The Slaughterer of Fury possessed absolutely no technique in its combat style. It was purely unadulterated violence.
Every swing of its great-axe caused varying degrees of damage to at least one Knight Mech. Even though the destruction of Iron Will had made the remaining Knight pilots far more cautious, this daemon was simply too ferocious. Resisting it was an incredibly arduous task.
Groups B and C attempted to focus fire, but the daemon's speed defied the laws of physics.
It could perform short-distance Warp jumps the split-second before artillery fire struck, reappearing in completely unexpected positions to launch an attack.
"This isn't working!" A Paladin pilot shouted over the comms. "Our attacks can't hit it!"
"Then change tactics." Landon gritted his teeth. "All Knights, engage close-quarters combat mode! Engage it in melee with Power Swords and Reaper Chain-Cleavers!"
"Are you insane?! Melee combat with that kind of monster?!" Kans's voice cut into the channel.
"What's the alternative? Wait for it to call our names and slaughter us one by one?!"
Kans fell silent on the comms.
Then, the remaining thirty-three Knight Mechs simultaneously drew their melee weapons.
The disruption fields of Power Swords hummed to life, and the teeth of Reaper Chain-Cleavers began to whir madly.
These metallic giants—averaging eight to twelve meters in height and weighing over seventy tons—charged toward the sixteen-meter-tall red daemon.
The scene was both absurd and tragic.
–
Meanwhile, the battle against the Lord of Bizarre Mysteries painted an entirely different picture.
The Tzeentchian daemon did not engage in melee combat. It hovered in mid-air, its nine arms moving at a dizzying speed.
It flipped the pages of its grimoire, waved its scepter, sliced through space with its dagger, inverted its hourglass, wrote in the air with its quill, and refracted reality with its mirror...
It didn't even look directly at the Knight Mechs besieging it.
Group A's seventeen Knights were locked in a bitter struggle.
A Warglaive fired its thermal spear at the Lord of Bizarre Mysteries, but mid-flight, the searing beam suddenly transformed into a flock of fluttering butterflies.
Another attempted to fire its thermal cannon, but the melta beam split into dozens of separate streams as it neared the daemon, instead striking allied units.
The most bizarre incident occurred when an Armiger Knight finally managed to charge right in front of the daemon. Just as the pilot raised his chain-cleaver to strike, he suddenly realized his Knight was melting.
It was softening and deforming like a candle, its Machine Spirit emitting a trembling wail.
The metal comprising the chassis lost its rigidity, the joints lost their structure, and within seconds, the entire Knight melted into an indescribable puddle of metallic sludge.
"It's warping reality!" A surviving pilot screamed in terror. "This thing cannot be understood by common sense!"
One of the heads of the Lord of Bizarre Mysteries—the cackling one—turned toward the melting Knight.
"Truth..." It spoke with a chorus of a thousand voices. "Truth is relative."
"You believe metal is solid, while I believe it is liquid."
"Who is right and who is wrong?"
"Both are part of the truth..."
The pilot let out one final scream inside his cockpit before dissolving, along with his Knight, into a puddle of silver-grey substance.
–
Scoria Kane's mechanical eye rapidly scanned the battlefield, hundreds of data streams cascading across his visual interface.
"Analysis Result: The blue daemon excels in reality warping and knowledge-based attacks; its physical defense is relatively weak. The red daemon excels in melee combat and Warp disruption; it possesses extreme resistance to energy weapons."
His mechanical hands blurred across the control console.
"Skitarii arrays, redistribute firepower. Lascannon turrets, focus fire on the blue target. Melta turrets, focus fire on the red target. Combat servitor units advance to the two-hundred-meter mark and establish a defensive line to prevent lesser daemons from interfering with the artillery positions."
The orders were given, and the forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus began to operate with ruthless efficiency.
The Skitarii calibrated the turrets, while the Tech-Priests loaded specially purified ammunition into the breeches.
The combat servitors—lobotomized cyborgs implanted with control chips—marched forward in perfect lockstep. They fired their lasguns simultaneously, forming a dense, intercepting net of fire.
Six lascannon turrets charged up at once.
The focusing crystals atop the turrets began to glow, and the smell of ozone in the air grew heavy.
These were no ordinary lascannons; they were reinforced models, their barrels etched full of holy runes of purification.
"For the Omnissiah!"
"Open fire!"
Six thick laser beams ripped across the battlefield, striking the Lord of Bizarre Mysteries with pinpoint accuracy.
This time, the reality warping did not take effect.
The laser beams pierced the protective force field surrounding the daemon and struck its body.
The stench of burning flesh filled the air. The Lord of Bizarre Mysteries let out a piercing shriek that was an equal mix of agony and fury.
"Knowledge... tainted knowledge..." One of its arms—the one holding the grimoire—began to disintegrate, turning into a flurry of fluttering paper scraps and digits. "Unforgivable... UNFORGIVABLE!"
Its remaining eight arms pointed simultaneously at the lascannon array.
Space began to warp.
The ground around the turrets bulged upward, forming small hills made entirely of stacked books and scrolls.
The books flipped open on their own. The text on the pages floated into the air, restructuring and transforming until they became chains forged purely of knowledge.
"Warning... Systems under attack by unknown format data stream..." The control consoles of the lascannon turrets began flashing errors. "Logic circuits overloading... Immediate shutdown recommended..."
Scoria's mechanical eye flashed a violent red.
"Initiate Anti-Psionic Protocols! Switch to offline mode!"
But it was too late.
The control system of one lascannon turret completely collapsed. The barrel began to swivel uncontrollably, firing directly into the allied lines.
A single sweep of the laser beam vaporized over twenty Skitarii.
"Heavy casualties." Scoria assessed the situation calmly. "But the attack was effective, continue firing at all costs."
–
"Holy shit! They're going absolutely nuts over there!"
Tax Bro looked toward the center of the industrial zone.
Even from several kilometers away, he could clearly see the sky-piercing psychic glow and the flashes of explosions.
"Paul, should we go join the fun?"
Paul had just sawed a Horror in half with his Chainsword. Hearing this, he shook his head. "No."
He flicked the blue blood off the teeth of his blade and looked toward the center of the battlefield, his eyes grave.
"That psychic array... is undeniably powerful."
Paul could clearly feel the psychic fluctuations Riley Conmo was emitting. It had already crossed the threshold of the Master tier. Under the Imperial Psyker rating system, it was at least a Gamma-level, if not higher.
The combined power of over two hundred Psykers, stabilized by around a hundred auxiliary Psykers—this force was more than enough to change the tide of a battle.
But it still wasn't enough. Not against two daemons infinitely close to the level of Greater Daemons.
"She won't last much longer." Paul said quietly. "In this era, these people's understanding of Chaos daemons is far too shallow. The Emperor forbade mankind from understanding the Warp, much less understanding Warp daemons. Though I have no idea why this planet is so bizarre. To have a family with such powerful Psykers and a family with so many Knight Mechs existing completely out in the open."
But in the Warhammer universe, psychic power was a double-edged sword.
Using psychic power was like tap-dancing in a minefield. The slightest misstep would draw the gaze of the Warp.
Riley's method of forcibly aggregating the psychic power of hundreds of people might unleash terrifying destructive force in the short term, but in the Warp, it lit them up like a lighthouse.
What's more...
Paul cast his gaze toward the ruins of Sector Seven.
Daemons were still pouring out of the Warp rift there in an endless stream.
Although the two daemon lords were temporarily pinned down, the rift itself had not been closed.
"There has to be something beneath Sector Seven." Paul narrowed his eyes. "Normally, a Warp rift of this scale would require at least a Greater Daemon to sustain. That blue bird-head and red hound-head... even though they're close to the Greater Daemon tier right now, they still don't qualify."
He remembered the intel he had gathered earlier. Eighty years ago, the Iron Hands Legion conducted an orbital bombardment here, causing the entirety of Administrative Sector Seven to collapse and plummet.
Millions of people died.
In the Warhammer universe, an event involving mass death on that scale was inherently a breeding ground for Warp activity.
If someone back then—say, from the House of Alar—had performed some kind of ritual before dying, or if there was already some special structure down there to begin with...
"Paul! Watch out!" [Have You Been Loyal Today?]'s shout snapped Paul back to reality.
A Flesh Hound had somehow slipped behind him, opening its razor-toothed maw to bite at his neck.
Paul didn't even turn around.
He thrust his left hand backward, perfectly impaling the Flesh Hound's head with his Chainsword.
The teeth of the blade whirred into motion.
The high-speed screech of grinding metal and bone filled the air.
The Flesh Hound's entire head was instantly shredded into flying gore.
The corpse slumped to the side. Paul looked around.
The players were utilizing the knowledge they had gained from playing games against these daemonic units to form squads and hunt down these lesser daemons.
A thousand players with Type-III physical augmentations, armed with lasguns, heavy stubbers, and rocket launchers—dealing with these isolated, lesser daemons wasn't too difficult.
"Combat Stats!" Tax Bro yelled excitedly in the regional channel. "Two hours into the battle, we've already killed over nine hundred daemons! That's a salvage value of over three hundred thousand Imperial Coins!"
"Only three hundred thousand?" [Did White Scars Speed Today?] replied, "Those Knight Mechs getting ripped apart over there are probably worth millions each, right?"
"Yeah, but you have to actually survive to collect it!"
Listening to the chatter in the channel, Paul smiled.
The players' mindset was great. They were treating this like grinding a massive raid.
This relaxed mentality actually made them far more efficient on the battlefield. There was no fear, no hesitation—only a pure thirst for loot.
He looked at the daemon lords in the distance, at the Knight Mechs locked in bitter combat, and at Riley Conmo hovering in the air, bleeding from all seven orifices.
This war had only just begun.
–
Inside the command vehicle, Governor Harrington lowered his binoculars.
His face was completely devoid of emotion. There was no heartache for the catastrophic PDF casualties, nor any fear of the rampaging daemons.
"Record this." He instructed his adjutant. "The four major factions of Aurelian have united to resist a Warp heresy invasion. The battle is deadlocked. Our casualties are... let's say, three hundred thousand."
"Three hundred thousand?" The adjutant froze for a moment. "But Governor, actual PDF losses have already exceeded three hundred and fifty thousand, and the local guard forces have lost at least a hundred thousand..."
"Then write three hundred and fifty thousand." Harrington waved his hand impatiently. "It's not like Terra is going to send anyone here to audit the numbers."
He picked up his wine glass and took a sip.
"The important thing is that once this war is over, the four major factions will be severely crippled and when that time comes… this planet will finally return to the true control of the Imperium. Which is to say, my control."
Harrington looked out the window at the burning battlefield, a faint smirk curling the corners of his mouth.
Fight. The more brutal, the better. Once you've all beaten each other half to death, the Imperium will step in to clean up the mess.
The Sector Governor's Palace had already replied to his distress signal. He already knew exactly which reinforcement Legion was descending upon Aurelian IV.
A great Primarch was soon to arrive. These Warp heretics would shatter like glass before a grand Astartes Legion.
He drained the wine in his glass in one gulp.
In the end, the glory of the Imperium... would still be guarded by them, the men of Terra!
--
Next Goal = 250 Powerstones.
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