"Bad idea." Conrad Coetzes said for the 584th time, "That's a terrible idea. ”

"Friendly reminder, I was just making random suggestions at that time, and the person who really made the decision was you, the Lord of the Eighth Legion." Rika Fujimaru broke a piece of chocolate behind him, "I've said it about four hundred times, and if you really don't want to do it, you can stop at any time." ”

She tossed the broken piece of chocolate into her mouth, and replied to Conrad Coetze's glaring glare with a very deliberate look of innocence.

In terms of subjective time, after leaving the subspace, or the Terra Torch, they have been hunting for about half a year of Terra with extraordinary efficiency - the Midnight Lord.

At that time, Rika Fujimaru made a suggestion: "Don't you have a legion? Although they rebelled with you, more than 10,000 years have passed, but now that you have returned to the empire, your heirs are willing to submit to the news after hearing the news. Let's not talk about more details, but if you put them into the battlefield, you might be able to gather an out-of-the-box warband. ”

Conrad Coetzes thought that he must have been silently affected by the golden light that filled the torch at that time, and he thought it was okay to think about it. After Rika Fujimaru succeeded in arguing to the emperor that "technical problems are not a problem" with a long theory of magic, he even thought it was a good idea.

Don't get me wrong, he's already had a good estimate of this. Or rather, he thought he had a good idea of it. He fully knew what kind of virtue most of his legion's heirs were, and he also fully understood that in the past 10,000 years of continuous war, with no one to restrain and take care of him, things would only get worse and worse. He is fully prepared for "facing a horde of robbers, robbers, abusers, murderers, perverted artists, and even ogres, or waste who acts only to satisfy his bestial nature, deserters who will easily kneel when they encounter a strong enemy, and scum and villains who commit any other crime that will humiliate the pen and paper even if they are written, and the kind of person who is truly 'saved' may only be one in a thousand."

He didn't even expect that after 10,000 years, there would be any righteous characters among his heirs. Including newly drafted recruits. Anyway, his Eighth Legion was originally made up of criminals and scum. The only thing he dared to believe was that his good sons would carry on the tradition perfectly.

But if you feel that something is no longer worse than your prediction, it is better to give yourself a mental margin of "it just will get worse". Because fate is the kind of thing that makes everything worse with a wild laugh that defies the will of man - especially in a world where reality and fantasy are gradually merging as the Great Rift unfolds.

It's hard to pinpoint when Conrad Coates was angry, disappointed, or sad: when he returned to reality, was once again tormented by his haunting gift for prophecy, and thus learned what he was about to face; Or when he really saw his own children who bowed to chaos and fell into imhuman form; It was when he slaughtered an entire Chaos Gang with his genes in a fit of rage and despair; Or in the process of calming down and reviewing afterwards, he realized that more than half of the things he killed that were barely called Astarte were even surprised and happy when they died.

If he had been mortal, he would have vomited. But he wasn't, so he just said to Rika Fujimaru for the first time, "I'm starting to think it's a bad idea." ”

Although this idea was come up with by Rika Fujimaru, she didn't insist on it, and immediately said that otherwise, we would have stopped, and I had several ways to detour. But Conrad Coetzes refused.

He saw it as torture, a punishment, and he deserved it—not for betraying the Empire or the Emperor, but for allowing himself to trample on the righteousness of his heart. Even though the crimes of his last life had been tried by the Assassins sent by the Emperor, that did not mean that he would be eligible to retrieve those ...... Something noble and sacred.

Therefore, he must personally punish his sinful offspring, and he must eradicate little by little the venom that has been sown into the galaxy due to his poor supervision...... In the way he is most familiar, of course.

For this reason, Rika Fujimaru has said three times that "I think your methods are a bit excessive", but Conrad Coetze has turned a deaf ear. So after three admonitions to no avail, she began to ask to act with him, and blatantly stated that she was in the way.

Perhaps no one in their right mind would agree to take her with him after hearing about this purpose, but Conrad Coetzes did not care to paraphrase the sentence that Rika Fujimaru had said to him many times: You are the one who really makes the decisions, and you can do whatever you want. The latter was obviously a little surprised that he would say this, maybe she didn't plan to really follow Conrad Cotz in the middle of the action, but since he dared to say so, of course Fujimaru Rika didn't dare to accompany him to the end.

So for the next four subjective months, they "cleaned up" the four Chaos Gangs with terrible efficiency in subspace, in the world of the Hive, in the abandoned orbital space station, and among the apparently looted and tattered Imperial cruisers. Rika Fujimaru did try, but the best she could do was to make Conrad Coetze's crime scene look like a normal plasma slice rather than a bloody performance art stand.

They were able to have this terrifying efficiency thanks to the reliable technology provided by Rika Fujimaru. Not just a divination magic based on a base contract, not very precise but currently seemingly sufficient, based on the blood of Conrad Coetzes himself, casually named the "Midnight Lord Locator System"; What she herself has always been thinking about, the application scenario is obviously that the small ship in the planet's atmosphere also plays a great role.

Conrad Coetze, who lacks the corresponding talent, can't understand how she can use magic and the Emperor's psionic energy to operate the equipment on the Storm Frontier, but this artifact-level armed research ship that can't even travel at sub-light speeds, and is highly suspected to have been produced at the beginning of the second millennium of humanity, can complete subspace navigation quickly and well, and even this small ship can properly use the waves of time and space in subspace to travel time within an acceptable margin of error- That's why their journey must be calculated in subjective time.

Not to mention, she also researched a large-scale ritual that is said to be based on the light of the Torch, which can be called a large-scale ritual of teleportation over long distances - it is with this that they even moved from Holy Terra to the edge of the Ghoul Realm in three hours with a man and a boat in the first step, the farthest place in history that the light of the Torch can reach. However, this ritual requires the support of the Emperor's psionic energy, and this remote transmission will weaken the presiding ceremony for three or four days, so after she decided to act with Conrad Coetze, this function was temporarily suspended.

Incidentally, in the course of the joint cleanup of the Midnight Lord, Conrad Coz made death threats to Fujimaru Tachika forty-two times, suddenly went berserk or fell into a state of delirium seventeen times for various reasons, actually practiced death threats ten times, successfully wounded people twice, and shut himself up sixteen times in a cabin in the storm border that was too small for him (for a total of about fifteen standard Terra days). The most infuriating thing is that Rika Fujimaru even realizes that this is the result of Conrad Cotz trying to restrain himself as much as possible for some reason.

And the result of their work was only the successful "recovery" of the eighteen Midnight Lords who were "rotten but probably not rotten to the end" - all recruits from the last two hundred years, and the Great Expedition and the Primordial were utter legends to them. Even so, the moment they met Conrad Coetzes, they realized what the person in front of them meant to them.

Although Rika Fujimaru already knew that she should not have any illusions about the attitude that Conrad Cotz showed when facing her own legion, it was another thing to actually see the scene of the disaster. Obviously, although he allowed these people to live for a while, he didn't feel that he should like them - he didn't even bother to say a few words to these eighteen people, and threw them to Fujimaru Rika for full discretion. The reason is also readily available: she is the captain of the Storm Boundary.

This attitude is clearly not friendly, but it is also clearly very effective. Dressed in a patchwork of power armor and adorned with human skins and corpses, these eighteen people who live by robbing merchant ships and corrupt aristocrats on remote planets (which is why Rika Fujimaru was able to convince Conrad that they are "not rotten") behaves on Rika Fujimaru's ship as little creatures who are frightened and frightened.

The fact that they were completely ignored by their own genetic father seemed to be more terrifying and desperate to them than the other members of the same warband being dismembered alive in front of their eyes, Fujimaru Rika didn't ask them for anything outside the basic rules after placing them in the right space, but after a short period of time, these people quickly realized what they were really doing, and very actively provided Fujimaru Rika with everything they knew and could think of. Rumors and information related to the Midnight Lord.

Conrad Coetzes was noncommittal when he learned about this, as if he wanted to carry out his disregard for these reluctant children who were barely stepping on the line, but unfortunately, as he had found before, Rika Fujimaru was the captain of the Storm Frontier. It was only natural for her captain to decide the course of a ship, so they eventually spent about a week observing and calculating the star map, and following the information implied in one of the interesting comments, they found an almost savage "agricultural planet".

And the moment he saw the planet in Sheba's observation interface, Conrad Coetze once again exclaimed that "bad idea".

Fujimaru Rika pondered for a while while with chocolate, and decided to make a move to retreat: "What? Although we came...... Why don't you turn around and go back to the vicinity of the Great Rift? ”

"No, I'm going down." Conrad Coetzes used a deliberately suppressed tone from which it was difficult to guess what he was thinking, "The grapevine still seems to have a little bit of accuracy. ”

"Did you 'see' something again?" This topic has become more and more secure in recent times, so much so that Rika Fujimaru is willing to take this one-on-the-point approach.

Conrad Coetzes paused for a few seconds, and finally reluctantly spoke:

"I see I've found Sevita on this planet."