Interlude: The Crow Takes Flight.
The first priority was to secure the home front before dealing with outside threats. Judging by how bad things could get, the Guilliman Heresy universe might actually be a little better off than Hogg's home. At least it hadn't spawned a Great Rift, and its Chaos Gods were a whole lot weaker.
There were more Primarchs in rebellion here, but every last one was a brain-dead slacker. The loyalists, by contrast, were stronger across the board. As for how things had ended up this way, all I could say was that the Imperium of Man had its own unique circumstances.
As true veterans of the eternal grind, the Iron Warriors Third Company, where Dantioch served, were practically half children of Blackwatch. Aside from their extraordinary height, you couldn't tell them apart from Blackwatch troopers. They even had the same innocent expressions.
The Third Company's exact roster was fluid, too. Perturabo might not say it aloud, but he and Hogg were brothers who shared a pair of pants—an exemplary wife at his side.
Thanks to their inherited mastery, the Iron Warriors and Imperial Fists had been locked in a fierce rivalry. They'd once been able to rig the game through Blackwatch, but now that the Imperial Fists had awakened their Waaagh! Power, they had no choice but to retreat to the sidelines and go build bunkers elsewhere.
But the Dark Portal had opened up a whole new blue ocean market. As long as those Cloaked Cockroaches from Blackwatch were around, you could always count on seeing giant Little Bees clad in yellow-and-black stripes.
What a boy couldn't have in his youth would haunt him for the rest of his life. When Hogg was young and wandering the wilderness of Alicia, he'd loved scavenging. Nobody wanted trash,