The green light membrane rapidly contracted, shrinking until its diameter was less than a hundred meters.
And yet, the pyramid warship had not fully withdrawn from the gate.
From Roya's vantage point, he could still see into the control chamber—where the Seventh Overlord sat, his hands clutching the throne's armrests, his eyes dark and silent.
"To come and go as you please… who gave you that right?"
Roya let out a cold snort, his will moving at once!
Deep beneath the sea, Green Bull, who had been desperately fleeing toward the abyss, suddenly felt as if the waters around him had come alive.
Every molecule of water seemed to transform into a loyal warrior, seizing and pinning down every spore within his body.
Normally, he could split apart into billions of spores and scatter in every direction. As long as even a single spore escaped, he could shed his skin like a cicada, waiting for the chance to be reborn.
But now, under the grip of the living ocean, he could not find the slightest gap to break free!
He was forcibly wrapped, restrained by the seawater itself, and dragged upward at terrifying speed!
In the blink of an eye, he burst out from the surface of the sea!
"Roya! Let me go! What are you doing?! Roya!"
A flood of terror drowned every fungus and spore within Green Bull's body.
For what awaited him was none other than the Astral Gate—shrinking now to its very limit.
One corner of the pyramid ship, crushed against the contracting rim of the gate, lost every property of its high-grade biometal and was sliced through like mere paper.
A section of hull, thousands of square meters in size, tore away and plummeted from the heavens, crashing straight into the sea.
Almost at the same moment, Green Bull's body was thrust through the Astral Gate—forced across the gap created in the pyramid ship's hull—and tumbled uncontrollably forward until he collapsed at the feet of the Seventh Overlord.
"Here—your slave knight, returned to you!"
At last, the Astral Gate closed completely. Roya's spirit also withdrew safely, returning wholly to the Pirate World.
"Master! Save me! Save me!"
On all fours, Green Bull clawed desperately toward the Seventh Overlord.
But the aftershocks of passing through the gate unshielded erupted within him in that instant!
Red, purple, yellow, and green—
Four strange sigils flared simultaneously across his body.
Even the Seventh Overlord, upon seeing them appear together, showed unprecedented horror.
The green flame particles within his eyes fluttered violently, nearly extinguished.
The sigil upon his forehead snuffed out its flame in an instant.
His master had severed their soul-link on the spot!
Green Bull, who had been pleading for salvation, suddenly broke into a grotesque laugh.
The sound was like phlegm caught in his throat—yet he forced the laughter out, the gas in his chest bursting past the obstruction, creating an indescribably sickening noise.
It was laughter, but held no joy at all.
His face flushed a lurid violet as he rasped, "Don't be afraid, little one! We merely found it curious… that a creature of the material world would dare traverse the Warp unprotected."
His face shifted again, flushing crimson. His voice, once erratic, now hardened like steel.
"This one could never become a chosen vessel of any of us. Such a lowly lifeform is utterly unworthy!"
Even as he spoke, the flesh of his cheeks began rotting away in great swathes. From the wounds, masses of green-tinged fungal threads writhed frantically outward.
As if escaping his body could spare them from the strange, corrosive green rot devouring him.
Yet no matter how hard they struggled to crawl free, they dissolved even faster into drops of luminous, virulent green pus.
More grotesque still—those drops of pus swiftly gathered together, forming a tiny homunculus, no larger than an inch tall, sculpted entirely of pus.
Skipping with childlike glee, it hopped to Green Bull's face and tore at the festering wound!
The decaying flesh ripped wider, more foul and terrifying than before.
From the new rents, more infected tendrils slithered outward like snakes, merging once more into pus-children that leapt happily back upon his body.
Tearing. Tearing without end. Tearing with gleeful abandon.
They even sang cheerful, twisted melodies as they worked!
"Jie-jie-jie! Did you truly believe, that by listening to the lies of those foolish star-gods, by turning your kind into these idiotic, half-man, half-machine abominations—you could cast aside all desire? That you could be free of my dominion?!"
This last accusation hissed through the ruined gaps of Green Bull's mouth.
At last, the yellow gleam in his eyes guttered out.
The four sigils faded into nothingness.
The pus-children, too, dissolved reluctantly into sticky pools of ooze.
After suffering possession by those unknown beings—the Four Gods of Chaos—both Green Bull's body and mind had reached the brink of total annihilation.
Only now did the green flames in the Seventh Overlord's eyes stabilize again. The sigil on his forehead rekindled, a faint flicker of fire.
"M… Master…"
Green Bull's throat forced out one last breath of sound—then his body froze, lifeless.
The Seventh Overlord twitched a single finger. That slightest ripple of air reached Green Bull's corpse—
—and the body crumbled instantly into dust and fragments.
"Damn it!"
The Seventh Overlord slammed the armrest, leaping to his feet in fury.
The loss of a resource world—even of a loyal slave knight—was nothing he could not accept.
But to be simultaneously noticed by all Four Chaos Gods? That was misfortune beyond imagining!
Even the soul-link to his master had grown faint, nearly imperceptible.
If not for the faint heat still lingering in his forehead sigil, he might have feared his master had abandoned him outright.
"Material realm—full speed! Set course for the Third Spiral Arm!"
"I will crush that planet with my own hands!"
Burning with rage, desperate to obliterate the cursed world that had brought him such calamity, the Seventh Overlord nonetheless dared not reenter the Warp.
For the Warp was the very lair of the Four Gods of Chaos.
To enter it now, while under their gaze—even the Silent King of the Imperium, sovereign of the Fearless Dynasty, would never dare!
But traveling only through the material realm, even with the pyramid ship's most advanced propulsion technology of the Fearless Dynasty, the journey to the galaxy's Third Spiral Arm would take no less than two months.
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