---o---
In the skull-heaped camp, Zhou Ye strolled forward with his hands in his pockets like he owned the place.
In all honesty, covert infiltration into enemy-held territory was the sort of thing normally reserved for specialists — the Raven Guard, the Night Lords, operatives of that particular caliber. Waltzing straight in wearing your own face was something else entirely. For an Astartes, it was far too conspicuous. For a regular Imperial Guardsman, well — surrounded by a camp full of chaos cultists, any regular Guardsman would most likely end up corrupted before they got three steps in. The Imperium was not short of fallen Guardsmen, after all.
The situation called for someone effectively immune to corruption, someone who couldn't be marked by the Ruinous Powers, someone who could pass through chaos-saturated spaces without triggering a reaction.
That was, uniquely, Zhou Ye.
Corrupting him would probably be harder than corrupting a Primarch.
And beyond that, he simply couldn't be chosen.
Pfft.
He casually split the head of a Khorne cultist who'd swung an axe at him clean down the middle, and moved on without breaking stride, eyes already scanning for his actual target.
The thing about Khorne worshippers, when you thought about it, was that they weren't particularly picky about whose skull they collected. Anyone's skull would do. Which meant that cultists hacking at each other was completely standard behavior in a camp like this. You could, in theory, walk into a Khorne encampment with a blade drawn and start swinging, and as long as you didn't flinch afterward, the Blood God's followers might just respect you for it.
Everyone here, to Zhou Ye's eyes, was essentially a one-hit job.
He wasn't an Astartes by any measure. But his physical capabilities — if he were being frank about it — put him in range to go toe-to-toe with Fulgrim in single combat. Trading blows directly with Angron didn't concern him in the slightest. A camp of baseline cultists wasn't going to give him any trouble.
Still, keeping a low profile was the smarter play.
So he cut and carved his way through the outer sections at a measured pace, and eventually found himself at the heart of the position.
Here, he found Iron Warriors standing watch. He found Skitarii radiating enough radiation to make a Geiger counter weep. And he found —
A Thousand Sons sorcerer.
The Thousand Sons sorcerer?
Zhou Ye immediately located a position in the trench line and pressed himself against it, listening.
"Break open the Aestia hive city. I want the head of that Mechanicus priest."
Simple trash talk. Absolute premium content.
Zhou Ye felt a deep, genuine appreciation for this. The sorcerer, on the other hand, was clearly very much not over it — his entire current objective had apparently been reduced to killing one specific mouthy Tech-Priest.
"Your people are better suited to corrupting mid- and upper-tier Imperial loyalists. When the general offensive launches tomorrow, your role is to coordinate from within."
"....."
The Thousand Sons sorcerer went silent at that.
The mid- and upper-tier assets he'd spent time corrupting had been almost entirely neutralized. There was nothing left to work with for an inside job. He genuinely could not understand how it had gone this wrong. His plan had been thorough. He'd accounted for the possibility of additional Astartes chapters arriving, even accounted for an Inquisitor showing up. He had contingencies for all of it.
But none of it had unfolded the way he'd calculated.
Among his various fail-safes, he had arranged for a Chaos Artifact to be embedded inside the Ecclesiarchy contacts he'd corrupted. If the Astartes launched a hard assault, he'd trigger it. Chaos corruption would detonate across the Upper Hive in an instant, and then —
And then nothing. Because the artifact wasn't there anymore.
He had just registered this with a degree of genuine bafflement.
That artifact had been sizable. Considerably sizable. How did something like that simply disappear?
No matter. This too was within the parameters of the plan. This was merely change in motion, one variation among many.
He still had a contingency. The Dark Mechanicum and the Iron Warriors here — he was the one who had quietly steered them both to this position. Now he simply needed to activate the secondary plan.
As for that foul-mouthed priest who went by the designation 010 Omega — he was going to extract that soul and keep it nearby for an eternity of suffering.
"Hm..."
The sorcerer's reaction was visibly dissatisfying to the Iron Warriors officer. Meanwhile, from his position in the trench, Zhou Ye let out a quiet hum of his own.
His mind was moving at full speed.
In that moment, his expression perfectly matched a particular image — a panda sitting very still, absolutely stuffed with schemes.
Against the Warhammer universe, Zhou Ye had decided to deliver a small Honkai-flavored demonstration.
First: he activated two Authorities simultaneously — the Authority of the Herrscher of Thunder and the Authority of the Herrscher of Erosion.
An electromagnetic erosion virus transmitted instantaneously through the signal network. Every Skitarii unit in the camp was seized in a single moment.
Then: the Authority of the Herrscher of Wind and the Authority of the Herrscher of Flame — he assembled what appeared, from the outside, to be a psychic energy detonation. A spectacular, convincing-looking fireball that would register on any psyker's senses as Warp-powered.
Then he launched it directly into the tent where the Thousand Sons sorcerer was sitting, courtesy of the 2nd Herrscher's Authority.
He dropped the second payload directly at the feet of the largest Dark Mechanicum figure in the camp.
BOOM. BANG!!!
In an instant, explosions and gunfire erupted across the entire position. Blinding light punched into the sky. The target location was launched skyward.
Zhou Ye decided this still wasn't quite enough.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed at the top of his lungs:
"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!"
A regular transmigrator couldn't have pulled this off with a straight face. Zhou Ye did not care even slightly.
The effect was immediate. The entire camp ignited like a lit fuse. Every Khorne cultist in the encampment lurched as though they had just received a direct summons. The chaos from the explosions fed directly into it. Even the Iron Warriors sentries couldn't contain the surge in time. In seconds, the camp dissolved into absolute carnage.
A mob of bloody-handed fanatics who had already been wound to the breaking point suddenly felt the Blood God's blessing descend upon them from the highest heavens — a blessing that told each and every one of them to offer more skulls, to take more lives, to please their God with further tribute.
Three battered silhouettes came staggering out of the wreckage.
The Iron Warriors commander. The Dark Mechanicum Magos. And the Thousand Sons sorcerer, all three of them in varying degrees of disaster.
"YOU ABSOLUTE —!!!"
The Thousand Sons sorcerer had no capacity to deal with anything calmly in that moment. The instant he cleared the wreckage, multiple Skitarii weapons opened fire directly at him.
He threw up a psychic shield and discharged several arcs of lightning — shredding the Skitarii units bearing down on him. The lightning also caught the Dark Mechanicum officer who'd been commanding those very Skitarii, taking him out as a bonus.
Then he stepped onto his Disc and made for the perimeter at speed. The Iron Warriors and the Dark Mechanicum both locked weapons onto him simultaneously. Chaos factions didn't exactly operate on a foundation of goodwill, and their alliances were always precarious — this was well past a simple ambush. Retaliation was mandatory.
"Bring out the automata! Blow him apart!!!"
The Dark Mechanicum Magos screamed this with a fury that was, in fairness, understandable. Tzeentch's people and their infuriating fickleness had always been loathsome. But —
"Sir, the Titan! The Titan is gone!!!"
"!!!!"
"THOUSAND SONS!!!"
After a moment of stunned silence, the Dark Mechanicum erupted with a shriek of pure outrage.
"All units — advance on Aestia. We are going to teach that wretch a lesson he will never forget!!!"