Volvok was a veteran with over three hundred years of service. The original plan had been straightforward: escort one Krieg regiment and one newly formed regiment to a front where Greenskins needed dealing with.
Then they flew straight into a Warp storm and got swept all the way here.
To make matters worse, one of their Navigators had been possessed by something during the transit. The man had been murmuring nine words before they put him down....
Plague. Five hundred worlds. War. Beginning. Conspiracy. Reality. Future. Chaos. Calamity. Nine words.
The Space Wolves, who had been fighting the Thousand Sons for ten thousand years, knew exactly what that kind of possession looked like. They put a bolt through his head and moved on.
Whether the nine words were true or false, the Wolf Pack elected to ignore them entirely. The Warp storm hadn't cleared. They couldn't leave. Nurgle-tainted forces were active on the planet below. The answer was obvious: drop in and fight.
Had they shared those nine words with Zhou Ye, he would have been startled to discover that every single one was the truth.
Strung together, they formed a sentence that roughly said:
This world was the opening move in Nurgle's future campaign to ignite the Plague Wars of the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar. An overture written long in advance for the coming invasion of Macragge.
It was a perfect staging point — a feudal world in the middle of nowhere. Even if it became infected, Imperial administrative efficiency would guarantee nobody noticed for a very long time. And when they finally did, they would classify it as a low-priority feudal world and deprioritize it accordingly. In the meantime, he would saturate the surrounding Warp with interference, and when the time eventually came, this world would serve as a vital foothold.
But whatever Nurgle plotted, Tzeentch was inevitably going to do something to obstruct him. So he had swept a contingent of forces here simply to make trouble. Outcome didn't particularly matter.
None of the people present knew any of this. What Volvok had noticed the moment he arrived, however, was that something was wrong.
There was a Space Marine Chapter here. A Chapter he had never heard of. Something called the Star of Trailblaze.
Still — given that Tillius wasn't terribly far from the Five Hundred Worlds of Ultramar, he hadn't found this too suspicious. Ultramarine successor Chapters were everywhere out here.
Then he saw a tin can nearly three meters tall walking toward him. His beast-sharpened senses told him immediately: whoever this was, they were far beyond his ability to contest. Possibly capable of slaughtering his entire squad alone. So....
"Did I just run into a Custodes?"
That was his first thought. But it evaporated quickly. There was something distinctly, unmistakably wrong about this particular tin can, a kind of bone-deep exhaustion, an itch to punch something very hard, perpetually repressed by an enormous backlog of administrative work. Definitely a child of the Smurfs.
The squad trailing behind him was a different matter. That was where something felt off in a way he couldn't immediately place.
This was actually related to Zhou Ye's own Gene-seed situation. He didn't have much Ultramarines stock to begin with. He had handed a batch over as part of the Gene-seed Tithe to get his name logged with the Imperium. So the troops at his back were running on Luna Wolves and Death Guard Gene-seeds.
The Ultramarines content was extremely low.
Volvok's actual purpose in inviting Zhou Ye inside was simple. The Holy Necrons were exquisitely sensitive to corruption. Even the most carefully concealed trace of Tzeentchian taint would not escape their notice. From what he had gathered, Tzeentch had been throwing everything he had at these Necrons for years, trying to corrupt them, and every single attempt had failed.
So the Necrons gave the all-clear. This individual was not corrupted.
Only, the moment he walked in and the Chapter Master came striding toward them, both he and the Necrons picked up something else.
The scent of a secret.
Tentative conclusion: the detestable First Legion. Was this Chapter Master carrying a trace of Dark Angels Gene-seed?
If so, the classic cat-and-dog protocol was in order. They'd been about to set something in motion when four Contemptor Dreadnoughts stepped out and every thought in their heads evaporated.
The entire Ultramarines faction barely had a handful of truly ancient Dreadnoughts. And here stood four of them at once. One of those four radiated something that hit the Space Wolves in the bloodline, a pull that bypassed conscious thought entirely, the unmistakable resonance of kin.
They hadn't even had time to process that when their brains stopped functioning altogether.
"Vlka Fenryka — we shall not fail the All-Father and Russ."
Oh. It's Varagyr.
Varagyr.
Va.......
In that single instant, every one of the hundred-plus Space Wolves shuddered simultaneously. The Varagyr aside from Bjorn, everyone who bore that title had vanished alongside Russ.
But...
The Space Wolves were already moving. Every single one of them had converted into a streak of motion charging at the Dreadnought, still shouting as they ran: "Ancient — we are here!"
"A-ancient...."
No matter how they processed it, blood-kin recognition couldn't be fabricated. Their bodies had moved before their minds could intervene. They were already surging toward him but then....
The Contemptor Dreadnought visibly flinched and took a step backward.
"?"
The Space Wolves stopped, collectively blank.
What was wrong with this Ancient? Why was he afraid of them? Even if this elder decided to hang all of them from a tree and thrash them soundly, every one of them would consider it a mark of honor. Space Wolves who had received a powered-fist correction from Bjorn were a rare and distinguished group.
"Let me explain."
Zhou Ye looked at the Space Wolves Dreadnought with genuine surprise and very quickly understood what had happened. The Gene-seed he had pulled from Istvaan III had been modified extensively with his own private seasoning.
Things like: what came next. The Istvaan V Massacre. The Siege of Terra. The Emperor ascending to the Golden Throne to endure eternal torment for humanity's sake. The Sigillite Malcador burning away to nothing....
This one was probably having a bit of an internal crisis. The Space Wolves in the M30 era had a reputation that was, to put it charitably, difficult to spin positively. They had operated as the Emperor's execution squad. Their discipline for a considerable stretch of time had been, to put it charitably, catastrophic.
As Zhou Ye recalled, even the Night Lords hadn't needed military commissars at that point. The Space Wolves had. Of course, anyone who reached the rank of Varagyr was not from among those particular ranks.
But that was an entirely different responsibility. Leman Russ had posted a small Space Wolves detachment to the side of every other Primarch. The implication was unambiguous: you even think about betraying the Emperor and I personally come to remove your head. This had presumably been instituted after Horus's betrayal was confirmed though it was equally possible that a detachment had been placed at the Warmaster's side from the very beginning.
And then....
They had apparently spent ten thousand years convinced they had failed in their duty. And then Zhou Ye had stitched the rest of the story onto them.
"Why do I feel like I've done something monstrous.... whatever, this is all part of the plan."
Fully understanding what had happened, Zhou Ye stepped in between the Space Wolves and the Dreadnought. He was going to need to do some explaining.