"If this is ant to be that man's revenge for his son's betrayal, then he has certainly succeeded."
The voice, dripping with bitterness, echoed through the air. It caught Dantioch completely off guard, freezing him just as he was about to raise his weapon and counterattack.
His own primarch had not lunged at him with furiously swinging fists?
He instinctively glanced toward Arthur and Rases, who were still standing nearby.
"Do not look at . This was The Emperor's doing."
Rases shrugged. While he had personally handpicked and salvaged later recruits like Sepatus and the others, the first generation of Thunderforged Warriors was an entirely different story.
This was purely a result of The Emperor's twisted sense of humor. He absolutely refused to take the bla for it.
"Oh, Perturabo, who else would you like to see? Zanon or Anouldi? I could always ask your father for a favor."
Countless lethal weapons bristled across the surface of the steel giant's massive fra.
Rases imdiately pushed Arthur two steps forward.
At a speed visible to the naked eye, the protruding weapons began to lt away.
Perturabo was seething with rage, but his true body was not physically present. Funneling more of his power into this projection would only delay his inevitable banishnt.
Manifesting in the material universe following his Daemonic Ascension was a trendously arduous task. This was especially true for soone like him, a master of his own domain, who had to carefully budget every ounce of his chaotic energy.
Even Be'lakor occasionally resorted to borrowing power from the Four Gods to expand his influence across realspace, but Perturabo outright refused to do so.
Ever since he witnessed the wretched fates of his four fallen brothers, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Four Gods.
He cast another withering glare at the two "brothers" who endlessly irritated him.
And that included The Emperor!
This astonishing restraint only deepened Dantioch's shock.
Was the current Lord of Iron truly willing to humble himself to such an extent?
No, that was not quite right. He had been willing to do so in the past as well. Driven by a desperate need for The Emperor's praise and the envy of his brothers, he had deliberately led the Iron Warriors into the most grueling and brutal battlefields.
And now, to achieve his own ambitions, he was once again willing to swallow his pride and rein in his volatile temper.
"You want to return to your command?"
Dantioch asked, already knowing the answer.
"I refuse."
"Why refuse? You must understand exactly what that man truly is by now, and the nature of your own existence. I am not Mortarion, manipulated by my own Progeny. Nor am I Angron, blindly trading one Slave Master for another."
With a single sweeping glance, Perturabo pierced through his son's thoughts. The soul bearing his indelible mark held no secrets before him now.
And that was precisely why he found it so utterly unacceptable.
"I am my own master," Perturabo declared. "From this day forward, you only need to serve . You will no longer be forced to march to your death for that man's ambitions, nor for my own misguided desires."
"Ti really is a sharp blade. To think that such a stubborn, twisted man could ever adopt an attitude like this."
Rases muttered under his breath, "Dantioch, co back and be my trident, I am begging you."
Perturabo imdiately snapped his head around, glaring furiously at Rases.
"No. This is not the sa."
Having patiently waited for Perturabo to finish his explanation, Dantioch continued.
"You discarded a trust that should never have been broken. You placed your faith in brothers who were entirely unworthy of it, and you trampled over boundaries that should have remained inviolate. The path between us has irrevocably fractured."
Dantioch stared firmly at Perturabo.
Had this been the dawn of the Great Heresy, he would have answered his primarch's call without a second thought, provided it was Perturabo asking.
Even in the bleak aftermath of the Heresy, he had agonized over the dark future awaiting his primarch and his Legion.
But after bearing witness to the horrific truth of Chaos, after learning exactly what atrocities the traitor legions had committed, all such loyalties had burned away to ash.
"So you would rather serve an even more wicked and paranoid Creation of The Warp?"
Perturabo scoffed, pointing a massive finger at the shattered remnants of The Emperor's sacred statue.
"That is different,"
Dantioch said, shaking his head as he repeated his earlier sentint.
"I remain steadfastly loyal to the Imperium, and absolutely loyal to humanity."
"I am your father,"
Perturabo growled in a low voice, the thick layers of steel plating that ford his massive body grinding harshly against one another.
"You were."
Dantioch looked up into the eyes of his forr primarch.
Ah, how impossibly tall, how fiercely majestic. He had finally recognized his own worth and carved out a definitive place for himself within the swirling depths of The Warp.
"I am still a warrior of mankind. Clad in impenetrable armor, I am unyielding steel both inside and out."
"But you are not, Perturabo."
A small part of him was genuinely glad to see Perturabo's transformation. He had fully expected his father to degenerate into a paranoid, raving lunatic like the countless other Space Marines who chose to Turn to Chaos. Against all odds, the Lord of Iron seed far more composed and rational than he had ever been in the past.
But they were no longer walking the sa path.
Sins were not erased simply because a man changed his deanor, nor could monuntal guilt vanish in the face of re regret.
Perturabo had chosen to distance himself from humanity entirely. Dantioch, however, was a warrior explicitly born to shield mankind, and he would carry out his sacred duty just as he always had.
They were enemies.
In the past, the present, and the future.
It would always be this way.
'I genuinely thought they were going to co to blows.'
Rases muttered to Arthur over their internal comms channel.
'It seems the Chaos kool-aid has a remarkably calming side effect.'
"..."
Perturabo opened his mouth to speak again, but fell silent as he watched his Progeny firmly shake his head.
Arthur chose that exact mont to step forward. A trendous, utterly irresistible repulsive force violently engaged, ripping Perturabo's presence directly out of the temporarily fabricated body.
Perturabo did not even have a fraction of a second to detonate his chaotic might into the inferior scrap tals before his consciousness was violently severed.
His vision violently spun.
In the blink of an eye, Perturabo found himself slamd back onto his freezing steel throne. The vast network of thick cables and churning cogitators around him continued humming, coldly calculating imnse streams of raw data.
The Lord of Iron kept his eyes firmly shut, desperately trying to sense the location of his defiant son.
The psychic tether had been severed completely. Even relying on the innate genetic link between Primarch and Progeny, Dantioch's presence could no longer be felt.
Perturabo pictured Dantioch's calm, impassive deanor in his mind's eye.
Utterly calm. Completely indifferent.
The fateful reunion had been fully expected, and the stinging rejection had been calculated long in advance.
The cruelest thing in the galaxy was not betrayal, but a man looking reality square in the eye and making a completely clear-headed choice to walk away.
And in Dantioch's resolute choice, there was absolutely no room left for his primarch!
Inhale. Exhale.
The Daemon Primarch sat in deep, churning silence. As his tumultuous thoughts swirled, the sheer weight of his presence made the entire colossal warship seem to heave, inhaling and exhaling in rhythm with his foul mood.
"The Emperor!"
Deep within The Warp, a soul-shaking, thunderous roar echoed from the terrifying tallic bowels of the "Iron Blood."
Across the chaotic void, the various scattered warbands received an urgent, synchronized update.
Their weapon orders had just been delayed yet again.
——
The planetary war finally entered its sweeping mopping-up phase.
The Sons of Dorn diligently excavated the shattered ruins of the fortress, respectfully retrieving the bodies of the glorious fallen, and rcilessly executing any battered traitors foolish enough to still be breathing.
The sons of Guilliman watched on with poorly concealed envy, secretly praying that they would be lucky enough to cross blades with the Word Bearers in their upcoming campaigns.
The Angel's Progeny worked closely alongside the Sororitas of the Ecclesiarchy to rescue and treat the injured, seizing the golden opportunity to preach the newly minted state doctrine surrounding The Angel.
At this point in ti, every single Planet within the Imperium fundantally relied on The Emperor for sheer survival. No one was daring enough to attempt any overly radical ideological shifts—
But that certainly did not stop the inherently restless Transmigrators from trying their luck at so more subtle subversion.
After all, Baal was a Planet that The Emperor himself had explicitly granted permission to retain its unique religious worship of The Angel.
Since The Emperor had decreed it with his own mouth, they had a completely airtight legal and theological mandate to operate with, didn't they?
And since they had the theological mandate, there was absolutely no reason they couldn't actively spread that worship around, right?
The various sprawling sects of the modern Ecclesiarchy could trace their fragnted histories back to the closing years of the War of the Beast at the absolute earliest. There was no logical reason why these upstart priests were allowed to gather massive flocks while the literal Transmigrators could not.
"Are you entirely certain that siphoning the power of Faith won't cause any psychic interference for us? And are you absolutely sure we won't accidentally spawn so bizarre, Eldritch horror in The Warp from all this worship?"
Having just finished listening to the hilarious recount of the Iron Warrior incident down on the Planet's surface, Romulus gripped a fresh casualty report and turned to question Rases.
They had been deeply analyzing and experinting with religious reformation for quite so ti now. The core tenets of the Order of the Sacred Rose served as a remarkably solid foundation to build upon; at the very least, their doctrines were rciful and gentle toward the common citizenry.
Yet before this bold new initiative, no one had ever dared attempt to siphon and redirect the raw power of Imperial Faith toward a divine entity other than The Emperor.
For one thing, the harsh realities of the Inquisition strictly forbade it. For another, The Warp was brimming with terrifying historical examples of misplaced worship accidentally birthing catastrophic new Chaos entities.
"Relax. The Faith directed toward us ultimately acts as nothing more than a funnel, cleanly converting into pure Psychic Energy. We aren't going to let any random Warp entities freeload off our hard-earned worship."
Rases casually waved a hand, his attention still entirely focused on studying the intricate Souls circuits so generously donated by the slain Iron Warriors.
The current primary objective for the four of them was simply to farm as much initial capital as possible along the Expeditionary Fleet's route. After that, they would carve a path straight to Macragge and thoroughly wipe the Behemoth Hive Fleet from existence.
Once they had racked up an insurmountable mountain of political favors and firmly established their reputation across the stars, they planned to head straight toward the Baal sector. There, in the sprawling domain that would eventually beco the dark side of the Imperium following the catastrophic opening of The Great Rift, they would officially carve out their own territory and run these grand religious experints in earnest.
"Even the directed faith of those Aeldari isolates solely focuses on , which allows to perfectly intercept and safely convert the energy,"
He further explained, confidently illustrating just how secure their blasphemous little operation truly was.
And that supre confidence was precisely why the Transmigrators had begun covertly lacing the standard Imperial doctrines with their own personalized dogma.
Seizing control over the flow of Faith was not even considered a difficult operation at this point. Sanguinius was fundantally, unequivocally dead. His radiant soul had been violently shattered into microscopic fragnts, and even the corrupted shards clutched in the greedy claws of the Four Gods had failed to incubate a new Warp entity after ten thousand years of marinating.
anwhile, the enigmatic Sanguinor, whose true origins remained shrouded in absolute mystery, proved to be exceptionally cooperative, outright refusing to absorb a single drop of the misdirected Faith.
Covertly altering religious doctrines and quietly redirecting the flow of theological power had an extensive, incredibly well-docunted history within The Warp—
More than one Greater Daemon of Tzeentch had successfully tricked entire swaths of pious Ecclesiarchy worshippers into bending the knee to them. Even Vashtorr the Arkifane was currently hard at work, maliciously skimming the profound Faith directed toward the Omnissiah.
"Fair enough,"
Romulus conceded. Given that the modern Imperium was completely and utterly dependent on blind Faith just to keep the engines running, firmly grasping one of those dangerous Blades in their own hands was probably a wise insurance policy.
Romulus shrugged and pulled out a fresh stack of administrative datapads to continue his endless bureaucratic grind.
Thanks to the advanced warnings provided by the Expeditionary Fleet, Macragge had mobilized early, rapidly organizing an incredibly solid defensive periter to hold the line against the encroaching Hive Fleet.
Because of this, the pressure on their advancing vanguard was relatively light, generously allowing them the breathing room to administratively smooth out several glaring logistical issues as they traveled.
Casually opening the encrypted frequency band designated for Fleet command, Romulus prepared to upload his freshly approved supply manifests. He paused. He suddenly noticed a glaring crimson notification pulsing urgently within the incoming Astropathic Communication logs.
Romulus imdiately sat bolt upright, his fingers flying across the console to rip open the ergency cipher.
"???"
What exactly did it an that the entire Imperial Navy armada had been wiped out, and the defense lines across Macragge were on the verge of total collapse?
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