Sanguinius's pristine white wings vanished as the Thunderhawk's assault ramp sealed shut.
At this moment, the gentleness on the Great Angel's face had completely evaporated, replaced by the sheer, unyielding killing intent of a Legion Primarch.
Azkaellon could feel the violent shift in his father's psychic field—it was overflowing with endless, frigid murderous intent.
"All fleet assets: elevate combat readiness to Condition Red."
Sanguinius's voice transmitted directly from the Thunderhawk's vox array to the bridge of the Red Tear, and out to the command decks of every escort vessel.
"All combat companies prepare for immediate drop assault. The Librarius is to focus all scrying on Warp signatures within the City of the Holy Anthem sector."
The roar of the Thunderhawk's engines gradually faded into the distance above the hive apex.
In front of the Governor's Palace, Cogboy, Schrödinger Bro, Blood Angels' Second Emperor, and over twenty senior players stood frozen in place, watching the crimson and gold thruster wake disappear into the glare of the artificial dome's illumination arrays.
It took them a long while to process what had just happened.
The [Regional Channel] was instantly flooded with messages.
[I'm the Emperor's Dick]: What just happened? Why did he just up and leave?! The report was only half finished!
[I Want to Eat Nurgle's Sour Stinky Little Feet]: Did you guys see Sanguinius's face just now? He looked like he was about to murder someone... No, like he was about to murder a daemon.
[Slaaneshi Champion in Training]: What did his last sentence mean? 'Something crawled out of the Warp'?! Holy shit, don't tell me...
[Titus Shine My Shoes]: Chaos? Daemons?! Is the plot actually advancing this fast?!
--
At the same time. Kent Hive Governor's Palace, Sub-Level 3, Respawn Point.
Crimson Deep Sea stepped out of the faintly glowing respawn pool with an incredibly complicated expression on his face.
[Crimson Deep Sea]: Brothers, I'm back...
A new message suddenly popped up in the regional channel. The sender's ID made everyone freeze.
Cogboy stared at the text for three seconds before typing out three question marks.
[Fugitive Cogboy of the Mechanicus]: ???
[Fugitive Cogboy of the Mechanicus]: Deep Sea, weren't you undercover in the City of the Holy Anthem? You were just messaging us that you found an opportunity to assassinate Achil and take over the Hysman Merchant Guild! Why are you suddenly back?! Are you outside the hive? Hurry to the Governor's Palace!
After the message was sent, the channel fell silent for a moment.
[Crimson Deep Sea]: No need. I'm already in the Governor's Palace.
[Schrödinger's Loyalist]: What happened? Was your cover blown?
[Crimson Deep Sea]: ...Yes and no.
[Teaching Nurgle How to Read in the Warp]: Speak English! You're killing me with suspense!
[Crimson Deep Sea]: I actually did become the boss of the Hysman Guild.
A wave of ellipses and question marks flooded the channel.
[Crimson Deep Sea]: I took out that furious idiot Achil and used the Avatar Reconstruction to perfectly duplicate his appearance, memories, and behavioral patterns. I was just about to use his identity to consolidate the guild's resources and make a massive move.
[Crimson Deep Sea]: And then, out of nowhere, the City of the Holy Anthem was suddenly swarming with Tzeentchian daemons. Pink Horrors, Blue Horrors, even those shapeshifting Changelings. Along with them were at least five hundred Chaos Sorcerers—purple skin, glowing eyes, killing everyone on sight. They were setting up twisted rituals in every street and alley, trying to widen the Warp rift to summon even more daemons.
[Crimson Deep Sea]: The craziest part is, for some reason, those Chaos Sorcerers seemed to have a massive hate boner for the leaders of the major factions. I had just convened a meeting with the guild's inner circle as Achil, and three sorcerers stormed in with hundreds of Horrors and jumped me. The guild's defense force lasted maybe ten minutes. I took a purple lightning bolt straight to the dome and died on the spot.
[Crimson Deep Sea]: So yeah, I died. And considering... the City of the Holy Anthem is probably a full-blown daemon hive by now, I opted not to respawn there.
The sheer volume of information was so staggering that no one spoke for a while.
Finally, Cogboy was the first to react.
[Fugitive Cogboy of the Mechanicus]: That's a hive city with billions of people... No wonder Sanguinius bolted so fast!
Schrödinger Bro muttered in shock, "A hive-wide Chaos outbreak... How many people are going to die?"
"They won't all die. Tzeentch doesn't want slaughter; he wants corruption. Killing billions only nets you billions of corpses. Corrupting billions nets you billions of believers, billions of souls to burn for power. That is what he truly wants."
Everyone turned around.
Paul walked out from the shadows.
His brow was furrowed tightly. The dark golden pentagram in his pupils was flashing erratically, the five points illuminating in sequence. All five of his traits were screaming warnings at him.
"Paul," the group nodded respectfully.
Paul walked up to Deep Sea and patted him on the shoulder. "You did well. Undercover missions are inherently high-risk. Getting as far as you did is already incredible."
Deep Sea sighed. "A shame I stumbled at the finish line. If I had just a little more time, I could have seized total control of the Hysman Guild. Coordinated with our requisition plan, we could have swallowed at least half of the other three factions' assets..."
"Plans can never keep up with changes," Paul interrupted, then looked at Deep Sea intently. "What about Leon and Vanessa?"
"Sent them away!" Crimson Deep Sea replied instantly. "The very first thing I did after usurping Achil's identity was use the guild's clearance to shove them onto an ore transport headed for the Coryphene Sector. Their cover is that they're Schola Progenium cadets sponsored by the Hysman Guild. I had to bribe the officials with three solid-jade Emperor statues and fifty crates of vintage amasec just to grease the wheels."
"I also had to promise an annual 'donation' of twenty million Aquila Thrones to the Schola," he paused. "This corrupt Imperial bureaucracy is a joke. You can't get anything done by the book; you literally just have to throw money at them. But if I hadn't sent them away, those kids would probably be dead by now. Those Chaos Sorcerers..."
Paul nodded. "You did the right thing. Those two kids were the first natives Crimson Dawn took under its wing. They have talent, and they have the right mindset. The Schola Progenium is the Imperial institution that produces the most military and political officers for every sector and segmentum. Successfully planting them there is worth any price."
His tone then shifted, turning deadly serious. "But right now, we have a far bigger problem to deal with."
"A massive Tzeentchian daemon incursion, over five hundred psykers falling to corruption simultaneously, and a major hive city compromised." Paul stated flatly. "Given Sanguinius's personality and his duty, he only has two options."
"Option one: organize an immediate purging operation, deploy the main ground forces of the Blood Angels, and attempt a forceful extermination. This will result in catastrophic casualties, and it may not even be fast enough to stop the corruption from spreading."
"Option two... Exterminatus."
The temperature in the room plummeted.
"I... it wouldn't go that far, right?" one player whispered. "This is a planet with tens of billions of people..."
"It absolutely would," Schrödinger Bro said, his tone icy. "In the Warhammer universe, the Imperium's stance on Warp corruption has always been 'better to kill a billion innocents than let a single heretic escape.' And this isn't just some small-scale heresy. An entire hive city has fallen, and a Warp rift has torn open. If Sanguinius deems a ground-based purge unviable, then orbital bombardment—or even virus bombs—are absolutely on the table. And the moment he chooses Exterminatus..."
"Everything Crimson Dawn has fought for over the past two months," Paul spoke up. "The twenty thousand workers we saved, the ninety-eight million citizens of Kent Hive, the thirty billion human beings on Aurelian IV... all of it will be reduced to ash."
He swept his gaze across the room.
"We know Horus is going to betray the Emperor. We know the Emperor will be entombed upon the Golden Throne. We know humanity is about to plunge into ten millennia of darkness. We originally planned to keep a low profile, consolidate our power, and bide our time... But that time has run out."
Paul's voice abruptly spiked in volume. "Chaos is already knocking on our front door! A Primarch of the Imperium is in orbit! This world, the people we personally saved, the civilians we promised dignity and hope—they could all be annihilated in a storm of orbital fire at any moment!"
He slammed his fist onto a nearby metal console, leaving a deep dent in the alloy plating.
"We cannot sit here and wait for death! We cannot entrust the fate of everyone here to the decision of a single Primarch!"
The mechanical eye of the Cogboy whirred frantically. "Paul, you mean..."
"Crimson Dawn is undergoing full-scale militarization," Paul enunciated every word clearly. "Starting right now."
He looked at Schrödinger Bro. "Notify Tax Bro, White Scars, G Bro, Tau Buddy... Tell all players who have completed the Astartes augmentation to log in immediately and assemble in the plaza before the Governor's Palace."
He turned to the Cogboy. "In the name of Governor Cage, declare a state of emergency for the hive. Initiate the deep-trench protocol, Operation Ark. Evacuate all non-combatant civilians to the designated subterranean shelters. Simultaneously, we are going all-in on bolstering our military strength using the two hundred and seventy billion Imperial Coins we requisitioned."
The three men snapped to attention simultaneously. "Understood!"
Paul took a deep breath.
"Tell all the players: the first legion under the banner of the Crimson Dawn Chapter is about to be formed. The mechs, tanks, heavy self-propelled artillery, Astartes augmentations, Tech-Priest enhancements, void ships... everything they've been drooling over in the system store. Tell them the Imperial Coin reserves are fully stocked. Tell them to reinforce themselves without holding back!"
"Once our military buildup is complete, our first objective is this: If Sanguinius's ground forces become deadlocked with the Tzeentchian daemons and suffer catastrophic casualties... before Sanguinius makes his final decision, and before the Chaos corruption swallows this entire world..."
"We will do it ourselves. Crimson Dawn..."
"...will retake the City of the Holy Anthem!"
--
The bridge of the Red Tear was bathed in the grim, blood-red illumination of combat readiness.
Every single feather on Sanguinius's pristine white wings quivered slightly in the air currents disturbed by the surging Warp energy. His amber-gold slit pupils were locked onto the holographic hololith.
A model of Aurelian IV hovered in the center of the command dais. At this moment, the City of the Holy Anthem in the planet's southern hemisphere was continuously spewing blinding purple psychic signatures.
"Contamination level?"
"Mu-class, Father. This has already reached the threshold of severe corruption and is continuing to escalate."
The voice of the Second Epistolary of the Librarius, Gregory Walsh, echoed through his rebreather grille, carrying the metallic resonance characteristic of a psychic hood. "The Warp rift has expanded to three point seven kilometers in diameter. We are detecting over five hundred high-level psychic signatures, as well as... uncountable lesser daemonic entities."
"Five hundred psykers falling to corruption simultaneously."
Captain Tobias Fane of the Second Company stood beside Sanguinius, the servo-motors of his artificer armor whining softly. "This requires meticulous planning and long-term corruption. What exactly has the Mechanicus been doing? Was their entire psychic monitoring grid nothing but a prop?!"
The holographic projection switched to a real-time aerial view of the City of the Holy Anthem.
Suspended from the towering apex of the central hive spire, dangling like blasphemous banners, were three corpses: Achil (Deep Sea) of the Hysman Merchant Guild, Greave of the Atens Knight House, and Occus Kane of the Order of the Omnissian Mind.
The corpses were impaled by purple psychic chains, swaying in the wind thousands of meters in the air.
A viscous mixture of blood and Warp energy continuously dripped from their wounds, burning blasphemous runes into the spire's surface like hyper-acid.
The image zoomed in on the very peak of the central spire.
A figure covered in a pale purple carapace, bearing two pairs of semi-transparent wings, stood at the edge.
He tilted his head back, gazing toward orbit, as if his vision could pierce through the atmosphere and the armored viewports of the battleship to lock eyes directly with Sanguinius.
Then, he opened his mouth.
His voice took the form of a psychic pulse, smashing straight into the vox arrays of the Red Tear and blaring from every single speaker on the bridge.
"SAN! GUI! NI! US!"
The voice was a horrifying amalgamation of dozens of different pitches.
"Did you not demand an answer within three days?!"
"Did you not want to uncover the identities of those Champion raiders?!"
"Well, now I shall give you your answer!"
Sacken Alar spread his arms wide, his psychic wings unfurling completely as purple lightning arced between the membranes.
Beneath his feet, the entirety of the City of the Holy Anthem was undergoing a horrifying mutation. Constantly shifting geometric patterns surfaced across the architecture.
The people in the streets screamed as their bodies warped and twisted. Warp rifts tore open like purple wounds across the hive, and more Tzeentchian daemons poured out like a plague of locusts.
"Look closely! This is the eighty-year truth of Aurelian IV!! The Mechanicus treated us like lab rats! The Imperium treated us like slaves! You Primarchs treated us like disposable statistics!! The so-called Emperor is nothing but a False Emperor! He waged a bloody, hypocritical Great Crusade in the name of human restoration, bringing nothing but endless suffering to humanity across the cosmos! And now, it is our turn to make a choice!!"
Sacken's voice abruptly spiked, carrying the fanatical zeal of a martyr.
"We choose knowledge! We choose change! We choose true freedom!! We choose... the Changer of Ways!!!"
Those final words plunged the bridge into a deathly silence.
The only sounds were the deep, rhythmic thrum of the plasma drives deep within the hull and the blaring sirens of the auspex cogitators.
Sanguinius slowly closed his eyes.
Three seconds later, he opened them. There was absolutely no hesitation left in his amber-gold pupils.
He spoke only a few words, his voice perfectly calm.
"Warp-spawn."
"It must face purification and absolute judgment."
--
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