Terra (39): Loyalists Among Traitors

Angron Tey realized that the timer inside his Power Armour had malfunctioned. → Before he killed Garlan Kusa, the timer showed him four hours and twenty-two minutes, but after he killed Garlan Kusa, the number turned into a string of incomprehensible characters.

It kept pulsating, changing every second, a chaotic mess that was terrifying. So Angron Tei turned off the timer. The effects of Chaos always begin to exert their power from the smallest details, just as all evils accumulate little by little.

He walked up to Garland Kusa and drew his Power Sword.

Night Lords provided the Aurelian's Sons with more weaponry options, not necessarily out of a sense of compensation, though perhaps there was some, but ultimately it was due to Angron Tai's stubbornness.

He insisted on participating in the battle, which the Night Lords naturally disagreed with. Konrad Curze Curze personally approached him three times for this reason, as did the venerable Roboute Guilliman —who not only allowed him to recruit soldiers at the Macragge's Honour but also proactively provided Roboute with supplies Roboute Guilliman.

Angron Thai, feeling guilty, refused the two Primarch, giving a simple reason.

"He will be here," said the Aurelian's Sons. "And we have no reason to be absent."

Thus, all rebuttals, debates, and dialogues vanished completely, like a closed window on Cogitator's desk. Of course, not all of them could actually come; some had to plan for the future. So the "Anchorite" was forced to stay behind.

He was furious about this and publicly cursed Angron Tey on several occasions until others subtly reminded him of Angron Tey's reasons for doing so, at which point he calmed down.

Reason?

The Aurelian's Sons sighed.

There is no reason, only that you are the most devout, Anchorite, so devout that you can completely ignore any gossip, and your loyalty to the Emperor is unmatched by any of us. Therefore, the newborn Aurelian's Sons needs you.

The idea was steeped in ruthless political considerations, which Angron Tei knew were sordid, but he had no time to dwell on them. He raised his sword, turned to leave, but heard a strange murmur.

Turning around, he saw a pair of eyes that had opened at some point. So Angron Te went back and walked to those eyes. He bent down, lifted the head he had personally severed, raised it, and looked into its eyes.

This head was once named Garlan Kusa, a priest of the 66th Assault Company of the Word Bearers. Now, he is one of the hundreds of thousands of traitors who need to be killed one by one by the Aurelian's Sons.

"He's watching you," Garland Kusa, or something else, opened its mouth and uttered the words with writhing black lips.

The Eight-pointed Star on his forehead was faintly glowing, casting an ominous light. Angron Tai squinted; he shouldn't have had any further conversation with this monster, but since it had mentioned him...

"We will give him peace," Angron Tei replied softly, his voice filled with determination.

To this, Garland Kusa's head merely revealed a cruel smile. His lips parted slightly, and his teeth slowly crumbled from his dark gums.

"There is no peace here, you foolish son of Lorgar. Here there is only war, death, and torment. This place has become a man-made hell, and you have chosen to step into it. Soon, you will see your own demon."

Angron Tai released his grip and crushed it with his foot. He did so with great force, great care, and great precision. He continued until he could no longer feel anything under his feet before turning to leave, while Night Lords and his brothers had been waiting for a long time.

Clad in grey armor, Lorgar's last loyal followers stood alongside the dark, blue blades of night in the thick fog, awaiting his end.

Shen Ying from the Fourth Company stepped forward.

"What did it say?" the young sergeant asked, his tone unchanged.

"Just repeating the same old tune." Angron Tai shook his head. "Devil, warning, very religious, like a third-rate priest with poor rhetoric."

"An interesting description." Shen Wei smiled slightly. "You seem to have learned quite a bit from Sevatarion."

"He could have taught me a lot, but he taught me how to tell these awful jokes," Angron Tey sighed. "Do you really think these jokes are funny?"

They began their march, heading through the dense fog to the next location steeped in corruption. The fog had become a kind of safeguard for their high-speed movement, like a special rapid deployment mechanism for individual soldiers, or a mystical version of an airdrop pod.

However, walking in the fog is not a comfortable experience; being inside feels like being frozen in ice, and every second is quite torturous.

"Sometimes, whether a joke is funny or not depends on where and when it's told, and the tone you choose," Shen began to explain intently. "These jokes are essentially just a kind of self-deprecating humor that we've reselected. Few people can accept the strange sense of humor in them, but you are one of them, Angron Tye."

Are you implying that I have a quirky sense of humor?

Shen smiled and didn't answer. They emerged from the thick fog and saw a half-ruined parade road. Terra used to be filled with these magnificent and grand buildings, but now it was destroyed, just like this parade road.

The bridge was destroyed, and charred vehicles and dead soldiers were scattered along the roadside. The gun emplacements on the artillery positions had their barrels twisted, and the heroic statues at both ends of the bridge were deliberately preserved and defiled. They were covered with blasphemous and obscene words and altered with blood and pieces of flesh.

Take, for example, the statue of General Gonzalo, the Auxilia combat hero whom Angron Te was also familiar with. His dignified and gloomy face is now comically smeared with blood, and his bronze eyes have been hollowed out, with two real eyeballs inserted instead.

At this moment, they are sitting in Gonzalo's eye sockets, quietly gazing at them.

"I smell something," Shen said softly. "I also heard something talking."

"Daemon?" Angron Tai raised his sword, and Night Lords and the Aurelian's Sons began to scatter and stand guard.

Needless to say, everyone knows what they should do.

Shen didn't answer, but instead sniffed intently, like a wild beast searching for its prey. The Nostramo's pale skin and high, narrow nose added a terrifying metaphor to this behavior, as if he truly were a humanoid beast.

Angron Ty couldn't help but stroke the hilt of his sword with his right hand. A thought that shouldn't have crossed his mind flashed through his head—had Konrad Curze Curze done the same under the night sky of Nostramo?

Hunting

His thoughts ended with Shen raising his gun. After a brief preheating, the plasma burst forth with a blinding burst of energy. It rushed toward the collapsed bridge surface, but then disappeared into the air like flowing water.

A massive network of Catalepsean Node suddenly appeared, and the world flipped upside down in an instant. Blood vessels, nerves, bones, and severed limbs were crudely stitched together, forming a colossal wall that blotted out the sky, blocking the bridge between them and the world.

Tens of thousands of meticulously fabricated faces filled the gaps between blood vessels; the victims were men and women, young and old. They were breathing painfully, as if they were not yet dead.

However, if you have keen enough observation skills or a deep enough understanding of human anatomy, you will discover that this wall of flesh and blood is actually their vanished corpses.

It's incredibly ironic, incredibly appalling, but the numbers do match. However, there's another matter that needs to be addressed.

Shen slowly put down the plasma in his hand.

"I must tell you, cousin—" He glanced at Angron Tey, turning his head—"I'm about to do something very irrational."

"I understand," said Angron Tye. "Believe me, I understand perfectly."

He stared at a spot on the wall of flesh, where arcs of electricity were already crackling on his Power Sword. There was a deliberately left blank space there, where someone had written a name, or rather, a signature, using building materials instead of flesh and blood.

That name is Samus.

At the same time, they heard a soft chuckle.

The Daemon "Samus" turned his laughter into maniacal raucous roar. "Samus is here!"

--

At times, Garviel Loken wishes he could reverse time, using some impossible power to push back the universe's timeline to the day Horus Lupercal was injured.

In this way, he can change all of this.

He can turn the tide before everything is beyond repair, thwart Erebus's plot, rebuke Ezekyle Abaddon's foolishness, and transform Horus Aximand's indecisiveness into true courage.

He can save everything, right? He can make...

"Snap out of it!" someone roared in his ear. "Eleven o'clock!"

Luna Wolves silently turned and decapitated a man with his Power Sword. Only after doing so did he realize he was panting heavily, as if he had been fighting continuously for over ten hours.

Perhaps that really is the case, Garviel Loken thought absentmindedly. Perhaps we've been fighting for tens of hours, hundreds of hours, even hundreds of years?

Time has no meaning here, just like our existence.

Son who attempted to kill his father

His idea was proven wrong just six minutes later, as the traitors were found and killed one by one in the trenches. Then came the post-battle statistics: Imperial Fists, 65 men; a detachment of War Hounds, 220 men; and a heavy weapons squad of Iron Hands, 33 men.

And them, Luna Wolves, twenty people.

Twenty people in a battle of this scale is a joke, but that's not the total number; there are other Luna Wolves fighting elsewhere in Terra.

There were only about three hundred of them, and they all participated in the battle—it wasn't a wise move, but you can't expect a group of Astartes who have lost their Gene-Father to maintain any semblance of sanity.

Especially when their "father" was still active in this area.

"We need to move to a different position," said Haren Kosen, commander of the Third Company of the War Hounds. "Those damned traitors don't care whether they win or not. These beasts just keep charging the position. I repeat, brothers, their goal isn't to win; they just want to fight us."

Half of his face had been replaced by machinery, but the remaining eye contained immense rage, creating a perfectly terrifying contrast with the red glow of the mechanical prosthetic eye.

"I'm afraid there isn't another well-fortified position within several kilometers for us to relocate to, Company Commander Harun," said one of the Imperial Fists. "Probably in a few days."

He paused, looking somewhat confused, but continued, "Or perhaps a dozen or so hours ago, the nearby positions had already been bombed."

"Bombing?" War Hounds frowned. "You mean they've gained air superiority?"

"No, it was artillery barrage," Imperial Fists said. "It started with a Cultists mass charge; they used this tactic to divert our attention. By the time the deadly artillery barrage arrived, few of us had time to retreat to the bunkers beneath the trenches, and that's how many positions were destroyed."

"This sounds like a tactic," the War Hounds commander said thoughtfully. "And in my observation, all the traitors we've encountered so far have been nothing more than a pack of beasts driven by instinct. This means the instigator still possesses a clear mind capable of executing tactics, and subordinates who can carry out his orders."

He couldn't help but glance at Garviel Loken, Luna Wolves nodded silently, tacitly agreeing with his unspoken conjecture. He was grateful for Haren Kosen's ambiguity, but some things needed to be made clear.

"I think it was probably done by the Sons of Horus," Garviel Loken said.

His first words immediately set the atmosphere on ice. These venerable warriors—whether Imperial Fists, War Hounds, Destroyer of the Iron Hands, or even his own brothers—began to stare at him with complex expressions.

"That's not hard to deduce," Garviel Loken continued. "Of the three betraying legions, the Word Bearers have been utterly destroyed by their own corrupted faith, reduced to beasts, manipulated by Daemon into mindless zombies."

"The Alpha Legion doesn't seem to be on Terra at all, and even if they were, this style of play wouldn't suit them. The Sons of Horus, on the other hand, I think, probably still have complete company-level organization and are very well-equipped. Only they have the capability and discipline to execute similar tactics."

"However, if it was indeed them who did it, I hope you will all be on high alert from now on. Because their attacks are often interconnected, leaving the enemy no chance to breathe."

"Understood." Haren Kosen nodded. "Thank you, Garviel Loken."

Garviel Loken's words came true just before the next battle, six hours later, if his biological clock was not mistaken.

The first person to discover the enemy's arrival was Herold of the Imperial Fists, and he was also the first to die, his head blown into a bloody mist by a precise sniper bullet.

While Garviel Loken was busy strangling a Word Bearers, Garviel Loken glanced up and, before he could even grieve for the Sons of Dorn, saw a group of very familiar figures through the blood-stained peephole in the trench.

And someone he knew very well.

Ezekyle Abaddon.

Anger surged immediately.

Update complete. I'll take a couple of days off, then resume the intensive update mode.