When the senior Sisters of Silence moved, they made almost no sound at all.
They silently came to the Custodes' side, entering the protection range of the Aquilan Shield, and then layer after layer of invisible barriers appeared.
Those unseen barriers intercepted every strand of silver-white psychic lightning spilling outward, severely disrupting the Grey Knights' ritual power.
"Damn it..."
Seeing this, Pedron and the Paladins all felt an immense pressure settle over them, one so heavy it was almost unbearable.
They had never expected the Custodes to bring in so many senior Sisters of Silence just to deal with them.
More importantly, the main Grey Knights force had been temporarily cut off. Pedron and the others were fighting alone, isolated under the suppression of so many Sisters of Silence.
They had almost no way to use psychic power to attack the Custodes at all.
Which meant they would have to face the Emperor's Custodes with their own flesh and blood alone.
"Can we... beat the Custodes?" Pedron swallowed as he watched the towering golden-armored warriors advancing toward him with heavy steps.
For the first time, he was no longer sure.
In truth, the Custodes had remained within the Palace for ages. Loyal Imperial forces had almost never had the chance to cross blades with them.
They were universally recognized as the strongest military force in the Imperium, with individual combat ability even greater than that of the Adeptus Astartes.
Even so, Pedron and the Grey Knights had not lost their will to fight.
The Custodes had an overwhelming reputation, yes, but that did not mean the Grey Knights were necessarily inferior. They too were stronger than ordinary Space Marines.
The Grey Knights' gene-seed came from the Emperor Himself, the purest gene-stock of all, resistant to corruption, the final gift that being had left to mankind.
Strictly speaking, it was only after the Emperor had become disappointed in the rest of the Imperium's armed forces that He had ultimately created the Grey Knights to resist Chaos and guard humanity.
Besides, their goal was not to defeat every Custodian in this sector.
It was to break through.
Macrinus, the Custodes commander, seemed to recognize that immediately. He ordered the Custodes warriors and Sisters of Silence under his command to spread out and hold the key points.
At the same time, he used the anti-psychic nature of the Sisters of Silence to establish a broad lockdown zone, making sure the Grey Knights would have no chance to use psychic force for sorcery or Warp teleportation.
The Grey Knights wielded the power of the Warp. It would be all too easy for them to alter the battlefield through strange rites or simply vanish.
And then the Custodes would have to waste more effort hunting them down, creating even more trouble.
While the Custodes patrol established its blocking line, Macrinus led eight Custodians straight toward Pedron and the Paladins.
He intended to capture this group of Grey Knights alive, these warriors who had refused to obey the Savior's command.
Raising his Castellan Axe, Macrinus gave one final warning.
"Grey Knights. Will you surrender with dignity and lay down your weapons, or do you want me to help you do it?"
The Custodes commander was still offering the Grey Knights a shred of dignity. After all, these daemon hunters were still a high-authority force directly created by the Emperor.
But if they refused, what followed would not be pretty.
"My apologies, but the Grey Knights have been entrusted with the Terminus Decree. We are the embodiment of the Emperor's will, and that responsibility, that mission, does not permit us to surrender."
That was Pedron's answer.
There was no possibility of surrender. Not before any enemy, not under any hardship.
In ten thousand years, as daemon hunters and the Emperor's unbreakable shield, the Grey Knights had never once set such a precedent.
The Custodes were the Emperor's attendants and had the duty of guarding the Palace.
But the Grey Knights were also the final gift the Emperor had left to humanity, a truth confirmed by the Terminus Decree.
If both sides stood before the Emperor at the same time, which of them would be loyal, and which would be traitors?
Perhaps no one could answer that.
All the Grey Knights could do was carry out the command the Emperor had left behind.
"With will as armor, and loyalty as our shield, we are the Hammer of the Emperor!"
Pedron strengthened his resolve.
With a furious roar, he formed up with the Paladins behind him into a battle formation and assumed a combat stance.
He also used Warp sorcery to create defensive wards and reinforce himself.
They could not use sorcery to attack, but the powers of the Warp could still provide support.
Pedron knew that with the senior Sisters of Silence already forming a blockade, there was no way to force a breakthrough at the nexus while the Custodes commander stood in their path.
Their only chance was to first defeat Macrinus and the Aquilon Terminators before them. Only then could they push forward and deploy the teleport beacon.
Fortunately, the numbers on both sides were still even. It had not yet reached the point of utter despair.
So the Grey Knights Grand Master decided on a direct clash, to see for himself the true gap between the two forces.
Even if they failed in the end, at least they could test the Custodes' strength and send that information back to Titan.
Then the Grey Knights could organize their next course of action.
By the Emperor, the Grey Knights may still have a chance! Pedron thought.
Aside from the Custodes holding the nexus points, the two sides' mobile forces were evenly matched.
It was, in a sense, a duel.
Perhaps this was the first direct confrontation between the Grey Knights and the Custodes in ten thousand years, and under conditions unfavorable to the Grey Knights at that.
For a long time now, they had wanted to know: as warriors shaped by the Emperor's gene-craft, what was the true difference between a Grey Knight and a Custodian?
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
But just as Pedron finished hardening his resolve, he heard the scream of high-speed aircraft cutting through the air above, accompanied by flashes of blazing gold armor.
Those were... Custodes Ares gunships!
Pedron looked up to see several golden gunships descending rapidly into the area.
Then one Custodian after another dropped from the air, slamming into the ground hard enough to throw up thick clouds of dust.
That was the standard reinforcement method of the Savior's Custodes. They would jump from any height and hit the ground as hard as possible. The louder the impact, the better.
It was a bit rough on the flooring, though.
???
"How is this necessary?"
Pedron's voice shook slightly.
He and the Paladins stared at the Custodes closing in around them, and their minds went numb. Even their bodies stiffened.
Rage. grievance. cold despair.
Wasn't this supposed to be a duel? Since when had they started calling in reinforcements?
There were only nine senior Grey Knights in this zone in total, including everyone there. Yet the Custodes, already holding the numerical advantage, had still specifically called in more men to gang up on them?!
This was wrong. Where was the Custodes' honor? There was no martial dignity in this at all.
"Wait..."
Pedron looked at the scene before him and tried to say something.
He wanted to stall for time, to let Titan react. Perhaps then the Grey Knights would still be able to break through the Palace's disruption of the sorcerous teleportation array.
But it was already too late.
"Take them!"
Boom!
Macrinus shattered the stone paving beneath his feet and lunged forward with terrifying speed, fast enough to stir the air itself.
The sweep of his Castellan Axe broke the sound barrier.
At the commander's order, the other Custodians charged in as well, hefting hammers and massive axes.
The Savior's Custodes did not care about any of that this or that. Honor? Fairness?
Their opening move was saturation assault. If they could gang up on you, they absolutely would not fight you one-on-one.
In an instant, Pedron and the Paladins behind him were swallowed beneath the Custodes' overwhelming physiques.
Some of the Custodians could not even squeeze into the scrum, so they remained on the outside with shields raised, lending support.
Amid it all, faint screams could still be heard.
...
Titan. Chambers of Purity.
"Emperor above!"
Kaldor Draigo and the assembled Grey Knights elite no longer carried the fierce momentum they had shown when first accepting the Terminus Decree.
They stared at the broken, intermittent psychic images coming from the Palace, stunned and full of conflicted emotion.
In those psychic images from the Palace, Grand Master Pedron of the Fifth Brotherhood and his Paladins were being pinned to the ground and beaten by the Custodes.
Not long ago, Pedron and the others had withstood the chaos inside the sorcerous array and successfully reached the interior of the Palace.
They had presented the Terminus Decree to a Custodes patrol, and that decree, bearing the Emperor's will, had stunned the Custodes.
The Custodes had even saluted the Grey Knights and shown them respect.
That had delighted Kaldor Draigo and the other senior Grey Knights. It had meant the Grey Knights might be able to leverage the Terminus Decree to gain greater authority.
Perhaps even compel the Custodes to cooperate in carrying out their final mission.
But before they had enjoyed that hope for long, the situation had taken a brutal turn.
In the Savior's name, the Custodes had rejected the Emperor's will.
That Savior was lawless beyond belief. Even the Custodes had fallen under his control.
He had turned the Emperor's own sanctum into his personal territory.
"Could it be that under the influence of the Warp, the Emperor truly has generated a new Warp-consciousness?
"And through the Savior, that thing now seeks to destroy the Terminus Decree He once established, so that He can escape the Throne?"
Kaldor Draigo and the other senior Grey Knights found themselves thinking along those lines.
It was the only explanation that could account for what they were seeing.
The Grey Knights would never believe that the Savior could truly rise above the Emperor, command the Custodes, and make them reject the Emperor's will.
And if such a thing really had happened, then the Grey Knights had even more reason to drive out that new Warp-consciousness and force the Emperor to continue fulfilling His duty.
That only strengthened the senior Grey Knights' resolve to carry out the Terminus Decree.
They watched the images sent back by Pedron and the others, hoping to gather more information about the Palace interior and the Custodes' troop deployment.
Those were the most secret and forbidden facts in the Imperium, almost completely unknown to any armed force outside the Palace.
Then came the Grey Knights' attempted breakout, the Sisters of Silence sealing off the zone, and the Custodes commander leading his warriors to intercept them head-on.
The numbers on both sides had been equal.
It had been a perfect opportunity to gauge the Custodes' strength.
The Grey Knights all stared fixedly at the psychic screen overhead.
They hoped Grand Master Pedron and the Paladins of the Fifth Brotherhood would be able to withstand the Custodes' assault even without using psychic power.
If the Fifth Brotherhood's elite could truly hold the Custodes at bay, then the assault plan still had a greater chance of succeeding.
But reality was merciless.
The Custodes gave the Grey Knights no opportunity at all. Instead, with no regard for honor, they simply called in reinforcements.
Inside the Chambers of Purity, the psychic curtain echoed with the screams of Pedron and the other Grey Knights.
Those finest warriors of the Grey Knights, those elite daemon hunters, had their psychic strength suppressed by the Sisters of Silence's null field and were being mercilessly beaten by Custodes who outnumbered them several times over.
Their armor had been smashed apart. Their faces were bruised and swollen. All they could do was helplessly cover their heads, curl up, and endure the blows.
It was a miserable sight.
Most pitiful of all was Grand Master Pedron of the Fifth Brotherhood. He had taken the worst of the beating, so many heavy strikes that he had blacked out and lay motionless on the ground.
"What humiliation!"
Watching that scene, the Grey Knights could not help feeling the sorrow of seeing their own brought low.
And another question pressed itself into their minds.
If they teleported over there, would they end up in exactly the same state?
"If there had been no Sisters of Silence, Pedron and the others could have used psychic force to break through the line," one Grey Knights Grand Master said.
Pedron, Grand Master of the Fifth Brotherhood, was one of the most powerful psykers within the entire Grey Knights order.
A high-order psyker possessed terrifying might. Under normal circumstances, even if he were surrounded by an army, he should never have ended up in so miserable a state.
"How many Sisters of Silence are there in the Master of Mankind's Palace?" Kaldor Draigo asked, clearly troubled.
The Sisters of Silence, those soulless anti-psyker beings, had always been few in number. Senior ones were rarer still.
That scarcity was one of the reasons the Grey Knights had believed they could use psychic power to break through the Custodes line.
According to Grey Knights records, the Sisters of Silence had never been numerous. Especially in the latter half of the Horus Heresy, their forces were virtually wiped out, leaving fewer than a hundred survivors.
Whether because blanks made others uneasy or for some other reason, the Sisters of Silence were eventually driven from Holy Terra at some point after the rebellion.
Even within the Palace, very few of them remained.
The only recorded trace left behind was a unit of fifty Sisters of Silence stationed on the civilized world of Nadiris.
That had been the last remaining fully organized formation of the Silent Sisterhood.
The Nadiris Sisters of Silence might have been distrusted and abandoned by the Imperium, yet they had remained loyal to the Emperor and the Primarchs.
But they despised that ignorant Imperium that had lost its Primarchs, and would rather watch it burn than continue to help it.
By the forty-first millennium, the Sisters of Silence had been all but forgotten by the Imperium, and those who remained were mostly serving aboard Black Ships on secret capture missions.
Only after the Great Rift opened and Roboute Guilliman returned were the Sisters of Silence brought back into service and recalled to Holy Terra.
That gave the Silent Sisterhood a chance to recover.
Even so, replenishing their numbers remained extremely difficult. Blanks were simply too rare.
After that, the Grey Knights also recorded that the Savior had been secretly gathering blanks, but they had no more detailed information.
After all, the Grey Knights were daemon hunters. They had always looked down on the rulers of the Terran court and had little to do with them.
In the past, the Grey Knights had never had much interaction with such people, and those people had no authority to interfere with Grey Knights daemon-purging operations.
Besides, the Imperium's forces had long been fragmented and insular, with poor information-sharing. Even basic intelligence gathering had always been difficult.
Titan had also refused connection to the Savior's psychic network and continued using older, traditional methods of communication.
What the Grey Knights had never expected was that in such a short span of time, the Savior would have become so overwhelmingly powerful.
Not even Guilliman, the former Imperial Regent, could compare with him.
Only now did they finally realize something.
The Grey Knights knew far too little about the Savior.
"How many blanks are there? Several hundred? More than a thousand?"
The Grey Knights Grand Masters tried to estimate the number of Sisters of Silence.
With the appearance of those senior null-maidens, the Grey Knights' Warp-sorcery had been weakened, making the assault plan far more troublesome.
"Judging from the highest numbers ever recorded, they probably do not exceed a thousand. We may still have a chance," another Grand Master replied.
The relic vaults of the Chambers of Purity also held many sacred mechanical relics capable of amplifying psychic force. It was not impossible that those relics could help resist the Sisters of Silence's suppression.
"Although Pedron failed to break through, he did leave behind a faint teleport beacon..."
Electric arcs flashed brilliantly in Kaldor Draigo's eyes as if he had sensed something. A faint smile appeared on his face.
No matter what, the Grey Knights were still one of the Imperium's mightiest military arms, and they were at the height of their strength.
Three thousand warriors.
They could still launch one final breakout.
If those three thousand Grey Knights fought with reckless abandon, escorting the Grand Masters and accepting any sacrifice, they had enough force to smash through the walls and fortresses of any region.
The only real problem was that they still did not know how many Custodes remained, making it difficult to apply a more targeted dispersal strategy.
"Lord Kaldor Draigo, perhaps we should cancel the assault plan. It would be a meaningless sacrifice."
At last, Corwin seized his chance to speak. Until now, he had been kept out of the discussion.
The moment he finished, he was met with hostile stares from the other Grey Knights Grand Masters. Even the Supreme Grand Master turned a questioning look on him.
There was even a trace of pressure in that gaze.
Yet Corwin thought of something, and at that realization, he did not retreat in the slightest. Instead, he straightened his back.
This Grey Knights Grand Master, the one with the closest ties to the Savior, looked at Kaldor Draigo and continued:
"Even if you insist on assaulting the Throne Hall, there is still one thing you must understand clearly...
"In the worst-case scenario, exactly how many Custodes and god-machines can a single Grey Knight really handle?"
(End of Chapter)
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