Meanwhile, as Sanguinius received the two defecting agents and hurried toward the Cabal's main hive ship, the colossal vessel that had sunk beneath the sea was rapidly rising toward the surface.
This hive ship, which combined the technologies of countless races, could evade the physical and psychic scans of Imperial warships, and could even directly reshape a planet's terrain, now faced an urgent threat.
It... was leaking.
The Cabal had considered many dangers their hive ship might encounter, but they had never imagined that one day, a leak would become a fatal threat.
Because some of the vessel's controllers had forcibly detached their sections in order to flee, this combined warship the size of a hive city was greedily swallowing seawater like a submarine with a ruptured hull.
The once-calm sea had long since become a raging vortex. Vast sheets of floating ice were being sucked down, while drowned T'au corpses occasionally floated up from the seabed.
Worse still, Guilliman had personally led numerous cloned primarchs into the undersea battlefield, launching a simple and brutal boarding assault against the Cabal's main hive ship.
Astartes rarely fought in ocean environments. In most circumstances, they were elite troops active on space battlefields or across the surface of worlds.
But that did not mean Astartes could not fight underwater. Their repeatedly upgraded power armor had long been capable of moving freely at high speed beneath the sea.
On the contrary, the underwater environment was the real threat to the Cabal hive ship. Massive amounts of seawater were corroding the colossal vessel's systems and conduits. The longer it remained submerged, the greater the damage it suffered.
Moreover, with flooding raging through the vessel, the Cabal's defensive forces simply could not organize an effective resistance.
They only saw vague figures seemingly carried in by the