After the boundary between the Warp and realspace had been repeatedly torn apart by the layers of illusions derived from the Ritual of Annihilation,
The [Sarah Link] Avatar of Dominance barely stabilized its tottering form, its overall state having plummeted to an extremely dangerous plight.
Previously, in order to open the path between reality and the Warp, Raynor had staked his entire authority, attempting to use Tooth Many's body as a realspace anchor to forcibly complete a divine descent onto Brevis.
That attempt had consumed a massive amount of the divine authority of dominance, only to be brutally interrupted by a wisp of Tzeentch's remote projection. The invisible backlash, like a tide, washed over this avatar of the zerg-like monarch again and again.
The towering 150-meter-tall body no longer possessed its previous awe-inspiring might.
The endless swirling purple flames on the outer layer faded in patches, flickering unsteadily.
The three pairs of flying tyrant-style giant chitinous wings, which had originally been fully unfurled and aggressive, were covered with crisscrossing, gruesome cracks across their wing membranes. Many spikes had broken and fallen off, and fine fragments of purple light drifted continuously into the surrounding void like catkins.
The draconic head, fusing royal majesty with the ferocity of the Zerg, had its carapace surface covered in densely packed psychic burn marks.
Beneath the charred damage, one could faintly see the churning, restless, and nearly out-of-control flow of authority inside the avatar.
Raynor and Sarah's consciousnesses were deeply bound, and the two shared all senses and mental feedback.
Sarah could clearly perceive that within the avatar's core, the authority of dominance was being endlessly overdrawn and consumed.
Every defense against the illusionary impact, every attempt to tear apart the spatial barrier, continuously squeezed dry this newly completed lesser divine core.
She could feel the exhaustion transmitted from Raynor's mental level, and she could also see the situation on the battlefield sliding step by step toward an irrecoverable defeat.
In the direction of Planet Brevis, that layer of deep blue mist representing the Ritual of Annihilation was still slowly expanding.
That planet's life signals were still continuously plunging, and the time left for them was ticking away second by second.
Just as despair over an inevitable defeat had grown deep within Sarah's heart, thinking that they would ultimately be completely swallowed by the tide of Chaos,
The eyes of the Avatar of Dominance's insectoid draconic head suddenly erupted with two dazzling, deep purple beams of light.
The power of dominance, repeatedly suppressed by the backlash and illusions, broke through layers of shackles and returned once more to its wielder.
A brief yet immensely heavy thought resounded within the avatar's soul core, spreading throughout the entire interstice of the Warp.
"I'm back."
Mere four words declared that Raynor's consciousness had completely broken free from the entanglement of the illusions, regaining full dominance over this fused avatar.
Sarah, bound within the same body, instantly burst forth with unconcealed elation in her consciousness.
Countless fragmented, warm mental ripples undulated across the soul bond between the two; that was her unique emotional feedback.
"Raynor, I knew that you would definitely come back."
The two consciousnesses that had undergone life-and-death hardships briefly lingered and merged within the Avatar of Dominance.
Fragments of memories of fighting side by side in blood and battle flashed rapidly across each other's mental worlds—their first meeting on Necromunda, the fierce battle on Planet Brevis, and their narrow escapes from death several times over. Countless life-and-death bonds precipitated at this moment.
Meanwhile, not far away, relying on Atia's remnant soul coordinates and barely maintaining its existence with the energy overflowing from the Ritual of Annihilation, was the Avatar of Tzeentch.
At this moment, sensing the recovery of Raynor's state, thousands of winged pupils shrank and trembled frantically.
If this Chaos God avatar possessed teeth capable of clenching, it would likely have crushed them all to pieces by now.
The plan it had meticulously laid out to exhaust its opponent through illusions had suffered a massive flaw at this moment.
Tzeentch was well aware that this newly born lesser god before it, after the previous round of overdraft, no longer possessed its peak strength.
However, relying solely on this projection avatar propped up by a mortal anchor, wanting to completely annihilate the combination of Raynor and Sarah would still require an incalculable cost, and might even cause this worldly projection of its own to be completely obliterated right then and there.
It was unwilling to bear such an unrewarding risk.
Without the slightest hesitation, the countless twisted tentacles behind the Avatar of Tzeentch danced wildly, and a grand and bizarre summoning ritual suddenly opened within the void.
Pitch-black, jagged Warp rifts tore open one after another around the battlefield; powerful entities from the depths of the sea of Chaos, under the traction of its authority,
crossed dimensions and were projected in batches into this interstice battlefield.
The first to charge out from the rifts were dozens of Lords of Change.
Every Lord of Change was clad in iridescent psychic armor that constantly flowed and shifted, their bodily contours twisting and reshaping at every moment.
In their hands, they gripped trickster staves engraved with myriad bizarre runes, roaring psychic storms surrounding their bodies, while the madness and cunning belonging to the greater daemons continuously poured outward along the rifts.
Following closely behind the Lords of Change, several Supreme Sorcerers of the Thousand Sons Legion stepped out of the Warp rift.
They were the top psychic elites among Magnus's Thousand Sons warband, clad in Power Armor interwoven with gold and blue, their bodies covered with esoteric runes passed down through generations of the Thousand Sons lineage.
As the runes flowed, constantly drawing upon the magic of the Warp, they were proficient in the sorcery of fate calculation and flame incineration, and even mastered the terrifying power to twist reality.
Psychic threads interlocked between several Supreme Sorcerers, constructing a massive joint spellcasting array. Their magic converged into one place, and its power skyrocketed exponentially.
The Lords of Change and the Thousand Sons Supreme Sorcerers immediately formed a sophisticated tactical coordination.
A portion of the Lords of Change waved their staves, unleashing a sky-darkening barrage of chaotic psychic artillery that heavily bombarded the body surface of the [Sarah Link] Avatar of Dominance wave after wave.
Another portion of the daemons transformed their claws and blades into ferocious ones, rushing forward under the cover of the artillery fire to launch vicious close-quarters combat.
Meanwhile, the Thousand Sons' joint spellcasting array steadily outputted power from the rear, continuously firing curses intertwined with threads of fate, directly targeting the source of Raynor's authority of dominance.
Those curses attempted to penetrate the level of fundamental laws, interfering with and dismantling the operational logic of the power of dominance, weakening this newborn lesser god from its very foundations.
Raynor was forced to fight on two fronts.
On one hand, he had to withstand the berserk close-combat harassment of the Lords of Change; on the other hand, he had to constantly resolve the fate curses woven by the Thousand Sons sorcerers.
To resist the tide-like onslaught of Chaos, the Shadow in the Warp barrier deployed under Sarah's leadership saw its load skyrocket exponentially.
Layer after layer of insulating membranes were constantly generated, only to be torn apart under the impact of the chaotic artillery and sorcery.
Sarah mobilized all the remnant Hive Mind will remaining after their fusion, continuously replenishing power for the barrier.
Yet, facing the wave-after-wave attacks of so many high-end Chaos combat powers, the Shadow in the Warp was still growing thinner bit by bit, with more and more gaps appearing in its protection.
Across vast space, the deep blue mist of Annihilation on Planet Brevis was still continuously accumulating power, and the energy threshold of the god-slaying sorcery was steadily rising.
Sarah's thought was full of anxiety, transmitting along the soul bond into Raynor's consciousness.
"If this endless consumption continues like this, the avatar's authority will sooner or later be completely exhausted. By then, both of us will be torn apart, and Brevis will completely become a sacrifice to the Annihilation sorcery."
Just as the Thousand Sons Supreme Sorcerers' joint incantation was finally completed, and a devastating fate-destruction sorcery condensed and formed at the center of the array,
and dozens of Lords of Change scattered simultaneously, sealing off all dodging positions of the Avatar of Dominance, at this critical juncture of completing the encirclement and locking onto the target's life and death,
On the outer side of Planet Brevis, the huge Warp vortex continuously spewing outward the mist of Annihilation suddenly suffered a devastating bombardment from the outside.
A blinding golden holy light, comparable to a stellar explosion, burst forth with a roar. The barrier on the outer layer of the chaotic vortex used to isolate reality and the Warp shattered and disintegrated like thin ice.
The Avatar of the Emperor—Dominic, in the posture of an Imperial Walker, broke through the boundaries of the material universe and the Warp, forcibly killing his way into this war-torn boundary battlefield.
Floating above his head was a laurel crown purely gathered from holy light, his red hair flying, and his pair of eyes had already erupted with a golden luster.
His entire body was constructed through the mutual fusion of the psychic power of the Emperor and Dominic's remnant soul.
In his right hand, he tightly grasped a sacred greatsword personally forged by the Emperor, its blade flowing with a brilliant radiance that purified all the filth of Chaos.
A thick layer of faith force field hovered around his body, capable of isolating the vast majority of Chaos pollution and mental erosion.
Of course, this was not the true body of the Emperor descending in person, but merely a projection of power cast here.
Yet even if it was just an avatar projection, it had already reached the power tier of a lesser god. He represented the will of the Emperor of Terra, officially intervening in this melee of the Warp.
The very instant the Imperial Walker Dominic stepped onto the battlefield, a silent anomaly stirred once again on the level of fundamental laws within the entire Warp interstice.
A higher-dimensional perspective—belonging neither to Tzeentch, Raynor-Sarah, nor the Emperor—cut into this battlefield without any warning.
This mysterious entity did not release any attacks, nor did it participate in the various factions' games; it was merely a calm observer. It transcended the local causal chains within this interstice, and everything on the battlefield could not hide from its gaze.
It peeked at Atia, who served as the container for the Avatar of Tzeentch; that mortal sorcerer's soul was already riddled with holes, and the container's barriers were on the verge of complete collapse.
It saw through the fact that the Tzeentch before it was merely an avatar projected remotely, while its true body remained far away in the depths of the sea of Chaos.
It thoroughly understood the complete primal structure of the authority of dominance after the consciousnesses of Raynor and Sarah fused.
All the conspiracies and trump cards behind the Ritual of Annihilation were laid bare under this gaze.
Even the causal links of every spell cast by the Thousand Sons Supreme Sorcerers and the underlying logic of every morphological transformation of the Lords of Change were completely parsed.
The higher-dimensional observer merely watched quietly, like flipping through a pre-written script of destiny, neither interfering nor intervening.
"So that's how it is." Dominic's remnant consciousness also followed the Emperor's perspective, seeing through the relationship between Raynor and Sarah.
At the final moment of his demise, he was quite open-minded about it—so they weren't colluding, they were dating!
"Huh? Dating?"
"Isn't that even more wrong?!"
Subsequently, he erupted with a tremendous emotion of joy—perhaps seeing the taboo romance between a human and a zerg, he could finally die in peace.
Yet this existence prying into everything was still keenly captured by the Avatar of Tzeentch.
The thousands of pupils on the avatar's body suddenly contracted violently, rolling with intense unease within each and every pupil.
The Lord of Change was abundantly clear that an external force of unknown origin was peering into all the plans it had plotted for so long.
However, the current situation on the battlefield no longer allowed it to be distracted to track down that observer.
Dominic did not have the slightest hesitation, lifting high the sacred greatsword in his hand. The surging, mighty torrent of the Emperor's faith swept across all directions like a golden tsunami, charging straight into the center of the melee.
At this point, two lesser god avatars stood side by side upon the battlefield.
On one side was the [Sarah Link] Avatar of Dominance formed by the fusion of Raynor and Sarah, and on the other side was the Imperial Walker Dominic.
The two formed a battle line, facing the Avatar of Tzeentch head-on, along with the swarming Lords of Change and Thousand Sons Supreme Sorcerers under its command.
The battle situation was thoroughly rewritten as a result.
Raynor-Lena's Avatar of Dominance quickly adjusted its combat strategy, no longer single-handedly withstanding all the chaotic offensives.
The Shadow in the Warp spreading outward prioritized pressing toward the Thousand Sons Sorcerers; the membrane constantly oscillated and cut, striving to interfere with and sever the interconnected psychic circuits between the sorcerers, disrupting the joint spellcasting arrays they relied upon to unleash powerful spells.
At the same time, the authority of dominance operated at full power, and massive purple light-cast giant hands reached out from the void one after another, seizing and containing the charging Lords of Change, restricting the greater daemons' offensive rhythm.
However, the old wounds on the avatar's body still had not healed, and its luminous shell was covered in cracks of all sizes.
Every time it released large-scale authority moves, it consumed a massive amount of its remaining divine power, and the cracks continued to spread and expand outward.
On the other side, Dominic, the Emperor's Walker, swung his sacred greatsword, and broad, mighty torrents of golden purifying sword light swept across the void.
Wherever the sword light passed, the iridescent armor on the Lords of Change sizzled and smoked, and their chaotic flesh was dissolved by the holy light.
The faith force field surrounding him fluctuated constantly, neutralizing and resolving the layers of fate sorcery laid down by Tzeentch, and specifically dispelling the various psychic curses released by the Thousand Sons sorcerers.
Yet Dominic was ultimately only a partial power projection of the Emperor, and his power had a clear upper limit.
Faced with several Lords of Change taking turns in close-quarters entanglement, coupled with the uninterrupted spell harassment of multiple Thousand Sons Sorcerers, the holy light psychic reserves within his body were also depleting at a visible speed.
Throughout the Warp interlayer, authority collisions and spell explosions rose and fell one after another, and the roaring reverberations were endless.
The already scarred space was further torn and expanded by the power of both sides, with brand-new, pitch-black spatial rifts spreading everywhere.
The floating spatial islands drifting within the crevices were continuously crushed into powder by the shockwaves stirred up by the battle, and the wreckage of various ships drifted scattered toward nothingness.
The Thousand Sons Sorcerers constantly switched between all kinds of sorceries, a violent flame storm swept across the battlefield, fate tampering distorted the distance between friend and foe, and reality-displacement spells shifted attack trajectories out of thin air.
The Lords of Change waved their chaotic weapons, relying on the metamorphic authority bestowed by Tzeentch to reshape their bodily forms at will.
Sometimes transforming into physical giants to launch fierce attacks, and sometimes decomposing into illusions to confuse opponents, disrupting the judgment of the two avatars.
The Avatar of Tzeentch retreated to the rear of the battlefield, continuously urging Atia's soul vessel to maintain itself from disintegration, while uninterruptedly replenishing energy for the Ritual of Annihilation above Brevis, ensuring that the god-slaying sorcery continued to accumulate power.
At the same time, it wove layer upon layer of fate tricks to interfere with Raynor and Dominic's offensive predictions.
It frequently used the authority of change to perform short-distance spatial teleportations, dodging all blows sufficient to be fatal, and occasionally flung out several phantom projections of the blade of tzeentch, launching sneak attacks from various tricky angles.
Both sides went back and forth, locked in a fierce, ceaseless battle.
But as time passed, the scales tilted toward the Chaos faction once again.
Two Thousand Sons Sorcerers brazenly chose to self-detonate; the surging psychic explosion was not used to kill opponents, but served as the causal price offered in sacrifice.
The violent explosion forcefully tore open a part of the isolation defense of the Shadow in the Warp, and the remaining sorcerers seized the fleeting opportunity to complete an extremely perilous fate curse seal.
The pitch-black curse seal light patterns, like a living creature, crossed numerous barriers and heavily branded themselves onto the body of Raynor's Avatar of Dominance.
The curse seal took root on the surface of the authority, continuously corroding inward at the foundation of the laws of dominance.
At that exact moment, three Lords of Change tightly entangled Dominic, the Emperor's Walker, launching frantic attacks at any cost, consuming a massive amount of his psychic reserves, and the light of his faith force field noticeably dimmed.
Raynor seized a fleeting combat opportunity, mobilizing his authority with full force. The Supreme Sealing Seal plummeted crashing down from high above, and the giant imperial seal with a diameter of over a hundred meters, carrying the might of ten thousand jun, smashed heavily toward the main body of the Avatar of Tzeentch.
But Tzeentch had already distorted the falling trajectory of the sealing seal by borrowing the causal price sacrificed by the Thousand Sons Sorcerers' self-detonation.
The heavy imperial seal grazed past the body of the Avatar of Tzeentch with a roar, smashing only a portion of the tentacles on the flank of its body, failing to cause a decisive, heavy blow.
It was this flaw that appeared for just a brief instant which became the fatal node of the entire battle.
Seizing the opportunity, the Avatar of Tzeentch suddenly accelerated its entire massive body, ignoring the sporadic energy streams blocking its path, bypassing the frontal defense, and pointing the blade of tzeentch held in its hand directly at the authority core of Raynor's Avatar of Dominance.
At the same time, the remaining Thousand Sons Sorcerers joined forces to release a destructive psychic cannon, and a brilliant beam of chaos locked onto Dominic.
Both avatars were simultaneously caught in a two-pronged attack.
Raynor's Shadow in the Warp barrier had no time to redirect all its defensive power, and Dominic's faith force field was also nearing depletion.
Falling short by a single move, seeing the two lesser god avatars about to suffer heavy damage side-by-side, and the entire battle situation on the verge of complete collapse, despair enshrouded this Warp battlefield.
At this critical juncture of life and death, an unexpected variable that no one could have anticipated suddenly entered the stage.
Luna, the woman who had first instigated the Chaos rebellion in Brevis, had previously been defeated by Raynor, and whom everyone thought had already fallen.
Suddenly rushed out from a hidden Warp shadow rift behind the Avatar of Tzeentch.
She had not truly died.
Long ago, Tzeentch had incorporated her into its own fate contingency plan, treating her as a hidden piece that could be discarded and activated at a critical moment.
Yet for a long time, Luna had been wantonly toyed with by the Lord of Change, manipulated as a discarded piece, coupled with the bone-deep resentment accumulated from her previous defeat, her faith had long since completely twisted and deteriorated.
What drove her to this day was never fanatical worship of Tzeentch, but the obsession to revive the Saint Gallus Family.
Yet in the end, the entire Saint Gallus Family was completely destroyed by Tzeentch's conspiracy.
With the family destroyed and her dreams turned to bubbles, Luna had long since gone completely mad.
Only one thought remained in her heart: to make this Chaos God, who wantonly toyed with the fates of all living beings, pay a price in blood.
During these days, she had been lurking between the gaps of Tzeentch's power, silently enduring, waiting for the best opportunity.
At this moment, Tzeentch's entire attention was focused on the two opponents ahead, Raynor and Dominic, its thousands of pupils locked onto the frontlines of battle, completely neglecting the forgotten discarded piece behind it.
Luna poured all the Chaos power she had devoured and absorbed over the years, as well as a small portion of the energy of the Ritual of Annihilation that she had meticulously and secretly intercepted, entirely into a short blade.
More importantly, the moment before her strike, she offered a prayer to Khorne, the Lord of Skulls and Blood.
Khorne did not care about Tzeentch's scheming; He appreciated this berserk courage to swing a blade at a deity. A meager yet incomparably berserk strand of power crossed the Warp, responding to Luna's plea.
A short blade, pitch-black throughout and covered with scarlet etchings, thus took shape. Named "Tooth of the Oathbreaker", it was tightly gripped in Luna's hand.
This was a weapon of destruction sufficient to inflict heavy damage on a lesser god avatar.
She did not let out a single shout or roar, exerting all her might to restrain all her psychic fluctuations, transforming into a silent shadow as she lunged straight toward the back of the Avatar of Tzeentch.
Carrying the berserk power bestowed by Khorne, the Tooth of the Oathbreaker stabbed fiercely into the core upon which the Avatar of Tzeentch relied for existence.
Atia's soul anchor vessel, which was already on the verge of collapse.
" !!!"
The thousands of pupils on the body of the Avatar of Tzeentch simultaneously erupted with blinding psychic light, and a painful shrieking howl mixed with countless tones shook the entire Warp interlayer.
It never expected that the piece it had planted would turn around and stab at itself.
Atia's soul vessel was already tottering, and suffered this vicious, heavy backstab from within.
The massive form of the entire Avatar of Tzeentch began to violently vibrate and twist, and a large amount of colorful iridescent psychic light spewed wildly outward from the wound.
The anchor to reality was heavily damaged.
On the battlefield, all existences maintained by Tzeentch's authority suffered backlash simultaneously.
The power of the Lords of Change instantly plummeted significantly.
The joint psychic array of the Thousand Sons Sorcerers directly experienced severe disorder, and the spell lights dimmed in large swathes.
The desperate situation that was about to completely overturn was thoroughly shattered by this sudden betrayal.
Raynor and Dominic firmly seized this once-in-a-lifetime flaw, and two forces at the lesser god tier gathered momentum simultaneously.
Preparing to launch a decisive general offensive against the injured Avatar of Tzeentch.
The Emperor was long no longer that mortal ruler of Terra trapped upon the Golden Throne.
Having undergone a metamorphosis and sublimation through the long years, He had already completed a transition at the level of essence, transforming into the fifth Chaos God within the Warp.
The foundation of His power was deeply rooted in the continuous survival will of the entire human race.
Day in and day out, the beliefs, hopes, sufferings, and desires of the billions of mortals spread across The Galaxy continuously supplied Him with sources of power.
As long as human civilization was not completely destroyed and extinguished, His divine authority would endure endlessly, continuing to grow and strengthen.
Relying on this unique source of power, the Emperor mastered an exclusive ability sufficient to awe the various Chaos powers.
His divine grace could directly scorch the Chaos essence of the Dark Gods at the level of the Warp, severely crippling the avatars and divine authorities projected by the Dark Gods from their root.
Dominic, the Walker of the Emperor, inherited this hard-earned gift of divine authority, summoning a projection of the Emperor's Sword in his hands.
This greatsword, flowing with brilliant golden light throughout its body, was precisely the concrete carrier of the Emperor's power to scorch Chaos.
Facing the Avatar of Tzeentch—which had just been backstabbed by Luna and whose anchor point was damaged—Dominic exerted his arms to lift the projected greatsword high, pouring out all of his remaining psychic power and the borrowed divine power.
The heavy, wide golden blade carried the radiance that burned away Chaos, slashing down with the momentum of a thunderbolt, and heavily smashing into the avatar's body of Tzeentch, which was barely maintained by the soul anchor of the sorcerer Atia.
At the very instant the greatsword pierced the body, Raynor urged the Shadow in the Warp with all his strength.
Layer upon layer of purple isolation membranes instantly spread out, firmly locking down all spatial rifts and Warp transit channels through which the Avatar of Tzeentch could escape outward.
At the same time, he fully opened his dominion authority, and the rolling torrent of purple divine authority, like a monstrous giant wave, suppressed the operation of the remaining witchcraft within the Avatar of Tzeentch, disintegrating its attempts to reorganize spells and repair its body.
The brilliant golden light of the Emperor's Sword, like a driving stake, firmly nailed the Avatar of Tzeentch into the void of the Warp's interlayers.
That power scorching the Chaos essence continuously eroded inward along the wound.
Above Planet Brevis, the deep blue psychic fog driven by the Ritual of Annihilation and shrouding the entire planet lost the energy source supplied by the Avatar of Tzeentch, rapidly dissipating and retreating like a receding tide; the trend of the entire planet being eroded by the ritual and gradually marching toward destruction was finally forcibly halted.
The confinement and blockade of the power of dominion, the isolation of the Shadow in the Warp, coupled with the scorching of the Chaos essence by the Emperor's Sword—these two distinct layers of destructive damage continuously impacted the foundation of Tzeentch's avatar projected to this place.
Tzeentch's consciousness, through the shattered avatar, clearly perceived a fatal crisis.
If they continued to entangle and stalemate here, the scorching power of the Emperor's Sword would trace back in reverse along Atia's worldly anchor point, tracing all the way back to directly scorch His Dark God essence far deep within the Sea of Souls.
Weighing the pros and cons, He decisively abandoned all the plans laid out this time.
The goal of capturing Raynor and Luna, and the god-slaying witchcraft benefits that the Ritual of Annihilation could bring, were all cast to the back of His mind.
The Avatar of Tzeentch suddenly erupted with all the remaining Chaos power within its body, and the violent energy wave exploded with a bang, forcibly breaking free from the dual constraints of the dominion authority and the Shadow in the Warp.
Shrouding the remaining shattered psychic fragments of the Supreme Sorcerer of the Thousand Sons, He forcibly tore open a twisted and turbulent Warp rift, no longer longing for battle, and fled in panic toward the direction of the Sea of Souls.
When the last wisp of psychic light of the Avatar of Tzeentch disappeared deep within the rift, only the aftershocks of power left after the burning remained on the battlefield.
As the vessel undertaking the Emperor's divine authority, Dominic's life also ushered in its end, and the price of making a contract with the Emperor was completely cashed in at this moment.
His psychic body, constructed from the Emperor's psychic energy and his own remaining soul, began to shatter and dematerialize bit by bit.
The shattered psychic form floated quietly within the ravished interlayer of the Warp.
Dominic's consciousness finally slowly looked toward Raynor and Luna, who had just broken free from the net and survived a catastrophe, and then his mind penetrated the barrier of the material universe, looking afar toward the sea of stars where his own fleet originally belonged.
The obsessions, unwillingness, and doubts about the unknown accumulated in his heart all vanished like smoke.
All kinds of thoughts returned to relief, his psychic light dimmed bit by bit, and his consciousness completely returned to annihilation.
Within the Warp interlayer, the smoke of battle and the violent psychic storms slowly subsided.
The bonds accumulated over a long time between Raynor and Luna through countless bloody battles and across racial barriers were completely fulfilled at this moment.
The system interface suspended in Raynor's conscious field of vision—that string of favorability numbers that had stirred countless lives and deaths—finally settled at 100.
The light pink prompt pop-up window slowly popped out: "Unlock Special CG. Annotation: Love can transcend time and space, and also mend a broken mirror."
Raynor's mind instantly perceived the truth.
The power corresponding to this special CG was precisely the only hope to repair the ravished Planet Brevis and redeem the billions of lives nearly buried under the Ritual of Annihilation.
The two were no longer bound by the barriers of physical flesh, both sinking into the deep sea of consciousness to open a deep stream-of-consciousness fusion.
This was not only the fusion of bodies, but even more so the resonance and combination at the level of souls.
In the process of soul fusion, Sarah's spiritual body possessed the ability to freely transform its form.
For the first transformation, she transformed into the appearance of a human girl from the old era of Earth deep within Raynor's memory, with gentle eyebrows and eyes, shedding all the ferocious characteristics of the Tyranids.
After a round of resonance and intermingling at the mental level, Raynor's thoughts stirred, and the notion of wanting to witness her true appearance arose in the bottom of his heart.
Sarah's mind revealed a trace of hesitation and unease, as she faintly worried that her true form belonging to the Tyranids was ferocious and terrifying, perhaps not beautiful enough, which would cause Raynor to feel estranged.
But Raynor's mind was gentle and firm, telling her straightforwardly: "What I want is the Tyranids."
Receiving the response, the spiritual body's light and shadow flowed, and she changed back once again into that majestic and towering Frost Dragon true form.
The huge chitinous carapace gleamed with a chilling purple light, and the dragon pupils flowed with a temperature belonging solely to her. The two continued to entangle and resonate within the boundless sea of consciousness.
Accompanied by the progress of the special CG, earth-shaking changes were quietly taking place upon Planet Brevis in the material universe.
Those strata of earth destroyed and disintegrated by the Ritual of Annihilation, collapsed Hive City cities, and polluted river ecosystems—time seemed to be slowly reversed, backtracking and recovering bit by bit, gradually turning back into the appearance before the descent of the psychic fog.
Yet there were two sacrifices that even the power of time reversal could not reverse.
Tooth Many, who had sacrificed his entire self to build the descent anchor point, and Dominic, who had signed a contract with the Emperor and burned out his soul—their souls had completely dissipated and were not within the scope of restoration.
On the surface of Brevis, the billions of living beings who survived the catastrophe woke up as if from an endless nightmare.
The vast majority of humans felt as if in another lifetime, and the instinct of escaping death drove them to offer prayers and thanks to the Emperor of Terra.
But the remaining Ork Boyz under Tooth Many's command, as well as the few loyal subordinates who had followed Raynor all the way, had already changed the object of worship and belief in their hearts.
They began to praise a brand new moniker in the depths of their hearts—the "Taskmaster", the God of Order and Shackles.
Just as the divine authorities of the Four Chaos Gods were never a single good or evil.
Khorne wielded slaughter, blood, and violence, but at the same time also carried the courage and glory of warriors;
Slaanesh represented debauchery and endless desire, yet also nurtured brilliant art and passionate love;
Nurgle symbolized decay, plague, and decline, similarly representing endless vitality and inclusiveness;
Tzeentch represented trickery, conspiracy, and endless change, also nurturing exploration and wisdom.
There was no completely black-and-white divine authority in the world; every emotion and every concept simultaneously possessed two sides: positive and negative.
And Raynor's core divine persona was dominion.
This divine authority represented order and rules, ruling over all things in the world, but inherently came with the other side of enslavement and shackles.
The brand-new Dark God of the Warp, Zhenwantian, the Taskmaster, was thus officially born.
He was not a divine persona of a single origin.
This newborn divine authority perfectly fused Raynor's own dominion origin, while simultaneously absorbing a portion of the traits from the Tyranids.
That was the absolute control and enslavement of the Hive Mind over individual members of the entire race.
The billions of Tyranid swarms distributed across various parts of The Galaxy under Sarah's command instinctively perceived this homologous fluctuation of divine authority, spontaneously and collectively generating belief.
Torrents of belief, massive like rushing rivers, continuously poured into the Warp from the material universe, layer after layer, continuously solidifying the divine persona foundation of the "Taskmaster".
The time flow rate inside the Warp was inherently completely different from that of the material universe, plus the time distortion effect brought by Raynor's own dominion domain.
Only a brief instant had elapsed in the external reality universe, but within this interlayer Warp, the souls of Raynor and Sarah had already spent several days accompanying each other.
Their souls completed a thorough fusion, and the love belonging to the two of them gave birth to a crystal at the mental level.
Raynor was well aware that if all the divine power were concentrated in himself and Sarah as one, the overly immense mighty power would restrict them from entering real space.
They would be forever imprisoned within the Warp, never able to set foot in the real world again.
To avoid this disaster, he actively split a part of his own divine persona and authority, differentiating them into thirteen mutually independent conscious individuals.
These were the descendants of Raynor and Sarah.
From the perspective of newborn gods, Raynor and Sarah, full of loving kindness, quietly gazed at those thirteen conscious embryonic forms still in the gestation stage.
It was precisely by relying on these thirteen descendants to undertake the diversion and buffering of divine power that they were able to break free from the shackles of mighty power and retain the possibility of returning to the material universe in the future.
Yet at the critical juncture when the thirteen descendants had not yet fully formed and were still extremely fragile, a violent mixed Warp Storm swept across the entire interlayer space without warning.
Mixed within the storm were the crimson blood of Khorne, the putrid rotten green of Nurgle, the flamboyant pink-purple of Slaanesh, and the treacherous deep blue of Tzeentch.
This was an offensive jointly driven by the Four Chaos Gods.
Across the Sea of Souls, the Four Gods witnessed the birth of a brand-new Dark God throughout the entire process.
Khorne, Nurgle, and Slaanesh successively issued taunts at the mental level, mockingly ridiculing Tzeentch extensively.
Ridiculing Him for scheming and planning for a long time, only to end up empty-handed in the end, and instead personally giving birth to a brand-new opponent whose strength could not be underestimated.
The might of the storm whipped up by the joint forces of the Four Gods was terrifyingly peerless.
Having just been born without a firmly stabilized foundation, the Taskmaster was simply unable to fully withstand the destructive blow of the Four Gods joining hands.
Raynor was incomparably clear in his heart that with his current strength, he did not have absolute certainty of being able to preserve the thirteen descendants under the ravages of this terrifying storm.
Once these immature conscious split-bodies were captured by the Four Gods, their internal authority origins would be wantonly distorted and corrupted by Chaos power, ultimately degenerating into tools manipulated in the hands of the Four Gods.
Under extreme helplessness, Raynor could only harden his heart and urge his dominion authority.
One spatial channel after another was forcibly torn open, spreading across every corner of The Galaxy.
He disrupted the consciousness of the thirteen not-yet-fully-developed descendants, throwing them out randomly all at once.
Letting them scatter and drift to various parts of the galactic sea of stars, each seeking opportunities for survival and growth to evade the search and hunt of the Four Chaos Gods.
Having finished all this, Raynor withdrew all his mind and spirit, standing shoulder to shoulder with Sarah, facing head-on the joint Warp Storm of the Four Gods rolling and crushing toward them.
The Warp Storm raging with the violent and mixed powers of the Chaos Gods was still roaring all around, and the chaotic energy washed over this pocket dimension over and over again like chaotic muddy waves.
Raynor had just dispersed and banished the thirteen progeny, and now he joined hands with Sarah, preparing to face head-on the devastating impact unleashed by the joint forces of the Chaos Gods.
There was no time to catch one's breath, nor was there any retreat to speak of.
Sarah's psychic avatar and the consciousness of The Swarm burned completely at this moment, driving the unique Biomass reconstruction instinct of the Tyranids to the absolute extreme.
Billions of flowing Biomass filaments converged from all directions of the void, and countless screened and optimized gene fragments, like a precision brocade, were woven, stacked, and shaped bit by bit.
She was going to forge a brand-new physical body in the mortal world for Raynor.
Massive amounts of Tyranids genes were repeatedly tuned and screened to eliminate the frenzied and bloodthirsty alienation defects, while retaining the formidable physique, self-healing potential, and resistance of Tyranid creatures.
In this newborn body, the muscle fibers, neural pathways, and skeletal structure had all been tempered and polished by the Dominant divine power, and its strength far surpassed that of an Astartes champion warrior.
Strength, reaction speed, and psychic tolerance all reached the peak that mortals could ever touch.
Beneath the fleshly body also lurked the seed of the Dominant authority, which would awaken immediately as soon as Raynor's consciousness returned to its place.
While recasting Raynor's physical body, Sarah split off a portion of her origin power to construct a brand-new Frost Dragon.
This newly born Frost Dragon was no longer bulky and massive like before; its size was smaller and more condensed compared to the old version, its horns shimmered with a deep dark purple luster, and its huge wing membranes flowed with purple biological psychic light.
She sacrificed some pure size advantage in exchange for faster breakthrough speed and higher psychic conduction efficiency, combining offense and defense, and her strength was a step higher than before.
When the last wisp of Biomass returned to its place, the brand-new physical body hovered steadily amidst the Warp turbulence.
Raynor's consciousness smoothly descended, returning completely to his own body.
The body conveyed the real sensation of blood flowing, and surging power rushed within the bones. He flexed his five fingers, being able to clearly feel the terrifying potential dormant in this body.
Relying on the dwindling Dominant divine power to block the destructive storm, and depending on the mortal-world coordinates left behind by Adodo, Raynor successfully opened the passage to realspace.
The two immediately leaped in, leaving the Warp.
...
Just as the two had just completed their return to the mortal world and before they had time to stabilize their state, a grand Warp exit was suddenly torn open at the Mandeville Point of Kalishis.
A massive Imperial Fleet broke through the surging Warp Storm and majestically sailed into this caged star system.
The entire fleet was painted in the Ultramarines' signature serene blue, with the eye-catching Greek letter Ω emblem engraved all over the hulls, making their affiliation clear at a glance.
The Thirteenth Legion, the Ultramarines.
This was a task force sent by Guilliman.
The fleet took a majestic and massive retribution-class battleship as its combat core, guarded by several Lunar-classs and gothic-class cruisers all around.
More than a dozen frigates spread out to form a tight alert formation, and a Torchbearer-class transport vessel closely followed behind the formation.
The heraldry of Ultramar was imprinted on the hulls, and every inch of the ship hulls outwardly proclaimed that the will of Guilliman, the Lord Regent of the Imperium of Man, had already descended upon this star system.
As soon as the warships stabilized their Warp emergence, all-band communications were forcibly deployed immediately, and broadcast signals penetrated the planetary atmosphere, covering the entirety of Brevis and even radiating towards all surrounding airspace.
A majestic and heavy synthesized human voice crossed the radio waves to spread to every corner of the planet: "General notice to the entire region, immediately summon the actual controller of this star system, Raynor Coravana, to board the ship and receive an official Imperial summons."
Countless civilians, officers, and surviving local nobles on the surface of Brevis burst into an uproar upon hearing this broadcast.
Until this moment, many people suddenly awoke from a dream, realizing that the nominal Planetary Governor Carey Von was merely a disguise, and the person who truly held the destiny of Brevis in his hands was Raynor.
Panic spread rapidly like ripples, casting a shadow over countless people's hearts.
Quite a few people secretly speculated whether Raynor had committed a heinous crime and was going to be personally arrested and liquidated by the Ultramarines Chapter.
Rumors were everywhere in the streets and alleys, with suspicion and unease spreading all around.
But not long after, a second official announcement came through the communication link again, shattering everyone's conjectures.
This was not an arrest warrant, but an official enfeoffment announcement from the Imperium.
The truth was buried before Brevis fell into the chaotic battle of the Ritual of Annihilation.
The Emperor, sitting atop the Golden Throne, transmitted all general information regarding Raynor to Lord Regent Guilliman through psychic contact.
Having endured ten thousand years of agonizing torment, the Emperor on the throne had long since shed the seven emotions and six desires of mortals, leaving behind only a purely cold rationality whose primary goal was the survival of human civilization.
He gave neither praise nor reprimand, but merely threw this observation result to Guilliman, wanting to see what choice the Lord Regent would make.
After careful consideration, Guilliman chose to wait and see for the time being.
In his judgment, Raynor's ability in his hands to establish a bond with the Tyranids possessed incalculable strategic value.
If it could be brought under the command of the Imperium, humanity could possess a Tyranid force belonging exclusively to itself.
This would be enough to share the huge external pressure for the riddled humanity in the now fragmented galaxy.
And everything that had just happened in Brevis gave Guilliman the answer.
Raynor narrowly escaped death amidst the multiple deadly traps laid by Tzeentch, shattered the long-concocted conspiracy of the Lord of Change, forcibly reversed the Ritual of Annihilation, and pulled billions of living souls in Brevis back from the brink of destruction.
This solid achievement was already enough to prove his value.
The envoy of the task force was Severus Agemman, the First Company Captain of the Ultramarines and an elite warrior of Ultramar.
He carried with him the "Warrant of Trade" with Guilliman's personally branded psychic imprint, and the enfeoffment ceremony was scheduled to be held inside the shrine chamber of the retribution-class battleship.
Receiving the communication summons, Raynor did not avoid it. After discussing with Sarah for a moment, he set off for the main Imperial warship.
The huge warship shrine chamber was solemn and majestic, with the holy icon of the Emperor engraved on the walls. Dozens of Space Marines of the Ultramarines stood in two rows in solemn guard.
Agemman stood in the center of the shrine chamber, his deep blue Power Armor glowing with a cold and hard luster under the lights.
The white Ω emblem on his shoulder guard was like a silent decree, and on his weather-beaten face, a pair of eyes that had not turned muddy after two centuries of war were calmly sizing up Raynor who had stepped into the cabin door.
What he held in his hands was an ancient document with an adamantium axis and a dark red leather cover.
A blackened blood fingerprint was pressed at the seal.
That was pressed down by the owner of the fingerprint with his own hands when he was still able to walk among the mortal world.
"Raynor Coravana." Agemman spoke, his voice deep and resonant, echoing beneath the dome of the shrine.
"In the name of the Emperor, by the authority of the Lord Regent of the Imperium Guilliman, and by the authorization of the High Lords of Terra..."
He slowly unfolded the document.
On the parchment surface, dense high Gothic text floated in the psy-driven ink.
And at the end of the document, beneath Guilliman's signature, there was an extremely faint golden psychic imprint embedded in the surface of the paper like a brand.
Agemman finished reading and handed over the document.
""Warrant of Trade". From this moment on, you and your bloodline possess the eternal rights to freely navigate, conquer, trade, and expand territories beyond the borders of the Imperium."
"All your actions shall be in the name of the Emperor."
Raynor took the document.
The parchment felt slightly warm to the touch, and the place where the blood fingerprint was located felt completely different from the rest.
As if beneath that small piece of paper surface, there was still some extremely distant thing throbbing extremely faintly.
Following Agemman's instructions, he pressed his left hand beside the blood fingerprint and completed the oath of allegiance in high Gothic.
The moment the last syllable fell, the golden psychic imprint on the charter suddenly lit up for a flash, then dimmed and returned to normal.
Agemman's gaze lingered on that golden light for a split second. He did not speak, but only nodded slightly.
Raynor lowered his head to look at the document in his hand.
That golden light had disappeared, as if it had never existed.
But he knew that the imprint did not come from Guilliman, but from the Emperor.
The parchment envelope lay upon the stone altar of the sanctum chamber; it was the Warrant of Trade issued by the Emperor through the hands of Guilliman.
The parchment was imbued with a faint, dark red shimmer of the Emperor's blood, with ancient Gothic script carving out eternal authority stroke by stroke.
This document was no ordinary temporary appointment, but a supreme, hereditary warrant.
It granted Raynor and his descendants the eternal right to sail freely beyond the borders of the Imperium, conquer alien worlds, and conduct trade across the sea of stars.
A single warrant, permanently hereditary, was enough to sustain a Rogue Trader dynasty spanning ten thousand years.
From that moment on, Brevis officially became Raynor's homeworld foundation.
Relying on the legal legitimacy granted by the Warrant of Trade, he was able to raise a massive private military force completely under his command.
He could now rightfully set out toward the Imperium Nihilus, launching a crusade to "reclaim lost territories" in a legal sense.
Beside the Warrant of Trade lay a tightly sealed letter, a handwritten message from Roboute Guilliman himself, delivered by Severus Agemman, Captain of the Ultramarines First Company.
Opening the envelope, the Lord Regent's handwriting on the paper was resolute and sharp, devoid of any superfluous pleasantries.
Guilliman stated plainly that he had received an imperial revelation from the Golden Throne of Terra, and was aware of the extraordinary entanglement between Raynor and the Tyranids.
Between the lines, one could read the Lord Regent's complex mindset; he was relieved that Raynor had ultimately chosen to stand on the side of humanity, while earnestly hoping that Raynor would always remain steadfast in his human allegiance.
The letter promised that Ultramar would provide aid to him to the best of its ability.
Yet this support was not without limits; the Imperium's gaze would remain fixed on Raynor for a long time, monitoring his every decision, and absolutely forbidding him from falling to the xenos or Chaos.
The mission of this task force fleet, which had crossed the Warp Storm, went far beyond merely completing the investiture ceremony.
Within the massive cargo holds of the ships, vast quantities of materials urgently needed for the post-war reconstruction of Brevis and Dead World-A were already piled high, alongside reserves of various strategic resources for Raynor's future crusades.
Batches of scrap recovery and disassembly machinery, along with standardized, obedient Servitors, were continuously transported to the planet's surface via landing craft.
Complete water purification units and atmospheric cycling systems would restore the Hive City's ecology, which had been devastated by the Ritual of Annihilation.
Mountains of medical supplies, canned nutrient starch, and emergency rations filled the ground warehouses one after another.
Arriving alongside the fleet were several Tech-Priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus from Mars, tasked with the heavy responsibility of restarting Brevis's industrial system.
From small-arms assembly lines to plasma reactors and giant generator units, the complete blueprints and core components required for heavy industrial production were fully provided.
For Dolido Agricultural World, the assistance was equally comprehensive and well-prepared.
Large quantities of soil-enriching compounds, chemical fertilizers, and microbial conditioning agents were unloaded from the ships.
There were also complete sets of farming machinery, selected cold-resistant, high-yield crop seeds, and breeding stock for domesticated beasts such as Grox.
Massive amounts of resources were transported here to restore the war-ravaged farmlands of Dolido Agricultural World and restart food production.
Aside from construction materials, the military support belonging to the Rogue Trader was also fully handed over.
The Imperium transferred one cruiser, six frigates, plus various auxiliary vessels such as munition transports, troop carriers, and fuel barges, totaling twenty ships.
Deep within the ship holds, armaments were piled like mountains.
Lasgun charge packs, bolt shells, plasma flasks, melta fuel, promethium tanks, and plasma fuel rods—countless munitions and military supplies.
This laid a solid foundation for restoring his homeworld and building a fleet capable of embarking on a frontier crusade.
The depleted Tithe Fleet, which had originally been stationed there for Imperial Tithe collection, also received reassignment orders via the Lord Regent's hand-written decree brought by Agemman, temporarily departing the Brevis system.
With all the heavy shackles removed, Raynor could finally settle down to manage his territory.
The immediate priority was to race against time to restore the basic operations of Brevis Hive City and Dolido Agricultural World.
Turning both planets into stable and reliable logistical strongholds to prepare troops, armaments, and supplies for future crusades across the stars.
Yet beneath the veneer of victory, there remained an indelible regret.
Tooth Many had already sacrificed himself in the previous descent ritual, his soul dispersing, never to return.
After much deliberation, Raynor made personnel arrangements, handing over command of the Hokage Clan's Greenskin forces on Dead World-A to Doudou.
The leaderless Greenskin tribe needed a leader familiar with Raynor's will to stabilize the situation, and Doudou was the most suitable candidate at the moment.
As an Ogryn who had managed to become a boss-level figure among the Greenskins, his intelligence and strength were sufficient to support managing the entire Hokage Clan.
The reconstruction of Brevis unfolded in an orderly fashion, with the roar of machinery echoing through every block of the Hive City.
Servitors bustled back and forth, Tech-Priests calibrated the newly restarted reactors one by one, and the war-torn planet gradually shed the scars left by the conflict.
...
Meanwhile, in the distant Calendar Cage System, a completely different story was unfolding on another planet.
Wedeltar, this planet unfortunately lay within the Segmentum Obscurus, shrouded by the Imperium Nihilus after the opening of the Great Rift; Warp Storms had severed all communication between it and the main galaxy, turning it into a completely forgotten island of the Imperium.
The entire planet was permeated with the atmosphere of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with city ruins everywhere and the rusted hulls of abandoned starships scattered across a vast, endless scrapyard.
Scavengers struggled on the resource-depleted land, searching the ruins for anything that could be exchanged for rations and drinking water.
The scavenger Mei had already been out searching for more than twelve local hours.
He had combed through two massive landfills but found nothing of value that could be sold.
The water container he carried was nearly empty, thirst tortured his throat, and despair slowly crept into his heart.
Just as he was about to give up and head back to camp, a faint smell of burning drifted into his nostrils with the dry, hot wind.
Mei's heart stirred, and he trudged in the direction of the smell.
A fresh impact crater suddenly appeared in the center of the scrapyard, with earth, stones, and metal shards blasted outward in all directions.
At the bottom of the crater lay half of a massive chitinous shell, and within the carapace, a human infant was nestled safely.
Fate had not been kind to the forty-year-old Mei.
He once had two daughters, but the brutal survival conditions of the wasteland had claimed their lives, leaving the pain of loss buried deep in his heart.
He hesitated before stepping down into the crater, carefully bending over to lift the swaddled little one into his arms.
"Oh, my Emperor, you are so heavy!"
"You look like you were just born, but you must weigh at least twenty pounds."
No sooner had he spoken than the infant in his arms suddenly looked up, flashing a sweet smile at Mei.
Especially those clear, bright eyes—a pair of beautiful, gem-like purple eyes that left a deep impression.
She carefully pulled back the tattered fabric wrapped around the infant, confirming that this child fallen from the sky was indeed a baby girl.
Mei pondered for a moment, having already decided on a name in her heart—Ella.
The name was derived from an ancient Terra word meaning bronze, the first metal tamed by human civilization.
On Wedeltar, this forgotten wasteland planet where danger and death lurked at every turn, she simply prayed that this child would be like bronze—enduring rust and hammer blows without easily shattering, surviving with sheer resilience.
There was no elaborate meaning behind it, merely the most earnest wish of a suffering scavenger.
Cradling the swaddled baby, Mei trudged across the wasteland strewn with scrap metal and weathered stone, heading back to the settlement where she took shelter.
It was merely a crude refuge where more than fifty desperate scavengers huddled together for warmth.
A few scrap-metal shacks cobbled together were wedged inside the hollow of a massive warship's wreckage, with rusted steel plates stacked outside as defensive barricades, while a humming generator barely maintained basic lighting and warmth.
When Mei stepped into the camp cradling the infant, word spread quickly.
To these scavengers long accustomed to death, Mei gaining another daughter was a rare and joyful occasion.
People gathered around and craned their necks to look, their weathered faces showing a long-lost softness; someone offered a rag, another produced half a hard, dried starch cake, each offering their meager blessings.
Mei looked down at tiny Ella in her arms, harboring no extravagant hopes other than wishing for her to grow up safe and sound.
Reality soon presented a harsh dilemma.
Mei was already forty years old, her body long past its prime, and she had no breast milk at all.
Even after asking around the entire settlement, she could not find a single nursing woman.
Yet to Mei's surprise, Ella proved remarkably easy to raise.
When Mei mixed compressed starch Tin can with water into a thick paste and fed her, the little one ate with great relish, squinting her violet, gem-like eyes in sheer contentment.
This brought immense relief and joy to Mei.
However, trouble soon followed: Ella's appetite was astonishingly large.
Mei had already spared two-thirds of her own food rations for the child, yet Ella still frequently seemed unsatisfied. In exchange for this massive intake of food came an unfathomable rate of growth.
In just one month, Ella was already able to walk upright steadily, tottering and running back and forth between the metal shacks.
In less than half a year, her height had reached a full 1.2 meters, her build virtually indistinguishable from that of a five- or six-year-old human girl.
Yet her appearance was far more striking.
Silky black hair fell like satin, her eyes were as luminous as violet gemstones, and her porcelain-fair skin was as exquisite as a finely crafted doll.
In a wasteland settlement filled with grime, scars, and ragged figures, such an excessively beautiful child was far too conspicuous.
Rumors and whispers quietly bred and spread among the shacks.
Some muttered around the campfire that Ella was a daughter of daemons, a seed of calamity cast down from the Warp, destined to bring ruin and disaster upon Wedeltar sooner or later.
Suspicion lurking in the shadows spread wider, and panic quietly rippled through the small settlement.
Yet when Mei learned of these rumors, her response was fiercely unyielding.
Whenever she overheard anyone gossiping behind their backs, she marched straight to their door, stood before their crude shack, and sternly demanded to know by what right they maliciously slandered an innocent little girl.
"Every single bite of food she eats is scraped from my own ration! She hasn't eaten a single bite from your Tin can!"
Mei's voice echoed through the camp, her calloused palm resting on the hilt of the rusted hunting knife at her waist.
"If I hear another whisper defaming Ella, I'll cut out your tongue myself!"
Mei was one of the most senior scavengers in this wasteland and had once served as an enforcer in the fallen Black Iron City, commanding considerable prestige within the settlement.
Following her fierce declaration, the overt gossip was finally quelled, and no one dared criticize Ella openly again.
Yet the enormous appetite brought by the child's rapid growth remained an unavoidable practical dilemma.
Despite her reluctance, Mei had no choice but to make the decision to take Ella along on scavenging runs.
Scavenging was the means of survival upon which more than ninety percent of Wedeltar's inhabitants depended.
Long before the Great Rift tore across the galaxy, this planet had been trapped in the isolation of the Cage Star System.
Apart from the occasional Chaos pirates intruding, there were virtually no visitors from elsewhere in the galaxy, and even the Imperial Tithe had long forgotten this abandoned Star System.
Fortunately, this place had once been a massive industrial world, its surface carpeted with the ruins of abandoned factories,
and combined with several brutal void battles, the wreckage of countless warships had crashed onto the planet, forming endless, gigantic scrapyards across the land.
Day after day, the surviving people of Wedeltar picked through the metal ruins, salvaging usable components and supplies to trade for the food and water they needed to survive.
Mei did not expect the young Ella to actually dig up much valuable salvage.
The little girl's skin was fair and delicate, and she appeared frail and delicate.
She brought Ella along mainly to avoid leaving her alone in the camp, fearing that hidden malice might harm the child while she was away.
She only hoped Ella would follow obediently behind her and not get lost in the vast sea of scrap.
Yet reality soon overturned all of Mei's expectations; the talent Ella demonstrated shocked her immensely.
Extraordinary insight and a terrifying capacity for learning were fully displayed in the little girl.
Mei needed only to explain the classification methods and values of various parts and supplies once verbally for Ella to commit them firmly to memory.
Walking through the boundless sea of debris formed by mountains of scrap metal, shattered circuit boards, and rusted components,
she could always spot items of value at first glance, picking out supplies from among countless pieces of useless waste.
Not only that, her physical capabilities and reaction speed far surpassed those of ordinary human children.
On one scavenging run, a giant Radiation Cockroach over two meters long burst out from beneath a rusted steel plate, its jointed legs flailing and its mouthparts dripping corrosive mucus as it lunged straight toward Ella.
Mei did not even have time to raise her gun to fire.
Yet Ella pivoted deftly, cleanly dodging the cockroach's pounce, bent down to grab a sharp-edged metal shard from the ground, and hurled it with all her might.
With a flash of cold light, the sharp iron shard struck true, piercing the softest, most vulnerable spot on the Radiation Cockroach's body.
With a wet squelch, the giant insect carcass crashed heavily onto the ruined ground, twitching a few times before falling completely motionless.
Mei stood frozen in place, her breath catching in her throat.
The girl who had just made the kill before her eyes was not even a year old.
Ever since Mei began taking Ella out scavenging, famine never struck their little home again.
At first, Mei worried that his old age would make it hard to teach the child, but reality quickly made him realize something.
Ella's learning capacity and rate of growth far exceeded the imagination of any mortal on this wasteland.
She had been scavenging with Mei for less than a week, yet her scavenging efficiency had already far surpassed that of the old man, who had spent over a decade rummaging through junk heaps.
Now, every time Mei went out, the supplies he brought back were more than triple what he used to find.
An abundance of food fueled Ella's even more astonishing growth.
In just over half a year, when Ella turned one year old, her physical development was already indistinguishable from that of an ordinary teenager of sixteen or seventeen.
Her genetics seemed inherently superior to the indigenous humans struggling to survive on the planet Wedeltar.
At merely one year old, Ella's height and physique were already taller and stronger than those of any adult man in Mei's settlement.
Every gesture held an explosive power far beyond her peers, and within those violet-gem eyes lay a calmness and sharpness vastly at odds with her tender age.
Yet this precociousness also brought another side.
Ella's emotions were exceptionally detached, bordering on cold-blooded.
At first, she disdained communicating with anyone in the settlement aside from Mei.
She was like an emotionless precision machine—accurate, efficient, yet utterly oblivious to human interaction and social graces.
When others exchanged pleasantries, she treated it as meaningless noise; when others greeted her warmly, she was stingy with even a response.
Until one time, Mei got into an argument with someone. In a fit of emotion, the other person merely snapped with a slightly harsh remark.
No one saw how Ella made her move.
In the blink of an eye, she closed the distance and landed a precise strike just to the left of the person's vitals.
The strike was at a tricky angle and delivered with just the right force, instantly incapacitating the person without being immediately fatal—she had clearly calculated it in an instant.
In Ella's straightforward, almost single-track logic, the insolent person had harbored ill intent toward Mei; not pulling them up by the roots was already her greatest mercy.
It was then that Mei was jolted awake to reality.
He realized that for Ella, teaching morals and values was thousands of times more important than imparting survival skills.
This child was too powerful—so powerful she seemed like a being that belonged only in myths and legends.
Yet once she lacked the constraints of human decency and morality, this power would sooner or later drive her down an irredeemable path.
He did not want to see his daughter ultimately reduced to just another soulless beast driven purely by instinct on this wasteland.
Thus, Mei began deliberately taking Ella to help other people in the settlement.
He taught her how to properly interact and converse with humans, how to respond when receiving kindness from others, and how to discern the true intentions behind a person's words.
Little by little, he patiently imparted the worldly wisdom he had accumulated through years of scraping by in life to this gifted child.
At first, Ella did not understand why Mei would share the food and medicine they had painstakingly traded for with others, or why he would repair someone's dilapidated roof free of charge.
Yet she gradually noticed that the people who were helped would express heartfelt gratitude, and quietly gift back some of their own treasured supplies in return.
And when Mei was accidentally injured during a scavenging trip and lay bedridden, young and old across the settlement took turns tending to him.
They brought hot water, delivered medicine, and quietly patched the holes in his shack.
Little by little, warmth seeped silently into Ella's cold heart.
That time, lying on his sickbed, Mei told Ella a short story in a weak yet gentle voice.
"Child, the earliest sign of human civilization wasn't actually tools, but a healed femur."
Ella listened quietly without interrupting.
"In nature, once any animal breaks its femur, it is almost equivalent to death.
The injured cannot walk normally, cannot hunt, cannot forage for food, and cannot escape predators.
Yet in an ancient site, anthropologists found a fully healed femur.
It healed so completely, which meant that during the weeks or even months that person was injured, fellow humans looked after him, provided him with food, and protected him from being eaten by beasts until he fully recovered."
Mei looked into Ella's clear eyes and said word by word:
"So, civilization never began with the strong conquering the weak, but from the moment humans were willing to bend down and care for their injured, weak companions."
These words detonated like a thunderclap in Ella's heart, profoundly enlightening.
From that day on, this child who once believed only in efficiency began trying to understand the things she could not grasp in the past.
She gradually came to understand why Mei helped others, and why a group of strangers was willing to gather together.
To jointly fend off foreign enemies and beasts, share food and campfires, and lean on one another through the endless, dark wasteland nights.
Those instincts of community and civilization buried deep within her human genes began quietly awakening.
She wanted to create a better world for humanity—or rather, for Mei.
...
To achieve this goal, she first needed a truly united and obedient team.
Although she knew deep down that even if everyone in the settlement ganged up on her, she was fully confident she could slaughter them all within a minute.
But she understood that to accomplish great things, personal martial might alone was far from enough.
However, the current settlement had no true leader; everyone maintained their fragile cohesion purely through simple human rapport.
Mei had taught her that as a human, she could not be too barbaric.
Therefore, she could not seize the position of leader by conquering everyone with her fists; that was not civilized enough.
She needed an opportunity—one that would make everyone realize this settlement needed a leader.
The opportunity arrived soon enough.
Late one night, when all was quiet and everyone was fast asleep.
Dozens of pairs of eyes gleaming with an eerie glow were silently closing in on the camp.
A pack of Tusag Hounds.
These beasts dubbed "hounds" actually had nothing to do with true canines.
They were radiation-mutated pack lizards with an astonishing shoulder height of 1.5 meters, covered in hard scales, with backs and limb joints bristling with barbs.
Perhaps describing them as "barbed giant lizards" was more apt.
Yet before the hounds could even get within fifty meters of the camp, Ella's senses had already detected them.
Without causing a panic, Ella quietly woke the sleeping Mei and all the capable adults in the camp, calmly issuing orders.
Prepare for battle.
Woken from their sleep, the people grabbed homemade scrap guns, electric spears wrapped in cables, and crude crossbows, hurriedly forming a defensive line behind the camp's rudimentary barricades.
And amid this chaos, Ella naturally assumed combat command of the entire camp.
She remained calm, merely sweeping her violet-gem eyes across the scene, dispatching everyone to their assigned posts with a single gesture or glance.
The crowd did not know why, but the words spoken by this one-year-old girl possessed a magical quality that compelled them to obey.
The charging pack of Tusag Hounds consisted of six adults, eleven sub-adults, and eight juveniles.
Given Ella's combat strength, she could have easily wiped out these beasts single-handedly, but she chose not to flaunt her personal prowess.
She wanted to prove through flawless command what a true leader was, letting everyone witness it with their own eyes.
That night, not a single casualty occurred in the camp.
Ella precisely anticipated the charge of every hound, directed the crossbowmen to break up their formation, guided the electric spear wielders to flank them, and used focused fire from scrap guns to gun down any stragglers one by one.
All twenty-five Tusag Hounds were cleanly slaughtered, while the camp emerged completely unscathed.
When taking stock after the battle, Ella discovered an anomaly on the hounds' corpses.
The hounds had been artificially injected with a neurostimulant, causing them to charge so frenziedly at the human camp.
Following the tracks, she found an attractant outside the camp used to lure the Tusag Hounds.
Ella deduced the truth in an instant.
Someone wanted to use the Tusag Hounds to weaken their camp.
This was only the beginning; next, an attack from fellow humans was lurking in the depths of the darkness.
After that battle, the camp dwellers began subconsciously asking Ella what they should do next.
Ella was very satisfied with this outcome, but remained impassive on the surface.
She calmly instructed everyone to disguise the camp as a grim scene of devastation by the hounds; battered barricades, chaotic footprints, and scattered bloodstains were all meticulously staged.
Meanwhile, deadly traps were quietly laid along the essential paths around the camp.
Everything was set, waiting only for the rats lurking in the dark to take the bait.
At the dawn after the traps were set, while the light of day was still dim, the figures of a group of human bandits slowly emerged on the horizon.
Aila had guessed right; that meticulously disguised "tragedy" had worked, and sure enough, someone had taken the bait.
The equipment of this band of bandits was simply not on the same order of magnitude as Aila's scavenger camp.
At the head were several modified off-road vehicles, with ferocious spiky bumpers welded to their fronts, oversized wheel hubs crushing the gravel of the wasteland, and even a heavy machine gun mounted on the roof.
Several wasteland motorcycles prowled on both sides of the convoy, with weapon platforms installed on their flanks.
Almost everyone was armed with firearms, such as assault rifles, double-barreled shotguns, flamethrowers, and so on...
Most exaggeratedly, the center of the group was crowded with several burly men wearing crude exoskeleton Power Armor, their mechanical joints gleaming with a cold light in the morning light.
In terms of numbers, the bandits and the camp were roughly equivalent, but in terms of equipment, the two sides were completely on different orders of magnitude.
What made the people in the camp even more nervous was that the other party was exceptionally cautious.
The convoy stopped three hundred meters away from the camp, halting its advance and beginning to observe from afar.
Someone raised a crude telescope to peer over this way, and what was more, someone actually put on a kind of bionic nose, twitching their nostrils from afar to sniff out the scents drifting in the wind.
"Boss Rolling Stone, it should be fine now." A short man wearing goggles and a Mohawk hairstyle sidled up to the big guy wearing simple Power Armor in the center of the team.
"Such a strong smell of blood, it can't be fake. Look at their side, it's damaged a lot more than when we came last time; it seems the Tusag Hounds have wreaked havoc on them."
The big guy called Rolling Stone had a fierce face with a mechanical prosthetic limb hanging by his side, looking at a glance like a ruthless character not to be messed with.
But he was by no means a brute; on the contrary, he was extremely cunning.
Although all current signs indicated that the hounds had indeed caused heavy losses to the opposite camp, and his own side had a complete advantage in equipment, he still refused to act rashly.
"No rush, let's observe a bit longer." Rolling Stone narrowed his eyes, his voice low.
Inside the camp, people hid behind the shacks, staring fixedly through crude telescopes at the group of bandits parked in the distance.
Seeing that they delayed their attack, a few timid scavengers were already sweating with anxiety: "Could it be... that our traps have been discovered?"
Yet Aila showed not the slightest bit of panic.
Apart from her superhuman physique, her most powerful talent was actually her perception.
She not only possessed vision and hearing far exceeding that of a mortal, but she could also read the general emotions and thoughts within the hearts of the humans around her in a form akin to colors.
This ability endowed her with extraordinary insight.
Ever since she was three months old, she had often been able to hear some strange whispers, or catch glimpses of unsettling illusions in her dreams.
But deep within her mind, it was as if a barrier was protecting her; whenever she wanted to block out those auditory hallucinations and visions, she could isolate them at any time.
At this moment, she clearly perceived the reason why that group of bandits had stopped.
That was not a dread after discovering the trap, but a pure caution and observation.
Rolling Stone was testing, weighing, and judging whether it was worth making a move.
Therefore, what she needed to do was to give the other party a little "temptation".
Aila gave soft instructions.
Several scavengers immediately understood, successively disguising themselves as battered and bruised, some wrapped in bandages, some in casts, swaying as they dragged burlap sacks filled with stones to the outer perimeter of the camp.
Right in front of that group of bandits in the distance, they dug holes shovelful by shovelful, burying "comrades' corpses" to stage a miserable scene of post-war collection and burial.
Sure enough, less than two minutes after that miserable scene of twos and threes wrapped in injuries and burying corpses fell into the eyes of the bandits, the convoy roared to life and drove toward the camp.
A cold sneer surfaced on Aila's lips.
At the end of the day, caution was just a layer of disguise; deep down, they were just a bunch of thugs scraping a living on the wasteland, with a bit of brainpower, but not much.
The moment they saw the prey reveal its miserable state, this gang could no longer hide their greedy thoughts, wishing they could each rush to the very front so as to carve up the most spoils of war.
The camp was chosen to be sited upon hills, surrounded by long gentle slopes.
The bandits' convoy crushed over the gravel, halfway through running into the first line of trap defense.
Extremely exposed animal traps were sparsely buried on the slope, looking as if they were merely meant to ward off beasts like Tusag Hounds.
Seeing this, the bandits burst into loud laughter, mocking the camp's scavengers as utterly foolish, cursing and laughing while driving on to continue climbing the slope.
They had no inkling that this was merely another layer of illusion handed out by Aila.
The real lethal blow was hidden in the second line of defense.
Beneath the soft sandy soil were buried shoddy landmines homemade by the scavengers.
The so-called shoddy nature was only relative to the workmanship and stability of military-standard landmines.
And in the scavengers' simple philosophy, such life-saving gear naturally had as much material piled into it as possible.
Thus, the TNT equivalent filled in each shoddy landmine was more than three times that of ordinary military landmines.
To further increase the lethality against the human body, a large number of iron fragments were also buried in the sandy ground.
When the explosives blew open, the soft sandy soil along with the iron fragments spattered in all directions, no different from a storm of shrapnel.
The first to suffer was that domineeringly imposing modified off-road vehicle.
Its wheel crushed over two shoddy landmines, and the fierce blasting power directly blew it into mid-air, disintegrating on the spot, with the heavy machine gun on the roof not even getting a chance to fire.
Over a dozen shoddy landmines exploded one after another, waves of earth and iron fragments flying all over the sky.
In just a single round, that off-road vehicle was completely written off, nearly half of the motorcycle vehicles were lost, and over twenty bandits lost their combat effectiveness on the spot.
The remaining thirty people all panicked, flattening themselves on the ground in utter terror.
Boss Rolling Stone had after all been through the mill on the wasteland for many years, and his reaction was extremely fast.
He immediately shouted to stop his panicked subordinates and issued a new order.
No longer advance, stabilize their footing right where they were, and launch a ranged attack on the camp from the mid-slope.
They brought quite a few heavy weapons; if worst came to worst, they would just raze this camp to the ground!
Amidst the flames and gunsmoke, the bandits set up heavy machines guns and hauled out rocket launchers, preparing to pour firepower onto the camp.
But right at the instant they were about to open fire, the camp gate burst wide open, and a figure single-handedly charged out toward the direction of the bandits.
That was a tall yet excessively beautiful figure.
A head of raven-long hair fluttered in the morning breeze, a pair of bright purple eyes sharp as a knife, she was all by herself, carrying only a power spear, without bearing any heavy weapons.
She strode running like this straight toward a group of fully armed bandits hundreds of meters away.
The bandits were stunned at first, and then burst into a roar of laughter.
"Is this woman crazy? Charging out alone to court death? Beat her to death for me!"
At Rolling Stone's command, the muzzle of the guns simultaneously turned, aiming at that charging figure.
Yet Aila looked at that expanse of gun muzzles and firelight without the slightest fear in the depths of her eyes; instead, she narrowed them slightly, and within those purple gem-like eyes, a biting intent to battle burned.
In the previous battle, she had already proven to everyone her command capability as a leader.
Then at this moment, she would let this group of bandits, as well as the people in the camp behind her, witness with their own eyes what ultimate personal martial prowess truly was.