Typhus was under considerable pressure. Ahead of him stood the Imperium -- Chaos's greatest enemy in this reality.
The Emperor Titan alone was giving him serious headaches. But if it were just the one Emperor Titan, it wasn't necessarily unmanageable. Destroyed Emperor Titans were not unheard of, and he had two Warlord-class battle groups to work with.
The Orks over on one flank had done something strange -- they'd all suddenly pulled back, apparently trying to put together something large. You could never predict Orks by any normal standard. Their ceiling was simply too high.
The Aeldari were an ancient race. They still had some real depth to them.
The Iron Warriors had immediately locked onto the Imperial Fists the moment they spotted them, which explained a great deal -- so the opposing force was a successor Chapter of the Imperial Fists. That tracked.
With all of this on his mind, Typhus found himself thinking back to the Father's mission. His head was starting to ache. The arrival of multiple Titans had pulled the entire battlefield into another brief, tense silence. Even the intensity of fighting along the front lines had temporarily dropped.
Typhus understood what this silence meant. Whoever broke the equilibrium first would trigger the real battle the moment they moved.
His forces and the Iron Warriors had a temporary alliance. The humans would most likely ally themselves with the Aeldari. The Orks were a loose cannon -- a wild card that would happily attack anyone and everyone with absolute glee.
So the real question was: which side would crack first and launch the Grand Free-for-All.
Oh. T'au. Well, that's fine then.
So what exactly were the T'au?
Typhus stared at the report from his rear guard with a completely blank expression. And what was "the Greater Good" supposed to mean?
He set his mind working -- hard enough that the maggots living inside it began to stir with agitation -- trying to locate any memory or intelligence file related to the T'au. Unfortunately he came up entirely empty.
"Send me a live feed of the situation."
If they dared enter this battle, they couldn't be complete unknowns.
The feed came through. On it, Typhus saw a group of small blue figures bearing distinctive forehead ridges, accompanied by disc-shaped objects hovering through the air like oversized flies.
"For the Three-Eyed Goddess....."
"This is the power of the Three-Eyed T'au God!"
After hearing that battle cry, Typhus quietly switched off the communicator.
"Someone go eliminate them."
Ah. Just Genestealers. That's fine, then.
This planet was one the Father had personally marked as vital -- a critical staging point for the future spreading of his gifts. There was absolutely no chance he would allow a mob of ground-scrapers to spoil it. Typhus would not permit those creatures to interfere here under any circumstances.
"The Titans stay where they are. You -- take three hundred Death Guard plus substantial supporting forces and finish them off."
He suspected this was the same group that had hit them immediately after that artillery bombardment. To avoid drawing a Tyranid Hive Fleet in on top of everything else, they needed to be eliminated first. The Tyranids were one of the very few threats that could compel both the Imperium and Chaos to cooperate against a shared enemy -- they held the highest possible priority for removal.
After all, the Chaos Gods were the ones who ran the card table. The Tyranids were the ones who flipped it.
So Typhus detached a portion of his force to deal with the problem. Whatever this group was, it wasn't a Tyranid Fleet. It wasn't even worth his personal attention.
His only genuine frustration was that the Warlord Titans were his main strength and couldn't be redeployed. He'd have to send what amounted to supporting assets to handle them instead.
Typhus dismissed the matter quickly and turned his full attention back to monitoring the battlefield. He ordered his personnel to begin the special rites immediately -- preparations to activate the Chaos artifact.
Even he wasn't particularly confident about how this battle would play out. Looking over everything he had received reports on -- an ancient Imperial Fists Contemptor Dreadnought, Death Guard going berserk for inexplicable reasons, Imperial forces that were displaying a very unsettling combination of qualities, borderline heretical by any sane measure -- and on top of all of that, the Father's direct orders, which meant he couldn't simply blanket the zone in plague and scrub it clean the way he normally would.
Typhus was under enormous pressure. Right now, all he could do was pray that whoever that person was on the other side didn't get killed in the crossfire.
...
---o---
Elsewhere. Inside the fortress.
The former Planetary Defence Force General and Fallen Angel, Thisli, made his way into a concealed underground room. From the moment Zhou Ye had arrived, he had been quietly removed from the command structure. He was now, in effect, a man without a post.
He knew Zhou Ye hadn't done it out of malice. Whoever was on the other side had most likely recognized what he was. For everyone's sake, this arrangement was better. He had been content to rest.
But when he saw the Titans locked in that standoff, something in him would not stay still.
He was an Astartes. A proud knight of The Order of Caliban.
He could not endure the thought of watching every other warrior on this field fight to their limits while he hid in a basement.
He was a Dark Angel. First Legion.
From the day he had arrived on this world, he had made a promise to himself -- he would protect it.
He could not watch soldiers bleed and die while he crouched underground with his wife and children.
He hungered for battle. He hungered to serve the God-Emperor. And he hungered for the day he might once again -- once again -- stand before Lion El'Jonson, the most deeply concealed traitor in all the Imperium.
That was the greatest secret. The darkest truth of all. The world had been deceived. The Dark Angels had hidden it for ten thousand years -- they had buried the Lion's betrayal. And he had been there. He had just finished his adaptation training, barely wearing his new armor, when the first enemy he ever faced was their own Primarch.
He had been one of the finest among the new recruits that day. He had defeated brother after brother to earn his place in the honor guard -- chosen to welcome the Primarch none of them had ever seen with their own eyes.
But what had waited for them?
Slaughter. New recruits who never even had time to understand what was happening, cut down by their own Primarch before a single one of them could react.
"A pity. It seems I will never live to see the traitor made to repent. This place will be my grave."
He looked at the black armor before him -- clean, unornamented, carrying no luxury -- and slowly picked it up.
The situation on Tillius had no room left for anything else. Once Titans entered the field, this became a different class of war entirely. Even Space Marines were just line infantry now. Even the most revered of Dreadnought Brethren were just filling gaps.
So....
"Tell me, neophyte. What exactly happened on Caliban?"
At that moment, a voice -- utterly calm, and yet it made him tremble -- spoke from behind him. The door opened. An enormous figure walked slowly inside.
A Dreadnought. One bearing the colors of the Star of Trailblaze.
A Dark Angels Dreadnought....
"...Ancient?"
The Fallen Angel's voice wavered as he felt it -- that particular sensation, familiar and undeniable, the pull of shared genetic lineage.
He had known this Chapter housed a Dreadnought Ancient of ten thousand years. He had heard there might be sons of the Blood Angels among them. He knew for certain there were Varagyr Wolf Guard. But nothing -- nothing -- had prepared him for the possibility that there might also be an ancient Contemptor, a genuine relic of his own Dark Angels Legion.
So....
Just what was this Chapter. And just who was that Chapter Master -- who looked for all the world like some overworked office drone on the verge of complete physical collapse, and yet....