"Guilliman's luck has never been particularly good. There's a very real chance this boarding action will lead him straight into an ambush."
The more Eden thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Judging by Guilliman's past record, the number of times he had been knocked out of action was genuinely impressive.
With Calgar, another frequent ICU patient, accompanying him, they had stacked every possible bad-luck buff. They might end up reenacting the disaster of Guilliman's battle against Fulgrim.
The Stormlord and several Phaerons would probably gang up on them. Whether they could escape afterward was another matter entirely.
In principle, Guilliman's decision to launch the boarding action had been correct. That crucial command node had to be defended.
Unfortunately, the Silent King believed the Savior was also inside the command fortress. He had therefore organized an ambush intended to eliminate Eden, the Savior and Emperor of the Imperium.
In other words, Guilliman had probably stepped into a trap meant for Eden.
His situation was extremely dangerous.
"Hopefully, Guilliman can hold out. At the very least, he needs to survive until I break into the Sindor System. Only then will they have a chance to escape."
Eden sighed.
He had to command the battle here and had no way to rescue them. Sending conventional forces would accomplish nothing, and even the Spellbound Legion would struggle to cross the barrier and deploy directly inside the colossal tombship.
All Eden could do was support them indirectly and hope his intervention changed something.
This was an exceptionally important war. Any redeployment could have an unbearable impact on the final outcome.
After sending several encrypted transmissions to his deputy, Taco, Eden returned his attention to the battle before him.
He had done everything he could. The rest would depend on Guilliman's luck and his ability to withstand the pressure.
Fortunately, that brother of his was very good at taking a beating.
"I'm under quite a bit of pressure myself..."
Eden gazed through the vaulted observation deck. Several more radiant, multicolored supernovas were rising in the distance, their extreme heat staining the black void crimson.
They might look like colorful balls of fire from here, but each was actually a supernova engulfing an entire star system, a terrifying galactic catastrophe. Compared to one of those, Cyclonic Torpedoes and Eternity Spheres were little more than children's snap-poppers.
The devastation could incinerate virtually any form of matter. It could even disrupt time and space throughout the affected system, turning everything within into a lethal, chaotic nightmare.
That was the true horror of war between advanced species. If they fought without restraint, they could grind space itself into oblivion and permanently transform one star system after another.
Eden was in a foul mood.
Every new multicolored supernova that flared within the distant stellar region meant that another system had been destroyed by the Silent King's attack.
And with it went the tomb fleets under Eden's command.
The losses were heartbreaking.
Unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about it. The power released by the collapse of a stellar body approached the limits imposed by the laws of physics. Almost no force field or shield could withstand it.
It didn't matter whether the victim was a Necrontyr, a human, or a daemon manifested in realspace. Even an unsuspecting C'tan struck by something like that would be knocked flat and left howling in pain.
"My lord, every assault by our vanguard has failed.
"At our current rate of advance, the main force cannot penetrate the Sindor System. The power of the Celestial Orrery is impossible to withstand."
A Phaeron had come to deliver the latest battle report. His eyes revealed his fear of that galactic-scale celestial weapon.
The ancient Celestial Orrery controlled by the Silent King was more terrifying than the celestial weapons possessed by any other dynasty. Worse still, it was equally effective for offense and defense.
Under its influence, they could not even eliminate the threat by destroying the stars themselves.
The moment the Celestial Orrery was deployed, every star within its domain became locked in place and enveloped by higher-dimensional space. Conventional attacks could not affect them.
Eden's concern only deepened as he listened.
He did not blame the Phaeron for fearing the Celestial Orrery. Everything the noble had said was objectively true.
Every species would fear such a horrific celestial weapon. Even the ancient C'tan would have regarded it with caution.
Even if every tomb fleet under Eden's command charged forward as fearlessly as the vanguard, the only possible result would be total annihilation.
"As expected of the Silent King's stronghold. That bastard has fortified the Sindor System like an iron barrel."
Eden studied the latest strategic star chart with genuine admiration.
On the three-dimensional display before him, ring after ring of orange-red stars surrounded the Sindor System. They had been positioned at perfectly regular intervals, forming four or five celestial defensive lines.
This was no naturally formed stellar arrangement.
The Silent King had used immensely powerful technology to capture stars from other regions and forcibly relocate them to the perimeter of the Sindor System.
It was an astounding feat of engineering that had reshaped a galactic region and rebuilt the sea of stars itself.
If the stellar defenses surrounding the Sindor System were an iron wall, the Great Wall of the Void that Eden had constructed earlier was little more than a mound of dirt.
The two projects were not remotely comparable.
At present, at least a dozen star systems separated Eden's tomb fleet armada from the Sindor System. Every star along the route was another galactic-scale nuclear deterrent planted by the Silent King.
For an attacking force like Eden's, the situation was a perfect catch-22.
If he sent only a small number of vessels ahead, they would never break through the enemy's defending forces. They would be surrounded and destroyed almost immediately.
But if the entire armada advanced in overwhelming force, the defenders would rapidly withdraw and use the Celestial Orrery to detonate the system's stars.
Then Eden's forces would be completely screwed.
Several dynastic armies under his command had already been destroyed that way, resulting in catastrophic losses.
Fortunately, they were armies of living metal. Eden could still recover some of the remains and slowly repair them.
Had those forces been human, there probably wouldn't have been so much as a carbon atom left to salvage.
Entering the Sindor System through spatial translation was even less feasible.
The Silent King had already filled the deep-space routes with spatial mines, reducing the entire region to chaos and making conventional interstellar navigation impossible.
That conniving old bastard had even planted stars in deep space. A careless fleet could stumble into one at any moment.
His defenses were extraordinarily thorough.
Under these circumstances, Eden's tomb fleet armada had no choice but to advance through realspace while enduring the threat of the Celestial Orrery.
"That bastard was probably traumatized by how badly the C'tan and the Old Ones once humiliated him. That must be why he became so cautious."
According to the historical records Eden had uncovered, the Silent King had suffered terribly at the hands of both the C'tan and the Old Ones. He had been driven into humiliating retreats and pushed to the brink of destruction several times.
Those experiences had likely made him place exceptional importance on his own safety, leading him to devote enormous resources to constructing such a comprehensive defensive network.
After winning a pyrrhic victory in the War in Heaven, he had realized that the weakened Necrons would soon face the rise of the Aeldari and the possibility of retaliation.
So he had immediately fled beyond the galaxy to seek refuge.
"A difficult opponent."
The green light in Eden's eyes grew increasingly wary.
None of this made him look down on the Silent King. If anything, his estimation of his opponent rose again.
Compared to proud or insane enemies, someone like the Silent King, a devious old monster who prioritized defense and fled the moment circumstances turned unfavorable, was far more troublesome.
After all, this was the bastard who had outmaneuvered and shattered the C'tan.
Eden, the Savior and Emperor of the Imperium, had realized that he had finally met his match.
Every offensive he launched and every attempt he made to breach the defenses had been stopped by his opponent.
In truth, every deployment, collision, and withdrawal among the hundreds of thousands of fleet formations gathered throughout this stellar region was another test between the two commanders.
Most encounters ended the moment contact was made. Neither side allowed itself to become entangled in battle.
The war was being fought across several different layers simultaneously. There were massed fleet breakthroughs, deep-space incursions, struggles for control of stars, and decapitation strikes.
Both sides were employing every conceivable method.
Tomb fleets were even fighting one another along the outer reaches of the Pariah Nexus to prevent the Silent King from capturing additional stars.
Ultimately, this was a war of life and death.
Both Eden and the Silent King were using every means at their disposal in the hope of destroying the other.
"Hm?"
A sudden chill seized Eden.
A suffocating sensation descended upon him, the instinctive response of his body to a mortal threat.
He felt the arrival of deathly silence.
An unseen gaze fixed upon him like a cold, lifeless dagger, crossing dimensional space before driving itself into his body.
Only after his physiological reaction subsided did Eden identify the direction of the threat.
At the edge of his vision, something invisible emerged.
An eerie green beam was quietly gathering power.
The source was a skeletal Necron body covered in specialized runes. It was an elite assassin of living metal.
It possessed no breath, emotion, or hesitation. There was only the pure, unerring precision of its targeting lock.
It was utterly cold.
This was one of the Silent King's most precious living-metal assassins. Its importance was no less than that of any Phaeron.
This supremely lethal entity had never failed an assassination.
Now it had been dispatched to kill the Lord of Hope.
I've been targeted!
The moment Eden realized what was happening, the sensation of danger intensified.
Once that specialized synaptic disintegrator fired, his current living-metal body would be destroyed beyond all possibility of repair.
Simply put, the weapon ignored force fields and armor alike. If its shot connected, the target died.
The instant Eden was targeted by an elite Deathmark, he already had one foot in oblivion.
Yet even in the face of such danger, Eden remained exactly where he was. He made no attempt to escape.
Once an elite Deathmark acquired its target, evasion became meaningless. Its mark existed on a dimensional level.
The target was effectively separated from reality and reduced to a set of coordinates awaiting erasure.
Whether Eden moved or remained still would make no difference.
Even if he teleported to the opposite end of the galaxy, the synaptic beam would cross the intervening dimensions and strike him.
The weapon was simply that absurd.
When facing an elite Deathmark, there was only one solution: kill it before it completed its lock and fired.
"New God!"
"No!"
Nemesor Zahndrekh and the other Phaerons realized that the Lord of Hope had been targeted by one of the Silent King's assassins, and they immediately panicked.
When the Deathmark fired its eerie green beam, despair gripped them.
No one could stop it now.
Yet when the attack arrived, the Lord of Hope remained standing exactly where he had been, alive and completely unchanged.
The Phaerons stared at him in disbelief.
A moment later, the assassin's living-metal body became visible and fell from above.
It had been killed by one of Eden's own Deathmarks. Smoke rose from its body where its neural systems had been disintegrated.
"There's no need for concern, gentlemen. Szarekh's assassins cannot kill me."
Eden acted as if nothing had happened. He didn't even glance at the assassin's corpse lying on the floor.
He simply continued studying the star chart, his expression remaining unchanged even as disaster struck before his eyes.
The sudden reversal left many of the Phaerons stunned.
Their reverence for the Lord of Hope only deepened after witnessing him survive a shot from that specialized synaptic disintegrator.
Their future ruler was supremely calm, majestic, and wise. Not even the Silent King's most feared assassin could harm him.
Eden was entirely unsurprised.
He was even more paranoid about his personal safety than the Silent King. How could he possibly have neglected to prepare for an assassination by a Deathmark?
In truth, Eden was surrounded by fields capable of rewinding time. The instant the synaptic beam struck, they reversed time by several dozen milliseconds.
That gave one of his own Deathmarks enough time to kill the assassin before it fired.
In effect, the enemy Deathmark had been removed from the preceding timeline, causing the shot it had fired to disappear along with it.
Unfortunately, the temporal reversal lasted only an exceedingly brief period and affected only a localized area. Eden could not rewind time on a large scale.
If he could, he would already be invincible.
Still, Eden believed that by continuing to uncover and surpass the technologies of humanity's Golden Age, he would eventually wield even greater authority over realspace through science alone.
"Are the spatial anchor installations ready? We must seize this opportunity to breach the defensive line."
Eden turned toward Nemesor Zahndrekh.
He had spotted an opening on the holographic strategic display, one valuable enough to justify committing one of his hidden trump cards.
"My lord, we have implemented the agreed protocols. The anchors can be deployed at any time," Zahndrekh replied.
"Then proceed according to the plan. Assemble the fleet and break through the designated section of the defensive line."
Eden issued the order without hesitation.
He could not afford to delay any longer. The more time passed, the more human lives would be lost, and the greater the likelihood that Guilliman and his other brothers would face mortal danger.
The Silent King's assassins were genuinely terrifying, especially on the battlefield, where there would always be areas his protective fields could not cover.
Soon, wave after wave of elite tomb fleets gathered around Eden's tomb flagship before accelerating toward the next star system.
Several exceptionally bright stars could be seen arranged in formation within that system. An elite tomb fleet loyal to the Silent King was stationed there as well.
Eden's direct assault on the defensive line was exceptionally risky.
There was a high probability that his forces would be caught by the resulting supernova, annihilating both him and his elite fleets.
Just as expected, the Silent King's fleet stationed within the system immediately activated its spatial interference mines when it saw the Lord of Hope's flagship leading the armada deep into the region.
It then withdrew from the system.
"Our souls are eternal! For the noble Necrontyr!"
Beyond the defenders' sight, one small tombship after another raced directly toward the stars, fighting for every second without the slightest hesitation.
Never before had those beings of living metal desired victory so fiercely.
They were prepared to pay any price for it.
"Faster! Keep advancing!"
Eden tensely directed his forces, his gaze fixed on the condition of the stars.
If they detonated before his fleet neutralized the interference and escaped into the next system, everything would be over.
The entire war would turn decisively against them.
In all honesty, if Eden could not break through the Silent King's stellar nuclear defense line, even an alliance of every species in the galaxy would be unable to conquer the Sindor System.
The Silent King would have ample time to destroy Eden's effective fighting strength piece by piece and reverse the course of the war.
Fortunately, while Eden's tomb fleets neutralized the interference and accelerated toward the next system at faster-than-light speeds, the stars merely trembled violently.
They did not collapse into supernovas.
"It worked..."
Relief washed through Eden as he witnessed the result.
The spatial anchors carried by the small tombships had temporarily suppressed the destructive collapse of the stars, buying the fleet precious time to pass through the system.
That meant Eden's forces now possessed a method of crossing the Silent King's stellar defensive lines.
The moment Eden's elite tomb fleet cleared the system, brilliant supernova flames rose behind it.
The collapsing stars engulfed the small tombships and every living-metal being aboard them.
But they had fulfilled their mission.
Through their sacrifice, they had purchased enough time for the main force to pass.
Eden and the others gazed toward the supernovas and fell silent.
This was the price their offensive demanded.
It would be paid not only with the lives of the Necrontyr, but with those of countless humans and members of other species as well.
"Szarekh, I'm coming for you."
Eden turned toward the black void.
The outline of the Sindor System could now be faintly seen in the distance.
It was almost within reach.
This time, the Silent King would have no opportunity to escape!
(End of Chapter)
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