"00:00"
The moment the timer hit zero, time seemed to freeze over Tatooine, and John's breathing echoed unnaturally loud inside his helmet.
Then came a piercing alert from the tactical network—
The fleet under Sigismund's command simultaneously vanished from the battlefield perception system.
There was no farewell communication, no final blessing, not even a "Good luck"—only the cold logic of tactics and absolute obedience.
Almost at that same instant, the entire sky began to warp.
The humming of the Chaos warships entering the atmosphere, charging their main batteries, sounded like the wings of a thousand insects, sending shivers down the spine.
Dark red energy gathered at the cannon muzzles, stirring the clouds into enormous whirlpools, as if the sky itself were rotting.
Ri~shoo—————!!!
The first corrupted artillery blast tore through the atmosphere, striking Anchorhead dozens of kilometers away.
The explosion stained the entire horizon a sickly purplish red.
Within the rising mushroom cloud, countless twisted human faces could faintly be seen screaming in agony—souls devoured by Chaos, forever trapped in the nightmare of the Warp.
When the shockwave swept through, even the ruined structures of Mos Eisley began to tremble.
More deadly still, the motion detection system of John's Mjolnir armor picked up numerous fast-approaching signals—over a dozen high-speed light signatures breaking through the clouds in a steep dive.
"John." Cortana's voice carried a rare weight. "Signature match complete. This is most likely Darth Vader's personal transport formation."
"..."
John said nothing. He simply looked up.
Through the shattered clouds, a jet-black transport squadron pierced the burning atmosphere like a blade.
The leading shuttle had a menacing design, its armor laced with energy veins resembling blood vessels, and its engines spat ominous dark-purple flames.
Its descent was locked onto a specific target: the heart of Mos Eisley.
At that moment, Obi-Wan's lightsaber suddenly flared violently.
The blue-white plasma blade emitted an unusually high-pitched hum, and the energy arcs circling the blade repelled the dust on the ground.
The Jedi Master's face, wrinkled and aged, flickered under the saber's light, but his eyes, having seen through the ages, were fixed firmly on the descending black specks.
"He's here."
Obi-Wan's words were like a sigh, yet they resonated through the entire defense line via the Force.
Every soldier felt that sentence speak directly into their mind—
A Spartan changing magazines momentarily paused. An auxiliary heavy weapons operator subconsciously tensed their shoulders. Even Knight-class mechs adjusted their cannon angles.
In the sky, the shuttle formation began to decelerate.
The foremost black shuttle adjusted its posture, landing gear slowly deploying like a predator unsheathing its talons.
Seeing this, four Knight-class mechs simultaneously raised their heads, their sensor arrays locking onto the descending black squadron.
Though the original pilots had retreated with the fleet via warp jump, the neural and consciousness synchronization system still projected their combat intent through the void into these war machines.
Consciousness transmission ignored distance—so long as the pilot and mech existed within the same universe, synchronization was possible.
High-powered hardlight and plasma cannons lit up with dangerous red and blue glows, their charging hums whispering like the voice of death.
Target locked.
The pilots, far away in warp space, reached a consensus via the datalink.
All four main guns completed calibration simultaneously. Their crosshairs overlapped into a blood-red kill zone on the tactical network—locked onto Vader's transport squad.
But just as the barrage was about to be unleashed—
WHOOOOOOM————!!!
A scream beyond physical laws tore through reality.
Four colossal, translucent hands suddenly appeared in the sky, each finger wrapped in blood-red lightning, and a constantly rotating eight-pointed Chaos star glowing in each palm.
These terrifying constructs, forged from pure Warp energy mixed with the Force, grasped the Knight mechs in an instant.
"Warning! Joint stress overload!"
"Alert! Mainframe structural failure!"
Red alerts burst across the pilots' visual interfaces, and they simultaneously felt searing, all-too-real pain.
The massive steel giants hovering mid-air writhed violently, joints groaning under the strain, and their power packs began to fail.
But those giant hands, like a child gripping a toy, slowly tightened.
WHOO. CRACK. CRACK——!
The waist armor was the first to collapse.
The twenty-meter-tall war machines crumpled like soda cans under an invisible hydraulic press, frames bending and snapping with screeching metallic groans.
Next, one mech's head imploded and vaporized into crystalline dust under the pressure. The pilot's consciousness, forcibly ejected at the moment of severed connection, experienced an excruciating neural scream.
The other two mechs attempted emergency eject protocols—but their fates were just as brutal.
One had its plasma core crushed, unleashing a torrent of blue-white energy that vaporized half a street into a glassy crater.
The last was torn in half at the waist, its upper body flung hundreds of meters, collapsing a communications tower already teetering on the brink.
Shards of metal rained from the sky. One sharp armor fragment grazed John, carving a nasty gash into the sand beside him.
The burning hydraulic fluid spilled across the ground like the blood of those steel titans, forming eerie totems.
Amid the blazing, shattered wreckage, the lead black shuttle finally touched down in the devastated center of Mos Eisley.
The moment the landing gear hit ground, rubble and debris within a hundred-meter radius floated up, defying gravity, as if the material world itself bowed to the Dark Lord.
Even before the hatch opened, John felt the servos of his Mjolnir armor begin to tremble unnaturally—
It wasn't mechanical failure, but something far older and darker tearing through the veil of reality.
Obi-Wan's lightsaber shone blindingly now, reflecting his solemn face like a marble statue.
"John! Fall back! Now!"
Cortana's voice exploded in the comms, her unusually frantic tone snapping every Spartan's nerves to full alert.
Her projection flickered violently across everyone's helmet display, while warning messages flooded the screen like a waterfall—
"Threat level: EXTREME."
"Recommended action: Immediate disengagement."
"That Darth Vader is no longer someone you can fight!" Cortana's hologram looked panicked as she shared the data and intel across all command units, then pleaded with John again:
"Rally all remaining forces and evacuate Mos Eisley immediately! This isn't retreat—it's a strategic regrouping! If you stay, you'll die for nothing!"
Cortana, through the intelligence network, had learned of Coruscant's fall and knew Darth Vader had received the "blessings" of the Chaos Gods.
And even though she didn't possess a true soul, she could still sense the looming shadows of four Dark Gods hovering above the transport squadron.
She had once calculated—if it were the pre-fall Darth Vader, Sigismund's swordsmanship, personally taught by a Primarch and blessed by the Emperor, combined with Obi-Wan Kenobi's Force mastery, might still pose a threat.
After all, intelligence reports claimed Vader could use the Force to halt a starship preparing to enter hyperspace.
But the current Dark Lord had long since transcended mortal limits.
Those blasphemous blessings had turned him into a living weapon—a puppet of Chaos.
His energy readings alone exceeded Cortana's calculations. His personal combat capability now rivaled—or even surpassed—most Primarchs.
From the fact that he could crush a Knight mech using only "willpower" while still inside the shuttle, it was clear that Darth Vader was no longer a foe Spartans could withstand.
Cortana had no desire to see these young warriors die in vain, so she continued:
"John, fall back to the command zone. We can use the Tatooine desert terrain to build fortifications and still hold on, until—"
BOOOOOOM————!!
But before Cortana could finish, an invisible, formless pressure suddenly descended, plunging all of Mos Eisley into eerie silence—even the crackling of flames vanished.
Beep—Beep—!
Inside John's helmet, just as he prepared to follow Cortana's advice, a shrill alarm blared.
His powered joints froze like they'd seized. He tried to lift his Gauss rifle, but couldn't even move a finger to pull the trigger.
The pressure rendered the Spartans frozen like insects in amber.
Douglas was stuck mid-combat roll, an ejected magazine hovering three centimeters above the ground;
Jerome's vibrating knife halted half an inch from a Chaos cultist's throat, its blade ceasing all frequency oscillation.
Further away, the Imperial Fists Astartes looked like holograms caught on pause.
One who had just pulled the pin on a metallic hydrogen grenade was frozen;
A Terminator veteran's dual-linked heavy cannon began to bend, like putty crushed by an invisible force.
Even machines weren't spared.
A Vulture gunship stalled at an impossible angle, its ion exhaust frozen into crystalline blue;
Autoturrets crackled with dying current, barrels crawling with cracks as if rusted by a thousand years.
As the pressure intensified, Mos Eisley's temperature dropped rapidly, as if the hybrid psychic-Force field had twisted physical space entirely.
In this absolute stillness, only the shuttle's hydraulic hatch remained active.
Hiss——!
Its pressure valve vented a plume of pale mist like a tide of cold air seeping from a tomb.
A pair of pitch-black armored boots stepped onto the scorched earth. The instant they touched down, surrounding sand began to levitate in bulk, forming strange vortexes in an invisible field.
Thump, thump.
Each footstep sounded like a funeral bell hammering against the frozen air.
Darth Vader emerged from the mist, the hem of his black robe flowing without wind, as if unseen tendrils writhed in the shadows.
What was once the symbol of the silver-black Empire's majesty was now overrun with crimson markings. His breathing mask was gone, revealing a face pale as a corpse.
Chaos' blessing had reshaped his flesh.
His lava-scarred visage was restored to the handsome countenance of Anakin Skywalker, though his still-bald head did not diminish the inhuman allure.
His skin was almost translucent, veins beneath it glowing sickly blue, crimson, algae green, and lilac;
His vertical pupils gleamed like a predator's in the dark, reflecting Obi-Wan Kenobi in the distance.
Vader slowly raised his right hand. As his crystalline fingertips cut through the air, they left spiderweb-like cracks in reality.
Each finger radiated arcs of intertwined dark red and deep purple energy—a manifestation of the perfect fusion between the Force's dark side and the Warp's sorcery.
As he advanced, a hundred black-armored guards surged from the shuttle.
Once elite troops of the Galactic Empire, they had swollen to near-Astartes size. Corrosive slime oozed from their armor seams, and baleful fire flickered behind their helmet visors.
Their heavy steps cracked the earth. Some wielded power axes or power swords, and from their waists hung bone-chime totems of human skulls, clinking unnervingly.
Three stood out in particular—
The left guard's spine pierced through his armor, forming a cape of bone spines;
The right's shoulder plate had grown screaming human face reliefs;
The central standard bearer held a banner made of an entire flayed human hide, painted with a rotating eight-pointed star in blood.
At that moment, Vader stopped walking.
He stood ten meters from Obi-Wan.
The perfect distance for the old Jedi to clearly see the strange new markings at the corners of Vader's eyes—Chaos runes engraved by the gods themselves.
!!
Obi-Wan stared in disbelief at Vader, unable to accept that the once Chosen One had fallen so far.
The Jedi Master wasn't fooled by the restored Anakin face—he saw through the beautiful facade into the twisted, mutated soul within, and the Chaos Gods pulling Vader's strings.
"Master."
When that word came from Vader's mouth, the air was suddenly filled with the sulfuric scent of Mustafar's lava.
Floating stones and sand began to tremble at a specific frequency, assembling a blurry vision—
A Jedi on the high ground. A limbless man below him.
"..."
Obi-Wan's lips moved, trying to speak, but under the dual restraint of Force and psychic energy, the Jedi Master couldn't break free. His jaw creaked under strain.
Then, everyone in Mos Eisley heard a hallucinatory dual-toned whisper—
One half was Vader's mechanical, icy voice: "You taught me how to kill."
The other was Anakin's youthful, clear tone: "Now let's review the lesson."
As the words fell, Obi-Wan Kenobi was released.
And Darth Vader charged forward.
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