Warhammer: Start with a dog.

Interlude to Chapter 891: Animal Scenes from Halloween
“Wu——!!”

The one who rushed into the room shouting like a wild dog was none other than Lord Leman Russ, followed by a young man with a wry smile.

Of course, a collar was absolutely out of the question. Alaska Russ's furry body was covered by a new gray-blue chest and back brace bearing the insignia of the Sixth Legion. Rope? They were neighbors, why would they need rope!
Two groups of visitors met at the door of a librarian's house.

The Iron Army construction brothers from Fricks exchanged greetings with Mr. Bi next door.

The last two groups were then invited into the house by the cheerful (?) Mr. Ramizan.

A group of burly men and less burly men sat awkwardly in the living room.

There was a young man with gray hair and green eyes who had arrived earlier than them.

He was wearing a sweater woven with patterns of the Death Guard, Nurgle, Christmas trees, and strange, fat green reindeer, and casually left his slippers on the floor, curling up his long legs in a corner of the sofa.

Those who came in later could only see the young man's tightly furrowed and familiar brow, the shimmering charts and calculation codes flashing across the computer screen in front of him, accompanied by the rapid clatter of his keyboard.

I don't know how serious it is.

"Ah, you haven't met him yet. Let me introduce him. This is my stepfather's son, Mo Dongyue, who is my legal brother?"

Seeing Fricks's puzzled look, Ramizan smiled and introduced, "I only met him a few days ago at a family gathering... Don't let his quiet demeanor fool you, he's a really nice guy. He said he was working on his thesis at home today and could take care of Peturabo and the others for me, so I asked him to come over first. He was studying in England and only just returned this year... He's a PhD in biochemistry from Cambridge!"

Fricks and the others listened with twitching eyebrows.

"Let me point out two details of the errors."

The young man finally looked up from behind his bangs and the computer screen, revealing his true face.

The moment they saw his face and automatically associated it with the tall, withered, corpse-like half-face of its owner, almost everyone in the house except the owner felt an instant urge to run away.

Fortunately, the homeowner spoke up and suppressed the impulse—or perhaps it was because at the study door, a black and white Border Collie and a gray Alaskan Malamute silently stared at the people inside with their brown and blue eyes.

"What mistake, Xiao Mo?"

“I graduated from Trinity College, but you can add Cambridge University in front of it to distinguish me from other Trinity College graduates.”

"certainly……"

"And another thing." Those eyes, the color of slightly withered green buds, swept over the group of people in the room who dared not breathe. "I studied biopharmaceutical engineering, not biochemistry."

"Oh……"

"Of course." The young man, who exuded an aura of "I'm about to meet my deadline," raised his voice slightly, sounding weak and listless.

"This is the problem with the person who introduced me. When they recounted my introduction, they may have given you incorrect information. I feel it's necessary to stop this misinformation from continuing to spread."

"Oh, that's great, really impressive! ... Come on, have some tea first before we set off!"

The Iron Army members, already drenched in sweat under their coats, and Mr. Bi, who looked like he really wanted to run away, immediately surrounded the kind (?) homeowner as if granted a pardon and began praising everything about him, from his tea-making skills to the water he used.

After drinking three rounds of tea, the group went to the parking lot and drove to the street where the Halloween event was to be held, leaving behind a human (?) and a group of animals (?) whose numbers were gradually increasing.

----------

"great."

Peturabo said, "Go to the living room and sit down."

"Is the window open?"

"I'll open it." Mo Dongyue—the Pale King—rose, walked through the room, and opened the window.

"Ouch!"

With a vulgar curse, the myna, hoopoe, red-bellied squirrel, blue cat, black and white cat, and golden Maine Coon all jumped in from the water pipes and awning outside the window. Except for the bird and the squirrel, the three cats instinctively stretched out their paws and clung to the Pale King's clothes.

“I’m so angry! This is a sweater I brought back from Nottingham! I bought it in pounds! Pounds!”

"Unbelievable. When did you become so mercenary, Mortarian? It's just a sweater, is it really worth you lowering yourself to attack your own brother like this?"

"I never imagined that someone could be turned into such a fluffy creature as a Maine Coon and still be so annoying. It's truly unbelievable."

Mortarian gave the Maine Coon a cold look at the plump bell between its legs.

Conrad Coates, standing nearby, let out a sound that resembled the most cat-like snicker, as if he had seen some interesting future.

The golden Maine completely ignored his brother's words. He raised his huge tail, which was as big as a feather duster, and proudly began to survey the house, looking for a suitable place to be his throne, and commenting on the furniture that filled the room.

"This room is way too cramped!" Leon commented. "If our true forms were standing here, it would instantly become impossible to even walk through!"

"Don't talk nonsense. -- Why do you still have a Beijing accent? Have you been talking to a female cat from Beijing lately?"

His black and white brother struggled to resist the urge to pounce on the cat and retorted sarcastically.

"If our true form is standing here, it means that the goal we've been working towards has completely failed! Oh, right, that damned Stone is still locked up in his own house. Today, his master is hosting an event for Ramizann and the others, and they won't be back until after midnight, so someone hurry up and bring him over?"

"Can't you go? Aren't you good at driving?"

"Now that we have humans in human form like you, and humans have gained an upright form and grown ten fingers, it's time for us to do some work."

Peturabo was concise and to the point.

So Mortarian left grumbling, and a moment later, their seventh brother came in with short legs and began to nod to everyone.

“Excellent. Feralas? — Feralas? Are you there?”

An electronic response came from the surveillance camera.

"We are here."

"You connected to the zoo in Fulgrim, right?"

"Yes."

"What about the Vulcan family?"

“His speech might be a little unclear, but he can still understand our conversation—my module was upgraded again after September. So this time I managed to hack into his owner's robot vacuum cleaner through a different route.”

“Fantastic. Now all that’s left is the final Angron…” Peturabo turned to the two birds.

Clark nodded. "No problem, we'll take all the messages with us."

"It's a pity he still can't make it today," Dorn said. "Isn't he the only one missing today?"

"It's a real shame, but thankfully none of the things we're going to discuss today require his immediate feedback... It's a pity that his size prevents him from running out on his own."

“But thankfully Guilliman is among us today, isn’t he?” Leon raised his paw and stroked his beard.

“I’m still very happy to be here in person,” Blue Cat replied. “After all, this is one of the things I’m familiar with.”

"Now that everyone is here."

Peturabo watched as Mortarian drew the curtains.

“So, we’ve gathered here today,” Peturabo announced, “to verify one thing: now that Ramizann’s power continues to grow stronger, can we, through the successful appearance of Mortarion, influence the key nodes of ‘our universe’ that we want to influence—or, glimpse the ‘truth’ that we couldn’t know back then?”

“That sounds really great,” Magnus said. “So, what ritual are we going to use? —By the way, Mortalian, where’s your rabbit body?”

"He went back," the Pale King said succinctly.

“Huh? Without any warning?” Clarks asked.

“How did you handle the rabbit’s body? I mean, it’s weird.” Magnus frowned—if a hoopoe had eyebrows.

Leon immediately raised its tail.

"Wait! So that means there's a chance I can go back on my own?! Then I..."

“Yes. Appeared without warning, returned without warning,” Mortarian said, skillfully avoiding the question of what to do with the rabbit’s body.

"But I still can't control whether 'my' rabbit will appear here next time. Obviously, this is a different algorithm. And we don't know how it works yet."

"Just like why Peturabo was here in the first place. This is Patient Zero, the source."

The Pale King's gaze was fixed on the black and white Border Collie. "If he were to tell me the details of the cause and effect, I could deduce it from here..."

“I already said, I don’t know why I’m here either,” Peturabo said quickly.

"Let's try quickly and see if we can increase our influence and connections on the other side through his collection!"

"Wait! I thought we were gathered here to conduct some kind of magical ritual experiment? Psionic energy? Warp?"

Magnus flapped his wings, frantically trying to retrieve scraps of paper covered in notes. "I've prepared a vast collection of reading notes on the magic books here! From papyrus documents and rubbings of the Sun Obelisk to the latest core rules..."

“There is neither psionic energy nor warp here, Magnus. Sit back down.”

"Then what are we here?!"

The Primarch of the Fifteenth Legion shouted, "How could we possibly exist in a place without psionic or warp powers?! Are we even allowed to exist here?"

"wait……"

As Magnus questioned him, it seemed as if some invisible "crystal wall" in the room was broken.

Each Primarch could feel its own delicate thread of destiny from behind the veil being "hooked" by the tip of the broken "crystal wall".

"...As expected of you. It's you again." A vague, eerie voice came from the camera.

A few seconds later, the Primarchs in the room realized that it was an electronically synthesized voice produced by a program written by Ferrus, which read Vulcan's eyeballs.

"What's wrong with me!" Magnus cried out, his injury clearly showing his guilty conscience.

"Alright! Quickly, help me stabilize the surroundings! I hope things won't get out of control until Ramizann and the others return!"

Motalian silently joined Peturabo's high-speed computing team and connected his laptop to the host computer here.

Luo Jia had already begun skillfully picking up the chalk and sketching lines and patterns around the space to stabilize it.

"Come help me fill in the ash, I've already finished drawing the lines for this part."

The red-bellied squirrel grinned and stuffed a large bag of dust that smelled like a mixture of temples, Taoist monasteries, ancestral halls, and churches into Guilliman and Leon's arms.

Before Guilliman could display any intense, obvious emotion, he had already turned and jumped away.

Blue Cat stared at the squirrel's retreating figure for a few seconds with a complicated expression, but still joined Leon in filling the pattern on the ground with powder. For a moment, the only sounds in the room were the tapping of keyboards and the slight rustling of animal paws. They worked side by side, hand in hand, concentrating on their efforts.

The air wafted through the room, and the emotions in everyone's soul accumulated little by little.

"Good... at least we're still within the confines of this room. Things have stabilized. If this weren't Lamizan's study, the ironclad rule against supernatural beings after the founding of the nation would have scattered us all to who knows where."

Perturabo let out a long sigh and gave Magnus a stern look. "As a mage, you must understand the environment in which a mage casts spells!"

"Should we continue the experiment...?"

Guilliman glanced at the clock—he was worried that his grandmother would find out he had left without permission.

“Of course!” Peturabo exclaimed decisively. “Today is Halloween here. It’s just a holiday for them to have fun, but it’s a perfect opportunity for us. If we miss it, we’ll have to wait for the next important holiday.”

“It hasn’t been that long, actually…” Magnus muttered.

"Today, the power of Mortarion here reaches its peak, and as the oldest origin of the festival, tracing back to the ancient Celtic mythology of Albion, it is said that tonight, the boundary between the 'underworld' and the 'mortal world' will become blurred. That is to say..."

"Can 'ghosts' travel between the two sides?"

"Yes, that's the concept. So today is a very auspicious day."

"So, whose offspring should we choose first?

The Primarchs looked at each other in bewilderment.

Several people coughed at the same time, about to speak.

"Let the Iron Warriors handle it."

Peturabo had a calm, bushy eyebrow.

"Of these collections, apart from the Imperial Fist and the Black Templar, only my offspring are the most numerous."

“The Fist of the Empire is not afraid of sacrifice,” Dorn said bluntly. “Besides, I am not looking to compete with you.”

"Ah."

The Border Collie got up, jumped onto the desk, and looked at the collection behind the glass bookcase door.

"bring it on."

He pointed to one of the chess pieces, which was painted with silver and yellow-black warning stripes, and another chess piece next to it.

Mortarian wrapped the power in his palm, carefully opened the cabinet door, and then carefully took out the chess piece and placed it in front of Peturabo.

"Barabbas Danteok".

Peturabo looked up at Guilliman, whose expression was even more complicated.

"Don't worry. I have no intention of punishing or retaliating against him for this."

The border guard said that the commander, Mortarian, placed his hand on one piece and another.

“I hope to see him again in ten thousand years…in a different form than before—that way, it won’t be considered a breach of…the casual remark I made when I asked him to leave.”

The dog sighed.

“I now know that he believes that is my…wish.”

(End of this chapter)