These leaderless stragglers, without unified command, saw their threat level plummet against the well-equipped, well-trained, and tightly coordinated Diwuzu Astartes, Imperial Auxiliaries, and the bio- and machine-weapons fighting alongside them, such as AI-guided mechs, combat robots, and clone soldiers, scarcely posing any strategic challenge at all.
The Astartes could even operate in smaller combat elements, conducting highly efficient "hunts" that precisely and swiftly cleared residual threats in every block and every building.
However, that did not mean the danger was gone.
For unarmed, panicked civilians, even the lowest-grade corpse-mutants moved faster and hit harder than ordinary people, and the Unification Church "fanatics" who had gone utterly deranged—willing to self-detonate or wield dangerous weapons—were an extremely unstable lethal factor.
Therefore, the purge had to be swift and thorough.
In the city, the thunder of bolters and the hum of plasma weapons still rose and fell, but the tempo had shifted from fierce defensive blocking to systematic advance and sweep.
Under Astartes squad fire cover, auxiliary soldiers searched for survivors building by building and door to door, while mercilessly shooting any corpse-mutants or diehard heretics they discovered.
On the streets, heavy clearance vehicles and engineering mechs began removing piled-up rubble and remains, opening safe evacuation corridors and supply routes.
At temporary medical stations and shelters, War Ministry officials and medics worked busily to treat the wounded, register identities, and hand out basic necessities. Under the Empire's armed protection, order was being rebuilt—difficult, but steadily.
Meanwhile, more targeted decapitation operations were already underway.
Based on prior intelligence infiltration and detection, as well as information possibly gleaned from surrenders or intercepted communications, several of the most elite Diwuzu tactical squads, Terminator squads, or jump-pack-equipped assault teams moved like blades in shadow, cutting straight toward the Unification Church high-command hideouts that had been marked.
These locations were often reinforced bunkers deep underground, secret bases disguised as civilian facilities, or underground levels of private estates in remote areas.
The Diwuzu launched their raids with thunderous force.
Heavy blast doors were like paper before thermite charges or plasma cutters; internal automated defenses were rapidly crippled by Astartes electronic-warfare suites and precision firepower.
Inside the bunkers, Unification Church leaders who had believed themselves safe listened in terror to the explosions and fierce firefights outside.
Those sounds usually meant a one-sided slaughter.
The heavy tread of power armor drew ever closer.
They tried to destroy documents, trigger self-destruct protocols, or order the last loyal guards into hopeless resistance.
But before the Diwuzu's absolute strength and resolve, all such struggle was futile.
Combat broke out in narrow corridors and hidden rooms—short and savage.
Bolt rounds tore robed figures and their guards apart; the chainsword's roar was the last sound these schemers heard.
The Diwuzu carried out the Primarch's orders with exacting rigor: leave no one alive, accept no surrender, ensure that the heretical ringleaders who caused a global catastrophe and drenched their hands in innocent blood paid the ultimate price for their madness and folly.
Deep in the bunkers, file servers were forcibly dismounted and taken away. Any valuable intelligence was sealed to await subsequent analysis.
The purge was extending from the macro battlefield into every shadowed corner.
In those reinforced underground refuges—once symbols of the Unification Church's supreme power and secret luxury—the hour of final reckoning had come.
When the Diwuzu Astartes smashed through layer upon layer of heavy alloy gates with unstoppable momentum and leveled bolters at figures huddled in corners or trying to hide behind safes, the once overbearing church elites bore no resemblance to the posture with which they had preached divinity in public and accepted the worship of believers.
"No… don't kill me! I'll give you all my wealth… all my knowledge!"
A grand archbishop who had once shouted the gospel of "ascension" before hundreds of millions now collapsed to the floor. His costly silk vestments were soaked with his own filth from fear. With snot and tears running, he pressed his palms together and begged the cold iron giant for his life.
"I-it was orders from above! We were forced! Spare me, I can name others!"
Another, the cardinal responsible for the sect's armed forces, went white as paper, trying to barter the betrayal of his peers for a sliver of life, his voice gone shrill with terror.
"Gods… no! Honored lords of the Empire! We were wrong! We'll convert—we'll worship the Emperor! Please…"
Pleas, sobbing, and incoherent excuses echoed in the cold chamber—a final elegy for the collapse of power and ambition.
They had greedily coveted the illusory eternity promised by "ascension," but when cold, real death arrived, their attachment to life smothered everything else.
They wanted to live, willing to beg for it in the most abject, humiliating posture.
The only answer was the unwavering gaze hidden behind Astartes helmets, and the steady, bass thunder of bolters.
Bang—bang—bang—!
Short, lethal bursts—merciless.
Bolt rounds punched precisely through the heads or chests of these heretical leaders, shredding their base souls along with their guilty flesh.
Begging fell silent, leaving only the reek of smoke and blood in the air.
No trials, no detention. For the ringleaders who had caused a planetwide disaster and bathed their hands in their compatriots' blood, the Diwuzu enforced the Primarch's order to "act first and report later—shoot on sight."
Under an iron hand there could be no mercy. It was the most direct defense of order and the most basic solace to the countless dead.
At the same time, synchronized actions aimed at the Earth Federation and Defense Force (EDF) leadership were also in motion.
Unlike the total eradication of the Unification Church, the Diwuzu applied differentiated treatment here.
Those who resisted, tried to profit amid chaos, or were found to have covert ties to the Unification Church were killed as ruthlessly as the heretical leaders.
Others who saw the tide turn and chose to surrender, or who had held office without unforgivable crimes, were swiftly controlled and detained by elite teams, then escorted to temporary holding sites to await review, trial, or "reform," in hopes they might yet contribute within the Empire's framework.
With the core of resistance swiftly uprooted and the blood moons driven back, the consolidation advanced across Dead Space's Earth and throughout the solar system with astonishing efficiency.
Earth in the Dead Space universe, this human homeworld battered by catastrophe, all but lost any will to resist before the Diwuzu Legion's absolute strength and efficient organization.
The remnant federal government and military units, leaderless and after witnessing the Diwuzu's fight against the blood moons and purge of the heretics, announced one after another that they would accept the Legion's jurisdiction.
On Venus, those vast industrial hive-cities, the closed cities under harsh conditions, and the orbital stations around the Moon and other planets all received the Diwuzu fleet's final ultimatums in turn.
After symbolic gestures—or realizing any resistance would be eggs against rock—these key human colonies quickly changed their banners, declaring allegiance to the Diwuzu Legion, that is, to the rule of the Human Empire.
Advance officials of the Imperial Interior and War Ministries began landing on these worlds to conduct initial takeover and assessments.
Cut to twenty-four hours after the blood moon host's rout.
Combat on Earth's surface had largely subsided.
Unrelenting sweep operations had driven the threat from leaderless corpse-mutants down to a minimum. Scattered resistance, like candles in the wind, was quickly snuffed by patrols.
And the root of the calamity—the Primordial God Seal steeped in endless malice—had been successfully extracted from deep beneath the Yucatán Peninsula by the thirty Xianzhen Honor Guards and the War Maidens, bound with multiple layers of psionic and technological seals, and securely transferred to the lowest-deck containment vault on the Renwei Yonggu with the highest isolation measures.
From then on, the source of the ceaseless psychic corrosion and distortion of humanity was completely isolated, and the humans of Dead Space's Earth were finally freed from those unseen whispers.
By now, the Diwuzu fleet had seized complete "command of the heavens" across the Dead Space solar system. Patrol flotillas moved between planetary orbits, and the Imperial dragon crest was projected on key space facilities.
The Earth Federation as a political entity no longer existed; its officialdom was dead or had surrendered, and the apparatus was entirely dissolved.
The Unification Church's mid-to-high-level backbone was subjected to an unrelenting, hard purge by the Diwuzu—none escaped.
In the genetic Primarch Sui Meng's eyes, the Unification Church, which took the lives of billions of compatriots as sacrifice in pursuit of a twisted, hollow "ascension," was the ultimate profanation of life, order, and human reason, and had to be eradicated by the most thorough means.
Meanwhile, company fleets sent beyond the solar system to other human colonies began to report victory in succession.
Those systems' colonies were far smaller than the solar system's, their Defense Force (EDF) even weaker, their fleets sometimes only a few aging escorts.
Confronted with Diwuzu company fleets fielding a hundred-plus advanced warships "at their gates," and upon receiving word from the solar system of the Empire's overwhelming might and prospects for "cooperation"—
or simply understanding the outcome of resistance—those colonies' administrators almost without exception chose the most rational path—
Surrender.
After all, the Earth Federation's control over fringe colonies had always been lax, and their loyalty limited. Faced with an absolute power gap and the instinct to survive, bending the knee to the stronger was the natural choice.
The Human Empire's frontiers were expanding at astonishing speed in this scarred universe.
Back to Earth, focusing on a once-thriving coastal metropolis now covered in wounds.
This city had suffered grievously in the blood moons' descent, the corpse-mutant surge, and the opportunistic rampage of Unification Church zealots.
Everywhere were the skeletal frames of collapsed towers, blackened broken walls, and streets strewn with abandoned vehicles and battle wreckage, silently telling of the recent cataclysm's ferocity.
Yet life and order are stubborn forces.
With the Imperial Engineering Ministry's all-out, high-efficiency repairs, the city's functions were recovering rapidly.
Obstacles on major streets had been cleared, buildings not too severely damaged had been reinforced, and basic water, power, and communications were initially restored and running steadily.
Though far from its former prosperity, the city had at least emerged from total paralysis and could sustain residents' basic needs.
Order had replaced chaos on the streets.
Swarms of patrol drones skimmed the sky, sensors scanning every corner with vigilance.
On the ground, clone soldiers in uniforms of white with blue and red accents and trench-coat-like battle skirts patrolled along fixed routes in standard tactical formations.
They were taciturn and efficient.
At key intersections or around major facilities, even more daunting figures stood: Jiezhe robots with metal skull visages.
They held heavy weapons like eternal sentinels, radiating a cold, indisputable deterrence.
Surprisingly, the city's residents did not show excessive fear or rejection toward these varied bio- and machine-weapons from the Diwuzu.
More often, their gazes mixed curiosity and appraisal.
Because over the past twenty-four hours, the Diwuzu had not only swept away threats with an iron hand, they had also—through the War and Interior Ministries—distributed emergency supplies, medical aid, and basic welfare subsidies to survivors on a massive, unconditional scale.
This tangible aid, in stark contrast to the Earth Federation's bureaucratic habits and the Unification Church's madness, effectively won hearts and eased survival pressure.
More importantly, the footage shot at the risk of death by journalists—and which could not be deleted or buried—showing the genetic Primarch Sui Meng becoming a ten-thousand-meter golden giant and purifying a blood moon with supreme might, continued to circulate widely online and ferment.
That scene like myth reborn was stamped deeply into every witness's heart.
By comparison, the blood moons the Unification Church preached, which ultimately brought only death and mutation, appeared evil and false.
Sui Meng's guardian bearing and sacred radiance inclined people ever more to believe that he was the god truly worthy of awe and following.
The Church's once-dominant doctrine, under the iron weight of facts and contrast, had already collapsed of itself and completely lost its "market."
What is more, what the Unification Church had done during the disaster—its indelible harm to Earth and humanity—left the populace with boundless hatred toward it.
By contrast, the Diwuzu and the "golden giant" who brought order and hope of survival were naturally easier to accept, and a new, simple worship had already begun to take root.
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