul-Banishing Death Field, the Blackstone portal and the like were all technology of the Old Ones.

The space Necron could only play with scraps of Old Ones technology, because the Old Ones' core technologies were two in number.

One was webway technology, which the Emperor still drooled over to this day. The other was the Old Ones' causal-temporal technology.

After all, Azrael had been able to blow up Caliban because of that very technology. It was more than just time. Humans had time technology too.

But human time technology could only lock down a single region, and it couldn't rewind very far.

This one touched on causality. In this world, Heydrich didn't fear the Daemon Primarchs at all. He didn't even fear the Dark Gods behind them. But the moment causality was involved, he turned very cautious.

It touched the foundation of the world, and even gods were bound by causality.

Heydrich still held causality in high regard. Without it, this world would have fallen into chaos long ago. Take the Warp's tangled time, for instance: the you of now, the you of the past and the you of the future might all appear in the physical universe at once.

Without some causal restraint in a situation like that, the world would have collapsed into disorder long ago.

But compared to the Blackstone Fortress, Heydrich was now watching something else entirely.

"Come on, grab the watermelon. We're going to watch the show."

Setting the Blackstone Fortress aside, Heydrich, true to his Chinese instinct for watching drama unfold, immediately fetched a little stool. And if Guilliman got captured again, he'd go and fish him out too.

But then Heydrich suddenly paused, because he had thought of another person: the Lion, Lion El'Jonson.

The next moment, the Harlequin saw a flash of light before his eyes, and Heydrich had vanished.

At the same moment, in another dim and deep chamber, the Lion was standing there. Before him knelt a row of Dark Angels. The war was over, and there were still matters to settle.

The Fallen Angels problem, for one. As for the matter of Caliban exploding, he intended to suppress it, or at least not mention it in front of all the Fallen Angels.

He knew exactly how obsessive his sons were. After all, he had once been the most obsessive of them all.

But…

Zap!!!

With a flash of light, Heydrich appeared on the spot, right before the stunned eyes of the Lion and a room full of Dark Angels.

Wait, what? This was a room they had specially chosen and fitted with top-tier security and secrecy equipment. How did you get in? Where the hell did you come from?

Of course, Heydrich offered no explanation. The main reason was that the Lion carried an advanced communicator Heydrich had given him. It relied on the frankly terrifying signal base stations Heydrich had built at the tavern, which could communicate directly with every world linked to the tavern. On top of that, to deal with the Tyranid swarm, Heydrich had laid down a large number of teleport sequences across the entire planet.

There was no teleport point in this room, but Heydrich had used one nearby to reach it. Naturally, only he could play that way.

An ordinary Chapter battle-brother who copied him would simply repeat Andre's fate.

Of course, none of that mattered now. Heydrich grabbed the bewildered Lion by the arm.

"All right, stop disciplining these kittens. Guilliman is boarding the Blackstone Fortress right now. Come on, let's go watch the show. If the guy gets captured, we'll go fish him out. Don't you find Guilliman hard to stomach? This time you can laugh at him for ten thousand years."

Hah!!!

Hearing Heydrich's words, the Lion let out a breath. His eyes lit up too. Without Heydrich around…

Without him, they would just be two grim, grudge-laden brothers shouldering the pressure, and neither of them could laugh. But with Heydrich there, even though he looked thoroughly absurd, somehow both men felt as if a weight had lifted.

Heydrich might look ridiculous, but he gave off a sense of pressure that could withstand anything. It was just like the Emperor ten thousand years ago. No matter how dangerous the situation was, as long as the Emperor stood there, people felt hope. In the ten thousand years since the Emperor had been unable to walk, no one like that had existed in the entire Imperium.

Even Guilliman, who had returned after ten thousand years, fell well short. In the end he was only a Primarch.

So Lion's interest was piqued. They said Guilliman had barely smiled since his return. Lion wasn't doing much better, though that was no longer the case at all.

Heydrich often left him gaping in disbelief, but at least that pressure was only on the surface, and the weight in his heart was much lighter.

What was most precious in the entire Imperium now was never a powerful warrior, but the existence called hope.

So the Lion was in the mood to go laugh at Guilliman with Heydrich. Disciplining the Dark Angels could wait.

After all, nothing was happier than watching the brother you liked least take a beating. So he simply followed Heydrich and activated the teleport.

"This… isn't a good idea, is it?"

The Harlequin who had come to Heydrich for help now saw Heydrich and the Lion arrive in high spirits, and he couldn't shake the feeling that he'd made a terrible mistake.

Why weren't these guys tense at all? They had come to enjoy the show.

Heydrich's view was that he wanted to see whether Guilliman could activate the Path of Harmony's powers on his own initiative, rather than relying entirely on passive effects as he did now.

The Ultramarines had already begun to be influenced by the Path of Harmony, or rather by Guilliman's subtle influence.

As a commander, Guilliman believed there was strength in numbers, and that triggered the swarm concept within the Path of Harmony.

So Ultramarine units, whether Ultra-Tyranids, 'Ultra Ribs' or Ultra-Orks, all grew stronger the more of them there were in an area.

The Ultra-Orks were the most outrageous of all. Orks already had their Waaagh field, and with both bonuses stacked, they had cut down a Nurgle expeditionary fleet at the edge of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar until it started doubting its existence. The survivors slunk off on a detour, still baffled by what these blue-skins even were.

Greenskins were already hard to corrupt, and these were harder still.

"Hurry, hurry, or we'll miss it."

In the end, all Guilliman faced was a bunch of Chaos traitors. Compared to this Tyranid war, it wasn't even in the same league.

You could call it an Apocalypse-level war, too, but there were differences even between Apocalypses.

Before long the party arrived aboard Macragge's Honour. Heydrich raised a hand to tell the Ultramarines left on guard not to rush to report.

The place was now thick with Chaos taint, and all communication had been cut. As for the guards left behind, nobody was bullying them.

It was simply that every so often a squad had to charge in recklessly to confirm the situation. Now that Heydrich was here, there was no need.

…

But on the other side, with Guilliman's arrival, the whole battlefield was boiling.

The Imperium's Primarch, Lord of the Ultramarines, charged at Kairos like a god, as if Heydrich himself had possessed him.

"Gah! Father, wait!!!"

Seeing Guilliman so valiant, Cato Sicarius felt his soul about to fly out of his body.

Before they left, Heydrich had specially warned the Ultramarines' Chapter Champion. Roughly speaking, Guilliman's resistance was high enough. In the whole universe, apart from the Emperor, probably no one could shake Guilliman with psychic power, but his resistance was high and his resilience was not.

So he was to stay close to Guilliman and make sure he didn't get controlled. Seeing the man's performance now had frightened him witless.

"Blasphemous Changer of Ways!!!"

Just then, a towering blue figure surged ahead, crushing every Tzeentch cultist and Chaos Space Marine in its path. Seeing it, even Cato Sicarius froze for a moment.

It was none other than the Great Ultra One!!!

"Come, come…"

At that moment Kairos's attention was entirely on Guilliman. The man was about to put his foot right into the trap.

But just then…

"By the Changer of Ways, what blasphe— what Tzeentchian cunning! We are humbled."

Behind Kairos, his colleagues were watching with the air of spectators at a show, and their exclamations kept drifting into his ears.