Chương 201: Chapter Two Hundred and One

E-SIM swings his huge pole axe and the Greater Demon disintegrates beneath his blow, then reforms next to me, entirely unharmed. Wards flare around it, repelling my silver mist and it strikes at my chest with its crescent bladed staff. I step in close and catch its wrist on the back of my arm, then spear my power field covered hand into its sternum. Again, the Greater Demon dissipates and reforms two hundred metres away, hovering in the air.

It says something, but unlike its incantations, I hear nothing of what it says, my mute protocols still in effect. ++It is a projection. We must continue to the end of the maze. ++"Agreed." We connect to the obelisk and teleport to a new location and appear on the lawn of a white painted, wooden house, surrounded by fields of corn. From E-SIM's pict-feed I immediately notice that the corn is planted in strings of Lingua-Technis.

The text tells the story of a chimpanzee, trapped in a glass room, floating in an ocean full of fish, who starved to death because he didn't know what the food printer attached to his room was. It is by far the least subtle message I've noticed since we entered the Greater Demon's domain and I think it might be losing patience with us.

"Burn everything," I say. E-SIM and I turn our weapons on the house and fields, setting them alight with blasts of plasma and volkite weaponry. From within the flames appear a legion of rotund Pink Horrors and multi-headed Burning Horrors. Great flocks of Screamers form from the smoke choking the skies and attempt to rip us apart. Side by side, E-SIM and I wade into the horde of Lesser Demons and lay waste to them. They swarm and strike us with no concern for coordination.

Most disintegrate the moment my silver mist touches them, though some last long enough for me to shoot them. I launch micro-missiles en masse, clearing the initial rush of demons, then summon my own helpers. Myriad jellyfish pop into existence and swarm through the sky, their engulfing forms and long tentacles wrenching the screamers from the air and consuming them before they overwhelm us. My gnomes are let loose among the corn, their obsidian knives and cruel grins reaping a tithe of screams.

Millions of clockwork bees peel off my armour like flecks of paint and zoom off, disrupting enemy vision and increasing the detail and perspective of our auspex. E-SIM sweeps his poleaxe near the ground, splatting scores of Demons. He picks me up and places me on his shoulder. The armour on his shins peels back revealing eight emitters. With a sudden flash, the ground around him is filled with lightning as he triggers a titanic volkite blast that turns the house and corn to ash.

As the space around us clears, E-SIM deploys his mechanical legions and slaughters the lesser demons. Here, in this Immaterial realm of data, they just can't compete with us. Guided by the soul lantern, we march through the unending fields of burning corn, hunting the Greater Demon. The flow of time distorts and slows, the Demon's Domain stretching every second within to many seconds without. The Heralds and Tempstous Scions continue to struggle within the Demon and Tyranid infested hull of Dying Light.

The remaining Space Marines retreat, then gather the other half of their strike group and send another fifty marines into the vessel, supported by Red Knoll's voidsmen. Only twenty-five active marines remain on Red Knoll. Gradually, more of the vessel is secured and Alpia and the Navigators make good progress on stopping the ritual. Raphael finally breaks into the Bridge and secures it, cutting Dying Light's Nova Cannon from the vessel's auspex.

The surviving cultists manage four more shots with the powerful weapon, using the secondary controls near the prow of the vessel, before the Space Marines secure it. With no way to properly aim the gun after the Bridge was captured, all their shots miss by millions of kilometres. Our struggle continues, and we receive reinforcements from the Stellar Fleet, most of the void assault regiment getting rotated out with two penal regiments.

After nine hours struggle within the corn fields, and nine days fighting within Dying Light, E-SIM and I reach the Greater Demon. Bad Penny's statue still hangs around its neck, but the statue has cracked and turned to ash coloured stone. We immediately fire upon the Demon, but all our shots fly right through it, leaving it untouched. It smirks at us, its twin beaks morphing like a child's cartoon character forming an unnatural grin.

Within Dying Light, Alpia disables the last rune and all the energy powering the ritual flows back to the Chaos Knight. The Warp begins to calm and the brewing Warp storm stops growing. At the same time, Bad Penny's statue crumbles and turns to dust and the seal on the Chaos Knight burns away, overwhelmed by the backlash of the broken ritual. A crescent headed staff punches through the pilot hatch from within the Knight and a two headed Demon hauls itself from the Chaos Knight.

Having finally got a good look at the Demon, this time with my third eye, I am absolutely positive that it is the same Demon that tried to pull Marwolv into the Warp. I am upset I fell for such a trick, while also delighted that it wasn't actually Tzeentch who tried to swallow Marwolv and it likely explains why we all survived the ordeal, a twist of fate that, given Tzeentch's power, never quite made sense.

A sinking feeling grows in my metaphorical stomach and I realise the thrice damned bird Demon has led us on a wild goose chase through its domain using Bad Penny as a lure. It never entered the noosphere because it was sealed in the Knight, interacting with us remotely like I did with it. With a disdainful wave, it opens a portal to the Warp, raises a middle talon at the pict-recorder I'm observing it through, then steps into the Warp. The portal closes behind it.

I curse, realising that Bad Penny was sent into the noosphere as it was outside the seal, its power drained to send the legions of demons against us at almost no cost to the Greater Demon, who, guessing from the cultists' last cry, likely goes by Marabas. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. The ritual was almost certainly always intended to break its seal, even though it was designed to weaken the boundary between the Materium and Immaterium.

The Warp storm and demon invasion that the ritual caused were a distraction and consequence of the ritual, so that when we triggered the feedback upon the ritual's creator, caused by forcefully shutting the ritual down, we were effectively tricked into destroying the Inquisitorial seal, which absorbed the energy created by the ritual backlash. We did all that work, at great cost to us and Bad Penny, but no expenditure of power or resources on the Greater Demon's part, other than a loss of its mortal followers.

That left it free to waltz out of here, completely recovered from whatever ordeal trapped it in the first place, leaving us with an absolute disaster and my own plans completely in tatters. Not only that, but from Bad Penny's perspective, this was the first time I met him, and likely the cause of our enmity. It is also his final death, as I got a crown kill when he passed.

The odd, timeless nature of the Warp suggests that he spent centuries searching for his killer, eventually finding me on Mote after I first left the Warp after being on the Federation space station, hoping to destroy me before I could kill him, even while knowing it was ultimately pointless, because from his own perspective, though not mine, he was already dead. That makes no sense whatsoever! I scream in my head. I hate time travel and paradoxes!

Convoluted though it might be, I really can't think of any other explanation. This encounter also suggests why Bad Penny disrupted Marabas' plans for Marwolv by tossing three Ork Roks at Marabas when Marabas summoned a massive avatar, posing as Tzeentch, using the power from the ritual by the Tau Ethereal that killed all those psykers. Bad Penny was almost certainly seeking revenge for destroying his last anchor to existence, the statue that crumbled as the seal on Marabas was broken.

With the way clear, I finally penetrate the Knight's defences and disable the war machine, slowly venting its plasma generator, purging its corrupt Machine-Spirit, then leaving it to shut down as the batteries are deliberately overloaded. Once it has been completely turned off, I message Domhnall, Raphael, and Tech-Marine Balor that the Chaos Knight and the ritual have been disabled, but the Greater Demon escaped to the Warp, then inform them I am going to secure the site.

Gathering my depleted bodyguard, I head to the centre of Dying Light. The interior of the vessel has been absolutely shredded by fighting. Nearly every panel we pass is pocked and rent, the wires, plasma conduits, and other gizmos behind them melted and shattered. The major corridors are piled high with Tyranid and Hull Ghast bodies, some of which I am not entirely certain are dead.

There has been little time to collect our own dead, though the bodies have been secured and stacked at multiple choke points, denying the Tyranids further organic matter to feed their brood. We encounter several packs of Chaos Spawn on our journey, but they are weakening fast now that the ritual has been stopped and the gathering Warp storm is fading. Those we do find seem more intent on destroying the ship than my troops, determined to ruin any chance of us salvaging anything useful from this debacle.

After an hour of sporadic combat, we arrive at the remains of the central cogitator. We double check all the Chaos forces are non-functional. To my great surprise, nineteen Space Marines still live, having gone into hibernation after their Sus-an Membranes activated.

The Space Marine exclusive implant has worked far more effectively in conjunction with the Vitae Supplements that were added to their power armour, mimicking the specialised functions of pharmacopoeia built into the Heralds' MOA carapace armour, keeping their brains alive long enough after catastrophic injuries for them to fully slip into hibernation.

I had been uncertain how well a Vitae Supplement would work for a Space Marine as they are intended for baseline Humans and cyborgs, not Transhumans, but it wasn't something we could test beyond ensuring compatibility. Fortunately they worked so well that even Verlin is still alive after being reduced to little more than a head and quarter torso. Only the marines who were completely incinerated, lost more than a quarter of their grey matter, or had their souls pulled from their bodies are actually dead.

The soul removal is the one that killed half of the seventy-five marine strike group, the vicious spell even removing the souls of Marines hibernating beneath the mountain of corpses by the main door. In some ways this is a blessing, as many of the bodies are unharmed, providing plenty of spare parts with which to restore the injured Marines, though I am somewhat sceptical about the success rate for a head transplant for Verlin.

Swapping limbs and organs should, in theory, work just fine as Space Marines are universal donors for each other but a complete body transplant is in the realms of the dodgiest types of rejuvenat and infiltration treatments and not something anyone in the fleet has attempted before. When asked if she can perform the treatment though, JK-404 is rather enthusiastic to head the team that will attempt to save Verlin.

With the immediate crisis under control and recovery operations underway, I examine the large Chaos Knight close up. The air around the machine weighs upon my shoulders, as if the pressure of an ocean thick with filth is trying to drown me with awe and terror. I have often thought Knights, Titans, and other war walkers to be impressive, but ultimately a little silly and rather niche.

You can do so much more with an armour regiment than you can with a single Knight and the latter is far more difficult to field given the limited quantity of qualified pilots and the extensive support network of specialised staff and exclusive machinery required to maintain the massive war machines. Sure, if you want a line broken through, the concentrated speed and firepower of a Knight is unmatched, but there are other ways to achieve the same result.

Standing beneath this corrupt machine, I realise that my thinking was flawed. Like the soldiers of the Great War who witnessed the first tanks and believed that they were being attacked by monsters, the Knight performs the same role, regardless of whether you know what it is or not. A tank is a scary box on wheels. You can defeat a tank with a well placed shot of a man portable weapon, even a grenade in the right spot will do the trick. Against a Knight, these tricks mean nothing.

It might mimic the Human form, but that just makes it worse. A Knight is a monster. This particular one thrashed a force of marines that could have brought a planet to heel and did so without any obvious effort. Looking up at this machine reminds me of an era where we filled maps with fantastical creatures that said 'Here be Dragons'. Suddenly, it's no longer about an efficient use of resources, but crushing the morale of your enemies.

I may live inside a multi-kilometre, spacefaring vessel, but to me, for all its intimidation and glory, it's just home. A Knight can never be home. All it brings is death. Despair overwhelms me for a moment and for the first time in many years, I cry. Silver alloys and tiny machines run down my cheeks and are absorbed back into my skin without a single person noticing. I take a deep breath and steady myself, pushing away the ugly feelings that seek to crush me.

I cross my arms and glare at the corrupt Knight, its existence forcing an uncomfortable truth upon my mind. I have been too lax. The frequent conflicts I have endured have been tempered by the joys of my family, and the constant, numbing fear of my early days of my revival have faded. In my confidence and contempt, I have forgotten the only thing that matters. In the forty-first millennium, there is no joy or hope, only war, and the everlasting laughter of thirsting gods.