Chapter 185: The Title Was Eaten by the Emperor (Patreon)

That's the Warhammer way: once you've slain the strongest batch of creatures, everything left over is just rabble.

Of course, it isn't all nonsense. Take the present battlefield. With the Khorne Bloodthirster gone as crucial anchors, Khorne's power was swiftly suppressed.

Under the Emperor's pressure, those seemingly invincible Khorne hordes wilted on the spot, and the blood-red glow vanished in an instant.

What followed was the usual garbage time. After all, this was Holy Terra.

The Emperor's power was formidable, and the Astronomican was right here. At the Warp level, nothing would cause real trouble unless one of the great Dark Gods stepped in personally.

Haven't you seen the swarms of Tzeentch daemons working for the Administratum on Holy Terra? They aren't stirring up any trouble.

Plenty of them had even performed so well that they got promoted for their excellent records.

After all, daemons are tougher than humans, even if the human in question is a Warhammer 40K superman.

Of course, in the Warhammer universe, and especially on Holy Terra, a promotion is hardly good news. It just means more paperwork.

The High Lords have the most to say on that. You can call them wicked, but you can never call them stupid, even if the things they do are pretty stupid.

Most of it is just inertia within the Imperium's administrative system, plus the disasters caused by that godawful bureaucracy.

All you can say is that the Imperium is a cesspit, and Malcador deserves the lion's share of the credit. At least his cesspit is deep enough to drown Tzeentch daemons, and even Tzeentch himself.

*

Meanwhile, on the other side, Heydrich stared at the thing in front of him, expressionless.

"I really do admire the Emperor. How does he have everything stashed under his backside? And how are you still alive? Ten thousand years have passed!"

Faced with the creature, Heydrich was a little speechless, because it was currently kneeling on the ground, beaten down by his own hands.

It stood well over three meters tall, and its oppressive bulk of muscle was suffocating to behold. Even Irena had been sent flying the instant she came into contact with it.

Its fighting strength would have rated at least Tribune level even among the Custodes. Heydrich suspected that, given a set of equipment, it could even trade blows with Trajann.

Of course, after meeting Heydrich it had been beaten flat on the ground by him personally, and by the look of it, it still wasn't entirely convinced.

That wasn't the point, though. The point was that this thing appeared to be a Thunder Warrior.

"The Thunder Warriors were Neoth's stopgap creation, with combat power far beyond that of ordinary Astartes. But they're extremely unstable, both mentally and physically."

Heydrich glanced at Irena as she crawled out of the rubble, then casually flicked the dust off himself. A fight like this only left a smudge on the hem of his clothes, and he wasn't even wearing armour.

But with the stats of a Path fanatic, armour wasn't exactly useless, though it was close to it.

Look at Acheron. She wears a crop top and shorts and still cuts down everything in her path. If she hadn't wanted to minimise casualties, she could have blown Penacony open from the inside with her Nihility catastrophe, and that alone would have been enough to give Brother Sunday a rough time.

"Cough, cough… What are Thunder Warriors?"

Irena wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth. She hadn't expected the enemy to be so strong.

"A betrayal, you could say. A sin of Goldie's own making. Isn't that right… Arik Taranis?"

Heydrich addressed the giant before him calmly. This one also bore a title that circulated as an online rumour: the Primarch of the Thunder Warriors.

Of course, that was only a rumour, but he was indeed the oldest of the Thunder Warriors.

As for the purge of the Thunder Warriors, that truly was the Emperor's sin.

He defined the Thunder Warriors as disposable consumables, and their later betrayal came from their extremely unstable bodies.

Was the Emperor really so coldly ruthless? Not exactly. Many of the Thunder Warriors back then were already on the verge of collapse.

The Emperor gave them a dignified end, but it couldn't be called an extermination either. After all, quite a few Thunder Warriors turned up during the Horus Heresy, and their combat strength was nothing to sneer at.

Killing most Chaos Space Marines was like killing chickens for them.

After all, even the youngest Thunder Warrior is older than the oldest Astartes. They were the old guard who fought alongside the Emperor to win his empire, and any Astartes should step back and make room.

"The Emperor, the Imperium… Betrayal! That was a disgraceful betrayal!!!"

At that moment the man's mind suddenly became wildly unstable, and he moved to attack Heydrich again.

"Concord!!!"

In that instant, Heydrich activated the modulation ability of the Path of Harmony and forced down the heart that had slipped out of control once more.

The Thunder Warrior only felt his mind grow heavy and dizzy, and he collapsed unconscious in front of Heydrich.

"Take him in for the time being. Goldie's other tech isn't much to write home about, but his bio-alchemy has some commendable points."

Heydrich was clearly delighted with such a rare find. The man had obviously been locked in the Black Gaol for these ten thousand years. Taking advantage of the Khorne invasion, and of a batch of the "Black Corn" being pulled away and leaving the defences hollow, he had slipped out.

All he could say was that the Emperor hadn't acted honourably in the Thunder Warrior affair. Surely quite a few innocent Thunder Warriors had been killed back then.

"Cough, cough… So this is one of the Imperium's secrets."

Though she didn't know what had just happened, Irena coughed up a fair amount of blood.

"This is nothing yet. Hm, did I just see that right?"

Heydrich shrugged it off. He sealed the Thunder Warrior inside a stasis field and tossed it into the tavern.

His Harlequins would later transfer them to his craftworld, where he might draw plenty of inspiration from the man. He would also cure the main problem while he was at it. Astartes were strong, after all.

Still, for the Imperium and for humanity, Thunder Warriors weren't necessarily beyond mass production again, provided they could be made stable enough.

Before long, though, Heydrich found a new target, and even he was left dazed at the sight of it.

A literally twisted lump of flesh was lumbering out from inside. It looked like a person, but its body was covered in contorted faces, and it was far larger.

"Holy crap, Shuhu… No, it's not that thing. And it isn't a Warp creature either. This guy seems to be a warlord from ancient Terra who kept remodelling himself in pursuit of immortality…"

Heydrich was thoroughly numbed by the strange things that kept escaping.

For now, all he could do was keep cleaning up after the Emperor and company. There was a reason he had mistaken it for Shuhu at first glance.

It was basically a watered-down version of that thing: hard to kill, and a bit of a circus besides.

*

While Heydrich was busy collecting trash, the war was drawing to a close.

With Guilliman and the Lion joining the fray, the Bloodthirster host was swiftly cleared away.

Anything that could rival a Primarch was at least a chief Greater Daemon of its faction, and each of them was one of a kind. Even Dark God couldn't make a second one. Ka'Bandha was strong, strong enough to break through a Primarch's defences, but still fell short against a Primarch. And these Khorne Bloodthirster were all inferior to Ka'Bandha, so they were quickly banished.

In the end, amid Khorne's furious roars, the eight Khorne Bloodthirster were killed outright by Old K. They would never be revived.

After all, Old K had truly gone all in on the Battle of the Lion's Gate: a thousand years of scheming, countless losses, and the perfect moment, just to tear open that Warp rift.

Now it had all come to nothing, his effort wasted at the last step. In all of Warhammer, the Emperor is the worst sore loser, and Old K comes second.

His rage could easily be imagined, but it undoubtedly accomplished nothing.

Of course, although the Imperium had won, it was a rather miserable victory. Holy Terra had suffered heavy losses, and that is before counting the endless, vast throngs of pilgrims massed before the Lion's Gate.

The personnel lost across the various departments were beyond counting, and many records had surely been lost as well.

Compared with those so-called records, though, the Chaos corruption problem was the bigger one.

By the Inquisition's standard practice, any commoner who had seen a daemon was basically killed on the spot.

But this time too many had seen them, including no small number of Holy Terra's nobles.

And these were the nobles of Holy Terra. Even a minor noble among them would outrank an ordinary Planetary Governor in some remote sector.

A great purge was out of the question under these circumstances. At any rate, it was easy to foresee that the Order of the Holy Hammer would be busy for the next hundred years.

Of course, one institution had survived the most intact: the Administratum. Its officials had suffered almost no losses, and many had already thrown themselves back into the great work of making the Imperium great again.

Compared with them, though, the expressions of Guilliman and the Lion were extremely complicated. They had now reached the very heart of the Holy Terra palace, the throne room.

This had once been the site of Mount Everest, the highest peak on Earth, though no gleaming white snow covered it now.

The enormous mountain had been hollowed out, and the Emperor and his Golden Throne now rested in the rock beneath it.

"What about Dragon Emperor? Doesn't he want to come and see?"

Guilliman took a deep breath, turned to look around, and found with some helplessness that although the Astartes Heydrich had sent in support and their Chapter commander were nearby, Dragon Emperor himself had long since vanished without a trace.

But Guilliman soon shook his head in relief. Considering the Emperor's glorious track record, which had wrecked that man's empire along with humanity's age of prosperity, Dragon Emperor was obviously fuming.

If the two were to meet now, they might well come to blows.

Ten thousand years ago, let them fight if they wanted. Two Perpetuals, and neither could kill the other.

But the situation was different now, and the Emperor's condition in particular was deeply strange.

He was practically no different from a Dark God. If a fight to the death got out of hand and beat the Emperor into ascension to daemonhood, that would be no fun at all.

"…"

As for the Custodes, they stood silent one after another. They didn't know how to face that legendary being.

And there was a far more important matter. Since the birth of the Imperium of Man, who was the first human to have injured the Emperor?

That was hard to guess, wasn't it? Should they even try?

A chill ran down the Custodes' spines. On top of that, they still harboured deep doubts about his identity.

"Let's go. We'll see… Father together."

Guilliman took another deep breath and drew along the Lion, who was just as nervous as he was. Under the gaze of a throng of Custodes, they walked step by step toward the supreme throne.

With a brother beside him, Guilliman's pressure was much lighter.

The Lion was under the same enormous pressure, if not more.

Guilliman had lain in stasis for ten thousand years because he'd had no choice. The Lion's predicament, on the other hand, was purely of his own making.

Worse still, the armoury of the Dark Angels was now down to a tenth of what it had been, and many of the ancient weapons could not be repaired. Even the STC repair templates Heydrich supplied couldn't mend them all, since the core of an STC template is repair based on the special memory stored in the nanites.

For many of their weapons the STC templates held no record at all, because those were handmade. Heydrich could probably fix them, but for one thing it was painstaking work that took far too much time.

If Heydrich had time to repair such things, he'd rather hand-craft a few even cooler gadgets instead.

*

On a hilltop on the other side, Heydrich watched Guilliman and the Lion enter the throne room, expressionless.

"Do you want to go and take a look? Goldie is in there."

He turned to Irena, whose expression was rather complicated now.

"There's no need."

Irena shook her head at Heydrich's words.

"As you said, a god is best kept as a flawless totem, living on in one's heart."

After all, as a Sister of Battle, Irena had been taught since childhood how to worship the Emperor, and the most important method was to sing praise of his greatness and holiness.

But after following Heydrich for so long, she had come to see that the Emperor wasn't holy or great at all. He was an old bastard.

So she felt a sense of disillusionment, yet she was unwilling to abandon her faith. Her exact state of mind could be compared to Barbara from Genshin Impact.

"Then let's go back too. The Plague Wars are about to begin."