Warhammer: Hail to the Void Lords!.

Chapter 951, 08.950: 'Father and Son'

Deep inside the building, time seems to stand still.

This place was once a temple of technology, but now it is a forgotten graveyard.

The enormous vaulted ceiling hangs high in the darkness, forming an artificial night sky that weighs heavily on everyone's shoulders.

Captain Harvey quickened his pace, his heavy Conqueror-class officer power armor making a slight scraping sound in the silence.

The scouts quickly dispersed with a silent understanding, deploying tactical formations within the ancient building, which resembled a giant metal coffin, searching for any possible clues.

Rows of long-dormant bureaucratic thinkers stood like tombstones in the darkness, their towering silhouettes forming giant stone pillars that supported the dome of this technological mausoleum.

Covered in a thick layer of dust, like a shroud, it concealed the sacred knowledge they once possessed.

The silence here is a blasphemy. In this temple that once echoed day and night with binary hymns and the hum of engines, it is now so quiet that you can hear your own breathing and heartbeat.

The beams of light from the tactical lights on the scouts' helmets crisscrossed in the darkness, sweeping over the abandoned cables hanging like spiderwebs and the ancient rune displays that flickered with their last glimmer of light.

"Captain, here."

Lieutenant Vox's voice, calm and clear, broke the suffocating silence as it came through the internal communicator.

Harvey looked in the direction of the sound and saw Lieutenant Vox squatting beside a pool of dried, blackened blood.

The pool of blood stood out starkly against the cold metal floor, like an ominous symbol drawn in blood.

The bloodstains had lost all moisture, and the edges were thin and brittle, like dried resin.

Lieutenant Vox followed the trail of blood, his professionally trained eyes quickly spotting the crawling marks.

He circled around a massive control panel covered in extinguishing runes and found a corpse.

It was a man dressed in Cinnamon velvet. Judging from his gorgeous but blood-stained clothes, he must have been of noble birth and held a prominent position in life.

Now, this magnificent robe, a symbol of power, is torn and stained, clinging limply to his withered body, a truly ironic sight.

He lay helplessly against the back of the equipment, his eyes closed, his expression frozen in a moment of terror and pain, his jaw dislocated from the extreme agony.

The blood in his body had long been drained, and his skin and flesh showed signs of dehydration and shriveling, like dried leather.

Lieutenant Vox noticed a horrific wound on the man's back.

It wasn't a gunshot wound or a knife wound. The flesh around the wound had an unnatural, black, crystalline, and festering appearance, as if the flesh itself had been reconstructed at the molecular level by a malevolent force into some kind of crystal that shimmered with black light.

"It's a miracle that he survived being hit by a poison crystal weapon and still made it this far," Lieutenant Vox reported in a low voice over the radio.

He knelt on one knee and began searching every pocket of the body with swift and professional movements.

No.

No.

still none.

Every pocket was empty, containing nothing of the particular shape and weight he had expected.

Were they too late?
No, it's impossible.

His gaze was drawn to the corpse's clenched right fist.

The hand was clenched tightly due to stiffening after death, the knuckles were particularly prominent due to severe dehydration, and the skin was taut on the bones like withered tree bark.

The lieutenant tried to gently pry open the already stiff, shrunken, blackened fingers.

This process requires considerable strength and is accompanied by a tooth-grinding sound of bones grinding together and the faint cracking of dry tendons snapping.

The corpse's skin was cold and hard, like stone.

Suddenly, with a crisp snap, the corpse's index finger broke off cleanly due to excessive force, falling onto the metal floor with a soft clinking sound.

A core, shimmering with a faint internal light, emerged from the stiff palm.

However, this core is not a standard data tablet or information storage device.

It's more like an unpackaged, raw chip. It doesn't display any information on its own; it must be placed in a Decoder Thinker array to read its sacred data. And the Hell Vanguard's assault-type heavy-duty power armor happens to have a miniature version of the Decoder Thinker that the goddess just deployed.

Lieutenant Vox carefully picked up the core and placed it steadily into the portable reader built into his arm armor.

With a slight mechanical meshing sound and the click of the locking mechanism, the reader began to work.

On the display screen of his helmet's visor, lines of green high Gothic data began to flash, cascading down like a waterfall.

"+ Accessing core: Authentication sequence Ω-7+"

"+Verification passed...Start decoding+"

The speed of information flow is faster than imagined.

Massive amounts of data, like a flood bursting its banks, swept past the lieutenant's goggles.

Flashing tactical maps, encrypted supply lists, troop movement orders, and organizational charts of the Severo rebels were all mixed together, forming a torrent of information.

He immediately activated the built-in tactical auxiliary soul, a semi-sensory component connected to his nervous system, which began to perform preliminary screening and classification of data at superhuman speed.

Key information is highlighted with red runes, while irrelevant and redundant data is archived in gray.

"Captain," Lieutenant Vox's voice crackled through the team communicator, "Target acquired. Requesting instructions. Over."

Harvey was silent for a moment, then asked, "What's inside?"

"From a preliminary perspective, regarding the specific details of the Severus rebel invasion, the location of their invasion command post..." Lieutenant Vox paused, his auxiliary machine spirit having just marked a data stream with extremely high priority, "...and also, the complete movements of Aurelian Pompeius Severus, Severus's most famous and capable general, Severus XIII's cousin."

According to Astral Army intelligence, he is the only general in Severus capable of commanding large-scale military operations, and is specifically responsible for leading the war zones initiated by the Principality of Severus.

The intelligence included detailed operational plans for his next three rotations, the route of his command ship HMS Duke's Pride, and details of his personal security arrangements.

The lieutenant paused during his report, allowing the weight of the information to settle.

"If we can take him down, Severus's forces will lose a vital military pillar, their morale and confidence will suffer a heavy blow, and they may even lose the ability to launch an offensive in the short term."

Harvey took a deep breath, his voice tinged with realization and undisguised exhaustion. "I see. No wonder the Dark Eldar and the Severus rebels were so ruthless in their pursuit of this intelligence."

They are hunting down our command, and we are hunting them down.

He was very conflicted.

The original plan was to destroy the intelligence on the spot after it was found to prevent it from falling into the hands of any enemy.

But now, the value of this intelligence has far exceeded expectations.

The brothers shed so much blood to obtain this crucial intelligence. Wouldn't it be too much of a waste to destroy it now?

But if we don't destroy it now and instead take it away, no race in the entire galaxy is better at capturing, interrogating, and torturing than the Dark Eldar. If we don't destroy this intelligence now, it will be difficult to destroy it later if the situation worsens.

Ultimately, while being captured, the intelligence was also seized by the Dark Eldar and handed over to the traitor Severus, making the entire operation a complete and utter failure.

Henry Harvey could sense that he was at a critical juncture.

This decision will inevitably have a significant impact on the entire Battle of the Circus and the suppression of the Principality of Severus.

Everything will depend on his next decision.

If we could seize the swift advance, kill Aurelian Pompeii Severus, and then quickly recapture the entire southern front, how many Astronaut soldiers and civilians would survive this massive battle? How much of the God-Emperor's currency could be saved?

[What should I choose, Father? Will I make the same mistake you did...?] Harvey's heart was in turmoil.

The roar of the greenskins, the Consul's Guard who died in battle, the raided command post, the general who was killed by the greens and had his head cut off, his father...

He opened his eyes again very quickly.

The changes in existing sunk costs led Harvey to make his decision.

"Take it away. Present this intelligence to our commander."

(End of this chapter)