Chapter 443: Ouroboros: I'm Going to Die! Typhus: I Died Twice!
Throat sacs long since mutated into living bio-organs howled the echoes of war.
The crowd began to scatter in panic, grabbing weapons. Tentacles or arthropod limbs reattached armor and helmets that had been shed earlier as the "little animals" swelled and pulsed.
Typhus wished someone could tell him what was happening and where he should go.
But he already knew the answer to the first question, and the answer to the second question didn't matter to anyone.
The first explosion, accompanied by lance strikes hitting the outer perimeter of the Terminus Est, kicked up a massive amount of debris. The distant roar of bombardment, carried by these fragments, scraped against the surroundings like a gale. Typhus saw the enemy. Beneath him, swarms of soldiers surged along the banks of a wide, deep valley filled with creep, flooding into guard posts and gun emplacements. The enemy formed a tight phalanx, launching an attack on the spaceport from the west within Caliban's gravity well.
More shells and beams crisscrossed in the void.
Counter-fire began to erupt from the turrets of ships deployed around the Terminus Est, spewing dense rain of munitions.
Tight. Without many flaws.
The image of the Invincible Reason emerged from the scrying pool, along with this entire fleet.
The Dark Angels' ships still bore some scars of battle, but they didn't seem to be slaughtering each other as expected. Caliban remained intact, not reduced to ruins.
The indestructible fleet pressed forward under a unified command.
"..."
This is not what was promised!
Typhus knew he perhaps should leave this area, return to the Eye of Terror, and avoid all this. He looked back at the magnificent outline of the Nurgle rift behind him, unable to understand why Grandfather Nurgle would give him a mission with zero chance of survival.
But after just one glance, he started running with the soldiers.
He came here with a mission. As a servant of the Plague God, running away wouldn't achieve anything.
"Sigh~"
Nurgle sighed.
At first, he intended to tear open a rift to cause strife between the two Dark Angels legions, plunging them into chaos, severely damaging the Dark Angels while also bringing back his killed Typhus.
Next, he lowered his standards, planning to rely on Luther—who was highly bound to Caliban and had accepted the Grandfather of the Four Gods—as the ritual base, thinking it would be good enough to bring back Typhus and a plague fleet, which would at least give his child Mortarion considerable help.
And then...
It became like this.
Mountain-filling, sea-blocking Nurgle daemons filled Caliban, attacking various cities. The gradually thickening Warp influence also began to neutralize orbital strikes, further compressing the Imperium's advantage.
The Ouroboros hid deep within the crust, acting as Nurgle's vessel, constantly pouring power into reality.
Typhus's fleet also had enough capability to tangle with the Dark Angels; at least delaying for a while wouldn't be a problem.
This was the maximum investment Nurgle could accept.
Otherwise, what could He do? Bleed endlessly on Caliban? This wasn't Terra; where was He going to pull six thousand Vengeful Spirits to fight the Dark Angels?
Did he stop caring about Corax burning his garden? Did he stop caring about Mortarion preparing the Godblight in the Ultima Segmentum?
That damn Tzeentch kept thinking about usurping the fruits of his victory. Khorne and Slaanesh were also damned, always watching from the sidelines, as if His misfortune would please Them.
The more the Plague God thought about it, the angrier He got. He exerted power trying to close the space-time tunnel, but under Ramesses' hands, it wouldn't close no matter what. He felt that this series of operations was self-defeating, doing all the work for the Warp gods and the four in reality.
Damn it, being with these insects, how could he manage the Warp well? How could he corrupt the Primarchs? How could he grab those four?
Look at those dead children.
Dying in a foreign land, hurting in His heart!
Clang!
The stirring ladle exerted a little force, hitting the edge of the cauldron, scaring Isha, the Goddess of Life, into trembling.
She covered her face, crying from fright, while also unable to help wondering what happened.
What made the famously cheerful Nurgle so angry? What caused His current helplessness? Since time reached a certain node, these Chaos Gods, known for their unscrupulousness since the Fall of the Eldar, seemed to have encountered considerable difficulties.
A faint hope bloomed in her heart.
The god known for her weakness rubbed her eyes. Terror burst forth again with Nurgle's creepy laughter, and a teardrop inadvertently fell into the material universe.
Boom!
While thinking, Typhus sensed an attack. His thoughts were pulled back to reality, birthing a trace of envy.
The Dark Angels' void warfare capability was the strongest, manifested in their powerful organizational skills and the various advanced weapons mounted on their warships. The Emperor, as a father, loved such a legion.
"Hold the breached chokepoint."
He hissed, pointing to a ruptured deck three kilometers away in the projection, where the vault responsible for defending against boarding torpedoes had collapsed.
Before his voice fell, bright light surged from the breach. The roar unique to melta charges rose abruptly in the comms.
The Death Guard acted immediately, forming a line between the entrance and their master. The rest of the Plaguebearers charged straight at the gap, their tainted plague weapons pointing at the source of the noise and light.
Typhus himself stood still, his scythe resting on the honeycomb floor, his heart full of disturbance.
The outer wall collapsed inward with the roar of krak charges, followed by a string of heavy bolter fire.
Warriors of the First Legion poured out from the cracks in the wall, leaping into the formation before the debris even hit the ground. At the same time, teleportation triggered the familiar smell of ozone. A cavity of pure air displaced within the plague clouds bloomed, followed by a loud bang. Terminators in bone-white armor emerged, immediately joining their battle-brothers in the fray.
The two sides collided, the ranks instantly turning into flying bullets and flashing energy fields.
Typhus nodded silently. The First Company Terminators began to move, trudging along the walkway, swinging their deadly great scythes.
Not a single Dark Angel approached the bridge. As the battle intensified, they were forced back along the path by the thick virus clouds. Daring to board a ship blessed by the Plague God was truly audacious.
And that was where it would end.
He almost wanted to join the fray himself. Stretching his stiff limbs before the real slaughter began might be good for him. But then he sensed an anomaly. right in the shadows behind him. It wasn't Warp technology similar to shipboard teleporters.
Typhus turned abruptly, his tattered cloak making a sound like tearing silk in the air, but his gaze met only emptiness.
However, something touched his perception. Something lurked deep in the miasma, hidden in the churning toxic fog. Deaf to the sky-shaking slaughter behind him, he took a step forward, his sharp 'eyes' piercing the thick fog, capturing every tremor.
In an instant, the shadows began to flow.
Two shadows trembled, glided, converged, entangled, and merged. A broken pulse of light suddenly began to beat.
Typhus didn't even catch the moment his opponent appeared. One moment these knights were twisted phantoms standing between the bridge compartments; the next, they stood real and solid upon the colonnade.
Warboots shattered the surface of stone pillars. Runed blades were already drawn, the light of disruption fields hissing on the edges.
It seemed the Dark Angels' research into psychic powers wasn't bad either. Right, this mysterious legion that gathered the last group of ancient sorcerers from Terra held countless secrets. Teleporting so precisely within a domain blessed by a Chaos God was never an easy task.
Typhus thought of the miserable state of the Council of Nikaea banning psykers and couldn't help but smile mockingly again.
Even the Emperor, even the First Legion most loyal to the Emperor, couldn't discard the great power of the Empyrean, couldn't ignore reality. The Imperial Truth was destined to be swept into the dustbin of history.
The warrior in front of him was a Dark Angel, but clad in the black-green armor of the Templar Brethren.
Before seeing the sword, certain characteristics of the opponent had already excited him.
This excitement came from the swordsman himself, the way he moved, that absolute, immersive focus, making the warriors around him involuntarily adjust their formation with him as the center, like planets orbiting a star.
A surge of joy welled up in Typhus's heart.
"The Lion."
He murmured, crouching into an offensive stance, the rolling teeth of the scythe in his hand emitting a scream of hatred.
Being ordered around like a pet when he met the Lion on the eve of Tsagualsa, the death threat penetrating his marrow—he would never forget that feeling.
Even Mortarion dared not treat him like that.
"I didn't expect to meet you so soon—"
The blade swept across.
He didn't even see that strike.
The Lion Sword swept through thousands, unstoppable. The attack pierced his defense, making him stagger, his body shattering.
It was a very plain sweep, as if subsequent moves were never considered, yet it was already unstoppable.
Bang!
The blade hit his helmet, the vibration making him see stars.
Crack!
Then it sank into his body, splitting his head, blood splashing everywhere.
The last scene before Typhus's eyes was a pair of red lenses passing by his side, the runed blade slicing across his neck. He raised his hand, and his vision inadvertently vanished, turning into darkness.
The scythe hadn't even been raised.
His parrying distance wasn't close enough—
The Lion glanced at the shattered corpse falling into the dust.
Before he continued, Corswain also slew his opponent.
It was a group of Terminators. The fight between Space Marines lacked the violent beauty unique to Primarchs; it was a perfect combination of skill and strength.
Corswain's movements were swift. The Lion sensed an indescribable feeling from him similar to his own, as if blessed by something greater, endowing his son with even more powerful combat capabilities.
At the same time, he inherited that transcendent existence's hostility towards him.
This feeling was very much like Chaos corruption.
The Lion had sensed the anomaly in his son early on. From the probing chat during their first meeting, the other party was always vigilant and speculating on his movements during every respectful response, his hand never leaving the Lion Sword that was then in Corswain's hands.
He was really thinking about how to kill him.
And what caused such a change?
Frowning, the Lion pondered.
He was no stranger to Chaos. Caliban was almost encompassed by the Eye of Terror; Chaos corruption was everywhere. The native Order of the Wolf on Caliban even preserved a large number of Chaos tomes. He had cognition of Chaos while growing up on Caliban, and he was extremely sensitive to such corruption.
Just during the meeting on Terra, he glimpsed quite a few traces on Corax and Dorn. He just didn't flare up because of the stunt he and Guilliman pulled, but Ramesses explained this issue to him from the start, so the Lion couldn't say much.
However, when he asked who held such deep hostility towards him and why it affected his most valued son, the other party's behavior of teasing and snickering without choosing to explain further made the Lion very unhappy.
Crash~
Dropping the opponent's corpse, noticing the Lion had cleared the entire bridge, Corswain also looked down.
"It's a captain."
He noted the characteristics of the attire on the fragments. Unfortunately, the Lion's force was too great; just the air rolled up by the blade had torn this Terminator apart.
Corswain asked curiously:
"Who was it?"
He hadn't objected to letting the Lion take command of the fleet again, because the Lion's arrival also made hardliners like Redloss choose to cooperate. They didn't need to spend too much energy guarding against these unstable factors while fighting the Plague Fleet.
Why does it feel like His Highness can always find the best outcome?
Thinking of this, Corswain was slightly stunned. Recalling Arthur's emerald eyes, vast as an endless lake, he suddenly realized that His Highness's level seemed fundamentally different from theirs.
They were manipulating the battlefield, while Arthur was manipulating the people manipulating the battlefield.
"Don't know."
At this moment, the Lion walked down the filth-filled stairs, pointing straight at the remaining enemies.
Just a captain, nothing special. It would be more fitting if Mortarion came.
The Lion looked around, didn't find the commander's figure, and immediately ordered the boarding parties to disperse.
Boom!
Endless firelight transmitted from outside the window. Under the Lion's will, the Dark Angels fleet had dispersed, forming small groups with different styles, strangling their enemies in unpredictable and efficient ways.
Boarding the fleet, determining friend from foe, returning to his most familiar environment, the confidence unique to a Primarch enveloped him again.
This was what the Lion was most familiar with, no longer needing to care about factors outside the battlefield.
The Lion hoped to solve all this perfectly. He needed to prove his ability to these brothers.
It would be best if he could complete his mission before Arthur ended everything, so he could properly mock them at Caliban's victory feast.
Thinking this, the Lion spoke.
"Continue advancing."
Arthur was on a high-speed maneuvering Stormbird.
As he moved, he issued simple and clear commands on the comms channel to dispatch surrounding units.
The mountain-filling, sea-blocking Nurgle daemon army was pouring into the surface cities. Massive bridges with huge spans began to tremble, and the sounds of gunfire were gradually drowned out by huge noises increasingly sounding like the peristalsis of a biological throat.
A regiment nearby, mostly composed of Auxilia units, was assigned to hold the edge of the town. Facing the threat, they seemed equally slow to react to the enemy attack and his orders. He felt this wasn't due to the Dark Angels' lack of efficiency.
Rather, those mortals were exhausted by the successive attacks and the erratic rock assaults. Even with Astartes assistance, these mortals inevitably faced problems of falling behind or piling up at certain nodes during the evacuation.
But they weren't slow at all. They were ordinary people. Many might have been used to commanding those superhuman Space Marines, able to execute orders with full force in the blink of an eye.
But these civilians, even the elite Imperial Army regiments, though still fearless and selfless, were still not Space Marines.
The Space Marines needed to wait for them.
And the Ouroboros was hiding too well.
Arthur looked down at the tactical slate. The War Council monitored Caliban's global status, while the Stormbird was ready to deploy Arthur at any time upon detecting anomalies.
According to known intelligence, the Ouroboros entity was a gigantic biological organism inside Caliban, with a transparent body surface, the whole individual appearing ring-shaped.
With Nurgle corruption almost filling Caliban now, Arthur really couldn't find the specific location of the opponent.
And then, there seemed to be nothing else.
Arthur pondered Caliban's seemingly grim situation, but wasn't as anxious as imagined.
Nurgle was taking things for granted, or were all these gods like this?
Although they weren't crazy enough to continuously blow up their own planets like some Inquisitors, they weren't like those members brainwashed by Imperial political correctness who had to stall on a severely corrupted planet, right?
Let's just smash the chessboard.
After reviewing again that he had no omissions, Arthur thought immediately.
"You said whatever I do here won't affect ten thousand years later?"
Receiving Azrael's hourly evacuation mission report again, Arthur, feeling no need to drag it out, asked aloud.
They didn't need to act as the Chaos Gods expected; just proceed to the next stage when progress was made.
Ramesses, who was imagining what expression the Lion would have if he knew who wanted to kill him, smiled and replied: "Correct. I don't understand the specific principle if asked to list one. You just need to know that whatever you do won't affect the present. The present is the present. Those dead people transferred over won't have issues either."
Ramesses wasn't too obsessed with situations where he really didn't understand the principle.
It was the interstellar age, yet no one had calculated fluid dynamics formulas; didn't they still build wind tunnels on various planets to blow hard?
No wonder the Imperium started playing the "brick flies with enough force" game.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to shatter Caliban."
Looking at the space battle report again, Arthur replied.
He didn't want to play hide-and-seek with the Ouroboros.
Caliban's threat had been lifted; no need to waste time here with the opponent. As for Caliban itself, it wasn't important; what mattered were the people who should have died.
"As for the disposal of Caliban itself, I plan to drag the fragments through the rift. The Rock's gravity control system can complete this task, and many Dark Angels ships are equipped with similar systems. Our efficiency can be very high."
Many large space weapons of the Imperium were equipped with similar systems. Many Star Forts could even rely on these systems to drag fragments out of stars to strike stubborn hostile planets, or directly tear the crust apart through this system.
Dragging a fragment really wasn't a problem.
"Wait, why do the Dark Angels have everything?"
Ramesses was surprised.
"Otherwise, why do you think a branch fleet could save the Wolves from the Alpha Legion?"
"Fine, you have lots of black tech, you win."
Ramesses had no objection to this.
"I think it's fine. Just control the degree. The Lion and Caliban are bound deeply enough anyway; we don't need to collect other Caliban fragments."
"Agreed."
Arthur nodded, took one last look at the ground, and ordered the pilot controlling the Stormbird to send him to the highest point of Caliban, the top of the Angelicasta.
[...Shatter Caliban?]
"Agreed!"
When Arthur's decision entered the War Council, Azrael was the first to raise his hand in agreement.
Everyone present was stunned briefly, then instantly thought of countless possibilities, and immediately raised their hands to pass it. Many didn't even notice Ramesses' footnote.
Are you kidding? If Caliban doesn't break, what about the future? Will His Highness still come to find us?
The thoughts of the Dark Angels at this moment were so simple that they didn't even notice the series of explanatory footnotes using daemons as actual cases to rule out their worries.
Almost at the same moment, the raised arms formed a line in the bright hall.
Azrael paused, retracted the finger pointing at the footnote intending to explain, and finally represented the War Council in passing the resolution.
Blow it up!
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