Tax Bro violently kicked away the mangled corpse of the last Dal defender in front of him, panting heavily.
His Imperial Fists-painted power armor bore seventeen new gouges of varying depths. The nastiest one ran from his left shoulder down to his right ribs, nearly breaching the ceramite inner lining.
But his eyes were terrifyingly bright.
"Gates are clear!" he roared into the comms. "All units, report casualties!"
"White Scars squad: five KIA, three critically wounded," a White Scar player reported, his voice cutting through the roar of jump packs in the background.
"Salamanders squad: eight KIA, seven critically wounded," [Have You Been Loyal Today?] stated coldly.
"Tech-Priests: zero casualties. But three of my servo-skulls got blown to bits." [The Last Scourge Mechanicus] sounded visibly pained by the financial loss.
"Raven Guard: zero casualties... wait, where's [Anyone Who Likes the Raven Lord is a Bro]?"
Just as Tax Bro was about to follow up, Schrödinger Bro's voice suddenly cut into the regional chat.
[Regional Chat: (Crimson Dawn)]
[Schrödinger's Loyalist]: "Tax Bro, the hell are you still dawdling at the gates for?"
[The Emperor's Tax Must Be Paid Even if the World Ends]: "Fuck off, you think I want to be here? There's at least thirty-eight thousand defenders on this end, plus a whole bunch of mechs shooting energy cannons..."
[Schrödinger's Loyalist]: "Paul is soloing ninety thousand Royal Guards right now, and you're complaining about thirty-eight thousand?"
[The Emperor's Tax Must Be Paid Even if the World Ends]: "..."
[The Emperor's Tax Must Be Paid Even if the World Ends]: "White Scars! Stop trying to flank them! Charge straight down the middle with me!"
[Is the White Scar Late Today?]: "Roger that."
Tax Bro closed the comms channel.
"Listen up, everyone..."
"Paul is waiting for us to clear the field, not waiting for us to attend his funeral banquet!"
"We breach these gates in three minutes! Anyone who falls behind is scrubbing the entire Chapter's power armor tonight!"
His answer was the deafening roar of three thousand, four hundred bolters firing as one.
--
General Roger Theodore stood on the elevated turret of a Demolisher self-propelled artillery tank, surveying the Royal Court gates three kilometers away through his magnoculars.
In the distance, the Dal defensive line was collapsing at a visible rate.
With every synchronized volley, the Astartes' bolters tore bloody, mangled gaps through the enemy's black-armored formations. And further out, that solitary golden figure was still cutting through ninety thousand Royal Guards like he was taking a casual stroll.
"General," the vox-operator's voice crackled through his earpiece. "Incoming orders from the Crimson Dawn Chapter. Encrypted channel."
Roger grabbed the vox-handset. Schrödinger Bro's voice was terse and icy.
"General Roger, we expect to breach the Royal gates within three minutes."
"Mobilize fifty thousand troopers and three thousand Dawn Guards. Take over defensive operations at the gates, mop up the remnants, and establish a secure beachhead."
"Copy that."
Roger didn't ask why. He didn't ask about follow-up plans. He didn't even bother fully confirming the orders.
He simply turned around, faced his command staff who were already standing by, and spat out a single phrase:
"Execute Combat Protocol Seventy-Three."
Thirty seconds later, fifty-two thousand soldiers moved out as one.
These weren't your typical Imperial Guard cannon fodder—conscripts forcibly drafted and pumped full of manufactured liquid courage. They were the citizens of Aurelian...
Twenty-three years ago, they were just underhive miners choking down synthetic starch-paste, willing to sell their lives for an extra ration of nutrient gruel.
Now, wielding Crimson Guard Mark I lasguns and clad in composite-alloy flak armor, the Crimson Dawn insignia on their chests gleamed under the Dal homeworld's sun.
They marched in perfect lockstep, absolute discipline in every stride.
Because true faith required no words.
--
Ten minutes later.
The black tide violently collided with the crimson steel at the edge of the plaza.
As Tax Bro's power fist caved in the chest plate of the first Dal Royal Guard, his chainsword revved up, cleanly lopping the xenos's head off its shoulders.
The White Scars squad tore into the enemy flank like a screaming hurricane, the whine of their jump packs echoing across the battlefield.
Two hundred Terminators formed a wedge of walking steel, forcibly plowing three parallel avenues of gore straight through the black wave. With every swipe of their lightning claws, a Dal Royal Guard's armor was shredded, their bones pulverized, and their internal organs liquified into slurry.
A hundred Contemptor Dreadnoughts laid down heavy suppressive fire from the rear. The rhythmic thumping of their twin-linked heavy bolters acted as the timpani drums, setting a steady, relentless tempo for the slaughter.
The three hundred Brothers of Silence, fresh to the deployment, advanced slowly onto the field.
They gave off absolutely zero psychic footprint. Yet, the moment the profane energy borrowed from the Blood God came anywhere near them, the Dal Royal Guards found their strength suddenly sluggish and withering away.
Two hundred Vindicare Assassins lurked in the shadows of the battlefield. Every time they squeezed a trigger, a Dal Royal Guard's skull exploded, dropping them silently to the dirt.
The hundred Eversor Assassins, on the other hand, were the exact opposite.
Screaming maniacal war cries, they hurled themselves into the enemy ranks at superhuman speeds, using mono-molecular claws and executioner pistols to shred absolutely everything in their path.
In the regional chat, [How Many Floors Can You Carry a Sack of Rice] let out a deep sigh of awe.
"Is this... is this Crimson Dawn's true combat potential?"
"Four thousand transhumans against a hundred thousand Chaos-tainted xeno bastards, and our kill-death ratio is still in the fucking green."
[You Ashe I Soraka] fired back:
"Don't jinx it, we ain't done yet."
"Plus, Paul is carrying at least 40% of the team's DPS by himself."
Everyone glanced toward that golden figure in the center of the plaza.
The corpses of Dal Royal Guards were quite literally piling up into a crater rim around Paul.
Standing atop a mountain of the dead, his Golden Aquilon armor was entirely saturated in green gore. The five-colored psychic flames rippled through the viscera, making him look like an avenging angel baptized in blood.
The blade of the Watcher's Axe didn't have a single scratch on it.
He looked up.
Past the sea of black ceramite, past the choking smoke and the aftershocks of psychic detonations, past the hundred thousand frenzied Dal Royal Guards...
His gaze locked directly with the scarlet pupils burning atop the royal palanquin.
Charles Darwin stood up.
The four-and-a-half-meter-tall tyrant ripped off his ruined pauldron, revealing the hyper-swollen, dark-red musculature underneath.
Dense clusters of runes surfaced across his skin, looking as if they'd been seared into his flesh with a branding iron. They were the marks of Khorne's blessing—profane stigmas crystallized from three hundred and twenty years of endless slaughter.
He tightened his grip on a gargantuan, six-meter-long chainaxe.
The teeth engaged. It spun up from a low, guttural hum to an ear-splitting, high-pitched shriek.
"Golden insect," Charles rumbled, his voice as coarse as sandpaper grinding against a skull.
"You have slain many of my champions."
His maw split wide open to his ears, completely exposing his four rows of jagged teeth to the air. Thick saliva dripped from his jaws.
"Good."
"The more you kill, the richer the Blood God's favor becomes."
He sucked in a massive breath. The profane red energy geysering from his chest erupted like a volcano, coagulating into a hideous phantasm hovering just above his head...
Horns, a gaping maw of blood, and an absolutely bottomless thirst for slaughter.
The phantom seemed to be whispering, yet simultaneously howling with laughter:
Kill.
Kill everything on this world.
Let the skulls pile into mountains. Let the blood flow into oceans.
And then, you shall take your seat upon the true throne.
Charles Darwin slowly levitated into the air.
Force-fed by Khorne's raw energy, his physical form continued to drastically expand, revealing a physiology that had utterly abandoned anything remotely mortal...
Five meters. Six meters. Seven.
By the time he hovered a hundred meters in the sky, Charles Darwin had reached a terrifying height of eight meters.
He glared down at Paul, staring at him like he was nothing more than an insect.
"Golden bug." Every word Charles spat out was choked with blood bubbling up from the back of his throat.
"I will make you understand..."
"The sheer majesty of the Blood God."
He raised the gargantuan chainaxe.
"The majesty of King Charles."
The bloody, profane energy wrapping the axe materialized into physical mass. Scarlet arcs of lightning wildly chained and snapped through the air around him.
"Blood for the Blood God..."
"Skulls for the Skull Throne!!!"
Paul entirely ignored Charles's rant.
He simply took one step forward.
The second his boot hit the ground, a visibly spiraling vortex of golden light surged up around his body.
Twenty-four years ago, Paul's mastery over Spiral Power could only boost his Terminator armor's output by twenty percent.
Over the span of twenty-four years, he had endured countless cycles of practice, failure, trying again, and failing again.
Until one late night on the bridge of the Light of Dawn, staring out the viewports into the eternal void of space, he suddenly remembered a quote he'd seen on some video platform in his past life:
Spiral Power isn't something you learn.
It's remembering how to do something you already knew.
And slowly, it clicked. Using the power of Hope as a catalyst to ignite the power of Belief, Paul spent countless hours adrift in the absolute silence of the endless void, grinding his conviction to a razor's edge.
At this exact moment, that golden spiral current erupted from deep within his chest, surging along his veins, muscles, and bones.
It cascaded outward, flooding every single joint, armor plate, and power conduit of his Aquilon Terminator plate.
The dark-gold finish of his armor flared with a blinding intensity. The majestic phantom behind him and the five-trait psychic energy wreathing his body surged to entirely new heights.
The thrum of the Watcher's Axe's disruption field sharply spiked in pitch. The arcs of electricity dancing along its edge shifted from a deep phantom-blue to a searing, incandescent white.
A 50% power boost.
Paul launched himself into the sky.
His flight path wasn't a straight line—it was a violently jagged zigzag. Across a mere three hundred meters, he abruptly changed direction nineteen times. Every single pivot flawlessly juked the Royal Guards' predictive crossfire.
Charles leapt to meet him at the exact same moment.
Propelled by the chaotic thrust of the Blood God's blessing, his hulking frame exploded with a speed that completely defied his massive bulk.
The six-meter chainaxe chopped downward through the air. The hysterical whine of the revving teeth and the maddening whispers of the Blood God blended into a single, eardrum-rupturing noise.
"Golden insect!!!" Charles's roar tore the sky apart.
"I will skin you and eat you alive..."
"And I will offer your skull to the great Blood God!"
The chainaxe and the Watcher's Axe violently collided dead center over the battlefield.
Disruption field against whirling chainsaw teeth.
Psychic plating against profane corruption.
The dark-gold phantom against the blood-red phantasm.
Spiral Power against the Blood God's Blessing.
The kinetic shockwave from the clash blasted a hundred-meter-wide spiderweb crater into the center of the plaza. The bedrock violently curled outward like ocean waves crashing against a reef.
The muscles in both of Charles's arms bulged to their absolute breaking point, shoving his chainaxe so hard its teeth were practically grinding into the blade of the Watcher's Axe.
Unfortunately for him, the adamantine density of the Watcher's Axe caused his chainsaw teeth to instantly bind and stall.
His jaws stretched back to his ears, thick spit flying everywhere. His scarlet pupils locked viciously onto Paul's face.
"Pitiful ant... how dare you attempt to rival the brilliance of the sun and moon in the presence of a god!!!"
"Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Skull Throne!!!"
Paul didn't say a word. He just stared calmly at the rabid tyrant before him.
He simply shifted his weight slightly, smoothly parrying Charles's crushing downward momentum off to the left.
Simultaneously, he drove his right knee up. Empowered by the full brunt of his five-trait psychic force, the knee strike slammed dead into Charles's lower abdomen.
The black crystalline armor visibly caved in by a full three centimeters, deep stress fractures rocketing outward from the point of impact.
This single strike carried the combined kinetic output of his Custodian gene-enhancements, the dark-gold psychic mass of his five traits, the extreme multiplier of his Spiral Power, and the raw servo-driven torque of the Aquilon Terminator plate.
Charles let out an unearthly howl of pure agony. His colossal body was launched backwards fifty meters through the air, violently plowing two deep, jagged trenches straight through the bedrock when he finally touched down.
--
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