Chapter 398: Keep Moving Forward

"The Romans made Caesar emperor to praise the ancient republic: they used the praise of freedom to decorate their own despotism." - "The Book of Lorca"

He checked his equipment, first of all the bolter. It might not be powerful enough to destroy all the obstacles in front of them, but after rapid-fire training, more ammunition can be dumped within the range at once. out. Its speed and precision are as comforting as the right temperature on the anvil.

As for the choice of secondary weapons, he brought a melta, which was used to break armor, making up for the responsibility of breaking armor that explosive bombs could not do.

Then there is a regular power sword. Like most Iron Warriors, he can use swords, axes, hammers, spears, and power fists in any of them, but he is exceptionally non-biased. Just like the whole process of joining this legion.

Like other children born into the surrendered gun tribe of the Oro Highlands, he was turned over and examined, and when the recruiting officer asked his name, he gave an answer, but his voice was drowned out by the noise around him. The recruiting officer took one look at him and, by some internal logic known only to himself, registered him as Hammer.

Later, he implanted those highly adaptable gene seeds without any rejection, and then became a warrior, crushing the enemy's skulls with a gun. He doesn't care about reputation or who he is, he only cares about completing his mission.

There were only two moments when his calm heart would ripple.

One was when he felt his gun sing in the palm of his hand as he slew the Emperor's enemies in the shadows. Orpheus, each of his guns share the same name, like it's in his genes.

The second was when the battle brothers beside him were chatting and laughing. The waves he felt at this time had no reason, he just felt good.

"I always thought it looked a little different here than in orbit," Jack said in his characteristic chatter, and even if the Astartes didn't easily become thirsty from talking too much, he still talked a little too much.

He looked at the map calculated from the orbital images in the helmet, then looked at the bare sandy surface in front of him and made a disgusted expression.

"Would you rather wallow in flesh and blood, Jack?" As always, Gerry Gris was the one who answered him. Maybe he was infected by Jack, or maybe he was just showing his true nature to the fullest. "The sand blocks the spread of alien flesh and blood."

An inappropriate metaphor, but the only one Hammer can think of: Jack is more invasive to the Space Marine psyche than the virus "Randan's Seed". He smiled into his helmet at that.

"What if we pour all the radiation sand from Baal's third celestial sphere here?" A strange idea suddenly came to Jack's mind, "Can we choke Ran Dan to death?"

"Jack," their de facto captain Kroger couldn't help but whisper warning the moon wolf to be careful and not to make jokes on other legions.

"No," Gerry judged majestically, "Baal only has two satellites, but the territory we established after passing through the corridor already includes eleven planet-level cosmic structures. You can't do it with Baal Sand fills the Randan Empire..."

"And you, Gri-Gris!"

The winged helmet of the Dark Angel turned innocently to the Iron Warrior: "We have never broken our battle oath, Kroger."

"We are on a search mission this time, Kroger, not a combat mission. Maybe we can actually take it easy."

Hashem the Word Bearer meekly found an opportunity to join the conversation, this time siding with two warriors whose Primarchs both went by the nickname of Beast.

This time it was the Iron Warriors' helm's turn to turn toward the Word Bearers' inscribed gray helm with a sense of betrayal.

“We are to have a tolerant patience with our friends, ‘by patient waiting,’ and faith must be nourished by patience.” The Word Bearers continued, “When things don’t happen according to our hopes and joys We should not grow tired of our situation or lose our patience, which is a visible complaint against Him..."

He gradually stopped talking as the others fell into a blissful silence as he calmly chanted, and there was peace among the ranks.

To be honest, this is actually Hashem's purpose itself. He had long since stopped counting on his fighting cousins ​​to truly listen to him.

The surface layer of sand flows slowly around their boots. The sky is dark, and the gravel occasionally reflects the dim crimson light from the two natural satellites in the sky. As the sand moves as a whole, it shimmers like a veil. , gently hitting the Space Marine's leg armor.

The outline of the shadow floats vaguely on the horizon. It is most likely a hill of sand that glows with dried blood, but there is also a very small possibility that it is what they are trying to find - a signal source that continues to emit The electromagnetic waves are similar to the Randan biological ships the fleet has encountered in space, but are weaker.

The moment Horus detected it, he sent out several agent teams with extremely good mission completion rates in recent times.

In principle, Team 23 is actually a combat assault team. They have other battlefields to go to than agents who act as reconnaissance and exploration agents.

But the injury Gris-Gris sustained on his arm inside the ship suffered some kind of malignant infection.

After passing the Iron Warriors' initial sterilization standard process, he was stuffed into the infirmary and underwent rigorous examination under the best pharmacists of all the four legions. It was finally confirmed that he was one of the very few who could be infected by Ran Dan's seed. Infected Space Marines.

After a series of ineffective treatments and day-and-night research, the pharmacists decided to give Gerry a new mechanical arm, which came with a small piece of steel shoulder. As for how they plan to distribute one arm equally to the four legions next, that is obviously not a question that patients should consider.

In a nutshell, after that, the whole team turned to the agent exploration mission. This does not mean that their combat effectiveness has decreased because Gerry replaced his arm, but that the mechanical arm provided by the Iron Warriors has too many unique modules packaged in it, so that it is only used in fighting and slashing battles. On the contrary, it is a wasteful move.

"If they hadn't chosen that name in advance, I think your name would be quite suitable for naming the disease," Jack said. "It's too long and hard to remember."

"You can try to memorize it. It's good for training your memory." Gerry-Grice Sean Georgiev Pat O'Sullivan said as his robotic arm began to move quietly.

At this time, Gerry's robotic arm was also working quietly. The augury scanner installed on the front helped him ignore the dim conditions of night light, ignore the possible limitations of using the naked eye to observe auxiliary shooting, and the potential surrounding situations. Maybe any infiltrator that suddenly bursts out of the sand.

It helped Gerry a lot, although the Dark Angel still sometimes missed his flesh-and-blood arm in his dark room.

They groped in the sand for a while, the sky became darker, and the active blood-colored light inside the sand became darker and darker.

This echoes the parts of the planet where alien invasions are serious - from orbit, those areas appear completely fleshy, the mountains are giant undulating faces, and the rivers are filled with giant eyeballs staring into the sky.

The first mortal correspondent who saw this scene calmly forwarded the picture to the Astartes battle headquarters, then turned to the coffee machine and knelt down to vomit until he was delirious, until he was carried out of the hall by his angry colleagues. Throw it into the hallway.

"I heard that they had completed a new training course before taking charge of this work. How could they have such an obvious reaction? This task is harmful to them." Hassem said worriedly, crossing his index and middle fingers. , making a sign of the cross.

"If there is no training, it's probably not just vomiting. Maybe we can refer to the communications personnel who haven't been trained when we just walked through the corridor?" Jack shrugged, and the shoulder armor moved slightly, "Don't always It's because I'm worried about what's going on, Hashem, look at me, I've always been like this..."

"There's no sensitivity," Gerry said.

Kroger's eyes swept across the three warriors in turn, and the slow rotation of his helmet gave people a sense of weakness.

Anyone who knew Kroger would be surprised to hear that he now tolerated three noisy warriors traveling with him.

If a Word Bearer understood this, Krog hypothesized, the Word Bearer might be pleased to admire another warrior who understood the principles of balance and moderation, how to make oneself invincible through godly faith. He must always take comfort from His radiance and calmly accept all the arrangements He has received...

Kroger quickly deleted the above paragraph from his mind and concentrated on enjoying the quiet moment that was not common in the team.

After the four legions opened the corridor, the four Primarchs held a meeting in the strategy room again, but no one else was allowed to accompany them during the meeting, and the door of Harhabat's strategy room was always closed. When they were tidying up and cleaning afterwards, everything in the strategy room was placed as usual, without any clues.

Perhaps only the Primarch himself knew whether what took place in that hall was a harmonious negotiation or a fierce quarrel.

After walking out of the conference room, Horus Luperkar led the Luna Wolves to break into the interior of the sector first, followed by the Word Bearers and the Iron Warriors who held the Aquila flag high. Leon El'Jonson's Dark Angels temporarily stayed behind until a new batch of Astartes from Caliban joined the Legion, adding fresh blood to the Terran descendants of the First Legion.

In the report submitted to the imperial prime minister, the four legions were making great progress. After several months of rectification, inspection, exploration and planning, even the destruction of the outer sentry sent Ran Dan's vigilance to a higher level, and dozens of magnificent victories were achieved. Still successfully completed within the next few weeks.

Horus Luperkar went to the front line personally, walked into the ever-changing battle situation, and brought a decisive end to every key battle he was involved in.

If everything that happened to Ran Dan can be made public in the future, the record of Wolf Shepherd will undoubtedly be the most dazzling legend at this stage, and every command and military order he issues will serve as a sample for countless imperial soldiers to learn from, and will last for a long time. Be remembered.

He completed each battle extremely quickly, moving from one location to another, focusing on the conquest to expand the territory, leaving the finishing behind to the Iron Warriors and the Dark Angels.

And his brother Lorgar Aurelion accompanied the Wolf God, his quiet eyes reflecting the burning sky. Armed with a jump pack and a heavy fire breather, the Ember Ring burns the Emperor's enemies with fury.

No one knows how many Word Bearers' skeletons accompanied the charred corpses of their enemies in their radical advance. However, the only place Lorgar Aurelion went after leaving the battlefield was the Wandering Temple, which has been burning incense for a long time recently. Perhaps a few inferences can be drawn from this information. But their record is indeed amazing.

However, temporarily forgetting the perfect battle reports and discussing everything at a microscopic level, the Astartes encountered difficulties in the battle at the beginning. Even if they could break through the orbital air defense of Randan, ground-based air strikes were also a difficult problem, and the battle after landing on the ground was even worse.

Although the Astartes had been warned that they might encounter larger flesh and blood structures, when they found that those flesh and blood structures were large enough to cover half of the continent, a kind of trouble that they had no idea where to start still blocked their progress and conquest.

The Randan aliens that could overturn the world made it impossible for them to land. From the ground to the sky, there were flying objects that could fire lasers, spreading the smell of blood in the humid air. On the ground, any dirty structure with white skin could suddenly tear a crack in the middle and swallow the space warriors walking on it into its cracked fangs.

They - or it, or in Jack's words, "that group of Randan", in some areas where they were rampant enough and eroded the planet deeply enough, if you want to fight them, it is equivalent to fighting a planet itself. Sacrifices always exist before victory. They will be recorded, but at the same time, they will be too dim under the glory of victory and will not be noticed.

"So," Jack said, his voice floating on the evening wind, "what exactly is that mass powered by? They live in a place where they are alone! They can't eat each other, or extend downward until they are full of dirt."

Grey said after a while: "Not necessarily. We all know that these connected structures are not completely integrated."

"Wait, which we?" Jack looked at Gerry in surprise, and so did the others. Shadow Moon Wolf stood back and pointed his finger at himself, "Isn't it that I am the only one in the 'we' in 'what are you talking about we don't know'?"

"I think Gerry's 'we' refers to the Dark Angels." Hashem said.

"This is the latest news from our First Legion," Gerry said, lowering his voice and holding up the scanner on the mechanical arm, as if he was worried that a few professional Dark Angel interrogators would suddenly jump out from the ground around him.

"We can analyze different consciousness fluctuations from the interconnected constructs, and the intensity of the fluctuations is randomly distributed. It is very likely that not every piece of flesh and blood has its own independent consciousness, but it is not that the entire construct has only one independent consciousness."

"How did you analyze it-well, the mysterious arsenal of the First Legion." Jack gave up thinking.

Grey continued: "Father ordered us not to tell the Moon Wolves directly before the situation is clear, so you'd better pretend not to hear it."

"What about them?" Jack pointed at the others aggrievedly, and his slightly curved goggles reflected some sparkling light.

"No, who made you Moon Wolves charge so hastily? Some losses could have been avoided, and the Primarch Lion did not want us to sacrifice for false merits... I detected an electromagnetic signal." Grey said, raising his mechanical arm flatter and looking up into the distance.

There, a vaguely sharp outline appeared at the end of the empty sand plain, about three miles away from them.