877.M30.
The Second Chapter was the first to encounter the main fleet of the Hrud in the Gurgan system.
Wilshire stood on the bridge of his new flagship, the ancient intelligent ship, the Slaughtersong.
Unlike Imperial ships requiring a full officer corps, the bridge had only thirty-six Shadows of Order.
They were not responsible for any operations. Their duty was to stand before the screens, reviewing all images, data, and information, reporting to the Light Lord anything the intelligent program deemed unimportant.
The entire ship also lacked the over two hundred thousand officers and crew of an Imperial vessel of its class.
Replacing them were two hundred ninety of the Chapter's finest singers.
They took turns, constantly, as per the "Contract," singing for the ship.
"My advice is," a metallic voice sounded in Wilshire's ear. He had grown accustomed to the ship as an advisor, not merely a machine-spirit.
"Withdraw immediately."
"My sensor arrays have detected eighteen hundred forty Hrud ships, over twenty-seven million life signs."
"The combined entropic fields of such numbers will reduce your battleships and their crews to dust."
A green screen descended before Wilshire.
"I have accounted for the defense of the force fields and the transhuman bodies of the Shadows of Order."
"Thank you for your advice," Wilshire glanced at the analysis report provided by his advisor, then turned his gaze to the hololith.
"My Lord's command is to draw the Hrud fleet to the designated coordinates."
The Slaughtersong's weapon arrays, all activated, needed no human operation.
The intelligent program assigned targets to the arrays based on scan results.
Weapons, pouring from the arsenals, emerged from the silver-white hull, firing blue-white beams at the Hrud ships.
The beams constantly leaped within the twisted entropic fields, like light repeatedly refracted.
Some beams were cut into segments. Others were stretched, compressed, or bent.
The Hrud's twisted fields were unpredictable.
Most beams, after iterative calculations by the intelligent program, orders of magnitude beyond the Simulus Chamber, were fired to maximize hit probability, and struck their targets.
Blue-white light pierced the layered time fields, detonating the blurred Hrud ships.
The brilliant flashes confirmed the Slaughtersong's scanning array exceeded the combined auspex capabilities of the rest of the Second Chapter's fleet.
"The Sun Shadow has made contact with the main Hrud fleet..." The advisor's voice sounded in Wilshire's ear. He immediately looked at the battleship.
"Encountering temporal collapse!"
Dazzling, bright arcs leaped from the Hrud's rough hulls, linking their massive city-ships.
Time and space around the Sun Shadow were simultaneously torn.
The temporal shockwave from the Hrud's departure point spread at a quarter of lightspeed, like a scroll unfurling in the spacetime continuum.
The Slaughtersong's hololith struggled to depict what the sensor arrays detected.
The Sun Shadow bucked. The image was mottled, the projections blurred.
Two ring projectors suddenly went dark. The hololith flickered before stabilizing.
The Sun Shadow was shattered into thousands of curved fragments, like a broken mirror reflecting.
The moment a thousand escape pods launched from the ship, they were caught by the temporal wave.
The force field was instantly swallowed by darkness. The temporal wave ravaged the 16.9-kilometer-long battleship.
Its starboard side exploded first, turning to burning debris.
The next instant, the entire ship aged millions of years.
The Punisher-class reactor died.
Ripples in spacetime raced across the Sun Shadow. Machine-spirits screamed. Machines exploded.
Time raced in a chaotic vortex. Some crew vanished. Others collapsed in piles of black carbon dust.
A row of servitors faded. The row beside them withered.
Another row further away reverted to human form, shocked and maddened by rebirth.
Different parts of the ship were forcibly disassembled, scattered across different reference frames.
Components shifted through time at meters per second, triggering terrifying explosions.
Shadows of Order fell. Saturnine-Pattern Terminator armor, like Mark III power armor, crumbled, its corroded plates scattering like relics neglected for a million years.
Bone dust poured out, covering the decks.
Bolters, shock weapons, power weapons, and chain weapons, all turned to dust and scattered.
Astartes, like the crew, aged and perished, becoming mere ripples in the time stream.
The temporal wave continued. Within seconds, a frigate's hull corroded, then became a crumpled, rusted wreck.
Two destroyers disintegrated into particle rain, shining alongside the escape pods.
Aboard the Shadow's Sovereignty, heading for the predetermined coordinates, Shipmaster Diana watched the scan results and fragmented images, recalling that instant during the night on Golghis.
She sighed. "Even Shadows of Order can age and die."
"When the Hrud gather in sufficient numbers, this is the result." Nareth spoke.
Typically, Astartes did not die of old age. Most fell in battle.
Sigismund's abilities declined after living too long, leading to his death at Abaddon's hands. Dante's weariness after millennia was exceptional.
But the Hrud were different. In sufficient numbers, their stacked entropic fields could age almost anything.
In Nareth's memory, during the Iron Warriors' war with the Hrud, many warriors and ships were reduced to dust.
Barabas Dantioch, the Warsmith stationed at the Vulpa Straits, walked with difficulty, his hair sparse, his face wrinkled, his skin creased.
Apothecaries determined he had aged three thousand years, irreversibly.
His decrepitude even momentarily stirred Perturabo's pity, but he was subsequently exiled to Little Damanthain as its regent.
There, Dantioch was able to do the construction work Perturabo himself craved, and later lit the Pharos for the Imperium Secundus.
As Nareth pondered, Diana's voice sounded.
"My Lord, thirty-five seconds to designated coordinates."
'Twisting time and space, I have such weapons too.' Nareth issued the order.
"Activate the Void Fist!"
"As you command, my Lord." Diana tapped rapidly on her console. A cogitator beside the command throne was awakened.
As red light flashed, Diana looked at the throne. "My Lord, please authorize."
Nareth raised his right hand and pressed it to the panel.
Only he had such authority.
Amidst piercing alarms, red runes flashed rapidly.
The Shadow's Sovereignty's twenty-three Punisher-class reactors were brought to maximum power.
The suddenly increased output was directed solely to life support. Weapon arrays and other systems were shut down.
Lumen lights on the hive-like layered decks went dark.
The bridge's bright light dimmed instantly.
The doomsday weapon of the Dark Age of Technology activated for the first time in ten millennia.
A beam of light flashed from the second-tallest black claw-shaped structure on the Shadow's Sovereignty.
It vanished in an instant, imperceptible to the physical world. The shattered spacetime energy was transmitted to the preset coordinates.
At the center of the Hrud fleet, amidst fourteen city-ships, the spacetime energy opened a tiny singularity.
The tiny singularity rapidly expanded, forming a bottomless black hole.
Hrud ships, wrapped in layers of time fields, instantly became clear, bright on the surrounding hololiths.
The Slaughtersong raced through the void like a startled white stallion.
Gravitational waves shook, catching black ships and pulling them into the bottomless hole.
Grey ships struggled desperately, like fish caught in a whirlpool.
A flash, like a stellar explosion, lit the Gurgan system, outshining its faint star.
For the first time in millennia, since the formation of the Orion-Cygnus Arm, bright light tore through the gloomy skies of Gurgan, Kraven, and Golghis.
Light pierced the deep Vulpa Straits, striking the black hulls of the Third Chapter's fleet, just emerging from the Mandeville point.
Light lanced into dark caves, traversing the Hrud's hundreds of kilometers of tubular tunnels, reaching the archives filled with mycelium books.
Hundreds of millions of Hrud scurried in panic, surrounded by terrifying light.
The destructive shockwave penetrated the entropic fields of over a thousand Hrud ships. City-ships, vast as hives, disintegrated and vanished in the light.
On the black hole's periphery, hundreds of ships shook.
Hundreds of ships were torn to shreds.
"Terrifying..." the advisor's metallic voice sounded in Wilshire's ear.
"A terrifying attack. Even in the era of my birth, it would be considered doomsday-class."
The Shadow's Sovereignty's bridge was illuminated by light, then plunged into darkness for five seconds before the lumen lights returned to normal.
Diana stared blankly at the hololith. Even the Emperor's flagship, the Bucephelus, the Imperial Fists' flagship, even a Ramillies-class Starfort could not unleash such a destructive blow.
She glanced at the report, then stared at the great ball of light in the void, the Hrud ships struggling like trapped in quicksand.
She knew the region's spacetime structure had been permanently altered. It would never be traversable again.
'No wonder Lord Nareth decreed that only He could authorize its use.'
After establishing a communication link with Adams, the Fourth Chapter left twenty-seven ships, including five capital ships, to hunt the remaining Hrud ships.
The Shadow's Sovereignty, along with the Second Chapter and part of the Fourth Chapter's fleet, set course for Kraven.
Half an hour before sunset on Gurgan, at the Second Chapter's landing zone.
Wilshire stood before fifty-two "Solar High Priests." The "Notary's" eyes shone like miniature suns.
Psychic energy surged. Golden light enveloped the "Solar High Priests."
The light grew purer, finally transforming into a seal-like projection.
"'Notarize,' 'Sun Halo'!"
"'Notarize,' 'Holy Light Summoning'!"
"'Notarize,' 'Holy Oath'!"
"..."
After the Light Lord acquired his new flagship, the Slaughtersong, 1st Company Captain Winterbourne had taken command of the relic-class ship Radiance and thus did not perish aboard his former flagship, the Sun Shadow.
The "Solar High Priests" felt, with the Light Lord's commanding voice, the seal's projection shower them with light.
He saw Second Company Captain Olivier basking in the light, as if sunbathing.
A minute later, the "Solar High Priests" boarded Stormbirds, heading for their respective battle zones.
Olivier stepped off the ramp, approaching the tunnel.
"Light Suppliants" stood among the Tarantula sentry guns, golden bottles of pre-made holy water at their waists.
Techmarines busily adjusted the internal cogitators' logic engines, setting firing modes and identification codes.
Based on the Hrud emerging from the caves, the defensive mode was set to point defense, one of four modes, angled forty-five degrees, focused on a single direction.
As the candle-like light faded, countless Hrud surged from the caves.
The Tarantulas' machine-spirits roared, unleashing dense barrages. The exploding beams burned through the Hrud's concealment layers, piercing their bodies, leaving gaping holes.
The "Solar High Priest" walked towards the densest grey shadows in his Spirit Vision.
A Tarantula's machine-spirit, recognizing his identification code, immediately ceased firing.
The "Solar High Priest" leaned back, arms spread, as if embracing the sun.
A pure, blazing column of light descended from the sky, striking the Hrud mass.
Over a dozen Hrud, and dozens more behind them, were vaporized.
Hundreds of Hrud recoiled from the blinding golden light. They didn't even raise their plasma flintlocks.
They circled wide around the drifting golden motes, surging forward.
The "Solar High Priest" was suffused with gold, layer after layer spreading outward.
"Sun Halo" warmed the Honor Guard members within thirty-five meters. They followed their Captain towards the cave entrance.
The "Light Suppliants" took golden bottles from their waists, stepping forward one by one, scattering holy water.
A drop of holy water struck a Hrud.
Points of golden light illuminated its blurred form, piercing its entropic field.
Rows of Hrud dissolved, collapsing.
The "Solar High Priest" felt his abilities, both power and range, significantly enhanced.
As he walked forward, he seemed to merge with the light.
Olivier remembered the Light Lord's words: "Your abilities are temporarily enhanced," and decided to make the most of it.
The golden aura plunged into the cave. Hrud fled like startled mice.
When the runes on Olivier's helmet displayed 3.6 kilometers, the aura around him suddenly contracted, its range only about twenty meters.
"Withdraw," the "Solar High Priest" ordered loudly, then lunged forward to meet the onrushing Hrud.
Golden, illusory flames spontaneously ignited around him. The flames, radiating the sun's vast energy, densely formed an ocean.
The pure, sacred light melted the Hrud like candles, leaving drops of sour, acrid liquid.
The "Solar High Priest" felt he had completely merged with the golden light.
He withdrew calmly with his Honor Guard. The Hrud only attacked again after the golden fire sea vanished.
'The halo-like effect: surrounding him with gold, spreading outward layer by layer. It warms his companions, granting them courage, dispersing evil, and can be precisely controlled.'
Wilshire moved between battlefields, restoring his psychic energy aboard a Stormbird.
The "Notary" led his Honor Guard to the most critical battlefields. After routing the enemy, he would "Notarize" the "Solar High Priests" before leaving.
Across the dark world of Kraven, light flared in place after place, brighter, more dazzling than brief glory.
.....
If you enjoy the story, my p@treon is 30 chapters ahead.
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