Though a gun was pressed against the back of his head, Heydrich wasn’t the least bit flustered.
Because he could dispel his disguise in an instant—his actual height was only a little over one meter eighty.
This current frame, over two meters tall unarmored and two and a half meters in full plate, was entirely fabricated.
So strictly speaking, that gun wouldn’t even hit him.
As long as the other party’s first shot didn’t kill him, he could swiftly counter-kill.
After all, even though his current identity was a fiction, even if the Enigmata Path mechanism were broken, his own stat panel was still right here—he was hardly without the strength to fight.
Of course, that wasn’t the point.
Heydrich had no desire to blow his cover.
After all, being an enforcer for a spire-top family was a pretty cushy gig, even if all he lived in was a plain, unremarkable little apartment of twenty or thirty square meters.
But an apartment in the spire-top at the heart of a sector—even back on this planet’s upper-hive it would be enough to buy a whole building, and on another planet it would be a sprawling palace.
Not to mention, with this identity propping him up, he could calmly keep advancing along the Path.
What’s more, even with a weapon’s muzzle jammed against his head, Heydrich had just hit upon a brand-new idea.
As the saying goes, the bigger the wind and waves, the more valuable the fish.
The nature of the Path of Enigmata was actually rather contorted.
He needed others to believe in you, yet never see through you.
Or rather, the more people who were influenced by the lies or illusions you wove, the farther you could walk along this Path.
And besides, Heydrich had heard perfectly clearly what this fellow had shouted a moment ago.
This one, it seemed, was a Loyalist Alpharius—though as for exactly how he was loyal, it was best not to scrutinize too closely.
And so……..
“Child, have you heard the tale of the Emperor and the Primarchs?”
At this point Heydrich deliberately spoke in a somewhat aged voice, which made the Alpharius behind him freeze for a moment.
“Do you know the name of His Majesty’s true first-returned son?”
“Hor—…..”
Hearing Heydrich’s words, this Alpharius answered almost reflexively.
But the very first syllable choked in his throat—that was a name that must never even be uttered.
“But only a very few, even many of the Primarchs themselves, do not know.
Only Omegon is the true first-returned son.
The Primarch, ambushed by the Warp, was scattered across every corner of the galaxy.
And Alpha appeared directly at the palace gates—you…..”
Hearing Heydrich’s words, this Alpharius trembled as well.
The gene-Primarchs and their progeny shared a strange and inexplicable connection.
In the very instant Guilliman awoke, nearly all of the Ultramarines felt a special resonance, and at the same time their strength surged dramatically in a short span.
So upon hearing Heydrich’s story, the Alpharius behind him instinctively shuddered.
This was a secret about the Primarch—one known to almost no one, even within their own Legion.
“And let me tell you something else early.
No matter how the Emperor and the Sigillite Malcador prophesied, they discovered that nine Primarchs would always betray.
So do you know why our Primarch had to betray?”
“Because….”
Hearing Heydrich’s words, this Alpharius was stunned.
As a Loyalist tin-can, he had never been able to grasp his own Primarch’s true allegiance.
That was precisely what kept even the Alpha Legion itself in perpetual chaos within—and now this single speech from Heydrich made him realize something.
That was….
Their Primarch had not betrayed.
If a certain half of the Primarchs were destined to betray, then he might as well join in, thereby taking up the slot of one of the traitors.
Heydrich’s voice dropped extremely low, yet every word drove like a nail deep into the other’s cognition.
The story he wove was not entirely conjured from nothing—within the original setting’s many speculations, Alpharius’s betrayal had always been the most baffling unsolved riddle among all the Primarchs.
He cleverly fused those half-true, half-false clues together with the power of the Path of Enigmata, fabricating a narrative capable of shaking the very foundations of an Alpha Legionnaire’s heart.
And most crucially, the Alpha Legion was never a monolithic block within—each member grasped only a single shard of the truth, and the more fragmentary the information, the more easily it could be completed by seemingly reasonable logic.
When an Alpharius heard an account more complete than the information he held, one that better explained his years of confusion, his first reaction was not to doubt, but to attempt to verify.
And the time differential was exactly what Heydrich was gambling on.
“The Primarch, for the sake of….
the El—der?”
Only at this moment did the Alpharius also discover, with some astonishment, that the one who was very likely an Elder of the Alpha Legion had vanished without a trace.
At the same time, a furious roar came from behind him, forcing him to retreat first.
…….
On the other side, behind another mountain of garbage, Heydrich immediately dispelled his Alpharius state and reverted to his original mortal appearance.
“Looks like he believed it.
Calm down.
I do hope the little treasures I left behind for those fellows didn’t disappoint you lot, eh.
Alright, I can head back and report in.”
Glancing at the swiftly departing Alpharius, Heydrich greased his heels and slipped away.
On his escape route, he dragged out that World Eater corpse he’d stashed earlier and tossed it onto the path, leaving behind a few marks belonging to Slaanesh for good measure.
That point-blank melta blast meant the Necron he’d prepared had gone unused for now, but it wasn’t a big problem.
It was merely one of his trump cards—use it if you can, and if not, there would be plenty of chances later.
Heydrich didn’t believe they would all be blown to bits; as long as one or two survived, that was enough.
…….
So on the other side, that World Eater squad leader came charging out with his men.
The power armor on his body had been scorched into great swaths of charred black by the aftershock of the melta bomb, and half the eight-pointed star on his left pauldron had been melted by the heat into a twisted teardrop shape—but none of this diminished the nearly tangible killing intent radiating from his entire being.
He lowered his head to glance at the corpse of his World Eater brother at his feet; the fatal wound on the other’s breastplate was clean and decisive—absolutely not a wound any mutant creature could inflict.
Then he noticed a shard of ceramite left behind not far off.
He bent down to pick it up and flipped it over—and there, plain to see, was the mark of Slaanesh.
The disgusting Prince of Pleasure—so it really was them.
Looking out at that empty under-hive wasteland, he knew he had lost the man he’d been chasing.
Then he glanced at the scattered handful behind him; only one brother remained at his side now.
They had fought desperately to protect that Warp energy source, only for it to be destroyed outright by the ashes of a Pariah.
At the same time, those ashes had also neutralized a great deal of the blessings upon their bodies, so that after taking a melta bomb to the face point-blank, only these few of them were left.
As for the mortals who hadn’t reacted in time, apart from the boss of the Blood Glory Gang, every last one of them was dead.
“Good, very good.
The Dark Prince, is it.”
At that moment the World Eater picked up a fragment of power armor—it had been beside the body of a World Eater.
Clearly the World Eater who had just chased that fellow out had been slain, though he had still managed to wound him, leaving behind this shard of ceramite.
Upon it was the mark of Slaanesh—obviously this was the hand of the Slaanesh faction.
And as for that tin-can shouting about the Emperor—please.
Drugged out of his mind.
It wasn’t as if he’d never seen a son of the Emperor high on combat stims, screaming “For the Imperium” while leaping into a Slaanesh daemon with a chainsword.
So clearly that pack of sissies had discovered their plan and secretly sent an Alpharius who had defected to Slaanesh to infiltrate their ranks.
“Is there any Dark Prince faction on this local planet?”
At this moment the squad leader turned to look at the Blood Glory Gang boss who had luckily survived at his side, his face covered in a ferocious and frenzied expression.
“There is—House Miltel……”
Upon seeing the look in this World Eater leader’s eyes, this Mortal Champion of Khorne shivered.
He didn’t dare conceal a thing, and immediately added it.
“Launch an extermination against them!!!”