Deep within Paul's dark gold eyes, the five stars spun at an almost frenzied speed.
A bizarre psychic resonance rippled through the Light of Dawn's psychic conduction network, spreading outward into the engine rooms of every single ship in the fleet.
"Attention the entire fleet. All Warp engine rooms, follow my command."
His voice, carried on a thrumming psychic undercurrent, projected directly into the minds of every operator.
"On my mark, you will overload your Warp drives and vent every ounce of pent-up Warp energy. The entire fleet will bank hard to starboard and punch straight into the reality tear."
"Psykers, keep your tether-spells locked tightly onto the Light of Dawn."
"Understood!"
"Copy that!"
"Crimson Conviction, holding for your mark!"
"Unyielding Crusade, fully synchronized!"
Across the engine rooms of one hundred and six voidcraft, over four hundred native Aurelian psykers shouted their confirmations in unison.
These were the very individuals Paul had handpicked and rigorously trained for over a decade. Right now, they pressed their palms firmly against specially modified psychic conduction plates, beads of sweat breaking out across their foreheads.
Paul stood at the dead center of the Light of Dawn's psychic amplification array, the energy conduits tracing across his golden Aquilon Terminator Armor blazing with a blinding intensity.
He slowly raised his right hand, splaying his five fingers as if gripping an invisible helm in the very fabric of the void.
"Three."
On the bridge, Schrödinger Bro, Tax Bro, White Scars, and the others collectively held their breath.
They weren't psykers, yet they could physically feel the air turning thick and viscous, a terrifying power gathering that completely defied the laws of physics.
"Two."
Helovia stood at Paul's side, her long silver hair drifting wildly without a breeze.
The tip of her staff glowed with a soft, silvery luminescence, striking a delicate balance against Paul's violently turbulent aura. She was acting as a stabilizing anchor for the weaker psykers across the fleet, preventing them from being knocked unconscious by Paul's Primarch-level psychic shockwaves.
"One."
Paul's pupils violently contracted.
At that exact microsecond, the orbital paths of the five stars aligned and overlapped, merging into a single, piercing ray of light that bridged the gap between reality and the immaterial.
"Mark!"
The screaming klaxons of Warp drive overloads erupted simultaneously across the fleet.
Governed by Paul's millisecond-perfect timing, one hundred and six Warp engines violently discharged their accumulated Warp energy all at once.
This was no standard translation sequence.
It was a brutally violent, recklessly dangerous, and near-suicidal forced deflection.
Under normal circumstances, a starship leaving the Warp was supposed to glide smoothly along a pre-calculated vector, like an aircraft touching down on a runway. But Paul's order was to push every engine into an explosive overload, effectively brute-forcing the entire armada sideways through the very structure of the Immaterium.
Because right there, a tear existed.
A hairline fracture leading back into realspace that his Wisdom trait had pinpointed three days prior.
BOOM!!!
Even through layers of adamantium bulkheads and void shields, every soul in the fleet felt a violently jarring impact.
It didn't feel like a starship in motion; it felt as though an unfathomably massive hand had grabbed the entire universe and violently chucked it aside.
Beyond the observation viewports, the crimson-gold walls of the Warp tunnel twisted and tore apart in a frenzy.
The chaotic nightmare that had been previously held at bay—the spinning vortexes of color, the wailing faces, the grasping, grotesque tendrils—swarmed the breached hull like blood-crazed sharks.
But they were half a second too late.
Paul's Pioneering trait viciously cleaved a path straight ahead of the fleet.
The radiant aura of his Hope trait burned like an active forge, incinerating any Warp entity foolish enough to get close.
Meanwhile, the Wisdom trait ran hyper-precise calculations, continuously adjusting the positional drift and trajectory angles of every single vessel.
One hundred and six starships, moving like puppets strung to an invisible master, carved a razor-sharp, physics-defying zigzag right through the churning tides of Chaos, plunging headfirst into the reality tear.
"Activate void shields! Gellar fields to maximum output!"
Paul's voice remained a bedrock of calm amidst the violent shaking.
The defensive countermeasures across all vessels snapped online within zero-point-three seconds.
Void shields flared up to repel physical munitions, while Gellar fields erected an absolute barrier against Warp corruption.
Every ship captain executed the maneuver on pure, ingrained instinct.
A deep, resonant hum vibrated through the hulls as the ethereal blue luminescence of void shield generators cascaded across the outer plating.
The psychic bulwark of the Gellar fields slammed shut, locking out the few lingering whispers that had tried to slither into the ships.
This was standard operating procedure, a doctrine Paul had hammered into the Dawn Fleet since its very inception.
In this universe, the most perilous aspect of Warp travel was never the turbulence of the journey itself, but the exact moment of exit...
When a vessel tore through the veil of reality to drop back into the materium, it frequently dragged things out with it that had no business existing in the physical realm. The lingering gaze of daemons, the corruptive murmur of whispers, fragments of Warp entities...
Throughout the bloody history of the 40K universe, countless ships had fallen victim to sloppy translation protocols, dooming their entire crews to become sacrifices for Chaos.
But Crimson Dawn would never commit such a rookie mistake.
Through years of relentless ideological conditioning, Paul had literally carved safety and unyielding discipline into the very marrow of every Dawn Defense Force soldier.
"Brace for realspace transition!"
"Three, two, one..."
--
Realspace. System L-246, low orbit above Dal.
Without a shred of warning, a reality tear stretching over three hundred kilometers tore open, its jagged edges bleeding the distinctive crimson-gold afterglow of a massive psychic overload.
Immediately after, a colossal armada violently disgorged itself from the rift.
The first to breach realspace was the Light of Dawn, an Olympia-class Strike Cruiser, dragging its sleek, five-kilometer-long hull out of the tear.
Its dark red plating reflected a cold, unforgiving metallic sheen beneath the local starlight. The Crimson Dawn insignia mounted on its prow—a sun breaking the dark horizon—gleamed like the freshly opened eye of a god.
Following right on its heels were four Lunar-class Cruisers: the Will of Daybreak, Crimson Conviction, Unyielding Crusade, and Glory of Hope.
They were slightly smaller, measuring in at four kilometers, but the densely packed weapon batteries lining their broadsides had already disengaged their safety locks. The massive barrels of their macro-cannons were slowly rotating, pre-heating for immediate bombardment.
Fifteen Sword-class frigates scattered like hunting hounds, fanning out into a textbook escort formation.
Finally, the eighty-six transport ships poured through. These Aurelian-manufactured vessels boasted rough, utilitarian designs, but their sheer, overwhelming numbers made them look like a drifting mountain range of iron.
The entire fleet completed its translation in under seven seconds.
As the engine wash of the final transport re-ignited in the physical universe, the reality rift slowly stitched itself shut, leaving absolutely no trace of their passage.
"Holy... shit."
Tax Bro, decked out in power armor painted in the livery of the Imperial Fists, slammed both hands onto the railing of the Light of Dawn's bridge, his jaw dropping wide open beneath his faceplate.
And it wasn't just him. Every single veteran player on the deck—Schrödinger Bro, G Bro, White Scars, Blood Angel—stared dead ahead at the azure planet looming right outside the viewport, utter disbelief plastered across their faces.
Dal.
It was right there.
A genuine, terrestrial planet boasting an atmosphere, seas of clouds, sprawling oceans, and vast continents. Right at this moment, it hung less than ten thousand kilometers from the nearest vessel in their fleet...
On a stellar scale, this was practically point-blank.
Looking through the observation deck, roughly seventy-three percent of the planet's surface was dominated by oceans, while its landmasses were a sickly, yellowish-green hue.
Heavy clusters of smog choked the atmosphere, and the faint, sprawling outlines of metropolises were visible beneath the cloud cover.
The urban planning down there was an absolute chaotic mess, resembling haphazardly splattered stains.
Orbiting the planet, however, were four distinct space installations. The largest was a standardized orbital station, roughly ten kilometers in diameter. It sported a ring-shaped superstructure with six elongated docking arms protruding from its perimeter.
Starships were moored to three of those arms...
A total of twenty-three vessels were present. Most hovered around the two-kilometer mark, placing them squarely in the frigate weight class, while only three stretched to four kilometers, likely cruisers.
The other three smaller stations looked more like dedicated defense platforms—triangular pyramids completely bristling with macro-turrets and defense batteries.
"Paul, you've got to be kidding me!"
Tax Bro was the first to snap out of his sheer disbelief.
"That positioning was flawlessly precise!"
"We punched straight out of the Warp and landed right on our target's front porch!"
"Imperial Navigators would drop to their knees and call you daddy if they saw this level of precision!"
Paul slowly exhaled, the blazing energy conduits crisscrossing his golden Aquilon Terminator Armor gradually dimming.
That short-range, hyper-precise Warp jump had drained nearly thirty percent of his psychic reserves, but the results were undeniable. It had shaved a significant amount of travel time off their journey.
"Just got lucky," he smiled. But the expression vanished a second later, his gaze turning razor-sharp as he locked onto the orbital installations. "Though it seems our hosts aren't exactly rolling out the red carpet."
Just as he predicted, Dal's orbital defense grid had reacted within three seconds of the fleet's arrival.
Dense clusters of warning lights flared across the superstructure of the largest space station. The engines of the ships moored to its docking arms sputtered to life.
Across the three defense platforms, massive weapon batteries swiveled in unison, locking dead onto the suddenly materialized Crimson Dawn armada.
A crude electromagnetic wave swept over the fleet at the speed of light.
"Receiving a vox-request... no, it's a broad-band transmission."
The Light of Dawn's vox-officer turned from his console to report. "Signal origin: the primary space station."
"Decrypting the broadcast... decryption complete."
"The message reads as follows:"
[What fleet is this? How dare you brazenly trespass into the domain of King Charles!]
[State your species and your intentions immediately, then withdraw! Otherwise, we will initiate a justified and overwhelming lethal strike!]
Attached to the bottom of the text was an insignia...
The severed head of a simian creature. Its maw was grotesquely exaggerated, a gaping slit tearing all the way from its cheeks to the base of its ears, revealing rows of densely packed, jagged teeth.
Its eyes were voids of pitch-black.
"King Charles..."
Paul softly repeated the name, the stars spinning in his dark gold eyes accelerating slightly. "Looks like this is the 'King Charles of Dal' mentioned in the quest log."
He pulled up the Light of Dawn's deep-scan telemetry of the planet below.
The surface was scarred by obvious signs of urbanization.
However, the architectural style was incredibly barbaric, resembling haphazard nests stacked from poured concrete and rusted steel.
Atmospheric readings indicated unusually high oxygen levels, while carbon dioxide concentrations were three times that of a standard terrestrial world. There were also trace amounts of hydrogen sulfide in the air...
"Bloodthirsty, ruthless, and domesticating humans like livestock."
Tax Bro muttered the words straight from the System's quest description, his fists clenching tight with an audible whir of power armor servos. "Paul, give the order."
Paul didn't respond immediately.
He was waiting. Waiting for the enemy's next move.
Waiting for the augur arrays to finish their deep structural analysis of Dal's surface and orbital stations.
Waiting for every weapon system across the fleet to complete its final pre-combat diagnostic.
Five seconds later, the second wave of transmissions hit.
[Silence? Foolish outsiders! This is your final ultimatum!]
[Respond within ten seconds, or you shall taste the wrath of the Dal Split-Maws!]
[The warriors of King Charles will tear your ships to scrap and leave your crew strung up in orbit to rot!]
This time, the transmission came with a video attachment.
The footage was shaky, clearly recorded on a handheld device.
The background was a dimly lit, filth-ridden cage. Behind rusted iron bars sat dozens of captive humans.
They were dressed in rags and emaciated to the bone. Their eyes were vacant, as hollow and empty as corpses.
Several Dal guards lumbered into frame.
They were the simian-headed, split-jawed, black-furred xenos depicted in the insignia.
They yanked the cage door open and brutally dragged out a middle-aged man.
The man didn't even fight back. It was as if his will to resist had been completely hollowed out long ago.
The camera then panned toward a blood-stained "dining area."
The video abruptly cut to static.
But absolute, deathly silence had already fallen over the bridge.
"Holy... shit."
Tax Bro hissed the words through his teeth.
White Scars was breathing heavily, his chest heaving.
Schrödinger Bro's eyes were as cold as drawn daggers.
Helovia gripped her staff so tightly her knuckles turned white, her silver hair drifting wildly around her.
Meanwhile, in the [Crimson Dawn] Regional Chat, messages were completely flooding the screen.
[How Many Floors Can You Carry a Sack of Rice]: "Did I just see... was that...?"
[You Ashe I Soraka]: "They were eating... gag..."
[Optimus Lemme Pilot You Real Hard]: "The quest description wasn't exaggerating..."
[Have You Been Loyal Today?]: "Listen up, rookies. Do you understand why we absolutely have to fight this war now?"
[Execute Old Man the War Criminal]: "Suffer not the alien to live... and to that, I'll add: they must be brutally exterminated."
[Paradox Players Aren't War Criminals]: "From a purely strategic standpoint, a civilization that feeds on sapient species possesses extreme aggression and hyper-expansionist tendencies. They must be eradicated before they reach an uncontrollable threshold."
[The Imperium's Last Gambler]: "Screw the analysis, let's fucking kill them!"
--
Goal = 300 Powerstones.
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