"Repent. Repent! Give me your repentance, traitors!!!"
A Dreadnought descended upon the Nurgle daemon masses like something falling from the heavens itself, carving through them in every direction alongside a pack of War Hounds. It looked nothing like a Dark Angels warrior. It looked far more like a World Eater running full Butcher's Nails.
The sheer force of its fury made even the nearby Space Wolves -- who had no love for the Dark Angels at the best of times -- flinch slightly.
To be fair, while the Dark Angels had more than enough moments of genuine insanity and deeply questionable behavior, toward these particular Space Wolves they had actually been entirely decent. If anything, the Space Wolf cubs had done far more questionable things to the Dark Angels over the years. And this one, at minimum, was a legend -- someone who had survived the entire Horus Heresy from start to finish, only to catch an Ordinatus round at the Siege of Terra.
"Take note -- stay well away from that old Lion in the future. Though knowing your lot, you may never have the chance to meet him anyway."
The Space Wolves' Dreadnought Ancient watched the furious Dark Angels counterpart for a moment, exhaled something between a sigh and an acknowledgment, then turned and cut a Daemon Prince in front of him to mince in a single stroke.
He turned back and saw something he had not expected: a Dreadnought with both legs moving so fast they were nearly a blur, charging toward them at full speed with a flock of little yellow figures sprinting to keep up. Anyone who didn't know better would have mistaken it for a White Scars Dreadnought.
Someone was clearly being bullied. Left behind while the charge went ahead without them.
"Honestly, bad luck just follows them around."
The Space Wolves' Dreadnought Ancient muttered it with mild exasperation. He did not doubt the Lamenters' capability -- but knowing their history, knowing everything they had been through, there was something about putting them on the front line that felt like inviting misfortune to dinner.
"Watch out!!!"
A cluster of Beasts of Nurgle surged in from the flank. Zhou Ye's Life-Death Barrier was straining against an ever-growing tide of Nurgle forces. All it could realistically achieve now was blocking the Warp's whispers -- keeping the people inside from being slowly corrupted. Outright plague was another matter entirely.
Anyone who had played Space Marine 2 knew the score. Many Astra Militarum soldiers simply could not hold out against this level of exposure. The Commissar in that game had shot several of his own men and then turned the weapon on himself.
......
---o---
Out on the field, the two colossal Titans had drawn close enough to nearly touch.
Zhou Ye had pushed his Emperor Titan's systems to their limits through sheer modification. The Chaos side had the benefit of a Warp concentration so dense it thickened the air. Both Titans' Void Shields had bloated to a level of obscene thickness neither side could meaningfully crack with ranged fire.
If neither shell could be broken from the outside, then something more direct was required.
Close assault. Neither Titan hesitated. They surged toward each other, the corrupted Plague Titan in particular screaming with the warped human faces fused into its hull, each one wailing in agonized accompaniment. The impression it gave was of something that fully intended to tear itself apart in the process of destroying its target.
An ordinary Mechanicus Titan crew would have found that terrifying.
Zhou Ye barely looked at it twice.
As long as the Titan's core materials could be recovered, the cost was acceptable. And besides, there was still a Warlord Titan soaked from hull to drive core in Warp energy standing on that side of the field. He looked at the bloated, grotesquely swollen Plague Titan -- its surface was a landscape of tumorous growths and writhing tentacles, its base architecture still technically Warlord-class but its sheer mass having expanded to approach his Emperor Titan's scale.
To everyone else, that thing was an abomination of corruption. To Zhou Ye, it was the finest possible raw material.
Win the battle. Recover the wreckage. The conversion yield from this entire field would be extraordinary.
So when he looked at the lumbering, increasingly engorged Plague Titan, he felt nothing a normal Imperial officer would feel. He simply ordered his Emperor Titan forward, knowing that if the hull got shredded it was no lasting problem -- he could shield the core A.I. through it, bring it back, repair it, and put it back on the field.
Typhus watched the Emperor Titan walking directly toward a Plague Titan that was at this point essentially a walking bomb, without any apparent concern whatsoever.
He felt a genuine thread of unease for the first time.
Every Imperial he had faced over ten thousand years had behaved like an Imperial. The Titan Legions only fought to the last when their Forge Worlds were being sacked -- because that was the only occasion where a planet was actually worth a Warlord-class Titan. This was a Feudal World. The most ordinary Feudal World imaginable.
So Typhus finally arrived at the question he probably should have asked much earlier.
Was this single Feudal World really worth the scale of investment he had committed here...
That doubt flickered through him -- and then he snapped to the answer.
"Tzeentch!!!"
He snarled it like a curse.
Of course. It had to be the blue-feathered idiot. That scheming architect had clearly detected Grandfather's Plague Wars plan and dispatched something to wreck it. The interference made complete sense now.
The comfort of understanding did not change the tactical reality. Things on the field were deteriorating fast.
"Grandfather. Please. Grant me your strength once more."
The Warp's veil had already been partially shredded by the Chaos relic's activation, thin enough that the barrier between reality and the immaterium had begun to fracture. Typhus's prayer passed through it cleanly.
A wave of plague, far beyond anything he had carried before, descended from the Warp and settled into him. This was Nurgle's personal blessing, freshly delivered.
The battle had apparently frustrated the Plague God enough that he was actively intervening. Had the veil not still held so much of its strength, Nurgle would already have been hurling Great Unclean Ones through in waves.
"Grandfather..."
The power flooding through him was immense. Under any other circumstances, a gift of this magnitude would have been sufficient to elevate him to daemonhood on the spot. But Nurgle was directing this gift deliberately -- channeling it specifically for combat rather than transformation.
And the enemies in front of him had defied every expectation. The Daemon Princes he had brought -- each one a match for any named Greater Daemon -- had been carved down one by one in single combat by the assembled Dreadnought Ancients. That was already staggering enough.
But there was something else, something Typhus could not quite locate. Something felt incomplete about the Dreadnoughts. As though something were slightly absent from their core identity. He could not find the words for it.
But there was no time to examine the feeling further. Typhus charged.
He aimed for the Space Wolves. Aside from the group of small yellow figures in the far distance running desperately toward the line -- apparently hauling what looked like an Imperial Fists contingent with them -- the Space Wolves were the obvious weak link. The only reason they were even worth protecting.
Not because they were easy targets. But because they were who he would have to shield now.
---o---
A wet sound accompanied the next moment, and Volvok Blood-Howl dropped to one knee, one hand planted on his axe to hold himself upright.
The Space Wolves had taken the worst casualties of any force on the field. By the numbers in the Codex Astartes, he had begun this engagement with the equivalent of a full company. That strength was now past half-gone, not all of them dead outright but many down with wounds that had forced them to withdraw. Nurgle wounds did not simply heal. Even Astartes physiology had limits when the infection was this concentrated -- and this was the main Nurgle daemon host, not some peripheral force.
Without the Dreadnought Ancients standing over them, they would all be dead already.
"Everyone up. We cannot let.... wait -- that is Typhus!!!"
Volvok got himself upright, turned to rally the Space Wolf cubs around him, and then his nose caught it: a wave of stench and danger barreling in from ahead.
And then he saw it. The figure the Imperial Knights had driven back and set on fire moments ago was emerging from the Nurgle host again, and it was coming directly for them.
Volvok's heart effectively stopped.
The landing arrived in the next instant. A shockwave of rancid force preceded the scythe's arc by only a fraction of a second -- and the blade swept horizontal, targeting multiple brothers simultaneously. Several had no time at all to react.
They were about to be cut in half.
Then --
Clang!!!
A clean, sharp collision rang out. The scythe stopped.
The Contemptor Dreadnought had taken the blow.
But the scythe was no ordinary weapon -- Nurgle-blessed from pommel to blade edge. Even the Contemptor's hardened shell could not hold it cleanly. A single strike had already bitten deep into the shoulder armor, and the moment it made contact, the Sacred Pestilence detonated across the entire chassis. Green lines spread in an instant, veining every surface of the Dreadnought from impact point outward.
Typhus felt himself at the absolute peak of his power. He was confident he could stand against a Primarch in this state. These ancient warriors were formidable, yes -- but they were not his match. Not now. Not like this.
The proof came a moment later.
Crack.
With a single application of force, Typhus tore the Dreadnought's shoulder armor free.
"No!!!"
Volvok watched the ancient Dreadnought lose an arm in seconds. The other arm attempted to strike back -- and was shattered. Then a final blow landed, and the entire Dreadnought, veined from top to bottom with crawling green plague, toppled backward and fell.
In that instant, Volvok felt his heart physically shuddering in his chest.
"You are all too weak..."
Typhus looked down at the fallen Ancient -- steeped in Nurgle's personal gift, a bequest of the Plague God himself directly. A single Dreadnought could not hope to resist. He turned the same dismissive gaze on the Space Wolf pack around the body.
In this moment he was as a god pronouncing sentence.
"If not for them, this Dreadnought could have traded several more rounds with me."
He said it plainly, as a simple statement of fact. And every single Space Wolf's eyes turned red at the words.
But then --
Ting.
A streak of cold light crossed the air from somewhere in the middle distance.
Typhus was hit -- struck by something with staggering weight and force -- and launched sideways.
And somehow, without anyone seeing him cross the distance, Zhou Ye was already standing between Typhus and the fallen Dreadnought.
"Direct purge..."
The Flame Greatsword in his hand drove directly into the Dreadnought's chest cavity. Fire and Wither, working together, burned through the Sacred Pestilence's corruption from the inside outward, erasing it completely.
Zhou Ye found himself mildly impressed, in the irritated way he reserved for things that surprised him unpleasantly. Typhus had destroyed one of his Dreadnoughts in the time it took to blink. A slightly slower response and there would have been nothing left to save. As it stood, this one was still technically breathing -- barely -- but repairing this level of damage was going to be an achievement even by the standards of the most ancient forges in the Imperium.
One breath remained in the machine. That was what he had.
"My.... my Lord.... Ancient.... he."
"Not dead. But in his current state, he cannot be repaired."
Zhou Ye glanced up at the trembling Space Wolf standing in front of him and considered saying "he'll be returning to the Golden Throne for restoration" -- then registered the pack's collective expression of men preparing to cut their own throats, and decided against it.
They were going to get shredded for this when they got home regardless. That was enough.
"My Lord.... careful..."
Then the indicator light on the Dreadnought's chassis flickered once.
A shadow fell over Zhou Ye from above.
Then --
Boom.
Another enormous collision rang out, and Typhus's mountain-like form was launched sideways by Zhou Ye's strike yet again.
"Who are you?"
The force behind that hit had actually surprised him. Warriors capable of trading blows with him at this level of blessing were rare even among Primarchs' scions. And that greatsword -- something about it made his skin crawl in a way he could not account for.
---o---
"Old Wolf..."
The Blood Angels Dreadnought arrived at the front line at last, the Lamenters flooding in behind it to fill the gap left by the fallen Space Wolves Dreadnought. The Ancient planted itself in the breach.
As for the Lamenters -- they had the Rubicon Primaris conversion working in their favor now. And what they also had, which people tended to forget when looking at their track record of near-extinctions, was genuine underlying combat capability. Their legendary curse was one of equipment failure and catastrophic circumstance, not of soft warriors. With new gear and Primaris physiology, they moved into position with practiced efficiency.
"I'm still functional. But it appears my penance has reached its end..."
The Space Wolves Dreadnought said this slowly, as the Blood Angels Ancient came to stand beside it.
"Get up, Old Wolf. Do you still remember what you said to me back then? We made a promise to drink Fenrisian Mjod together, to go back and see what Fenris had become."
The Blood Angels Ancient's voice was quiet.
Every single Space Wolf cub within earshot was suddenly fighting very hard not to weep.
Ancient Bjorn the Fell-Handed -- if he knew there was still a brother from that age alive and walking the galaxy, it would surely bring him joy. He had been alone far too long. Even waking him now required tremendous effort each time.
"Of course I remember. Back then it was you, you ridiculous blood-drinking fool, who put me in this thing -- and then quietly drank the last of my Mjod while you were doing it."
"You nearly killed me first. You used me to grind through three of the monastery's load-bearing pillars. The entire Chapter kept erupting in noise that whole day -- it was only because the Chapter Master personally deleted the recording afterward that the whole embarrassing affair was finally put to rest. Now get up, Old Wolf."
"Ha.... seeing you end up in one of these things too.... that is satisfaction enough for me. You and I were both men of sin. If not for the Chapter Master at the time..."
The Space Wolves Dreadnought seemed to catch itself on something at those words, and what came out instead was something slower and quieter, rising from the deep of ten thousand years:
"I truly want to.... I want so badly to look once more at Fenris's ice-blue sky.... I want to.... taste that Mjod one more time.... I want to.... feel that cold wind on my hull again...."
The world went very still.
"ANCIENT!!!"
The Space Wolf cubs rushed forward as one. Volvok was fighting tears outright and losing.
If the Ancient was gone -- if he was truly gone -- Volvok was not going to be able to live on the same field and do nothing. He would spend whatever he had left carving through Nurgle's forces until someone put him down. Losing an Ancient meant they had nothing left to stand behind.
"Get out of my face. I am not dead yet. Stop your wailing and go hack that bastard apart!!!"
......
A beat of absolute silence.
Every Space Wolf's expression froze simultaneously.
Zhou Ye -- who had been watching all of this while fighting Typhus -- finally could not hold it. He pressed a hand over his face, but the corner of his mouth had already gone completely out of control. He had known perfectly well the Dreadnought's core was intact. He had engineered this scene specifically to watch what these two would produce.
"This is also part of the plan..."
He muttered it inwardly, deciding this was the correct framing.
And it had worked. These warriors had been shaped by his influence from the moment he pulled them from the Warp with his Authority -- every one of them, carrying some trace of his mark within their Gene-seed. It showed. In little ways, in large ways, in moments like this.
---o---
Typhus had not recovered from the sight of that Dreadnought standing up.
"Impossible. Impossible. How did you cleanse Grandfather's gift."
He stared at the Dreadnought moving with full strength, and his expression finally broke.
He had used Sacred Pestilence on it. Even without fully breaching the sarcophagus, the time elapsed should have been more than sufficient to destroy whatever remained inside the Ancient's shattered body. He had not even finished it -- he had intended the Ancient's death to break these warriors psychologically, to push them into irrational decisions.
He had even recognized the specific Dreadnought. The Varagyr wolf guard who had stood beside Horus. That one should have died in the viral bombing of Isstvan III. The fact that it had survived and been interred was surprising enough. A warrior of that era dying in front of witnesses this seasoned -- that would have shattered composure across the entire line.
And instead.
He was getting a profound sense that the fool in this scenario was himself.
There was only one explanation available. The person now walking steadily toward him had somehow cleared Nurgle's personal Sacred Pestilence -- a divine gift directly cultivated by the Plague God himself. That was not impossible to do. But in under one second?
"..."
Zhou Ye said nothing. He simply kept walking.
And Typhus -- standing as tall as a small building, freshly blessed by the Plague God himself, host of more raw power than he had carried in ten thousand years -- found his body taking one involuntary step backward.
"My child. What are you afraid of?"
Nurgle's murmur drifted to Typhus at that moment, brushing the edge of his consciousness.
It jolted him back to clarity. He was fortunate to serve the Plague God rather than the Blood God -- Khorne would have erupted in furious contempt at a Champion who flinched. Nurgle simply felt a mild curiosity.
"Grandfather is encouraging me!!!"
Typhus drew a deep breath, gripped his scythe, and fixed his gaze on Zhou Ye.
What Typhus did not know: Nurgle had simply asked a question. A genuine one. He was not watching a Champion face down a worthy foe. He was watching his beloved Herald back away from what appeared, from the Garden, to be an empty patch of air. Something about this was confusing Nurgle deeply. He had been unable to see Zhou Ye at all since the beginning. And now his Herald was retreating from nothing.
Then the sensation vanished entirely from Nurgle's perception, and in its place came a shriek.
"TZEENTCH!!!"
Nurgle's roar erupted from the Garden. He had been suspicious since the beginning -- the Chaos relic should have been sufficient to release Mortarion well before now, and yet it sat in a state of persistent, maddening delay. Someone had been interfering with his ritual from the start. The candidate was obviously his ancient adversary, that blue-feathered meddler who had made it his personal calling to disrupt everything Nurgle touched.
The Plague God's own realm should have been an overwhelming home advantage. This was supposed to be the launch point of the Plague Wars, the moment Nurgle would establish himself as the ascendant power among the Dark Gods.
Back in realspace:
"I do not care who you are. The age of the Primarchs has long passed. Those who obstruct Grandfather's great work will surrender everything."
Typhus had made his decision. While the Great Unclean One continued reinforcing the Nurgle daemon host, numbers were grinding the Imperial formation to a halt. He needed their leader broken. He charged.
"..."
Zhou Ye looked at him without expression.
Then -- and Typhus could not explain why -- he felt it again. Unmistakably. From somewhere within that unremarkable figure, something that could only be described as hunger.
The sensation of a predator assessing a perfect meal.
It produced in Typhus a very specific and instinctive revulsion.
What in all creation was wrong with this individual. Every other opponent Typhus had ever stood across from -- up to and including Primarchs -- had given him a sense of something appropriate: wariness, hatred, contempt, rage. Not this. Not this sensation of being looked at like something that would taste interesting.
And then the revulsion became something else.
Fury.
This was an insult.
"Feel the full might and fury of Grandfather!!!"
Psychic force detonated outward from Typhus. Plague-laced psyker energy, channeled through the freshest and most potent of Nurgle's gifts, came crashing toward Zhou Ye --
And then --
"URK, Grandfather save me!!!"