Chapter 840 - 839
The burly being was overjoyed.
At long last, he had ended his long drift, returning from the Warp to galactic reality. Returning to the Imperium.
His dark skin, towering frame, and faintly red eyes confirmed his identity.
He was the Emperor’s Primarch son, the Lord of the Salamanders, the Black Drake of Nocturne, a Perpetual, and the Imperium’s greatest forge-master—
Vulkan!
This loyal Primarch of the Imperium, Lord of the Salamanders, had vanished completely ten thousand years ago. Since then, there had been no record of him at all. Only the seven artifacts he left behind could prove he had ever existed.
"I should not have left. I should not have left the Throneworld. That may have placed Father in danger..."
Vulkan felt deeply guilty.
After the Horus Heresy ended, the Emperor had been trapped upon the Golden Throne. In the fifteen hundred years that followed, the Imperium had continued to rot.
This Primarch, who loved humanity so deeply, had watched helplessly as mankind lost its great ideals, became shackled by dogma, and sank into ignorance, brutality, and cruelty.
The Imperium had walked down another path entirely, using dogma to bind human nature until it became a cold war machine.
Bureaucracy and the rampant abuse of Exterminatus had reduced civilians and warriors alike to expendable resources.
Everyone had become indifferent to life.
What Vulkan could accept least of all was that the Emperor had been raised onto a divine altar, becoming the very thing his father had hated most.
That father sat upon the Throne, lingering day and night on the lives of innocent psykers, while everyone could do nothing but watch.
Not only that, but the Ecclesiarchy and the Adeptus Mechanicus had grown ever more extreme. They even used human bodies to forge instruments and machines, treating life as decorative material.
All of this left Vulkan struggling to breathe.
He had tried to push for change, but he was powerless.
Even more desperately, he discovered that if he forced reform, it would split the Imperium, ignite wars on a vast scale, and cause even more lives to be lost.
"Perhaps this is humanity’s fate. No one can change it. Not even the Emperor.
"In the end, we cannot realize our ideals. We cannot allow humanity to prosper."
That was what Vulkan had thought at the time. He had been helpless, disheartened, and unable to bear it for even another moment.
He feared that one day he would lose control and slaughter all those ignorant priests and greedy bureaucrats on Terra.
In the end, the Lord of the Salamanders chose self-exile. He left Terra for the front lines of war, far from Terra’s schemes and intrigues, far from the things that made him feel powerless.
He did what he could do: resist the invasions of xenos and heretics.
Vulkan believed that if he killed one more invader, he could save one more human life.
That was the only thing he could do in an Imperium growing ever darker.
Later, Vulkan came to understand.
He decided to return to the Throne and guard his father, while doing everything he could to push change within the Imperium.
Even if he could protect only a portion of the kind and reliable, that would still be worthwhile. It would still save more lives.
However, before Vulkan could return, the War of the Beast broke out.
Those greenskin xenos had completed a new evolution. They were no longer the mindless brutes the Imperium had believed them to be.
They had established a systematic military industry, possessed forge worlds and agri-worlds, and had even learned from the Imperium’s administrative institutions.
More terrifying still, the Beast who led the Ork Empire possessed both a Primarch-level physique and Primarch-level intelligence.
The Attack Moon under his command far surpassed the Imperium’s void fortresses. It was like a small planet.
It directly threatened Terra’s safety, and humanity stood on the brink.
Not only that, the Beast even dispatched "Ork diplomats" to Terra, attempting to force the High Lords of Terra and its bureaucrats to surrender through intimidation and negotiation.
At that time, the Imperium had no leader. All the loyal Primarchs had disappeared, and no one could defeat the Primarch-level Ork leader known as the Beast.
Just as the Attack Moon approached Terra’s orbit and humanity trembled in fear, Vulkan returned.
He returned to this Imperium he did not recognize in order to save human lives.
He took up the responsibility of a Primarch and united many Space Marine Chapters, launching a decapitation strike against the Attack Moon and the Beast.
Vulkan led the warriors into the depths of the Attack Moon, found the Beast, and dueled him.
That battle was ferocious. Both he and the Beast were left covered in wounds.
In the end, he won. He defeated and killed the Beast, but he also fell with his foe into the Attack Moon’s energy reactor.
When the energy reactor exploded, Vulkan, Lord of the Salamanders and Perpetual, was swept into the endless turbulence of the Warp.
Time in that hateful region seemed to stand still.
Countless streams of Chaos energy gnawed endlessly at his body. He died and was reborn several times, yet still could not escape that place.
Amid the turbulence of the Warp, Vulkan occasionally received fragments of information about the Imperium.
But without exception, every piece of news broke his heart.
The Imperium had fallen completely into darkness. Humanity struggled in suffering. Xenos invasions, heretical incursions, sector rebellions, tithes, and extreme rigidity and inefficiency all tormented ordinary civilians.
The suffering endured by the Imperium’s citizens was far worse than before he had left.
People were crammed into the depths of hive cities or struggling on worlds ravaged by Chaos. At the same time, they bore crushing tithes, becoming fuel for the Imperium.
They could not even eat normal food. They could only fill their stomachs with industrial waste and human refuse, then starve to death or die from exhaustion.
What sorrow was this?
The human Imperium created by the Emperor had become something pitiful and loathsome.
Whenever Vulkan thought of the suffering humanity faced, he was filled with unbearable regret and guilt. It was as if a blade had pierced his heart.
How he wished he could return and change all of it, by any means necessary.
He wanted to protect the lives of the innocent. He wanted to protect the worlds casually abandoned by Terra’s bureaucrats.
But Vulkan could not.
He had drifted into a barren region of the Warp. He could only watch it all happen, and could only carry that guilt forever.
He could do nothing.
Fortunately, Vulkan’s prayers seemed to be heard. He received the favor of fate. A powerful fluctuation in the Warp swept through the region where he was trapped.
Because of that, he was finally able to break free from the Chaos turbulence and regain his freedom.
Afterward, Vulkan drifted with the energy tide, as if sleepwalking, until he appeared on this asteroid wreckage in space and fell upon it.
He could not explain why he had arrived here.
But the Lord of the Salamanders knew that he had successfully returned to the galaxy. He had to return to the Imperium. He had to go to Terra.
He would do everything in his power to change this rotten Imperium, to protect humanity’s people, even if it cost him his life.
"Father, I will inherit your ideals. I will bring the Imperium and humanity back to the path we first set out upon.
"Ignorance and cruelty will be ended, and suffering will come to an end as well. I will work to accomplish all of this until I finally fall."
Vulkan wiped away the tears at the corners of his eyes. His voice was so gentle, in stark contrast to his burly and intimidating physique.
He had always been the kindest of the Primarchs, perhaps even one of the kindest beings in the entire Imperium.
The Lord of the Salamanders would rather put himself in danger than harm other lives, especially human ones.
After wiping his tears dry, Vulkan’s expression grew even firmer.
He pushed himself up with effort, gently moved the fiery-red lizard beside his foot out of the way, and crawled out of the ruins.
When he had fallen, he had punched through the ground and dropped into a strange cave formed from rubble.
The wreckage in the ruins somewhat resembled Imperial architecture. He could even faintly see the presence of the Imperial aquila.
This made Vulkan even more worried. Perhaps the world in this region had been attacked by xenos or heretics.
The people needed him.
He crawled faster, allowing sharp metal to leave faint scratches across his body. Even blades had difficulty harming that burly frame.
More importantly, he was nearly immortal. Even if his head were cut off and his body dismembered, there was still a chance he could revive.
That was a certain unnatural ability, inherited from his father—the Emperor.
Of course, this ability was not invincible. Otherwise, the Emperor would not have been wounded so badly that he could not recover, forced to linger on by relying on the Golden Throne.
"What in the world happened here?"
The farther Vulkan climbed upward, the more alarmed he became.
He saw more and more architectural wreckage. There were even steaming pots, half-eaten fresh food, and twisted livestock within it.
Everything was so lifelike, as if this disaster had happened only moments ago.
Yet Vulkan saw no human presence at all in the ruins. No survivors. No corpses or remains either.
That bizarre sight tightened Vulkan’s heart. This might have been some terrifying Chaos attack.
Boom!
He clenched his fist and swung it violently, like a massive hammer smashing through the rubble above his head. Then he crawled out through the opening, his battle intent surging.
Now that the Lord of the Salamanders, the Hammer of Salvation, had returned, he would never allow heretics or xenos to harm humanity again.
He was the shield of mortals. In the Emperor’s place, he would protect the Imperium and its countless trillions of human citizens.
"Emperor..."
But when Vulkan saw the stars again, he was stunned speechless by the sight before him.
In his vision, the stars had sunk into darkness. Hundreds of planets had shattered beneath that darkness, and entire worlds had been completely destroyed.
The remnants of those planets continued to rotate along their former orbits under inertia, colliding and burning. Molten core magma drifted through the void like the blood of planets.
They were all dead, killed by a terrible disaster.
Even more horrifyingly, countless black specks floated in the void, spreading all the way to the end of his vision.
They were all dried, twisted human corpses.
Their heads were tilted back, as if they had let out shrill screams before death. Even their souls had been completely devoured.
Even Vulkan, Lord of the Salamanders and veteran of countless battlefields, was frightened by the sight before him. His body trembled faintly.
First he fell silent. Then boundless rage surged up from the depths of his heart.
Who had created all this? Xenos, or heretics?
He gritted his teeth, and his eyes seemed to burn with crimson flame. "No matter who it was, they must pay the price!"
This kind Lord of the Salamanders was rarely so furious. His heart was filled with killing intent.
The enemy’s methods had completely crossed his bottom line. They had to face the harshest judgment.
Vulkan forced down his anger and began searching for relevant information. He had to contact the Imperium and find out who the enemy was.
He also had to contact his former Eighteenth Legion, later one of the Imperium’s core Chapters—the Salamanders.
He needed more help to eradicate that hateful enemy.
Vulkan swore that he would find that cruel enemy and destroy them utterly, grinding their bones beneath his feet as an offering to the lives they had taken.
He took a deep breath and thought about what kind of weapon could cause such terrifying destruction.
He did not dare imagine whether only this sector had been destroyed, or whether even more sectors had met the same fate.
Without question, the Imperium was facing a catastrophe.
A catastrophe even more terrible than the War of the Beast.
Terra might struggle to respond. He had to step forward.
When Vulkan, filled with endless compassion and rage, continued forward and crossed the horizon of the planetary wreckage, it was as if he had encountered some unspeakable terror.
He was struck as if by lightning.
"Fa... Father?!"
Vulkan dropped to his knees with a thud. This was not reverence, but utter despair.
He saw an enormous black scar in the void, like an endless abyss, and within it he even saw a vast black sun.
That black sun was terrifying and twisted. It seemed to be devouring everything in the galaxy. Countless souls wailed within its corona.
Wave after wave of dark tide spread outward, extending into one region after another in order to devour more matter and life.
Even more terrifyingly, it was... the Emperor’s projection in the Warp.
It represented their father.
The moment Vulkan saw the black sun, countless shrill voices calling out to the Emperor echoed in his ears.
Mixed among them was the final title of the being before him—
The Dark King!
In his vision, he even saw the damaged Throne and the Emperor’s shattered bones, such a tragic sight.
The Master of Mankind seemed to no longer exist. The sanctity once worshiped by humanity had become a black sun that destroyed everything, the source of disaster.
"The Dark King... Father ultimately reached that point after all? Perhaps if I had never left Terra back then, none of this would have happened..."
Vulkan’s spirit was almost shattered by the reality before him.
He knew the legend of the Dark King. He had even borne part of the responsibility for preventing His arrival.
If he had been on Terra at the time, perhaps he could have used the Talisman of Seven Hammers, or forged some other artifact, to prevent the Throne from collapsing.
The Emperor, their father, might not have fallen to this state.
"No!"
Vulkan was in such pain.
His hope of returning to the Imperium was shattered once more. He did not dare imagine what kind of disaster humanity would suffer beneath the ravages of the Dark King.
Perhaps the Imperium had already been destroyed by the catastrophe and no longer existed.
The Lord of the Salamanders walked forward in a daze, enduring the corrosion of the black tide, heading toward the direction of Terra.
Right now, he only wanted to return to Terra and see what had become of the Emperor upon the Golden Throne, no matter how long it took.
Even if all he ultimately found was a field of ruins.
Or perhaps the Dark King had occupied Terra. If so, he would stake his life on one final battle against Him.
Vulkan used a cobbled-together power pack to travel through the dark void, moving forward, and forward again.
He did not know how much distance he had crossed. Space here was far too chaotic.
Even so, he still could not detect any trace of life. Not only was there none in this region, there was none in the distant regions either.
He could not find any Imperial communication signals either. Everything was empty. There was no response at all.
The entire galaxy had sunk into dead silence.
This disaster was so terrifying that the Imperium seemed to have perished. Humanity seemed to have ceased to exist.
"Is this our ending?"
Vulkan’s body was corroded by dark warp energy, the wounds so deep that bone could be seen.
But to him, that was not a serious injury. What mattered far more was the blow to his spirit.
He had never imagined that humanity would face such an extreme situation.
Among the dark stars of the galaxy, he alone survived.
So lonely.
Vulkan moved like a walking corpse, advancing only by instinct. He did not even notice the fluctuations of a scanner.
"Savior above, where did this monster come from?!"
Suddenly, a startled cry rang out.
It was a human voice.
Not long before, Ork had been wearing a full-enclosure suit of armor and working among the ruins of the disaster zone, searching for usable materials.
When he saw the terrifying "monster" before him, he reacted at once and raised his gun, aiming at the other party.
Aside from disaster-relief personnel like them, the only things in this region were monsters from the Warp!
(End of Chapter)
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