Perhaps half of the wounded White Templars inside the command sanctum also recovered, and returned to their command modules and pict-screens to coordinate the battle.

"...The gene-seed!" One of them yelled in panic, just as I detected the invisible Tyranid creature attacking the Apothecaries guarding the Chapter's life blood.

I waited for my T-engine to ping, and then stepped through the Tesseract and beheaded the next Norn Emissary just as the thing unleashed its psychic blast. I grabbed the head and stepped back, before some angry Templar started shooting at me too.

Yes, a few canisters of gene-seed might have gone missing, but that was the risk of attracting my attention.

"Pef, guard the Lord Commander! This isn't over!" my wife demanded in a wary voice, while enveloped in the white light of her biokinetic healing.

Fine! It wasn't like I had an entire Crusade Fleet to oversee, and a critical space battle to win. Now I had to babysit some idiot Noble?

I located Commander Leontus and stepped next to him, to find his horse fighting yet another Tyranid Emissary. Yes, this guy had a horse called Konstantin, and he kicked ass. With his hooves.

My T-engine was skipping beats again, so I loaded a Darkstar bolt and just shot the thing. The Tyranid, not the horse. The horse was great.

Unlike that cheater Ahriman, the Emissary just died. And then the horse stepped on its head a dozen times to make sure. It didn't get any more dead, but a horse wasn't very smart.

"Good job, Konstantin! You saved my life again!" the Commander praised his horse while ignoring me.

I collected the deadly bolt into a blackstone case and returned to my ship. Then remembered about Semnai and moved him to the Apothecary to get stiched up. The other bodyguard, Alaric was just fine. One day I might investigate him, and why he never got wounded even once in the past 1000 years, but for now he was guarding Valyene. Remembering how I found Velyene the first time, blind and missing an arm, Alaric seemed to prioritize his own safety first. Hmm, I probably should not investigate, and get both of them killed. My Inquisitor wife was rather the opposite of a Saint. Plus they both had a tree tattoo on the left shoulder, which likely meant something deadly that would get me killed or worse.

Instead I just spectated the system-wide battle, and compared my nice Ion Beamers with the tungsten auto-cannons made by the Blade, and found them...rather identical in combat stats. Except the Ion guns didn't use ammo, so I won.

'We used to have flash-forging magazines for our guns, you know? Less so for primitive autocannons, but rail and coil-guns do have much higher projectile speed.' the Blade spoke without prompt, and sent a Magna-rail cannon template to my implant.

'I still don't like consumable munitions.' I argued with a tired voice.

'One of those three Hive Ships must have the Norn Queen. Orks again?' the AI continued on a different track, while highlighting the three targets on the main screen.

Much farther away, and beyond the burning Tyranid ships that got caught in my temporal blast, there was the Triad Line or three Star Forts meant to block the Warp points into the system.

And each of them was being attacked by a Hive Ship, circling the defense perimeter and testing the range of the macro-cannons, or the reserves of macro-shells.

Curiously, I also had three Castigator Titans, armed with a gigantic Power Fist each.

A few Nova Mines first to clear the space of escort bio-ships and pesky gargoyles, then my battleship-size Titans got displaced on top of each Hive Ship.

The good thing of my debatable Sanctum visit, about half of the Tyranid Fleet was burned alive, while many landed Tyranids were still spasming from losing so many synaptic creatures.

Not all of them, and even without Hive Mind control some Tyranids became feral but were still hungry and dangerous. But overall, a decent blow.

Maybe I should raise horses? Konstantin seemed quite deadly.

Canis growled at me, somehow reading my mind.

Or maybe he was upset I didn't take him with me.

Bianca punched a few times to weaken the Hive Ship's carapace, then fired the Titan's Plasma Annihilator into the crater. And then jumped inside the big hole and began firing her secondary Volcano Cannons. In a short minute, the Hive Ship exploded in a shower of gore and blood, while the Titan got painted red.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"Hive Ship smoked, Father! These things are much softer on the inside." she declared in a proud voice.

"I am Smoking Hot, not you" another Princeps daughter called Tania 'Smoking Hot' Lancefire yelled in, probably fake, outrage while burning the Hive Ship from one end to another, starting from the tail.

My third daughter simply broke the monster's jaw and forced her way into the giant maw, then grabbed something inside and pulled, ripping out organs and holding a captive Norn Queen in the Titan's power fist. "I want to speak with it, Olivia. I'll get you another gift instead." I spoke while capturing the giant Norn Queen and holding it in my labyrinth.

Binding the creature in adamantium and blackstone, I entered the tesseract myself and stood eye to eye with the creature. "I am Pef Lancefire. I was there in the Garden, when Nurgle was shattered. Remember me now?" I asked in a calm voice.

The Norn Queen faked being illiterate, but I knew better. The genestealers had been absorbing trillions of lives and memories, which is how this Queen knew who to attack and where. Plenty of those lives had been Space Marines, after all. There was even a theory among the Ordo Xenos that Hive Tyrants were created from Space Marine biomass. Not a mainstream theory, but I agreed with it. Plenty of the creatures in the galaxy gained their mutated reflections in new Tyranid organisms.

"Sceeee!" the Norn Queen screamed.

"Anyways, there will be your chance in about 9 months. Attack the blue molusk in the Warp, while it is weak. I'll collect more Hive Fleets and send them into the Maelstrom when is time." I continued in a level voice.

Something deep and intelligent flashed behind the Queen's many eyes, and I knew I was heard.

"And now, because your Emissary wounded my offspring, I have to wound yours. Let's say, a meltagun first? Right in the belly, of course. " I spoke in the same mild voice, while taking out a meltagun and burning a hole through the Norn Queen.

The Queen remained silent, while the alien eyes watched me with cold hate.

"There, there. It's only a flesh wound. I'll heal it right back, and we can try a new weapon. I have thousands of them, and plenty of time." I explained in a polite voice, while turning back time and taking out a Volkite gun. Being cooked from inside out should be rather painful, probably. Clusters of eggs spilled rows of ovipositor orifices along its flanks, fluid filled depressions on its upper surface writhed with maggot-like larvae, fetal sacs hang like ripe fruit from umbilical branches...and they all burned like dried grass.

I make a poor Inquisitor, sadly. After a dozen weapons, I got bored, especially as the Norn Queen was still silent.

Anyways, a dozen stellar time-shifts meant a dozen extra temporal sunblasts, incinerating every bio-ship in range.

"You've been a great test subject, dear Queen. But now we must part. My Ordo Xenos wife will want to return the favour too. Can't help you now, since she's both a Lancefire and an Inquisitor. You will die in great pain..." I mused in a thoughtful voice, and turned around.

"...Wait." the alien creature spoke in clear Low Gothic. Even had an accent, but I wasn't an expert to locate it.

"Hmmm. I do have a Drukhari Blast Pistol I haven't tested yet." I realized in mild surprise.

"You killed my Fiend of Hag Rift. You captured and painted many of my children as your Xeno Auxilia. Dragged a planet with my ships. You play with my swarm like toys. Lancefire...your mind is like a bored god. And now you dare to plot against the Architect in the Warp? That broken C'tan in your glove is not enough to match me, even less the Architect." the Queen spoke, but not for herself.

Blam! The darklight fragment struck the Norn Queen in the belly, and ruptured all her organs.

"Remember the name. Pef Lancefire. It will be the last thing you hear before you die, especially if you hurt another Lancefire." I claimed with a grin, then stepped out of the labyrinth and froze the time inside the Norn cell.

Spreading my dimensional senses wide, I began collecting the troops and sending them each to their barracks and repair bays, while organizing the fleet for immediate departure.

I left the poor Krieg soldiers behind, as there would be more clean up duty in the system, but if the Hive Mind spoke, this meant there was something important in play.

Primarch Corax had excellent instincts.