The Dreadnought still remembered how it had all begun — a grand crusade led by the Emperor himself, twenty Legions raised on Terra, the birthplace of humanity.
As one of the first Second Legion Space Marines to undergo his transformation on Luna, he had still possessed his own name back then. He had spoken with members of the Lunar gene-cult — those resentful adherents of a creed the Emperor had crushed, now toiling day and night against their will to advance His project of creating Space Marines.
Their attitude toward other Space Marines was ice-cold. They regarded the rest as the Emperor's hounds, instruments of war and nothing more. But toward him and his brothers, they were different.
"You are the crown jewel of our genetic craft!" one researcher had told him, eyes burning with a fervour the young warrior could not yet understand. "The others are nothing but pitiable gene-freaks — the Emperor's blunt instruments. But you are something else entirely!"
"You carry within you the potential for infinite evolution," the man had whispered, his gaze alight with something almost worshipful. "You are the future of humanity."
The warrior had not known what future the man was talking about. He only knew that he and his brothers, compared to their cousins in other Legions, possessed extraordinarily developed gene-sense nerves and the accompanying glands to match. In battle, they could consume the bodies of slain enemies, absorb the strengths encoded in their genes, and complete targeted adaptations in a remarkably short span of time.
Their Legion had been designated by the Emperor Himself as the foremost experts in combating non-human xenos — and that designation proved entirely justified. Throughout the Great Crusade, by assimilating the strengths of their enemies and crafting strategies tailored to each foe, they proved unstoppable in every engagement against alien life.
And he had stood out even among them. His kill-record against xenos was unmatched, and the brothers around him had taken to calling him with reverent admiration: "the Hunter."
As time passed, even his real name faded from memory. Everyone simply knew him as the Hunter. And he, utterly absorbed in the role, had grown to love that name. It felt like proof — proof that he was fulfilling the purpose the Emperor had given his Legion with distinction. And so he had willingly set aside his birth-name, riding the stars under the Hunter's mantle, cutting down ever more of humanity's enemies in the Emperor's name.
But great strength never comes without a price. Their gift for absorbing enemy genetics had made them the finest xenos-hunters in the Imperium — yet too much absorption had begun to leave its mark. Some of his brothers showed signs of irreversible physical mutation.
Those brothers retained their minds, their clarity of thought — but the alien limbs that had evolved from their bodies gradually changed their behaviours as well. They began adopting increasingly non-human mannerisms, and that quiet creeping wrongness made the Hunter uneasy.
Yet watching how the Third Legion — once ravaged by the Blight — had been reborn in fire after reclaiming their Primarch, the Hunter had told himself: if only they could find their own Primarch, everything would fall into place.
He had never imagined that their Primarch had already walked far further down that road than any of them.
The Hunter and his brothers found their Primarch on a primitive world known as Zerus.
It was a planet host to a peculiar parasitic organism called the Primal Zerg — creatures that burrowed into other monsters, fed on their spinal fluid, and after harvesting their genetic material, consumed and absorbed them from within.
Their Primarch had been born aboard a human-crewed starship, where he had learned basic human language and knowledge. But that ship had crashed on Zerus not long after, and its sole survivor had quickly become another link in the planet's grotesque food chain.
He had learned from the Primal Zerg. He began preying on other creatures — and on the Primal Zerg themselves — harvesting their genes to evolve himself, striving simply to survive on a world teeming with monsters. By the time the Hunter found him, he was still recognisably humanoid in rough outline — but his hands had mutated into chitinous claws, his legs had become the leaping limbs of a mantis, and a venomous scorpion-stinger curved from the base of his spine. Every part of him announced that he was something extraordinary.
"Who are you? Where do you come from?" The Hunter heard his inhuman Primarch ask. "I can feel a subtle connection between us. Who exactly are you?"
The Hunter had suppressed his revulsion and revealed their identities. Upon learning that these warriors were his gene-sons, the Primarch's demeanour shifted immediately — he became warm, even enthusiastic. He shared his "cuisine" with the assembled warriors and taught them which parts of a monster to eat for the most effective genetic harvest.
The warriors were moved by their Primarch's generosity. The Hunter alone stood apart, watching. He had a gnawing feeling that his brothers were no longer consuming enemies in order to defeat them — they were becoming addicted to the act of harvesting genes for its own sake. The Primarch's return had not reversed this slide. It had accelerated it.
The Hunter had originally hoped that life reintegrated into human civilisation might shift the Primarch's outlook. He was wrong. The Primarch's mastery over his own biology was so complete that he could evolve or revert to baseline human form at will — he simply preferred not to. He preferred to remain in his non-human state.
That preference, in itself, was a statement. And the Space Marines who had attached themselves to the Primarch rushed to emulate it. But ordinary Space Marines lacked the Primarch's exquisite control over their own genetics — when they tried to mirror what he did, the changes were irreversible.
Watching the entire Legion hurtle toward the abyss of non-humanity, the Hunter had tentatively proposed destroying Zerus's Primal Zerg, hoping to slow the Legion's degeneration. The Primarch refused without a moment's hesitation.
"Don't you see that these creatures have something worth learning from us — or rather, that we have something worth learning from them?"
The Primarch had turned the question back on him. "To consume the genes of others and become greater and stronger in the process — this shall be the way of our Legion. I will lead our brothers to become the ultimate lifeform, an 'Evolutionary Swarm' that will sweep across the stars!"
"But we are humans who hunt xenos," the Hunter had shot back. "Harvesting genes is a means to that end — a tool of the hunt. It was never meant to become the hunt itself!"
"Only those who occupy a higher position on the food chain have the right to hunt those below. Endless evolution is the very foundation that ensures we remain the hunters and not the hunted. Hunter — you are one of the oldest veterans of this Legion. I had assumed you understood that long ago."
Blue fire seemed to smoulder behind the Primarch's eyes. "Our father gave us the gift of evolution. We should savour every part of that process. And besides — the unpredictable transformations that come from assimilating new genes — don't you find them magnificent?"
"Father, you can freely govern your own biological evolution and devolution alike," the Hunter had pressed. "But many of the brothers who try to follow your example have already suffered severe physical mutation. By the Imperium's own definitions, some of them can barely be called human anymore…"
He had meant to push the Primarch to think harder about the Legion's fate, but the Primarch cut him off.
"Definitions? Whose definitions? Who gets to decide they are no longer human?"
"By scientific standards and Imperial Truth, any being with a human skull structure is classified as human."
"And who wrote those scientific standards? Who authored the Imperial Truth?"
The Primarch pressed forward, relentless. "Have you never encountered those sub-humans isolated on their own worlds, transformed by local environments over generations? That population we exterminated — the ones whose skulls had gradually reshaped over countless generations due to high-pressure atmospheric conditions. Even while they still called themselves human, the Imperium had already handed down the order to wipe them out!"
"Tell me, Hunter — is the science you keep invoking truly scientific? It is nothing more than a set of standards drawn by someone else for their own purposes. If you live your life by the lines others have drawn, your mind is nothing but a racetrack that belongs to them."