At this moment, Magnus was casting with his sorcerers.
They were hidden deep within the throne hall, in a secret altar chamber. This place was both his private base and the entrance to a passage connected to the Warp.
According to Magnus's original design, if one day Prospero ever met the destruction foreseen in prophecy, he would activate this gate into the Warp and flee. And once he had escaped, he would spend the rest of his life rebuilding Prospero and swearing vengeance on whoever had destroyed it.
But this time, the situation was different.
The secret escape route was being used for something else—
A teleportation ritual.
Magnus had never expected his Thousand Sons to actually subdue two primarchs, so he had prepared a fallback. If the painstakingly arranged array failed, then this spell would take over.
By means of Warp transit, it would tear open the barrier of realspace and transport the entire throne hall straight to Holy Terra—directly before the Emperor.
If it succeeded, then Father would naturally punish Horus and Curze, these two whose flesh had so obviously undergone mutation.
And perhaps Father might truly be able to save them.
Ah, my dead sons… your sacrifice will have been worth it.
Your deaths will buy back a whole Warmaster and another uncorrupted primarch.
That would be an honor.
"Father! Something's wrong!"
"Our brothers seem to have been defeated!"
"There's still some time before the spell reaches Holy Terra! What do we do?!"
Eight of the greatest librarians had gathered here. Together with Magnus, greatest of them all in psychic strength, they had to pour their power into the ritual circle as quickly as possible.
But things were not so simple. A ritual of such range and such precision had one iron rule: once begun, it could not be interrupted.
Otherwise, the casters would suffer backlash from the Warp and be devoured by Chaos daemons in an instant. Right now, their defenses were little better than paper.
"Do not panic! No one can pass through the maze I set!"
"Even my two brothers would need hundreds of days to cross it!" Magnus declared confidently.
He had anticipated this possibility long ago. The psychic maze had been made precisely for this situation. Once inside, intruders would lose all sense of direction, trapped in corridors without time or space, forever wandering in circles.
Unless Magnus himself used sorcery to retrieve them, the only end awaiting intruders was death inside it.
Thud.
The moment he finished speaking, a heavy impact sounded. The sealed golden gate shuddered once, and all the librarians turned to stare at Magnus, their expressions saying the same thing:
Didn't you say no one could get through?
Then what was that?
At last, the heat-melt charges blasted a hole through the golden gate, even through the reinforcing wards layered over it. Amid smoke and fire, a figure walked out slowly, lightning running over both hands.
"Cough, cough…" Curze waved away the choking dust and stood there with her arms folded, looking down at the sorcerers on the altar with imperious disdain.
"No! That's impossible!" Magnus stared at the two Curzes before him, anger and disbelief twisting together.
Why are there really two Curzes? What in the world is going on? The image I saw through projection wasn't fake?!
Of course, what Magnus found even harder to accept was not that—but how Curze and Bruce had solved the maze so quickly and found this place with such precision.
It made all his carefully arranged defenses look like a joke.
"Newblood! The sorcerers are yours."
Curze conjured her spear from thin air, unfurled her wings, and flew straight at the giant-like Magnus.
"—!"
Magnus could only lift his staff with one hand while continuing to channel power into the ritual with the other, forced to meet Curze in battle.
Accelerating through the air, Curze rammed headlong into his staff. Magnus had never expected such a tiny figure to carry such monstrous strength. He cried out in pain, and the weapon flew from his hand.
How can something this small be so strong?!
"No!!!"
Then Magnus saw what Bruce was doing, and let out a scream full of anguish.
Compared to Curze, who charged in without a word and smashed into Magnus, Bruce's methods were far more "gentle." He slipped behind one of the sorcerers and drove his lightning claw through the man's body from the back.
The next instant, the Thousand Son in mid-casting was engulfed in warp-fire, letting out a scream of agony. The substance of his soul streamed from his eyes and ears.
In less than half a second, his soul was devoured clean by the daemons of the Warp.
"Curze!!!"
Enraged, Magnus caught his staff, reversed it, and hurled it like a spear at Bruce's position.
Though technically a staff, it was still a weapon tipped with blade and spike. If it struck, the consequences would be catastrophic.
Curze knocked the flying staff aside with her spear, then after a brief charge drove Gungnir straight at Magnus's throat, aiming cleanly for the kill.
At the last moment, Magnus caught the spearhead with his hand and avoided death. But the force behind it was so overwhelming that he could no longer remain on the altar and was pushed backward.
"AAAAAAAHHHH—!"
Magnus strained with all his strength, trying to force Curze back. No matter what he did, it was useless.
As Bruce butchered the sorcerers still maintaining the ritual, he also fired at Magnus's eyes. Faced with the threat of losing his remaining eye, the Crimson King instinctively flinched aside.
That simple act of self-preservation brought about consequences he could never have predicted.
The moment his psychic output faltered, the entire formation and altar began to collapse.
The passage connected to the Warp became unstable. The Thousand Sons were utterly abandoned. Amid horrible screams, they were eaten from within by daemons. Their corpses in turn became anchors, tearing open a pathway from the Warp straight into realspace.
The crystals that had glowed with gentle psychic light dimmed. Blood began to seep from the golden walls and silver pillars. The once-holy altar was transformed into the kind of paradise Warp-things loved best.
"Look at what you've done!!!"
Golden markings blazed across Magnus's body. Steam rose from him under the heat of his fury.
A psychic shockwave powerful enough to destroy the whole sanctum burst outward from his body. The daemons that had only just clawed their way out of the librarians' corpses were annihilated instantly by the aftershock.
The collapsing chamber itself was consumed. Matter shattered on all sides. And the wave did not weaken at all with distance or destruction.
Luckily, Curze darted back to Bruce in time, seized him, and shot upward into the air. A shield formed from blood spread around them, barely absorbing the incoming psychic blast.
Even so, Curze came perilously close to exhausting her blood and magic and failing to hold it.
"I'll make you pay!" Magnus roared, nearly insane.
He could not understand it. He had only wanted to save his two primarch brothers from their curse. And this was what he got in return.
My sons. My research. My sanctum.
You trampled my goodwill into the dirt and destroyed everything I treasured.
In that case—die!
Heretics!
"Why's he gone mad?" Bruce stared at Magnus, baffled. For a moment, seeing the giant cry, he even felt a stab of pity.
So primarchs cry too?
"He's not mad. He's stupid enough to look mad." Curze sensed Bruce's mood and immediately cut it off. "You did well. You stopped him."
"If he'd succeeded, it wouldn't just have been the Webway getting breached."
"Huh?"
"If I'm guessing right, he intended to teleport this entire place directly onto Holy Terra. If he'd pulled it off, then instead of the Webway being cracked, you'd have seen Holy Terra turned into the front line of a daemon war."
"Think of it as an Eye of Terror Plus version. Scared?"
"…"
Bruce thought about it for all of half a second, then his fleeting sympathy vanished without a trace. He raised his bolter and aimed it at Magnus, who was still kneeling amidst the corpses of his sons and weeping.
Good grief. How can Magnus be this terrible?
Join here to read ahead.
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Uma Musume: From Beginner 125
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Checking In in Demon Slayer 59
The Reincarnating Trainer of Tracen Academy 73
I Refuse to Become a Heroic 45
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The Gacha Merchant Who Started 31
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