Chapter 73 The New War in the Webway

Vane’s words plunged the entire strategium into absolute silence. In the history of the Imperium, no one had ever dared to issue such a monumentally arrogant, universe-conquering declaration.

The three Primarchs stared at Vane in sheer shock.

Forefather… we asked you to give a pre-crusade speech, not declare war on the entire cosmos! Are you seriously planning to wage war against the entire universe?!

But after a split-second of shock, the Primarchs simultaneously realized a profound truth. Mortals could never achieve such an impossible feat. But the Forefather wasn’t a mortal. He was the one who wielded the very rules of reality.

“Crusade! Make humanity glorious again!”

Sanguinius was the first to raise his fist and roar the battle cry, with the Lion and Guilliman instantly following suit.

With the three Primarchs leading the charge, the stunned silence shattered. A tidal wave of deafening cheers erupted from the assembled commanders.

“Crusade! Make humanity glorious again!”

“Crusade! Make humanity glorious again!”

The roaring chants rolled through the strategium in endless waves. Every single commander, from Lord Generals to Chapter Masters, was completely swept up in the absolute frenzy, their faces flushed red as they screamed at the top of their lungs. Even the usually cold, calculating Tech-Priests of the Mechanicus were infected by the sheer fanaticism, their vocal emitters blaring the chant at maximum volume.

Watching the spectacle, Eldrad, Yvraine, and the rest of the Aeldari felt a genuine shudder run down their spines. They had to admit, when humanity fully embraced its fanaticism, the sheer, suffocating pressure they exerted was utterly terrifying.

“Let the war begin! Sweep the Webway clean!” Vane shouted, thrusting his fist into the air. “Wherever the xenos tread, humanity shall tread as well!”

“War!”

“War!”

The crowd roared back, their collective voices echoing like thunder, pouring every ounce of their zeal into the cry.

The moment Vane concluded his speech, the gears of the Imperial war machine violently shifted into overdrive. The massive armada amassed in the Macragge system had already completed its resupply operations. As the captains returned to their bridges with the kill orders, they immediately fired up their plasma drives. The void ignited with the blinding brilliance of thousands of thrusters, burning as bright as a cluster of newborn suns.

The colossal expeditionary fleet surged forward with apocalyptic momentum, broadcasting a singular, undeniable truth to the galaxy: the absolute supremacy and invincible might of humanity.

The Webway, an ancient labyrinth forged by the Old Ones, spanned the entire galaxy. There was even a stable Webway gate located within the Macragge sector, hidden on the fringe world of Laphis. The crusade fleet simply had to reach Laphis orbit to breach the labyrinth.

Under the precise guidance of Eldrad and the Aeldari Farseers, the Webway gate of Laphis flared to life, revealing the ancient architecture of the Old Ones to human eyes. A glowing, impossible thoroughfare materialized before them—a dimensional route heavily shielded from the Warp, plunging deep into the swirling, kaleidoscopic depths of the Empyrean.

The Webway was in a state of constant, fluid motion, shifting and reconfiguring itself with a dazzling complexity that completely defied the comprehension of the human mind.

Standing on the bridge of the flagship, the Macragge’s Honour, the three Primarchs gazed at the glowing portal. A second later, they turned in perfect unison to look at Vane, who was casually lounging on a command throne.

“Forefather, give the order.”

Vane nodded. “Take us in.”

With those words, a conflict of unprecedented scale officially commenced—a war so cataclysmic that the sheer ripples of its onset triggered terrifying, galaxy-spanning Warp storms.

Deep within his Realm of Brass, Khorne suddenly felt an absolute surge of raw power. A future conflict of unimaginable scale and unbridled brutality had just been locked into destiny, and the sheer volume of anticipated slaughter was already buffing the Blood God. Billions of daemons shrieked into the void. In their frenzied visions, they caught glimpses of a terrifying, blood-soaked future where gods would fall, and they would all meet an apocalyptic end.

—

The Webway was shrouded in dense, ethereal fog.

As the colossal Imperial warships tore through the labyrinth, their sheer mass churned the fog, leaving massive, swirling vortices in their wake. The Aeldari Farseers were distributed across the fleet, acting as the fleet’s Navigators. Navigating the Webway blind was the second most suicidal act in the galaxy—right behind trying to navigate the deep Warp without a Gellar Field. The labyrinth was constantly shifting; a single wrong turn meant being hopelessly lost in an eternal, inescapable maze.

Just look at Jaghatai Khan… the guy chased the Drukhari into the Webway ten thousand years ago and still hasn’t found his way out.

Every so often, the fleet would pass through massive junction nodes, revealing breathtaking, ancient Aeldari cities left behind from the empire’s golden age. These cities were entirely grown from wraithbone and psycho-crystal, featuring soaring spires, grand cathedrals, sprawling temples, and massive open-air amphitheaters.

“Is this the grand design our father abandoned the Great Crusade for?” Sanguinius murmured, staring out the viewport at the impossibly massive Webway thoroughfare and the ancient, pristine cities, genuinely awe-struck by the sheer prosperity and might of the ancient Aeldari Empire.

Standing nearby, Eldrad felt a swell of quiet pride. See? We used to be a big deal, too. We just… fell off a bit.

“No wonder father rushed back to Terra and delegated the crusade,” the Lion agreed, equally awed. “If humanity could fully control the Webway, we would never have to risk Warp transit ever again. The moment we achieved true independence from the Immaterium, human civilization would rocket to unimaginable heights of prosperity.”

“Magnus… Magnus, you absolute fool. Look at what you destroyed,” Guilliman gritted his teeth, his hands clenching into fists. “When we get back, I am going to shatter every bone in his body until he begs for the Emperor’s mercy.”

Currently, Magnus the Red had been completely stripped of his psychic powers and was locked inside a heavily reinforced bedrock cell on Macragge. The disgraced Daemon Primarch had officially been rebranded as Macragge’s most lucrative tourist attraction: ‘Magnus the Fool’.

“Stop dwelling on the tragedies of the past,” Vane said, cutting through their melancholy. “We are here to forge a new future. Magnus may have destroyed the Emperor’s grand design, but this time, he’ll be forced to watch humanity rise to absolute supremacy and witness the final twilight of the Dark Gods.”

“And your Forefather isn’t going to hoard all the glory. Eternally loyal to Imperium Secundus!”

Hearing the first half of the speech, the three Primarchs were genuinely moved, their hearts swelling with righteous zeal. But the second ‘Imperium Secundus’ left Vane’s mouth, all three of them simultaneously cringed, their faces twisting in utter exasperation.

Clearly, the Forefather is never going to let this go.

Whatever. We surrender. Let the galaxy burn. Our reputations, our loyalty—just burn it all.

Guided by Eldrad and the Farseers, the Imperial armada effortlessly navigated the treacherous, labyrinthine pathways, finally arriving at the outer edges of Commorragh.

Commorragh was born during the absolute apex of the ancient Aeldari Empire. It was a hyper-massive, impossible metropolis. Due to its incredibly vital strategic location, no single faction within the Aeldari Empire had ever managed to secure total control over it; they merely maintained a tense, heavily armed balance of power.

When the Aeldari Empire partied itself into oblivion and birthed Slaanesh, a faction of paranoid nobles had already fled into the Webway, using the dimension’s natural shielding to block Slaanesh from devouring their souls. Commorragh became the primary refuge for these survivors, causing its population and physical size to violently bloat to incomprehensible proportions.

Despite the cataclysmic Fall of their empire, these refugees learned absolutely nothing. In fact, because their souls were constantly, agonizingly draining away to Slaanesh, they doubled down. They engaged in even more extreme, depraved hedonism, raiding the entire galaxy for slaves and refining the art of torture to an absolute science. They harvested the raw agony and despair of their victims to temporarily patch the holes in their own souls.

In the 41st Millennium, Commorragh was no longer just a city. It was the literal definition of Hell. Merely hearing the name ‘Commorragh’ was enough to reduce anyone who knew the truth into a trembling, terrified mess.

Over millennia of unchecked expansion, Commorragh had violently annexed neighboring Webway cities and empty dimensional real estate, mutating into a sprawling, multi-dimensional mega-complex linked to countless satellite realms. These satellite realms were fiercely defended territories controlled by powerful Kabals, serving as the staging grounds for their sickening, depraved rituals.

The Imperial crusade fleet had arrived directly at one of these satellite realms, currently under the dominion of the Kabal of the Black Rose.

This specific Kabal had committed a particularly horrific atrocity against the Imperium in the year 394 of the 41st Millennium. They had launched a massive raid on an Imperial world but were successfully repelled by the devastating firepower of the 346th Cadian Armoured Regiment. Furious at being humiliated by ‘mon-keigh’, the Drukhari infiltrated the world’s deepest mining shafts and planted master-crafted void-mines near the planet’s core, completely detonating the entire world and slaughtering billions in an instant.

“Alright, give these Dark Aeldari freaks a full broadside of orbital bombardment. Let these rats know that humanity has come to collect,” Vane ordered decisively.

This is a massive void-war. Who the hell cares about ground tactics? Bomb them into the stone age first, ask questions later.

—

The headquarters of the Kabal of the Black Rose was a towering, pitch-black spire heavily adorned with barbed spikes and jagged blades.

Archon Kh’miel lounged lazily on his throne, swirling a goblet of blood-red wine as he enjoyed a meticulously composed symphony of agony orchestrated by a Master Haemonculus.

More than a dozen humans—men, women, and children—were strapped to complex torture racks, their flesh methodically sliced and flayed by razor-sharp surgical blades. Their constant, agonizing screams filled the hall. By precisely manipulating the pitch and tone of each victim’s screams through varying degrees of torment, the Haemonculus had turned their agony into a rhythmic, horrifyingly beautiful musical instrument. This sickening practice was considered standard, entry-level artistry for any aspiring Haemonculus.

Bound to an adjacent rack was an Imperial Commissar. His eyelids had been surgically removed, forcing him to watch as the citizens of the Imperium were reduced to xenos playthings. He roared in raw, unadulterated fury. Feeling the Commissar’s burning, hateful gaze, the assembled Drukhari nobles just threw their heads back and laughed.

Yes, hate us! Hate us with all your pathetic little heart, mon-keigh! Because that is literally all you can do!

Struck by a sudden whim, Archon Kh’miel took a sip of his wine and strolled over to the agonizingly bound Commissar.

“Your decaying, pathetic Imperium cannot save you, little insect. Just lie there and savor the absolute desp—”

Before the Archon could even finish his villain monologue, a deafening, apocalyptic explosion ripped through the air, violently shaking the entire towering spire.

“What’s happening?!”

The Drukhari nobles in the banquet hall scrambled to their feet, genuine panic flashing across their arrogant faces.

Kh’miel sprinted to the massive viewport. The first thing he saw was his entire docking port engulfed in raging plasma fires. The second thing he saw was a colossal, twenty-kilometer-long Imperial battleship looming in the void.

Am I hallucinating?! Am I still asleep?! What is a human warship doing in the Webway?!

—

OR