"How do you intend to dispose of it?"
Aboard the Blackstone Fortress, Blazkowicz held the divine authority aloft, addressing the Emperor enthroned upon the Blackstone Throne.
The Emperor sat in stoic silence, his majesty self-evident. Clad in the Armor of Reason, radiance shifted along his frame, his eight-meter stature shimmering faintly within a hazy halo. Lowering his gaze, he stared at the squirming, intangible entity, contemplating how to frame his answer.
Blazkowicz maintained a vice-like grip on the authority. Without a sound, logical resolution, he would not relinquish the fallen deity's power.
"Seal it."
A low, resonant answer reverberated through the hall, explaining the necessity of a seal: "A deity's authority stems from the dark willpower of the Warp—it is an absolute constant."
"So long as the Warp does not revert to its primordial state, a dark divine right cannot be destroyed. You may shatter it and erase it conceptually, yet you cannot prevent it from shifting forms to return through alternative means."
"So long as darkness persists, authority endures."
There was an unmistakable trace of powerlessness in the Emperor's voice. The Warp had spawned this divine authority, and so long as the Sea of Souls endured, divine right could never be truly eradicated.
Even Blazkowicz—capable of executing a god and conceptually erasing a specific divine authority—merely achieved a one-sided, temporary suppression. Because the Warp existed, authority would inevitably return to the Sea of Souls to cultivate fresh darkness.
That foul-choked Sea of Souls was the true fountainhead of darkness; gods were merely isolated, singular manifestations of its specific traits.
Slay one deity, and countless more would arise to take its place.
"Rather than erasing it—only for an unknown darkness to claim the vacant seat of divine right—it is better to seal it away, keeping it securely under human vigil."
Having listened to the Emperor's explanation, Blazkowicz offered no immediate reply, his gaze fixed directly upon the Emperor's true face beneath the golden light.
With raven hair falling loose, the majesty he displayed was laced with an undeniable, deeply rooted fatigue.
While Blazkowicz had battled the Supreme Overlord in the Warp, the Emperor had maintained the Astronomican while sustaining instantaneous psychic communications between the front lines and Terra. His dark skin bore the strain of that exertion, faintly tinged with paleness.
"A seal?" Blazkowicz shook his head in disapproval, considering this a flawed solution: "Humanity excels at forgetting danger."
"With the passage of vast spans of time, the peril of the seal will be trivialized, and the resolve to stay vigilant will slacken. A mind forged in the crucible of darkness cannot be inherited alongside duty alone to convince future generations of what we faced today."
Blazkowicz was blunt, expressing total distrust in those who would come after.
Those who had never lived through horror could naturally never grasp the price of peace. Divine authority was fraught with temptation, and human greed possessed no upper limit. Perhaps one day, a mortal insect would dare seek to wield the authority of a god.
"What then do you propose?" The Emperor looked down at the Doom Slayer, inviting a counter-proposal.
To raise an objection naturally required a decisive alternative.
"Compared to a deity, a human life is as brief and fleeting as a shooting star."
Blazkowicz turned his back, gazing beyond the Blackstone Pyramid into the starry void blazing outside: "Thus, humanity excels at oblivion. To bury divine right within oblivion is the most fitting end."
He raised the authority in his hand, addressing the Emperor: "Sever it into numerous fragments, bind them under eternal seals, and scatter them into the deepest reaches of the cosmos."
"Across the boundless void, the authority will never reunite—enduring thus until its ultimate fade into nonexistence."
The Emperor stared at the intangible distortion, contemplating the idea at length before finally nodding with solemn conviction: "Agreed."
"Oblivion is indeed the finest resolution for a divine authority."
Having lived through the entirety of human history, the Master of Mankind understood human nature to its absolute depths, knowing full well that oblivion was a masterstroke of containment. Ambitious megalomaniacs could never trace the location of an authority buried in a forgotten past. Furthermore, the sheer, endless vastness of the universe would extinguish any lingering desire to hunt for them.
The Blackstone Throne cast down golden light, binding the intangible distortion.
As if sensing its fate, the authority squirming form writhed in unease, instinctively attempting to break free of its shackles. Regrettably, as merely half of a divine authority, its newly birthed, hazy consciousness could neither comprehend what it faced nor muster the strength to resist.
Blazkowicz ignited the Crucible, pointing its deadly edge straight at the authority, asking the Emperor: "Into how many pieces must it be severed?"
"For maximum security and to ensure the stability of the seals," the Emperor deliberated for three seconds, his fingers lightly tapping the armrest of his throne: "Five hundred pieces."
"It will preserve enough stability to prevent the fragments from lapsing back into the Warp. Yet the value of each piece will be small enough that the Chaos Gods will not bother hunting them down."
"Very well." Without a moment's hesitation, Blazkowicz brought the Crucible down upon the intangible entity.
RIP—!
Like the sound of tearing cloth, the blade ripped through the divine authority, severing it once more.
The intangible distortion shuddered violently within the golden light, as if screeching in agony.
Infused with the concept of god-slaying, the Crucible cleaved through everything pertaining to the divine, shredding it without impediment.
Striking dozens of times within a single second, Blazkowicz divided the divine authority with absolute precision.
Its presence plummeted continuously, the conceptual authority reduced from a complete whole to scattered shards, its power thoroughly shattered.
Unleashing a torrent of psychic energy, the Emperor encased the fragments within golden spheres. Reaching out to the Blackstone Fortress itself, he extracted a massive slab of Blackstone, carving it into a thousand Blackstone containers.
The fragments were placed inside, and the Blackstone containers sealed shut.
Golden psychic energy flooded the Blackstone, saturating every atom as the Emperor personally engraved his sealing wards upon them.
Five hundred Blackstone containers floated around the Emperor, their dark, ink-black surfaces gradually turning golden.
"This process will require considerable time."
The Emperor closed his eyes, his consciousness slowly submerging into the sealing matrices: "The first layer of the seal ensures the containment of the divine right."
"Once the psychic sealing is complete, I will encase them in a second shell of Blackstone, reversing its polarity to completely block all psychic detection."
"Five hundred sealed containers—some real, some decoys—will all be cast into the outer galactic rim and hurled into the void between galaxies. Neither the gods, nor other alien races, nor humanity itself shall ever find them."
"Even I will not retain knowledge of where the containers end up."
As he spoke, a subtle smile tugged at the corner of the Emperor's lips, finding Blazkowicz's method increasingly brilliant. Even for him, once the Blackstone shells blocked all psychic resonance, he would lose psychic track of them, completely ignorant of their ultimate destination.
The Sisters of Silence tasked with scattering the containers would eventually meet their natural end, and the secrets they guarded would sleep eternally alongside those forgotten guardians.
In the end, oblivion would replace wardens, imprisoning the divine authority for all eternity.
Pure brilliance!
A ten thousand new plans surged within the Emperor's mind—he felt inspired to empty the vaults of the Imperial Palace, dispersing its dangerous prisoners to dilute the inherent risks borne by Terra.
It was like dismantling a bundle of tethered warheads into individual, minor explosives; even if a detonation occurred in the future, humanity would possess the means to suppress it.
---
Blazkowicz glanced at the dais, finding the Emperor's sudden smile completely inscrutable.
He turned and strode out of the Blackstone Hall—a final battle still awaited in the J-11 star system.
The war on Planet VI had entered its closing moments.
In truth, it could hardly be called a war any longer.
Ever since the Supreme Overlord was conceptually erased, the Rangdan had fallen into complete disarray, their chain of command entirely severed from Solas's control. Without a supreme intelligence to coordinate their forces, how could a Rangdan Warmaster stand against the Legions and their Primarchs?
The battlefield had descended into a one-sided slaughter. Facing the unrelenting assault of the Space Marine Legions, the Rangdan elites no longer even knew what they were fighting for.
With the Supreme Overlord gone, the mental corruption and control implanted within the Rangdan species withered over time.
The slave armies broke free of their mental shackles. Though generations of servitude left them instinctively loyal to the Rangdan, beneath that loyalty, their fearlessness had vanished. Unguided by psychic mind-control, they hesitated, unable to endure the terror inflicted by humanity.
With reinforcements from the Salamanders and Hands of Iron joining the fray—alongside drop pods from the Ultramarines and Imperial Fists raining down—six whole Space Marine Legions were actively hunting across the surface of Planet VI.
The Adeptus Mechanicus concentrated its might as well, deploying fifty Titan Legions alongside a sea of Skitarii to join the siege.
The armored spearheads of the mortal Auxilia pushed forward steadily, transforming into an unstoppable tide that crushed alien defensive lines underfoot.
Over a hundred Knight Houses took to the field, a thousand Knight suits galloping across the battlefield, using their iron frames to purge smaller bio-titans.
With ground warfare concluded on all other planets, the Imperium directed an unprecedented volume of military might onto Planet VI.
Under normal circumstances, concentrating so many combat units on a single world was nearly impossible. Frontline commanders had never waged a war with such overwhelming abundance; a single fortification assault could call upon multiple elite formations simultaneously, resulting in highly adaptable tactics.
At the vanguard, Space Marines spearheaded the charge alongside towering Titans; in the center, armored columns advanced alongside mortal Auxilia; from the rear, heavy artillery bombardment swept the line forward continuously.
As the naval battle drew to a close, more Legions dropped from orbit, bringing Primarchs directly onto the battlefield.
On the far side of the world, the Universe Island hovered in near-Earth orbit, launching wave after wave of million-strong deployments.
Across the surface, automated war-machines stretched as far as the eye could see, marching on mechanical legs and grinding forward on heavy treads.
Super-carriers released swarms of autonomous combat drones from low orbit to coordinate with ground forces. Linked through shared data-streams, they purged Rangdan strongholds with terrifying efficiency.
These mechanical units possessed no concept of life or death—within their data directives, the absolute annihilation of the enemy was the sole priority.
Even Leman Russ's Space Wolves were left panting for breath, struggling just to match the relentless tempo of the Abominable Intelligence legion's advance.