Chapter 35: The Emperor: Why Doesn’t Magnus Have a Brain Like This?

"How is this even possible?" Romulus muttered subconsciously.

Inside the cramped, dim confines of the warship, a single Drukhari could easily inflict multiple casualties upon the Astartes. Never mind the few hundred Astartes in their expeditionary fleet; even a full Chapter of Carcharodons would struggle to clear this in five minutes, and with the meager forces the expeditionary fleet currently possessed, there was a high probability of total failure.

If the main force of the Black Templars were here, it would be a different story. With a minimum of five thousand Black Crusaders, even if the Archon Lelith Hesperax herself showed up, she would be hammered into the ground and dragged to the pyre.

"Indeed, how is this possible?"

The Chaplain found it equally incomprehensible. Clearing out these xenos, who were like rootless duckweed, was not difficult in itself; they only needed to concentrate their superior forces to whittle away the areas the enemy occupied, which could naturally be achieved in a short time.

A vessel as massive as an Ark Mechanicus would not lose its combat effectiveness simply because its furnace core had been sabotaged by the Drukhari. But five minutes...

He suspected that the Archmagos was either having second thoughts and intended to abandon the deal by throwing an impossible task at them, or that the importance of this ship in his mind had reached a point where he could not tolerate any risk whatsoever.

Ultimately, unable to withstand Aglaea’s insistence and the results of the Chaplain’s divination, the expeditionary fleet dispatched two strike teams to launch a raid. Only after suffering heavy casualties did they manage to capture three commanders alive, hoping to extract sufficient intelligence. The highest-ranking one was locked in a sealed container, while the other two remained silent despite interrogation by the Inquisitor.

Now, the accumulated friction within this team had reached a critical level. As the Chaplain spoke, Romulus managed to sort out the sequence of events.

Aglaea was adamant about her prophecy, demanding that the Black Templars disregard their own casualties, but her personal competence had already caused Marshal Orland to lose faith in her, and he was unwilling to pay the price for her absurd decisions any longer. The Chaplain, meanwhile, relied on Emperor’s Tarot divination, hoping to secure the assistance of the Deathwatch and the Carcharodons to attempt to fulfill the Archmagos’s requirements.

Cawl’s own attitude, however, remained highly ambiguous. Before encountering the Drukhari, the rewards offered by the Archmagos were incredibly generous, but after the Drukhari boarding action, he became uncharacteristically conservative, directly abandoning the very planet he had been willing to pay a great price to reach.

"What do you think?" Romulus asked his companions for their opinions.

"Don't look at me. I can't finish the killing in five minutes." Arthur shrugged, noticing Romulus’s hesitant expression. "Even with Karna and Tyberos, it would be the same. If anyone else joined our assault, the casualties would be too high."

"...Is that so."

Romulus wanted to say that wasn't what he meant, but Arthur clearly felt that he was quite the badass for thinking he could cut down all these Drukhari alone. Of course, Arthur didn't particularly want to micromanage this kind of skirmish; after all, it involved a horde of Drukhari hidden in the shadows. He wasn't a Primarch, and no matter how terrifying he was, he couldn't guarantee that over a hundred people would be able to react in time. Their usual training focused on combined armored assault tactics; this kind of high-speed, point-blank blade-fighting with Drukhari was too taxing for his brain.

"Karna..."

He had just started to speak when he saw the expression on Karna’s face—a look that clearly said, "You’re really picking me for this?"—and he simply shut his mouth.

"..."

Romulus looked left and right, suddenly realizing that there weren't many usable brains in this group.

"Hey, why not ask the all-powerful magic wizard in the transmigrator squad?"

"You have a solution?" Romulus asked, ignoring Ramses’s self-deprecation.

"I have a train of thought, but we have to test it first—also, you don’t mind dabbling in the Warp, do you?"

"I don't mind." Romulus added, "But Arthur can't."

"That’s enough. Don’t wander off; I’m going to fetch the cargo."

Ramses turned and headed straight back to the Thunderhawk that had brought them, dragging a coffin wrapped in chains back out only a few seconds later.

"Try to link up with it." Ramses knocked on the iron coffin.

Romulus glanced at the coffin lid, which was plastered with Purity Seals, understood, and directly synchronized a portion of his perception with it.

Then, his vision changed. The most obvious change was that he seemed to be able to see the soul of a living creature. The Chaplain and the Sister of Battle beside him were wrapped in a faint layer of golden mist, while Archmagos Cawl looked like a fragmented cloud.

Especially when his gaze fell upon the sealed iron box, a soul, distinct enough to outline a complete silhouette, curled up within it, mimicking the movements of the physical body. It felt as if an extra layer had been added to his field of view, complete with a bizarre, eerie color filter.

"This is?"

"A hand-crafted Slaaneshi daemon host."

Ramses replied, "Looks like the effect is pretty good?"

"Good is an understatement." Romulus’s gaze swept toward the depths of the ship’s hold, where souls flickering like bright lights wandered, exposing every facet of themselves. He turned his head away, and the filter, tainted with a dirty, sickly pink, finally vanished once he focused on his companions. "I finally understand why, in the novels, a single Slaaneshi daemonette can wipe out an entire slaving party."

Facing an opponent who sees right through you, without an absolute physical advantage, any struggle is just a path to death.

"Are you confident now?"

"I am, but I still need the sharks to assist."

Romulus nodded, tacitly accepting that Ramses was taking advantage of everyone. "After all, those Dark Eldar react with such exaggeration; we still need to surround and kill them. By the way, since you’ve already mastered the subject of daemonic possession, why haven't you used it on the Astartes directly?"

A Slaaneshi Astartes would be perfect for hammering the Eldar; back in the day, the Drukhari webway hub of Commorragh was given a hard time by the Slaaneshi champion Lucius.

"Buddy, that’s a daemon. Do you really expect that thing to listen to you?" Ramses couldn't help but roll his eyes at the comment. According to their experiments, the daemon host and the occupant shared control of the body. Essentially, it was like installing a Warp-based operating system onto a physical vessel, leading to a constant battle for the controller.

"You should know that daemons aren't actually that afraid of death, right?"

"Of course." Romulus nodded. This was, in fact, a common misconception among most Warhammer enthusiasts, who assumed that daemons would be obedient when faced with powers capable of truly destroying them. But honestly, the Great Game of the four gods was fueled by daemons being permanently destroyed by the millions; even Greater Daemons were tossed into the grinder, yet none of these things seemed to fear death.

Of course, they understood self-preservation, but death could not be used as a threat to control them. If they were really stuffed into the empty shells of Space Marines to fight, and they caused a disaster for the transmigrators, it would be impossible to clean up.

In the reality of the material universe, what could truly constrain a daemon were the daemonic pacts that were linked to Warp forces, allowing for the forced control of a daemon's behavior.

"And don't even talk to me about daemonic pacts. My brain, which was half-swindled out of its savings the first time I met the Emperor, shouldn't be touching that."

*Sigh.*

If a certain wise Thousand Sons Primarch from ten thousand years ago had your brain, the Emperor would probably have finished the Webway all the way to Andromeda by now.