"Emperor... the Grey Knights' Oath of Purity will finally be fulfilled!"
The order from Titan left Corwin so tense his nerves were stretched to the limit, yet there was excitement in him too.
Every Grey Knight knew of the existence of the Terminus Decree.
From the moment they passed their initial trials and became recruits, they were told the purpose of their existence.
They existed to cut down Chaos daemons for the Emperor, and when the time came, to carry out the final order the Emperor had left behind.
Then came round after round of training, along with the examinations and loathsome ritual tests, all of which reinforced that truth.
It was burned into them. It made them remember the mission of a Grey Knight forever.
Even Corwin, a Grey Knights Grand Master, had long awaited the arrival of this day.
After all, only by carrying out the Terminus Decree and completing their true mission could they be considered truly whole.
"Emperor above, I can finally see the contents of that decree. Even if I die afterward, I will have no regrets!"
Corwin sighed with emotion.
Many Grey Knights died with the regret that they had failed to live long enough to witness the revelation of the Terminus Decree.
Because no one knew what that decree actually contained.
That was the contradiction at the heart of it all.
The Grey Knights' ultimate reason for existing was to carry out that decree, yet they did not know what it said, did not know what they would ultimately be fighting for.
Nor did they possess any authority or channel by which to learn it. All they could do was speculate.
The Terminus Decree was the greatest secret of the Grey Knights, the foundation upon which their Chapter had been built. It had always been locked away in Titan's underground Hall of Purity, within Malcador's tomb.
That decree had been written by the Emperor himself, and it was his final command to the Grey Knights.
It was hidden inside a plain wooden casket imbued with special power, and only the Supreme Grand Master himself could open it.
Legend said it was the Grey Knights' final instrument of judgment, holding the ultimate power either to destroy the Imperium or to save humanity in its darkest hour!
Fortunately, they were about to witness all of it on Titan!
"All warriors of the Seventh Brotherhood, clear the battlefield at maximum speed. We are returning to Titan at once!"
Corwin gave the order.
He wanted nothing more than to reach Grey Knights headquarters immediately and witness that great moment with his own eyes.
As for that strange daemon world, there was no longer time to investigate it. A simple record and report would have to do.
No matter how dangerous it might be, it could not compare to the importance of the Terminus Decree.
That was the one thing that could truly save the Imperium. Everyone wanted to know exactly what task and what power the Emperor had entrusted to the Grey Knights!
Very soon, Corwin led all the Grey Knights in withdrawal, vanishing from that Chaos domain, now reduced to ruins.
They returned to realspace.
Not long after, violent tremors rippled through that Warp region. The daemon world began to shine with impossible, malignant warp-light, while Chaos energy surged wildly.
If any high-ranking psyker or Librarian had been present, they would have detected the utter evil within it, along with the terrifying dark devices covering its surface.
They would also have discovered the bodies of more than ten fallen Primarchs upon it.
Any Imperial who witnessed such a sight would have understood at once that it was the deadliest threat in ten thousand years, without question.
And when the warp-energy reached its peak, that daemon world shifted from solid to unreal, then slowly disappeared, embedding itself into the veil between the Warp and reality.
That was New Dragon Forest Star.
This ultimate mobile fortress, this daemon world painstakingly built by the Chaos Gods, had completed its final preparations.
It had officially set sail!
Holy Terra, Imperial Palace.
Clang, clang, clang!
Dozens of Titan-grade engineering machines were hammering away inside the Palace's fortress-complexes, while even more workers drove cargo haulers back and forth transporting every imaginable kind of material.
Among them were specialized Warp machines.
It could be said that the Palace had never been this lively before. Huge numbers of personnel were moving through the various sacred sites and major transit hubs.
The veteran Custodes found it deeply uncomfortable, yet they had no choice.
The one who now held the Palace was the Savior, His Majesty the Emperor of the Imperium. That being had the authority to do anything he wished within the Palace, even install dangerous Warp machinery.
These veteran Custodes, who had guarded the Palace for ten thousand years, felt a faint bitterness in their hearts.
It was almost as though they were being retired.
"You needn't worry. These Warp machines are here to protect the Palace."
Eden understood the anxious state of mind of those aging Custodes and tried to reassure them.
As the Emperor of the Imperium, and the man who had turned the Palace into a construction site, he still had to take the old Custodes' feelings into consideration.
Of course, that reassurance was only verbal. There was no chance he would alter his plans for anyone.
They could only obediently accept what was happening.
"As for danger, yes, of course there's a little. But these are necessary measures. No matter how dangerous these Warp machines are, can they really be more dangerous than the Golden Throne?
As long as they can ease the Golden Throne's condition, then they're worth it."
In the entire galaxy, there was nothing more dangerous than the Golden Throne.
Beneath it lay the Webway breach, and it itself could explode at any time. The real danger was already inside the Palace.
Since there was already a massive bomb buried in the Palace, and the fuse had already been lit, then adding a few smaller bombs hardly mattered.
As long as the gains were greater than the losses, it was acceptable.
After sending those veteran Custodes away, Eden climbed onto the rooftop terrace of one of the fortress spires and looked out at the sky.
He felt a faint pressure weighing on him.
That pressure was not coming from the Custodes.
It came from the Golden Throne, and from the Warp.
He had an increasingly strong feeling that a storm was approaching. The sense of things slipping out of control was getting worse and worse, and nothing he did seemed able to ease it.
Right now, many intelligence channels were being disrupted by some unknown interference. Even the daemon-birds could no longer gather accurate information, which had made Chaos' movements murky and impossible to read.
"This is bad. I don't even have the advantage of foresight anymore..."
Eden was deeply worried.
In the past, he had been able to roughly understand what the Chaos Gods and the xenos intended to do, whether it was the Battle of Macragge, the Battle of Baal, or the Plague Wars.
That had let him prepare ahead of time and deal with possible threats, giving him enormous advantage.
But now, all the information he once possessed about this world's trajectory had already been exhausted.
It was exactly this kind of uncertainty that was most dangerous.
"Let's just hope GW's financial reports are healthy and they haven't cooked up any new nonsense in the future. Otherwise this is going to be rough..."
Eden muttered those words so softly that only he could hear them.
It was now the 42nd Millennium of the Imperial calendar, and more than two hundred years had passed. He simply had no idea what the future held for the galaxy and the Warp.
He was afraid some sudden new event might occur, or that some dangerous being or artifact might emerge and overturn the old balance of power.
If that happened, all his plans would be thrown into disarray, producing an even more dangerous situation.
Just as Eden was worrying over all this, his aide Tarko hurried toward him.
The moment he saw that, Eden's heart sank. It was obvious the man had received some urgent intelligence.
"Your Majesty, Supreme Grand Master Kaldor Draigo of the Grey Knights has returned. He is currently on Titan, and he has recalled all Grey Knights..."
Tarko approached, saluted, and delivered his report.
"Kaldor Draigo?"
Eden frowned slightly.
He recalled that top-tier Imperial superhuman, the man some people jokingly called the swaggering one.
Back when Draigo had still been a low-ranking Grey Knight, he had already banished a Daemon Prince.
After that, he had gone on to achieve one unbelievable feat after another.
That man had even beaten a Primarch. He had carved words into the heart of the Daemon Primarch Mortarion, weakened him with his true name, hacked him to pieces, and banished him back into the Warp.
That was completely outrageous. Draigo had essentially carved the equivalent of Loyal and True onto the body of a Daemon Primarch, permanently branding him with humiliation to the absolute limit.
That giant moth probably would never forget that disgrace for the rest of his existence.
It was hard to say whether Mortarion was just that pathetic, or whether Draigo was simply that strong, but either way, the man definitely counted as one of the Imperium's top combat assets.
Compared to him, Titus was basically just a common grunt.
And after Kaldor Draigo had been lost in the Warp, he had gained still greater power. He cut through daemons like chopping vegetables.
In terms of sheer aura, he was no less imposing than a Primarch.
At the very least, he was firmer than certain fallen Primarchs. After being stranded in the domains of Chaos, Draigo had resisted the temptations of the Chaos Gods and killed every champion they sent against him.
At the Peaks of Bloodfall, he slew countless champions of Khorne and took the head of the bloodthirsting monster Kalvos.
In the rotting forests of Nurgle's garden domain, he unleashed his psychic power to burn away everything in his path, and for a long time afterward, that region was filled with the stench of burned, rotting vegetation.
When he crossed the Whispering Meadows of Pleasure, six daemon-sisters, handmaidens chosen by the Prince of Pleasure, tried to tempt him with honor, power, beauty, wealth, and limitless strength. In the end, their bones were all that remained, scattered through the thick grasses.
At last he reached the Inevitable City, where the Lord of Change M'kchin offered him a road back to reality, but he rejected the offer and instead pushed down the city walls, burying that Tzeentchian raven-servant beneath them.
In other words, Draigo had resisted every corruption the Chaos Gods could throw at him through sheer willpower and personal strength alone.
He had fought his way from one end of the Warp to the other, rampaging through one Chaos domain after another, and his battle-record was staggering.
According to certain legends, so long as Kaldor Draigo still lived, victory was inevitable. One day he would return to the material world and become the savior of all!
It could honestly be said that if Eden, this current Savior, had never appeared, then Draigo would have been much like Guilliman or the Primarchs - a future great savior of the Imperium at some crucial point in history.
"Did those GW lunatics ever even visit this universe? They really just make things up and write whatever they want."
Eden could not help complaining.
No matter how you looked at it, Kaldor Draigo's feats were absurdly over the top. He was more imposing than many Primarchs, a complete protagonist-tier, ridiculously overpowered figure.
Even a chosen son of fate like Guilliman occasionally wound up sprawled flat on his ass after getting beaten around by daemons, but that top Grey Knight seemed to have almost never truly lost.
His whole style was simple: slaughter everything, never yield.
"Maybe Draigo is one of those rare natural-born warriors among humanity, just as the Emperor was a natural-born Perpetual and Master of Mankind.
Or maybe the old Emperor has been backing him from behind the scenes."
Eden's expression turned serious. He was taking this very seriously.
The return of such an Imperial figure to the material world was no less important than the return of a Primarch.
More importantly, Kaldor Draigo carried tremendous influence, especially within the Grey Knights themselves. He effectively held sway over one of the strongest armed forces in the Imperium.
And yet after returning, such a figure had not come to formally report to Eden, the Savior and Emperor of the Imperium.
Instead, he had gone straight back to Titan headquarters and summoned a massive concentration of forces.
That was starting to look a little too much like he did not regard the Emperor of the Imperium very highly.
Eden lifted his gaze toward the heavens. He could vaguely make out a tiny, distinct point of light among the stars, different from the others, as though shrouded in a layer of gray haze.
That was Titan.
Titan was Saturn's sixth moon. During the Horus Heresy, Malcador had used a powerful psychic matrix to move it into the Warp and conceal it for quite some time.
By the time it reappeared, the Grey Knights, created through the Emperor's own gene-work, had already taken shape.
The Grey Knights were a secretly founded Imperial armed force. Every warrior among them possessed tremendous power, while also hiding even deeper secrets and strength, beyond the authority of any outside faction.
Not even the Custodes could interfere with them.
According to legend, the Grey Knights were a force created by Malcador at the Emperor's command, and they were meant to carry out one final order.
Eden had once been quite curious and had asked the Emperor about this directly, but the old man had merely shaken his head and said he no longer remembered.
To put it simply, the Emperor knew the matter existed, but had lost the specific memory of it. He did not know what the Grey Knights' ultimate purpose truly was.
That made the matter even more troublesome.
Worse still, not even the Grey Knights themselves knew what the command actually was.
In other words, the entire Grey Knights Chapter might, at any time, launch itself into extreme action for the sake of one unknown final order.
And what is unknown is, by definition, uncontrollable.
For Eden, the Emperor of the Imperium, having a powerful armed force under his banner that concealed an unknown purpose was not a good thing.
Over the last several years, he had repeatedly tried to bring the Grey Knights fully under his control and dig out their deepest secrets, but had encountered resistance.
The Grey Knights accepted his mobilization orders, but they had not given him complete loyalty. They were still in that state of obeying deployment while refusing true submission.
For the sake of that ultimate order, they insisted on maintaining their independence.
Under those circumstances, Eden could not very well force the issue. Instead, he had chosen to work slowly.
He had begun inserting people into their ranks one recruit at a time, strengthening their ties to the Imperium little by little.
That plan had not progressed especially quickly. At present, only the Seventh Brotherhood was relatively obedient.
Now that Kaldor Draigo had returned, he would profoundly affect how the Grey Knights responded to Eden, the Emperor of the Imperium.
If Draigo continued to insist upon the Grey Knights' independence and rejected all outside interference, then Eden's previous efforts might all go to waste.
It might even trigger conflict.
Eden used a far-seer lens to observe Titan's situation. He could faintly detect fluctuations in the Warp, signs that warships were arriving.
No matter how one looked at it, one of the Imperium's strongest armed forces was carrying out a large-scale troop concentration inside the Sol System without his approval.
That was undeniably dangerous.
Especially during a time like this, when any change at all might trigger unforeseeable consequences.
He turned to Tarko.
"Have you determined why the Grey Knights are gathering? Personnel from the Departmento Munitorum should already have gone to Titan to supervise the situation, right?"
Under normal procedure, any Imperial military force outside the Savior's direct core forces was supposed to be monitored by officials from Munitorum headquarters whenever it mobilized.
They were essentially political overseers.
That way, the army would remain under control.
There was no helping it. Eden worried that one day he would end up like the Emperor, happily eating hotpot and singing songs, only to suddenly discover that some Imperial force had gone rogue under the influence of a Chaos God or some other hidden power.
Tarko shook his head grimly.
"The Grey Knights used their own internal sorcerous communication channels and sealed off all information.
Beyond that, they also rejected supervision from the Departmento Munitorum.
The senior elder of the Hall of Purity asked me to apologize to you. They said the Supreme Grand Master is about to announce a top-secret command, and that only the Grey Knights themselves are permitted to know of it."
...???
The moment Eden heard that, his expression changed on the spot.
Kaldor Draigo was moving troops, sealing information, and refusing interference from him, the Emperor of the Imperium.
Just what the hell was that man trying to do?!
"This is starting to look a little rebellious..."
Eden's caution instantly hit maximum, and he let out a deep sigh as he began considering the worst-case scenario.
"That Supreme Grand Master of the Grey Knights isn't planning to throw down with me at the Lion's Gate Spaceport, is he?"
He thought about it for a moment, then shook his head.
That guess was too ridiculous.
No matter how absurdly overpowered the Grey Knights were, surely they would not betray the Imperium and attack the old Emperor's Holy Terra... right?
(End of Chapter)
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