Warhammer 40K: System Error, I Summoned the Arch-Traitor!

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"If you can see this, Mr. Trazyn, this is the only thing I can do for you."

Kaelen murmured the words to himself, drew the Mind Scarab from inside his coat, and set it gently on his shoulder.

Its faint green glow pulsed against his pauldron, quiet and steady, like a pocket-sized recorder faithfully capturing everything that was about to happen.

Kaelen knew Trazyn the Infinite was watching from the other end, and loving every second of it.

A clone versus the original. Even Trazyn's museum probably didn't have footage like this.

On the battlefield, the Fallen Serpent turned his gaze toward the clone with the ease of a man who had already decided how this would end.

His voice was lazy with pleasure.

"Yes. I have come, my cloned 'brother.'"

He stretched the word out, letting it drip with mockery.

"I must give Fabius Bile his due. You are the most perfect of all his clones, I'll admit that much. Face, mind, bearing — identical to what I once was."

He tilted his head. Dangerous light flickered in his violet eyes.

"But we have walked very different roads since then, haven't we, brother?"

The Phoenician's grip tightened on his blade.

Inside his chest, two things warred.

Fear, because the being across from him was stronger, and could kill him.

Self-loathing, because he was only a copy, and the one standing opposite was the true owner of the name Fulgrim.

They coiled around his heart like twin serpents, cold and lethal.

But the Phoenician did not let fear win.

He knew what lived deeper than either of those feelings. Something the serpent across from him had long since cut out of himself.

Love.

And love cannot be conquered.

"Look at what you've become, brother." The Phoenician's voice trembled. "Do you feel no regret?"

"Regret?" The Fallen Serpent spread all four arms wide and let out a long, satisfied exhale.

"I have tasted the forbidden fruit of perfection. That sweetness is everything I ever chased." His gaze slid back to the clone, and what lived in his eyes was contempt edged with pity.

"You have never tasted it. I feel sorry for you, brother."

He glided one step forward. His serpentine tail carved a lazy winding line through the scorched earth, and his voice went soft and sweet, coated in honey over rot.

"Join me. I will show you every ecstasy this galaxy has to offer. Why spend yourself on hollow loyalty to a father who has been nailed to his throne and forgotten? Follow your desires. Embrace the eternal carnival. Put down your blade, submit to me, and perhaps I'll be generous enough to find you a decent position." A laugh followed, warm and musical. "Ha. Hahaha."

Every syllable rang like a perfectly tuned string. The sound pressed against the minds of everyone present.

Koz's brow tightened. Kaelen felt a brief wave of dizziness roll through his skull.

But the Phoenician stood straight. He looked directly into his fallen original's eyes.

There was no contempt in his gaze. No anger. Only something purer and colder than either, scorn that had burned away every lesser emotion and hardened into something unbreakable.

The scorn of a man who had looked into every crack in himself, every fear, every weakness, and still chosen to stand. Directed at a wretch who had fallen all the way to the bottom and was still pleased about it.

"How utterly pathetic you are."

His voice wasn't loud. It landed like ice fracturing underfoot.

"You failed our father. Failed humanity. Failed your Legion and your sons. Failed Koz."

He glanced at the Night Lord beside him, just for a moment, then locked back onto the Fallen Serpent.

"And failed him."

Ferrus's face surfaced in his mind.

The ugly Gorgon. His beloved. His other half. The brother who had crossed blades with him at the forge for the joy of it, who had stood beside him between battles and talked about the pursuit of perfection in that blunt, unhurried way of his.

Those silver iron hands. That still gaze. That man of iron who never had the words but always had the proof.

A flame the Phoenician had never felt before ignited in his eyes. Grief had gone in and forged it into something harder.

The Fallen Serpent's expression finally shifted.

"Him?"

His voice snapped upward in pitch. All four arms moved with sudden, irritable energy.

"You mean Ferrus? He was nothing. A mediocrity who resented talent he could never match. I am the only perfection. He was the ugly Gorgon, how dare you place him beside me!"

His tail cracked against the ground, throwing up a spray of gravel. Then he forced himself back into that languid, cruel smile.

"Love can be conquered. Family can be discarded. And loyalty," he leaned forward, violet eyes fixed on the clone, his voice dropping into something thick and low, "can always be bought."

"Name your price, clone. What would it take to purchase your betrayal?"

"There is something."

Clean. Quiet. Certain.

The words left the Phoenician's mouth like a blade clearing its scabbard.

Koz snapped his head around. Behind those eyes long accustomed to darkness, something unreadable flashed through.

Further back, Kaelen went still for a beat, his fist tightening without thinking.

The Fallen Serpent's smile bloomed wider.

"Oh? Tell me."

"This."

The Phoenician pulled in one slow breath.

Then his presence detonated.

"I want you dead!"

His blade leveled at the Fallen Serpent's throat.

His chest heaved. Every word that came out was torn from somewhere deeper than anger.

"Love cannot be conquered! Family can be unbreakable! Loyalty can hold! All of that is still possible, and you have none of it. No one loves you anymore, Fulgrim."

A beat of silence.

Then he declared himself.

His voice rang out across the entire battlefield, cutting through the poison mist and the gun smoke, clear enough for every Imperial soldier to hear every syllable.

"I am Fulgrim! A cloned gene-primarch crafted by Fabius Bile, but I remain a loyal son of the Emperor! The Phoenician of Chemos! And today, I swear to bring judgment upon the Fallen Serpent!"

The blade tore through the air. The Phoenician launched himself like a bolt of violet lightning.

Koz said nothing. He only smiled, sharp and dark. His Lightning Claws powered to full output, and he threw himself at the enemy right behind his brother.

The Fallen Serpent's laughter cracked upward into something close to a shriek.

All four arms spread wide at once. He met them both head-on. Sinister violet light and cold silver sword-radiance slammed together in midair with a sound like the world splitting open.

Behind him, the Phoenix Guard charged at the same instant, crashing into the Imperial Astartes. Bolter fire and chainsword-howl tore through the air and swallowed the battlefield whole.

---

On another front, Mathieu's war-train was pushing deeper into hell.

"He is with us!" Mathieu stood on top of the train, his vestments cracking in the foul wind.

His voice carried through the loudspeakers to every corner of the battlefield, to every Sister of Battle, every Guardsman, every fanatical believer in the press.

"The Emperor is with us!"

He kept shouting. His voice had gone raw, nearly shredded, but every word still burned with the same heat.

Sisters guarded the train's flanks with bolters and chainswords. Guardsmen poured las-fire into the surging tide of plague zombies. And those who had nothing, no weapons, no armor, nothing at all, threw themselves into the enemy with bare hands, with teeth, with fingernails, tearing a path forward for the train with whatever they had.

Those infected by the plague fell. The ones behind them stepped over their bodies and kept moving.

No one retreated. No one hesitated.

On a small ridge not far away, Novamarines armor provided fire support. But Nurgle's forces had no end. Plague zombies and daemons poured from every patch of rotting ground in swarms, and the corruption they breathed didn't just eat flesh, it stripped the metal hulls of armored vehicles down layer by layer until there was nothing left but scrap.

One troop transport dissolved in the poison mist mid-advance. The driver liquefied inside the cockpit. The vehicle lost control, crashed into the ruins at the roadside, and never moved again.

Every step forward cost someone.

The fallen warriors rotted fast. Pale mushrooms and white creeping vines burst from their skin. Swarms of flies poured out from their mouths and noses, thick and droning, like heralds of death.

But Mathieu was untouched. Venom that could dissolve an adult into a puddle in seconds splashed across his face. He wiped it off with one hand, barely pausing, and kept shouting.

His face held something that couldn't have been faked. A holiness. A joy that came from somewhere beneath skin and bone.

"He is with us! We will save His sons! We will save humanity!"

"Throne above."

A Novamarine named Justinian muttered it low. He was a veteran born ten thousand years ago, and what he was seeing was outside the edges of everything he understood.

"He's completely unharmed. I watched that venom — the kind that kills a mortal in seconds — hit him in the face. And he just wiped it away."

"This is the Warp, brother."

The old warrior Paris said it quietly, steady as bedrock.

"The Emperor is protecting him. Believe it or not — there it is."

He worked the bolt, chambered a fresh round, and looked back toward the ruined hospital ahead. The stench of corruption rolled off it in waves. Nurgle's Cauldron was somewhere inside. They had to reach it.

"We need to destroy that cauldron fast." Paris's voice went out through the comms to every Novamarine. "If we don't, Lord Guilliman's plan falls apart. And the primarchs will be in danger."

The war-train ground over a still-twitching Nurgle daemon's corpse and kept pushing deeper into the ruins.

The road ahead narrowed. The enemy thickened. Mathieu's voice never stopped.

That invisible light around him held steady on this plague-eaten ground like a lamp that simply refused to go out.

He didn't know that observation equipment across the entire Imperial fleet was recording him. He didn't know his image was already becoming something like legend in the eyes of countless Imperial soldiers. He didn't know that in the deepest reaches of the Warp, the Master of Mankind upon the Golden Throne was watching all of this through his eyes.

He only knew that the God-Emperor was with him.

He only needed to reach the cauldron.

And then finish what he came to do.

➤ Next: Battle of the Demigods

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