"Perturabo really is a walking contradiction…"
Eden gazed at the distant tide of Chaos war-engines and sighed.
The Lord of Iron claimed to loathe war and to prefer civilian technology, yet now he had built an enormous mechanical legion and was drowning everything in artillery saturation.
He probably wanted to prove something to the Emperor.
To deal with someone like Perturabo, you had to show overwhelming strength first. Only then could you talk.
And it had to be a clean, proper victory, the kind that made the other side concede. Not just a butcher's tally.
Eden sent a transmission to the warp-animated Chaos foundry, addressing the Lord of Iron directly.
Inside the warp-animated foundry, Perturabo watched the approaching Imperial Emperor and felt a surge of interest.
In sheer volume, the Imperial Emperor was smaller than the walking Chaos factory, yet it carried a faint, dangerous pressure.
The Savior's domain had clearly made breakthroughs in building massive war-engines. Could it truly stand alongside his own daemon-forgecraft?
Boom.
A missile from the Imperial Emperor detonated, briefly lighting the platform. It was only a probing strike, more greeting than attack.
Perturabo frowned. In the reflected flare he saw his own face.
A snarling mask of fangs and rage, like a beast with blood-red eyes.
He snorted and turned away, fast.
The Lord of Iron did not like what he had become. He did not want to touch old memories.
He would not let anything human show through.
He was the mechanical flood of Chaos now. Only bombardment and slaughter remained on his road.
As for the Chaos Gods, they had no right to interfere with him.
Those entities squatting in the warp were simply one form of life, not "gods."
By logic alone, a god had no place in reason. There was nothing in the universe worthy of his worship.
Bzzzt.
"Savior?"
Perturabo suddenly received a transmission request.
It came from within the Imperial Emperor. No data-viruses, no malice.
"'Savior,' 'Imperial Emperor'… what theatrical titles. Just the false Emperor's favoritism in different clothes."
Perturabo shook his head and reached to cut the signal.
He did not believe the one wearing that title deserved it. Another Dorn, favored by the false Emperor, granted authority and resources.
But just before he severed the link, his hand stopped.
He thought of something, and accepted the transmission.
He wanted to see what the so-called Savior intended.
The electromagnetic channel opened. Vox-ghost and hololithic projection synchronized, connecting both sides' virtual imaging.
Aboard the Imperial Emperor.
Perturabo's beastlike face filled the projection, red eyes cold as he assessed the Savior.
His tone was harsh, contempt threaded through it.
"So you are the one who has come to meet my mechanical tide?"
The Lord of Iron was not unfamiliar with Eden's appearance. He had seen that handsome, annoyingly composed face many times.
Especially when the forums forced open yet another pop-up propaganda window about the "Savior" and the "Imperial Emperor."
The Savior's domain spent heavily across the PsyNet, pushing Eden's publicity pages everywhere, randomly. Watch to the end, earn Gear Coins or other forum credits.
People loved it. Some even hunted the ads on purpose.
"He's changed a lot," Eden noted to himself. "He looks fully daemonic now."
This was Eden's first time seeing Perturabo after apotheosis. He looked like a heavy industrial daemon fused into a suit of brutal war-plate.
The scholar's air was gone. The scientist's poise had been crushed into something else entirely.
"Hello, Perturabo. First time we've met face to face, even if it's not under pleasant circumstances."
Even with a daemon-primarch on the other end, Eden remained calm and mild. He did not rage like the loyalist primarchs did. He did not spit curses.
He even offered a friendly smile.
With prickly, self-contradictory people, provoking them usually backfired.
…?
Eden's easy familiarity nearly short-circuited Perturabo.
The ritual exchange was supposed to happen here. Snarl, insult, declare, then collide.
Instead, the Savior refused to follow the script and left the Lord of Iron momentarily wrong-footed, his prepared verbal firepower stuck behind his teeth.
Perturabo rarely received a smile like that.
Even during the Great Crusade, his brothers kept their distance. The false Emperor never truly recognized him. Even the Imperium's subjects feared him.
Perturabo steadied himself and forced his voice back into ice.
"Are you here to beg? If so, it is useless. I will not accept. My mechanical tide will flatten your line regardless, and you will be swallowed."
"You're right. A fight between us is unavoidable. And I will be your opponent…"
Eden replied with the same seriousness, as though answering a technical query.
But before he could finish, the region convulsed again with warp turbulence. A violent roar shook the air, and beneath it came faint, chanting syllables, like scripture recited through broken teeth.
That kind of pressure meant only one thing.
Two more daemon-primarchs had arrived.
Angron.
Lorgar.
Eden did not look especially worried. He kept his eyes on Perturabo.
"Khan and the Lion have their opponents now. That makes this fairer. No excuses. No diluted victory."
Eden issued the challenge with solemn gravity, not by charging in or opening with mass slaughter.
He knew Perturabo's desire to win ran deep. Otherwise he would never have chosen rebellion, never marched as the breaker of walls toward Holy Terra.
Records made it clear: Perturabo's goal in the Siege was largely to dismantle Rogal Dorn's fortification systems.
The Emperor had not chosen Perturabo. He had handed the right to build the Imperium's great bastions to Dorn.
Then Dorn, the blunt instrument that he was, had bragged in Perturabo's face that his walls were unbreakable.
That had driven Perturabo half-mad.
So when Horus rose, Perturabo joined the traitors and brought his Legion to break those walls, to prove that "unbreakable" was a lie.
And he succeeded. He tore down bastions, cracked defenses, and helped open the way into the Palace.
Once he achieved that, he lost interest in the rest of the civil war. Horus had become a slave to the warp. Not worth following.
So Perturabo found an exit and left at speed.
Hearing Eden's words, Perturabo's mouth twisted into a cold smile.
"Then begin. I will see what the false Emperor's chosen truly amounts to."
He started to end the link. He intended to return to command immediately, to crush the Savior with maximum efficiency.
But Eden stopped him.
"Wait. I have a better way for us to decide this. Cleaner. Fairer."
As he spoke, Eden transmitted a file.
"I've heard you're the most learned and technically gifted of all primarchs. Maybe that reputation is inflated. I want to defeat you in machinery, in knowledge, and in force, so you cannot deny the outcome."
The file was a war compact.
Three contests. Best two of three.
First: equal numbers of war-machines on the battlefield, matched unit counts, to fight it out.
Second: a contest of knowledge between the two primarchs.
Third: a direct duel.
Machinery. Scholarship. Martial strength.
The loser would withdraw from the war and grant the victor one feasible demand.
Eden believed Perturabo's logic would not refuse such a framework.
At the very least, this daemon-primarch's mind still functioned. He was not a frothing madman like some others.
Perhaps that was because he had avoided deep conceptual shackles from any single warp god.
That was why Eden believed Perturabo still had a path back.
"Oh. Interesting."
Perturabo scanned the compact instantly, and for the first time sounded surprised.
The Savior was too confident. If he lost, the price would be catastrophic.
Especially that "demand" clause.
Perturabo did not reject it outright. Doing so would be an admission of fear.
Did the Lord of Iron truly believe he could lose all three categories to the Savior?
He activated analytical subroutines in the Logos armour and began running the problem.
Eden had indeed used Men of Iron-era techniques to build his mechanical forces, but Perturabo's Chaos engines were built on the same foundation, layered with daemon-forge innovations.
By the numbers he had observed, an individual Chaos engine outperformed Eden's remote automata.
The Savior's mechanical terror came from scale. From quantity. From a flood.
Now Eden was voluntarily giving up that advantage, agreeing to match numbers.
That meant the Savior was underestimating the true lethality of Chaos engines.
And underestimating the Lord of Iron.
Ignorance always led to defeat.
"The Savior hasn't acquired enough data on my engines. That's why he dares propose this. He is walking into failure."
Perturabo's original reason for delaying open war had been data collection. He wanted to dissect Eden's machine legions first, then execute a plan.
In truth, Perturabo understood those remote automata better than Eden imagined.
He had already analyzed their structure, materials, and core principles. He could replicate them if he wished.
Eden himself likely did not understand his own creations that thoroughly.
As for scholarship, Perturabo felt no concern at all.
His mind was a living archive-engine, endlessly absorbing knowledge.
Mechanics, art, culture. Across ten thousand years he had become one of the most learned entities in the galaxy.
Even Trazyn the Infinite, that hideous Necron collector, had admired Perturabo's intellect.
Trazyn had stolen from Perturabo a rare artwork from ancient Terra's Roman era, and had even boasted he intended to collect Perturabo's brain, especially its stored knowledge.
"A being with only mid-tier Schola Progenium schooling thinks he can challenge the Lord of Iron in scholarship. Absurd."
Perturabo fell silent for a beat.
Through his black-mechanicum contacts and darknet channels, he had learned plenty about Eden.
The Savior rarely failed. He loved grandstanding. He loved throwing resources at problems until they broke.
His raw intelligence, however, was not widely praised. He could not even read a complex schematic without help.
"The scholars under him seem to live well, though…"
That thought flashed through Perturabo's mind against his will.
In the Savior's realm, researchers largely had freedom to pursue what they wanted.
And the funding was obscene. Sometimes beyond excess. That was how technological revival had happened so quickly.
"If that foolish false Emperor had simply given me resources to pursue science, perhaps he would never have been chained to that pathetic Golden Throne."
Perturabo's contempt sharpened.
"His fate is self-inflicted."
He extinguished that thread of thought immediately.
He would not allow himself any regret about the past.
He had a greater work now: building the ultimate war-machines.
He would eventually storm the Imperial Palace again, and the false Emperor on the Golden Throne would witness, with his own eyes, the scale of his own stupidity and what he had denied the Imperium.
Perturabo's mind split into multiple threads, calculating and comparing. Based on Eden's temperament, strength, technology, and habits, he deduced why the Savior would suggest such an arrangement.
Conclusion: Eden likely believed he could win the machine contest and the duel.
Unfortunately, complacent confidence and intelligence gaps would ruin that plan.
"Lord of Iron. What do you say?" Eden asked.
Only a second or two had passed since the file transfer, but Eden assumed Perturabo had already understood every clause.
Perturabo did not agree immediately. He probed.
"Where will this 'special contest' take place?"
He considered one obvious danger: traps.
He had learned that lesson painfully.
The Savior might use the lure of "fair victory" to pull him into a prepared kill-box.
Eden was not like the loyalist primarchs. He did not worship "honor." He could be shameless when it paid.
"We'll meet inside your foundry-fortress," Eden said after a moment's thought.
"To show my sincerity."
Perturabo was caught off guard.
Even Tarko, Eden's aide, looked half stunned.
"Your Majesty, that's…"
He did not finish.
Eden raised a hand gently, silencing him.
Eden said nothing else. He simply watched Perturabo and waited for the decision.
"I accept this compact."
Perturabo's answer came flat and heavy.
"My condition is simple. If you lose, you leave your vehicle behind. Especially the Dreamweaver and the Imperial Emperor."
Now that things had reached this point, refusing would only look like fear.
So Perturabo went for the throat, demanding one of the Savior's most valuable assets.
That ship contained everything he wanted: every technology Eden relied upon, including the PsyNet's engine-core nodes.
"Tch…"
Eden sucked in a breath.
"He really dares to ask for it. Even the Dreamweaver."
But he thought for a moment and nodded.
"I accept your condition. Now mine."
"If I win, I want your Iron Warriors Legion."
The Savior was even more ruthless.
This was not a big ask. This was carrying the whole table out of the room.
He meant to strip Perturabo down to nothing, leaving him a primarch without an army.
The Iron Warriors captains behind Perturabo changed expression instantly.
Eden noticed. He turned a warm smile on them.
"Come work under me instead. Don't worry. I won't randomly draft you to go pour ferrocrete at some worksite."
The Iron Warriors were talent. Loyal, stubborn, clever. Wasting them on nothing but trenchwork was a crime.
If nothing else, they could at least serve as engineering supervisors.
Of course, Eden's real goal was to bring Perturabo back to the Imperium and put Imperial science into overdrive.
Many stalled research programs needed a truly frightening mind.
If the Lord of Iron returned to the right path and worked with the Machine-Goddess Webby, unleashing his potential fully, the Imperium's technological curve would spike.
Eden could finally push through projects that had been stuck for far too long.
Otherwise, who knew how long humanity would remain trapped behind the same locked doors?
But Eden did not make "return to the Imperium" his stated demand.
He feared it would trigger Perturabo's contrarian reflex.
Say it wrong, and the Lord of Iron would reject everything and choose war on principle.
No, Eden needed to proceed exactly as planned.
First, take away the army. Make him a solitary island.
Then talk.
Perturabo belonged in a laboratory, not at the head of a slaughter-machine.
Under his command, the Iron Warriors suffered grotesquely. They were forced into wasteful deaths again and again.
They deserved better.
Eden intended to teach the Lord of Iron what it meant to be alone. What it meant to be broke and cornered.
More importantly, Eden knew Perturabo would agree.
Perturabo did not truly treasure the Iron Warriors the way other primarchs treasured their sons.
And as a primarch, he could always generate more gene-seed. Rebuilding a legion was possible.
Eden stared into Perturabo's red eyes with a faint, unreadable edge.
"Well? Are you afraid? Or are you suddenly sentimental about your gene-sons?"
(End of Chapter)
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