Chapter 180: Magnus: Blasphemous Guilliman, You Have Defiled the Glory of Humanity (Patreon)

There's not much to say about Magnus and Guilliman. Of all the Primarchs who had undergone ascension to daemonhood, Guilliman had faced every single one.

First, there was the Shadow Crusade, which freshly ascended Angron beat into the ICU. Of course, if Lorgar hadn't ascended Angron back then, the two of them would have been slaughtered by Guilliman together. After that came Fulgrim's single stroke across the throat.

When it came to fighting Daemon Primarchs, Guilliman had plenty of experience. Take right now: he'd given up thinking about Magnus altogether, and he had turned into a berserker. He tossed aside his brain and his thoughts and began a purely mindless war.

Not that he had any choice about thinking, anyway. As Guilliman charged, the ones running at the very front and fighting beside him were…

Every last one of them Tzeentch daemons!!!

The Emperor above, Slaanesh below.

Guilliman was completely numb. It wasn't that his strength had failed him. He had simply charged alone into the heart of Tzeentch's army, so naturally everyone around him was a Tzeentch daemon.

He looked nothing like a Primarch of the Imperium now. He looked like a Chaos Warmaster. Guilliman didn't even dare think about it anymore, because he wasn't sure whether he was more blasphemous than Abaddon the Despoiler or Horus.

He didn't know how he stacked up against Abaddon the Despoiler, but he was quite certain that even Horus's retinue back then hadn't had this much… biodiversity.

*

It wasn't only Guilliman. The Custodes and Sisters of Silence who had rushed in as emergency reinforcements wore the same bewildered look.

A moment ago, the Sister had been so shocked that she'd spoken aloud. The last person to make a Sister of Silence speak had been Heydrich.

Back then, Trazyn had given him one of them to throw at Guilliman, and Heydrich didn't understand a word of sign language. After enough fumbling, the Sister had no choice but to communicate by speaking. These days, this Sister didn't care much about her vow of silence anyway.

It wasn't that she'd abandoned the vow. The problem was that nobody in Heydrich's world understood sign language. Or rather, it wasn't that they didn't understand it. In Heydrich's world, there was simply no such thing as the disabled.

Because of the overwhelming divine power of Abundance, the people of Xianzhou had no need to treat ordinary injuries. Even a severed head could be reattached and recover. But with congenital disabilities, even a transplanted prosthetic would be expelled by the body's rejection the next day.

The people in Heydrich's world had no such problem, since his Abundance wasn't nearly that extreme.

At most, it meant you almost never fell ill and could reliably live past a hundred. Under those conditions, if someone was born disabled, Heydrich had a hundred ways to treat it.

And it wasn't only his world. The Imperium had plenty of similar technology. Prosthetics, the most famous example, could often be regrown.

But the Imperials were like cyberpunk characters, and they all loved their prosthetics. Calgar had been reduced to a limbless torso who knows how many times, and he was doing just fine now, unless Games Workshop retconned it.

So naturally nobody was interested in learning sign language, and in the end this Sister had started speaking too. She also didn't need to worry about anyone suffering Chaos corruption from it. After all, Heydrich's world had no psykers, and no soulless ones either.

Today, though, she had spoken up because the prelude to Magnus's attack had given her a real fright.

After all, now that the Emperor had ascended the Golden Throne and Malcador had turned to ash, the most powerful psyker in existence was the one standing before her.

She was a newly made Sister of Silence, so she had never seen psychic power this violent.

But that was as far as it went. The Sister admitted she had underestimated Primarchs. The blast of psychic power that could have torn a planet apart had hit Guilliman and done nothing. He'd lost a scrap of skin, and even that healed instantly.

"He's loyal like a heretic…" the Sister signed, again and again.

The Custodes beside her chose to stay silent.

It was simply too heretical. Never mind the Great Ultra One, the 'Ultra Ribs,' and the Ultra Necrons. Right now Guilliman was leading an army in a charge against Magnus, and the blazing Emperor's Sword in his hands signified the Emperor's approval.

The problem was that the army he led wasn't the Ultramarines, and it wasn't his Ultra-daemon host either. It was a horde of Tzeentch's creatures. The Sister had truly never seen anything like it.

And it wasn't only her. The Ultramarines and the Great Unclean One, stuck behind the Tzeentch daemon host, had also fallen silent, because they were just as dumbfounded.

"Should we support him?"

The Great Ultra One watched Guilliman in the distance, who looked like a god of war, and the Tzeentch army that kept dying and yet kept pouring forward. His brain felt like it couldn't keep up. With a dopey, earnest look, he turned to Cato Sicarius, Belisarius Cawl, Celestine, and the others.

Their path of attack was blocked by the Tzeentch army, and those things had their backs to them. They were lining up one after another to make suicidal charges at Magnus. He had never seen heretics so loyal.

That made him a little reluctant to disturb them, so he could only look to the others.

"…"

"…"

"…"

The answer he got was three constipated faces, because none of the three had ever seen anything like this either.

Even Cawl, who had lived ten thousand years, had truly never witnessed such a situation. As for Celestine, she had already covered her face. It was just too absurd.

The Living Saint, who had been active for ten thousand years and fought in countless wars, had only one thought now: this world had finally gone mad.

"Leave them be for now. That Tzeentch host holds a great many psychic units that can disrupt Magnus's psychic spells, though I suspect he may not even need the disruption."

At that moment the Living Saint had no choice but to speak. Magnus's greatest strength was his psychic power. Everything else about him was a mess, though that wasn't to say Magnus was truly weak.

The problem was that this ascended Magnus wasn't whole. He was only a fragment, and compared with the Magnus of ten thousand years ago, he did have some weaknesses.

Other Primarchs who ascended to daemonhood gained tremendous power. They lost some of their ceiling but raised their floor. Angron, for instance, was honestly pretty weak, and together with Lorgar he had nearly been taken apart by Guilliman two against one.

Only this one was unchanged in power, since the canon text states it outright. Having ascended as a fragment, he had still gained strength no lesser than the original's.

After all, the original Magnus had fought the Wolf King head-on during the Battle of Prospero. He had been beaten down, but he had also crippled the Wolf King so badly that the Wolf King couldn't take the field for the entire Horus Heresy.

But this fragment was clearly a notch below that. Just as Celestine finished speaking, a flyer descended from the sky.

The Custodes and Sisters of Silence, their faces all pinched with constipation, stepped out, and then every one of them fixed their gaze on the Great Ultra One.

At a glance, it was obviously a Great Unclean One, and one that Heydrich had improved considerably. At least the big mouth on its belly was gone, and its skin was hard and free of plague.

The Tyranids and space Necron up front were no big deal. The erased Legion had in fact been dabbling in xenos genetics.

Take the Imperial Fists' chapter called the Soul Drinkers. Under the influence of their gene-seed, they had sprouted a pile of strange extra limbs.

That was what had truly been intolerable to the Emperor. But Guilliman hadn't implanted xenos genes into his own body.

So none of those were big problems. Still, compared with the Custodes, the Sisters of Silence seemed a little more lively, mainly because they were soulless ones.

To them, Warp daemons were just clouds of mist. Now, for the first time, they were seeing a Greater Daemon at such close range. And that Greater Daemon showed no discomfort at all at their approach.

It wasn't only him. Even the Plague Beasts and Nurglings were unaffected.

One Sister even picked up a Nurgling, or rather what should now be called an Ultra Nurgling, and held it in front of her face to study it carefully.

The thing was round and plump, and after being optimized with imaginary numbers and remodeled by Heydrich, it looked ugly-cute.

"You must give us an explanation."

The Custodes, forcing down the urge to cut down everyone in sight, looked at Cato Sicarius, Belisarius Cawl, the Living Saint Celestine, and the others.

Everything before him made his brain twitch, but he restrained himself and asked anyway.

After all, their Emissary Imperatus had received the Emperor's explicit instruction to welcome Guilliman's return.

"All of this is the handiwork of the Dragon Emperor of Cathay…"

Celestine answered the Custodes then. She had in fact reported it to the Emperor many times. But given how shattered the Emperor was now, even she didn't know how much His Majesty could hear.

"Deal with Magnus first!!!"

The Custodes looked toward the center of the battlefield, and then his body went still again. He realized the battlefield might not need them after all.

*

For at that very moment, at the center of the battlefield…

"Blasphemous Guilliman, do you even know what you're doing?"

Though the war was still raging, seeing the rich variety of species around Guilliman, Magnus was struggling to keep it together.

"You've forgotten our glory, forgotten the Great Crusade of ten thousand years ago. You trample humanity's glory and Father's pride underfoot, and you stand with filthy, blasphemous xenos."

"…"

Guilliman said nothing in the face of Magnus's accusations. Even with his multi-threaded mind, he didn't know how to explain himself. Since he couldn't explain, Guilliman simply gave up thinking.

"For our great Father, I will cleanse you, filthy traitor… and, are you people insane?"

Magnus felt he had a mission, a great mission: to purge Guilliman from before him for the sake of Father and the glory of humanity.

But just as he began to gather a Warp spell, a surge of energy interrupted him.

He turned and saw a Changeling, one who had staked its entire existence in the material universe, breaking his casting. After all, Magnus was a Daemon Primarch, the second in command of Tzeentch's faction, and this wasn't a game.

Interrupting his casting would cost dearly, but this Changeling had done it anyway.

This army's appearance in the material universe was no small matter. The Changeling had paid a huge sum of souls as expense, and the daemons themselves had also paid something, since fighting at one's own expense was tradition.

The Imperium was like that, and so was Chaos. But going straight back this time would be a dead loss, since they hadn't accomplished anything.

Even so, the Changeling had done it, and on its way out it flipped him off.

That enraged Magnus, and it also left him in a cold sweat. For the first time, he realized how formidable his ambitious brother was. Having discarded thought, Guilliman had been grinding Magnus into the dirt the entire time.

What made him even warier was the weapon in Guilliman's hands. If that thing struck him, he would be in real trouble. The sentimental Emperor was unlikely to truly reduce him to ash, but it could certainly inflict permanent damage.

After all, back in the Plague Wars, Nurgle had immediately recalled Mortarion when he saw the tide turning. The Emperor had actually had a chance to hit Mortarion hard, yet even then He hadn't moved.

Facing the Guilliman of today, Magnus was naturally outmatched. His specialty, psychic power, did nothing against Guilliman, and with all these Tzeentch things around, he couldn't even release his power properly.

The army he had brought was simply too large, and so were the creatures in it.

Naturally, the psychic units were plentiful too. Each could stop him only once before returning to the Warp, but there were so many of them.

At this point Magnus was talking big, but all he really wanted was to flee.

If this went on, he felt he would truly capsize. Besides, a berserker Guilliman was strong, but he had one flaw: he wasn't being careful about anything. So Magnus still had a chance.

In that case, Magnus quickly thought of a plan.

After all, he was a Primarch. When a Primarch wanted to run, nobody could keep him unless the Emperor came down in person.

Abaddon the Despoiler was a good example. Once your power reaches a certain level, it's truly hard to hold you back when you want to escape.