Tax Bro was the first to cross the still-smoking door.
He was immediately greeted by a dense wall of energy beams and kinetic slugs.
However, the vast majority merely showered his power armor in harmless sparks. The few that managed to slip into the weaker joints were instantly countered and healed by the rapid cellular regeneration of the Compassion trait.
He bared his teeth in a savage grin, revving his chainsword as he plunged into the Dal ranks.
High above, Paul continued to hover, the five-colored rain of psychic light still cascading from his form.
His consciousness had spread out like an invisible net, blanketing the entire battlefield.
Under the hyper-calculations of the Wisdom trait, the status, position, and combat data of every single Crimson Dawn unit was rendered with crystal clarity in his mind.
Tax Bro's squad had breached the gate and was locked in a brutal melee with the Dal elites inside.
White Scars' mobile cavalry had flanked to the east wing of the Royal Court, systematically dismantling the anti-air grids there.
The main host of the Dawn Defense Force, under General Roger's command, was advancing steadily. Their casualty rates were a staggering 73 percent lower than initial projections.
As for the Grey Knight company...
Paul looked down.
The two hundred silver-grey warriors had reformed their battle lines. They were facing the gargantuan, two-hundred-meter-tall primary doors at the base of the Royal Court pyramid, which were now slowly grinding open.
Within the threshold, darkness surged.
It began with the heavy, perfectly synchronized thud of marching boots.
Every step caused the stone pavement to tremble slightly. Every step seemed to thicken the metallic stench of blood in the air.
As the massive doors parted, a tide of uniform black armor poured out from the depths of the pyramid.
These Dal Royal Guards were even larger than the ones slaughtered in the plaza. Averaging over three meters in height, they were encased head-to-toe in black alloy heavy armor.
They wielded standardized long-handled energy halberds, the heavy blades crackling with an ominous, dark red arcing current.
But the most chilling feature was their eyes.
They were voids of pure, absolute crimson. There were no pupils, just a radiant glow of unadulterated bloodlust.
One hundred thousand Dal Royal Guards flooded out of the gates like a black ocean, rapidly fanning out into disciplined formations across the plaza.
Their movements were far too synchronized for biological creatures, resembling an army of automatons driven by a singular, overarching will.
And right in the dead center of this black host sat a colossal war palanquin.
The construct was less a vehicle and more a mobile, rolling palace.
Its chassis was carved from a dark red, bone-like material, and its exterior was meticulously inlaid with thousands upon thousands of... human skulls.
Every single skull had been polished to a gleaming finish, their hollow eye sockets staring outward as if frozen in silent, eternal screams.
The palanquin was hefted upon the shoulders of forty exceptionally massive Dal honor guards.
Each stood well over three meters tall, clad in pitch-black skeletal armor. Their helmets were forged in the visages of roaring apes, the jaws split wide to reveal jagged teeth dripping with venomous drool.
Flanking the four corners of the palanquin were four blood-red personal bodyguards, each towering nearly four meters in height.
They were vastly bulkier than the black-armored guards. The surface of their warplate bulged with pulsing energy conduits that looked like swollen, infected veins.
They wielded absurdly oversized, two-handed chainaxes, the rotating teeth completely caked in fresh, wet gore.
Atop the palanquin, seated upon the throne.
Charles Darwin slowly stood up.
The King of the Dal boasted an awe-inspiring height of four-and-a-half meters. Even simply standing upon the palanquin, he looked like a titan peering down at insects.
He wore his master-crafted heavy armor woven from black crystal and adamantium. The hundreds of preserved eyeballs embedded across its surface gleamed with a sickening, oily sheen under the sunlight.
Clutched in his grip was the seven-meter-long colossal chainaxe, its serrated edge rotating at a agonizing crawl, emitting a deep hum that sounded like a colossal beast grinding its teeth.
"Lowly humans..."
Charles's voice was a deep, gravelly rasp that seemed to penetrate straight through to the soul.
He used no vox-amplifiers, yet his voice echoed across the entirety of the sprawling plaza, easily drowning out the deafening roar of artillery and bolter fire.
The sheer sonic force hit like a physical shockwave, rattling the loose stones on the pavement.
"Did you come here solely to offer yourselves as food?"
His split maw stretched all the way to the base of his ears, fully exposing four rows of jagged, razor-sharp teeth.
Thick drool spilled down his chin, striking the bone-paved floor and sizzling as it burned small, acidic craters into the ground.
"I can smell it... the exquisite aroma of your souls."
"Far more robust... far more vibrant than the livestock rotting in the pens."
Charles took a deep, shuddering breath, a look of sheer intoxication swimming in his crimson eyes.
"Now this... is truly worthy of being the main course upon my dining table."
The moment the final syllable left his lips, a terrifying, suffocating psychic pressure violently expanded outward.
It was raw, brutal, blood-soaked red energy, dripping with an insatiable hunger for slaughter.
The Dal soldiers within the Royal Court erupted into fanatical, deafening shrieks.
Their muscles grotesquely swelled and bulged, and thick saliva uncontrollably poured from their split maws.
Chaos corruption, made manifest.
Paul, hovering high above, slowly descended, touching down upon the crown of a hundred-meter-tall ape statue overlooking the plaza. He stared coldly down at the encroaching army.
Within his dark gold eyes, the star representing the trait of Wisdom violently accelerated...
Wisdom Trait: Origin Tracing.
By locking onto the residual temporal and psychic imprints clinging to the entity before him, Paul traced its absolute origin, its history, its everything.
A torrent of data flooded into Paul's mind.
He saw it...
Over three hundred years ago.
On this very planet, an organization known as Fuji Life Sciences was conducting forbidden experiments in a black-site laboratory located in an island nation.
Their ultimate objective: the creation of super-soldiers.
Through advanced CRISPR gene-editing technology, they attempted to splice the dominant genetic traits of humans with those of primates, seeking to engineer biological weapons with strength, agility, and endurance far surpassing standard baseline humans.
Project Designation: [Project Dal].
The initial phases were highly successful. They cultivated the first batch of hybrids... a neo-human species possessing human intellect and primate physicality.
However, these hybrids harbored fatal genetic flaws. They were emotionally unstable, highly prone to violent outbursts, and suffered from overpowering cannibalistic urges.
The project was abruptly terminated. Orders were issued to incinerate all test subjects.
But one deranged researcher secretly preserved a single embryo.
He spliced his own genetic material with the modified egg cell of a transgenic female chimpanzee, cultivating it entirely in vitro.
He then implanted the embryo into an unknowing human surrogate mother.
That child was born.
He was named Charles.
Charles was fundamentally different from normal humans from the moment he drew his first breath.
He possessed faint, distinct slits at the corners of his mouth. He possessed strength far outclassing children his age. His capacity for learning was terrifyingly high.
But he was also... exceptionally brutal.
At age six, he tore a neighbor's pet dog apart with his bare hands. At age ten, he nearly bit a classmate to death for mocking his appearance.
He was institutionalized in an orphanage, eventually adopted by a wealthy, infertile couple.
The couple wanted a 'special' child.
Charles's adoptive parents were incredibly affluent and deeply loving.
They provided him with the finest education money could buy, took him around the globe, and constantly reassured him that he was no different from anyone else.
But Charles knew he was different.
Late at night, he would stare into the mirror, tracing the two growing slits at the corners of his mouth.
He secretly devoured biology textbooks, desperately trying to define exactly what he was.
He would hide in his room, taking scissors to his own flesh, purely to see if the blood flowing through his veins belonged to a human or a beast.
In his eighteenth year, he finally uncovered the truth.
That very night, Charles slaughtered his adoptive parents.
He then traveled back to the global headquarters of Fuji Life Sciences.
He butchered every single living soul inside the facility—from the CEO down to the janitorial staff. Not a single person was spared.
Deep within the laboratory's mainframe, he pulled up his complete genetic sequence.
57% Human. 43% Chimpanzee. And several strings of unknown, anomalous sequences.
"So I am a mutt," Charles smiled.
Charles immediately began a frantic campaign of kidnapping geneticists and researchers, forcing them to mass-produce his gene-spliced apes.
And so the Dal's were born in massive, industrialized batches.
These hybrid abominations, wielding human intelligence and primate brawn, rapidly displayed terrifying combat potential.
Charles led them in a global sweep across the planet.
First, they annihilated the remnants of Fuji. Then, they systematically butchered one human nation after another.
And amidst the endless oceans of slaughter, Charles felt something... a gaze from the beyond.
It was blood-red, a presence that understood only the joy of massacre and the offering of skulls.
It bestowed power upon Charles. It violently twisted the minds of every gene-ape on the planet.
Charles realized that not only did his strength eclipse that of mortals, but... the more he killed, the stronger he became.
With every life he extinguished, a warm current of power flooded his veins, making him faster, stronger, and more cunning.
He didn't know it was the Blood God watching him.
He only knew one absolute truth: the weak are meat, and the strong do eat.
Humans ate pigs, cows, and sheep. He ate humans. What was the difference?
He built his own empire and named his species the Dal...
They were the next step in evolution, neo-humans possessing greater intelligence and vastly superior strength. They were the true apex predators of this world.
He captured the surviving humans and penned them up, treating them no differently than humans treated livestock.
He forced them to breed, and then he routinely harvested them.
He enslaved millions of human laborers to construct his massive golden pyramid, crowning himself King.
Just like this three hundred years passed.
Charles Darwin had evolved from a synthetic, lab-grown hybrid into the tyrant of an entire planet.
And the human population of that world was aggressively culled from tens of billions down to barely three billion.
These remaining humans were corralled into massive cages dubbed "human settlements."
Left with nothing to do but await their inevitable fate as food.