Take Your Conspiracy to My Ship Cannons!

"Tell the Beastmen Infantry Regiment to guard those xenos devices and send the bodies of our fallen brothers to the warship." Sandman ordered.

After two days of slaughter, the Raven Guard had finally cleared out a large area, making the deployment of heavy firepower far more flexible.

With an overwhelming advantage secured, the Beastmen Infantry Regiment (Solar Auxilia) joined the purge of the Krav Xenos. Earlier, to prevent the enemy's psychic enslavement, only the Raven Guard and the Adeptus Mechanicus's legions had entered the battlefield—the Mechanicus had no fear of xenos skilled in mind control.

The Raven Guard's strategy of striking everywhere on Canta IX left the Krav Xenos with no means to resist. Without the support of their space fleet, any large-scale troop concentration was merely feeding the enemy kills.

The Krav Xenos could only huddle in the cramped hive city, waging brutal urban warfare. From the sky, ground-targeting Lances from small warships fell intermittently, making the enemies cowering in the hive tremble—even Titan-class units couldn't withstand a single direct Lance strike from a frigate.

The labyrinthine terrain of the hive city couldn't stop the Raven Guard's advance. Even when the xenos fled into the deep, shadowy underhive, the Raven Guard rooted them out from the sewers. Darkness itself was the Raven Guard's home ground.

War never ceased. War continued.

The Emperor had inscribed absolute hatred for xenos into the very genes of the Astartes at their creation. The Raven Guard carried out the most thorough policy of extermination against them. Even later, when traitorous Chaos worshippers encountered loyal Astartes on a planet with xenos present, both sides would tacitly kill the xenos first.

How could the joke of humanity's civil war be watched by petty xenos?

"Damn the psychic powers! I'll slaughter every last one of these ugly bats—not a single one left!" Arendi roared, watching his guardsman fall in battle.

Moments ago, they had encountered an elite Krav Xenos unit. One of them had fired a devastating Warp Energy Bolt from a dark corner with an Extermination Carbine. If his guardsman hadn't shoved Arendi away, he would have been the one on the ground.

The next second after that Krav Xenos opened fire, a roaring heavy bolter turned the ugly bat into a pile of shredded meat.

In the brutal warfare of this interstellar age, exposure meant destruction.

"Found you, human commander!" A jarring voice suddenly sounded beside Arendi Sandman. A surge of powerful psychic energy erupted, and dozens of elite Krav Xenos teleported directly in front of Arendi's command squad via psychic transmission. A wave of mental force, nearly tangible, crashed toward Arendi.

"Kill them all!" The moment the enemies appeared, Arendi's Storm Bolter spat deadly flames. But these foes were far stronger than the previous ones. A barrier woven from psychic power and mental energy blocked all incoming bolts, and the Krav Xenos had already closed into melee range, locking the Raven Guard in chaotic close combat.

"Submit to us, wretched food!" The Krav Xenos commander began psychic enslavement while the Raven Guard couldn't fire. Not only that, another ripple of psychic teleportation surged across the field—another unit of xenos enslavers appeared, their formidable mental power pressing relentlessly into the Raven Guard locked in life-or-death combat.

It was a trap, set specifically to enslave Arendi's frontline unit.

"Embrace your death, filthy xenos!" Arendi swung his Power Sword, cleaving two xenos blocking his path into four pieces. If he could hold out just a little longer, reinforcements would arrive. The moment he realized it was a trap, Arendi activated the Psionic Beacon on his Terminator armor. Once the beacon was detected, help would come—Ironclad Terminators, Saturnine Terminators, or other units.

"Hold the line!" Arendi shouted into the comm channel to his comrades. The enemy's mental power wove countless false memories, flooding his mind. The Krav Xenos' enslavement combined psychic and mental energy to forcibly implant these memories into a chosen target's brain, achieving control.

But this method took longer against Astartes, whose willpower was formidable. They preferred enslaving mortals—their fragile minds were instantly subjugated. As for the livestock raised from birth to believe the Krav Xenos were their masters, enslavement was even faster.

"Destroy their helmets!" The Krav commander overseeing the enslavement quickly sensed something wrong. These enemies, encased in iron cans, couldn't possibly have such strong willpower. He was straining with all his might, yet they still resisted stubbornly—their leader even managed to counter-kill elite Krav soldiers.

The xenos commander soon realized the problem. Even if the helmets weren't the issue, destroying them would speed up enslavement, allowing him to extract intelligence from these powerful foes. Arendi's identity seemed significant—perhaps he could plant a Krav Xenos spy within humanity's military and absorb this force. Just imagining that terrifying power made the Krav commander tremble with excitement.

"Get excited in your next life!" A cold voice suddenly rang in the Krav commander's ears as he fantasized about successfully controlling Arendi. A Power Sword slashed across his neck, and his head rolled onto the smoke-choked ground. At the same time, the assisting Krav Xenos had their skulls blown apart by bolter fire.

"Are you alright, Brother Arendi?" Sharojin, clad in standard Power Armor, ordered his squad to melt into the shadows on guard, then helped the gasping Arendi up with concern.

"If not for you, I'd have really screwed up this time. Those damned xenos elites gathered their psychic power and nearly blew my mind apart." Arendi shook his Terminator helmet violently, trying to shake the jumbled memories from his head.

"I happened to be on reconnaissance in this area. I received your distress signal and rushed over. Lucky I made it in time." Sharojin said to Arendi.

"Order the troops to halt their advance. Wait until the other fronts push forward before moving." Arendi commanded his unit to stop and resupply.

"Sharojin, what's the situation ahead? We should be pushing into the hive's core zone." Arendi glanced at the feedback from his Terminator's Augur Array and asked. As the chapter's scout, Sharojin had fully impressed the Terran veteran instructors over the past few days, earning the authority to freely command his squad on reconnaissance.

"The situation isn't good. The hive's core zone is shrouded in an ominous Warp energy field. Even I can't penetrate that layer of Warp energy to see what's inside." Sharojin reported this information to Arendi.

"Let's go take a look." Arendi checked the command platform—the follow-up troops had caught up to the front—and began advancing again.

Arendi's squad merged with Sharojin's and moved along the route toward the hive's core. Along the way, they purged Krav Xenos while linking up with other units.

At this stage of the war, the Raven Guard's various units were like the trawling nets of Old Terra's ocean fishing, dragging from the periphery toward the center. All Krav Xenos along the way were annihilated.

"Halt!" Arendi stared at the thick, ominous purple-black Warp energy before him and ordered the troops to stop.

"Fire a Disintegration Cannon at that spot!" Arendi commanded, pointing at the Warp Energy Field covering dozens of kilometers.

Wum!

The Disintegration Cannon's distinctive hum rang out. A pale blue beam slammed into the distant Warp Energy Field. The cannon, which normally reduced structures within its target range to particles, achieved nothing—the Warp had clearly twisted space and time within.

"Pull the troops back!" Sandman arrived, looked at the Warp Energy Field before him, and smiled. Korax had once said something in the chapter that fit this moment perfectly.

"The first principle of victory is: don't go where the enemy wants you to go."

"Styx, overload the main cannon. Have your fleet fire a shot at these coordinates!" Sandman decided to use his flagship's main gun to deliver a heavy blow to the Krav Xenos.

Take your schemes and tricks to my ship's cannon!

"As you command, my master." In orbit, the Styx's secondary engines spewed pale blue flames as the ship adjusted its posture. Other warships cleared the firing lane for the Styx's fleet. The massive Death Ray at the bow aimed at the coordinates Sandman had provided.

Energy from the ship's reactor poured through colossal conduits into the Death Ray. The familiar purple-black light gathered at the bow, and then a unique beam of the same color descended from the sky, slamming into the Warp Energy Field covering dozens of kilometers.

Pop! A sound like a bubble bursting echoed in the air. The Warp Energy Field, which had redirected the Disintegration Cannon's shot to some unknown place, shattered. Purple Warp energy slowly dissipated, revealing the hive's core zone, previously hidden in the fog of war.

"Krav Xenos... they must die!" Sandman's voice turned ice-cold as he saw the scene before him. The air around him began to freeze, frost forming. Since arriving in this universe, his bloodlust had never burned so fiercely!