Possessed by the Corpse Emperor?

The bridge of the Vengeful Spirit.

After Calgar lured Abaddon down to the surface with a duel, command of the Gloriana-class Battleship temporarily passed to the captain of Abaddon's Chaos Astartes First Company.

He wore immensely bulky Terminator Armour, with a vicious, pointed tusk jutting from either side of his helmet like a pair of iron elephant tusks.

Looking like a humanoid steel monster, the First Captain stood on the bridge, watching the densely packed boarding alerts projected before him.

Crewmen ran back and forth around him, while still more Chaos Astartes and armed Cultists surged from every corner of the enormous Vengeful Spirit, wave after wave, toward the isolated Imperial boarding parties.

Watching the red dots appear and vanish just as quickly, the First Captain showed only indifference behind his Terminator helmet and its two enormous "tusks."

"Imperial lapdogs. Die here, and you won't even make it back to the Corpse Emperor's side."

The First Captain surveyed these enemies launching suicidal attacks. But as his gaze swept across the enormous Vengeful Spirit, a red dot moving away from the bridge suddenly caught his attention.

"Why is there one... attacking in reverse?"

The First Captain paused. He hadn't called it retreating or routing, because once you had boarded the Chaos flagship, whichever direction you went counted as attacking.

But while the other Imperial forces were desperately assaulting the bridge, this force was moving away. After struggling for a while, "attacking in reverse" was the only explanation the First Captain could find.

But then he looked at the distance between its boarding point and its current position. The other Imperial boarding parties had been wiped out in moments, yet this red dot had actually crossed such a vast distance inside the Vengeful Spirit.

The First Captain's expression turned furious.

"Why haven't these Imperial lapdogs been exterminated yet?!"

He angrily demanded an answer from the Astartes adjutant beside him, who looked just as bewildered. The adjutant hurriedly contacted the front line, then paused. Amid the din coming through his earpiece, he frowned and repeated what he heard in broken fragments.

"What? What do you mean, possessed by the Corpse Emperor?"

"What do you mean, a bunch of you Astartes are being chased around and hacked at by a bunch of mortals???"

"Not a bunch? Just one?"

Perhaps the fighting on the other end of the communicator was too loud, because he repeated those words at extraordinary volume.

As he repeated those words with his head lowered, not only the First Captain but even the professional Chaos crewmen below, who never reacted no matter what happened, abruptly looked up.

Bang!

A bolt round blasted the first crewman to look up into pulp. As the smell of blood spread, the remaining crewmen hurriedly lowered their heads again.

After killing the crewman, the First Captain fixed the mechanical lenses behind his two enormous "tusks" on the adjutant.

The noise over the communicator cut off amid another piercing scream, and the friendly marker blocking the red dot on the projection vanished completely.

Under the First Captain's deathly silent stare, the adjutant couldn't help swallowing dryly and raising his head stiffly.

After struggling for a while, the adjutant gritted his teeth.

"New interception forces... are already on their way..."

The First Captain abruptly raised his hand, his powerful Terminator Armour hoisting the adjutant straight into the air.

As terror gripped the adjutant, the First Captain's furious voice finally thundered across the bridge.

"Do I care about new interception forces?!"

"I care about what the hell happened up there! And just how incompetent our men are!!!"

The First Captain's furious strength even crushed the adjutant's helmet out of shape. Gasping in terror behind it, the adjutant couldn't speak and could only send over all the relevant information.

Soon, information on this force called the "Black Watch" arrived, along with chaotic footage from the final moments of numerous armed crewmen and even Astartes.

As he reviewed the information, the First Captain finally released his grip on the adjutant.

But when the adjutant landed, he neither stood straight nor rejoiced. Instead, his whole body collapsed limply, and copious black blood poured from his badly deformed helmet.

The adjutant's death terrified the crewmen below even more, but the First Captain had no attention to spare for them. He merely stared blankly at the dark-silver figure in the footage, and at how hundreds of hot-shot rounds fired by the mortals behind him had all struck their Astartes with precision in less than a second.

Watching these absurd mortals, the First Captain suddenly recalled the mockery within their ranks of a small warband led by someone named Black Skull.

Now, for some reason, he suddenly felt that Black Skull, whom he had mocked, might really not have been incompetent...

To stand in for Abaddon in commanding the Vengeful Spirit, the First Captain was certainly more capable than Black Skull.

After only the briefest consideration, the First Captain almost immediately turned his attention away from the projection.

"Do not send any more Astartes against this enemy attacking in reverse. Use only mortals to wear them down."

"And send all this information to the Warmaster!"

The First Captain's orders were carried out immediately. Soon, the Astartes preparing to intercept the enemy at the front were recalled, while an encrypted message reached Abaddon below, who was hammering Calgar into submission.

The enormous, vicious Talon of Horus was about to take another of Calgar's arms. With nowhere left to dodge, Calgar was ready to accept his fate, but the claws suddenly stopped. Abaddon, who had been displaying the formidable combat prowess of the chosen of all four gods, actually paused for an instant.

Seeing this, Calgar hurriedly fell back to put some distance between them again. As for seizing the chance to counterattack, faced with such a terrifying disparity in strength, he dismissed the idea outright.

But as Calgar retreated, he looked at Abaddon with some confusion.

Besides Abaddon's strange pause, there was also the fact that even Abaddon had just involuntarily muttered two things.

"Black Watch?"

"Possessed by the Corpse Emperor?"

Abaddon was stunned by this message, and Calgar, who heard it from across from him, was likewise stunned, even somewhat shocked.

He was stunned that even Abaddon knew about Sith's Black Watch, and shocked that Sith and his men were still alive!

And also...

Even severely wounded, Calgar couldn't help frowning in confusion. What did he mean, "possessed by the Corpse..."

No! What did he mean, possessed by the God-Emperor???

The two giants below, one larger and one smaller, who had been fighting to the death, now both stood still because of this little interruption, under the eyes of countless onlookers on both sides.

And on their exposed faces, both showed the same astonishment, confusion, and even a little... shock!

At the same time that Abaddon and Calgar stopped fighting, numerous boarding craft suddenly shot out from one side of the Vengeful Spirit toward a nearby Imperial Sword-class Frigate, which trailed thick smoke and had survived this long through its agility.

Seeing that Sith's ultimate objective had actually been to lead his men in seizing boarding craft, and then board an Imperial warship, the First Captain finally understood after a brief moment of astonishment.

The First Captain gaped, unable to accept it. After all, how could such a powerful force do something so shameless?

He pointed at the projection in astonishment, his voice even trembling a little.

"How did they... board their way back again?!"

No one around the First Captain dared answer. Meanwhile, aboard the Sword-class Frigate being boarded by numerous Chaos boarding craft, the despairing crewmen were equally shocked to see Sith and the Black Watch leap out of them.

Eyes wide, a junior officer lowered the "flashlight" in his hands and wanted to ask the same question as the First Captain.

But just as he opened his mouth, the assault, which had already been nearing its end, was finally disrupted completely by a sudden blazing light!

Sith turned back in astonishment. An enormous explosion that tore straight through the Warp instantly erupted amid the densely packed battling fleets.

And the terrifying breach blasted open by that explosion was dragging every ship around it toward the surging tides of the Warp with tremendous suction!