My Life as A Death Guard
Chapter 439: Little Death Guard Goes Looking for Old Mortarion
Vast stretches of farmland burned, flames swaying as far as the horizon.
Dry stalks crackled explosively in the raging inferno. The scorched stench mixed with rot assaulted the soldiers' senses, yet they advanced steadily.
'The Salamanders would like this fire.' Vorx thought as he carried a scale-toxin flamethrower modified by the Death Guard, moving through the fields. Iax was an extremely typical agri-world; more than ninety-five percent of its land was planted with crops.
The remaining five percent consisted of crowded habitation zones, fertilizer plants, and crop-processing facilities.
Vorx didn't like this place. It wasn't like Barbarus.
To supply food for the entire sector, Iax's sky had long been shrouded by emissions from fertilizer factories. The sky and rivers were toxic, and even the highly fertile soil could only sustain genetically modified plants. For ordinary humans, it was mildly corrosive.
But from what Vorx understood of the Warp lore, he knew who would favor this land.
He marched silently through the flames. Fire licked across his armor; occasionally, charred corpses with cracked, peeling flesh were spit out by the advancing blaze.
Foul pus oozed from their wounds.
Expressionless, Vorx swept his phosphor weapon forward, spewing fire to ensure every potential source of contagion was destroyed.
According to the original plan, the Death Guard relied on the spreading flames to flush out enemies hidden within the fields one by one.
Buzzing swarms of flies dropped under the toxic fire. Shambling plague-zombies were bombarded by orbiting warships before they could even emerge. Nurgle-beasts with trailing tails were roasted to death before they could crawl out of the farmland.
From time to time, massive explosions erupted in the burning fields, spraying pus. Vorx was certain they had burned and detonated some kind of organism.
The toxic phosphor fire advanced greedily, devouring any life it touched.
To prevent the enemy from developing resistance, after discussion between Garro, Vorx, and Malcador, the Death Guard selected three phosphor munitions with different toxic profiles.
Different fuels were used in separate zones—ashen white, pale green, and blood red flames flickered together.
The only thing they had in common was that, at Malcador's insistence, all of these phosphor rounds produced heavy smoke afterward.
Wisps of smoke drifted upward. With the fire still raging, the haze looked like thin gauze—but Vorx knew that once the flames died down, this land would be covered in lingering fog that would not disperse for days.
Reports from other companies came in. Vorx opened the channel.
"All Death Guard units have reached their designated positions."
For this operation, the entire Fourteenth Company of the Death Guard had deployed. Combined with the warships holding air superiority and the Hellhound vehicle companies advancing slowly behind the troops, the overwhelming manpower ensured domination.
Vorx took a deep breath. He stared ahead. Beyond the fading flames stood a fertilizer plant encircled by two irrigation canals and a drainage channel. Rivers flowed in from both ends, only to be polluted by toxic discharge from the facility.
This was the largest fertilizer plant on the planet, as large as a small city. Following Malcador's instructions, the Death Guard had surrounded it proportionally by company.
A strange… tactic.
This was absolutely not something a normal battle plan would produce. It felt more like a layout with symbolic meaning. As the legion's temporary commander, Vorx of course knew what Malcador intended.
He felt his mind tremble. For a Death Guard taught carefully by his Primarch to stay away from the Warp, what came next might be… too stimulating.
…Mortarion is a witch… a psyker, Vorx thought. Did that, in some way, explain why when he tried to teach the Death Guard numerology, aside from that half-mad Tech-Priest, everyone else's accuracy rate didn't even reach five percent?
Because… it wasn't science at all.
Vorx's mood was complicated.
When Malcador said they couldn't summon Mortarion aboard the Death Guard fleet because there were too many anti-psyker measures there, Vorx and Garro's feelings had become extremely subtle.
Their father, who had always hated psykers… turned out to be a psyker of exceptional talent.
Then all those things he'd said insulting psykers before…
Wouldn't that mean… he'd been insulting himself?
Vorx quickly cut off that absurd thought and focused on the factory ahead. The flames died down, white mist rose—this was it.
Through the hazy, choking smoke, Vorx could see faint outlines of Death Guard armor on the opposite riverbank, half-hidden behind leftover stalks—bone white and sickly green flickering in and out of view.
He imagined they saw him the same way.
"Too bad you don't have a battle cry,"
Malcador said somewhat regretfully inside the chamber. At Mortarion's request, the Death Guard always marched in silence, never shouting.
"Otherwise you could call out to him."
This was simply a summoning ritual. Change the conditions, keep the process the same—if the other side responded (or even if they didn't, so long as the pull of the ritual was strong enough), they could just as easily summon a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch.
Calas remained silent. He could feel his heart pounding.
The next moment, he was swallowed by white light.
When the blinding glow faded, Calas found himself standing inside a vast, empty factory. Towering blast furnaces stood like a forest, their tops impossible to see.
Malcador and the Grey Knights were gone. Only Calas remained.
Calas Typhon took a deep breath.
"Mortarion?!"
He shouted sharply. The patterns on the Mistletoe behind him seemed to come alive, spreading outward. They coiled beneath his feet, guiding him along the correct path.
Calas began to run.
"Mortarion?! Mortarion!"
He started coughing violently.
"Mortarion, answer me! Answer the Death Guard! You have to wake up! Your situation is dangerous! You must wake up!"
There was still no response. Calas thought for a moment, then continued shouting.
"Mortarion!" he yelled. "I know you're upset! I mean—realizing you're a psyker isn't something to be depressed about! Look! I'm a psyker!"
Mortarion being a psyker—indeed, some Warp entity far beyond a psyker—Typhon decided this ranked as the top deadpan joke he had ever heard in his life. Unless something stronger appeared—like Hades turning out to be a psyker too—this would remain number one forever.
He kept calling out. His voice gradually grew softer—not because he was tired, but because he was slowly entering another silent world.
When every trace of sound vanished into absolute stillness, the white mist began to roll in.
And Calas Typhon saw those bone-white figures.
Miniature versions of the Death Guard.
They stood atop the factory's iron frameworks, on conveyor lines long since halted, hiding in the corners of machinery, staring at him without blinking.
At one moment, Calas was certain he felt a chill crawl up his spine.
Every Death Guard bore unique markings on their shoulder plates. Aside from the Lord of Death himself, no one could read them all—others could only decipher fragments.
Calas was sure he recognized the shoulder markings of several who were already dead.
Subconsciously, he slowed his steps. As if realizing something, Calas looked up, toward the space between the towering furnace arrays—
In that instant, he felt his vital signs stop for a moment.
Without a sound, that figure sat atop the highest furnace. White mist streamed downward around it. It didn't move, didn't look at Calas; it simply sat there with its head lowered, doing nothing.
It wasn't wearing armor—only a gaunt, Mortarion-like cloak. Pale and dull in color, frost crawled across it, tracing patterns—like the eye-like mimicry some insects display in nature.
But that wasn't what shocked Calas the most. He stared at it, and behind it—
There was a pair of folded wings.
Huge, skeletal, insect-like wings the same color as the cloak—like fallen leaves of late autumn, ragged along the edges. The ridges of the wings were braced by white bone.
If this had been the old Calas, the moment he saw this thing he would have shouted, "Take cover, it's a psyker-type xenos!"
But now, all he could do was cautiously ask,
"Mortarion?"
No response. The being didn't acknowledge him.
It reminded Calas of a moth—those that cling to walls as if they had never moved in their lives, motionless, still, impossible for humans to predict.
So what should he do?
Calas remembered Malcador's instructions. With difficulty, he picked up the Mistletoe—something rather awkward for a Dreadnought.
He raised the long scythe.
"Hey! Mortarion, look over here!"
The next moment, the being turned its head.
Not only did it turn—it rushed toward him like a true moth spotting a source of light.
"Hey! Wait—don't come over—! AAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
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