Chapter 233: The Farmer Best Understands the Farmer
Lucan tried to release the divine power from his machine portfolio. The blasphemous machines that had been destroyed around him were returning to their original forms. The Chaos corruption was slowly disappearing from them.
For a moment, everyone stared at Lucan in a daze. The members of the Adeptus Mechanicus who had participated in the battle were now all murmuring praises to the Omnissiah.
"Guilliman, Cawl, I think we should leave here first. Staying here might not be a good decision," Lucan said, pointing to the sky. The Blackstone Fortress was getting bigger and bigger in their eyes.
Countless fragments were falling like meteors. The ground-based firepower did its best to destroy and shatter these fragments, but a large number of them still slammed heavily into the surface of Macragge, trailing long fiery tails. It was fine if they crashed in uninhabited areas, but the fragments that fell in densely populated areas, even if they were not large, still caused catastrophic damage with the added velocity.
The battle in the void had not ended with the death of Vashtorr. The planet-like Blackstone Fortress still had a large number of cannons, posing a great threat to any approaching warship. The fleet of the Ultramarines continuously broke through the blockade, pouring fire onto the Blackstone Fortress. Some ships even rammed it directly, trying to stop it.
Once the Blackstone Fortress completely entered the orbit of Macragge, there would be no more chances. It couldn't destroy the planet, but most of the life on Macragge would die from the secondary disasters and the impact explosion. In that situation, there was no difference between a mortal, an Astartes, or a Primarch. It was not something an individual could withstand.
And the safest choice Lucan could think of now was to take Guilliman and the others and flee Macragge directly. But that would also mean abandoning the homeworld of the Ultramarines and all the mortals on it.
"Impossible! We will never abandon Macragge!" Sicarius said resolutely. For their gene-primarch to awaken, only to find that his own sons had failed to protect the homeworld he had personally built—this was an insult to the Ultramarines.
Looking at the Ultramarines who did not want to leave, Lucan knew that it was almost impossible to persuade them to abandon their homeworld. Almost all Chapters would fight to the last moment to protect their homeworld, to say nothing of a First Founding Chapter. Even if their homeworld was destroyed, they would make its remains into a fortress, like the Rock of the Dark Angels. This showed the extent of their attachment to their homeworld.
"Wait... perhaps I have a way!" Lucan's words made all the Ultramarines present fix their gazes on him.
Before obtaining Vashtorr's power, he hadn't thought of this possibility, but now he felt that he could give it a try. The Blackstone Fortress, this ancient construct not made by humans, also had something similar to a machine spirit. These "machine spirits" had even had a precedent of helping the Imperium to stop and attack the Chaos forces occupying it.
And this Blackstone Fortress, which Abaddon had given to Huron, had been attempted to be controlled by Abaddon through daemonic possession. Although he had not succeeded, he had driven the "machine spirit" within it mad.
Lucan felt that he could use his own purifying power to restore the "machine spirit" within this Blackstone Fortress to normal, to free it from the control of Chaos! If he were to use the conventional method of applying Purity Seals, who knew how long that would take. But having plundered Vashtorr's power, Lucan now also had the ability to replicate that power into code and something similar to the daemon-steel neuro-bundles. He had essentially made the power that Vashtorr had been researching since his birth his own. It also gave Lucan the ability to actually use the portfolio of machinery and technology.
Lucan himself could not write this complex binary code. But Cawl could! Could there be anyone in the entire Imperium who was better at this than him?
"Cawl, if I asked you to write a piece of code now that could invade the system of the Blackstone Fortress, how long would you need?"
"An entire Blackstone Fortress?"
"Perhaps not the entire thing, but at least more than fifty percent! Only then will my plan be feasible."
"At least half a Terran hour! In the past, to deal with the possible invasion of my own large warships by Chaos scrap-code, I once wrote a large-scale hunter-killer program for countermeasures. And this code is still in the memory banks of this body. I only need to modify the code from 'hunter-killer' to 'invasive-diffusion' to achieve the effect you're talking about. But we must first reach the control core of the Blackstone Fortress. Otherwise, the fortress's own system will intercept my invasion program!"
Cawl's words made Lucan even more certain of the feasibility of his idea. And the only two things they needed to do now were to buy time for Cawl and to get Lucan onto the Blackstone Fortress, so that he could immediately use this newly acquired power. The former was the most difficult.
"Guilliman, we may need you to join the battle next."
"This is my homeworld. It is my duty to protect it. If you succeed, my sons and I will remember this favor!"
The moment Guilliman awoke, the initial plan of Chaos had already failed. But as things stood, if they could not kill Guilliman and Lucan, then destroying Macragge could also be considered achieving a certain strategic objective. Tzeentch could have let Vingaard and the remaining Chaos fleet retreat, but He did not. He needed these people to sacrifice their lives to achieve His goal.
A Gorgon-class battlecruiser came directly to their position. A transport ship took Lucan and the others, as well as the Night Sentinels and all the warriors of the Ultramarines' Second Company, and headed for the battlefield in the void at the fastest possible speed. A tactical jump took them directly past the blockade of the Chaos warships to a position close to the Blackstone Fortress. The group went directly into drop pods and slammed into the fortress.
At this moment, Karax was leading all the Phase-smiths to raise the power of the Spear of Adun to its maximum. Kerrigan had also abandoned the now-combat-ineffective Ark of Omen and had joined the assault on the Blackstone Fortress with the Zerg.
"Karax! Can you hear me?"
"Clearly, Lord Lucan!"
"According to the current situation, how long will it take for the Blackstone Fortress to enter the gravitational pull of Macragge?"
"Fifteen minutes! At most fifteen minutes! My Lord, the Solar Lance can cut off parts of the Blackstone Fortress's hull, but its volume is too large. The remaining part can still cause devastating damage to the planet."
"Only fifteen minutes?" Lucan was not sure if it would be enough time.
"My Lord! Another fleet!! Another fleet has broken through the warp and entered the battlefield! The strong warp reaction is a Chaos fleet!!" Karax suddenly said urgently.
This Chaos fleet that had entered the battlefield did not have a Blackstone Fortress, but the scale of its conventional fleet was even larger than Vingaard's current fleet. But what happened next was something he had not expected. This Chaos fleet that had entered the battlefield actually began to attack the Chaos fleets that were entangled with the Imperium.
"Have these Chaos forces gone mad? Are they starting to kill each other?!" For a moment, Lucan also couldn't understand.
The Chaos fleet that had entered the battlefield was the main force of the Red Corsairs, led by Huron. The moment Guilliman had awakened... Huron, whose own gene-seed also came from Guilliman, had also felt a faint connection.
He had originally wanted to come and seize the Blackstone Fortress after Vingaard had either succeeded or failed. But he had not expected Vingaard to have completely become a slave to the Chaos Gods and to be about to use the Blackstone Fortress to destroy Macragge.
Huron did not care about the destruction of a single planet, but he knew the price of doing so. The Ultramarines would not care whether Vingaard was following the orders of the dark gods. They would only see Vingaard as a member of the Red Corsairs. Once Macragge was destroyed, the Red Corsairs would have an irreconcilable blood feud with the Ultramarines. The Ultramarines would destroy the Red Corsairs at all costs. The Chaos Gods would benefit, and he would take the blame? He would not take the fall for this.
Moreover, Huron wanted the corrupt Imperium to be destroyed, but he did not want Chaos to completely devour humanity. Although Macragge was important, its spiritual significance was greater than its actual value. If Macragge was destroyed, the Ultramarines still had 499 other worlds. At that time, they would ignore the Codex Astartes and start mass-producing troops at all costs, which would be more than enough to give Huron a headache.
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