Sanguinius shook his head in silence, his expression grim and honest. "I cannot see Blazkowicz in any of my prophecies."
The Great Angel spoke the absolute truth; he truly could not perceive any visions concerning Blazkowicz. Hearing this, Russ's face went even paler than his frost-rimmed armor. As he watched the Blackstone Fortress plummet toward the star, he mentally calculated how he was going to explain the failure to his brother.
"My Lord." A handsome son of the Blood Angels knelt nearby, calling out softly to the two Primarchs. "We have received urgent intelligence."
Sanguinius turned, nodding for his son to relay the report. The Legionnaire activated a projector and reported: "Sensors report that deep within Rangdan territory, another Blackstone Fortress has been lost."
"What?"
The moment the high-pitched voice registered, Russ turned into a blur of motion, rushing to the side of the warrior to peer intently at the projector. The signal clearly showed that the fortress Blazkowicz had been aboard had also sunk into the gravity well.
"Ha!" Russ's brows smoothed instantly, and a peal of thunderous laughter erupted from his chest. He felt no concern for Blazkowicz's safety; his eyes were filled only with the exhilarating relief of a survivor.
"Gone! It's gone!"
With a grand sweep of his massive arm, he strode briskly toward the teleporter, leaving the Blood Angels' fortress behind without a second thought. At that moment, the Wolf King had only one thought: Blazkowicz's flagship went down, so surely it's not too excessive for me to lose one of mine?
Russ approached irrecoverable events with a cavalier attitude. Free of any lingering regret over the loss of the Blackstone, he hummed a Fenrisian folk song, leading his honor guard toward the Hrafnkel. Before the teleporter engaged, he called out to Sanguinius: "The Space Wolves will head for the garrison systems to lick our wounds and prepare for the next offensive."
"The Blood Angels shall make the same arrangements," Sanguinius replied, waving goodbye to his wild brother.
With the destruction mission complete, the two Legions parted ways, heading for their respective defensive sectors.
The storm was gathering.
In the human-held J-11 star system, the Rangdan Corridor was becoming a powder keg. As both sides fed more fuel into the furnace of war, the air grew thick with the stench of impending slaughter. During this period of stalemate, tens of thousands of skirmishes occurred. In terms of raw attrition, the losses sustained by both sides far exceeded the scale of conventional interstellar warfare. Every collision between the two vast empires left behind astronomical amounts of debris.
The public communication channels were filled with nothing but vitriol. Both the Imperium of Man and the Rangdan Empire had mobilized their brightest intellectuals for the sole purpose of weaponizing language, bombarding the enemy with psychic barrages.
"Every Rangdan mother is open-source!"
Just as a pulsar burst released an electromagnetic pulse, temporarily cutting off physical communication, the synthesized voice of a Mechanicus servitor—flat and perfectly monotone—left the entire channel in a stunned silence.
"Human... I...—"
The pulse waves arrived, rendering the Rangdan counter-rebuttal into a garbled static of electromagnetic noise. Having secured a tactical victory in the war of words, the human side erupted in cheers, their morale boosted as they looked forward to the next round of insults.
Behind the J-11 lines, as the date of the decisive battle neared, the two remaining Blackstone Fortresses arrived. The command staff moved to the front lines, gazing out at the pulsar system.
The void shivered. The Blackstone Fortress tore through the fabric of reality, returning from the warp accompanied by three Gloriana-class battleships. The Dark Angels fleet had suffered grievous losses; not a single ship possessed more than seventy percent of its structural integrity. The Razor of Truth was the most severely damaged, with one-third of its prow blown away and barely ten percent of its broadside batteries operational. Rangdan boarding parties were still entrenched on its decks, returning to Imperial space alongside the crippled vessel.
[First Legion Fleet: Proceed to the three nearest Forge Worlds—Shanna, Preparation-VI, and Preparation-VII—for repairs and resupply.]
[The first batch of Calibanite Knights has arrived, awaiting Lion El'Jonson for reception.]
[Brothers, welcome home.]
Aboard the Dark Angels' Blackstone Fortress, the Lion's eyes brightened as he read the report regarding the Calibanite Knights; the news was timely. Upon his return to the First Legion, he had dispatched recruiters to Caliban. The Lion was ambitious; he intended to reshape the First Legion from the inside out, according to his own vision. Integrating Calibanite Astartes into the ranks, imbuing them with the knightly culture he held dear, aligned perfectly with his inner expectations.
The arrival of the first batch of Calibanite Astartes was an auspicious beginning. He would mold the Dark Angels according to his own will, baptizing them in the fires of the Rangdan War until they transformed into the true "First Legion."
"Are you going to see Him?" Blazkowicz stood at a distance, asking if the Lion intended to join him in meeting the Emperor.
The Lion had intended to go, but the arrival of the Calibanite warriors required his personal arrangement. After a moment's thought, he declined Blazkowicz's invitation. "I must organize the Legion recruits; I cannot step away just yet."
Blazkowicz waved his farewell and led his Legionnaires away, vanishing in a flash of translocation light.
"Orders." With the outsiders gone, the Lion began to issue his commands. "All personnel, save for those assigned to shipboard repairs, are to assemble on the Blackstone deck."
The Lion descended from his throne with boundless majesty. His Lion Guard draped him in his cloak, polished his armor and weapons, and placed the laurel upon his brow. Ambitious and resolute, the Lion led his retinue to the deck; he would reshape the Dark Angels through a comprehensive reformation.
Aboard the Iron Hands' Blackstone Fortress, Blazkowicz stepped out of the teleporter to find rows of Space Marines kneeling before him.
"Primarch!" the Legionnaires shouted in unison, their voices filled with absolute reverence.
"Rise." Blazkowicz walked toward the Clan Leaders of the Iron Hands. He studied them closely, noting that some positions had been filled by new faces. Those familiar faces from the days of the Silk-Worm Wars, those who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, had inevitably been claimed by the war. At the end of the line stood the Destroyer squads newly arrived from Terra.
"Obelisk," Blazkowicz said, looking at the five hundred new faces. "Lead these new bloods to rendezvous with the Techmarines. Reallocate arms and resume tactical training."
"Incorporate the new blood into the reserve companies proportionally. Have Junior handle the logistics; they still require the guidance of veterans."
"By your command!" Obelisk saluted the Primarch and turned toward the recruits.
"I will accompany Obelisk to the Void Walker," Halan whispered from the side. "The great battle is at hand; I want to see our brothers in the Night Watch."
"Go," Blazkowicz nodded, granting his Champion leave. "Convey my greetings to them."
Halan shouldered Darklight and jogged to catch up with Obelisk's formation, stepping into the teleporter with them.
Blazkowicz stepped out of the receiving line and reached the command dais. He saw the life-support fluid being drained from Ferrus's sarcophagus, and his brother stepped out, assisted by his warriors. The Slayer quickened his pace, steadying his brother's arm. "How does the burden weigh?"
Ferrus ripped the life-support tubes from his back, his dark skin pale from the fluids. He shook his head heavily. "I have never felt so exhausted—building a defensive line capable of supporting a prolonged war, from nothing."
"But with Guilliman and Dorn assisting, we have managed to secure a strategic advantage before the main engagement."
Ferrus's stoic face cracked into a gentle smile. "Of course, you and the Lion entered Rangdan space and wreaked havoc, which bought us a great deal of time."
"From the electronic logs, seeing the state of the Dark Angels' fleet, I finally gained a concrete impression of the dangers you faced."
"A fleet that powerful, supported by a Blackstone Fortress, yet not a single ship is intact. The perils you navigated were enough to annihilate any Legion."
Blazkowicz draped a robe over his brother's shoulders, shaking his head—the truth of the dangers needed no words.
"And the Emperor?" Blazkowicz looked toward the high throne. The residual psychic signature of the Emperor was present, but He was not there.
"The situation is dire." Ferrus moved, his bones popping with a series of loud cracks. "Father is in the immaterial plane, engaging an unseen enemy."
He picked up a data-slate stamped with the word "TOP SECRET." "After you destroyed the World Engine, a massive, hyper-scale psychic artifice enveloped the entire front line."
"Our warriors and mortal soldiers have been cursed and weakened. Mysterious code has modified the constants of our machinery, tampering with the programs at a logical level and triggering utter chaos."
Blazkowicz took the slate, watching the holographic projections as the data scrolled, detailing the various anomalies. In the non-material realm, the demigod had already launched its assault on the Imperium of Man. The Iron Men had discovered and purged the daemonic scrap-code, raising the alarm and prompting Junior to submit recommendations to the command staff to deploy psychic countermeasures to protect the Imperial Legions.
Blazkowicz set the slate down; the standoff at the front lines was equally fraught with danger.
"Hand this to the Emperor." He produced a leather scroll from his dimensional space and placed it in Ferrus's hand. "It contains the truth regarding the Rangdan species."
Ferrus accepted the scroll solemnly, turning it over to see the Imperial seal, marked with the Slayer's signet. He weighed it in his hand, looking at Blazkowicz with a grave expression. "May I read it?"
Blazkowicz did not answer immediately, his mind racing through the contents of the scroll one last time.
"You may." Their eyes locked—two pairs of dark, unyielding irises. "During the Silk-Worm Wars, I owed you an answer. Perhaps this intelligence will serve to clarify a portion of the truth."