Chapter 176: Prospero's Specialty Red Ogryn (Patreon)

At Heydrich's command, his first expedition began. First, Heydrich needed to build a sector of his own in Imperium Nihilus, somewhere the Imperium of Man could never reach no matter what.

His Star Gate output had now reached fifty pairs a year, and next year it would be even more. For the moment, Macragge and his own Imperium Nihilus territory were split fifty-fifty.

The Ultramarines were eager to link up with Holy Terra as soon as possible, but Heydrich had not the slightest interest in meeting the Emperor.

Just hearing that guy was coming gave Heydrich a headache. The Emperor was notorious for wanting this, and that, and then some more, with an insatiable greed. And greed alone would have been tolerable, but his head didn't work right either.

All it took was the combined efforts of countless GW writers, and the Emperor had successfully become a schizophrenic.

Still, there was something to be said for the Japanese way of having one person handle an entire work. Characters don't fall apart as easily that way.

So even just thinking about the things the Emperor had done left Heydrich a little shaken.

*

Meanwhile, aboard Macragge's Honour, deep within the Warp:

"How far are we from Holy Terra now?"

Standing on the bridge, Guilliman gazed through the Warp barrier at the distance, where a dazzling Astronomican was flickering.

For anyone but a Navigator, one extra glance at the thing would make them explode. But with Guilliman's resistance, this much Astronomican was no problem at all.

He and Heydrich could both treat it like a glow stick. But neither of them could do a Navigator's job. Staring into the Astronomican was only the basic requirement. A Navigator also had to read the Warp tides and find a safe passage.

And the Warp tides shift. Even the most stable Warp route changes. Put bluntly, it was the cosmic version of the British Age of Sail, when wooden ships crossed oceans under canvas. Chinese authors generally can't write seafaring tales with such an authentic medieval flavor.

It had the same spirit as the Apollo moon landing: crossing the Pacific in a washing machine. When it comes to reckless adventures, China still falls well short of the West, since Westerners are full of that urge to say, "Look how badass I am."

As for asking Heydrich to navigate in person, others might dare. He honestly wouldn't.

"We're nearly there. The Warp in this region is still fairly stable. The Astronomican went out briefly not long ago, but it came back very quickly, though dimmer than before."

Hearing Guilliman's question, the Navigator aboard Macragge's Honour answered respectfully at once.

Back in the Plague Wars, Nurgle's plagues would vanish on their own as they neared Guilliman. His resistance had reached an almost metaphysical level. Heydrich, who had also met Nurgle's plagues, had taken a far simpler and cruder approach.

He had simply thrown Destruction at them. Every probe from Nurgle was blocked and pushed back, which was why Nurgle's armies had detoured around him.

They were like the Undead in Warcraft. Without a main force, they could only advance with Nurgle's plague paving the way ahead of them.

The Navigators and Astropaths had a similar experience beside Guilliman. Staying near him gave them a quiet they hadn't known in a long time.

Heydrich couldn't help them much here. At most he could give them some Abundance to stabilize their bodies, plus memory-cleansing work through the Path of Remembrance.

But their souls still had to remain in the Warp. Only then could they navigate or send astropathic messages. You couldn't very well send a psychic muggle like Heydrich up there. Until the Trailblaze or the Star Gate project was complete, Navigators and Astropaths were a necessity.

"But I sense something terrifying over there... it seems to come from the Blood God..."

The Navigator's brow was deeply furrowed. From far away nothing was visible, but up close you could see a red haze spreading.

That was plainly Khorne's color. His power now saturated the area around the Astronomican. That should have been almost impossible. An ordinary daemon wouldn't even get close, and a single glance at the light would probably burn it up.

Clearly, Old K had stepped in personally. Not only had he raised a vast barrier to shelter his brats, he had projected his own power straight onto Holy Terra. This was definitely not good news for them.

"Father..."

Guilliman turned grave at this. At the same moment, their battleship arrived at another node.

"We're approaching the Mandeville Point near Holy Terra. We must drop out of the Warp here, or the defenses will... Damn!!!"

The Navigator's face changed violently, because at that very instant an enormous force tore the Mandeville Point open.

That vast psychic power closed around the tens-of-kilometers-long Gloriana-class battleship Macragge's Honour like a giant hand. With one colossal wrench, it dragged them out of the Warp.

Then another surging blast of psychic power struck. As Macragge's Honour left the Warp, the Mandeville Point behind them was sealed shut.

Apart from the flagship, the rest of the fleet was stuck in the Warp. Even the Navigator showed disbelief. He was a psyker himself, and no weak one.

That was exactly why he found it so frightening. Pulling a warship out of the Warp took what kind of strength?

"It's my brother Magnus. He's already waiting for me on the moon."

Guilliman looked down at the world below with an expressionless face. It was chaos down there. He knew of only three beings who could yank Macragge's Honour out of the Warp: the Dragon Emperor, the Emperor, and his good brother Magnus.

Of those, the Dragon Emperor might use his technology. The other two simply had brute strength.

By Guilliman's reckoning, the Dragon Emperor's fighting power was the least important of all his abilities. The man kept cooking up odd contraptions for him day after day.

Typical of the lunatics of the Dark Age of Technology. By what Guilliman knew, the Dark Age of Technology had once blasted an entire stretch of the Warp into a vacuum. He didn't know whether this one had that kind of power now.

"Magnus? The red one-eyed Ogryn, a Prospero specialty?"

The words had barely left Guilliman's mouth when the Legion commander in charge of Heydrich's Astartes, standing beside him, spoke up excitedly.

"..."

Guilliman was struck speechless. The once-solemn war had turned a little surreal. He wanted to ask whether comparing Magnus to an Ogryn wasn't a bit insulting.

"Turn the guns around and probe him with an orbital bombardment. Don't engage him directly."

Guilliman wasn't in a hurry to fight Magnus head-on. In the original timeline, he had been caught, then escaped into the webway with the Harlequin's help, and left by the moon's webway. Then Magnus had been waiting at the webway gate. This time, clearly, Guilliman hadn't taken the webway.

Magnus had cut off the main force with his power, but the people aboard Macragge's Honour were still enough.

"Damn it, he's sealed off the space around here. The tavern is blocked for now. I can't reach him."

The Harlequin beside Guilliman wore a look of utter constipation. He wanted to call for backup but couldn't get through.

"You are not to enter the fight. If things become unstable, even if the rest of us die, you must live."

Guilliman looked at the Harlequin beside him. He was the only one who could contact the Dragon Emperor and Macragge through the tavern.

So he absolutely could not be allowed to come to harm. The rest of them were expendable.

"Let's see what the Dragon Emperor prepared for me..."

Guilliman muttered the words to himself. Then the main guns of Macragge's Honour swung toward the moon below, which was saturated with Warp energy.

After all, the Imperium had thrown all its strength into Holy Terra, where the Battle of the Lion's Gate was now being fought. They knew Magnus was on the moon, but they could spare only a little force, namely a few Custodes and Sisters of Silence.

Guilliman had spent more than a decade tinkering around at Heydrich's place, but he was moving faster than in the original timeline. This time he hadn't been captured, and with Heydrich's help he had settled the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar much more quickly.

*

Meanwhile, aboard the ecosystem-Ark, Heydrich stared at the thing in front of him, lost in thought.

"Very good. What have you made this time?"

Pearl stood beside him, deadpan. Before them sat a giant firecracker of a cannon.

"Well, I wanted to see whether I could reproduce something with the Path of Remembrance. Say, using memories of the Abyss to simulate combat. But something seems to have gone wrong."

Heydrich couldn't help scratching his head. Then he looked at the cannon again.

This was Heydrich's latest masterpiece: the Warp Burning Cannon.

In essence, it used the Path of Remembrance as a catalyst to bombard souls directly. In the physical universe its effect was mediocre. It was useful against daemons, but its cost-effectiveness couldn't compete with Astra Militarum artillery, at least on ordinary daemon battlefields.

The Plague Wars were a different matter. Back then the Warp concentration had been extremely high.

But once you bombarded the Warp itself, things got interesting. The Warp is also called the Sea of Souls.

It holds countless souls accumulated over sixty million years in this galaxy, and blasting into it was fun at first. With enough shells and a strong enough Path of Remembrance, it could blast out a permanent vacuum in the Warp.

Of course, that applied only to the ordinary Warp. Warp deities like the Five Chaos Gods, the Great Devourer, and Gork and Mork were out of the question.

But once he had blasted a region open, it became very hard for Warp entities to enter it, even if the Five Chaos Gods acted in person. They would need to refill the area with soul power, and given how stingy they were, that was clearly impossible.

To ordinary daemons and Warp creatures, such a place was like an ocean with no one in it, and they were all sea creatures.

"So what are you going to do with it?"

Looking at the cannon in front of Heydrich, Pearl's eye twitched.

"Blast a vacuum zone around my planets. Then corruption there can be avoided almost completely."

Heydrich explained. More than half the Warhammer universe's problems came from the Warp. Solve the Warp, and ninety-nine percent of the problems went away. You might even get a stable rear area, since physical-universe ships operating there wouldn't even need Gellar fields.

"You're not considering rolling it out more widely?"

Pearl sounded slightly surprised.

"It can't be rolled out. The souls of people who've received my blessing remain in their own bodies. When they die, they just die, with none of that tangled mess. For everyone else, that's not the case."

Heydrich sounded a little helpless. His vacuum effectively burned off the substance of the Warp. But the Warp was the Sea of Souls, and the souls of the dead on those planets would still flow into it.

Before long, it would revert to what it had been.

Heydrich's resources were limited, and his Paths couldn't compare with the genuine ones.

With the Path strength he held, he couldn't even give birth to an Aeon, though Heydrich considered that a good thing.

Aeons were far too powerful. And even beyond their power, the big stunts these lunatics pulled were terrifying. In Warhammer, at worst humanity gets wiped out, and after that some new race rises.

But Aeons could truly reset everything in the universe to zero. Heydrich thought it best not to let that world reach such a point.

"Try it on a planet in Imperium Nihilus. It might be useful. And I remember you gave Guilliman something good. What did you give him?"

Pearl said nothing more about Heydrich's creation. It was yet another firecracker, but at least this firecracker had a use.

"It's nothing much, really. Just a... well, a Stellaron. One infused with Destruction and the Path of Remembrance. It works very well on anything that's good with psychic power. And while a Stellaron can block the Star Rail, it can't block the tavern. If something truly goes wrong, I can recall them and seal them away."

The Stellaron, after all, was a thing of Harmony. After unlocking the Path of Harmony, Heydrich had gained the means to make them, but only one. So he had added a few things to it, then tossed it to Guilliman to use.

It worked extremely well against psychic things. Psychic power, in the end, is just drawing on the substance of the Warp and using it, so as long as the target wasn't a Dark God in person, it would be fine.