Chapter 94: Chaos' Counterattack
The Silent Vessel
When they returned to the stellar remains of the battlefield, the rebel forces had already scattered into void and ash. The Imperial defense fleet, their gratitude perfunctory and hurried, had withdrawn to safer positions. Only a single Night Lords warship remained, docked in eerie silence, its interior emanating oppression.
Even as the Furious Abyss approached, the vessel stayed inert. Unresponsive.
Hiss.
The docking umbilical unsealed with pneumatic precision. Guilliman moved toward the airlock, bolter gripped with utmost caution, his movements calculated and vigilant.
Francis caught his shoulder.
"What troubles you?" Guilliman's confusion was justified. "Does danger await us?"
"Not really," Francis replied, his eyes suddenly sparkling. "You mentioned desiring resistance against psychic corruption, yes?"
Guilliman's expression shifted to bewilderment as Francis rummaged through accumulated salvage until extracting a disc of pale blue, an object of humble appearance yet distinctly other in composition.
"This... is what?"
Sanguinius leaned closer to examine it. Sanguinius and Lion exchanged equally puzzled glances.
"Wraithbone," Francis explained with characteristic precision. "Solidified Warp energy, crystallized through processes I won't burden you with. Extraordinarily effective against psychic assault. It lacks full refinement, but serves as functional shielding for immediate deployment."
"I intend to construct a complete ensemble: helmet, pauldrons, and greaves. A complete full-body anti-psychic armor."
Guilliman felt something bloom in his chest: genuine gratitude. He had mentioned this requirement in passing, barely more than casual talk. Yet Francis had remembered it, had acted upon it, and had already begun implementation.
"This demonstrates considerable forethought. Should such equipment require a designation?"
Francis's expression became remarkably sincere, inspiration blooming with sudden clarity.
"I have already conceived one. This ensemble shall be designated the 'Captain of the Imperium Suit.'"
When the appellation reached their ears, something about it resonated with absolute power. The equipment itself seemed to gain weight just from being named.
Lion shifted, his jaw tightening. A subtle thread of urgency coiled through his chest.
Guilliman accepted the disc and carefully secured it to his forearm.
"No further questions. We proceed." He re-entered tactical alertness and crossed into the Night Lords' vessel.
Death seemed to grip the warship itself, a cold, suffocating presence that permeated every corridor and chamber. The interior remained dimly lit, red warning lights casting sickly shadows across gleaming metal bulkheads stained with accumulated blood.
Fallen Night Lords warriors lay strewn throughout, their armor battle-scarred, their faces contorted into expressions suggesting torments beyond endurance. They had perished recently. Terribly.
The air reeked of death in all its forms: copper-bright blood, spent promethium, overheated circuitry, and something else, something sweetly rotten that suggested psychic contamination lingering in the recycled atmosphere.
The boarding party advanced in careful formation. Their footsteps echoed through emptiness like invasive presences disturbing a tomb. Bloodstains traced patterns across the flooring, a macabre cartography guiding them deeper.
As they approached the primary control chamber, the silence fractured.
Indistinct sounds emerged from within, not speech, but something between argument and mechanical roar. Frenzied vocalizations. Restless percussion of armored feet. The ringing of metal struck against metal.
Every member of the boarding party tightened their grip on weapons. The Librarians exchanged glances and began whispering enhancement incantations, their psyker gifts already sensitized to what awaited.
Francis, with characteristic directness, delivered a decisive kick.
The reinforced door exploded inward, a thunderous impact echoing through the vessel's superstructure like an artillery strike.
"Konrad Curze, what possible—"
The words died.
What they witnessed transcended nightmare into something almost incomprehensible.
This was no desperate struggle. No command chaos. No final stand of cornered warriors.
This was revelry.
Beneath alternating crimson and obsidian light, the entire Night Lords contingent moved in unified frenzy. Not combat. Not a celebration in any conventional sense.
They danced.
Their war-cries harmonized with something external, something that pulsed through the speakers with distorted fury:
"Ah ah ah ah~"
"Terra dissolves at chaos's edge~"
"One by one, we rise~"
Raised weapons swung in synchronized rhythm with the beat, power weapons tracing arcs, Chainswords describing figure-eights, plasma pistols waving in unison.
The skull-and-lightning iconography etched into their armor blazed in the strobing illumination, rendering them genuinely demonic.
The figure commanding this tableau was unmistakable.
Konrad Curze stood elevated, his iconic bone-white helmet hanging at his waist, one foot resting casually upon the severed head of a Daemon Prince. His bare face, pale as corpse flesh in the flickering darkness, glowed with something approaching religious ecstasy.
He swayed with the music, his body moving in patterns that suggested both control and complete loss of it simultaneously.
His laughter intertwined with the backing track, a roar that seemed to rise directly from hell itself.
"Hahaha~ Crush all evil, be the final arbiter..."
The sound system, a bizarre fusion of Mechanicus refinement and improvisation, howled at maximum volume.
The entire command chamber trembled with bass-frequency vibration. Distorted guitars wailed in weird cacophony. Drums pounded like heartbeats. And over it all, a voice shrieked lyrics that might have been a hymn or might have been an utterance of pure madness.
Konrad Curze roared to the void itself, his voice consuming the music:
"Ah ah ah ah ah~ The Night Lords are reborn! Today marks our beginning!!!"
"Ho ho ho~"
"Ho ho ho~"
The Night Lords below swayed in perfect unison, their eyes blazing with fanatical certainty.
Behind Francis, his brothers froze. Guilliman and the others finally reacted, their expressions cycling through questioning → confusion → shock.
Every eye turned toward Francis.
"Oh, don't look at me with those expressions," Francis said carefully. "I have no role in this. Oh, C'mon, I was with you guys this whole time."
"Not every bullshit happens because of me." He swallowed. The death metal composition felt uncomfortably familiar somehow.
They clearly did not believe him. Konrad Curze had never demonstrated this side of himself. This was obviously Francis's handiwork.
As Francis began studying his boots with suspicion, Konrad Curze, finally fulfilled by the music, descended and placed one massive hand upon Francis's shoulder.
"I express gratitude for this... surprise," the Night Haunter said, a smile playing at his lips. "I believed the data archive was already exhausted, yet somehow this existed within the repositories. This is Rare METAL indeed."
"Hehehe~" Francis rubbed his face. He had clearly, accidentally, misfiled that particular data cache.
He looked up to meet the unified gazes of Guilliman, Sanguinius, and Lion. Their expressions suggested they had collectively concluded: Only he could orchestrate something this outrageous.
Francis cleared his throat. "Cough, cough"
"How many defected to Chaos?" Francis changed the subject, trying to get his attention.
Konrad Curze's expression hardened immediately. "A considerable portion succumbed to the corruption. Others underwent horrific mutation and fled into the void."
He gestured toward the Daemon Prince's severed head mounted on the platform.
"That one, Uziel Kurl, proclaimed himself elevated to Daemon Prince-hood. He claimed he no longer feared me. So I severed his head with a single stroke."
"However, I also perceived the Emperor enthroned as some form of god. I came to understand that humanity's survival requires his removal, woo-woo-woo..."
Before Konrad could continue his rambling, Francis clamped his hand firmly across the Primarch's mouth, his eyes widening to improbable dimensions.
"His neural pathways remain severely compromised! The corruption persists, the therapy remains incomplete!"
Guilliman: "...??"
Sanguinius: "...!!"
Lion: "....."
....
Deep within the immaterium, in that realm where time and space held no dominion, only chaos and hunger, four indistinct presences regarded their prey.
Horus lay at their feet, his consciousness being systematically deconstructed and rebuilt into something other.
"Cease your resistance, Horus!" The first entity roared with voices like grinding tectonic plates. "Fury and bloodshed alone are eternal! Slaughter grants might, and death grants coronation!"
Horus writhed beneath their attention. His soul was hammer-struck iron, twisted and folded in some cosmic forge. He screamed: "No!"
"Your destiny was written before your conception, Horus." The second voice dripped with honeyed certainty. "Accept my gift. Perceive the universe's fundamental truths. Every choice becomes a shortcut to glorious victory."
His consciousness expanded infinitely, yet remained perpetually trapped in recursive loops. "Stop! Please, stop!"
"Come, child, embrace decay's blessing." The third voice whispered with maternal warmth, obscuring absolute pestilence. "Death is not a conclusion, but eternal genesis. Let my power inhabit your flesh. Let agony transform into salvation's sweetness."
His body began to change. Putrefaction surged through his blood. Every millimeter of skin harbored disease. Agony claimed him entirely, causing his form to contort in uncontrolled convulsions.
"Transcend mundane sensation, Horus." The fourth voice sang with intoxicating allure. "Let every slaughter become symphony. Every destruction becomes art. Sensation elevated to impossible heights."
His consciousness dissolved into the embrace of something vast and alien. Every nerve burned with exquisite, fatal pleasure.
When Horus's eyes opened again, his mortality had been completely consumed.
What remained was something simultaneously all four and none of them, a vessel containing infinite Chaos authority, reshaped by darkness and flame, glowing with the Warp's terrible radiance.
Symbols materialized in the air around him. Symbols of the Four Gods blazed behind him, each radiating its particular corruption.
"Father..." Horus stood dazedly, his voice issuing harmonics that strained human hearing.
The immaterium itself convulsed in sympathetic response.
Titanic rifts tore through the Warp's fabric. Billions upon billions of daemons poured through these fractures like an infinite flood. And deeper within the maelstrom, shapes began to form. In the depths of those abysses, two familiar shapes started to coalesce.
Mortarion emerged first, his massive scythe dragging through the Warp itself, leaving trails of decay in its passage.
Miasma surrounded his form like a funeral shroud. Every step exhaled the stench of death absolute. His consciousness had been utterly consumed; he was no longer Mortarion, merely a vessel for entropy itself.
"Uh... Uh..."
Fulgrim materialized wreathed in Slaanesh's luminescence, beauty rendered absolutely lethal. His gilded armor and ornate longsword suggested a god of war fallen from grace.
Yet behind those perfect features, something else regarded the void, something that had worn his skin and devoured his will.
"Uh... Uh..."
Consciousness had been stripped from both, replaced by entities far older and infinitely hungrier.
The three converged. The three corrupted Primarchs stood arrayed, Horus at the center, Mortarion and Fulgrim bracketing him like pillars of damnation.
Behind them, the daemon legions arranged themselves in incomprehensible patterns. Bloodthirster princes towering as mountains. Twisted mutations that defied anatomical categorization. Plague creatures whose very presence induced rot and disease, countless fallen spirits dancing in ecstatic chaos.
The Maw of Chaos itself, that titanic rift separating material reality from the immaterium, began its inexorable opening.
Hellfire and entropic energy erupted through the expanding aperture, tearing at reality's fundamental structure like teeth through flesh.
Horus raised his gaze to the material realm. Horus took his first step.
His form rose god-like, impossible dimensions rendered physical. Each stride caused planetary tremors. Behind him, the daemon legions flowed forth in overwhelming torrent.
Billions. Trillions. Numbers that rendered conventional military calculus meaningless.
Their collective roar shook entire star systems.
On Moqi Star, the Space Wolves, Salamanders, and Raven Guard contingents witnessed this eruption with utter incomprehension.
The vox-network erupted into chaos:
"Primarch! Horus has manifested!"
"Hundreds of thousands of daemons emergent!"
"Correction, tens of millions!"
"Negative! Billions! At minimum, billions of daemons!"
"What are our orders?!"
Even these battle-hardened Astartes, veterans of the Heresy's most brutal engagements, found themselves paralyzed by the sheer scale of what manifested before them.
Leman Russ stood on the command deck, watching the rift expand. Leman Russ gripped his spear with whitened knuckles, his eyes reflecting the hellfire pouring from that impossible rift.
His command cut through the chaos with finality: "Retreat. All units. Immediate withdrawal."
The Space Wolves obeyed instantly. Even Russ's legendary ferocity paled before this overwhelming darkness.
The daemonic host surged forward. Horus and his daemonic legions advanced toward the Imperial positions.
The counterattack had begun.
[End of Chapters]