"Damnation! Guilliman should never have stayed my hand! Every last one of these Imperial vermin should have been put to the sword!"
The furious roar billowed out from the central grand hall of the Adeptus Administratum headquarters just as Vulkan and Guilliman arrived at the heart of the Imperium's bureaucratic engine.
Guilliman wore an expression of weary resignation, while Vulkan instantly recognized the thunderous voice.
The arrival of two sublime Primarchs prompted the surrounding mortals to drop into frantic genuflection before scurrying back to their labors. A high-ranking official, his uniform heavy with gold thread and intricate embroidery, came stumbling out of the hall. Upon spotting Guilliman and the towering form of Vulkan behind him, the man collapsed to his knees.
"Lord Regent, I..."
Before the official could finish, Vulkan reached out with a gentle hand to steady him. Guilliman merely gave a helpless wave.
"Say no more. I understand."
Guilliman had considered inviting Lion El'Jonson to welcome Vulkan's return. However, reflecting on the fresh disasters the Lion had manufactured during his own absence in the Pariah Nexus, Guilliman had decided against immediate notification. To ensure the Lion felt even a fraction of his own daily agony, he had tasked his brother with processing the mountain of scrolls and data-slates left unattended after the Lion had executed the original department heads.
For the Lion, this was nothing short of psychological torture.
The Imperium was vast beyond comprehension. Even for a High Lord, a twenty-hour workday was the standard, not the exception. Not all mortal administrators were as incompetent as the Lion imagined; rather, they were shackled by a system where efficiency was choked by sheer scale.
The officials the Lion had put to death were, in truth, tragically dutiful. They had labored for over twenty-two hours a day, sustained only by cocktails of stimm-elixirs to keep their hearts from seizing.
Yet even then, the tide of paperwork was insurmountable.
The Lion's snap judgment to purge them stemmed from a moment of shock during his regency: he had discovered the officials were only just now processing applications and missives submitted over a year ago, requests involving hundreds of systems, thousands of Imperial worlds, and an endless mire of logistical minutiae.
A year!
To a Primarch who rarely touched the grit of Imperial civil administration, such a delay was evidence of criminal negligence. He had decided to make examples of them to "improve efficiency." In his management of the Dark Angels, and even on ancient Caliban, response times were expected to be immediate.
The reality, however, was far bleaker.
Had they not been Primarchs and Angels of the Emperor, their own petitions would have been funneled into the same glacial queues as any planetary governor, languishing for months or years.
While both the Adeptus Munitorum and the Adeptus Administratum fell under the broader Imperial bureaucracy, the Munitorum's processing speed was nominally faster, but only by a marginal, desperate degree.
Before Guilliman's return, the Lion had even attempted to command his Dark Angels to apprehend several High Lords of Terra. Had the Adeptus Custodes not intervened to restrain the incandescent Primarch, the High Lords would likely not have survived to see the Lord Regent's return.
The Lion's rage had only deepened when, after identifying the rot in civil administration, he turned his eye to the military. He found that the fastest approval for a troop redeployment exceeded three months.
And that was merely the approval. It did not account for the requisition of materiel, the replenishment of manpower, or the warp-transit itself.
The Lion had no way of knowing that these figures were actually the result of Guilliman's radical optimizations. Guilliman's exhaustion was born of the fact that even after his reforms, the administrative carcass of the Imperium remained bloated. Often, Guilliman resorted to bypassing dozens of departments to handle critical crises personally.
Countless worlds owed their survival to Guilliman's direct intervention as Lord Regent.
In the modern Imperium, if a Planetary Governor spots the seeds of a threat, he must file his reports instantly. The Astra Militarum, or the Emperor's Angels, might, in a "normal" scenario, respond months or even years after the initial plea for aid.
This systemic lag had cost the lives of millions of Imperial warriors. Often, a regiment would arrive at its destination expecting to handle a minor containment, perhaps a few Genestealers, a local cult, or a handful of Orks, only to find the task report was months out of date.
By the time the boots hit the ground, they would find a world already consumed: a hive-wide Genestealer infestation, a cult that had successfully summoned a daemonic incursion, or an entire world scoured clean by xenos pirates.
Faced with this perpetual catastrophe, the officials responsible for troop allocation had developed their own grim triage:
For a plea three months old: Dispatch a few regiments to investigate.
For a plea six months or older: Dispatch a full battlegroup.
For anything over a year: Petition for Adeptus Astartes intervention.
The logic was simple: Astartes held higher tactical autonomy. If they arrived and found the situation spiraling, they could bypass the Munitorum and call upon neighboring Chapters, a method far more precise than waiting for a clerk on Terra to shuffle a data-slate. If one waited for the Munitorum to process a reinforcement request, the initial garrison would be long dead before the ink was dry.
Of course, this led to its own inefficiencies. Battlegroups would occasionally arrive at a war zone only to find the local governor had already resolved the issue, or a passing fleet of Astartes had handled it on a whim. Entire armies spent years in transit for wars that were already over, while the governor's "Request Cancellation" sat at the bottom of a pile on Terra.
…
CRASH!
A literal mountain of parchment was swept aside as the three Primarchs finally met across a desk buried in fluttering documents.
The Lion, staring at Guilliman as he emerged from behind a wall of scrolls, froze. Then, his eyes fell upon the towering silhouette of Vulkan.
"By the Emperor... Vulkan!"
The Lion cast aside his frustration and his lingering resentment toward Guilliman. He moved around the desk with predatory speed to stand before his brother.
Vulkan stood his ground, watching his old comrade approach. His eyes were filled with a mixture of deep sorrow and a pained affection.
"Lion... it has been too long, brother. The years have been exceptionally cruel to you."
The Lion faltered at the raw emotion in Vulkan's voice. He managed a smile, though it was tinged with bitterness.
"It seems time has seen fit to leave its mark only on me."
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