Chapter 524: When the Empyrean Fails, Use Material Logic; We Have the Seniority for It
The collisions between demi-deities within the Empyrean were far more savage than any conflict in the material universe.
In the galaxy, even a Warp-power required eons of planning, immense sacrifice, and a staggering stroke of luck to manifest in the material realm and snatch a morsel from the feast of the Gods. Usually, they would manage to destroy a planet, destabilize a few sectors, and act as a nuisance to their rivals before being beaten back into the Warp by the heroes of realspace to begin their cooldown cycles.
But within the Immaterium, it was entirely different.
There were no laws of physics to act as shackles. Every exchange was one of naked brutality. Mental fortitude transformed into spear-tips and shields as the friction of conflicting wills caused the Warp to churn and boil.
Yet, the Sea of Souls was saturated with infinite quintessence—tides that had remained uncollected and unrefined for ten millennia. The voids torn open by the clash were instantly refilled by these raw energies, serving as fuel for the next strike, ensuring that this violent dance could continue indefinitely.
Each entity was the sovereign of its own pocket-reality—all-seeing, all-powerful, a world-shaking titan.
In the material world, your "invincibility" was a fragile claim.
In the Sea of Souls, your "Vision" was the only reality.
Whoosh!
Another axe-stroke descended, churning a dozen star-systems within the mind-scape.
"I'Z BORED," Mork grumbled to Gork, wiping the residue of a disintegrated daemon from his jaw. He had swung a thousand times and hadn't even scratched a feather.
"ME TOO!" Gork roared back.
Gork was currently attempting to throttle Ramesses, but his bone-crushing strikes—which had already conceptually detonated a string of planets—seemed to slide right through the shifting, twisting radiance. The "Formless Lord" remained annoyingly lively.
"I RECKON I GOTTA THINK FOR A BIT," Gork noted, his grip slackening.
The shifting mass of light seized the opening. A mocking tentacle of energy lashed out, slapping the face of the Twin Gods before retracting back into its shell like a cowardly turtle. A provocative thought-pulse radiated from the core:
"TRIGGERED."
"WAAAAAAGH!!!!"
The two giants erupted with a fresh surge of emerald fire, leaping back into the fray.
The Empyrean became increasingly turbulent under the weight of the endless assault.
Cold and heat intermingled. Countless Warp-denizens were caught in the crossfire, ground into the dust as they were absorbed into the power-reserves of the warring gods. Their wails grew louder as they became fuel for the divine.
Infinite gazes watched this localized storm in terror—a tiny ripple in the vastness of the Warp, yet devastating to those nearby.
It was like watching a star-map of realspace at night: scattered points of light, perhaps stars or distant vessels. But where realspace was static, everything here spun in a wild, irregular formation.
Stars shifted. Ships drifted, out of control. From the sounds of tearing bulkheads and structural collapse, many were suffering total integrity failure. In the loop of aggregation and fragmentation, they were becoming hollowed-out husks rotating slowly in decaying orbits.
In time, they might be caught by a larger fragment, or colonized by daemons and the unfortunates who had blundered into the Warp, or simply ignite and die in the deep trenches of the Immaterium.
There was no way to predict their fate, mirroring the total loss of order that had plagued this realm since the fall of the Old Ones.
The Chaos Gods watched with curiosity. The lesser daemons fled in panic. Countless mortals in realspace watched as their Seers and Shamans collapsed in seizures and died, utterly blind to the cause.
Only Gork and Mork remained steadfast in their primary function:
Destruction.
Ensuring that no entity attempting to "Progress"—be they saint or sinner—ever succeeded.
"Eldrad, record the following deployment."
"Sylandri Veilwalker is hereby relieved of all external duties. The Troupe of Midnight Sorrow will remain within the Formless Manse to provide cataloging assistance. Furthermore, follow the Shadow-vessel to the Black Library and complete the handover of the Chaos-Sector's indexing system. Efficiency is paramount."
"The Biel-Tan group will submit their models now. Ensure they are correctly labeled before the next rotation. Librarians, begin the validation of the fresh blueprints. Practical utility is the only metric."
"Brother Ramesses, if you trust me, grant me sub-authority. I can take over the 'Auto-Duel' in certain sectors..."
The Formless Manse had transformed into a gargantuan command hub. Under the organization of the Laughing God, Cegorach, infinite psychic threads linked the various work-groups.
They were a singular machine: integrating incoming intelligence, connecting to the archives of the Black Library and the "Park" (where daemons provided "voluntary" data), and coordinating the flow of power. The voice of the command resonated in every mind through the psychic link.
High-tier Eldar Seers were tasked with weaving the counters to the Gork-and-Mork strikes. Human psykers—whose "Stat-Lines" had not yet fully integrated Eldar wisdom—handled the mechanical repetition of data-validation.
It was a system of high-speed programming and reliability testing, executed by living souls.
Through the layered images of the duel, they observed every twitch of the Twin Gods through the Formless Lord's eyes.
To Gork and Mork, the fluid, formless light they were fighting was manifesting ripples—unsettling patterns that felt like a billion eyes watching them, deconstructing their very nature.
The only mercy for the Orks was that the "Golden Giant" (The Emperor) had not yet arrived. In a realm where time was a suggestion, the Twin Gods figured they still had a good few rounds of "Scrappin'" left.
"We can maintain the stalemate, but the resource drain is excessive," a Farseer noted.
"As scions of the Old Ones, we have rarely clashed with the Greenskins. During the zenith of our Pantheon, the Gods and the Old Ones' legacy ensured we never had to concern ourselves with the chores of the Empyrean. We have grown... stagnant."
The speaker was ancient. Even Eldrad, a man of staggering seniority, looked like a child beside him. This elder had lived through the peak of the Pantheon and looked upon the true faces of the Eldar Gods. He was a living fossil of a dead empire.
"Beyond mitigating the immediate risks, this is the limit of our contribution."
"Sigh..."
The elder sighed, and a heavy sense of self-reproach settled over the gathered Eldar.
Facing the stagnant duel, they felt the weight of their own inadequacy.
Warp-power was too esoteric; it could not be quantified by pure data. Like the occultism of any civilization, it relied on intuition and verification.
And the Eldar had spent their peak years indulging in pleasure rather than exploration. As the psychic race closest to the Old Ones, they had spent sixty million years failing to replicate the construction of the Webway, nor had they sought the Trinity of Artifacts used to build it.
If they hadn't started with such a massive "trust fund" of technology, they would have been nothing more than an exhibit in a Necron museum by now.
"Enough, enough."
Cegorach, seeing that Ramesses had granted him a bit of "Controller Access," found time to snap at the Orks while maintaining a cheerful posture.
This is the way, the Laughing God thought. When faced with a threat, use the collective. If only Asuryan had let me 'drive' back then, we might have lost the war, but we would have escaped the crash.
He also privately admired Ramesses' Warp-avatar. It was a masterful "re-skin" of the ancient Terran myths of Amun and Ra.
With this level of power, if integrated into the Imperial Creed, they might actually be able to make a play against Be'lakor or even the Formless Distortion itself.
"It is not enough," Eldrad interjected, agreeing with the ancient elder. He didn't even notice he was contradicting a God; his focus was entirely on the metrics.
Cegorach felt a twinge of unease. His teammates were actually being... responsible.
"He's right," Sylandri added, reporting for duty. She set aside a soul-gem ledger and offered her own validation of the elder's concern.
Cegorach fell silent, feeling a bit ashamed.
Perhaps my own level of 'Waaagh!' is too low.
The logic was absolute now.
It didn't matter if you were Eldar or any other race; if you worked for the Formless Lord in the Manse, the value you created and the "overhead" you saved for Ramesses would be returned to you through the Lords' conscience.
If the Formless Lord made a decision, you supported it.
If he issued a directive, you executed it.
If he had an interest, you defended it with your life!
"So—"
Cegorach, sitting amidst the Eldar without a shred of divine arrogance, shook his latest data-packet. He looked at the "marginal figure" who had just approached.
"What are you doing here?"
As the current pillar of the Eldar race—the man who had successfully secured a "hot meal" for his people through sheer thick-skinned diplomacy—Cegorach held zero love for the ancient enemy of his kind.
Competitors in the same market rarely got along.
"I am here to save our partner some credits," Trazyn the Infinite said, rubbing his metallic hands. He pointed to a "Billing-Statement" hovering at the edge of the console, which was skyrocketing as the duel dragged on.
As the first xenos to strike a bargain with the Dawnbreakers, Trazyn had spent decades observing the four transmigrators at close range. He understood the "Operating System" of their power better than most.
"If Warp-based methodology is failing, perhaps it is time for some Material Logic."
"Oh?" Cegorach looked intrigued.
During the War in Heaven, the Old Ones and the C'tan fought at the apex, but the next tier was the slugfest between the Necrons, the Eldar, and the Krork.
And the Necrons didn't just go to sleep after their rebellion. They held a massive arsenal of C'tan Shards and had only entered the Great Sleep after confirming they couldn't break the Eldar—who had fully inherited the Old Ones' infrastructure—in a single generation.
Kill them with time. Let our immortality be the final victory in the galaxy. That had been Szarekh's slogan.
Translation: I can't win the fight, so I'll bury myself in a nice spot and hope my rivals die of old age.
The Eldar were immortals. Their bodies might age, but a trip through the Warp brought them back at full strength. How did a bunch of rusting iron-men expect to out-wait them?
Cegorach had laughed at Szarekh for eons. With the Eldar Pantheon on the board, and dominion over both reality and the Warp, how could they possibly go extinct?
Pity the boomerang hit so hard. When Asuryan started his "waiting to die" sequence, Cegorach had stopped laughing.
"Explain," Cegorach said, stopping Sylandri from tossing the "rusty corpse" out of the room.
As fellow survivors of the War in Heaven, perhaps the machine held a better solution.
"What do you know of 'Seniority'?" Trazyn asked. He gave Sylandri a provocative twitch of his metallic eyebrows.
Were you even born when the stars were first extinguished?
As the Eldar girl's face twisted in rage, Trazyn opened his palm. A miniature, iron-grey pyramid manifested in his hand.
"A Noctilith Obelisk (Pylon)."
Embedded with C'tan shards, capable of stabilizing reality, and armed with strategic-tier disruption arrays. It was an infinite-energy core, one of the super-weapons mastered by the Necrons in the post-War in Heaven era.
Cegorach recognized the device.
How? He had been hit by a cluster of them once. It had nearly ended his performance.
Strength verified by the Laughing God. Guaranteed quality!
But he immediately shook his head.
"Not enough."
Cegorach recalled the power output. "I've handled these. A dozen of them might contain me, but against Gork and Mork? It's far too little. And the risk of deployment in the Webway is extreme. They can draw power directly from the Empyrean; your obelisks would suffer structural collapse from the overload."
"Spoken like a professional," Trazyn noted.
Cegorach looked like he was having a PTSD episode. Don't ask. I got krumped hard.
But as he said, it was a specialized tool. In realspace, it was absolute. In a Webway fragment, trying to pin a God with a Pylon was a fantasy. You'd need a World Engine for that.
And to bring a World Engine into the Labyrinth to face the Twin Gods... even they would just stare in disbelief.
But Trazyn, a mere Overlord, lacked the authority to move a World Engine.
"That was then. In the past, we had to use the Labyrinths to cage the C'tan, meaning the Obelisks—despite their theoretical infinite output—had to maintain 'Safety Thresholds' to prevent a shard-breach."
Trazyn waved a hand, and the holographic pyramid disassembled into its component logic-circuits. He was showing a racial secret to his ancient enemy without a second thought.
"But now, things are different. Lord Arthur can mass-produce Unconscious C'tan Shards. Their necrodermis frames are now just inert power-conduits. The safety protocols are redundant. We can push the suppression levels far beyond anything seen in history."
"And our technology is time-tested. No need for your 'Mystical Rituals.' It is plug-and-play."
Trazyn gestured to the frantic humans and Eldar around them, his tone one of pure, metallic arrogance.
The Eldar were confused. First came disbelief, then they looked at Cegorach's thoughtful expression.
Clearly, Trazyn's "Materialist Practical" held weight in the eyes of a God.
They had to believe it.
While they diligently continued their tasks, the Eldar staff collectively swallowed.
Is this the seniority of the War in Heaven?
We've been playing with 'Warp-Magic' for eons, and the Necrons can just solve it by moving a few pyramids?
☆☆☆
-> SUPPORT ME WITH POWER STONE
-> FOR EVERY 200 PS = BOUNS CHAPTER
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you