Anger

The bolters roared, but Daemon Serindal no longer took any damage. Psychic power surged, and the shield grew tougher.

The tentacles lashed out in succession, directly blocking the great hammer crashing toward him. However, the psychic lightning covering Chief Librarian Asteris's hammer exploded like ice water dropped into a pan of scorching oil.

The scattered psychic lightning shot out at once, winding around Daemon Serindal's tentacles like spirit serpents before climbing up his torso.

The destructive energy erupted directly, causing the psychic power within Daemon Serindal's body to tremble. It lasted less than half a second, but the psychic shield instantly weakened. Countless shells then came screaming in, shattering it and viciously knocking the hovering Daemon Serindal down to the ground.

By then, however, the Noise Marines forming a perimeter in the other directions had also charged this way. Their Sonic Blasters clearly weren't very useful in this kind of close-quarters, one-on-one fight, so they drew bolters covered in profane symbols and Chainswords.

Some daemons were mixed in among them as well, rushing over with weapons in hand.

This was no longer a battlefield for mortals, whether loyalist or traitor. They had already been completely depleted in the battles before this.

Quan Tiehua drew the Karl-type Bolter at his waist with one hand. After its modifications, its extreme range, combined with the physique of a Codex Astartes Space Marine, allowed him to pick off the distant Noise Marines one by one.

The Chief Librarian brought his hammer down again, but Daemon Serindal dodged it just in time.

The Heavy Bolter in Quan Tiehua's hands opened fire once more. His terrifying arm strength allowed him to wield the Heavy Bolter in one hand and a Kor-pattern bolter in the other, suppressing two battlefields by himself.

The Noise Marines didn't charge straight in to passively take the beating, either. They quickly hid behind cover and fired back at him.

At that moment, Quan Tiehua stood in the open, practically a living target.

Countless bolter rounds marked with Chaos symbols focused their fire on Quan Tiehua, but several figures flashed in front of him the next second. Their boarding shields firmly blocked the incoming fire.

They were the Battle-Brothers who had retreated. They had been unwilling to leave, and the pride of the Astartes would not allow them to abandon their brother while they fled to safety.

Thus, many Battle-Brothers secretly slowed their pace, broke away from the formation, and came here to reinforce them.

At the same time, Chapter Master Affos and the others were still running, but they had also settled on their objective. They began setting traps along the way and searching for suitable positions from which to make a last stand against the enemy.

The Tech-Sergeant was still desperately trying to restore communications with the ships. However, because of the interference from warp psychic power, even though the two ships were separated by less than half an asteroid belt, the communications remained nothing but harsh static.

Quan Tiehua looked at the brothers who had come to reinforce him, and for some reason, an emotion welled up inside him. Ever since he had come to this universe, he had mostly treated it like a game.

But then this battle had suddenly erupted. The instructors who usually taught, reprimanded, and trained him, along with the brothers who were always fooling around, had died one after another before his eyes.

The indifferent attitude in his heart slowly changed. Perhaps he had considered himself an outsider who knew everything, which was why he could mock the Emperor without restraint.

But when the scenes and events he had only heard about in his previous life appeared before him in reality, that indifference gradually subsided. He began to face them squarely and think about them.

And later came the anger.

"What the fuck is this dump? Fuck you, heavens! You dragged me here—what the fuck is this dump?" Quan Tiehua surged toward the retreating passage together with the brothers who had come to reinforce him.

The weapons in his hands kept firing, but ancient Old Terra speech rang out inside his helmet. The people around him couldn't understand it, but they could clearly hear the anger it contained.

When Daemon Serindal heard that voice, he also sensed the heavy negative emotion within it. He seductively pressed his slender, pink, pointed tongue against his lips, and his eyes suddenly lit up.

He turned his head toward Quan Tiehua, who was still retreating into the passage. "Catch him. The Lord of Pleasure wants him."

In an instant, every gaze turned toward Quan Tiehua.

He froze for a moment, but fury immediately surged into his brain. Without hesitation, he shouted, "Come and get me if you've got what it takes!" His bolter opened fire, sweeping across the Noise Marines, and he taunted them, "Your Primarch daddy sure treated you well. I hear he let your chief Apothecary use alien genes to create a bunch of bastard freaks like you. That's pretty damn strange. So tell me, are you really using your Primarch's seed?"

This was an unspeakable secret of the Noise Marines—or rather, of the Emperor's Children Legion as a whole.

Toward the end of the Great Crusade, the chief Apothecary Fabius Bile used the genes of the alien Lel, combined with biotechnology, to create a brand-new breed of Noise Marine.

As a result, there had always been controversy over whether the Noise Marines' genetic lineage was truly pure.

So, in a sense, it was reasonable to say they were not seeded by the Primarch Fulgrim.

Moreover, after humanity's war against the AI, the betrayal of the alien races during humanity's period of decline had caused both the later Chaos forces and the Imperium to place their hatred of aliens above all else.

Using this issue to mock them was, as one could imagine, practically dancing on the edge of a blade.

Sure enough, those words had stirred up a hornet's nest. The Noise Marines, who had still been somewhat dazed, charged forward in a blazing fury the moment they heard them. Ignoring the storm of gunfire, they roared as they tried to kill Quan Tiehua, who was spewing such filth.

The several Battle-Brothers guarding him also looked at him in astonishment, wondering how he could possibly know something like that.

Quan Tiehua paid them no attention. He continued retreating and firing as he went, then continued, "I hear you worship that so-called Lord of yours. So tell me, at some of those banquet parties, when your Primarch and you got together, which one of you took the receiving end?"

The moment he said this, all the Astartes on the Imperial side froze for a moment. Before they could react and understand what he meant, Quan Tiehua immediately continued, "Could it be that you were the ones taking it? In that case, with bodies as small as yours, was he like those Ork squig kebabs, stringing every one of you up? My God, I can't imagine how many of you must have died. So I strongly suspect you were all born from those alien races."

The Chief Librarian and the group of Battle-Brothers: "..."

As Astartes, their thinking and reaction speeds were extremely fast. But how were they supposed to describe words like these? Their brains all fell into a state of total shutdown.

In short, their CPUs overloaded and burned out.

Even the Noise Marines charging forward in fury froze for a moment. Then they charged over even more furiously, their faces twisting with rage. The sinister, savage armor on their bodies even began to mutate.

Daemon Serindal stopped halfway through his charge. Looking at the enraged Noise Marines charging below, he felt a little uneasy for the first time.