Dead Titan

The sudden Ultramarines reinforcements threw the Word Bearers into disarray. The Shadowswords fired without pause, blasting every detected Word Bearers vehicle unit into the sky.

There had always been a consensus in military circles: anti-vehicle weapons were often even more effective when used against infantry.

Even Space Marines fared little better than mortal auxilia when facing a heavy tank at an advantageous range that had already locked onto them.

The loyalists' fury rang across the battlefield. The Word Bearers' losses skyrocketed in a short time, forcing them to assume a defensive posture and retreat for the moment. Once the Space Marines withdrew, the morale of the Word Bearers' mortal cultists finally collapsed as well.

No matter how their leaders encouraged or threatened them, the Warp entities they chanted to seemed to grow ever weaker. They scattered in all directions, only to fall like stalks of straw beneath the unceasing pursuit of enemy fire. Corpses lay everywhere, mingled with the civilians they had slaughtered.

"Captain Sedans! We've finally been waiting for you!"

Ventanus's heart surged. He had held out until the reinforcements arrived. The Ultramarines elsewhere shared the same unspoken understanding: they were reorganizing, gathering, and sounding the horn for a counterattack.

Calth had suffered dreadful casualties, and the Ultramarines had bled dry as well.

The reinforcements led by Captain Sedans were in fact a mixed force, composed of scattered remnants of the Eighth, Third, and Ninth Companies. At this moment, they cast aside the Legion's prescribed ways of war, using the lessons learned in this brutal conflict to revise the Ultramarines' doctrines of battle.

The Word Bearers could not destroy the Ultramarines Legion. Though the Ultramarines had suffered too many casualties and sacrifices over the past days, the Word Bearers' expectations had still been shattered.

They had employed every method at their disposal. Whether betrayal in space or traps on the ground, they could only wound the Ultramarines, not kill them.

They had already held the XIII Legion's strength in extremely high regard, yet reality had made one thing clear: they had still underestimated the Ultramarines.

Worse still, though gravely wounded, the Ultramarines had been utterly enraged by pain and hatred. The fire of vengeance burned throughout the Calth system, and the Ultramarines' counterattack was turning the entire war against the Word Bearers.

To reverse their disadvantage on the local battlefield, enormous Titan engines appeared some fifty kilometers southeast of the Universal Museum.

The Ultramarines' auspex detected the Titans. Even amid the chaos of the battlefield, the advance of Titan engines remained impossible to miss.

"It's a Warlord Titan, accompanied by two Reaver Titans!"

Ventanus roared. Those were Titans, the absolute pinnacle of surface warfare.

Moreover, these were not reconnaissance Titans such as Warhound Titans, but true battle Titans. They were the Imperium's most commonly deployed Titan engines, equipped with adamantium armor and six void shield generators. Their Volcano Cannons and triple heavy laser blasters were enough to sweep away any enemy on the ground.

They were capable of breaking through the Universal Museum's void shield defenses and obliterating this stronghold from dozens of kilometers away with long-range firepower.

"Where are our Titans?"

No one could answer, because even if any of the XIII Legion's Titan engines had survived, they had surely been marked as priority targets and were being hunted down by the enemy.

"We can't let them get any closer. Once Titan engines enter the battlefield, even Space Marines will only end up vaporized by a single shot."

Ventanus looked at the two newly arrived Shadowsword super-heavy tanks before him, his mind racing as he considered the possibility of ambushing the Titan engines with them.

The odds were too low. Though super-heavy tanks did have a chance of severely damaging Titan engines, that was only after overloading their void shields, and they had far too few tanks.

Inside the Universal Museum.

Lox, who had been treating the wounded alongside Tassa of the Salamanders, suddenly froze. An alarm from the starship in orbit rang through his mind.

Titan unit detected

Evacuation recommended

He was not ignorant of the battlefield's situation. He had merely chosen to maintain a relatively neutral stance.

When he awoke from his ten-thousand-year slumber and saw what humanity had become, Lox's state of mind had already begun to falter.

His starship was humanity's ark for the end of days, entrusted to him by the Chief. He absolutely could not recklessly send it into battle, or no one could know whether the enemy might suddenly produce some relic weapon capable of threatening it.

The traitors calling themselves the Word Bearers were certainly repulsive, but the Imperial loyalists represented by the Ultramarines were only marginally better.

They were all genetically modified warriors created by that Emperor.

This Imperium reeked of ignorance, feudalism, and anti-intellectualism.

Thus, Lox had only chosen to lend the Ultramarines a hand out of sympathy for the innocent humans on this planet.

But after traveling with them for some time, Lox had gradually come to feel that these warriors known as Astartes were not merely unfeeling tools of slaughter. Nykona dreamed of seeing humanity's homeworld; Iron Father Wayland was unable to pull himself free from grief over the death of his gene-father; Tassa of the Salamanders treated the wounded without pause, even when they were nothing more than ordinary mortals.

And Captain Ventanus, whom he had met only once, had been leading the Ultramarines against the attacks of those maddened enemies. They were bleeding.

"Fine, fine." Lox let out a long sigh. He knew the Ultramarines could not stop those war machines called Titans.

His ship did possess devastating technological weapons held in reserve. A single vacuum implosion bomb capable of creating a singularity would be enough to destroy every one of those Titans.

But weapons did not distinguish friend from foe. Loyalists and traitors across the entire planet had long since become intertwined, and an indiscriminate strike would instead inflict severe losses upon the loyalists.

He considered it for two seconds and decided to use a gentler method.

The Red Alert silently appeared from orbit. It was invisible to every warship's scanning arrays, and neither side, locked in fierce combat, noticed the arrival of a small starship.

A metal obelisk over three meters tall fell from space. The field emitters around it erased air resistance, preventing it from dropping like a meteor as a drop pod would.

The Titan engines marched past nearby, their steps sending rhythmic tremors through the ground. The void shields of these war machines linked together, blocking the sporadic artillery fire that emerged from the ruins.

Besides Ventanus, many other loyalists were trying to halt the Titans' advance.

The creations of the Machine God slightly turned their cranial sensor arrays, instantly locking onto the source of the fire. The Volcano Cannons held in their arms began to charge, gleaming like molten lava.

The world was illuminated in an instant. The Volcano Cannons transformed an entire stretch of ruins into a land of death flowing with molten magma and glass crystals.

Kill confirmed.

Inside the Titan engine's cockpit, the Word Bearers Titan princeps convulsed madly.

His limbs had been severed, and his entire body was immersed in an amniotic tank. Through neural shock units, he was linked to the Titan's frenzied Machine Spirit.

The Titan's Machine Spirit was so savage and unruly that the princeps struggled to restrain it with the aid of the control crew.

Within the amniotic tank, the princeps felt that the entire Titan was himself. His hands had become Volcano Cannons, his senses extended into the auspex, and his skin had transformed into a thick adamantium shell, completely shedding humanity's weaknesses.

The Titan's Machine Spirit inflicted immense pressure and pain upon his mind, yet that seemingly omnipotent sensation of connection made him unable to stop.

He failed to notice that beside the Titan, a small metal obelisk suddenly released an invisible radiance.

A devastating electromagnetic pulse pierced the void shields and instantly overloaded the Titan's Machine Spirit. The brains of the princeps, the control crew, and the Servitors inside the cockpit boiled as torrents of electrical sparks erupted.

It was as though the Titan engine had suddenly had its soul torn away. The next step it had taken remained suspended for a long while before falling.

Without a sound, the Titan had already fallen.

"What happened? Why have those Titans stopped moving?"

Ventanus, who was rushing to intercept the Titans, suddenly noticed that the blips on the auspex had remained motionless for some time. They had no idea what had happened.

Had the Titan pilots been killed by their frenzied Machine Spirits? Or had other Ultramarines penetrated the void shields and beheaded the crews in their cockpits?

Ventanus did not know, but his keen instincts for war sensed an outside force intervening in the battle.

This was too much of a coincidence.

Besides the Ultramarines and the Word Bearers, was there a third party on Calth?

The Ultramarines captain cast a long look at the Titan standing at the edge of his vision like a dead metal tower, then changed his decapitation plan.

The war continued, but Ventanus and the others finally had time to catch their breath. They returned to the Universal Museum's shelters and treated their injuries with the help of the Salamanders and mortal medical personnel.

Thanks to Lox's assistance, medical supplies such as bandages and medicine were not in short supply. The starship in orbit continuously produced these emergency supplies and delivered them to the Universal Museum by teleportation.

"We recovered the kill-code from the port. With Ultramarines escorting us, we didn't encounter much trouble."

Senior Tech-priest Tauren and the others had also returned from the port. After learning that Hurst had hidden the compiled kill-code there, they had reached the target site with the assistance of an Ultramarines squad and successfully recovered their mission objective.

The kill-code was uploaded into the transmitter. The starship far above in orbit immediately loaded this weapon specifically designed to counter Chaos Scrapcode. Supported by the Cogitator's processing power, Calth's shattered thought-space, almost as ruined as the surface itself, was beginning to revive.

"Lox, you—" Ventanus looked at the busy Lox and started to say something, but ultimately swallowed his doubts.

"The influence of the Chaos Scrapcode is continuously weakening, Captain." Seeing Ventanus return, a smile appeared on Lox's face. "With the number of Ultramarines now assembled, and if we can gain the support of Macragge's Honour, there is a high chance we can retake the Weapon Array in orbit."

"But the flagship isn't responding." Ventanus spoke softly. He set aside his suspicions. At this moment, who had destroyed those Titans no longer mattered.

He understood that the battle in space was equally brutal. Even the primarch had ceased responding.

In such circumstances, blindly assaulting the Weapon Array would only be reckless. Ventanus ordered the assembled Ultramarines to continue searching for survivors around the Universal Museum and absorb any arriving warriors, while also ordering the Senior Tech-priest to call the flagship once every thirty seconds.

"This is the surface of Calth. Calling the flagship!"

"This is the surface of Calth. Calling the flagship!"