20: Chapter 20: The surface is calm, but underground, an 800-meter-long monster is taking shape.

In the orbit of Dead Silence-42, the patrol formation of sixty-four Brood Lords completed its final formation adjustment on the fifteenth day.

Now, there were no blind spots in low orbit. Each Brood Lord's patrol route overlapped with adjacent formations by fifteen percent; any ship warping in from the outside would be locked on by the crossfire of at least three parasite swarms the moment it exited the Warp.

The Brood Queen named this defense system "The Web" and submitted the next phase of the expansion plan to the Overmind—before the leviathan mothership launched, the orbital defense units would continue to grow, with a target of ninety-six Brood Lords, completely enveloping the planet in three layers of crossfire.

The Overmind approved the expansion plan and added an instruction: all newly hatched Brood Lords must complete at least one live-fire targeting exercise against Imperial wreckage in a vacuum, calibrating the hit accuracy of spore mines and the coordinated penetration paths of parasites in a combat environment.

Deep underground, the embryo of the leviathan mothership had expanded to twenty times the size of a Behemoth.

The giant hatchery chamber had been expanded to a depth of eight hundred meters underground, and the volume of the entire chamber already exceeded that of an Imperial cathedral.

The chamber walls were lined with a three-meter-thick composite armor of adamantium and chitin—not to defend against external attacks, but to withstand the immense internal pressure generated during the embryo's development.

The cell division speed of the Leviathan was thirty times that of a standard Zerg unit, and every division released bio-electric pulses strong enough to shatter ordinary rock.

Mycelial cables connected to the embryo from all directions, pumping in hundreds of liters of high-concentration nutrient solution every minute to sustain this behemoth still in the process of forming.

The internal structure of the embryo had already differentiated into its basic outline.

The complexity of its neural center was forty times that of the Brood Queen, distributed across seven independent nodes within its body; each node could take over command operations if other parts of the leviathan mothership were damaged.

The main gun mount occupied one-third of the leviathan mothership's bow volume—it was a living railgun with a caliber large enough to fit a leman russ tank, its barrel grown from a mixture of adamantium-chitin and focusing crystals recovered from the wreckage of Imperial Lance Weapons.

The ammunition for the railgun was not a simple metal projectile, but an adamantium armor-piercing shell wrapped in high-concentration digestive fluid. After penetrating the target's armor, the shell would rupture, spraying a mass of creep digestive fluid capable of corroding an entire layer of armor plating within three seconds into the target's interior.

The Overmind reviewed all the design parameters of the leviathan mothership and added a note to the weapons system memorandum: "Anti-Titan weapon platform—Necron data integration test passed. The living railgun can lock onto and destroy Knight-class and Warlord-class Titans during the recharge interval of their Void Shields. Prioritize destroying the Void Shield generator, followed by the command deck. Test targets will be confirmed in actual combat."

This was the first time The Swarm had included Titans on its standard kill list.

Other areas of the underground nest were also operating in sync. All four main hatcheries were running at full capacity, with each production line responsible for a different unit type.

Above the surface, the creep had already covered fifty-seven percent of the northern hemisphere's land area, and it was still expanding outward at a speed visible to the naked eye every day.

Directly above the Hive City Ruins, a layer of camouflaged creep had even grown, covering the entire ruin area into what looked like a natural landscape.

Beneath this seemingly calm purple lichen, The Swarm's military machine was accelerating. Dead Silence-42 was no longer that desolate, forgotten planet of the Empire. It had turned into a hive fortress armed down to its crust.

The antenna repair project for the Necron Node entered its final stage on the sixteenth day.

Drones found the main structure of the antenna wreckage in the synchronous orbit of the fourth planet—a six-hundred-meter-long black metal mast, still maintaining the posture it had when it was pierced by a Warp storm sixty million years ago.

The quantum entanglement core in the middle of the mast had been pierced by a Warp rift; the rift had long since closed, but the energy scorch marks left behind meant the metal was still radiating residual heat to this day.

The Drones re-welded the scorched areas with adamantium-chitin composite material, transplanting the entangled particles captured when Brood Lords collided with Imperial wreckage into the transmitter in batches.

The entire repair process was remotely monitored by the Necron Node via an underground communication link. It remained silent throughout the process within the Hive Mind, only issuing a short message when the Drones completed the final weld point: "Quantum entanglement pair activated. Transmitter calibration complete. Antenna rebooted."

In the synchronous orbit of the fourth planet, a circle of flowing green light lit up on the surface of the black mast. The light was cold, but at the moment the signal connected, the Necron hall at the very bottom of the Hive City Ruins was suddenly illuminated by a light different from before—every hexagonal panel on the sphere in the center of the hall began to flash at maximum brightness and high frequency simultaneously, just like a heart that had been asleep for sixty million years suddenly beginning to beat violently.

"Communication array rebooted. Signal strength is forty-eight percent—insufficient to connect to the master control matrix, but it has reached the threshold for transmitting encrypted messages," the Necron Node said. "New variables, your engineering capabilities exceed my initial assessment by four orders of magnitude. You were able to complete the resurrection program for a machine that had been dead for sixty million years in three standard cycles, whereas the contractors I dealt with during the Necron Dynasty era usually couldn't even deliver bolts on time."

Then it made a request. It retrieved an encrypted message that had been sealed for sixty-two million years from the bottom of its database—a complete proof of identity composed of trillions of quantum entanglement pairs, including this node's engineering serial number during the Necron Dynasty era, the timestamp of the last master control matrix synchronization before dormancy, and a sentence written in the Necron native language. After translation according to the protocol, the sentence meant: "This node survives. Requesting reconnection to the master control matrix."

"Please send this message when the antenna next aligns with the Orion Arm. The alignment time window is in sixty-seven standard hours, lasting about two minutes."

The Overmind agreed. The Brood Queen wrote the transmission program into the scheduled tasks of the Brood Lord relay network, setting it to execute in sixty-seven hours.

After receiving confirmation, the Necron Node was silent for a few seconds, then added a communication: "There may be other surviving nodes of the Solemmnace Dynasty. If my message is successfully received, you will not only have an ally—you may gain the attention of a dynasty."

This did not sound like bragging, but rather a statement of fact. Necrons never brag. They simply state probabilities.

The Overmind stored the "Solemmnace Dynasty" in its long-term observation list, then turned its attention back to the construction progress of the leviathan mothership and the higher-priority movements of the Empire.

In an Imperial Navy staging sector twenty light-years away from the Dead Silence-42 system, Grey Knight Justicar Byrne's Thunderhawk Gunship had just landed on the hangar deck of the Ultramarines 7th Expeditionary Fleet flagship, the "hammer of macragge".

Bern stepped out of the hatch and was met by three rows of Ultramarines standing in neat formation—blue power armor, golden shoulder pads, each of their breastplates engraved with the emblem of Macragge.

Standing at the very front of the formation was a veteran without a helmet, his graying short hair shaved extremely short, with a scar running from his left eyebrow to his jaw on his face.

"I am Captain Ortron, vanguard Commander of the 7th Expeditionary Fleet," the veteran's voice was raspy and steady. "I have already read the intelligence from the Inquisition. To be honest, I thought Inquisitor Marcus had exaggerated the threat level in his report—until I saw the full tactical review of the orbital strangulation battle."

"Then what is your judgment now?" Bern asked.

Ortron was silent for two seconds. "Their Commander is not anything I have dealt with before. Not an Ork Warlord, not a Chaos Warlord, not an Aeldari Farseer. From the records of the Grey Knights' first engagement with the Brood Queen in the tomb, to the tactical coordination suppressing the Imperial Navy's anti-aircraft positions in orbit, their Commander has used our tactics in every battle—and used them better than we do."

He paused, "Therefore, the entire combat force of the Ultramarines 7th Expeditionary Fleet—three battle barges, twelve strike cruisers, eight full companies—has assembled and is awaiting your tactical briefing."

Bern nodded. As he walked toward the tactical room, he looked back at the starry sky outside the hangar. There was only darkness in the direction of Dead Silence-42. But he knew what was there. Three battle barges, twelve strike cruisers, eight companies of Ultramarines—the entire 7th Expeditionary Fleet was in the final countdown before entering the Warp.

This sector would soon welcome the true wrath of the Empire. And on that purple planet, the pulse of the leviathan mothership was growing stronger day by day, deep underground.