40k: Midnight Blade.

Chapter 757 46. Regaining Hope (four, three chapters in one)

"Fuck," Balboa muttered.

He stood up, walked to the front of the cell and looked out, but all he could see was darkness.

A few days ago, he would have leaned here and cursed continuously, then stretched out his hands and waved them around, trying to anger the jailer, but he no longer did that.

Firstly, there would be nothing here that would respond to him at all, and secondly, this darkness could freeze a person's bones soft and brittle, and he didn't want to have his limbs amputated for the time being.

The captain frowned in annoyance, his eyebrows twisted into a ball like weeds, making his rough and ugly face look even more ferocious. But he still did not give up, but stood in front of the door and looked for a while, until he was sure that there was really no living thing here except him, and then he returned to the prison.

However, to be honest, although he called it that in his heart, if he only looked at the decoration, it would be hard for Balboa to regard this place as a prison.

A large, soft sofa, a carpet that was obviously not cheap, a large satin bed that he had never thought he would be able to lie on, and a private bathroom that was half the size of a public bathhouse.
How could he have used these things in the past? Him? Balboa from Hellhound? What a joke.

You have to know that before he joined the army, he was the son of a blacksmith, and he drank all day, either drunk or on the way to being drunk. Until one day, he and a few friends got into a conflict with others in a tavern, and he beat one of them half to death under the influence of alcohol.

and then?
Bang! The sheriff who arrived beat him half to death with a stick and threw him into jail.

A few weeks later, he had his head shaved, had a physical, and was thrown into a reserve training camp.

He went in dazed, with no real sense of where he was or what fate he would suffer in the future. He was just scolded by the instructors every day until he collapsed from exhaustion and was often beaten black and blue.

Four months later, he officially enlisted and boarded the conscription ship with a military uniform, a gun, six magazines and a document proving his identity.

He stayed on that stinking ship for nearly half a year before landing, and was immediately taken away to become a soldier of the 6th Company of the 21st Hellhound Regiment.
In the first two months, he lived unconsciously, and even when he was beaten by his superiors, he just endured it silently. Until a year later, the 21st Regiment was officially dispatched and they were sent to a neighboring galaxy to deal with a rebellion.

The battle was very difficult, and nearly one-third of the 21st Regiment died before they managed to hang the leader of the rebellion outside his palace. Looking at the bodies of that man and his family floating in the wind, with their swollen blue-white faces and purple-red tongues.
It was not until this time that Balboa began to feel something real.

He finally understood what he had done to the people in the tavern that night, and finally understood what kind of path he had embarked on.

But he had no way to turn back, he had committed a crime, he almost killed someone, for this he had to atone, even though his way of atonement was to go to some other place and kill some people he didn't even know. But this was an order, what else could he do?

For three years after this incident, he resisted everything, although he never said it. But every night he would bite the pillow or clothes and howl hard in the quilt until he fell asleep. The soldiers who were with him thought he was crazy, but no one decided to take care of it. After all, they were all crazy, so what was there to care about?

Only his company commander at the time, a man named Root, would ask him the next morning: Hey, boy, what did you do last night?

Balboa always answered: I'm fine, I'm fine, I just had a nightmare - but Root actually knew the truth, but he never made it clear.

He just smiled and handed Balboa a precious cigarette.

During those three years, this became almost their daily morning routine: getting up, greeting each other, then standing in the trenches or barracks, smoking a cigarette, and then doing whatever else they had to do.

Until the fourth year.

In another rebellion, Root died when his head was smashed in by the enemy from behind.

Balboa was not present at the time and learned of the incident two days later, when he was busy catching rats in the cold and gloomy trenches.
Don't blame him, their supply lines were cut off by the enemy.

For a whole week, the group had to rely on their own initiative to find something to eat, or they would have to eat the corpse. But no one wanted to do that.

Although most of the Hellhounds' soldiers are criminals and death row prisoners, a bunch of depraved, heartless bastards, even such people have some bottom line.

It is precisely this insignificant bottom line that separates them from real beasts, making them just bad people and scum, rather than things worse than pigs and dogs.

So they don’t eat humans, absolutely not.

In this case, rats are a perfect delicacy. Moreover, this method can kill two birds with one stone. It can not only fill the stomach, but also kill all the beasts before they can gnaw on the fingers, eyes or ears of the dead.
So when the messenger rushed into the trench under the bombardment with the news of Root's death and announced it, Balboa still had two mice in his hands.

He had been about to throw the two mice to their cook, but the news was like a bullet that pierced his heart, causing his hands to tremble uncontrollably and forcing him to let go.

The dead body of the rat rolled to the ground with blood and hit the mud, but no one picked it up. Everyone stared at the messenger in amazement, as if they had heard something incredible.

This is normal. In the minds of these scum, Rutt will never die. He has fought in at least a hundred battles. Not to mention being injured, his clothes may not even be wet with blood.

He has long arms and legs, broad shoulders, strength like an ox, and amazing marksmanship. Even the most morally corrupt death row inmates would have some respect for him and want to fight with him on the battlefield because that would increase their chances of survival.

But he died, and the cause of death was commonplace: he was hit by a stray bullet.

What is this?

The scum immediately started shouting.

Two hours later, this group of scum and dregs organized a collective counterattack. They ran out of the trenches, each one of them as dirty as a rat. Then they braved the artillery fire and marched across the plain to rush towards the enemy position.

As a result, somehow, the other companies followed after a brief hesitation, as if they had taken this as an order for a general attack.
According to statistics afterwards, more than 20,000 people died in this charge, and their blood made the soil wet and soft. In return, they took the position and obtained ammunition, guns, medicines, bandages, and enough wine to drown the remaining 300 people.

As for what happened after that, Balboa was not very clear. He only remembered that he found a place to drink and then fell asleep.

When he woke up, the sky was filled with dark dust, and he could hardly stand due to the tinnitus and dizziness caused by the hangover, so he had to sit on the ground.

The messenger came to him again and stuffed some document into his hand. Balboa didn't look at it. He was too lazy to do so. He just put it away and threw it into his dirty and smelly military uniform, then continued to look up at the sky.

A few hours later, the battle was over.

The entire 21st Regiment was given an opportunity for military pardon due to their outstanding performance in this war and their service in the past four years - however, it was called pardon, but in fact it was just making the best use of it.

An entire regiment was reduced to only about 300 people, all of whom were death row prisoners. What was the need for reorganization or redistribution? It would be better to keep them away from the army and send them to other places to do hard labor.

As a result, most people happily accepted this matter and were sent to other places to perform hard labor under the supervision of law enforcement officers.
Only a small number chose to stay, including those who could no longer adapt to normal life and those who sincerely believed that dying on the battlefield was better than returning home.

As for Balboa? He was a special case. The document he was handed was a commission, so he couldn't leave.

The Hellhound designation had not been cancelled, which meant that the higher-ups probably still had some thoughts about the name. He didn't care what the reason was, he just knew it was fine this way, he didn't want to leave anyway.

In the following ten years, Balboa was promoted from corporal to a lesser soldier, and his name was gradually forgotten. The Hellhounds were no longer recruited from criminals, but from real soldiers. They not only had superior tactical skills, but were also literate.
But Balboa was not sidelined by them. Instead, he was respectfully called "Captain Bull" by these young men because he looked like an angry bull when he rushed around on the battlefield. This was obviously a joking name, but he actually accepted it.

Things could have had a better ending at this point, but Balboa always believed that he didn't deserve any good ending.

The man he'd crippled as a youth, everyone he'd killed later in battle, his superiors - the shadows of these people haunted him, making him instinctively distrust that anything good could ever happen to him.

His hunch was correct, and the last battle of the 21st Hellhound Regiment took place in his twelfth year of service.

At this time, he was no longer as stupid as he was when he was young, and had become a qualified officer. Unfortunately, their enemy was a large group of orcs.

The war lasted about a year and a half, and they were running out of ammunition and food, but no reinforcements came. According to the desperate speculation of the local lord, this was probably because the orcs had more than just ground forces.
The lord's guess was proved in another way three weeks later.

Balboa and his last forty or so men were in a broken bunker when they saw the greenskins approaching from the horizon in a Titan-sized vehicle that was as big as a mountain. Then it thundered and covered them with artillery fire.

——Logically, he should have died at that time, but he didn't, but Balboa was not grateful.

When he 'woke up', all he saw were aliens. He had never seen them in the real sense, but he had seen their hateful faces in the manual of the Military Affairs Department.

He immediately raised his gun and pulled the trigger. This action had become his new instinct, even replacing his bad habit of drinking. But his bare gun had no effect on them and even caused a burst of contemptuous laughter.

A skeleton in some kind of robe walked up to him and said something in a language he didn't understand, so they grabbed him and dragged him away.

Balboa's mind was in a mess. He had no idea why he was fighting the orcs one second and was suddenly captured by the Necrons the next.

He struggled with all his might, but of course he got nothing. Fortunately, he saw his subordinates - the group of young men were being dragged away like slaves just like him.
About ten minutes later, they were dragged out of the ruins where they had fought with the orcs, and strangely came to a sand dune.

There were also many tall skeletons standing here, but they were all wearing robes or some more bizarre clothes, just like the one who had laughed at Balboa. And beside them stood many Astartes, with armor of different colors and expressions, but they all maintained a fighting posture.

What's more, the grenade launcher in his hand seemed to have just fired, and the bullet was still suspended in the air.
Balboa was so shocked by this scene that he was completely speechless and could only allow himself to be dragged away.

After that, he was thrown into this prison, alone, unable to contact anyone, until one of the aliens actually sent someone to invite him to attend some so-called banquet - how absurd was this?

Balboa felt that the only thing that could compare to this was seeing with his own eyes a green-skinned beast shouting for the empire.
He folded his hands, sat on the sofa that made him itchy all over, and began to sigh uncontrollably.

In the past, the Military Affairs Department would issue them a new combat manual every month. In addition to jokes for entertainment, a weekly article on weapons maintenance knowledge, there was also a special column for popular science about aliens. The difficult-to-pronounce name "Necromancer" once appeared in it.

Balboa had read that issue, which clearly stated the dangers of this alien race, but he had never imagined that they could be so dangerous.

It's bad enough to capture a soldier like him, but even an Astartes could be made into a specimen like that?
He raised his head, closed his eyes and began to pray to the Emperor, hoping that he would open his eyes - it didn't matter whether he died or not, but it would be better if the good guys under him could leave, as well as the Astartes.
Their lives were much more useful than his, and they had never indiscriminately beaten up a person who had nothing to do with them in a tavern.

Their souls are clean.

But what can I do? he thought.

A few minutes later, the most famous captain of the 21st Hellhound Regiment opened his eyes in anger, howled, and began to destroy his room.

The first thing he did was to punch the sofa under his butt. Although it was soft, he always felt like he was going to sink into it.

Then there was the huge bed. He had long been dissatisfied with the gauze curtains. What was the use of such things? Just hanging there made him feel uncomfortable!
Then, he rushed into the bathroom holding up the bed legs, smashed the bathtub and the toiletries while yelling, and then wrapped his bathrobe around himself like a madman, soaked himself with water, and rolled around on the floor.
Soon, his actions attracted the sound of footsteps.

Balboa rushed out of the messy bathroom, ran to the door of his cell, grabbed the cold iron bars with his hands, and began to shake it while screaming.

The footsteps gradually approached, and a dead spirit stood in front of him, leaning forward stiffly.

"What do you need?" it asked.

"I want your mother!" Balboa shouted back.

His insults would make some people furious, but they seemed to mean nothing to the alien, which simply repeated his question stiffly in that uncomfortable voice.

"What do you need?"

"I told you, I want your mom!"

The undead was silent for a moment, and then a green light flashed in its eyes. The iron bars in front of Balboa suddenly fell to the ground and disappeared. It strode into the cell, looked around in the white light, and then looked at Balboa again.

"What do you need?"

The captain didn't say anything this time, he just jumped up and tried to insert the two hard wooden bed legs into the skeleton's eye sockets. He was not sure if this would work, but it did not fight back, just stood there and raised his hand to pull off the bed legs.

"What do you need?" it asked, with sawdust flying everywhere.

Balboa began to walk cautiously around it, and the thing kept moving, facing him.
A few seconds later, when Balboa turned his back to the cell door, he suddenly pulled off the towel on his body, threw it hard, and let it hang on the undead's head. He turned around and ran without hesitation.

"What do you need?" it asked from behind him, its voice still calm.

Balboa did not answer, but just ran. As he thought, it was unusually cold in the darkness, and his wet military uniform exacerbated the chill.

But none of this could stop him. Although he had no idea what he was going to do next, he still had to do something.
He ran wildly through the dark corridor, the dull footsteps echoing in his ears. He ran fast and steadily. His long military career finally gave him some rewards - after running for a full ten minutes without stopping, he finally saw a faint light.

The captain's eyes widened. Not only did he not stop, he even quickened his pace and ran towards the tiny light.
Two minutes later, a dazzling light enveloped him, and what appeared before his eyes made him shudder. He could not describe what he saw, because in his past life, Balboa had never seen anything like it.

If he had to say, the only word he could think of was warehouse.

Yes, a warehouse, a warehouse full of humans, and it was so big that it made him speechless. Wherever he looked, there were humans everywhere.

There were soldiers like him, standing in an abrupt ambush in a valley or river, with a focused expression and a very professional posture, but not moving a muscle. There were also Astartes, stepping on the corpses of aliens, fighting close combat with orcs in the ruins, one of them even sawed open the neck of an orc with his chainsaw sword, blood splattered, and was frozen in the air.

The orc's face was extremely ferocious, and he seemed to be roaring, while the Astartes had no expression. He was blind in one eye and missing one hand, but his right hand was still exerting strength.

Balboa believed that if it weren't for this damn place binding him, the orc would have been beheaded long ago.

Watching all this, the captain opened his mouth blankly, looked around, but his steps became extremely weak, and suddenly he stumbled and fell to the ground.

He lay on the cold ground, looking up at the sky in confusion, and found that the sky was full of motionless gunboats or shuttles.
Emperor, where on earth is this place?
No one answered, Balboa could only grit his teeth and prop himself up. He shook his head, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and began to walk in this huge and fragmented world with trembling lips.

He didn't know how long he had been walking. He only knew that he was sometimes in ruins, sometimes in a valley, then in a desert or scorched earth, and even in a world of death that he dared not step into - he kept walking and walking until he could no longer walk and fell to his knees in exhaustion.

A voice came from behind him.

"Brave! Tenacious!" he praised. "Your fighting spirit is truly amazing, Captain. I must pay my respects to you once again."

Balboa turned slowly and saw the undead he had just seen - the crazy alien who called himself Zandrek.

The latter was looking down at him, just like the undead he saw in the cell, with no expression at all, but he always felt that the other person was smiling.

After a long time, he got up from the ground and clenched his fists in front of him.

"What the hell is this place?" he asked.

Zandrek actually laughed, but did not answer the question. Instead, he came to him and patted him gently with his right hand. Instantly, Balboa felt dizzy and fell to the ground without even realizing what happened, but Zandrek reached out and pulled him up, even remembering to straighten the collar of his military uniform.

"Listen to me, Captain, good soldier."

He spoke in a low voice, serious and completely different from the craziness he had displayed at the party.

"The place where you are standing now is called the Soloms Dynasty, a kingdom owned by a rebel among our race. Our history is very long. Long before you were even just apes, we had already established our own empire in the galaxy."

"Once upon a time, we also had bodies and souls like you, but now everything is gone, leaving only this cold iron skeleton - we gave up everything just to live longer."

"We succeeded, but we also failed. But we do live a long time now. Millions of years, tens of millions of years, whatever number you choose. With such a long life, we have to do something to pass the time."

"For this reason, we have developed various interests. The master of the Sollems Dynasty has developed an interest in collecting you, or rather, collecting your history."

Balboa stared at him with his mouth open, saying nothing. He might have gone mad, or he might have suffered from aphasia temporarily.

Xandrek patted his back soothingly and pushed him forward.

He was much taller than him, but the gesture did not seem disdainful. Instead, it was like a general communicating with a soldier he favored.

"He's been doing this for a long time. As far as I know, he started collecting at least 10,000 years ago."

"Many of us thought his behavior was very strange, but he never cared about what others thought. He was a very self-centered person. And self-centeredness often means focus. So he was very successful in this matter. He opened a museum, you know? Museum--"

Xandrek spoke to the captain in standard High Gothic, pushing him forward.

"——It means to collect, restore and store things from a certain place, and one day it will be open to visitors for people to appreciate and learn the precious spirit of these collections. Of course, in my opinion, he actually has no intention of opening this museum, but he has no choice now."

"A few days ago, you may have discovered that many of my people freed you from the stasis field and dragged you around like slaves."

"I don't like this, and what may happen next. They are trampling on your dignity. For a struggling younger race, such insults are inappropriate and even damage our own dignity."

"So, I stepped in to stop their behavior, but for those of you who were released, I didn't want you to go back into the stasis field. In my opinion, this is cruel to you. And, I also want to communicate with you."

He stopped, raised his right hand and pointed in front of Balboa.

"All right, Captain, look there."

As he said, the captain looked up. His eyes could no longer focus, and after several seconds, the blurry scene became real.

Just like that, he saw a huge, pitch-black stone tablet, which looked like a tombstone, standing on a pure white stone brick with some distorted characters on it.

Balboa could not understand what these characters meant at first, but the longer he looked at them, the more they resembled the imperial script with which he was most familiar.
After dozens of seconds, the characters finally twisted into a sentence that he could fully understand.

【Welcome to the Human Branch of the Soloms Museum, where the backbone, conscience, wonders and sacrifices of a race are stored. 】

"Do you understand?" Zandrick asked sympathetically.

The captain did not answer, but just stood there in a daze. After several minutes, he finally came to his senses, and the first thing he did was to turn around and throw an uppercut at Zandrick.

He used all his strength to punch, but the result was that his right hand was broken into pieces in an instant, his wrist and fingers were completely broken, and the bones were shattered beyond recognition. Further up, the condition of his arm was not good either, from the elbow down, half of his hand was hanging there limply.

He growled in pain, but this seemed to arouse his ferocity - like a real angry bull, Balboa raised his left hand again with red eyes.

General Dai Guan stopped the hand halfway, very gently.

For a moment, there was silence, only the sound of Balboa's breathing and his blood dripping to the ground.

"Calm down, good Captain—"

His so-called good captain responded with a kick, but of course, pitting flesh against living metal did him no good.

Balboa groaned, stumbled back several meters, and fell to the ground holding his legs. He panted for a few seconds, and actually propped himself up with his left hand, stood on one foot, and jumped towards Zandrick.

With each jump, more blood spurted from the wound, but he did not stop. When he arrived in front of Zandrek, he had become a human figure covered in sweat and blood.

His face was completely distorted, making him look like he had no human intelligence at all, but only bestiality and ferocity.

Staring into his eyes, the crowned general slowly shook his head.

"Stand back, Obiang." He suddenly ordered, his tone extremely authoritative. "Do not harm this man."

The whistling sound stopped at Balboa's back. He looked back belatedly and found that the guard who had appeared at the banquet was slowly retracting the huge blade.

The captain jumped around and rushed towards him without hesitation, but the guard's figure had disappeared like ripples on the water.

He missed and fell to the ground, struggling with all his might to stand up again.

Zandrick sighed quietly, walked to his side and slowly sat down.

"Captain, to be honest, I envy you. In my opinion, you are a very happy person. You know why you are fighting, and you understand that your actions are meaningful. In other words, the same is true for your race and your empire."

Balboa forced himself to look up at the alien and said sternly: "Shut up! You damn alien, what do you know?"

The old general laughed generously: "I should have died long ago, but at least I know more than you, Captain! You are still stupid and don't understand the situation. You think your race and empire have perished, right? You are wrong, they are still alive and well!"

".What?"

"Yes, you heard it." Zandrek nodded at him. "And I won't repeat it again, you know, it's like rubbing salt into the wound for me."

He stood up and said nothing more. A green light flashed and Balboa fell into coma.

"Treat him, send him back to his cell - ah, by the way, Obiang, has the local lord agreed to sell us food?"

His guard stepped forward, lifted the bloodied captain from the ground, and then dutifully answered his master's questions.

"No." The guard replied in a stiff tone. "The local lord is Trazyn the Endless, and he has long since defected, sir. Besides, I don't think any lord who comes to guard this place will happen to bring a whole ship of food that can be eaten by humans."

Zandrek hesitated for a few seconds and replied, "Then we have to rely on Trazyn's inventory. He still has a lot of food left in the stasis field, right? I hope he won't think I'm a thief when the time comes. After all, I did it out of helplessness. Besides, who asked him to collect even food?"

"Understood, my Lord."

"You sound like you have something to say, Obiang."

"Yes, my lord."

"Well, go ahead."

"I don't understand why you would do this." The guard continued to answer in that stiff tone.

Xandrek gave a monotonous laugh.

"But I'm not breaking any laws by doing this, am I, Obian? I'm just a famous mad general, telling the history of the past to a young Necrontyr captain whom I admire very much."

"I want to know why," the guard insisted. "As far as I can remember, you've never done this before. I have to know the truth."

"What good would it do to you, my friend? Besides, it seems to me that what you have is not memory at all."

"How can you say that?" the guard asked in surprise.

"I just can, because it's not an insult. You know full well that I would never insult you."

The crowned general replied calmly, then turned and left, leaving behind only a calm but meaningful remark.

"But if you really want to know, come to me after you have dealt with Captain Balboa - I will explain it to you in detail. You have my promise, Obiang, my old friend."
-

Cato Sicarius put on a protective half-helmet, strode to the edge of the duel pit, and then jumped in.

There was a lot of noise all around, and the stands were filled with people from all walks of life, but he didn't care about it. Now, the only thing in his ears was the words his company commander told him before he went on stage.

"Forget it, Sicarius. I heard your opponent is very strong."

What do you mean, forget it if it doesn't work, Captain? Am I so bad in your eyes? I just won three games in a row!
Sicarius came to his corner, full of anger, holding a blunt sword, his oiled muscles gleaming under the fluorescent lights, making him look like a nimble hunting beast.

But his enemy had not yet arrived, and was walking slowly along the yellow sand.
Looking up, it was only then that Sicarius realized that he had actually known his new opponent for a long time.

"Hello, Brother Mephisto." He called in a deep voice.

The Blood Angels' Librarian-apprentice leaped straight into the dueling pit. Like Sicarius, he was smeared with grease and oil paint as per tradition, but he wore no helmet.

It has been more than half a month since they set out from Terra, but the exchanges between the chapters have never stopped and have even become more formal.

At first, it was just a few idle battle brothers playing with each other, but more and more people began to fill the audience, from officers to company commanders, to auxiliary soldiers who heard the news, and finally even the two Primarchs.
At this point, no matter which regiment the soldiers were from, they found that they had no way out. They had to correct their attitude and treat this conference with a war mentality.

Sicarius was one of them. Not only did he learn the tradition of binding weapons and wrists with chains from the Black Templars, he also got two or three unusual moves from the Astral Knights and the Galactic Guards.

And now, the only opponents before him that he had not yet defeated were the Blood Angels.

However, the think tank apprentice standing in front of him did not seem to value this exchange conference as much as he did.

Even though both of them had already entered the duel pit, he was still bowing to Sicarius with a completely calm expression.

In that case
Sicarius narrowed his eyes slightly, raised his sword in front of him, returned the salute, took off his half-helmet and threw it out of the pit. Then he held the sword with both hands, strode forward, and stabbed out with the blunt sword in his hand.

Faced with such a plain stab, Mephisto chose to slightly raise the long sword in his hand and block the attack with the blade - Sicarius immediately turned his feet and twisted his waist upon seeing this, his muscles bulged, and he growled, turned his wrist to the side, stepped forward, exerted force again, turned his wrist to the side, and was about to deliver another stab.

He had learned this move from an Astral Knight battle-brother, who had nearly defeated him with it two days earlier.
Sicarius was confident that even if his opponent was not knocked to the ground by this move aimed at the throat, he would at least be in a much more embarrassed state.

But things did not develop as he expected - Mephisto still stood in the same place, the long sword in his hand moved back slightly, and then reversed the second stab.

Then he disappeared from Sicarius' sight.

"Excuse me," the Blood Angel said politely.

The world before Sicarius fell into darkness.

In the private room at the top of the stands, Robert Guilliman, who had been smiling, suddenly frowned, and it was not until several seconds later that he uttered a word.

"You, the offspring"

"How is he?" Sanguinius asked expectantly. "Is he good?"

Guilliman turned to his brother and asked sternly, "Tell me honestly, Sanguinius, how many years did he serve?"

"It was only fourteen years at most. What about Cato Sicarius? How many years did he serve?"

"Eleven years." Guilliman replied in a deep voice, raised the glass in his hand, and drank it all in one gulp.

Sanguinius smiled and brought out a new bottle of wine, removed the cork with two fingers, and poured a new glass for Guilliman.

A sweet scent spread in the air, and the expressions of the two Primarchs were seen by their respective guards.

The Ever-Victorious Army remained silent, as did the Holy Blood Guards, who only hoped that today's duel would end quickly. Otherwise, the two Primarchs, aroused by their desire to win, would most likely step into the duel pit themselves and fight again.
However, just half a minute later, the smile on Sanguinius's face disappeared.

"Wait." He suddenly stood up, his brows furrowed. "This is simply nonsense! How could he do this?"

Guilliman raised his hand to hold him, trying to persuade him kindly, but he couldn't stop smiling.

"Don't be impatient, brother. Have you forgotten what he did in the past? Maybe he just wants to guide your think tank apprentice."

"No, I have to-wait, why is he already taking off his clothes and jumping in?"

Sanguinius stared at the screen in the box with wide eyes, looking extremely incredulous, while Robert Guilliman laughed out loud, as if he had seen something quite interesting.

"Who do you think is going to win? Huh? Bro?" he asked in a very pleasant tone.

He received an angry stare, followed by a snatch - Sanguinius snatched the wine glass from his hand and poured the wine back into the bottle.

"Drink your own Ultramar wine!" snorted the archangel.

(End of this chapter)