Chapter 408: Ashes of the Dead
“It’s nice here.”
Needles, or Sidney Blevins, looked at a sand cave found by his battle-brothers and expressed satisfaction.
"Here it is."
"We still have to pay attention. We have to set up a sentry post. We will take turns to rest."
"I want to meet with Martins, but not by surprise. We have come this far for more than 30 years. We made the decision together, and I have not let any of you down. So far, we have only lost one battle brother. I hope that this time, no one of us will die."
The other seven people surrounding him did not respond immediately.
Everyone seemed to have fallen into a kind of silence.
One of them broke the atmosphere and said, "I'm beginning to doubt whether we should really stay like this. Perhaps, it's not bad to be like the past thirty years, at least..."
Having said this, he couldn't continue.
After a while, another person spoke up, "If we just want to survive and don't care about anything else, then why don't we go find that traitor Zhong Jihua? He will definitely accept us. Why would we come to Martins and try every possible way to lure them out? And worry about whether he will kill us all?"
Someone else said, "Indeed, I would rather die than go to Zhong Jihua."
"Okay, why do you all act like loyal subjects of the empire? If we were really that loyal, we should have died thirty-seven years ago, or at least died with Fan Haozhe nine years ago."
…
The brothers who shared life and death seemed to be about to quarrel.
In fact, similar debates have been quite common in the past. Their situation is special. For more than 30 years, they have been in a daze and lost. Even a Space Marine would feel helpless and even unable to reconcile with himself.
This is a very dangerous signal. Don't think that venting out some things will make things better. On the contrary, as long as the situation cannot be changed, then wanton venting will only make the connection between them fragile, and cause cracks to appear in the seemingly solid relationship, and one day in the future, it will completely collapse.
This is the problem that Blevins, as the leader of the team, has always tried to avoid.
Every time there was a sign of something like this happening, he would speak up forcefully and put an end to any possible arguments.
No matter what his battle brothers were thinking, whether they regretted their past decisions, or if they had any new ideas for the future, they had to keep it in their hearts and not show it.
Of course, he also understood that this was only a temporary solution and not a fundamental solution.
But if there is any permanent solution... they thought about going to find Zhong Jihua.
However, most of the brothers thought that it would be better to die.
It was true that they had defected. During the battle that year, they could have returned to the team, but they believed that the Atonement Crusade had no end and no one could survive to see it end.
It was a journey of despair and resentment towards the empire.
Why? Isn't the glory accumulated over thousands of years of the Chapter's history, as well as the sacrifices made during the past few decades of the Atonement Crusade, enough to atone for one sin?
Obviously, the Empire felt that it was not enough. They were unwilling to die and perish. So, in the war to suppress the rebellion more than 30 years ago, they had the opportunity to reunite with Martins and others, but they finally chose to leave quietly, hiding their identities and wandering around.
Sometimes they would disguise themselves as normal space marines, receive some subsidies, and save some people; but more often, they would erase their signs and wander among some gray groups. Sometimes they were looters, pirates, and sometimes mercenaries...
They will carefully assess the danger level of the battle.
They no longer have the mission to fight to the death for any goal, so they will not lose their lives for these actions that have no honor and are only for survival.
However, they had no intention of endangering their parent group, or even becoming true enemies of the Emperor.
At the same time, for some reasons that they themselves did not express, they always kept an eye on the Phoenix Mother Group. Sometimes they would directly move to the battle area of the battle group and observe from a distance. There were even several times when they took action at critical moments and saved some battle brothers, but they did not meet them and left directly.
About 25 years ago, after they completed a looting and supply operation, they heard news from the parent group again that they were waging a war against the Chaos evildoers. The traitors, who had nothing else to do, rushed over with the mentality of "just going to take a look".
In this battle, the regiment suffered heavy losses.
Originally there were only more than 200 men left in the battle group, and half of them were stuck in the quagmire.
This is something they can't save.
There were only eight of them, and they had no way to escape from the battle that more than a hundred of their fighting brothers were unable to escape.
They could only watch sadly from a distance.
In fact, this was the majority of the scenes they had seen when they followed the mother group in the past. The scenes where they had the opportunity to save their battle brothers and retreat quietly were extremely rare.
However, this time something completely different happened.
When faced with a desperate situation, these more than one hundred people made an astonishing move: their leader, a Phoenix company captain, went out to negotiate with those cult traitors.
Blevins was also familiar with that company commander, whose name was Zhong Jihua.
Of course, people like Blevins who were watching from a distance did not know the specific content of the communication.
But they can see the results.
The group of fighting brothers led by Zhong Jihua stopped fighting and even opened their defenses, allowing the cult traitors to pass through their defense zone. They stayed in their camp, not firing a single shot, not resisting, and not contacting the outside world.
Next, sporadic sounds of fighting occurred in their camp.
Of course, that was not an invasion by any foreign enemy, but an internal cleansing among the Space Marines.
Obviously, not everyone is willing to accept Zhong Jihua's behavior. Among the Space Marines, the number of people who are willing to die for honor, for faith, and for the Empire is the largest.
In the end, after the cleansing was completed, only about sixty or seventy Phoenixes walked out of the camp.
Next, Zhong Jihua led the remaining people to the depths of the area occupied by the cult traitors and disappeared there.
In the end, the cult rebellion on that planet was resolved, but no one on the Empire side, whether it was the planetary garrison or the Phoenix Regiment, knew that Zhong Jihua's group had betrayed the Empire. They had always believed that Zhong Jihua's company had died in the war.
Until the cult rebellion was resolved, Zhong Jihua and his gang never appeared again.
The Phoenix lost a company, and in the sea of stars, a warband called the Ash Dead appeared. They believed in tyrants, their bodies had mutated, most of the members had grown horns, and the overall paint of the power armor was dark red with gray stripes.
Although the Ashes of the Dead are small in number and have only been established for a short time, they have done a lot in the past twenty years.
They looted the Empire's ships, slaughtering whole ships, and in the wrecks people found afterwards, blood covered every corridor, every room, and every wall; on the bridge, in the assembly square, in the ship's church and other places, there were bloody eight-pointed stars and skulls piled up into small mountains. This was the typical appearance of a sacrifice to Khorne;
They had also assisted the cultists in massacring the human empire worlds. In the past twenty-five years, they had appeared in at least four incidents where human worlds were destroyed or hives were massacred.
They even united with several other warbands to attack an Imperial fleet carrying gene-seed taxes handed in by a Space Marine Chapter, and seized a batch of gene-seeds to contaminate and strengthen themselves.
They even merged with another warband and took control...
Blevins and his companions once met their old comrade Zhong Jihua in a pirate alliance base. Zhong Jihua had invited them to join, but they had to refuse with great difficulty.
The only time they lost their first combat brother was when he died during the breakout.
They did betray, and even shamefully became deserters, not living and dying with their regiment. However, they might be worthy of the title of "traitors", but they were definitely not willing to go along with Zhong Jihua.
Surrendering to Chaos, worshipping the tyrant Khorne, and purging their own battle-brothers... Blevins and his gang simply would not be capable of such a thing, and it would be a shame to be associated with them.
But sometimes they would think that after the mother group was destroyed in the Redemption Crusade, they and the ashes of the dead might be the only ones left in this universe.
No.
The names, beliefs, liveries, and logos of Zhong Jihua's gang have all been changed. How can they still be called the Phoenix? The Phoenix is a symbol of indomitable spirit, a phoenix reborn from the ashes. The new name they chose, "Ashes" and "The Dead", clearly completely abandoned the traditions of the regiment.
The Phoenix finally came to an end.
However, just as they were wandering in the universe in a daze, not knowing where to go or even what the meaning of future life would be, they heard that the mother group had ended the Atonement Expedition!
But with only seven battle brothers left, what's the point? The number of people in the mother group is even smaller than these traitors!
However, by the time they heard the news of the Phoenix, they had already been deeply integrated with a multi-planet political entity called the 'Alliance'.
The current parent group seems to be fighting for a sector leader named 'Gu Hang'.
They didn't know what happened in between, but judging from the latest intelligence, the situation of the regiment seemed to be unexpectedly good.
The entire regiment not only did not look like it was dying, but it recovered quite vigorously. Especially when the news of the battle of Koroja came out, under the leadership of Governor Gu, a great demon was destroyed, ending the invasion war that he personally directed!
Although, in that war, it was the man called Gu Hang who gained the greatest fame. Those who knew about the war all admired the wisdom and bravery of this commander-in-chief, who also served as the governor, as well as his powerful spiritual power.
However, under Gu Hang's reputation, those who are interested can still see the contribution of the Phoenix. This group of Space Marines who should have been destroyed helped Gu Hang to a great extent, and showed a scale of at least a hundred people in the battle.
People who don't know or pay attention to Phoenix may not think this is a big deal. But for people like Blevins who have been paying attention to the mother group for decades, this is a miracle.
They knew that the Chapter had lost all its arsenals and gene seed banks in the last battle that ended the Atonement Crusade. Under such circumstances, how could it have grown from seven people to more than a hundred people in less than ten years?
Not to mention the success rate of the gene seed implantation surgery, it is impossible for there to be so many seeds alone!
Could it be that Holy Terra, or the Martian Order, allocated the gene-seed tax previously handed in by the Phoenixes to support the chapter?
This is really a rare thing!
Space Marines also have to pay taxes, but they don't pay taxes to the Empire, they don't provide in-kind taxes, and they can even ask the Empire or some forge worlds for equipment. However, they still have to hand in one-tenth of all gene seeds produced by the chapter within a certain period.
Nominally, this is to allow the Empire to check and monitor whether the Chapter's gene-seed is still pure and uncontaminated; in addition, it is also to 'save' the Chapter so that when the Chapter suffers losses in the future, the previous gene-seed can be provided to the Chapter to help it recover.
But in fact... the former may be a legitimate reason, but the latter is almost bullshit. A regiment, without the crisis of extinction, what do you need gene seeds for? If there is a crisis of extinction, why don't I use the gene seeds to create a new, obedient regiment, but support you old regiments with countless rich histories that may not be obedient?
It is a foolish dream to ask the Empire to feed back the gene seeds it has eaten. Perhaps, it may happen to some warbands with very special identities and backgrounds, but the Phoenix is obviously not one of them.
As a result, this thing really happened to the phoenix?
No matter how unbelievable this matter is, after thinking about it, this is the only possibility.
Could it be possible that Martins, that kid, could create genetic seeds out of thin air?
It was precisely because the parent group showed signs of recovery that these eight "wandering ghosts" came up with the idea of coming to find the parent group.
This was said to warn the mother group of the existence of the 'Ashes of the Dead'.
As for reality, do they have some unrealistic expectations?
Then only they themselves know.
(End of this chapter)
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