Warhammer 40k: Ours Journey

Chapter 59: Dead Memories Are Attacking Me

The Sorcerer remembered his voice. During the burning of Calth, the man's berserk fury had left a slight impression on him. He had been a good blade.

"What did you see?" the Sorcerer asked.

"Angels! Angels of wrath!" the voice, no longer berserk but filled with panic, screamed back.

Then, the squad leader's voice went silent. He was dead.

"What in the hell is going on?"

The Sorcerer tried to contact every squad he had guided. Either no one answered, or they were killed the moment the channel connected. The torpedoes carrying the other Chaos Space Marines should have breached the ship under his guidance and then teleported to rendezvous with him.

Why can't I contact a single one? Why don't I even know how they died?

And the "angels of wrath." The Sorcerer pondered. They, the enlightened ones who had seen the False Emperor for what he truly was, would never refer to his lackeys as angels.

Wait...

The Sorcerer's heart began to race. Something was definitely missing.

An answer. I need an answer.

He looked at the scenes in the mirrors. All he saw were cultists, wandering blindly. These numerous, inferior beings could not bear his holy will, leaving him completely ignorant of the current situation.

This should be the path of hope granted to me by the Lord of Change. The fact that I was able to board this ship alive is proof enough.

Wait a minute, what is my future after boarding?

His nine eyes began to tremble.

The Sorcerer suddenly realized that the so-called prophecy had not revealed what he would encounter after boarding. It had only told him that he would be able to board this cruiser alive.

What then? What happens after that?

The Lord of Change didn't seem to have mentioned it.

The way his men had been killed by concentrated fire was familiar. The craters chewed into their ceramite armor by bolter shells were also familiar.

Combined with the "angels of wrath," it added a suffocating, dark hue to this fog-shrouded battlefield.

A cold sweat broke out on the Sorcerer's face, hidden beneath his helmet. After embracing their new masters, these unrestrained warriors had finally rediscovered certain emotions.

Fear.

The fear that comes when the power they had gained by sacrificing their souls, betraying their honor, and abandoning their conscience could no longer control the situation—a fear from the very depths of their being.

VMMM!

The air suddenly froze. A humming sound pressed down from the ceiling. The Sorcerer looked up and was met with a brilliant flash of lightning.

CRACK-BOOM!

The tips of Ramesses's fingers erupted in blinding, blue-white fissures. The incantation he chanted became a low-frequency vibration that echoed through the air, finally converging into a reality-tearing shriek.

The sealed dome of the chamber exploded outwards, and a waterfall of lightning poured down.

BOOM!

The first thirteen arcs of electricity struck like the hammers of creation, melting the front rank of cultists into charred silhouettes. As the Sorcerer reacted, throwing up a psychic shield, the true devastation arrived a ten-thousandth of a second later.

The lightning, leaping between the countless mirrors, did not dissipate. Instead, it multiplied wildly with each ricochet. Each bolt split into thirteen new branches upon impact.

Gaseous plasma, heated to tens of thousands of degrees, wove a web of death through the corridor. The enemy was thrown into a crucible of lightning. Armor melted into slag and flowed down their bodies. The grenades on their belts detonated in a chain of fireballs. The heavily armored soldiers were pinned to the iron deck by the electromagnetic field, convulsing violently.

The nine Chaos Astartes who were not caught in the psychic shield in time faced the lightning's absolute judgment. Molten metal wrapped around their bodies like venomous vines, sealing their screams within their boiling throats.

Not even the cultists reflected in the mirrors were spared. Their bodies and skulls exploded in the intense light, the splattering flesh and blood ionized into vitrified dust before it could even hit the ground.

When the final syllable of the incantation faded, all that remained, both in the mirrors and in the real world, were nine hundred crystallized corpses. Their bones, through some superconductive phenomenon, had been turned into glowing blue quartz, like insects forever trapped in an amber of lightning.

"?" The Sorcerer, still maintaining his psychic shield, took a horrified step back, kicking away a Mark IV tactical helmet that now contained only ash. Can my spell be used like that?

SHATTER!

With a sound that tore through the air, the black knight struck from behind a mirror, lunging at the still-living Chaos Space Marines.

As Arthur's blade cut through the first mirror, glass shards rained down. The first Sorcerer-acolyte had just opened his grimoire when the knight's knee-strike shattered his chest plate, the splattering mithril plates self-immolating in the air into blue will-o'-the-wisps.

When the Word Bearer Sorcerer turned, he witnessed the second warrior, along with the gun he was raising, being cleaved in two by a power sword.

"Who are you?!" the Sorcerer shrieked, flames igniting in his hands. "You do not exist in my mirrors!"

CRACK!

Cutting down two enemies in mid-air, the knight remained silent. His raised greave crushed the neck-guard of the third warrior, the sound of splintering bone and shattering glass forming a duet.

As the fourth warrior's Chaos power halberd struck, the knight deftly avoided the disruption field's cleave, pushed forward with his shield, and used the force of the block to tear open the warrior's grip.

The blue fireball the Word Bearer Sorcerer had unleashed scorched the ground in front of Arthur but did not harm him in the slightest. Instead, it incinerated the warrior with the halberd, along with a fifth warrior beside him.

Your spell isn't working. How could that be?

"Thousand Sons!" the Sorcerer roared, his gaze locking onto the Librarian floating in the air above the chamber, as if remembering his student days on Prospero. Only these damned fools could steal the favor of the Lord of Change from him. He felt the power of the Empyrean receding, his meticulously chosen staff of sorcery already severed from its connection to Tzeentch, a frost beginning to form on its surface.

As the first ice crystals appeared on the Sorcerer's staff, the throat and spine of the sixth warrior were shattered by the edge of the shield, the concussive blast kicking up the glass shards that had not yet landed. The face of the seventh warrior was flayed into a bloody sieve by the storm of fragments, before a sword pierced through his skull.

As the ninth warrior's flamer spewed cobalt-blue fire, the knight was using the body of the eighth warrior as a shield. The knight then spun, severing the ninth warrior's knees, the falling giant crushing nine more magic mirrors.

The knight's swordsmanship was the very definition of this classical art of war. The momentum of each swing would inevitably guide his shield to cover any opening, and before the impetus of each thrust had faded, the joints of his armor had already micro-adjusted to an angle that would deflect any blow.

A perfect fusion of offense and defense, colored by no personal emotion. This was skill in its purest form, for the sole purpose of killing.

"Dark Angels!" the Sorcerer roared again, the figure before him overlapping with the black knight who had hunted him across the Five Hundred Worlds, ten thousand years ago. His voice was filled with terror.

The Sorcerer had always looked down on the successors who fought for the False Emperor. They shouted "For the Imperium," yet they had never seen the Imperium for what it truly was. They had not experienced that great battlefield, only a baseless fanaticism, a foolish belief instilled in them by external forces. They didn't even know what the False Emperor and the Primarchs looked like; they didn't understand what that great crusade had represented.

But now—

Looking at the black knight charging towards him, at the Thousand Sons Librarian who had dominated him in the psychic realm... there was no anger at a desecrated faith, no fanatical urge to annihilate a traitor. There was only contempt, as if they were looking at the dregs who had betrayed the human race, a herd of stupid pigs who had cut off their own path of retreat. Just like those who had seen the true face of the False Emperor and the Imperium, yet had still chosen to fight for them.

Lord of Change preserve me, what era did I just board into?

The heretics fell, one after another.

Now, he was the only one left standing.

Why? the Sorcerer did not understand.

Why are these memories, which should have been washed away by time, attacking me again?