After a while, the Archmagos lifted Magnus's head. His respect and awe for a Primarch suppressed his urge to study it properly. In the High Gothic he rarely used, and spoke somewhat awkwardly, he called to Magnus, whose eyelids were trembling.
Several seconds later, Magnus opened his eyes and had the Archmagos organize a team to send him to Leman Russ.
Twelve hundred li east of the Imperium's administrative territory, at the temporary encampment of the Imperium's central army group, Leman Russ paced back and forth inside the command post. He was waiting for the northern and southern army groups to reach their combat positions. They had already more or less destroyed half of the Ork Federation. The illegal demi-humans they had killed numbered in the tens of millions. The walls of city after city had been blasted down, thousands of homes flattened. Wherever the Imperial army went, no survivors were left.
Yet this overly rapid advance left Leman Russ troubled. More and more reports proved that the enemy had a special force operating in secret. They were gathering things from the piles of corpses that Leman Russ could not see.
Worse still, quite a few of the newly conscripted Imperial mobilization troops had been killed or wounded during this swift offensive. Their souls seemed to have been taken along with them.
The eastern lands were far broader than those in the west, causing Imperial forces to become increasingly scattered the deeper they advanced.
The battle-hardened, well-trained Imperial auxiliary forces could still rely on their own strength to complete the extermination of demi-humans with relatively light casualties. But the Imperial auxiliary forces found that difficult. They could even lose the courage to fight after their officers were killed and flee all the way to the rear, only regaining their composure