V3 Chapter 93: Let Your Legion's True Master Come Speak With Me!
"Robert, so you've finally crawled out of that tomb."
The instant Guilliman heard that voice, he knew exactly whose it was.
Mortarion.
His brother, long since fallen.
Magnus had already announced his own scheme through the Warp, then Angron had crashed straight into the Macragge's Honour, and now it was Mortarion's turn.
Guilliman found it almost darkly funny. Ten thousand years ago, he seemed to recall being rather less popular with these three brothers than he apparently was now.
He'd just opened his mouth to answer when Duvette beat him to it.
"Isn't this the First Captain of the Death Guard?"
Duvette looked up at the structure wrapped in rotting flesh, his voice dripping with mockery.
"What's the rush, coming out to see the Thirteenth Legion's true master?"
"Send your Legion's real master to come talk to us!"
The words had barely left him when the writhing flesh across the warped structure's surface froze all at once.
The blood vessels hidden within it tensed in the same instant, and great quantities of pus surged out through splitting skin. The whole structure shuddered violently, as though Duvette's words had struck directly at the will holding it together.
Mortarion's voice rose again.
Suppressed fury spread through the comm channel, and the poisonous mist around them thickened in answer.
"I know you, Duvette Erdmann. The one who helped Robert claw his way back from death. The Grandfather has named your soul specifically."
"An insignificant mortal, and still you dare provoke me to my face."
Mortarion's breathing grew heavier.
"I will find you."
"I will fill your body with disease, and let you live forever in endless torment and wailing, then offer you up to the Grandfather himself."
"I promise you that."
Duvette's mouth split into a grin, and he laughed once, contemptuously.
"Anyone can talk big."
"If you actually had it in you, you wouldn't be hiding in some corner right now, just talking at us."
He raised a finger and pointed at the rotting structure.
"A gene-Primarch, driven by his own sons into becoming a Ruinous Power's dog on a leash. Mortarion, you really are one of a kind. Look at the state of you. At least, next to how far your own sons have sunk, you can still see your own filth and rot clearly enough. That's almost pitiable, in its own way."
"The Primarch once called the most resilient, the one who resisted psychic power better than any other. And now, nothing but a hound on Chaos's leash."
"Genuinely pathetic."
Mortarion let out a furious roar.
The green mist churned violently in an instant, branches throughout the rotting forest cracking and colliding against one another, and several mortal soldiers standing closer to the structure were knocked half a step back by the force of the sound alone.
Right after, another bell toll rang out, and at such close range most of the mortals showed clear signs of nausea and sickness under its force, though Duvette's power kept them alive and standing regardless. As for Duvette himself, he simply watched it all with an expression of mockery, entirely unaffected.
Seeing he had no way to touch Duvette for the moment, Mortarion stopped paying him any further attention, and turned his voice on Guilliman instead.
"You will all pay for everything you've done."
"Go home to Ultramar, brother."
Guilliman's brow drew tight at that, and he tightened his grip on the Emperor's Sword.
Mortarion went on. "Return to that realm of yours, still singing the praises of order and prosperity."
"I will let the Five Hundred Worlds sicken, one by one."
"The cities you cherish will become graves. The order you built will collapse into plague and despair."
"When I have finished with it all, that Ultramar you take such pride in will be nothing but ash."
No visible change crossed Guilliman's face, but the flame along the Emperor's Sword, leaping ever more violently, told the truth of what lay beneath.
"You will watch it happen with your own eyes."
Mortarion said, low. "And then lose everything you tried to protect."
"I will see to it you remember this failure, Guilliman."
"I will let you live in endless suffering..."
"You really do talk too much."
Duvette had finally lost his patience for listening.
His figure vanished from where he stood in an instant.
The next moment, he had already appeared directly before the rotting structure. [Silence] spread outward from him, centred on his own body, swiftly enveloping the whole thing.
Mortarion's voice cut off at once.
The static across the comm channel vanished with it, and the churning green mist stopped moving within moments. The warped flesh covering the structure's outer layer began shaking violently, great chunks of it tearing loose from the metal frame beneath and crashing to the ground.
Foul-smelling pus surged out through the cracks.
Countless maggots burrowed their way out from the flesh, only to stop moving the instant they hit the ground. The organs sustained by Warp power withered fast, and the veins that had still been pulsing began to blacken.
"Fire."
Duvette said coldly.
Soldiers across all four converged forces carried out the order on instinct.
Flame teams moved forward fast, taking up firing positions from multiple directions. The next instant, great gouts of promethium fire erupted at once, wrapping the entire structure in flame within moments.
The rotting flesh shrivelled in the heat.
Thick, viscous fat crackled and popped, sending heavy black smoke rolling upward. The flesh across the structure's surface looked as though it were screaming, but under [Silence]'s cover, no one heard a single sound of it.
Duvette stood at the position closest to the fire.
Heat washed over him without pause, the edges of his black coat starting to scorch and curl. His expression never changed; heat of this scale posed no real threat to his body now, no more than a spring breeze against his face.
He simply watched the structure, still burning.
As the rotten flesh coating its outer layer charred away, a massive clock made of rotten wood emerged from deep within.
Its face carried only seven markings.
Rusted gears sat packed with the corpses of dead maggots, and a scythe-shaped pendulum hung beneath, still swinging slowly. Every motion it made left a faint warp in the surrounding remnant of space.
Duvette could tell this wasn't the true body.
It was only a projection, cast onto Badab by some creation born of the Warp. Deep within the clock, another suffering consciousness lay imprisoned, that soul used as the power source keeping both the projection and the seven tolls alive.
The flames burned through the rotten wooden shell.
An old, twisted face surfaced within the clock's face. It opened its mouth, letting out a wail no one could hear, before dissolving away along with the clock's projection, consumed entirely by the fire.
The scythe pendulum stopped swinging.
The last piece of rotten wood snapped and fell into the flames.
Once the entire ritual structure had been completely destroyed, the surrounding space began to change.
The green sky drew back fast, and the thick plague mist began thinning out as well. Part of what had once been an endlessly stretching rotting forest vanished, revealing the ancient metal walls and dome behind it.
The diseased trees that had genuinely taken root in reality still remained.
Thick roots still wrapped around the pipework, and the pus and rot coating the metal plating hadn't vanished along with the restored space. The corruption this place had truly suffered was not purely illusion, and would still need to be burned out and cleared thoroughly afterward.
Duvette pulled up his strategic map again.
The markers for the four hive cities, once overlapping, had separated. Their current position now showed within a vast underground space. Several ancient energy conduits stretched outward in different directions, each one large enough to carry a heavy armoured train.
Guilliman, silent for a long while, walked over.
He looked around at the structure now restored to normal, then studied the still-legible designation numbers once more.
"This is very likely an ancient, planet-wide energy network connecting Badab's four main hive cities."
Guilliman said. "We're standing at its central hub."
"Mortarion used the energy lines already running through here to fold the lower levels of all four hive cities into a single space."
Duvette turned his attention back to the strategic map.
"Which means we're nowhere near any of the hive cities right now."
"There's no walking back in any reasonable time."
Guilliman looked up toward a massive transport tunnel in the distance.
"There should be maintenance trains down here somewhere, heavy lift shafts, or industrial transport routes leading up to the surface."
"Confirm our coordinates first. Then contact the fleet."
Duvette looked around at the wreckage still burning nearby, then swept his gaze over the four forces now finally converged.
"Let's clean this up first."
Guilliman nodded.
"Seal off this area. Take a headcount."
"Burn out every remaining trace of contamination. No one leaves the central hub without decontamination first."
The new orders went out fast.
Mortarion's declaration of war had come to an end.
And the last cleanup of Badab's plague had, at last, entered its closing stage.