Horus walked toward the Stormbird gunship, surrounded by his Royal Guard.
As he turned, no one saw his tightly clenched left fist loosen slightly. His brow, too, creased almost imperceptibly.
The persistent, stabbing pain in his left arm grew clearer after the battle ended and the exhilarating effect of [Glory of Bloodshed] began to fade.
It felt as though ten thousand tiny insects were burrowing through his bones.
The scheme hadn't failed completely...
Liu Zhipeng smiled bitterly to himself. Mortarion had still managed to leave a "souvenir" inside his body.
He had to deal with this hidden threat as soon as possible. But not in front of anyone. He needed somewhere completely private and secure.
After returning to the Unyielding Spirit, Horus immediately shut himself in his private chambers, claiming he needed rest.
He stripped off his badly damaged Power Armour, revealing a physique as perfect as a sculpture from Ancient Greece.
Yet that perfection now bore a flaw.
The skin around the cut on his left arm had turned an unnatural, pallid white. On closer inspection, he could see black-green fibers as fine as hairs pulsing slowly beneath the skin.
Horus tried to marshal the power within his body to expel them, but with little success. They were extraordinarily tenacious, like poisonous weeds rooted deep in his flesh. Whenever he burned away a patch, new ones soon grew in their place.
This was trouble...
Liu Zhipeng frowned deeply. He knew that, left untreated, this thing would not kill him in the short term, but it would act like a permanent debuff, continually weakening his bodily functions. Against stronger enemies in the future, it would become a fatal vulnerability.
Meanwhile, far away in the void, Perturabo watched the recording of the entire battle, again and again.
His bionic eye flickered