"Brother, if you have other plans, I'll accept them."
Sensing the Savior's hesitation, Guilliman's voice grew a little heavy, and there was a hint of dimness in his eyes.
He had waited for this moment for ten thousand years, constantly training, repeatedly drilling tactics—just to one day defeat Fulgrim with his own hands and wash away his old shame.
But the Savior—his good brother—was the overall commander of this war, and the all-knowing, all-wise strategist behind it.
If his brother had a more secure plan, he would not allow his own honor to compromise the larger war effort.
"Gil, it's not that I don't trust you. I'm worried you'll have it too hard. Fulgrim isn't an easy one to handle."
Eden clapped Guilliman on the shoulder, sounding sincerely concerned.
In terms of overall combat power, the Fallen Phoenix was likely the second-strongest among the four traitor Primarchs—and by far the most cunning and troublesome.
A very hard bone to gnaw.
But Eden was not worried Guilliman would fail or die.
Not only had he designed special defensive wargear for him, but this brother's sheer survivability was absurd.
Guilliman had survived the Dark Gods' deadliest poisons, been beaten down over and over again by overwhelming foes, and yet always risen once more.
He had lost battles, but never truly been defeated—always able to claw his way back out of the abyss.
He was, in many ways, the Imperium's most indestructible cockroach, its untoppleable war god.
"Sigh… Gil, don't blame me for not helping you. This is what you chose yourself…"
Eden glanced at Guilliman's resolute expression and quietly sighed.
His brother's resolve to face Fulgrim was unshakeable. If Eden denied him this fight, it would leave a scar.
He regarded him with the gaze reserved for warriors.
"Good brother, I'll leave that Fallen Phoenix of a hard bone to you.
I believe you can fulfill your duty and your destiny."
Since Guilliman was so adamant, they would have to go with the original, primary plan for dealing with Fulgrim.
Plan One: the Guilliman Vanguard Plan—also known, in classified files, as XIII Primarch Guilliman Minefield-Clearing Protocol (Secret).
In short: use Guilliman's tremendous resilience and notoriously bad luck to blunder through every trap and scheme Fulgrim had laid.
That would yield far more precise intelligence on the Fallen Phoenix, allowing a better capture plan to be constructed.
If things went well and Guilliman won outright, so much the better. If he didn't, he would at least bleed Fulgrim, gather intel, and lull him into lowering his guard, making his eventual capture easier.
Ultimately, they would obtain that priceless relic—the Morgath Stone.
It was a reasonably cautious plan, second only to Eden himself feigning weakness to clear the minefields personally. The downside was that it required Guilliman to take the risks and the punishment.
Possibly a trip to the ICU.
Eden felt the plan was a little rough on his brother and had wanted to assign him a weaker opponent.
But with Guilliman's heart set, there was nothing for it. He could only help him fulfill his wish.
And in truth, it wasn't a bad deal—he could simultaneously implement a "horse-swapping" strategy.
Send their "baseline combat power unit 1" Guilliman against the most dangerous, power-spiking, trap-happy Fallen Phoenix who'd already burned two Primarchs.
Better to have that minefield chewed up by Guilliman than have himself or some other brother get caught out.
"Brother, I won't let you down."
With his good brother's support, Guilliman was deeply moved, and his resolve hardened.
He spoke as though taking a sacred oath:
"I, Roboute Guilliman, Lord of the Five Hundred Worlds, loyal son of the Emperor, will go all out.
Even if that bastard whelp Fulgrim flees into the deepest pits of hell, he will not escape me!"
Eden nodded. That was exactly the energy he needed from Gil—to stay on Fulgrim no matter what.
Whether he beat him down or hounded him endlessly, either outcome worked.
"Good brother, I entrust this mission to you."
His voice brimmed with trust as he transmitted the official capture plan for the Fallen Phoenix.
Of course, that was only the public version. Afterwards, he quietly sent a classified message to the Information Warfare Command.
Instructing them to activate the stretcher division.
As Guilliman's best brother, Eden was nothing if not loyal; he had spent a small fortune setting up a deluxe stretcher team for Gil.
The stretcher team was composed of elite Custodians, top-speed White Scars strike riders, high-tier psykers, medicae sages, and senior Hospitaller Sisters.
They were equipped with enormous stocks of medical supplies, defensive machines, wards, and teleport systems.
They even had protective relics and artifacts.
This stretcher division did not exist to wage war, but purely to save people. Its defensive power, penetration speed, and extraction capabilities were all extreme.
They could storm into a battlefield in the first instant—and drag people out.
So long as the target had not been reduced to ash and still had a breath left, they could get him out and treat him.
This dramatically boosted Vanguard Mine-Clearing Officer Guilliman's odds of survival.
Nor was that all—Eden also deployed the Terror Legion and his own Dark Prince clone.
Just in case.
He would cover Guilliman from every angle.
Let his good brother recover as fast as possible, then clear more minefie—no, fight more glorious battles.
Eden smiled faintly, quite pleased with his own thoughtfulness.
He really was the very definition of "best brother."
Naturally, he also had an even more luxurious, unknown, secret stretcher division of his own.
That special rescue unit would only appear if he himself were in extreme danger.
That kept them hidden from hostile eyes and reduced the risk of unpredictable outcomes.
"Brothers."
Once he had finished making arrangements for the Fallen Phoenix, Eden turned his gaze to another traitor Primarch.
"As for this fanatic preacher—how should we handle him?"
The figure in the projection wore a horned crown, a robe covered in scripture-scrolls, and a face and body inscribed with strange verses, his whole form wreathed in pale golden flame.
His expression was tranquil, and yet there was something feral in it, like the fusion of holiness and evil.
This was the 17th Primarch, the Great Word Bearer—Lorgar.
"What a pity…"
Reviewing the data and memories on this devout fanatic, Eden could not help but sigh.
The man had been born at the wrong time.
Had he lived in the post-Cicatrix Imperialis Imperium, he might have been the staunchest supporter of the Imperium and the Emperor, the one and only Pontifex of the state faith.
He would have led the Imperium's subjects under the Holy Sun, united against the corruption of Chaos.
In such an age, Lorgar the preacher would have been one of the Imperial pillars, not a traitor.
But there were no "if onlys."
The tragedy of this Primarch's fate had been written from the very start.
Like his brothers, Lorgar had been hurled to a distant world by Warp storms and had the luck (or misfortune) to land on Colchis, in the Segmentum Pacificus.
It was a world of great beauty and kindness, steeped in religious faith.
From childhood, he had been raised in a deeply pious environment, studying philosophy, rhetoric, and scripture.
He became a devout preacher of the Covenant faith, radiating extraordinary personal charm and drawing crowds of followers.
Those beliefs laid the groundwork for the later tragedies.
When Lorgar returned to the Imperium and joined the Great Crusade, he was at odds with its guiding principles almost immediately.
The other Primarchs threw themselves into constant warfare, conquering one region after another and expanding Imperial territory at breakneck pace.
Only he and his Word Bearers advanced at a crawl, drawing repeated rebukes from the Emperor.
Yet this was not due to any lack of martial prowess.
It was because of their convictions.
They disliked war and did not wish to subjugate worlds through slaughter.
From a certain perspective, during that era, Lorgar was practically a missionary of "truth, goodness, and beauty."
Even amid the Great Crusade, the 17th Primarch, the Great Word Bearer, rarely initiated wars.
He almost never scoured a world's civilization from existence.
The territories he brought under the Aquila's shadow were won more often by ideology than by bolter and bombardment.
The worlds left in his wake were not rubble-strewn spheres, drenched in blood and terror.
Nor did he, like certain war-mad brothers, wash planets clean in blood to fulfill mission quotas.
Instead, he left behind intact worlds that could quickly pay the tithe and contribute to the Great Crusade—civilizations that grew more prosperous under Imperial rule.
In that respect, Lorgar did not lose out to Dorn or Guilliman at all. The regions he conquered often advanced beyond their former state.
To this day, many of the most developed zones in the Segmentum Pacificus owed their roots to him—and those areas remained bastions of the state faith.
These regions were fiercely devout and saw little internal heresy. Throughout the Heresy and the long nightmare of the Rift, they formed a vital defensive bulwark against Chaos.
This was because Lorgar did not simply conquer. He poured immense time into disseminating his doctrines, reshaping the minds of the people.
With towering personal charisma and religious fervor, he convinced those populations that under the Imperium lay a brighter future.
United beneath the Emperor's banner, humanity would one day rule the galaxy.
Under such careful, painstaking guidance, those conquered subjects became fanatically loyal to the Imperium, with almost no traitors among them.
Viewed through a rational lens, Lorgar's method of conquest was clearly superior, sparing untold lives.
Even the T'au would have given a thumbs-up and called the Imperium a "beacon of civilization."
But this was the Imperium at the height of the Great Crusade—a time when humanity was required to expand as fast as possible.
Lorgar's snail-paced progress was something the Emperor could not endure. The deeper problem, however, was faith.
In the eyes of the Emperor and the other Primarchs, what Lorgar was doing was nothing less than sabotage—turning the tide against the unity of Imperial Truth.
His faith was too fervent. He refused to accept Imperial Truth and instead clung to belief in the divine, even going so far as to make a god of the Emperor himself.
The Crusade's central aim was to tear down the churches and temples of false gods, to build a humanity freed from superstition and guided by the Imperial Truth.
And Lorgar, in contrast, was slamming his foot on the brakes of history.
He did tear down the old churches and temples—but only to raise higher Imperial cathedrals in their place, installing statues of the Emperor within them.
He taught people to worship the Emperor as a god.
Not only that, he was so devoted that he penned a book—Lectitio Divinitatus—to prove the Emperor's divinity.
The irony was that after the Heresy, the very Lectitio once treated as so much toilet paper was dug up and re-enthroned. It became the founding scripture of the state religion, with almost every Imperial citizen owning a copy.
The Lectitio Divinitatus became the Imperium's best-selling, holiest text, eclipsing even the later Codex Astartes in prestige.
Back when Eden was still a planetary governor, he had had the honor of reading it himself—and had memorized more than a little of it.
It was, for him, akin to a personal warding charm.
From the Imperium's later view, the Lectitio was one of its most precious treasures, enabling a suffering Imperium to cling to relative stability.
But during the Crusade, Lorgar's actions were a dagger in the back of the Emperor and his Primarchs, who were dedicated to the spread of Imperial Truth.
He enraged the Emperor and alienated his brothers.
In the end, Lorgar's disruption of the Crusade's strategy was punished severely. The Emperor personally razed his holy city.
The seeds of betrayal were planted there.
When the claws of the Chaos Gods finally reached into the Imperium, the wounded and heartsick Lorgar became the first Primarch to fall.
And thus the Great Heresy followed.
Now, Lorgar had ascended as a daemon prince. From worshiping the Emperor, he had turned to worshiping Chaos itself—refusing to bow fully to any single Dark God.
He and his Word Bearers were a strange breed among the traitors. They still moved like missionaries, their manner almost pleasant.
The problem was that what they preached was Chaos. And they did not hesitate to stage grand, galaxy-shaking summoning rituals whenever they pleased.
Imperial records indicated that after the Heresy, Lorgar had not been seen openly in loyalist space for a very long time.
He had holed up in a sanctum on the daemon world of Sicarus, working on gods-knew-what.
The Lion and Guilliman pored over the dossier on their fallen brother and grew increasingly stunned.
The Savior's intel was too detailed. Much of it was news even to them.
They looked to Eden with newfound respect.
This brother truly was all-knowing; there seemed to be nothing in the galaxy he did not understand.
Even their father the Emperor might not have managed so exhaustive an investigation. Perhaps this was the terrible power of Warp-prophecy.
What they did not know was that this went beyond Warp-prophecy.
The Savior's previous life had drawn upon an even higher-dimensional vantage to acquire information about this world—understanding its secrets from the foundation up.
Had he arrived a little later, he might have known even more.
He might even have known when the world would end.
"What in the Throne's name is Lorgar doing?"
The Lion frowned, worry creasing his brow.
The other traitor Primarchs had all left tracks in the Imperium; their activities and strength could be roughly assessed.
It was Lorgar, skulking in the shadows, who was truly disquieting.
"That one is probably looking for a 'greater god' than anything we know," Eden replied, untroubled, as he layered in more intel.
"As for Lorgar's strength, there's little need to be overly anxious. He's very likely weaker than Fulgrim."
According to Eden's internal combat-power formula, pre-ascension Lorgar sat at about 0.9 standard Guilliman, while post-ascension he likely rested around 1.3 standard Guillimans.
But that figure was not absolute.
When they clashed, Lorgar had followed the daemon sorcerer Kairos Fateweaver's prophecy and had not tried to kill Guilliman.
He had chosen to spare him, letting him flee to build the Second Imperium.
So it was entirely possible he had been deliberately taking the hits.
Looked at that way, it did rather seem that poor Gil had never actually beaten anyone—losing fight after fight, each time "growing through the experience."
His whole style had been "participation is what counts; fight more, grow more."
Fortunately, since waking, he'd gained the God-Blade and now had a full set of custom Primarch wargear from Eden. That gave him the stability he needed.
As for more solid data on Lorgar—well, he had been thoroughly thrashed by Fulgrim.
He'd also been seized and brutalized by the 19th Primarch, the Raven King Corax, after the latter had awakened his Warp-essence.
And nearly beaten until his bowels came out.
For a long time afterward, Lorgar had been pinned down on Sicarus by Corax's black raven swarms.
From these records one could roughly deduce:
Post-ascension Lorgar could not match daemon prince Fulgrim, and he was still no equal to a Warp-awakened Lion.
These numbers were grounded in evidence and further backed by the Prophecy Division's "occult analytics"; the accuracy rate was around eighty percent.
Though there was always room for surprises.
"Brothers, I have a bad feeling about this…"
A thought came to Eden, and his brows knit.
He then gave voice to a troubling inference:
"Lorgar has been pinned down by Brother Corax for a very long time, unable to escape.
And yet now, he strides out at the head of the Word Bearers, with no one stopping him.
That means that either Lorgar has defeated Corax and forced his way out—
Or some unknown enemy has struck with such overwhelming force as to tie Corax down or even bring him low…"
(End of Chapter)
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