Outer Battlefield, Royal Court Plaza.
The black tide of eighty thousand Dal Royal Guards was collapsing at a visible rate.
Tax Bro's Imperial Fists power armor was absolutely drenched in green guts. From his helmet to his boots, there wasn't a single speck of the original yellow left.
The chainsword in his right hand had overheated and seized up ages ago.
The last Dal royal guard in front of him frantically raised an energy axe to block.
Tax Bro slammed his fist into the flat of the energy axe blade, the sheer kinetic force detonating on impact.
The axe flew out of the guard's grip. Without losing an ounce of momentum, the power fist plowed dead center into the Dal guard's chest plate.
The armor caved in a full foot, blowing out the backplate from the inside and shattering the Xenos's spine into seventeen pieces.
The corpse launched fifty feet through the air, bowled over three of its comrades, and rolled to a dead stop in a pool of blood.
"Fifty-seven." Tax Bro panted heavily, keying his comms. "White Scars, how's your end?"
"Seventy-one." White Scars's voice crackled over the channel, backed by the screaming roar of a jump pack.
"Though seven of those were half-dead assists, so they don't count as full kills."
"Are you fucking kidding me? You're nitpicking the kill count right now?"
"It's called being strictly professional."
Behind them, a solid wall of two hundred Terminators operated like the grinding blades of an industrial meat grinder, plowing three parallel rivers of blood straight through the black tide of enemies.
With every brutal swipe of a lightning claw, a Dal guard had their chest torn open and their heart crushed to paste.
With every roaring volley of bolter fire, a skull detonated, sending Xenos brain matter spraying into the sky.
The Dreadnoughts kept up a steady, relentless rhythm.
Twin-linked heavy bolters laid down suppressing fire to break apart enemy charges, while multi-meltas systematically vaporized any heavy units trying to rally.
Whenever a Dal mech actually managed to breach the kill zone, it was instantly met with the crushing steel embrace of a power claw.
But at the absolute dead center of this slaughterhouse stood the three hundred Brothers of Silence.
They didn't launch a single attack.
They didn't even move.
They just stood there in formation, projecting an invisible, impenetrable barrier.
Yet the moment the Dal guards—pumped full of profane energy borrowed from the Blood God—stepped within a hundred-foot radius of the Brothers of Silence, that dark power withered and died.
Crimson eyes faded back to their sickly, pale yellow originals.
Bulging, chaotic muscles instantly deflated.
All that unnatural strength, blistering speed, and endless stamina forced into them by Khorne's blessing... popped like a soap bubble the second it hit the anti-psychic blank field.
And a second later, the Brothers of Silence would simply raise their bolters.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Three-round bursts, aimed perfectly at center mass.
Stripped of their Warp-fueled buffs, the Dal guards' armor was easily punched through, green gore geysering from the bullet holes.
They looked down at the fresh craters in their chests, their expressions less filled with pain and more with... pure confusion.
"Blood God... why... have you abandoned us..."
The second dropped. Then the third, the thousandth, the seven-thousandth.
The total collapse of the black tide started at the edges and rapidly ate its way inward.
In the regional channel:
[Execute Old Man the War Criminal]: "Holy shit, the Brothers of Silence's anti-psychic field is basically cheating! Without the Khorne buffs, these monkeys are at least two tiers squishier!"
[Have You Been Loyal Today?]: "Chill out. It's not that they got squishy, it's that we were fighting max-buffed units earlier."
"Without the Blanks suppressing them, these guards could tank at least three to five bolter rounds, and the melee units could charge straight through our suppressing fire."
"Now though..."
He paused, a single bolter round perfectly threading the needle into the neck joint of a Dal guard three hundred feet away.
"One shot, one kill."
[Execute Old Man the War Criminal]: "Dal Royal Guard numbers are down to about thirty-four thousand. Casualty rates are heavily accelerating."
"At our current push speed, we'll wipe them all out in under twenty minutes."
[Paradox Players Aren't War Criminals]: "The Brothers of Silence have an effective radius of a hundred feet. We deployed three hundred of them, so the coverage area..."
"Hold on, they're moving."
He was right.
The three hundred Brothers of Silence were advancing.
Bolters raised, they marched methodically straight toward the thickest clusters of the Dal royal guard.
Wherever they walked, crimson eyes faded in droves, and berserker roars dissolved into confused, pathetic whimpers.
And then came the bolters, the power swords, the chainaxes...
And the second wave of orbital bombardment raining down from the sky.
Up on the bridge of the Light of Dawn, Helovia meticulously calibrated the impact coordinates for every single round, her silver-white hair drifting softly in the psychic resonance.
"Execution of fire mission alpha-three."
"Target: Eastern flank of the Royal Court Plaza. Remnants of the Dal royal guard."
"Fire."
--
The Royal Court Pyramid Gates.
Through the tiny gap between Paul's golden combat boot and the pool of blood, Charles's one remaining eye watched his eighty thousand royal guards being slaughtered by the thousands.
His breathing grew frantic.
An emotion he hadn't felt in his entire life began to violently claw at him: genuine terror.
These humans...
These two-legged livestock he hadn't spared a second glance at in three hundred years, the very creatures he treated as cattle penned up for food...
When the hell did they get this strong?
"What... what exactly are you..."
Charles wheezed, the words grinding out of the back of his throat, mixed with bloody foam and shattered pieces of teeth.
"You're not human... humans can't possibly..."
"I am human."
Paul cut him off, his tone terrifyingly calm.
Charles didn't argue back.
He simply didn't have the strength left.
His consciousness was slipping, dark patches encroaching on the edges of his vision.
But he still had one last card to play.
"Did you think... you won?"
The corners of Charles's split jaw twisted into a grotesque, mocking smile. His four rows of jagged, serrated teeth caught the dark green sheen of the blood pool.
"I... still have... my final..."
With the absolute last drop of strength in his ruined body, he unleashed a ragged, shattered scream.
"SACRIFICE!!!"
--
The ground floor gates of the Royal Court Pyramid.
The exact second that roar echoed out, a sinister, dark red light bled from the seams of the six-hundred-foot-tall alloy blast doors.
Right after, a massive wave of profane energy violently erupted outward.
It was an ancient, fathomless power... the raw energy of the Warp.
Tax Bro's voice blasted across the regional channel:
"Fuck! All units, be advised! Massive high-energy reaction inside the pyramid! Psychic readings are redlining! This is..."
He hesitated for a split second before dropping the phrase guaranteed to send a chill down the spine of every veteran Warhammer fan.
"A summoning ritual for a Greater Daemon of Khorne!"
"These Xenos sons of bitches are using sacrifices to pull a Greater Daemon of Khorne into realspace!"
Paul slowly turned his head.
Deep inside his dark gold eyes, five distinct stars suddenly spun up to absolute maximum velocity.
The Wisdom trait.
His consciousness pierced straight through the six-hundred-foot alloy doors, locking onto the source of the blasphemous energy and riding the current all the way back up to its origin...