Chapter 98 Time To Pack Up & Bounce!

“The Emperor? How is this even possible?!”

When Iron Father Kardan Stronos learned that the Emperor and his Custodes had arrived, he frantically rallied his honor guard and sprinted out of the fortress-monastery.

Seeing the Emperor flanked by the towering Custodes, the Iron Hands were left in absolute, paralyzed disbelief. As far as they knew, the Emperor was supposed to be completely paralyzed, eternally bound to the Golden Throne on Terra! How in the absolute hell was he standing on Medusa?!

After frantically triple-checking the Emperor’s bio-signatures and psychic imprints to ensure he wasn’t a daemon in disguise, Stronos and his Iron Hands instantly dropped to one knee, swearing absolute loyalty to the Master of Mankind.

“I have been reborn,” the Emperor declared, his voice radiating absolute power and majesty. “And now, I have come to drag my Gorgon back from the clutches of death.”

Following the Emperor’s command, Stronos led the entourage deep underground, into the heavily fortified, maximum-security temple where Ferrus Manus’s remains were enshrined.

“Traveler, how exactly are we going to awaken Ferrus?” the Emperor turned and asked Vane.

“Same way we did with Sanguinius. We’re just going to turn him straight into a god,” Vane replied casually.

Vane opened his inventory and pulled out a Heart of the Machine.

He had specifically crafted this endgame item back on the planet Sotha just to counter the Necron constructs. Once absorbed, it granted the user complete authority over the domain of machinery—which made it absolutely perfect for Ferrus Manus.

Another subordinate god added to the roster. That’s another workhorse locked in to grind away for me, Vane thought happily.

Guilliman can run the logistics and manage the empire’s mega-malls, and Ferrus can handle all the after-sales tech support and machine repairs.

“Go turn off the stasis fields.”

“Take Ferrus’s remains out of the reliquary and piece them back together on the altar.”

Vane barked orders, having the Custodes shut down the stasis fields and lay out the Gorgon’s shattered remains on an empty stone slab.

“Can you genuinely resurrect a Primarch?” Stronos asked, staring at Vane and the Emperor with intense, desperate anxiety.

“Everything is firmly under control,” Trajann reassured him calmly.

Under the watchful eyes of everyone present, Vane tossed the Heart of the Machine directly onto Ferrus’s remains.

The Heart instantly shattered into countless streams of brilliant, liquid light that violently surged into the Gorgon’s broken body. Impossibly fine, living metallic threads rapidly extruded from the light, weaving themselves together at blinding speeds to reconstruct his flesh, muscle, and bone.

Ferrus’s body rapidly repaired itself, the catastrophic damage reversing completely visible to the naked eye.

Simultaneously, deep within the Warp, the shattered soul-fragments of the Lord of Medusa suddenly flared with blinding brilliance, violently tearing themselves away from the Empyrean and surging back into his newly forged physical vessel.

His twin hearts, which had been completely still for ten millennia, suddenly began to beat with raw, immense power.

Sensing what was happening on Medusa, the four Chaos Gods were plunged into absolute despair. But apart from violently panicking, there wasn’t a single damn thing they could actually do about it.

The absolute terror and helplessness their lesser demons usually felt when faced with the Emperor? Yeah, that was exactly how the four dark gods were feeling right now.

They couldn’t fight back; they couldn’t even run. They just had to sit there and wait for the executioner’s axe to fall.

“Arise, my beloved son!”

Standing next to Vane, the Emperor watched Ferrus’s body completely revitalize. He dramatically threw his hands up and yelled at the top of his lungs.

Led by Stronos, the Iron Hands assumed this dramatic shouting was part of the holy resurrection ritual. They immediately dropped to one knee and started aggressively mirroring the Emperor’s shouts.

“Arise, our Primarch!”

Watching the bizarre scene unfold, Trajann let out a heavy sigh, facepalming in absolute defeat.

My Lord, what happened to your stoic, majestic, god-like persona?!

And what the hell is wrong with the Iron Hands?! Aren’t you guys supposed to be entirely devoted to cold, unfeeling logic?! Why are you breaking character too?!

Trajann was fully convinced that the Forefather was literally a walking, highly infectious memetic hazard. Anyone who spent more than five minutes near the guy instantly had their established persona completely destroyed.

Prompted by the chorus of shouts from the Emperor and the Iron Hands, Ferrus suddenly levitated into the air.

Countless incredibly fine metallic threads extruded from his body, writhing and twisting like living tentacles.

Every single piece of machinery within the temple instantly powered up, their cogitators unified in a harmonious, impossibly beautiful binary hymn, welcoming the birth of a true God of Machines.

“He literally just made a god?!”

The Void Dragon could clearly sense the terrifying, absolute mechanical authority radiating from Ferrus’s body, and the C’tan silently clicked its metallic tongue in absolute awe.

Thank the stars humanity wasn’t around during the War in Heaven.

If they had been, both the Old Ones and the C’tan would have probably gotten their asses comprehensively beat down by these completely unhinged monkeys.

Ferrus snapped his eyes open, the irises completely replaced by the mesmerizing rotation of countless, impossibly complex gears.

All around him, countless ethereal, glowing figures materialized. They were the heroic souls of the Iron Hands. The warriors who had been slaughtered on the black sands of Isstvan V, those who had sacrificed themselves during the Horus Heresy, those who fell defending Terra, and those who had laid down their lives over ten millennia of relentless, brutal warfare.

Every single soul manifested around Ferrus, dropping to one knee and swearing their eternal loyalty once more.

A moment later, having fully fused with the Heart of the Machine and claimed his new authority, Ferrus gently landed on the ground, and the miraculous phenomena surrounding him immediately faded away.

Ferrus respectfully bowed to Vane and the Emperor, expressing his deep, unwavering gratitude for granting him a second chance at life.

“Don’t worry about the thanks. Just remember to pay off the hundred billion star systems you owe me, and we’ll call it even,” Vane replied, casually waving his hand.

Ferrus’s eyes instantly bugged out of his head. “Wait, what?! A hundred billion star systems?!”

The Iron Hands, who had been weeping tears of joy over their Primarch’s resurrection just a second ago, also practically popped their eyes out of their sockets.

A hundred billion star systems?!

What kind of completely impossible, astronomical number is that?!

“Normally, the going rate for a resurrection is only fifty billion star systems.” Vane pointed a finger directly at Stronos. “But since your son decided to shoot at me when I showed up, I added an extra fifty-billion fee.”

Stronos’s eyes went completely wide. He slowly pointed a finger back at himself in utter disbelief.

Wait, how did I get dragged into this debt?!

“Just accept your fate,” the Emperor said, sympathetically clapping Ferrus on the shoulder. “Guilliman and I are in debt for an even more insane amount. Honestly, we’ll probably be paying this off for centuries.”

Ferrus turned to look at the Emperor. “Father, am I not your son?”

The Emperor wasn’t entirely sure where this was going, but he nodded anyway. “Of course you are.”

Since he was getting a completely fresh start, he genuinely planned on properly making things up to his sons.

“Then could you maybe cover my debt for me?” Ferrus asked, his eyes practically shining with expectation.

“Absolutely not,” the Emperor shook his head instantly.

I take back what I just said. I’m not compensating these bastards with a single cent. They are all completely unfilial degenerates.

“But I’m your actual flesh and blood!!” Ferrus cried, putting on an incredibly dramatic, heartbroken display.

“I grew you in a test tube,” the Emperor shot back with absolute, brutal coldness.

Trajann: …

Great. Now it wasn’t just the Emperor’s persona that was completely shattered, even the notoriously stoic Primarch Ferrus Manus was acting like a total clown.

Ferrus decided not to press the issue of his astronomical debt any further. Instead, he shifted his full attention back to the burning planet of Medusa, actively preparing to deploy and wipe the invading Chaos forces completely off the map.

—

Medusa’s Orbit.

Typhus, having just successfully secured a critical orbital station with his Death Guard and preparing to launch an all-out assault to completely dominate the orbital theatre, was currently frantically packing his bags to run for his life.

He had zero idea what the Iron Hands were actually doing down there, and he was completely unaware that Vane and the Emperor had already landed on the planet.

However, he had clearly seen the massive Imperial fleet drop out of the Warp to reinforce the defenders. Even worse, his potent psychic talents had picked up on a terrifying energy spike erupting from deep within the planet’s core.

Whatever the hell had just happened down there, Typhus was absolutely certain it wasn’t good for him. It was definitely time to pack up and bounce.

He had barely managed to rally his forces and prepare them to board the gunships back to his plague fleet when the air directly in front of him suddenly crackled with lightning. A blinding flash of teleportation energy violently erupted, temporarily blinding the Death Guard.

The second the light faded, a fully armed, furious Ferrus Manus stepped out of the teleportation pillar, flanked by an incredibly pissed-off squad of Iron Hands, completely blocking Typhus’s escape route.

“Ferrus?! That… that is impossible!”

Typhus’s very first thought upon seeing the Gorgon was that he was hallucinating.

Back in the day, he had literally watched Fulgrim chop Ferrus’s head off on the black sands of Isstvan V!

He could still vividly remember standing on the battlefield, openly laughing his ass off at the loyalist Iron Hands as they desperately tried to snatch Ferrus’s headless corpse and retreat.

He remembered mocking those pathetic fools who constantly chanted ‘The flesh is weak, but the machine is immortal,’ watching them cry as they desperately fought a totally losing battle just to drag their dead, headless Primarch out of the slaughterhouse. It was hilarious!

Ferrus fired up his massive forgebreaker hammer, staring at Typhus with a cold, terrifyingly dark smirk.

“Typhus. I am so incredibly pleased you decided to visit Medusa.”

“But considering you completely ignored basic guest etiquette and decided to slaughter my sons… I’m a little upset.”

“Now, why don’t we settle these outstanding accounts once and for all?”

—

OR