This is the bonus chapter for reaching 800 Powerstones.
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The crater in the Great Unclean One's chest healed at a visible rate under the infusion of green psychic energy.
New carrion tissue churned like a boiling swamp, fungal mycelium wove into a net, and pus coagulated into a carapace.
In just three seconds, the fatal wound cleaved open by the Watcher's Axe had recovered by eighty percent.
"Guaaaargh... The Grandfather's... gift... never runs dry..."
Within the Great Unclean One's murky eyeball, the rune of Nurgle accelerated its rotation.
It slowly raised its arms—those arms thick as siege rams.
Paul's psychic senses screamed in warning.
The Great Unclean One roared, its massive body beginning to tremble violently. The tens of thousands of pustules on its skin swelled and bulged simultaneously until they reached a critical mass.
"Guaaaargh, the Grandfather's... gift... spreads!!!"
The Great Unclean One threw its head back and roared, the sound no longer one of pain or fury, but a fanatical joy.
Then, they all detonated at once.
BANG! BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG!!!!
The dense sound of explosions was like tens of millions of pustules bursting simultaneously.
Yellowish-green pus, mixed with fragments of rotting tissue, writhing maggots, and plague spores, sprayed outward in a 360-degree radius without any blind spots!
Within a six-meter radius, the air was instantly dyed a sickly green.
The pus underwent secondary mutations mid-flight, turning into an acidic smog or coagulating into bacteria-laden crystalline shrapnel. Some even hatched miniature Nurgling embryos directly in mid-air.
This was one of the Great Unclean One's signature abilities: [Plague Eruption].
At the cost of expending its stored plague energy, it unleashed a full-range spray of corruption. All targets within the blast radius would not only suffer physical explosion damage but would also be implanted with dozens of different Nurgle plagues.
And right now, Paul was at the very epicenter of the blast.
"Praetor!" Behind the defensive line, Seranaphy cried out instinctively.
But the very next second, Seranaphy froze.
Because he saw the golden figure standing perfectly still, showing absolutely no intention of dodging.
Paul merely raised his left hand.
A dark gold psychic shield unfurled around him, but this time, the color of the shield underwent a subtle shift. A tinge of deep green seeped into the originally pure dark gold.
That was the manifestation of the Compassion trait after being activated by psychic energy.
Gamma-class psychic power surged through his body, pouring into the pale green point of the five-pointed star deep within his pupils representing Compassion.
"With the suffering of all living things, forge the shield of protection," Paul chanted silently in his heart.
The next second, the dark gold atomic forcefield shield surrounding him abruptly changed color. It transitioned completely from the dark gold to a deep green.
Sizzle-sizzle-sizzle!
The rain of yellow pus crashed against the surface of the deep green shield. The corruptive acid that was potent enough to melt ceramite decomposed and purified rapidly the instant it touched the shield, as if meeting its absolute bane, turning into harmless steam.
The plague spores attempting to spread through energy flow were directly erased from existence by the power of the Compassion trait the moment before they could penetrate the shield.
The miniature Nurgling embryos that had already hatched were vaporized directly by the purification field emanating from the shield before they could even let out their first giggle.
The entire Plague Eruption process lasted for thirty seconds.
When the final drop of pus evaporated into white mist on the shield's surface...
Paul stood in place, the deep green psychic shield flowing with a warm luster, without a single crack.
For the very first time, the Great Unclean One's murky eyeball... froze completely.
It couldn't comprehend why.
Plague Eruption was an authority bestowed personally by the Grandfather when He forged it; it was one of the core vectors of corruption for Nurgle's daemon legions. Although it was a newly forged Great Unclean One, and all its abilities were only at the base Great Unclean One level...
What was this golden thing...
Paul's voice echoed through his Custodian faceplate, carrying a hint of mockery, "There's no need for confusion, because a heretic about to be annihilated doesn't need to think that much."
He raised his right hand, spinning the Watcher's Axe in his palm as the disruption field re-ignited across the blade.
"The strength of humanity has never relied on a single individual. And I am not fighting alone."
He immediately issued commands in the regional channel. "All Brothers of Silence, deploy the anti-psychic field according to formation layout seven. Target: Large corrupt heretic entity and its surrounding pollution field. Maximize anti-psychic suppression without interfering with the psychic operations of the Grey Knights."
One second after the command was issued, the situation on the battlefield instantly transformed.
The three hundred Brothers of Silence in matte-black power armor, who had originally fanned out radially to suppress the entire battlefield, simultaneously stopped moving.
Then, they began to reform.
In groups of twenty, the fifteen squads of Brothers of Silence adjusted their spacing with centimeter-level precision. They no longer sought wide-area coverage; instead, they focused all their anti-psychic fields into a single, straight line.
Aimed directly at the fifty-meter area surrounding the Great Unclean One.
Fifteen squads, three hundred men, standing in a straight line that pierced across the battlefield.
At one end of this line was Paul; at the other was the Great Unclean One.
And the middle of the line perfectly skirted the edge of the Grey Knights Company. It neither interfered with the Grey Knights chanting their psychic mantras, nor did it compromise the maximum efficiency of the anti-psychic field suppressing the Great Unclean One and the numerous daemons.
"Formation constructed."
"Anti-psychic field engaged."
When the three hundred converging anti-psychic fields along that line slammed into the Great Unclean One, its violent, green, rotting psychic energy abruptly decayed, as if an invisible giant hand had clamped down on its throat!
Sizzle-sizzle-sizzle!!!
The pus flowing across its skin began to coagulate and dry up. The carrion tentacles dangling from its abdomen twitched and withered. Even the crown of plague fungi on its head, which had been constantly releasing spore clouds, began to droop and curl up like parched mushrooms.
What was even more terrifying was the effect on the Nurgle daemons surrounding it.
The low- and mid-tier daemons, which had previously only been sluggishly suppressed by the blank fields, were now directly exposed to this concentrated anti-psychic field.
Pop-pop-pop-pop...
Swaths of Nurglings exploded into fetid puddles of pus.
The rotting torsos of Rot Hounds and Plague Beasts disintegrated from the inside out, the sound of shattering bone unending.
The rusted blades in the hands of a few Plaguebearers that had just crawled out of the rift instantly corroded and snapped. They let out confused shrieks before their bodies melted away like soft wax.
Within a fifty-meter radius, all Warp energy was suppressed to near zero.
The Great Unclean One let out a furious roar, attempting to draw upon the origin-plague within its body to forcibly break through the suppression.
But Paul's command continued, "Grey Knights Company, Mantra of Purification. Target: Large Warp corrupt entity. Psychic chain binding, coordinate with the anti-psychic suppression for dual control."
The two hundred Grey Knights simultaneously halted their clearing of the low- and mid-tier daemons.
They rapidly congregated just outside the anti-psychic field and adjusted the angle of their Nemesis force halberds, pointing the tips straight forward instead of toward the sky.
Then, they began to chant a different mantra.
This mantra was no longer for purification, but for binding.
"In the name of Terra, I bind thy form."
"By the Emperor's Will, I shackle thy soul."
"With the rules of this world, I forbid thy power."
Azure psychic energy surged from every single Nemesis force halberd, weaving together mid-air.
It was psychic power manifested as psychic chains.
Chains constructed of pure psychic energy shot out from the Grey Knights Company, wrapping toward the Great Unclean One like living pythons.
Although the power of the psychic chains was weakened the moment they entered the anti-psychic field, they did not shatter. The first chain wrapped around the Great Unclean One's left arm.
The second bound its right leg.
The third, the fourth, the fifth...
Within twenty seconds, over three hundred psychic chains tightly bound the Great Unclean One's massive body, wrapping it up entirely.
The other ends of the chains were deeply embedded into the soil of reality. The Grey Knights linked the psychic chains to their Nemesis force halberds, driving them ten meters into the ground to temporarily anchor them to the planet itself.
This was not a permanent binding.
In a normal battle, the Great Unclean One could easily snap these chains with brute force or corrode them with plague energy.
But this was no normal battle.
The anti-psychic fields of the three hundred Brothers of Silence were ruthlessly suppressing its ability to draw upon Warp energy.
The Tech-Priests' heavy ordnance cluster had already completed the charge for their second volley.
The muzzles of all one hundred Contemptor Dreadnoughts had calibrated to the exact same coordinates.
"Fire," Paul uttered a single word.
Then, a terrifying hell of artillery fire descended.
Thirty multi-meltas, one hundred and eighty blinding white beams.
Fifty heavy bolters, unleashing thirty thousand .75 caliber armor-piercing rounds per minute.
A synchronized volley from the main cannons of one hundred Dreadnoughts—bolter rounds, melta beams, and plasma intertwined into a torrential rain of destruction.
All of it, bombarding a single target.
BOOM!!!
The fiery light of the explosions swallowed the Great Unclean One's body.
The shockwaves directly launched countless surrounding Nurgle daemons into the air, where they disintegrated and were purified mid-flight.
Yellowish-green pus and shredded rotting flesh rained down.
But Paul knew this wasn't enough.
The tenacity of a Nurgle Greater Daemon's vitality ranked first among the daemons of the four Chaos Gods.
This level of saturation bombardment could heavily injure it, could deplete it, and could even temporarily shatter its physical form.
But it couldn't truly kill it.
As long as the Warp rift remained, as long as Nurgle's domain continued to bleed into reality, this rotting mass of meat could reassemble and regenerate time and time again.
Therefore, he needed to deliver a truly fatal finishing blow.
To thoroughly disintegrate its physical form and temporarily banish its soul essence back to the Warp.
Or even truly slay it, extinguishing the source of corruption at this rift once and for all.
Paul took a deep breath.
His augmented, over-spec Custodian lungs pumped a massive amount of oxygen into his bloodstream, while the combat stimulant injectors inside his power armor activated simultaneously.
He began to draw upon the augmented functions of this body, as well as that power... from another universe.
Spiral Power.
The essence of life was a drill; it was the breaking of limits, the continuously ascending spiral.
In the universe of Gurren Lagann, this power allowed humanity to pilot galaxy-sized mechs and let civilization leap across millions of years of the evolutionary ladder.
In this Warhammer universe, it was defined by the System as a special energy representing the life essence breaking past its limits.
Paul hadn't possessed this ability for very long.
The Spiral Power he could currently draw upon was roughly equivalent to early-stage Simon in Gurren Lagann—boosting his armor's output by 25% and infusing his weapon with defense-piercing properties.
But that was already enough.
The massive cloud of smoke and dust kicked up by the artillery slowly dissipated, revealing the Great Unclean One's form.
After enduring such a terrifying assault, its physical body had unexpectedly not dissipated, and it was still regenerating!
Unconcealable fury boiled within the Great Unclean One's massive, murky eyes.
Although these physical injuries were still not fatal to it.
The humiliation of being repeatedly struck by ant-like existences sent this Greater Daemon of Nurgle into an absolute frenzy.
"You all—will receive—the Grandfather's—gift—!!!"
The dozens of carrion tentacles on its abdomen lashed madly, attempting to whip at the surrounding Brothers of Silence and Grey Knights.
But the moment the tentacles extended beyond the boundary of the anti-psychic field, they immediately grew sluggish and clumsy, easily blocked and severed by the Grey Knights.
And Paul had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"With Hope as the guide, Resolve as the bone, Pioneering as the path, Wisdom as the eyes, and Compassion as the heart... Five traits, infuse."
The five points of the star deep within his pupils lit up simultaneously.
Five-colored light seeped through the visor slits of his golden faceplate.
Spiral Power, infuse, he silently chanted.
The power originating from his life essence breaking its limits surged along his neural interface, pouring into every servo of the Aquilon Terminator armor and every conductive circuit of the Watcher's Axe.
The Aquilon Terminator armor and the Watcher's Axe received a steady, moderate enhancement.
[Aquilon Terminator Armor Comprehensive Performance Boost: +25%]
[Watcher's Axe Destructive Power Boost: +25%]
[Atomic Forcefield Strength Boost: +25%]
[Psychic Output Efficiency Boost: +25%]
Paul could feel every muscle, bone, and nerve of this Custodian body growing stronger under the nourishment of Spiral Power.
The Watcher's Axe in his hands felt a third lighter, and swinging it generated a sharp whistle that pierced the wind.
He slowly dragged the giant axe behind him. The blade made contact with the ground, plowing a deep, spark-spewing trench through the concrete.
This stance...
"Guan Yu's Dragging Blade Slash?" a player in the regional channel recognized it.
"Paul is busting out the classical martial arts!"
Then, Paul began to sprint wildly.
He dragged the Watcher's Axe, letting the blade plow an increasingly deep trench into the ground as his speed gradually increased.
His posture was peculiar: his body leaned forward, his center of gravity was lowered, his right arm was fully extended backward, and the blade of the Watcher's Axe trailed behind him at a thirty-degree angle to the ground.
This was the Spiral Dragging Blade Slash, a technique Paul had created by combining Custodian martial arts, Astartes tactics, and his own understanding of Spiral Power.
With every step he took, the Spiral Power within his body grew stronger.
And the trench plowed by the Watcher's Axe grew an inch deeper.
The light of the five traits flowed across the axe blade, spiraling upward.
The surrounding air began to distort. This wasn't the effect of excessively potent psychic energy, but rather a physical phenomenon triggered by pure physical force condensing to its absolute limit.
Fifty meters.
Paul's speed accelerated to thirty meters per second.
The trench behind the axe blade was half a meter deep, the concrete beneath his feet shattered, and his speed broke the sound barrier.
In a mere two seconds, he had already charged into the anti-psychic field constructed by the Brothers of Silence.
Hum!
The instant he entered the anti-psychic field, Paul felt as if his internal Gamma-class psychic energy had been gripped by a giant, invisible hand.
He could feel the Gamma-class psychic energy within him being suppressed.
While it hadn't completely vanished, its output efficiency had dropped by at least sixty percent.
If he were an ordinary psyker, he would have already lost the vast majority of his combat effectiveness by now.
But Paul had anticipated this long before he decided to charge into the anti-psychic field.
"Psychic energy is merely one of my tools. My true power is Spiral Power, the five traits, and this Custodian physique."
Deep within his dark gold pupils, the five-pointed star spun frantically.
Energy in the five colors of Hope, Compassion, Resolve, Pioneering, and Wisdom surged from Paul's body, converging entirely onto the Watcher's Axe in his hands.
On the axe blade, the original dark gold psychic glow was enveloped and merged with the five-colored radiance, transforming into an indescribable, resplendent brilliance embodying the positive traits of humanity.
The instant this brilliance appeared, the surrounding anti-psychic field that suppressed Warp energy was actually slightly... repelled.
Ensuring that the psychic power coalescing on his Watcher's Axe was neither banished nor dissipated.
Paul charged into the core zone of the anti-psychic field.
His speed did not decrease in the slightest.
And at this moment, he was a mere ten meters away from the Great Unclean One.
The Great Unclean One sensed the threat of true death.
For the first time, unmistakable fear appeared in its murky yellow eyeball.
"No... Grandfather... I..."
It began to struggle madly.
Disregarding the suppression of the anti-psychic field and the searing burn of the psychic chains, it forcibly detonated the Warp energy within its body!
Green, rotting psychic energy erupted from its body like a volcano, instantly snapping over thirty psychic chains binding it!
The Brothers of Silence's anti-psychic field began to fluctuate.
The twenty Brothers in the first row staggered half a step back in unison, visible ripples appearing across the anti-psychic field.
The Great Unclean One was utilizing the method of burning its own energy to forcibly break free from the dual suppression!
"Grey Knights! Apply pressure!" a player in the Grey Knights Squadron roared in the channel.
The remaining one hundred or so psychic chains blazed with intense light, attempting to re-bind this dying, struggling behemoth.
But the Great Unclean One threw all caution to the wind.
Its remaining single eye locked dead onto the figure dragging a golden axe light and charging straight toward it.
It opened its giant maw and chanted, "Sevenfold curses... Sevenfold diseases... Sevenfold gifts... All things rot... All life is eternal..."
This was Nurgle's unholy litany.
With every phrase chanted, the rotting psychic energy on its body grew stronger, pustules began to swell on its skin once more, and the severed chains were pushed aside by newly generated carrion tissue.
It was going to use its final shred of power to execute a mutually assured destruction counterattack.
Upon reaching the space immediately in front of the Great Unclean One, Paul poured every ounce of his Spiral Power into the Aquilon Terminator armor.
The jump pack burst once again!
The anti-grav suspensors engaged in overdrive!
"Give it to me—"
Paul leaped from the ground.
Under the triple-stacked propulsion of Spiral Power, the jump pack, and the anti-grav suspensors, he ascended violently in a near-vertical trajectory!
His altitude instantly crossed ten meters, fifteen meters, twenty meters...
Instantly breaching the twenty-meter mark!
Towering above the Great Unclean One's head!
Paul looked down from above at the putrid colossus.
Time on the Aru Industrial Zone battlefield seemed to freeze at this very moment.
Amidst the sky full of drifting green spores, the roars of numerous Nurgle daemons, and the thunder of artillery, the masses of players held their breath and watched.
Behind the final defensive line, Seranaphy's widened eyes; on the bridge of the Red Tear, Azkaellon's clenched fists...
All of these images played out in slow motion within Paul's eyes.
And the Watcher's Axe in his hands had already been raised to its apex.
On the axe blade, the five-colored radiance shone as brightly as the rising sun.
The twenty-five percent destructive power boost from the Spiral Power.
The total physical strength of the Custodian physique, and the residual output of Gamma-class psychic energy.
The energies of the five traits, the disruption field, all power—at this moment, coalesced into the disruption field cutting edge at the very front of the axe blade.
Beneath the blade of the Watcher's Axe, space itself began to warp slightly.
"In the name of the Emperor—"
Paul spun mid-air, driving power from his waist and abdomen as the Watcher's Axe carved a perfect vertical arc from top to bottom.
"CLEAVE!!!"
The instant the axe blade swung down...
The light of the five traits finally erupted completely.