Warhammer 40K: System Error, I Summoned the Arch-Traitor! Chapter 62 - Are You Sure He's Dorn's Son?

~ Every 100 Power Stones = Bonus Chapter! Your votes keep this climbing. Thanks!

No sharp screech erupted in the command room.

That was entirely a codic scene Kellen had conjured in his own head.

As the son of Konor and gene-father of the Ultramarines, Roboute Guilliman could weather any inner storm without letting a single ripple cross his face. The man was a seasoned politician to his bones.

He coughed twice, tactical, perfectly tid, and changed the subject with seamless grace.

"How could that possibly be the sa thing?"

Guilliman straightened his back. His tone shifted into sothing righteous and grand. "Considering the future of the Imperium and human civilization, I had no choice but to act as I did in that mont of crisis. It was a historical inevitability!"

The Lord of Ultramar began pacing the hall, walking and patching up his own dark history as he went.

"You must understand — Warp storms had engulfed the entire galaxy. Countless Imperial worlds lost all contact with Terra. The Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar beca an island. The Throneworld's situation was unknown. Father's fate was unknown. To stabilize morale, to preserve humanity's last ember, what else could I have done besides establishing the Second Imperium?"

The more he spoke, the more righteous he sounded. And at the end, he made sure to drag two heavyweight nas down with him.

"Besides, my loyal brothers — the Lion and Sanguinius were both present at the ti. They raised both hands in full approval!"

Kellen stood off to the side and rolled his eyes so hard it nearly hurt.

Who exactly are you trying to fool?

You think I haven't read the source material?

Back then, it was Guilliman who decided on his own to build the Second Imperium, then shoved a thoroughly reluctant Great Angel onto the throne.

Great Angel, if you were being taken hostage, you could've just blinked.

But Kellen wasn't stupid enough to puncture the Lord of Ultramar's story at this particular mont.

The man was a Primarch. Face was bigger than the sky.

"You are absolutely right!" Kellen took the opening without a second's hesitation, his voice dripping with sincerity.

"The past is the past, and now is now. Tracing back old history isn't what matters anymore. What matters is the present. Right now, the Imperium faces the sa predicant it did back then, and the Wolf Shepherd still needs his identity confird."

"Since Lord Guilliman has awoken and returned, we would like to invite you to step forth once more. At this stage, the only ones who can break the Imperium's deadlock wide open are you and the Wolf Shepherd."

"You two are the turning point of the Imperium's historical destiny. The Imperium cannot do without you — just as ancient Europa could not do without Jerusalem."

It was, to put it plainly, a masterclass in flattery.

Kullen stood at the rear, listening with a deepening frown. The old knight stared at the back of Kellen's head and spat a silent curse.

This kid's silver tongue never stops. One trick after another. Born to be a power-broker and a scher.

But the results were imdiate and undeniable.

The Lord of Ultramar and the Wolf Shepherd both looked like n basking in warm spring sunlight. The faint awkwardness from monts before dissolved into nothing.

"Kellen speaks well. Robert, don't you agree?"

"I believe Sir Kellen is a man of considerable foresight. We two brothers must indeed step forth to save the Imperium."

The two exchanged a glance and broke into easy, hearty laughter.

The jokes ran their course. The atmosphere settled back into sothing serious.

The topic returned to the core of it all: strategy.

Working from Guilliman's desire to rebuild the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, Kellen laid out the major events still to co. Fulgrim's trap during the parade. The Plague Wars launched by the fallen Primarch Mortarion. The fighting over the Nachmund Corridor, that vital strategic chokepoint connecting the Imperium Sanctus and the Imperium Nihilus. The Third Tyrannic War and the Fourth already looming on the horizon. The awakening of the Necron Dynasties.

Oh, and the galaxy's newest player crashing the grand lee: the T'au Empire and their expansion.

If the Imperium was going to face all of that, a stable strategic rear was non-negotiable. Guilliman's plan to rebuild the Five Hundred Worlds was the right call.

As for anyone who wanted to question whether the Lord of Ultramar harbored personal ambition, to hell with that. At this stage, internal strife was a luxury they couldn't afford.

Kellen's private recomndation: let Horus roll right over anyone who dared doubt the Imperial Regent's orders. Hungry for the Imperium's iron fist? Step right up.

That was what he thought, anyway.

----------

With the strategic direction locked in, Guilliman moved fast. He imdiately summoned every Ultramarines officer still breathing for an ergency eting in the great hall of the Fortress of Hera.

In any war spanning star systems, whoever seizes the information advantage first can snowball it into sothing unstoppable.

Guilliman fed his bewildered sons the key nodes and defensive strategies for the wars ahead. Chapter Master Calgar and Captain Agemman didn't even have ti to ask questions. They pulled out their tactical slates and transcribed every word their gene-father said, not missing a single syllable.

But this grand blueprint had one fatal problem.

Not enough n.

Even if they threw every Astartes on Macragge into the grinder, they still couldn't plug the gaps across that many fronts.

Guilliman was weighing whether to issue a galaxy-wide mobilization order and recall all Ultramarines successor chapters when his old friend of 10,000 years shuffled over. Archmagos Belisarius Cawl pushed forward on his massive chanical chassis, slow and unhurried.

The Archmagos threw down a trump card.

"The Astartes upgrade project you entrusted to ten millennia ago, by the Omnissiah's grace, it has yielded results."

There was sothing almost smug in Cawl's synthesized voice.

He disclosed to both Primarchs the existence of a brand-new fighting force: the Primaris Space Marines.

Genetically restructured. Taller than standard Astartes. Clad in the latest Mark X power armor. 10,000 of them, fully ard and ready to pull the plug and go straight into battle. And in hidden corners across the galaxy, more still slumbered.

Guilliman's face lit up.

This was a pillow delivered at the exact mont he'd started to doze.

The Lord of Ultramar decided on the spot. 5,000 Primaris warriors would stay behind to help Calgar and the others restart the Five Hundred Worlds. The remaining 5,000 would fold into his personal command and accompany him back to Holy Terra.

With soldiers in hand, Guilliman's bone-deep obsession with grand-scale order flared right back up.

He proposed rebuilding the original Legion structure. Horus disagreed.

The Wolf Shepherd's position was straightforward: the current Chapter system worked fine. No need to tear it down completely. Adjust it, update the Codex Astartes to keep pace with the tis, and move on. Wasting energy on a full restructure at this stage made no sense.

Guilliman considered it briefly, conceded that Horus's approach was the more prudent one, and imdiately put pen to paper. He added a stack of extrely flexible footnotes to the Codex, blurring the hard limit on company numbers beyond the original ten per Chapter.

The logic was simple enough. Cawl had Primaris Marines to spare. Horus was a loyal Primarch with a gene-seed that was, against all odds, astonishingly stable. Once the Five Hundred Worlds were rebuilt and the industrial machine running at full capacity, producing Astartes at the scale of 10,000 years ago was entirely achievable.

With strategy and tactics both settled, Cawl enthusiastically invited the two Primarchs to personally inspect the new generation of superhuman warriors.

Thousands of Primaris warriors stood in neat square formations. Their equipnt glead. Their muscles held an explosive power that made even veteran Astartes look modest by comparison.

The two demigods walked slowly along the front of the formations, nodding at the fresh forces arrayed before them.

Then a small incident completely fried their processing power.

At the very front of the formation stood a Primaris warrior of Captain rank.

He wore no helt. His face was strikingly handso.

His white hair was ticulously grood, almost aggressively perfect. The paint on his power armor carried a flamboyant purple-gold sheen. And every single ornant on his body was an ornate phoenix totem.

As Guilliman and Horus approached, the warrior placed a hand over his chest and bowed with exquisite elegance. The movent was flawless. His voice was smooth as silk.

"I salute you, great demigods."

Guilliman's footsteps stopped dead.

Horus's brow knotted into sothing that might never co undone.

That pride. That perfectionism. That insufferable artistic sensibility carved straight into the DNA. These two Primarchs knew it far too well.

"Cawl." Guilliman turned his head, voice low, eyes fixed on the Archmagos beside him. "Are you certain there was no mistake? Whose gene-seed does this warrior carry?"

Cawl's bionic eyes flickered. His synthesized voice rang out through the hangar with perfect, unhesitating calm.

"My lord, this warrior carries the pure gene-seed of the Seventh Primarch, Lord Rogal Dorn. He is an exceptionally outstanding son of the Imperial Fists."

Dorn's son.

He was calling this man, drenched in phoenix iconography from head to toe, with hair smoother than any woman's, a son of the Imperial Fists.

Guilliman and Horus turned to look at each other. Then they turned back to the white-haired warrior, who stood before them smiling with peerless, radiant elegance.

Neither of them said a word for a very long ti.

➤ Next: The Ga of Gods

— .—— .—— .—— .—— .——

Enjoying the story?

Read 60 chapters ahead on Patreon.

Join the free community tier for early access to the latest updates:

patreon(.)com/DarkGolds