"Stop it! Fast!"
A muffled growl shattered the dead silence. Solas could not ignore this terrifying power; raising his hand, he released streams of light to deploy forces and set attack routes.
He had no way of knowing whether anything he did would prove effective, yet he could not simply stand by and watch.
The incomprehensible technology displayed by the Disordered Array was far too horrifying.
Even as he issued orders to his forces, a wave of retreat surged in Solas's mind. Pressing his right hand against the edge of his throne, he sent a query through a secure channel—Should we withdraw our forces?
Judging from the tactical picture, he was almost certain that the Rangdan had lost this major campaign.
The escalating, all-out confrontation had already reduced the Rangdan Empire's populace to complete destitution, yet the war still demanded an unrelenting duel to the death against humanity.
For the sake of the greater strategic picture, Solas submitted his query to the Supreme Overlord.
A complete retreat was now the single best option.
If they stayed, the Conquest Corridor would become the graveyard for hundreds of millions of Rangdan troops.
Falling back was their sole path to survival: trading space for time, abandoning the choke points to force humanity to split its forces, and transitioning to a guerilla defense in the deep interior.
Snapping back from their horror, the Rangdan forces operated their warships to launch a desperate assault on the human fleet.
Morale within their ranks was abysmal; officers and soldiers alike harbored anxious dread, terrified that a strike of total obliteration could descend upon them at any moment.
"Let the World Engine deal with it."
A sigh echoed across the comms channel. Solas asked in surprise: "Why have you come?"
He recognized the owner of the voice—it was the Overlord stationed at the Rangdan core hub: the Wise One.
Prior to this, the Wise One had never sent a single transmission; Solas had not even known that it had departed the interior of Rangdan space to arrive at the front lines.
The black silhouette's hand clenched slightly; Solas sensed that something was amiss.
Without making a sign, he keenly felt that the Supreme Overlord seemed... incapable of ordering a retreat?
"Nothing escapes you," an ancient voice sounded in his ear.
The Rangdan Overlord's vast psychic power crossed astronomical distances to reach directly into Solas's mind.
"We cannot retreat," the Wise One's voice was serene, yet it could not mask its despair: "The Rangdan Empire is destined to meet its end right here in the Conquest Corridor."
"The Supreme Overlord is locked in battle with the Human Emperor within the Warp; its grand essence cannot return."
Solas shook his head, his mind emitting a psychic wave: "Why? Has the Supreme Overlord's physical body not already been transferred from the headquarters to the World Engine?"
He remembered clearly that everything had proceeded normally during the transfer, without a single external interference.
"Transferring a physical body in the material universe is simple," the Wise One offered an explanation: "However, a physical body cannot enter the Warp."
"Their duel takes place upon the plane of pure consciousness, crushing one another with supreme, godlike power. Yet both of their physical forms remain rooted in the material universe, safeguarded beneath layers of heavy military protection."
"A physical body in reality serves as a god's psychic anchor; it cannot be destroyed under any circumstances. Even if defeated within the Warp, the soul can retreat back to the material universe to heal its wounds and fight another day."
---
Solas was thoroughly bewildered: "This seems to have no bearing on what we were discussing?"
He grew somewhat agitated; the human fleet's morale was soaring, and his own forces were suffering set-back after set-back across the tactical map.
"To put it simply, both of them are currently in a state where spirit and flesh are separated. The war in the Warp does not threaten their physical survival directly."
The Wise One's voice was drawn-out, carrying a tone of patient explanation: "However, a physical body must never enter the Warp at such a critical moment."
"The Veil exists in the material universe, weakening the power of the Warp to an immense degree, keeping physical bodies safe."
"If a physical body enters the Warp while its true essence cannot return, a conflict of that magnitude—a single, careless glance—could destroy the physical vessel countless times over."
"Once the physical anchor is lost, consciousness is banished eternally to the Warp, and true death comes with it."
Solas nodded slowly, finally grasping the Rangdan's current predicament.
In truth, the Supreme Overlord was suppressed by the Emperor. Should its physical body enter the Warp, the Master of Mankind possessed the power to obliterate it in an instant.
The Supreme Overlord was trapped in the material universe—unable to escape the pursuit of the human fleet, yet terrified to let its ships enter the Warp, where the Emperor stood waiting.
With no escape possible, the Supreme Overlord had no choice but to drag the entire Rangdan species into a fight to the death.
"Very well," Solas had long ceased to care about life or death, pointing toward the magnificent annular ring: "I leave it to you."
The Wise One answered helplessly: "I cannot guarantee that I can pin down the ring."
"Yet we must try—"
Their psychic exchange lasted only a fraction of a second, settling their plan of response.
Dragging its bloated body, the World Engine built up immense energy, channeling the gravitational force of its neutron star core to launch an attack on the human forces.
"RIPPLE!"
A distorted growl echoed across the public channels, responding to the Disordered Array's provocation.
HUMMM—
The World Engine trembled in the void. At the center of its equatorial belt, a circular hatch thirty kilometers in diameter slowly parted, like a titanic god opening its eye of judgment.
The directional gravity of a neutron star erupted instantly. Across a forty-five-degree forward arc of space, human warships plummeted out of control in an instant, pulled helpless toward the World Engine.
Warship engines blazed bright as stars, yet they could not withstand the targeted gravitational pull, looking like fish unable to swim against a raging current!
Hull structures fractured; force fields collapsed.
Warships flipped and collapsed under the ultra-gravity, several-kilometer-long vessels compressed into hundred-meter iron spheres, leaving only adamantium spines struggling to hold together.
"Order the fleet to fall back! Sheer numbers cannot match a World Engine!"
Ferrus issued a decisive order, commanding the fleet to retreat and scatter to minimize unnecessary casualties.
That single strike alone had destroyed six fleets, reducing hundreds of capital ships to tiny iron spheres.
"Crude gravity manipulation!"
The voice of the Disordered Array remained serene, its contempt completely unmasked. The slaughter ring began to spin on its axis, its outer edge accelerating to near-light speed in less than ten seconds.
At the ring's core, thunder storms crackled, lightning expanding outward from the void.
Amidst the furious lightning, countless sensor arrays caught a gravitational collapse as a horizon-swallowing darkness flared onto the screens.
That was a black hole from which even light could not escape!
BANG—!
The cosmos should have been utterly silent, yet a roar echoed directly into the depths of everyone's consciousness, rattling every bridge.
Flanked by white lightning storms, the battle ring vanished from the edge of the system.
In the next instant, a black hole flickered inside the system for 0.00001 seconds, and the ring materialized ten light-minutes away from the World Engine!
A series of mysterious equations flashed across its outer armor plating before fading into nothingness.
"Teleportation? Wormholes?"
Witnessing this, members of the Adeptus Mechanicus screamed wildly, their cognitive chips pushed to the brink of overload.
"I see a possibility—a supreme technology that allows humanity to break free from the Warp and traverse the universe relying solely on the laws of reality!"
Keenly attuned to technology, the Tech-Priests quickly realized the monumental nature of the science laid bare before them.
With this, humanity possessed the hope of breaking free from relying solely on Warp travel!
On the bridge of the Void Wanderer, the Stone Man shook his head silently—that was an unreplicable technology, lost to the Dark Age of Technology.
The ancestors of Denurian had once possessed the chance to free humanity from the Warp, but the cybernetic rebellion of foreign AI had destroyed everything.
The Disordered Array was utilizing technology beyond current human comprehension to achieve instantaneous displacement of ultra-massive objects within a star system.
"Rewind space-time!"
Complex mathematical formulas lit up simultaneously along both the inner and outer surfaces of the ring, flashing with a mysterious, inexplicable rhythm.
An invisible wave—transcending both time and space—enveloped the sector containing the World Engine.
Then, the universe fell silent.
As if someone had hit a "rewind" button, time reversed, and the six destroyed fleets reformed in the void.
Iron, light, human lives—localized space-time replayed, returning everything to the moment before destruction!
"BY THE OMNISSIAH!"
Red-robed Magi fell to their knees in tears, prostrating themselves toward the ring from ship viewports, beholding the true power of the Machine God.
Yet an anomaly struck this miraculous scene.
Multiple explosions erupted along the ring; the timeline snapped violently, and causality fast-forwarded to recalculate, swallowing the fleets once more.
The human fleets were swallowed by the World Engine a second time!
Only then did many notice that multiple sections of the ring were damaged, causing its energy flow to stall.
"Your broken body cannot reverse space-time," the Wise One's voice trembled; it had distinctly felt time being reshaped back and forth.
Deep horror filled its heart, terrified by the glorious past of humanity.
"A minor failure," the Disordered Array's voice remained calm as ever: "Repair protocol activated. Executing Option Two."
"Under my vigil, death shall not touch humanity!"
"Reshape causality!" Energy flared like wild dragons along the ring as damaged sectors repaired themselves continuously, causing even more regions to glow.
Mathematical formulas on the inner and outer bands became vast as oceans, with energy threads fine as hair weaving through and linking the equations, stitching together humanity's supreme intellect.
This time, there was no dizzying reversal of time. The six fleets materialized directly back within the human battle line.
"Xenos, can your minds comprehend this?"
The Disordered Array issued an arrogant query, answered only by utter, total silence.
Inside the World Engine, the Rangdan scholars could not comprehend what had just taken place.
"They returned from before their deaths," the Disordered Array explained to the xenos what had occurred: "Intervening in the current timeline from an unblemished past."
"Alien filth is incapable of understanding such technology."
Silence—accompanied by a silent, hollow confusion.
The six destroyed fleets remembered clearly that they had died twice, only to reappear within their own fleet line once more—their positions completely identical to where they had been before the attack.