Chapter 523: Ramesses: "What's with the Chattering? Go Talk to My Million-Strong Logistics Division!"
"Ugh—"
Green psychic shockwaves continued to hammer against the defenses. As the Formless Lord, Ramesses, anchored the structural frame of the Webway fragment, he cast a look of pure disdain at the "Golden Geezer" for dredging up old administrative scars.
"Have You been compromised by a High Lord's soul-rot?"
They had agreed to pool their strength—to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and break the enemy when the blows fell. Yet here was the Master of Mankind, still stuck in the "Deliberation Phase."
"Why are You leaking blue light like a faulty reactor, Emperor? Get behind Me!"
The Emperor replied with a huff of indignation through the girl's vocal cords:
"Perhaps You'd like to swap places?"
At this moment, upon the features of the "Apprentice"—the Emperor's current vessel—His normally composed expression was flickering with dizzying speed.
One second, He bore the mournful eyes of a Saint; the next, the manic, wild-eyed stare of a high-stakes gambler. A heartbeat later, he was a cold-blooded slayer radiating a lethal aura, followed by several shifting, non-human silhouettes that defied anatomical logic.
These were not simple mood swings. Within the deepest vaults of the Emperor's consciousness, ten thousand warring personalities were screaming for control. Emotions surged in a boiling cauldron of psyche: Fury, Mercy, Madness, Logic, Greed, and Altruism. There was no peace.
Currently, driven by the Prime Directive of protecting Humanity, the Emperor was attempting a "Micro-Management Calibration." He sought to integrate ten millennia of Ecclesiarchical faith, ancient Terran myths, and his own essence as the Dark King into a singular, clinical strike.
He needed to break Gork and Mork without accidentally deleting Ramesses in the process.
To the Emperor, hitting the Ork Gods was a tactical necessity for the Webway Project. But hitting Ramesses? That was driven by the persistent, nagging dread that the future of Mankind was no longer entirely in His own hands.
Humanity's destiny must never belong to another.
This was the Emperor's supreme arrogance. It was the reason He had returned to the board while every other Perpetual had either died or slacked off into obscurity after a thousand cycles of failure.
However, the "Lucid" part of the Emperor also wished His "Other Selves" would stop being so proactive.
Some of His more extreme personas didn't even view the Dawnbreakers as allies. Having learned the hard lesson of the Crusade—where half His sons turned traitor—these aspects were calculating how to liquidate the "Outsiders" entirely, intending to "sculpt" a fresh batch of compliant Primarchs from their remains.
Had Arthur not been able to precisely "Whitelist" the sane personalities, and had Ramesses not used pure soul-capital to subsidize those specific aspects while suppressing the more "Inconvenient" ones, the Master of Mankind would have been unable to act at all.
It wasn't a peaceful negotiation. It was a war of the self.
In the world beyond Ramesses' perception, the Emperor he was talking to had just mentally "pounded" a cackling, suicidal personality into silence. Only minutes after grabbing the steering wheel of the "Emperor-Engine," He was "stabbed" in the metaphysical kidneys by a weeping aspect begging for the species to be allowed to die in peace.
Inside that golden, seat-filled mindscape, it was total anarchy.
Every second, a new persona manifested. Some were torn apart by their peers the moment they coalesced; others grew bloated by consuming weaker, similar shards of will.
These personas were the echoes of a quadrillion human souls screaming in the Warp for ten thousand years. Their goal was the survival of the species, but their methods were polar opposites.
One aspect wore golden plate and brandished a sword, intending to dominate all, including Gork, Mork, and the Dawnbreakers. Another wore spectacles and clutched a mountain of tactical schedules, intending to trade a billion lives for a strategic victory. A third was a mass of scar tissue and hollow eyes, believing only total sacrifice could buy salvation.
No rules. No compromise. Only a "No-Holds-Barred Brawling Championship" for the right to pilot the invincible body of the God-Emperor.
Literal Left-Brain versus Right-Brain combat.
"That is absolutely not an option," Ramesses said, his head shaking like a bobble-head.
The Dawnbreakers trusted the Emperor's intent to save Humanity, but they held a zero-percent confidence rating in His methods.
The Great Crusade was a Rorschach test for the species. Depending on who you asked, the Emperor was a savior or a butcher. The bickering was eternal. To this day, the Dawnbreakers refused to give the Emperor a "Final Rating" because His track record was so consistently bizarre.
"Then hold the line a while longer," the Emperor-avatar said. The switching faces suddenly stopped, His eyes turning sharp and focused—He had clearly won the latest round of the internal elbow-strike contest.
"I'm almost locked in."
"Fine."
Ramesses offered a one-word acknowledgement and allowed his consciousness to sink.
If the Emperor was unreliable, he'd have to do the heavy lifting himself.
His mind returned to the Formless Manse (The Un相天).
This "Lesser God" domain—constructed from the fear and fantasies of a billion Warp-entities regarding Ramesses—was currently operating like a high-speed industrial workshop.
Countless shadows were laboring within.
Eldar Seers hovered before star-charts, trading ancient lore with ancestors and juniors alike, simulating every ripple in the Empyrean. Human psykers sat in tiered education-circles, sharing data-bursts and validating their curriculum under the watchful eyes of their tutors.
The "Park Managers" were at the daemon-lines, dismantling prisoners for their information-shards, indexing the data with clinical efficiency, and providing a localized deterrence to any entity harboring thoughts of rebellion.
Scholars poked through "Sanctified Archives" that had been sealed since the Age of Strife, weaving spells for their quotas. Technical specialists used esoteric gear to map Warp-phenomena. Everyone was racing against their personal KPIs.
The moment Ramesses "logged in," every busy figure froze. A clear directive manifested on every HUD and within every mind.
[DECREE OF THE FORMLESS LORD]
[OBJECTIVE: TOTAL COLLABORATION. ALL SECONDARY TASKS ARE DEFERRED. ASSIST CORE WORK-GROUPS IMMEDIATELY. INITIALIZE OPTIMIZATION OF THE WARP-AEGIS. ANALYZE COMBAT-LOGS OF GORK AND MORK. DELIVER OPTIMAL SUPPORT-SOLUTIONS FOR EXTERNAL DEFENSE.]
[REWARD: ALL PARTICIPANTS ARE GRANTED ONE WEEK OF ROTATIONAL LEAVE. SCHEDULING TO BE HANDLED BY LEAD PROCTORS. BASED ON CONTRIBUTION, PERSONNEL ARE AUTHORIZED TO CLAIM SOUL-DIVIDENDS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF PRIVATE WARP-HABITATS AND REALSPACE-TRANSIT SLOTS.]
[ATTACHMENTS: 'HISTORY OF THE ORK GODS', 'ANALYSIS OF WAAAGH-FIELD GEOMETRY', 'METAPHYSICS OF GREEN-SKIN DIVINITY'...]
No rhetoric. Just the requirements, the data, the rewards, and the command.
The staff blinked in shock, before erupting into a fanatical zeal.
Is this a God?
Was there ever a God like this in the Warp?
He didn't just provide a sanctuary; He paid them!
They didn't have to scrounge through realspace like psychic panhandlers to meet their quotas. The Formless Lord gave them the work. They didn't have to fear being turned into spawn or dissolved by the tides. They had homes in reality and private villas in the Warp!
FOR THE FORMLESS LORD! LOYALTY!!!
"I didn't raise these boys for nothing," Ramesses thought, withdrawing the specialized application-templates his elite psykers had just compiled.
The universe was a pit of monsters that raw power alone could rarely hold back. A billion souls worth of strength could be erased in a second if the logic was wrong. Ramesses believed in Collective Wisdom.
To be blunt: although immortality and high-tier hardware granted the Emperor, Tzeentch, and the Eldar Pantheon immense knowledge, Ramesses felt they were all "Intelligence-Deficient" when it came to management.
They are legendary. They are transcendent. But 'Smart'?
Faced with a fluid, multi-dimensional crisis, Ramesses would take his group of hardworking scholars over a moody deity any day.
Under the direction of the Eldar Farseers, targeted contingencies were manifesting. One team analyzed how to secure the Webway fragment under the pressure of a "Deity-Level" assault. Another mapped the "Formless" traits to neutralize the "Brutality" authority of the Ork Gods. A third was dedicated to predictive analysis—pre-empting the strike before it landed.
With Cegorach having "brought his assets to the table," the Dawnstar's psychic workforce was now primarily Aeldari.
Since the Craftworlds had begun delivering their Infinity Circuits into the "Formless Manse"—coupled with the opening of the Black Library—the talent pool had reached critical mass.
The ancestors of the Eldar, bearing the knowledge of eons, were waking within the Manse. They worked alongside the living, their productivity increasing by a factor of ten.
Of course, the price was that every Craftworld had handed Ramesses their ultimate collateral.
The Aeldari understood the "Inequality" of the deal.
They knew their Ancestor-Souls were effectively hostaged. But the point wasn't whether they could get them back; the point was whether they would continue to exist.
Existence is the foundation of the contract.
And for an Eldar, serving a "Benevolent Manager" was a infinitely better prospect than reporting to the "Prince of Pleasure."
A controlled death is better than an eternal consumption.
The data-packets were finalized. Ramesses selected the most efficient defense-matrices.
When Gork and Mork finally punched through the Emperor's initial barrier and prepared to "Krump" Ramesses, they found they couldn't land a hit.
Logically, they were all "Lesser Gods" (in this localized sector). Their weight in the Warp was roughly equal. But when the Twin Gods swung their fists and palms to engage in a proper galactic brawl, Ramesses appeared wreathed in a layer of invisible light that was impossibly slick.
Gork's fist, carrying the kinetic force to shatter a moon, smashed into the membrane only to slide off, striking the empty void.
They tried to grab him, but their fingertips felt as though they were sinking into a bottomless sponge. They couldn't even touch the edge of his "cloak." Ramesses moved like a twisting, shifting blob of slime, swaying gently amidst the violent energy surges, always maintaining a tactical distance as he hovered over the Webway fragment.
The efficiency of the "Formless Manse" was absolute.
The Eldar Seers had mapped the Ork Gods' combat habits. The human scholars had deconstructed Their power-transmission methods. Ramesses implemented the defense using the Blackstone amplification of the Eldar Fortresses and his own bottomless soul-reserves.
Gork and Mork weren't fighting an individual. They were fighting a high-speed conglomerate controlled by a thousand minds.
Every movement was predicted. Every variable was analyzed. Every execution was flawless.
"WAAAAAAGH!!!"
Gork roared in frustration. His attacks grew more erratic—fists, palms, headbutts. But no matter how much "Waaagh!" he applied, he couldn't breach the oily energy-film.
It was like hitting a cloud of cotton. Every blow was neutralized and discarded. The feeling of "Strength without Leverage" drove the Ork Gods into a frenzy. Their red eyes were spitting literal fire.
In the distance, Mork—axe in hand—tore through the Emperor's blockade and lunged. He ignored Ramesses, aiming the massive blade directly at the Webway fragment.
But before the edge could strike, a pre-activated interference-wave shifted the geometry of the tunnel. The invisible light at the point of contact dissipated, and the axe-stroke grazed the "hair" of the fragment, plunging instead into the deep Warp, where it detonated in a riot of ripples and shrieking daemons.
Ramesses hovered in the void, feeling the constant support of his workers. His expression was one of absolute composure.
If you feed a million people, you expect them to do the work.
"What's the rush?"
A casual, metallic voice drifted into the discussion. It wasn't loud, but it possessed an air of supreme indifference that cut through the noise.
A particularly conspicuous, iron-grey figure leaned in.
Unlike the slender Eldar or the vibrant humans, he radiated a persistent smell of ancient steel.
"Krumping Orks?"
Having become a "Marginal Figure" in the Dawnstar ecosystem after his initial contributions—and having seen his "Niche" as a historian usurped by Inquisitor Aglaia—the Curator of the Museum (Trazyn) raised a metallic eyebrow. He had been wandering "The Park" in boredom until he saw the request on the Seer's display.
"Why use Warp-entities to fight Orks?"
Trazyn's ocular sensors flared with the joy of a specialist finding a job.
These Eldar are still thinking about 'Stalling' and 'Gods'.
He used his Dawnstar-authorized clearance to audit the battlefield situation. His desire for "Presentation" surged.
"If you want to clear a green infestation, you don't call a priest. You call a Star-God."
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