Dal Royal Court Plaza.
A hundred thousand black-armored royal guards surged forward like a dark, incoming tide. Radiating outward from the royal palanquin, the tidal wave of bodies crashed toward that lone, golden figure.
Scarlet pupils burned beneath their helmets. Their muscles, mutated and swollen by the Blood God's foul aura, strained against their armor until the metal groaned and popped.
With every thunderous footfall, the bedrock trembled.
The two hundred Grey Knights didn't yield a single inch.
Anchoring themselves around Paul, they formed a crescent-moon defensive formation. Two hundred storm bolters leveled in perfect unison, their muzzles aimed straight ahead.
Every weapon was chambered with spiritually blessed purgation rounds.
In the regional chat, the Grey Knight Company Commander, [I Really Don't Want to be a Power Bank], barked out cold, calculated orders:
"Squads One through Five, staggered volley fire."
"Squads Six through Fifteen, prime your force halberds. Sixteen through Twenty, spool up the psycannons..."
"Hostiles at three hundred meters."
"Two hundred meters."
"One hundred meters."
"Open fire."
The storm bolters roared as one.
Mass-reactive shells carved silver-blue contrails through the air before slamming into the dense vanguard. Every detonating round bloomed into a half-meter radius of purifying white fire.
Against conventional weaponry, the black heavy armor of the Dal guard was tough as ceramite. But against ammo baptized in psychic wrath? It might as well have been wet cardboard.
The front ranks were mowed down in droves.
Yet the rear ranks simply trampled over their corpses and kept charging. Through the choking cordite smoke, their glowing red eyes looked like a shifting sea of bloody stars.
SKREEEEEE!!!
A hundred thousand unhinged jaws unleashed a deafening warcry. The sheer volume created a visible shockwave, rattling the half-collapsed buildings on the plaza's perimeter until their facades sheared off in chunks of dust and rubble.
Paul stood dead center, completely unbothered.
The five-colored psychic flames wreathing his Golden Aquilon Terminator armor shifted, settling into a deep, intimidating dark gold.
"Two hundred versus a hundred thousand."
"The advantage is mine."
--
In high orbit, on the bridge of the Light of Dawn...
Helovia stared intently at the hololith table. The tactical display reflected in her eyes, showing a massive red ocean rapidly collapsing in on a single, stubborn golden dot.
"Schrödinger Bro, what's the status on the frigate missile silos?"
"Fifteen Sword-class frigates, twelve universal launch tubes per ship." Schrödinger Bro's data panels were scrolling at a blinding speed. "Ready for immediate volley... two hundred and twenty high-explosive payloads, two hundred and eighty armor-piercing, and sixty thermobaric warheads."
"Don't hold anything back."
"Dump the entire payload. We're taking the heat off Paul," Helovia ordered calmly.
A few agonizing seconds of comms delay passed. Then, the broadsides of all fifteen frigates blossomed with dense grids of ignition flare.
Six hundred missiles of varying payloads tore down through the atmosphere on blazing white exhaust trails. It was a spectacular, terrifying sight.
They traced overlapping parabolic arcs through the sky, converging to form a dome of guaranteed annihilation over the entire Dal Royal Court Plaza.
The collective shriek of their descent blended into an ear-splitting, continuous hum. The dreadful noise actually forced a good chunk of the frenzied Dal guardsmen to look up...
--
Charles looked up.
His crimson eyes reflected a sky full of falling meteors... an iron rain summoned by these puny humans.
Heh.
The tyrannical ruler of the Dal homeworld peeled his lips back in a horrid grin, exposing four rows of jagged, serrated teeth.
"Bring it on."
He raised his right arm and aggressively clenched his fist.
BZZZT...
Across the plaza, pale yellow energy circuits flared to life on the chest plates of all one hundred thousand black-armored Royal Guards simultaneously.
This was the ultimate culmination of centuries of the Dal race's technological advancement.
Deflector field generators, powered by an exotic native crystal isotope. They were specifically engineered to refract energy beams, disperse kinetic impacts from solid slugs, and drastically dampen explosive shockwaves.
Supercharged by the crimson will raging inside Charles, the shielding output was pushed far past its theoretical limits. Pale yellow energy bled from the seams of every guardsman's armor, rushing upward and interlacing in midair.
It quickly solidified into a massive, three-meter-thick energy bulwark blanketing the entire Royal Court Plaza.
But that wasn't enough.
Charles drew a deep breath.
Deep within his pupils, the scarlet flames violently erupted.
"Warriors of the Blood God..." His voice boomed like thunder across the courtyard. "Show these humans the true meaning of..."
He threw his arms wide. A geyser of profane crimson energy blasted from his chest, rocketing toward the sky.
It slathered a second layer over the yellow barricade—a roiling, writhing red barrier that pulsed like living flesh.
"Blood God's Blessing."
--
The frigates' missile swarm finally made contact.
When the first high-explosive warhead slammed into the crimson shield, it birthed a fireball thirty meters wide.
Then came the second. The tenth. The hundredth. All six hundred missiles.
The chain-detonations merged into a singular, blinding inferno, entirely painting the sky over the Royal Court in harsh, incandescent white.
Supersonic shockwaves violently rippled outward. Enormous slabs of ablative armor sheared clean off the exterior of the Royal Pyramid.
Surrounding low-rise structures were shredded, violently uprooted, and atomized into fine dust as if they were made of children's toy blocks.
The bedrock flash-melted into glass under the extreme thermobaric heat, only to be instantaneously shattered, pulverized, and caved in by the relentless concussive pounding that followed.
The entire plaza quaked on its foundations.
The absolute carnage looked like a fireworks show put on by a particularly explosion-happy Ork Big Mek.
In the regional chat, [How Many Floors Can You Carry a Sack of Rice] dropped a stunned message:
"Holy shit, the Emperor's fireworks."
[Optimus Lemme Pilot You Real Hard]: "How much money do I gotta swipe to unlock these particle effects?"
[Paradox Players Aren't War Criminals]: "Wait, hold on. At the System shop's unit price, over four thousand individual missiles is roughly five point three million Imperial Coins."
"Cost-efficiency... honestly, it's pretty trash."
[Have You Been Loyal Today?]: "Shut up."
"Rule of cool. That's all that matters."
--
The choking dust clouds slowly thinned out.
Charles still stood firmly atop his royal palanquin.
The yellow energy deflector... shattered.
The crimson shield of blasphemy... shattered.
But the Dal Royal Guards... were still standing.
Over eighty-one thousand pairs of glowing red eyes bored through the fading smoke, aggressively locking onto that solitary patch of gold in the center of the plaza.
The total casualties from the first orbital bombardment: roughly nineteen thousand, seven hundred Dal guardsmen.
The kill ratio: thousands of missiles traded for just shy of twenty thousand bodies.
Faced with such an overwhelming numbers advantage, and heavily mitigated by the double-layered shielding, even a saturation strike of this magnitude only managed to splash a few sizable holes in the black tide.
And then, the dark waters simply flowed back together, closing the gaps.
"ROOOARR!!!"
It was impossible to tell which guardsman initiated the battle cry. But a split-second later, eighty thousand energy axes were hoisted into the air.
Eighty thousand pairs of scarlet eyes engorged with blood, and eighty thousand unhinged jaws bellowed in deafening unison:
"For King Charles!!!"
"Blood for the Blood God!!!"
"Skulls for the Skull Throne!!!"
The crashing black wave was now barely thirty meters away from Paul.
Paul finally moved. He took a single step forward.
The instant his armored boot planted, the bedrock violently spider-webbed, fault lines crazily tearing outward in all directions.
The five-colored psychic flames coating his body erupted to their absolute zenith. The dark-gold psychic aura rippled over his terminator plate like a living, breathing entity, while the faint silhouette of five majestic wings flared into hyper-realistic existence behind his back for a split second.
Without hesitation, he threw himself headfirst into the crushing black tide.
The Watcher's Axe carved out its first blindingly silver arc.
It was the unmistakable visual signature of a disruption field outputting at maximum power.
Wherever the axe blade traveled, the very concept of physical matter was abruptly vetoed.
Armor plating... atomized.
Mutated flesh... disintegrated.
Bone... vaporized.
Five Dal Royal Guards were instantly deleted from reality by that single swing. They were vaporized so quickly their green blood didn't even have a chance to splatter.
Paul didn't even tap the brakes.
He pivoted hard, sweeping the monstrous axe head through a brutal backhand arc.
Supercharged by his dark-gold, five-trait psychic energy, the disruption field acted as a violent catalyst against anything carrying the foul taint of Chaos.
Seven guardsmen, heavily steeped in Khorne's corrupting aura, were casually bisected at the waist. The instant they were sliced open, the profane energy in their veins reacted explosively with the psychic charge on the axe blade.
They detonated from the inside out, showering the immediate area in a rain of pure gore.
Third swing. Fourth swing. Fifth.
Paul marched upstream through the ocean of black armor, butchering his way into the heart of the enemy formation.
There was absolutely no wasted motion. Every swing was mapped to the most ruthlessly efficient kill-curve. Every footfall was calculated for maximum forward momentum.
Against him, the three-meter-tall Dal veterans were as fragile as wet tissue paper.
When their energy axes managed to score a glancing blow against his psychic plating, it only sparked a pathetic little ripple. A microsecond later, the attacker was cleaved straight down the middle, shield and all.
The concentrated fire from the Dal energy rifles peppered his Golden Aquilon armor without so much as leaving a superficial scratch on the paint job.
Occasionally, heavy weapon emplacements managed to track and focus fire on his position...
Like the twin-linked energy cannons mounted on a Dal dreadnought frame.
The psychic shielding would flicker, and emerald-green psychic energy of Compassion would bloom across the ceramite, repairing the damage in the blink of an eye.
Twenty-four years ago, back in the Arlu Industrial Zone, Paul still had to actively dodge a daemon's strikes.
Twenty-four years later, standing dead center in a siege of a hundred thousand Dal Royal Guards, his footwork didn't falter for a single microsecond.
--
A hundred silver-grey Terminators formed a crescent formation, radiating outward with Paul as their anchor.
Beyond the standard disruption fields, the force halberds in their grips were coated with an additional layer of pale-gold psychic energy.
It was a purifying blessing unique to the Grey Knights, designed to inflict catastrophic damage on anything reeking of the warp. Against this golden veneer, the blessing of Khorne flowing through the Dal Royal Guards melted away like snow under a blistering sun.
"Force halberd phalanx... advance!"
[I Really Don't Want to be a Power Bank]'s voice was as calm as still water.
A hundred force halberds thrust forward in perfect unison. The psychic charge on the blades carved pale-gold afterimages through the air.
Dozens of vanguard Royal Guards had their chest plates punctured. The terrifying profane energy inside them was instantly neutralized the second it touched the purifying psychic force.
Meanwhile, the remaining hundred Grey Knights deployed their psycannons from the rear line.
These psycannons were forged by the Adeptus Mechanicus in the Omega Forges of Mars, utilizing warp-condensation technology. The ammunition incorporated Astronomican-irradiated crystals and xenos psychic minerals, allowing them to convert a Grey Knight's psychic essence into high-energy particle beams that shredded daemonic entities on a spiritual level.
With every flash of the muzzle, a fist-sized orb of silver-white energy shrieked through the air.
Target acquired... detonation.
The blast radius wasn't massive—barely three meters across—but any Dal Royal Guard caught at ground zero didn't even have the chance to scream. They were simply torn apart and erased from existence.
In the regional chat, the rookies were absolutely dumbfounded.
Chris, [Crimson Zealot], had just dropped a standard Dal footsoldier with his lasgun. He looked up, only to see silver-white arcs of light rapidly flashing across the Royal Court Plaza. Every single flash was accompanied by the mass shattering of black armor.
He muttered to himself, What the fuck... is this a damn hack-and-slash game?