And although he was a little curious about the Chaos relic, curiosity was just curiosity.
Heydrich knew perfectly well in his heart that he could not let this thing actually be triggered.
In the Warhammer universe—especially its physical reaches—the destruction that could be caused without performing the proper ritual was limited.
Even a Daemon Primarch couldn’t simply manifest at will; after all, the Great Rift had not yet torn open.
“These Necrons should all have fallen into deep dormancy.
Neither the Canoptek Scarabs nor the Necron Warriors have appeared.”
Surveying everything around him, Heydrich began to think things over in secret.
Because he was mulling over a rather good idea.
As everyone knows, the power of Enigmata can distort recorded history.
And aside from a tiny handful of powerful Phaerons or famous individuals, the vast majority of these Necrons were nothing more than soulless AIs.
This sort of thing, in essence, obeyed a fixed set of commands—all the more so once the Overlord or Phaeron at its core had put itself into deep dormancy.
So Heydrich began to consider whether or not he should swipe a few Necron units for himself.
Units on the level of a Necron Overlord, a Deathmark, or a Cryptek were not so easy to handle.
But those Necron Warriors were a perfect choice—he only had to use the power of the Path of Enigmata to alter their logic units.
After all, a whole heap of curios in the Simulated Universe had been rewritten beyond recognition by those History Fictionologists.
Surely these lowest-tier Necron Warriors wouldn’t backfire on him.
“They should be right around here.
Everyone split up and search.”
Just as Heydrich was brimming with wicked schemes, working out exactly how he would pull this off, the others on his side had reached the heart of the tomb.
After confirming that the Necrons here were essentially all in deep dormancy—
The squad leader at the front issued the order directly, then had the group split up to search.
“Suits me just fine.
At most two or three of these people are going to survive today.”
Hearing this, Heydrich’s expression brightened, and he made his way toward one of the passages without leaving a trace.
Soon he arrived deep within the tomb, where he found a cluster of Necron Warriors that had gone dormant along with the master control core.
“Let me give it a try and see if I can reconstruct their underlying code.
The Path of Enigmata’s mechanism may be powerful, but a powerful mechanism alone means nothing—it also comes down to scale.”
After thinking it over for a while, Heydrich chose to play it conservatively.
For the moment he gave up on the plan of directly tampering with the Tomb Overlord or the Necron Phaeron at the tomb’s core.
If it backfired and woke up the entire Tomb World, that would be no fun at all.
He still held a healthy dread of the power of the Necrons’ Gauss weapons.
The reason those Aeldari basically forewent armor and dumped everything into agility and evasion was, to a large degree, that they had been forced into it by these very things.
In every MMORPG, when facing those monsters that ignore armor, a tank can only rely on a mechanic like evasion to counter them.
Heydrich laid his hand on the husk of a silent Necron Warrior, feeling the power of the Path seep inward into its command matrix like fine, intricate vines.
This system was breathtakingly precise.
Every logic circuit was as if composed of countless overlapping gratings, advancing layer upon layer yet never interfering with one another.
Carefully, he peeled away the original loyalty-protocol layer and implanted the commands he was improvising in its place.
The whole process went unexpectedly smoothly.
After all, these soulless metal husks required no contest at the level of consciousness—just as you don’t need to persuade a door to believe it ought to be opened; you only need to change the lock.
“Let me see…
their underlying logic is just one single line: obey the arrangements of the Necron Overlords.
So all I have to do is change it to: obey ‘my’ commands.”
Drawing on the power of the Path to read these Necron Warriors’ underlying code, Heydrich overwrote and rewrote it directly.
This kind of thing wouldn’t work nearly as well on a living being—or even a machine-spirit construct, or anything at all capable of thought.
Enigmata is not intellect or memory.
There’s no way to overwrite perfectly, so it would only leave one feeling that something was off.
But for these purely mechanical robots, there was no problem whatsoever.
He fabricated a piece of information called false loyalty toward himself, and at the same time activated these Necron Warriors directly.
Then, one by one, their massive frames began to rise up, and a satisfied look spread across Heydrich’s face.
He then signaled these Necron Warriors to hide themselves for now, because at that very moment he had received an order.
Their target had apparently been found, which also drew Heydrich’s attention.
He immediately rushed over, and soon arrived at the gathering point.
Now appearing before them was an enormous container.
Inside it was stored an existence riddled with Warp fluctuations—it was, unmistakably, the same kind of Warp contamination source that Titus faced in Space Marine 2.
But because it hadn’t been activated, it now lay quietly within one of the Necrons’ blackstone containers.
Seeing this made Heydrich’s pupils contract slightly, and then, without leaving a trace, he stroked the bolt pistol at his waist.
But it was right at this moment….
“For the Emperor!!!”
Accompanied by a furious roar, one of the ‘World Eaters’ beside Heydrich moved swiftly.
In the blink of an eye, that armor covered in blasphemous sigils shattered like a soap bubble, revealing the power armor within—it was, unmistakably, Alpharius.
Seeing this guy appear quite obviously caused every World Eater present, Heydrich included, to suffer an instant mental blue-screen—all the more so since they’d been struck preemptively.
The latter directly grabbed an ossuary and hurled it at that Warp energy source, and at the same time lobbed a melta grenade at the several others.
“Oh, hell!!!”
Though startled for a moment by the suddenly-appearing Alpharius, Heydrich’s reactions were anything but slow.
He whipped around and bolted at once, and in the blink of an eye had charged out of the area.
As for that Warp energy source, Heydrich no longer cared about it, because he had clearly seen what that ossuary contained.
The ashes of a very high-grade Pariah—the instant this stuff made direct contact with a Warp energy source of that level, it would be enough to destroy the thing.
And on top of that, it was a melta charge.
With this thing detonating at close range, never mind an Astartes—even a Greater Daemon would be in for a world of misfortune.
So Heydrich didn’t dare to tank it head-on.
Even though tanking it wouldn’t necessarily kill him, he’d have to be sick in the head to choose to eat a hit.
At this moment, he spun around and charged out.
Relying on the stats his panel provided—considerably higher than those of an ordinary Astartes—Heydrich charged straight out of the blast zone.
BOOM!!!
Immediately after, a thunderous roar rang out, and scorching flames and a shockwave swept through the entire ruin.
Heydrich had no idea how the squad at the center of the blast had fared, but he himself had already run all the way to the entrance of the ruin.
Yet before he could secretly let out a breath of relief, a bolt pistol pressed directly against the back of his head.
At the same time, an ice-cold voice sounded beside his ear.
“Which kind of Alpharius are you?”
As that voice fell, the World Eater gear on Heydrich’s body shattered in an instant, revealing the second skin he’d been wearing—that is, the skin of Alpharius.
Once the Path of Enigmata is seen through, his ability fails.
Were it a meme-being, it might even die outright.
Quite obviously, the other party had seen through his first layer of disguise.