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The change in the Savior's statue made the Death Guard captain and the other plague-things deeply wary, and they instinctively took a few steps back.
A trace of fear flashed through their eyes. They were afraid that this enormous statue, loaded with lethal weaponry, might suddenly rise to its feet.
Judging from the force fields and relic-grade weapons mounted on it, the Savior, the Emperor of the Imperium, absolutely seemed like the kind of man who would turn a holy statue into a high-grade Titan.
"Defensive positions!"
The Death Guard captain made his decision instantly, issued the order, and then personally ducked behind a plague engine to watch what happened.
At the vanguard commander's command, layer after layer of Chaos veils rose across the plague line, while foul-smelling vine-walls grew up around them.
"Ah, the Savior has answered the prayers of his loyal people. House Will has not lost his favor. That great one has sent us aid..."
"Could this be the legendary Statue Titan?"
"We've been saved!"
It was not only the plague-things. Oris and the other Imperial commanders and workers were all staring up at the Savior's statue as well.
Their faith was absolute.
They hoped the Savior would send down a miracle, that the statue would move and rescue every Imperial citizen trapped on this brutal battlefield.
For a brief moment, the entire battlefield fell into a strange stillness, especially the area around the Savior's statue.
Whether plague-things or Imperial worker-militia, everyone was watching for the next change in the giant statue.
Yet before all their eyes, the huge statue only trembled faintly, then fell quiet again.
Even the Savior's signature warm golden light went out, as though that great being's gaze had already turned elsewhere.
He no longer watched over this suffering place or its people.
"Savior!"
Oris stared up at the now-silent, cold statue, and a trace of despair crossed his face.
"Could it be that we are not devout enough? Or that House Will has somehow committed an act of disloyalty?"
Even now, he did not think the Savior had abandoned them.
Instead, he believed they were simply unworthy of that kind of salvation.
That had to be it. House Will and the workers had not done enough. They had faltered in the fighting just now, retreating again and again.
"Lord Overseer, we cannot keep retreating any farther.
If we do, we'll stain the last of House Will's purity and honor..."
The old steward looked at Oris. His aged face was full of pain, but his voice remained steady.
House Will had only just promised the Savior and the workers that they would fight to the very end.
And yet the battle had barely begun before their line began collapsing, forcing them to withdraw again and again with almost nothing to show for it.
Rather than retreat all the way into a dead end and die in humiliation, they might as well launch one final mass charge, inflict as many casualties as possible, tie down as many enemies as possible, and then detonate the entire main defense platform to wound the plague host even further.
At least then, their deaths would have contributed to Holy Terra's defense.
Better that than dying pointlessly and rising again as living corpses to attack their own people.
"You're right. I wasn't resolute enough in my earlier command decisions. I let those plague-abominations grow even more rampant."
Oris drew in a deep breath, his body trembling slightly as he admitted his own lack of decisiveness.
The heir of House Will had black shadows around his eyes, and both eyes were bloodshot. The pressure on his mind was enormous.
Plague-like thought-viruses were continuously gnawing away at his sanity.
"You've already done well. House Will will be proud of you," the old steward said sincerely.
After all, their overseer was not a high-ranking Imperial field commander. And the enemy facing him was Chaos elite troops, all while his mind was being constantly eroded.
The fact that he had held out this long under such pressure already made him exceptional.
The old steward bowed deeply.
His voice was more solemn than ever, and utterly free of regret.
"Lord Overseer Oris Will, we await your final command. It is my honor, as an old soldier, to fight to the end at your side!"
"May we not disgrace the blood of our house..."
Oris turned to look at House Will's honor banner in the distance and spoke softly.
Then he made his decision, and his voice grew firmer still.
"Gather every remaining soldier. Bring every high-yield demolition charge we have. We're launching one final assault against the heretic traitors and those plague-abominations!"
A son of House Will had decided on a suicidal charge.
He also secretly arranged for another team to take control of the main defense platform.
No matter how their charge ended, the platform itself would overload, ram into the plague host, and then die in a total catastrophic detonation.
After that, the guards and workers received their final orders as well. They were sorrowful, but even more determined.
They loaded their weapons, strapped on heavy demolition charges, and prepared to die alongside the plague-abominations.
Some of the workers climbed into engineering vehicles.
This would be the last time they ever drove the machines that had sustained their lives, whether forklifts, excavators, or drill-rigs. But this time they were not doing construction work.
This time they were going to destroy the enemies of the Imperium.
"Hah, damn it. Looks like this time we've got to show off our best driving."
"We graduates of Charadon Second Technical School aren't necessarily worse than you Ultramar Technical Institute boys!"
"The great Savior will absolutely see my loyalty!"
Facing their final charge, the drivers were afraid, but they also felt a kind of pride rising in their chests.
Years and years of New Imperium education had long since taught them not to fear xenos and heretics too much, and not to treat them as invincible enemies.
They were going to become heroes.
Rumble!
The Imperial militia seized the moment while the enemy was still in a defensive posture and poured nearly every last bit of firepower into the plague lines.
"Charge!"
Oris stood at the front of the formation, surrounded by elite guards.
He ignited his power sword and slashed it forward.
Then the son of House Will led his people into the final battle, holding nothing back.
This was a battle they were meant to die in.
The only thing they could do was kill a few more daemons and show the Savior their loyalty.
"That Savior's trickery probably ends here. At best, he can conjure a few harmless illusions and pretend to be mysterious."
Once the Death Guard captain saw the light from the Savior's statue go out and the figure fall silent again, all his wariness vanished.
He laughed at himself inwardly. He had really been too cautious.
Had he seriously believed that this cheap stone statue could move like a Titan war engine?
The Savior was not like the Chaos Gods or the False Emperor. He did not possess enough power to interfere with realspace and produce unnatural manifestations of authority.
Perhaps all his earlier fame had just been the result of borrowing the False Emperor's strength and bluffing his way into glory.
Now that the False Emperor's power was being disrupted by the artifact on Xinlonglin and could barely be used, the Savior had finally shown his true colors.
He could not even help these human followers right in front of him. All he could do was watch them die.
"Heh. How pathetic.
The Savior has abandoned you. He cannot save anyone. He fears Grandfather Nurgle's plague-power so much that he doesn't even dare show himself."
The vanguard commander stepped out from cover and used the mouths of his maggots to hurl insult after insult at the Savior.
His loathsome voice echoed across the battlefield.
"Perhaps your so-called Savior, your Emperor of the Imperium, is cowering in some corner right now, trembling..."
As he spoke, the Death Guard captain commanded maggots and plague-beasts to splatter the Savior's statue with filthy vomit and excrement.
He meant to desecrate the Savior. To desecrate the Imperium's faith.
That was more or less standard procedure for heretics. Whenever they entered a cathedral district, they would violently defile every holy icon within it.
It created even more despair.
What surprised the Death Guard captain was that this desecration did not seem to shake the worker-army before him.
If anything, they looked even angrier than the Imperial crowds he had seen in the past.
Still, the vanguard commander did not care.
The worker-army was only making its final death struggle. It meant nothing. All it was doing was accelerating the speed at which they would be corrupted and destroyed by plague.
At the current pace, by the time the fifth bell rang, the plague vanguard would have slaughtered every last person on this position.
They would complete the Death Lord's order even faster than expected.
The Death Guard captain lifted his heavy hammer, ignited its power field, and spread a thick wave of stench around it.
Then he stepped forward to meet the charging enemy, fully intending to massacre them with his own hands.
Boom!
With a single strike, the vanguard commander smashed over a heavy engineering vehicle, and the machine began visibly rotting away.
"Die, abomination!"
The driver inside ignored his own injuries and glared straight at the plague-abomination commander as he snarled the words.
"What?"
The Death Guard captain felt a flicker of humiliation.
He had never expected a lowly mortal to dare threaten him like that.
"I said die, traitor to the Imperium. My life's already worth it now."
The driver took a long drag from a Loyalty-brand cigarette, completely at peace. Inside the cab, the demolition device was flashing rapidly, clearly already activated.
It was supposed to detonate the melta charges mounted on the vehicle and engulf the entire surrounding area.
The blinking warning light was like a death knell.
The Death Guard captain looked at the warning light and his pupils suddenly contracted. The speed of electromagnetic signal transmission was far too fast for any ordinary attack to stop.
Yet after the signal finished transmitting, nothing happened.
"Savior... what's going on?" the driver blurted out in disbelief.
He had clearly triggered the melta charges on the vehicle.
"Heh. What a stupid little struggle."
A mocking look flashed across the Death Guard captain's face. The tension he had shown just now had been an act.
"Nothing escapes maggots and disease. Your plan was pathetic from the start. It was never going to work."
The moment these Imperial worker troops launched their charge, the vanguard commander had spotted the large number of demolition charges among them and used maggot-sorcery in advance to corrode and destroy the relevant wiring.
As a result, those bombs could no longer be detonated.
The workers' final struggle meant nothing.
It could not inflict meaningful damage on the plague host at all.
Their charge had been stopped.
"You cannot reject plague. You cannot reject Grandfather's love.
Just like your Savior, all he can do is tremble helplessly beneath the pressure of the gods!"
The Death Guard captain stared at the despairing worker-troops before him and raised his hammer high, summoning still more maggots.
Those maggots burrowed into the workers' bodies, leaving them burning with fever and weakness, collapsing to the ground in convulsions.
"Come. Enjoy the blessing of the Sevenfold Plague. Embrace your swelling flesh and the bile pouring through you.
You will march in the Death Lord's footsteps, all the way to Terra, and help us corrupt everything there!"
The Death Guard captain shouted wildly as he unleashed meticulously crafted plague-diseases to shatter the workers' resistance.
Yet in the very next moment, the Savior's statue erupted once more with brilliant golden light, instantly drawing his attention.
What?!
The vanguard commander was baffled.
Was the Savior playing another one of his illusion tricks?
"What's this idiot rambling about? Why does he have so many lines? Someone listening to him might actually think he's important..."
Inside the Savior's statue, Eden's phantom looked down over the battlefield through the statue's eyes and could not help muttering a complaint.
Not long ago, he had sensed the call of his worker-faithful and projected the power of the Sun of Hope into this battlefield.
He had wanted to cast a broad blessing across the whole zone, the way the Chaos Gods did, in order to save these loyal workers, especially the descendants of House Will.
In the warp, gods and believers sustain one another.
If believers sincerely worshiped the Sun of Hope, then at a critical moment he had to show up for them. Otherwise the power of his faith would slowly weaken and eventually fade into irrelevance.
For example, the Emperor was constantly supporting the Imperium, guiding warp routes and sending down miracles.
In that kind of situation, no matter how much the old man denied it, he could not stop his followers from believing in him unless the sacred sun itself truly went dark.
But obviously, the Emperor had long since lost the ability to control the sacred sun's behavior. It was operating on its own under the influence of faith.
That was also one of the reasons the Chaos Gods were desperately expanding their territory and their followers.
They pursued strength, yes, but they were also driven by faith itself. They could not resist the lure of belief.
Unfortunately, Eden had only just arrived when he was affected by the authority of the Chaos Gods and cut off from the faith-connection route by warp storms.
Even the Cursed Legion under his command had been tied up by large numbers of daemons and could not teleport into this region.
To besiege Holy Terra, the Chaos Gods had established layer upon layer of blockade lines, both in the Solar System and in the warp.
Fortunately, his Sun of Hope was just bootleg enough to play both sides.
Eden quickly hacked the relevant faith-route, slipped in through the Chaos-side connection, and returned to the Savior's statue to begin casting his blessing-authority.
"So how do you even do a group blessing? Like this? Or this? Or maybe that?"
Eden stared at the battlefield, anxious.
He manipulated the Sun of Hope's faith-circuit and worked up a sweat trying to learn from the Chaos Gods.
There was no helping it. He had only recently advanced to this higher-dimensional state, and he still was not truly fluent in large-scale blessings.
He was being thrown in at the deep end.
This was a special situation anyway. Under normal circumstances, who needed blessings? You just sent in the main force and flattened the battlefield with artillery.
So-called large-scale blessings were really just a poor god's emergency way of temporarily boosting combat strength.
The Chaos Gods could not move daemon armies into the galaxy easily, so naturally they had to use them carefully and rely on blessings at critical moments to flip the battle.
"Finally got it. Barely usable."
After sorting out the structure of the faith-circuit, Eden let out a long breath of relief and wiped the sweat from his brow.
Of course, all this happened inside the Sun of Hope itself, so the actual time consumed was essentially negligible.
Then he burned a huge amount of faith-power and projected his blessing across the entire battlefield.
Just to be safe, he projected quite a lot of it.
"Hiss...
I might have overdone it a little. And there are definitely some impurities mixed in there. That shouldn't cause any problems... right?"
Eden looked at the blessing-power he had sent down and still felt a little uneasy.
Still, no matter what, he had spent heavily to save these devout, courageous followers.
In the moment of greatest despair, the Savior's radiance arrived.
In an instant, the plague-viruses inside countless devout guards and workers vanished, and their wounds closed.
Some people even began to glow with the Sun of Hope's golden light, and phantom wings appeared behind them.
Full visual effects. Plus fifteen to all stats.
Whatever else the Savior's authority might be, it never skimps on visual presentation. Its momentum is always overwhelming.
Such a miracle filled the people with overwhelming devotion and excitement. The great Savior had not abandoned them. He had sent down power!
"Praise the Savior. Th-that great one has shown us favor..."
Oris glowed from head to toe. He was trembling with excitement. Deep inside his body, it felt as if a bottomless well of strength was surging up without end, while a phantom iron halo shone brilliantly behind him.
He raised his power sword, now blazing with golden light, and pointed it toward the horde of daemons.
"For the Savior!"
Then the descendant of House Will led his warriors in a fresh charge, this one so full of force that even the plague-things hesitated.
"Grandfather, could the False Emperor be showing miracles again?
No, this is the power of that Savior, the Emperor of the Imperium!"
The Death Guard captain stared at the guards and workers charging at him, all of them fully loaded with glowing visual effects, and his face was full of confusion.
Even the blessings Grandfather Nurgle had bestowed upon the Death Guard had never looked this dramatic.
"Waaagh!"
Suddenly, one burly worker let out a roar that made the Death Guard captain jump.
???
He turned to look and went half numb.
That worker looked a little... green.
And he was charging into the plague-daemons with a hammer, smashing away with savage force.
The plague-things stared at the sight, dumbfounded.
Where the hell had they ended up?
Was that still even a human?
(End of Chapter)
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