Chapter 175: The Lion: You guys are truly awesome!!! (Patreon)

Heydrich had no objection to the Lion and Dante governing Imperium Nihilus together.

Imperium Nihilus was huge, and there was no Astronomican to navigate by. In that situation the Imperium was effectively every world for itself. The two of them worked hard, but against such an immense expanse they were a drop in the bucket.

Besides, apart from the Battle of Baal, nearly everything that came afterward had happened in Imperium Sanctus, not Imperium Nihilus. That included Vigilus, the Plague Wars, the Soul-Banishing Death Field and, most recently, Armageddon.

That didn't mean there were no great wars in Imperium Nihilus. It was simply that in Imperium Sanctus the Imperium could still muster armies and fight back.

Having lost more than a third of its territory had even improved the Imperium's efficiency considerably.

Imperium Nihilus had no such luxury. The lack of stories from there didn't mean nothing was happening. It meant most of the place had simply been written off. However strong Dante and the Lion were, they couldn't possibly shield all of it.

Now it was a paradise for the ambitious, and naturally for Heydrich as well.

The land grab was right before his eyes, though his plan was only to acquire ten worlds in about a century. Compared with the Emperor founding the Imperium, it was a different order of magnitude entirely. And since Guilliman hadn't even returned to Holy Terra yet, the Plague Wars were still far off.

Besides, Heydrich had a few tricks of his own to stall Mortarion and push the Plague Wars back another decade or so.

After all, the so-called Plague Wars were only a scheme between Mortarion and Ku'gath, and had little to do with Nurgle himself.

With the attention of the other three piles of garbage in the Warp fixed on the Stars of Calamity, even Nurgle had to commit his main forces to holding off the other three.

That left Mortarion with very limited forces to call on. In the original story, he could spread out and suppress the entire Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar so quickly mainly because the place had been hollow inside at the time.

Everyone says Primarchs are invincible, but once they hit the ground, GW's old habit kicks in. They always get taken out by some bizarre thing or other, like spawning a Draigo.

Either way, if Guilliman didn't come out, then under the big hand of the Emperor (GW) that thing would surely get tossed out.

"Oh, right. My lord, I know you have stargates. Could you spare us a few pairs? The Lion needs some too."

Dante had clearly resigned himself to it. It was still better than being stuffed into a Dreadnought.

As for the stargates...

Once Dante and the Lion learned of the things, they lost their composure too.

"I'll give you a few pairs. Don't ask me for any more."

Heydrich rolled his eyes at that. Sure enough, these people had come here just to hit him up for freebies.

The problem was that the things were of no use to him on their own, and they only became truly useful once they were densely networked.

"I'll open permissions for you. Keep a close watch on them so they don't get destroyed."

Heydrich thought it over for a moment and then gave his assurance. His stargate wasn't a free-for-all teleporter, either.

To use one, you had to work with the special communicator he had built from the tavern. Every jump had to be registered first, and only then could the chain of teleports begin.

In short, you couldn't teleport whenever you felt like it. Otherwise everything would descend into chaos.

"Fine..."

Dante clearly knew the network had to reach a certain scale to be worth anything, but to them it mattered enormously.

With Heydrich's supplies behind them, the Blood Angels could finally expand their ranks. They could never return to the old Legion scale, but they could at least break past the limits of the Codex Astartes.

But wanting to expand and being able to expand were two different things. After the Battle of Baal, Guilliman had given them Primaris, but the numbers were limited, so Dante had recalled some of the previously rejected aspirants.

The situation was much the same now, and the shortfall in viable candidates was even bigger than before.

This time there were no Primaris reinforcements, because Guilliman still hadn't returned to Holy Terra. The main body of those frozen Primaris were still buried on Mars and across the Solar System, and Cawl couldn't exactly carry that many around with him.

And although this was a great victory, no victory is ever free of losses. Many chapters were already under strength.

After all, the Blood Angels had always been poor in a truly epic fashion. Many chapters had plenty of slots on paper and nobody to fill them.

It wasn't a lack of gene-seed. It was a lack of equipment.

Now the equipment had been made up, but there were not enough men. So Dante needed a new round of recruitment, and for that he needed quick contact with several other planets.

The Lion was in much the same position. The Dark Angels' homeland was inside the Rock, and Caliban had long since ascended, so Dark Angels replenishment came almost entirely from nearby planets.

All of that required convenient transport. Short-range Warp travel could do it, but it was far too unstable, especially in Imperium Nihilus, where there was no Astronomican now.

Connecting directly to Heydrich's own planets was out of the question. The distance was simply too great.

"Whew..."

Dante let out a breath at Heydrich's words. He had actually asked Heydrich's chancellor before, but had clearly been shown the door at once.

Heydrich's own people didn't have enough stargates, and output was only a trickle. Most of them were hand-crafted by Heydrich himself, so there was no room for favors.

"Here are two pairs, one each for you and the Lion. Make do with them for now."

Heydrich didn't bother with more talk and simply handed over the last two pairs he had.

He knew full well that Dante and the Lion both desperately needed them, but the problem was that he needed them too.

And if you said the Imperium was on the brink and countless of its subjects were living in misery, Heydrich could only shrug helplessly. How things had turned out had nothing to do with him. Besides, there were far too many of them to count. Heydrich didn't buy into moral blackmail anyway. Anyone who tried it would get a huge slap across the face, followed by: "Go find the Emperor!!!"

Of course, so far nobody had been foolish enough to try. Hardly anyone who got to deal with Heydrich directly was an idiot.

It was like all those people who transmigrate to ancient times. You can laugh at the ancients for lacking knowledge, but never laugh at them for being stupid.

As for that bunch of oddballs in Europa these days, Heydrich could only say it was a problem of the system. There were no elections here. Even if you were born noble, you had to pass an extremely brutal selection to rise, because in the end they were all ordinary people.

Ordinary people can be killed, which put them in an entirely different category from Heydrich. Only when you hold the power to deny the world itself can you treat authority as lightly as he did.

The same was true of the Emperor. That fellow was a textbook hands-off boss. Without Malcador covering for him, the Imperium might not have lasted until Horus's Great Heresy.

"Many thanks..."

With what Heydrich had given him in hand, Dante left satisfied. It was already a good result. The Dragon Emperor of Cathay wasn't even a member of the Imperium of Man, and the fact that he had squeezed two emergency pairs out of his tight production was more than enough.

So very soon...

"Great Lion, why didn't you go over yourself?"

After passing through the tavern and returning to the Blood Angels' monastery, Dante found the Lion already waiting there.

For some reason, the Lion had flatly refused to go in person, so Dante had been sent instead.

"..."

The corner of the Lion's eye twitched at Dante's words.

In truth, he'd done nothing else lately but use the tavern to gather as many of the Dark Angels' successor chapters together as he could.

Then came the great reckoning, because Heydrich kept bombarding him with the Dark Angels' little secrets.

The Lion wanted to see just how many outrageous things his people had done, hence the so-called great reckoning.

The results were splendid, of course. The Lion could no longer show his face. He couldn't even face Dante, because nearly every one of the First Founding chapters had been dragged through the mud.

His head was buzzing now. In fact, the Dark Angels had no real problems.

As for those traitorous Fallen Angels, that was a non-issue, since what chapter doesn't have a few traitors?

The forbidden weapons had been issued by the Emperor himself, so procedurally there was nothing wrong. Even if you brought the Custodes in, they would have nothing to say.

But the problem was that, with this lot constantly courting disaster, these small matters had grown to a shocking degree.

Worst of all, these lunatics had actually charged Holy Terra. They hadn't wanted to say a word about it at first. It only came out when he was drinking with Heydrich, and it nearly scared him to death.

These people were really something. They had gone and stood shoulder to shoulder with that bunch of sitting ducks on Terra.

As for what became of the men Abaddon the Despoiler took along back then, most of them were dead.

Not even an Astartes-grade body, let alone a mortal one, can go ten thousand years without food or water, and Rylanor at least had a Dreadnought to protect him. As for those who had accepted some Chaos blessings, they fared even worse, since being alive was no better than being dead. That was especially true of those who had accepted Slaanesh's gift.

So now the Lion felt guilty just looking at Heydrich, because his damned sons had sworn up and down that they'd covered everything perfectly and nobody would ever find out about them.

They had erased all their records and even mixed in some Chaos filth.

Then the Lion had simply said, "The Dragon Emperor told me," and the Rock fell silent.

Now, seeing Heydrich, the Lion felt a real chill, like a child whose mischief has been seen through by an elder of the family.

Dante had his own secrets, of course, but his were a matter of genetics. They were something the Blood Angels were born with, and Dante, or rather the Blood Angels, were simply unlucky.

But these darling sons of the Lion's had brought it all on themselves. What started as a trifle too light to register on a scale had been inflated by them into something a thousand catties couldn't balance.

"One pair each is only for emergencies. You'll still need to go through the tavern from now on."

Dante couldn't be bothered with more talk and simply pulled out a budget-edition A-Ruan Pouch.

"Whew. Understood."

The Lion said nothing more. He put it away and left quickly.

He now had to reorganize the Dark Angels and continue the Primaris procedures, and to take delivery of another batch of Primaris from Heydrich while he was at it.

With Heydrich's current output, there was no shortage of anything except big-ticket items like warships. Power armor, boltguns, chainswords, bolts and the like were all plentiful.

That held even if he supplied the Blood Angels and Dark Angels together. Even combined, those two amounted to little. They had fewer than a hundred thousand men between them, and Heydrich suspected they might not even outnumber the Black Templars.

After all, aside from the Black Templars' High Marshal, nobody knew how many of them there really were. They had never missed a single Imperial war, and there had even been some Black Templars at the Battle of Baal.

Heydrich had been quite surprised by that. In the original timeline, these black Orks would surely have all died in battle.

Now, having turned down the Primaris Heydrich offered and taken a batch of supplies, they had simply gone on with their own crusade.

Heydrich had no intention of stopping them. The batch of black Orks who had returned with Guilliman, on the other hand, were adapting rather well.

With Dante and the Lion gone, the days went by one after another.

Mortarion's great host had been steered by Heydrich toward the T'au Empire, so for the time being they had no time to attack the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar.

After all, Mortarion wasn't leading Nurgle's main army, and he still couldn't break Heydrich's defensive lines by brute force.

Of course, if he wanted to fight Heydrich to the death, Heydrich would gladly oblige.

Heydrich's main army had by now arrived at his planets in Imperium Nihilus, and they needed an expedition of their own.

The plan was to purge the Chaos and xenos in this sector. Soon, one by one, they boarded their warships, each loaded with stargates.

The two thousand battle-brothers were now split into two forces, then allocated further according to the Codex Astartes.

It wasn't that Heydrich considered the Codex Astartes sacred or anything. The problem was that it was simply so useful.

If you left it to Heydrich, he could never write a work like that. So you may choose not to follow the Codex Astartes, but you must study it closely and be able to recite it.

Heydrich had now formed his expeditionary force, built mainly around auxiliary troops and backed by two chapters' worth of battle-brothers. Its task was a round of purges on nearby planets. This was not large-scale legion warfare.

This was the Imperium's familiar pacification work, and for it the Codex Astartes was practically tailor-made.

"By order of the great Dragon Emperor, Cathay's first expedition begins!!!"

At the command of the two chapter lords, two enormous fleets set out, carrying the battle-brothers of two standard chapters and several hundred thousand auxiliaries. More than ninety percent of those auxiliaries were ordinary Astra Militarum-grade troops, not the sort who had faced the Tyranids head-on at Baal.

The fleets traveled by faster-than-light flight, not the Imperium's Warp travel.

Heydrich had all but banned Warp travel. Anyone who fell into it by accident was another matter.