The Tyranids really were constructing the next wormhole in advance.
That made the situation far worse.
Four Tyranid bioships had appeared, and two of them were already heading toward the site where the new wormhole was being formed. If the thing inside that wormhole, now expanded to ten thousand kilometers across, still had not emerged by then, those two Tyranid bioships would probably move on to the next star system ahead of schedule.
So what were they supposed to choose?
If they stopped them, they would have to activate the weapon early. But if they did, they would no longer be able to stop the most dangerous thing.
If they did not stop them, then the threat posed by those two bioships and the scale of the Hive Fleet they carried was still terrifying.
"Activate it!"
One of the Astartes from the Lamenters could not stop himself from speaking.
He believed they could not wait any longer. Once those two Tyranid bioships reached the next star system, then with the speed at which the Tyranids devoured and infested worlds, countless humans would die in a very short time, and the Tyranids would spread even farther.
The next system most likely had no real power to resist them. Otherwise, it would have already sent reinforcements to this system.
The xenos would rapidly contaminate Imperial territory, seize countless human homes, and turn them into dead stars.
"Hold your tongue!"
Silt, the captain of the Lamenters squad, snapped at him at once.
In truth, Silt was also extremely anxious, but words like that should not be spoken carelessly and shaken everyone's resolve.
Although they still knew little about Lance Plane, the Salamanders' attitude toward him was enough to show that he was no ordinary man.
There was also something else. Silt felt a strange closeness from him, almost as if they had received the same Primarch's gene-seed.
No. If that were the case, there would not also be this instinctive urge to respect him.
It felt as though Lance Plane's gene-seed was even more advanced than theirs, closer to a Primarch's own.
At that moment, a sudden alarm for an enormous spatial-gravity shock rang out, drawing everyone's attention.
The scale was massive.
"That's the Webway!"
"The Aeldari Webway?"
A sizable fleet stabbed into the star system like a blade.
Under the interference of the Tyranids' Shadow in the Warp, it should have been nearly impossible for a fleet to jump into the system in such an orderly formation. Clearly, the Imperium had reached out to the Aeldari and borrowed their Webway to bring the fleet here.
"The Webway?"
Kain murmured as he looked at the fleet emerging before him.
The Emperor had tried to work on the Webway, only to be sabotaged by one accident, forcing Him to sit upon the Golden Throne, or the golden toilet.
The Webway could be described like this: if the Warp was an extremely dangerous ocean, then a vessel traveling through it was like a submarine moving beneath the sea, always at risk of being attacked by dangerous creatures in the water. The Webway, by contrast, was like an undersea tunnel built beneath that ocean. Traveling through the tunnel was much safer.
The Aeldari controlled part of the Webway, and the Imperium had borrowed their route to enter this system smoothly.
Less than ten minutes after the fleet emerged from the Webway and joined the battle, it immediately moved toward the region where the wormhole was being constructed.
With that fleet driving straight into the conflict, the battle instantly reached a fever pitch, and the Tyranids' construction of the next wormhole was interrupted.
At that moment, the quantum communication device shared by him and Archmagos Cawl received a message. A pager-like note informed him of the decision.
They would wait for the thing on the other side of the gigantic wormhole to come through, then activate the dimensional flattening weapon.
So Kain's ghost ship would remain silent until the thing beyond the wormhole emerged.
Alternatively, if the Tyranids tried to construct another wormhole to the next system before that thing came through, then they would have no choice but to activate the weapon early.
The Tyranid bioships absolutely could not be allowed to enter the next star system.
Half a day passed in silence.
The fleet that had arrived through the Aeldari Webway had already lost two-thirds of its strength.
At this rate, the second wormhole would soon begin construction again.
"This is…"
"Is it here?"
"What the hell is that thing?"
Nothing could actually be seen emerging from the observed wormhole yet, but Kain suddenly felt a violent impact against his mind.
The Astartes clearly felt it as well, and they seemed to suffer far worse than he did. Their brains must have felt as if someone had smashed them with a hammer. They were so dizzy that they nearly failed to keep their footing.
Because of that mental shock, or rather, that psychic shock, the Imperial human fleet, the T'au Empire fleet, and the other forces still fighting across the entire star system suddenly suffered malfunctions and chaos.
In that instant, many people had probably lost consciousness. It was not impossible that their minds had been destroyed outright.
After all, even Astartes were left dizzy enough to nearly lose their balance. If ordinary mortals suffered direct brain death from it, that would not have been strange.
Kain's pupils widened, then abruptly contracted.
He saw something finally beginning to emerge from the wormhole.
If that wormhole was compared to a birth canal, then the thing coming through was a hideous, grotesque egg.
The egg was larger than the opening itself. It looked almost as if it were suffering a difficult birth, slowly stretching the mouth of the wormhole wider as it forced its way into the system, little by little revealing what it truly was.
When the layer of distorted space-time membrane on its surface vanished, the portion that had entered the system was exposed clearly.
"Is that their nest?"
"Did their entire nest come through?"
The voices of the two Astartes captains were terribly heavy.
Just as they said, the thing looked like a nest. It resembled an ant colony and a beehive at the same time, except it was enormous, thirteen thousand kilometers across, the size of a planet.
On closer inspection, the planet-sized nest itself also appeared to be a gigantic living organism. Numbing, scalp-crawling tentacles could be seen writhing out from some of its openings.
Seen from a distance, it looked like a bizarre sphere covered in sparse, unnaturally long hair.
In the next second, the thing grew crab-like legs.
No. They were better described as spider legs.
It was like a spider squeezing through an opening far too narrow for its body. Once it reached the mouth of the hole, its legs emerged first, bracing against both sides outside the opening and dragging the rest of its body farther out.
Now they only had to wait for the instant it fully emerged, then activate the dimensional flattening weapon.
Hm?
Kain suddenly frowned, because something abnormal had happened on the battlefield. From every direction, the Tyranids suddenly abandoned their firefights with the human and allied warships and began moving toward him.
His ship, hidden in quantum ghost mode, seemed to have been detected.
Yes. They had definitely detected it, because they had just been struck by that mental shock.
Just as he realized why they had nearly been discovered, another wave of psychic impact swept over them. More than half of the Astartes dropped to one knee, unable to remain standing, and Kain's expression changed sharply.
He had been attacked too.
But the attack he received was different from the attack suffered by the Astartes. Now he understood: he had been attacked indirectly, while the Astartes had been attacked directly.
In other words, the Astartes being aboard his ship was what had exposed them.
The Astartes were not blanks. They had soul projections in the Warp, and the Tyranid Hive Mind had discovered the hidden ship through those soul projections.
And after that indirect attack struck him, the Hive Mind confirmed his existence.
That meant he had been locked onto.
The Astartes had become routers for the Hive Mind's attack on him.
They could not wait any longer. Kain had an extremely bad feeling. He needed to activate the dimensional flattening weapon immediately.
He started the activation at once.
Bang!
(End of Chapter)
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