Well, my original plans for Cadia were burned and the ash tasted quite bitterly.

No more Angron, to provoke the Chaos into mindless anger. No more daemon weapon, to kill whatever proved too difficult for standard weapons.

The only ace remaining was the Sounding Board, and the necklace tesseract that housed it.

However, with a single tesseract, and without my xeno auxiliaries, I was reduced to less aggressive tactics.

I could still move and deploy my own forces at will, but I could not risk my last tesseract by interacting with corrupted beings or engines. Not without solid walls of blackstone and Tyranid bio-titans to constrict the Warp effects.

It sucked, but I was still better off than most commanders in the galaxy could be. Even the tesseract vision alone was a gigantic help, as knowledge of the enemy disposition did allow a coherent strategy, by dispelling the fog of war.

As for weapons, I had the strongest weapons of the Imperium to use, from the Singularity and its Voidclaw gravity gun to the Black Lament and its Immaterium beam, and even Titans and Psi-Titans. Sisters of Silence, Blank Astartes and the Templar Psykologis teams formed the special forces, while my armor and heavy infantry Auxilia troops had a hundred times the firepower of normal Imperial Guard regiments.

I had pretty much everything I could want, except superior numbers.

However, I doubted the Chaos forces had that many forces remaining for use. I did sort of decimated their numbers over the decades, not only the invasion forces but even the Dark Forges and various Demon Worlds I could reach. I hit them behind the lines and burned the production facilities, and the effects of that should be massive even on galactic scale.

But...the Eye of Terror itself contained even more Demon Worlds and Hellforges and millions of Chaos marines. I had not managed to reach that far, and even Trazyn had barely managed to burn a single Hellforge at the edge of the Warp Rift, Xena II.

The stable corridor called the Cadian Gate included other Fortress Worlds like Belis_Corona or Agripinaa, and other Imperial worlds like Lelithar. That name seemed familiar to me, which was bad. Any memories I had of old books about the Black Crusades simply meant something bad would happen in that place.

There were some good news though. The Dark Angels and their Primarch were converging towards the Scarus_Sector to the north of Cadia, while the White Scars and Primarch Khan were approaching from the south, via Forge World Mordax. Over a hundred Astartes Chapters would be present, plus Mechanicus, Adepta Sororitas and countless regiments from the Astra Militarum and PDFs.

Over the holomap of the battlefield, Inquisitor Ramaeus simply waited with her eyes closed. Not sleeping, but instead diving into the future for omens and hints.

"Erebus. He's the one leading the traitor attacks." she revealed after her long psyker trance.

Well, considering who Erebus was, can't say I'm surprised. The guy was the architect of the Horus Heresy, and the one who turned Lorgar to Chaos.

"I'll take care of him, my dear." I answered with a confident voice.

She just smiled sadly. "Bravery is not a substitute for strength. You don't have to pretend, Pef. I can see you're not truly certain of this battle, unlike the other times we've fought together."

A few seconds later, Velayne tapped another planet on the holomap, marking it as lost. Urthwart, a world so often attacked that people lived in underground bunkers all the time, had finally fallen.

"Zombies of some kind. The astropathic messages are not clear." the Inquisitor whispered with a deep frown on her face.

I leaned back in my chair, and glanced at my fellow Princeps from the Ordo Sinister, called Albesalom. Didn't look much in the flesh, wiry and thin, but with Princeps it was mostly about willpower not muscles.

The Blank pilot just nodded. "I guess this time it won't be as fun. Any troops deployed on the surface could be lost to an orbital strike in minutes."

"What we need is some kind of protection aura, like the Saints can project over their troops. They call it the Inviolable Aura." I mused in a thoughtful voice.

Albesalom blinked at me then glanced at the Inquisitor with wary eyes. "And how would you manage that? Our Alpha psykers are not capable of it. Even if one of them might be a holy person, the ones on the left side are all savage, brutal beasts filled with anger and bloodlust. The darkness needs that to power the Psi-cannon."

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"I have some ideas." I said with a wry smile and jumped to my feet.

A minute later, I arrived at Sister Stern's quarters, to find her and Sister Darcy playing cards and giggling like school girls.

"Hello there. Mind if I join?" I demanded with a kind smile, and sat on the carpet in front of them.

"Only if you let me play with Canis again." Darcy demanded with puppy eyes.

I tried to resist. My willpower could restrain a Titan's Machine Spirit.

But those eyes...a minute later I just sighed, and picked up the cards. "Don't put your hand inside his mouth again. He ate a dozen Space Marines, hands and feet crunched like twigs." I warned her with a grim voice.

The girl didn't quite believe me, but it was very true. They were even Lamenters, if traitors.

Some hours later, Darcy returned to her room, and I shared a bottle of wine with the Demonifuge, while she spun tarot cards in mid-air.

A few glasses later, she leaned on my shoulder for support. "I'm going to die again, aren't I? The Emperor's Tarot is very certain of it." she murmured in a sad tone.

"Everyone dies, my dear. Some last longer than others, and some even come back. You think lamenting to a Lamenter, on board the Black Lament is fun?" I quipped and elbowed her gently.

"Hah! Your Chapter is quite famous for its misfortune, that's true enough. So why did you got me drunk? Wanna taste my pure body, my lord?" Ephrael proposed in a tentative voice, even pushing her chest out for emphasis.

"There's time enough for love. We'll get to that, one day. But no, what I want is your psyker abilities. I bet you'd like riding a Titan with me." I answered in a serious voice.

She turned to gaze into my eyes, electric currents swirling inside around the blue iris like a maelstrom of concentrated violence and wrath.

"Only if you let me sit in your lap." she demanded in a childish tone, and obviously copying Sister Darcy's perfect manipulation.

So I drew her into a hug, and groped her a little as thanks. "It's going to be great. We'll begin tests tomorrow, and see what psyker effects we can obtain together."

"Stay with me tonight..." the pretty Sister pleaded in a lonely voice.

I tried to resist. I really did. But my bleeding heart wouldn't let me.

Plus she did have a fabulous body.

The next day, we began working on controlling the psyker gestalt of the Psi-Titan, at the lowest setting possible. The fortress might be made of blackstone, but a Psi-Titan would still likely manage to breach the hull anyway.

Damned walkers were quite overpowered, even without my miracle girlfriend exceeding all reasonable limits and overcharging the Anima circuit with a dozen times the normal amount of psychic energy.

"I'm not much impressed with the abilities of your Titan, Lord Pef. It's slow, cumbersome, the psi-spells lag and take entire seconds to cast, and there's no psi-shield or even a Rosarius. All it has it's brutish mechanical strength and amazing range for its weapons." the Demonifuge complained while leaning backwards and resting on my body like in an armchair.

Well, technically my arms were the arms of the chair, so that worked fine.

"Other Titans are much worse, my dear. I'll show you the Emperor-class Titan in the next hangar. It barely moves at all, so I have to teleport it into battle before the enemy gets bored and simply leaves. And my Titans are all upgraded ones. The relics of the Mechanicus are much worse and take months to shamble around." I explained with a snort, and pawed at her peaks for my comfort.

At least my hands had something nice to hold to now, as piloting a Titan was all in the mind and the implant circuits.

Probably the exact reason why the Emperor enhanced my brain with his gene magic. He even unlocked the dominant genes of my Blank heritage, allowing me to begin learning the real skills of a Pariah, from Null Shields to rebounding psyker spells and draining psyker energy. Standing in the cockpit of a Psi-Titan with a potent psyker in my lap and six others slaved to the Anima circuit empowered me immensely even without drawing from this well of power.

"All right, I trust you. So what do we try next?" Ephrael asked while breathing deeply and pushing her peaks into my hands.

"Now, we try to make that psi-shield. First, a thin one covering the cockpit. Then a slighter larger one over the entire chassis. And keep the power low. No need to blow of the hangar doors, again." I whispered in her neck, while my mind merged with the Machine Spirit and gently urged it to listen.

A flare of golden light followed, and the armored doors blew out again.

"Sorry...I'm trying to be weak." Sister Stern muttered in a childish voice.

She wasn't really sorry though.