Chapter 59: Dead Memories Begin to Attack Me

The Sorcerer remembered his voice; during the burning of Calth years ago, the other’s ferocity had left a lasting impression on him.

It was a good blade.

"What do you see?"

The Sorcerer asked.

"Angels, raging angels!"

The roar came back, devoid of its former fury and laden with panic.

Then the squad leader’s voice went silent.

He was dead.

"What on earth is going on?"

The Sorcerer contacted every team he had guided, only to find them either unanswered or cut off by death.

The other torpedoes carrying Chaos Space Marines should have breached the warship under his guidance, then converged with him through a teleportation ritual.

Why could he not reach a single one now? Why did he not even know how they had died?

And the raging angels.

The Sorcerer pondered.

Having seen through the true face of the False Emperor, men of their awakening would never mistake the False Emperor’s lapdogs for angels.

Hmm...

The Sorcerer’s heartbeat accelerated.

Something was missing.

An answer—I need an answer.

He looked at the scene in the mirrors, filled only with cultists wandering blindly.

These numerous, inferior creatures could not bear his sacred will, leaving him utterly blind to the current state of affairs.

This ought to be the path of hope bestowed upon me by the Changer of Ways; the fact that I survived to board this ship is proof enough.

Wait, what is my future after boarding the ship?

His nine pupils began to tremble.

The Sorcerer suddenly realized that the so-called prophecy had not revealed what he would encounter after boarding, but had merely told him he would survive boarding the cruiser.

And after? What about after that?

The Changer of Ways seemed not to have mentioned it.

He was all too familiar with the subordinates who were instantly focused down and killed, and the gaping holes chewed into ceramite armor by bolter rounds.

Combined with the raging angels, these elements added a few layers of suffocating, deep darkness to the fog-shrouded battlefield.

Cold sweat beaded on the Sorcerer’s face beneath his mask.

After embracing their new masters, these unrestrained warriors had finally rediscovered a certain emotion.

That emotion was fear.

The fear that arises when one can no longer control the situation, despite trading their soul, betraying their honor, and discarding their conscience for power—

A primal, bone-deep fear.

Hum!

The air suddenly stagnated, a humming vibration pressing down from the vaulted ceiling.

The Sorcerer looked up to meet a blinding flash of lightning.

Boom!

Ramses’ fingertips erupted into dazzling blue-white fissures, his spell-chanting turning into low-frequency vibrations echoing through the air, ultimately converging into a shriek that tore reality apart.

The enclosed vaulted ceiling exploded outward, and a cascade of thunder poured down.

Roam!

The initial thirteen arcs of electricity struck like the hammers of creation, melting the front-row cultists into charred silhouettes.

As the Sorcerer hastily raised a psychic shield, true destruction descended a ten-thousandth of a second later.

The lightning leaping among the countless mirrors did not dissipate; instead, it multiplied frantically with every single bounce.

Each bolt split into thirteen new branches upon ricocheting.

Plasma gas at tens of thousands of degrees wove a web of death through the corridor, and the enemy seemed as though they had been cast into the gods’ lightning crucible.

Armor melted into liquid metal, streaming down their bodies; grenades at their waists detonated into chains of fireballs; heavy infantry were pinned to the iron deck by electromagnetic fields, convulsing wildly.

The nine Chaos Space Marines who had failed to be enshrouded by the psychic shield in time faced the absolute judgment of the lightning. They were melted by the high heat into metal that wrapped around their bodies like poisonous vines, sealing their screams in boiling throats.

Not even the cultists inside the mirrors could escape.

Bodies and skulls burst in succession under the glaring light, and the spattered flesh and blood were ionized into glassy dust before even hitting the ground.

When the final syllable faded, only nine hundred crystallized corpses remained in both the mirrors and the real world.

Their bones had turned into glowing blue quartz due to the superconductivity phenomenon, resembling insects permanently frozen in a thunder-storm amber.

"?"

The Sorcerer, maintaining his psychic shield, stepped back in horror, kicking aside an MK4 tactical helmet reduced to mere ashes within.

Could his spells be used like this?

Clang!

Accompanied by a crisp sound that pierced the air, a black knight struck from behind the mirrors, plunging toward the surviving Chaos Space Marines.

When Arthur’s blade cleaved the first mirror, glass shards poured down like a storm.

Before the first sorcerer-apprentice could open his grimoire, the knight’s knee-strike had shattered his breastplate, and the flying mithril armor fragments spontaneously ignited into blue ghost-fire in mid-air.

When the Word Bearers Sorcerer turned around, he witnessed the second warrior, along with the weapon he raised, being split in two by a power sword.

"Who are you!"

The Sorcerer shrieked, fire igniting in his hands.

"There is no place for you in my mirrors."

Crack!

Slashing down two enemies in mid-air, the knight remained silent, his elevated greave crushing the third warrior’s gorget. The sound of cracking bone formed a duet with the crisp shattering of glass.

When the fourth warrior thrust his Chaos halberd, the knight deftly sidestepped the cleavage of the disruption field, raised his shield to push hard, and tore the warrior’s webbed thumb apart using the recoil of the sturdy shield block.

The blue fireball unleashed by the Word Bearers Sorcerer scorched burn marks into the ground before Arthur, failing to harm him in the slightest, yet incinerating the halberd-wielding warrior alongside the fifth warrior at his side.

Your spells are no longer working; how did that come to pass?

"Thousand Sons!"

The Sorcerer roared, his gaze locking onto the Librarian suspended in mid-air above the cabin, as if recalling his days of study on Prospero long ago.

Only these damned wretches could steal the Changer of Ways’ favor from him.

He felt the power of the Warp receding from him; his meticulously chosen sorcerer’s staff had already been cut off from its connection to the Changer of Ways and was beginning to frost over.

Just as ice crystals began to form on the Sorcerer’s staff, the sixth warrior’s throat and spine were smashed by the edge of the shield, the shockwave whipping up glass shards that had yet to fall.

The seventh warrior’s face was scraped into a flesh sieve by the fragment storm, and then the blade pierced straight through his skull.

When the ninth warrior’s flamethrower spewed cobalt-blue flames, the knight was using the tip of his sword to skewer the body of the eighth warrior as a shield.

The knight then spun, severing the ninth warrior’s knees, and the falling giant crushed nine magic mirrors.

The knight’s swordsmanship exemplified the ultimate height of this classical martial art.

The momentum of every slash inevitably pulled the shield to fill a blind spot in defense; the piercing intent of every thrust had barely peaked before the armor joints dynamically micro-adjusted to a deflection angle.

Offense and defense integrated, devoid of the slightest emotional contamination, skill treated as pure slaughter.

"Dark Angels!"

The Sorcerer roared again, the figure before him seeming to overlap with the black knight who had hunted him across the Five Hundred Worlds ten thousand years ago.

The voice was laden with terror.

Sorcerers had always looked down upon those juniors fighting for the False Emperor.

Crying out "For the Imperium" with their lips, yet never having seen the truest posture of the Imperium.

Having never experienced that grand battlefield, holding only a nameless fanaticism, a blind faith conferred by external forces.

They did not even know what the False Emperor and the Primarchs looked like, nor did they understand what that once-great Great Crusade represented.

But now—

Looking at the black knight charging toward him with a sword, looking at the Thousand Sons Librarian dominating the psychic domain.

There was no anger over desecrated faith, no indoctrinated fanaticism to annihilate traitors.

There was only indifference, as if looking at scum who had turned their backs on the human race, a pack of fools who had cut off their own retreats.

Just like those who had seen through the true faces of the False Emperor and the Imperium, yet still chose to fight for them.

Changer of Ways above, what era have I teleported into?

Heretics fell one after another.

Fighting to this moment, he was the only one left standing in the arena.

Why.

The Sorcerer could not comprehend it.

Why would these memories, long since washed away by time, return to attack him once more?