The compound eyes of all three Battlefield Tyrants glitched with chaotic red light.
They were furious, but more than that... they were profoundly confused.
This tiny golden prey... its speed, its perfect reads, the terrifyingly casual way it seemed to see right through every single attack trajectory before it even happened...
This was absolutely not something a human should be capable of.
Unfettered Fury swung its massive chainsword in a horizontal arc for the third time.
This time, Paul didn't dodge.
He stepped completely forward.
And his foot came down in the exact, microsecond window where the chainsword was winding up...
A massive horizontal swing required the blade to be pulled back to the right before ripping forward to the left.
And Paul stepped straight into that exact moment of retraction.
He practically slid right along the flat of the blade, bursting into point-blank range directly against Unfettered Fury's chest. He swept the Watcher's Axe upward.
The disruption blade cleaved cleanly through the brass chest plate, sliced open the churning, blasphemous muscle underneath, and violently wedged itself straight through the gap between the third and fourth ribs.
Deep crimson demonic blood erupted outward in a geyser.
Unfettered Fury let out a roaring bellow of pain. Its massive frame rocked violently backward, a gaping wound completely unzipping its chest from collarbone to abdomen.
It looked down at the massive gouge on its chest, deep enough to fully expose its internal organs.
The red light bleeding from its compound eyes twisted into pure, mindless...
Berserker rage.
"You... dare..."
Its voice vibrated violently with profane energy. The blasphemous flesh around the edges of the gaping wound writhed frantically, trying to heal, but the dark gold psychic energy clinging to the cut acted like a branding iron, completely shutting down any regeneration.
Paul didn't follow up.
He just stood there, raised his left hand, and tapped the knuckle of his index finger against the temple of his helmet.
"Are you guys..."
His voice carried through his exterior speakers, flat, maybe even a little genuinely confused.
"...completely brain-dead?"
The compound eyes of all three Greater Daemons froze simultaneously.
"Because that would explain why you're all so damn slow."
Paul lowered his hand. The five-colored psychic flames pulsing across his armor burned even brighter with every beat.
"Is this all He taught you?"
He paused, his tone entirely level.
"Brute force beats everything?"
"Just turn your brains off and smash?"
"Blood for the Blood God, Skulls for the Skull Throne, and then you just close your eyes and charge face-first at the enemy?"
The bodies of all three Greater Daemons started trembling at the exact same time.
It wasn't out of fear.
It was the absolute, world-ending fury... of being called out for exactly what they were.
Followers of Khorne were never known for their tactical brilliance; that was basically common knowledge across the entire Warp.
The word "tactics" didn't exist in the Blood God's teachings—only more blood and more skulls.
And as Battlefield Tyrants, the absolute purest incarnations of war under Khorne's command, their entire reason for existing was simply to...
Charge straight ahead, cleave the enemy in half, and collect the loot.
As for finesse? Anticipating the enemy? Actually thinking about where your opponent's next strike was coming from?
That was nerd shit for Tzeentch worshippers.
Stuff for cowards.
They were the bravest warriors in existence. All they had to do was charge in looking as badass as possible and chop whatever bugs stood in their way into minced meat.
"GRAAAAAAGH!!!!!"
Wrath of Khorne was the first to completely lose its mind.
The profane hellfire wrapped around its twin battle axes flared up three times its normal size. The forty-foot-tall behemoth launched itself right at Paul like a burning, bloody meteor.
The three different types of Khorne Greater Daemons threw out whatever semblance of tactics or teamwork they had left.
It was just the most pure, primal, Khorne-style...
Balls-to-the-wall, blind fucking hack-and-slash.
Paul watched the twin battle axes chopping down toward his head.
This time, he didn't even twitch.
The edges of the blades stopped dead a foot and a half above his helmet.
Wrath of Khorne stared in disbelief. Horizontally blocking its massive battle axes was the dark gold Watcher's Axe.
When the hell did this golden bug even swing?
It didn't even see him move.
And what the hell was up with the ridiculous, overwhelming physical strength behind this golden bug's block?
"Countless eons of slaughter in the Warp."
Paul said softly, his dark gold eyes meeting those maddened compound eyes right through his visor.
"And this is all you managed to learn?"
"No wonder even a Bloodthirster like Ka'Bandha got chopped into ground beef and banished back to the Warp by a half-dead Sanguinius."
He twisted his wrist.
The Watcher's Axe slid diagonally up the flat of the battle axe. The tip of the blade punched with surgical precision straight into the gap of Wrath of Khorne's right wrist joint.
The disruption field hummed violently.
The entire forearm, along with the battle axe it was holding, was sheared clean off at the wrist.
Before Wrath of Khorne could even let out a roar, Paul had already spun to its left flank.
Strike two.
The left arm, severed cleanly at the elbow.
Strike three.
The right leg from the knee down, gone.
The forty-foot behemoth crashed to its knees onto the filthy bedrock of Planet Dal. The green gore geysering from its stumps instantly turned the ground into a thirty-foot bloody swamp.
It was still trying to struggle, trying to force itself up on its one remaining leg, snapping its jaws wildly as it tried to bite the golden figure in front of it.
Paul didn't even look at it.
He turned his back to it, facing the other two Battlefield Tyrants who were teetering right on the edge of absolute frenzy.
"If this is really all you bring to the table..."
He raised the Watcher's Axe.
Along the massive blade, the five-colored psychic flames and the deep blue electrical arcs of the disruption field began to merge, twisting together until they finally stabilized into a solid, dark gold fire.
It was the complete, unified state of the five great traits: Hope, Compassion, Resolve, Pioneering, and Wisdom.
Spiral Power slowly bled into the Terminator Armor and the Watcher's Axe.
"Then."
Deep within Paul's pupils, the rotational speed of the five stars shattered their limits.
"Die."
The dark gold phantom behind him abruptly swelled, becoming massively solid.
Five pairs of wings of light fully unfurled for the very first time in this material universe.
A wingspan stretching over six hundred feet.
The phantom's face was still a blur, but its silhouette, its posture, the stardust cascading off the edges of every single wing of light...
It was infinitely close to the imagery of something that only existed in ancient myths.
Every single energy circuit tracing across the Golden Aquilon Terminator Armor flared to maximum brightness at once.
The dark gold flames pouring from the seams of his armor solidified in the air, snapping and billowing wildly behind him like a physical cape.
The blade of the Watcher's Axe was entirely swallowed by the dark gold fire.
The flames raged, yet they carried absolutely zero heat against Paul's physical body.
Paul took a single step forward.
The exact microsecond his foot touched down, the bedrock beneath him didn't just crack.
It dissolved.
And then he vanished.
The compound eyes of Unfettered Fury, Rabid Bloodlust, and even Wrath of Khorne—who was kneeling on the ground silently trying to heal its stumps—simultaneously lost Paul's coordinates.
A second later.
Unfettered Fury felt a presence so overwhelmingly massive that it genuinely made a Greater Daemon instinctively tremble in fear, bulldozing straight toward it from the front.
The dark gold psychic flames crashed down on it head-on with an unstoppable, irresistible, completely incomprehensible force.
It instinctively raised its chainsword to block.
That twenty-foot greatsword, a weapon that had harvested the skulls of countless heroes across a million battlefields, personally blessed by Khorne himself...
The moment it touched the dark gold fire, the heavy brass rings began to melt.
Then the blade itself.
The arms holding the sword.
The brass armor plating its chest.
And finally, the demonic essence deep within its chest cavity, forged from pure, unfiltered profane energy.
Paul phased right past it.
The Watcher's Axe cleaved straight into Unfettered Fury's left shoulder and blew out through its right ribcage.
The trajectory of the blade was a textbook diagonal slash.
There was no flashy bullshit. After all, the Warhammer universe was all about direct counters... power scaling was basically a joke anyway.
So his move was just the simplest, most direct, and absolute... execution.
Unfettered Fury's physical form began to disintegrate the exact second the blade left its body.
The disruption field denied its physical existence in realspace.
The five-trait psychic energy denied its profane essence.
And Spiral Power completely severed and denied its tether of faith to Khorne.
Eons of slaughter.
Three hundred and twenty thousand campaigns.
Four million, seven hundred thousand harvested skulls.
In the face of this single axe swing, it was all reset to absolute zero.
Unfettered Fury's compound eyes flickered one last time.
It opened its faceless brass plate, seemingly trying to let out a dying roar, or maybe offer one final prayer to the Blood God.
But it couldn't make a single sound.
Because that twenty-foot chainsword, that heavy brass armor, that forty-foot towering body, and that demon heart personally forged by Khorne's own hands...
Had all been reduced to a cloud of deep red ash scattering in the wind.
From within the falling ash, a tiny wisp of corrupted crimson essence, thinner than a strand of hair, fled at blistering speeds toward the Warp rift inside the pyramid gates.
It was Unfettered Fury's absolute last scrap of Warp essence.
In its countless eons of warfare, it had never fled this pathetically in its entire existence.
Paul didn't chase it down.
He just watched that wisp of crimson completely disappear into the depths of the rift, calmly pulling back the Watcher's Axe.
"Tell Him."
"Humanity is no longer just a pile of skulls sitting on His dinner plate."
"Sooner or later, I'm going to rip His skull right off His neck and use it as a monument for every single human being who died because of Him."
"I'll make a piece of trash like Him, who only understands mindless slaughter, finally realize..."
"Killing is never the end goal..."
"It is simply the necessary means taken to protect the things you hold dear."
The Royal Court Plaza fell into a dead silence.
The remaining two Battlefield Tyrants stood frozen in place, the red light in their compound eyes flickering with a crimson hue.
They were creations of Khorne; they didn't know the meaning of fear.
But right now, looking at that golden figure, at the dark gold wings of light fully unfurled across the sky, at the battle axe that could completely incinerate even their essence...
They felt something they hadn't experienced.
Paul turned around, his dark gold eyes locking onto a target.
It was Charles Darwin's ape-like head, his crimson eyeballs bulging.
He had watched this exact scene play out.
He watched a Greater Daemon of the Blood God—the very entity he had worshipped for three hundred years, the god he had sacrificed countless lives to serve—get obliterated by a human in a single swing.
Charles stretched his split jaw to its absolute limit, but no sound came out.
His three hundred years of supreme tyrannical confidence shattered completely in this singular moment.
"No... impossible..."
He squeezed the words out from the depths of his throat, gagging on green gore and shattered teeth.
"The Blood God... the Blood God wouldn't abandon me..."
"I sacrificed... tens of billions of humans..."
"I built Him... countless altars..."
"He said... I was His chosen..."
The light completely died out in Charles Darwin's eyes.
The entity he had worshipped for three centuries, the being he had sacrificed endless lives to serve...
Had just been proven, right in front of his face, to be anything but invincible.
Charles stared blankly with those crimson eyes, repeating the same phrase over and over like a broken record:
"Blood for the Blood God... Skulls for the Skull Throne..."
"Blood for the Blood God... Skulls for the Skull Throne..."
--
IMPORTANT:
Well, it seems most people didn't read what I wrote yesterday, or simply didn't care.
Since we received barely 100 Power Stones yesterday, while usually when I do this kind of event, I post 3 bonus chapters on the first day alone (that's 300 Power Stones in one day).
Even though we received quite a low level of support, I will continue this event for this week. However, if we don't cross at least 1,000 Power Stones this week, I will not do this event for this book again and I really hope we do cross 1,000 Power Stones, or even more, since we reached around 2,100 Power Stones the last time I did this event :)
So, once again, for this week only, every 100 Power Stones gets you 1 bonus chapter.