As soon as the exploration team composed of Thousand Sons and Iron Warriors stepped into the mineshaft, a cold wind carrying the smell of sulfur and dust blew against their faces.
Before the team had even walked five hundred meters, dozens of cultists and those previously unseen translucent glowing figures charged out from the shadows on both sides of the mineshaft.
Levi, in the Thousand Sons ranks, used his psychic perception to identify them.
After a moment of thought, he concluded that these glowing figures were human soul remnants after Warp pollution.
They were also the mysterious glowing figures described in the intelligence report Magnus had received previously.
Facing danger, the Iron Warriors reacted extremely quickly.
With a volley of bolter fire, they instantly blew the enemies charging at the very front into bloody mist, clearing out the resistance in less than a minute.
However, the bolter shells had very little effect on those glowing figures.
Still, the concentrated firepower succeeded in destroying those psychic soul remnants; it merely took a slightly longer time.
Subsequently, the team advanced rapidly to a massive natural cavern hall.
Levi, who was guiding the direction of the entire mixed team, looked at the crisscrossing mineshaft entrances before him, as complex as a spiderweb.
He slowly closed his eyes, his psychic perception spreading out like a tide, instantly making clear the mineshaft structure for several kilometers ahead.
It meandered like a maze.
Every intersection hid traps laid by cultists, and countless glowing figures were hiding in the corners.
Withdrawing his psychic perception, Levi pointed at a deep, dark mineshaft on the left and spoke:
“Take the third fork on the left.
Bypassing the collapse zone and trap clusters in the middle will lead us to the location with obvious Warp fluctuations.
We’ll have to walk an extra three kilometers, but its advantage is safety.”
Perturabo did not speak, merely raising his hand to pull up his tactical terminal, which displayed the geological structure map the Iron Warriors had just scanned.
He cast a glance at it, then looked up at the direction Levi was pointing, his brows furrowing even tighter.
“Bypass?” Perturabo sneered, tapping the thick rock wall in front of him with his forgebreaker hammer.
“The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
Siege Tyrants, prepare to excavate.”
“Wait!” Levi hurriedly stopped him.
“Ahead is a solid rock layer over forty meters thick, and there is a high-concentration gas pocket here!
Digging through will take at least half a day, and it’s easy to trigger an explosion!”
“Half a day?” Perturabo looked at him like he was looking at a fool.
“My Siege Tyrants won’t even need ten minutes to dig through this little bit of stone.
He paused, his tone carrying the unique certainty of an engineer.
“Those forks you mentioned, every single one might have an ambush.
Bypassing three kilometers, with the ambush density inside, is enough to take half an hour.
Digging straight through: zero casualties, ten minutes at most.
Do I even need to calculate which is more cost-effective?”
Before Levi could retort further, Perturabo was already giving orders into the vox: “Siege Tyrants, step forward; mark the excavation route!”
From the ranks of the Iron Warriors stepped out a group of Siege Tyrants, clad in thickened MKIII power armor covered with blast-resistant ceramite layers.
Their left arms were fitted with multi-purpose servo-arms, their waists were hung full of demolition tools, and their entire bodies exuded a sense of industrial brutality.
They then hoisted shoulder-mounted multi-meltas and aimed at the rock wall to calibrate the angle.
Following Perturabo’s command, twenty blazing orange beams shot toward the rock wall simultaneously.
The hard rock instantly melted into magma, flowing down along the wall.
Immediately after, the Siege Tyrants pushed small excavators forward, the roaring drill bits easily gnawing away the remaining rock layer.
Levi stood in place, the corners of his mouth twitching as he watched, dumbfounded.
He knew the Siege Tyrants were the elite engineering troop type under Perturabo.
They had followed Perturabo fighting north and south since the Iron Warriors’ homeworld of Olympia and were extremely skilled in storming fortifications, breaching cities, and civil engineering operations.
But he hadn’t expected they could also be used to do this kind of rough work of digging tunnels.
As time passed, a straight passage was forcibly dug out through the over forty-meter-thick solid rock layer.
And they were lucky; they hadn’t encountered any gas pocket.
The rock walls were burned smooth and even by the multi-meltas; there was not even a single loose piece of rubble.
“What are you standing around for?
Let’s go.” Perturabo cast a sidelong glance at Levi and took the lead walking into the passage.
“This is the power of steel and engineering; it’s much more reliable than those mystical psychic powers of yours.”
Levi recovered his senses and led the Thousand Sons warriors to follow.
Just after walking out of the passage, a massive natural cavern appeared before everyone.
Glowing crystals hung from the roof of the cave, brightly illuminating the entire space.
And right in the center of the cavern quietly lay moored a giant ship, entirely silver-white, whose end could not be seen at a glance.
The ship’s lines were thick and orderly, its surface covered in gleaming alloy armor without the slightest bit of rust.
The portholes were pitch black, like hollow eyes.
An indistinct, cold resentment emanated from deep within the ship.
He walked briskly to the side of the ship, reaching out to touch the cold alloy hull.
“Board the ship immediately and inspect the power systems and navigation capabilities.”
Perturabo rapidly reviewed the map of all ship knowledge in his mind since his birth but could not find any matching model.
He felt the cold touch of the ship’s alloy, yet a strange thrill stirred within him.
A flicker of fanaticism flashed in his eyes; this was absolutely a creation of the lost Golden Age.
This could vastly supplement the fleet strength of the Iron Warriors.
Levi had just wanted to open his mouth to warn that there were psychic anomalies on the ship, but seeing Perturabo’s eager and excited appearance, he dismissed the thought of persuading him.
He didn’t want to engage in a meaningless argument with this moody Primarch.
Turning his head, he instructed the warriors under him:
“Be doubly careful, and pay attention to perceiving abnormal psychic fluctuations in the surroundings.”
Under Perturabo’s orders, thirty Iron Warriors immediately formed an assault squad, blew open the ship’s side hatch, and charged in first.
Levi only brought the captain of the Fifth Fellowship, Phosis T’kar, and stepped into the cabin.
He was afraid the other Thousand Sons warriors lacked sufficient strength; going deep into enemy lines was truly dangerous.
A heavy smell of dust mixed with the smell of decaying metal, along with a trace of an indistinct, cold, bloody stench, instantly entwined around them.
Countless withered bones were scattered in the rooms on both sides of the corridor.
Judging from the remaining clothing and accessories, these people were all colonists from the Golden Age.
Levi gently brushed his hand over a withered bone, his brows furrowing tighter.
Weak psychic fluctuations remained in these bones, which could be clearly perceived even through his power armor gauntlets.
Moreover, Levi also discovered that these withered bones were covered in marks from hacking knives and chiseling axes, looking as if they had been cruelly tortured and killed.
“This is a slaughterhouse for psykers.” Levi’s expression sank.
“They treated psykers as criminals and slaughtered them.”
He quickly deduced that it was highly likely the large-scale awakening of psykers in the late Golden Age had led terrified ordinary people to treat those psykers as monsters and persecute them wantonly.
For there actually to be so many corpses of psykers here, this would absolutely cause Warp pollution.
He already suspected that the true body of that Lord of the Storm was highly likely an aggregate formed from the accumulated resentment of these psykers.
A chill crawled up his spine.
A shrill scream suddenly came from the end of the ship’s corridor.
Countless black wraiths drilled out from the walls.
They had no physical bodies, only twisted, agonized faces, roaring as they pounced on the Iron Warriors.
Thaniel_a_goodchild.