Chapter 411: Back and Forth
"The existence of sin does not depend on the voluntary or active consent of the will: as if as long as the will does not admit its sin, there is no sin." - "The Book of Lorgar"
Lion El'Jonson followed the Second Primarch walking in the corridor of the Glorious Queen. Along the way, Space Marines occasionally passed by him, looking at him with more fear than admiration.
He didn't care about these warriors: if they really existed, even if all the Space Marines in the corridor rushed at him at the same time, he would not have a finger injured; if they were a fiction derived from some kind of psychic power, then the Primarch in front of him would be the core of everything.
The corridor seemed to extend endlessly, and the light and temperature maintained a standard stability.
Lion frowned quietly, realizing that after he remembered the smell of dozens of Space Marines, the smell of more warriors around him became less distinguishable. This gave him a warning of crisis, causing a slight pain in his brow.
"Where are we going?" The lion asked coldly, listening to his scabbard hitting the dark leg armor, making a light metallic sound. Similarly, this is no different from any detail in his memory.
Duncan turned his head: "Meeting room?"
The lion nodded indifferently, and glanced at Duncan's whole body. The long robe of a wilderness traveler covered from shoulders to ankles, revealing a pair of tan leather gloves on the wrists and a pair of suede boots on the feet. He revealed very few details, and this caution itself was enough to be suspicious.
He deliberately rubbed the long sword out of the scabbard again, making the friction of the metal clearly audible. In an instant, almost all the space warriors in the surrounding corridors turned their helmets towards him.
"It's okay." The second primarch comforted everyone with one word, "The first primarch can be trusted."
"Can I trust it?" Leon asked, "Are you not going to attack me?"
"Of course." Duncan replied simply, raising the corner of his mouth, "You are fighting outside, even if it is for us to get rescue, I will believe you."
Leon narrowed his eyes and let the sword slide naturally back to where it should be.
"Nice to meet you, Duncan Aihe." He added a little bit of relief to his cold voice, which he was forced to learn before he really understood human emotions. The jungle relies on fighting for survival, but human society does not.
Duncan also responded with the same joy, and his eyes seemed to light up slightly because of this possible flame of trust.
"Oh, me too," he whispered, "Lion El..."
Then, the lion extended his left hand to the second primarch, waiting for Duncan's handshake.
The second primarch's face, which had just improved, suddenly added a bit of strangeness, even - a kind of tiredness, Lion thought. A burning and consumption of patience.
"You still don't believe me." Duncan concluded, and the previous smile was gone in an instant.
He still responded to his handshake etiquette, and his hand wrapped in tan leather had no temperature, as cold as ice.
Lion grasped the other's palm, refusing to let go, feeling the direction of the bones of this hand. Something is wrong, he thought - no, this hand has been reconnected twice.
"Why?" Duncan said. "Did I offend you?"
Lion held the second Primarch's palm tightly until the opposite face began to change, and a trace of fresh emotion appeared on the tired, slightly dark face - anger, but not pain.
"Let go." Duncan frowned, staring at him with dark eyes. The wound on his neck had just healed a little and began to bleed again. "I'm not angry, Lion El'Jonson. We saved you from the universe, but we can't even get a word of thanks?"
The lion looked at him, and then spoke, his voice as low as the roar of a beast: "Let's fight, my brother."
"Why?" Duncan asked again.
But Lion El'Jonson had already jumped up, pressed down on the unprepared second Primarch with his bare hands, pressed the opponent's shoulders to the corridor, lifted up with his knees, and while the opponent subconsciously bent over because of the blow to the abdomen, he used his elbows to savagely press down on the Primarch's back.
The second Primarch reacted immediately after being surprised, blocked his attack, and his psychic power rose again, trying to hold Lion in place. Lion howled, unable to tell whether it was the roar of a lion or the cry of a wolf in his memory.
Sometimes Russ is right, a battle will solve 60% of the world's problems.
He called up the psychic power accumulated during the walk just now, and pushed them out angrily, like a raging fire burning from the skeleton and internal organs. Flame Wings, he thought, six-winged sky army, the Emperor's hunter.
The indoor environment fluctuated violently due to the psychic contest between the two sides. The furnishings on the cabinets in the corridor fell to the ground one after another, and the sound of broken glass was everywhere. Every shattering sound seemed to be the explosion of some kind of soul, crackling, tearing a cold and dark breaking edge on the edge of human will.
"Why!" Duncan shouted loudly, "Why do you doubt me!"
He seemed almost urgent and sad, and this persistence in communication gave the Lion the opportunity to hit his chest and ribs hard, and something cracked and broke inside the second Primarch.
The other Space Marines around tried in vain to join the Primarch's battle and protect their gene father, but they were easily knocked away and kicked away by the lion one after another, like weak small animals being expelled, and cried out in pain.
Lion turned a deaf ear to all the noises. He was focused on the battle. The blood burned his muscles like lava, making his consciousness clearer and suppressing the pain of the psychic confrontation on his untrained brain.
He grinned and hissed a low roar from between his teeth. He continued his gusty attacks, punching the second Primarch's body in a series of consecutive punches, tearing the psychic protection with his bare hands until the opponent lost his balance. He suddenly drew his sword again and stabbed the second Primarch's armpit side.
No blood.
The long sword penetrated into the air.
No, not air, there was a real object there, but it was too fragile for the Lion King's blade, so the curtain was easily torn.
Everything in front of him was like a split scroll, cracking along the direction of the sword, and falling to both sides. The corridor twisted and spun, the Primarchs and Space Marines all melted in the vortex of the picture, the psychic storm roared wildly, and the terrifying aftermath swept towards the whole world fiercely.
In this brief, heart-beating moment, Lion El'Jonson vaguely saw another scene - short, blurry, not enough to identify clearly, and chaotic like a fog covered under his heavy breathing.
A person, a Primarch, looked up at him, his dark eyes were like rusty black knives, sad and painful, and reflected a momentary light in an instant.
His face was the only clear and bright place. From the shoulders down, the body of the Primarch was tightly tied by countless arms, and fingers were like thick hook-shaped needles that pierced into his flesh and blood. The blood dripped out along the broken nails, falling into the depths of darkness in all directions, swallowed by the cold and boundless darkness.
"No——" A breath came out from the Primarch's dry lips.
This seemed to be a key code, a key to open a mysterious door. Lion El'Jonson felt the darkness under his feet suddenly crack, causing him to fall freely, and his consciousness was deprived in the process.
...A kind of sadness, coming and going, touching and going away...
...What is my name? Who am I? Our respective names?
The first moment Lion El'Jonson regained consciousness, he drew his sword and pointed it at the throat of the person standing in front of him, with the tip of the sword piercing half an inch.
Opposite him, a face with a similar outline to his was facing him, and his eyes were so sad.
Who is this? Lion thought, they are blood-related.
"Are you Lion El'Jonson?" The Primarch took the initiative to ask tiredly, and forced a polite smile: "Nice to meet you, I am the second Primarch, Duncan Aihe."
A wisp of bright red blood flowed from the second Primarch's throat along the sharp blade like tears, staining the deep red ruby inlaid with the sword.
——
"Ouch!" Jack shouted, attracting the attention of his fighting brothers. Although everyone's attention was drawn away by the surrounding battles a second later, they raised their grenade launchers and other weapons such as snake guns, and drove away the various Randan alien creatures that rushed towards them.
On the base planet of the Silver Angels, they maintained the purity of species very well, and most of the attackers were just large and small Silver Angels.
Of course, the homogeneity of species has nothing to do with whether they are easy to deal with. The Silver Angels are the most group-combat-conscious alien family on the entire Randan front. Fighting with them always gives commanders a headache, and some of them may even change their hairstyles.
But as the Shadow Moon Wolves approached the area indicated by Jack, the surrounding enemy environment changed significantly, and the species richness increased rapidly. All kinds of hairless birds and scaly monkeys began to rush out from the flesh and blood land.
Jack howled just now, because he was suddenly attacked by a legionnaire—well, it was the Dark Angel. Jack recognized the dark smell on them. He suddenly received a very fresh memory of the Dark Angel, in which he was bitten to death by a green-hoofed donkey.
This really stimulated Jack, and now his waist is still in phantom pain.
But to be honest, this is not the key to everything, nor is it the reason why Jack tried to avoid being killed by distraction in the battle and distinguish what he saw.
The golden hair on the top of the purple robe. Jack thought, and scratched a yellow-haired thing that rushed towards his face with a claw. He would not mistake that huge and majestic head, Lion El'Jonson, he really passed by here.
He threw the message to the channel of squad leaders and above in real time to ensure the timeliness of the information. Not long after, another Shadow Moon Wolf howled miserably. Fresh memories are more sensory stimulation than old dreams.
"East," Jack recalled the direction he saw Lion El'Jonson heading. The team immediately adjusted their direction and closely followed the target they needed to find.
In front of them, a relatively flat and low bone mountain was slightly raised on the plain. It was about dozens of kilometers long and slightly narrow. It looked like a skin bag with a few layers of meat stuffed in it, and a layer of bone armor on the outside, and then wrapped with some hot steam. It was sloppy and casual, and everything seemed so hurried.
Gunshots rang out one after another, and Jack looked for a foothold in a pile of bone structures on the ground, crushing some of the brittle bones and stepping over others that were too huge.
The structure of the bones here reminded him of the rib plates of Space Marines, which were covered one after another to form a natural layer of hard armor to protect the flesh and internal organs below.
After a while, he confirmed that this was not a guess - this was an enlarged version of the ribs of the Astartes, and even the number of bones was exactly the same. Well, who doesn't know that some of the Randan Angels came from the Second Legion?
Since several Shadow Moon Wolves were bumped into by Horus and were talking about this matter, but they were not scolded by the Wolf God, this was the default fact.
Suddenly, he fell into a new memory, which was more vivid than any fragment he had ever had, more like a branding iron engraved in his memory, and its mere existence made his brain begin to ache.
But strangely, in this memory, he saw nothing except the blank scene of flesh and blood squirming. Jack was confused, but his intuition told him that he couldn't let go of this precious information easily.
He stepped back slightly, letting his comrades protect his back, and tentatively divided part of his mind to explore this particularly uncomfortable psychic fragment. He had never been so eager to play with psychic power in his life - he was one of those people who followed the Empire's caliber and was always unhappy with psychic power.
Then, he saw it. His vision spanned a thousand meters and found the side of the Bone Mountain in front of him. A notch on the edge that looked like a growing black mold proved to be a narrow entrance into the interior of the Bone Mountain. The rolling hot breath swirled around the middle of the mountain, and the gray-yellow mist was like a mist made of ghosts, blocking a clearer observation.
At that entrance, a dark spot that looked so small from a distance, a figure wielding a long sword and fighting endlessly with a whole nest of enemies, once stood on the edge of the Broken Bone Mountain.
His golden hair reflected such a tiny golden light that it only appeared in the briefest blink of an eye, accompanied by the edge of the silver blade at a perfect angle.
"There--" Jack blurted out, then calmed down and described the location he saw in detail.
After a brief memory fragment, the Dark Angel who was once in his position shot forward like a bomb or a hunter's long arrow, running out of this place very quickly, just like running out of his body, chasing Lion El'Jonson in the distance.
Jack was thrown out of the memory fragment dizzily and fell back to the current reality. He didn't understand why this little clue could cause the Dark Angel to have such a headache, as if a hot nail pierced his head, and wet and hot blood was still flowing out...
Oh, he knew, Jack thought, the truth made him inexplicably helpless.
It was not the Dark Angel who was in pain, but himself, Jack, who had no name in Cosonia and casually gave himself a simple name when he was queuing up at the recruiting officer and chatting with other candidates. His own head was hurting.
His helmet gave him a series of emergency warnings, telling him that part of his temporal lobe was almost pierced by a bone spur, and he was currently being urgently injected with medicine to maintain his condition.
Fortunately, he was always very lucky, and this minor injury was far from enough to kill him, but it might only cause him to have some minor problems with his language and memory in the future.
Well, he admitted his defeat, he just shouldn't be distracted during the battle. It should be the work of a weird spider angel that jumped onto his neck just now. If he hadn't thought about tracking those memories, he wouldn't have made such a careless mistake.
He ran forward with the soldiers, and an unlucky brother fell at his feet. This time they brought a group of pharmacists to take care of the aftermath, so Jack just moved his brother slightly to the side with his feet to prevent him from being accidentally stepped on by the soldiers behind him.
I don't know if it was his illusion, he felt that the temperature around him had risen a little bit, the environment near the bone mountain was hotter than other places, and I don't know if this place was once a crater or something. There was a special, dim and dull light flashing everywhere, and the damp blood soaked their outer armor and kept flowing, as if something had condensed into substance.
Suddenly, an extremely strong and sad psychic wave crashed down like thunder, twisting the earth between the cracks of the world. Everything was turning over and reshaping. The worse pain grabbed him and pressed him to the ground.
A rare panic rose in Jack's heart. He shouted in the communication channel, trying to wake up other fighting brothers who were also knocked down and more sensitive to psychic energy.
No one responded.