"Aaaaah!!"
Screams fell from the sky. Then things came tumbling after them, landing directly in the converter below and being rendered down in an instant.
"Urp!!"
Zhou Ye let out a satisfied belch. Genuinely excellent.
"Plaguebearers manifesting already. Their conversion rate is impressive."
He watched the plague zombies raining down from above, several Plaguebearers tangled in among them.
His method was simple. He flew into the middle of a large cluster of plague zombies and quietly opened a rift connecting to the Thousand-Person Theater along his path. He kept the aperture small to manage the energy cost.
Then he just waited. These creatures had never encountered anything Imaginary before, so they had no reaction to it whatsoever. Already a fair number of Plaguebearers had pitched forward headfirst through the opening.
And then the screaming, followed by a plunge into the converter below.
The conversion yield from pure Warp-born entities was extraordinary. A single one was worth roughly a thousand corrupted Gene-seeds by his internal accounting.
In all honesty he was starting to feel genuinely curious. If he could throw Mortarion in there, what would the yield be.
Zhou Ye also noticed another property of his converter: it used a Warp entity's anchor point in realspace to pull their Warp-essence through as well. In some sense this might permanently destroy them. Or not quite permanently.
It was comparable to the Emperor's Blade in principle. Death was not necessarily the end, but resurrection became considerably more complicated, and a great deal depended on whether their god found the effort worthwhile.
So the Plaguebearers tumbling through were discovering, for the first time, that there was nothing funny about this situation at all.
They howled for Father to save them. But Zhou Ye's simple Imaginary infection was more than sufficient to make them invisible to a Chaos God's attention. This space was effectively a self-contained pocket of Imaginary dimension. Nurgle was not going to notice a few stray Plaguebearers going missing.
So their cries meant nothing. Every one of them became a little snack.
In that sense, Nurgle was not entirely inedible after all.
"The situation is not comfortable. And these are only Plaguebearers. Whatever comes next is an open question. A significant portion of those plague zombies are being pulled through directly from the Warp."
He watched the torrent of bodies falling like rain and his brow furrowed deeply.
The Great Rift had not yet torn open. But if a Daemon Primarch committed fully to this, the power was there to manifest even in this era.
All of it was also replenishing the energy Zhou Ye was currently burning through at speed. He was already planning his next fabrication: Imperial Knights. The Emperor Titan at his back stood over three hundred meters tall, and what it needed was a proper retinue of Knights to operate alongside it.
That was the genuine heavy artillery. With them operational, even deploying Astartes as frontline infantry would be acceptable.
"The only problem is that a wider opening risks detection. I still do not know what hand the Warp will play. I cannot show my full position prematurely...."
For all his preparations, his actual bottom card remained himself.
As for the plague zombies, Zhou Ye was fairly confident they could not detect him. Nurgle's plague zombies were among the least perceptive entities around.
As any informed observer knew: when ranking daemon quality across the four Chaos Gods, Khorne's were the finest on average, and Slaanesh's were the poorest.
During the Siege of Terra, every loyal and traitor force alike had been locked in the most brutal fighting imaginable at the walls of the Imperial Palace.
Every force except the traitor Emperor's Children, not a single one of whom had been seen at the gates. Where had they gone?
To torment civilians, naturally. Extracting the suffering of the population and then drinking it in until they were thoroughly drunk on it.
What could one even say about that. Terra held hundreds of billions of lives.
Those Emperor's Children managed to work through a few million. Among every faction present, that was the lowest body count of anyone. Even by traitor standards, they ranked at the very bottom of the hierarchy.
Back in his old world, they would have been at the bottom of the prison food chain.
.....
Meanwhile, within the Nurgle advance column.
"Typhus is on his way. His ship carries a rare Chaos artifact capable of providing sufficient energy for our Father to descend. The Grandfather has an absolute claim on this world."
"This will be the beginning. The word of our Father brought to the false Emperor and his servants."
In the center of the formation, several Chaos Space Marines whose bodies had twisted and mutated beyond recognition conferred among themselves.
"How much longer before the Ork defensive line breaks? The false Emperor's dogs have already arrived."
"A few more days....."
The Death Guard commanders weighed the question. To offer this world to the Grandfather, the first priority was clearing the Orks off it. Humans could be infected. Orks could not. Humans could be converted. Orks simply could not.
It was not always the case that the Imperium and Chaos would turn their attention to aliens in the middle of fighting each other. Sometimes it came down to the more straightforward reality that certain xenos were simply useless to a particular Chaos faction and not worth the effort.
"Hmm?"
"Wait. What is that?"
"Iron Warriors?"
At that moment their specialized detection instruments registered something new. A vessel fighting through the Warp storm, or perhaps hurled here by it, dropping toward them. Then the air above was full of them, a hundred figures descending in what felt like an eyeblink.
They tried to make contact. They received one word in reply.
'Get lost!!'
The Iron Warriors had come for this world. Even by their standards a planet represented something worth holding. This would have been a necessary recruitment world for them, and beyond that it was a matter of the ancient compact.
This world had always belonged to the Iron Warriors. It was their property by right. So...
The moment they landed, they came down directly into the middle of the Nurgle advance column, and then....
Boom. Boom. Boom. The fighting began immediately.
People liked to say the Imperium was a bloated, corrupt structure that could not organize its way out of its own refuse. True enough. But Chaos was no better when it came to actual results. Especially when a single faction moved unilaterally with no figure of sufficient authority to hold anyone together. Internal chaos was guaranteed.
Exactly as it was now: the Iron Warriors, undivided and beholden to no particular god, had not so much as glanced in the Imperium's direction. They went straight for Chaos, because what they had received was a distress call. By sheer reflex, they concluded that blocking the Nurgle advance was the priority.
So....
"The Iron Warriors are here, and they are fighting Nurgle?"
Zhou Ye blinked at that, then scratched his head. What exactly were these people doing here.
But considering that Chaos was deeply factional by nature, and that this was Nurgle operating without coordination with anyone else, that changed the calculus somewhat. Still, at that moment....
"Nurgle has begun dispersing its sacred pestilence. It looks as though the full melee is starting."
Zhou Ye blinked again, then slowly stood up.
The Nurgle forces had evidently become every faction's top priority. The plague army had apparently panicked as well.
They had started scattering Nurgle's sacred pestilence in all directions. Zhou Ye had prepared for this, of course.
The artifact he had personally assembled, composed purely of concentrated Wither Authority, was more than sufficient to counter it. No matter how potent a sacred pestilence might be, it was ultimately a form of life. Wither could suppress it absolutely.
Though even that had its ceiling. This was the kind of engagement where brute force could overturn any equation.
---o---