---o---
When starlight fell across the surface of Aestia once more, Zhou Ye poured himself a cup of coffee — vintage M30, from before all of this — and watched the battle below as it wound toward its conclusion with a calm, unhurried eye.
After he had pulled the Chaos Space Marines, the Dark Mechanicum, and their Skitarii off the field along with himself, the engagement had become something closer to a pure slaughter. In any ordinary world, he might have felt the need to intervene in that kind of one-sided extermination. But this was Warhammer. Every one of those fighters had been thoroughly marinated in Chaos — and honestly, even if they hadn't, Zhou Ye wouldn't have said a word. You never knew what sort of tripwires were buried in a place like this.
Take the Months of Shame incident, which had turned the entire galaxy into an absolute disaster. A world like this had its own rules and its own internal logic. He wasn't in a position to lecture anyone about it.
"Hah. I remember now — the original reason I came here was to dig up some materials. Quietly put down a few Chaos daemons. And look at what it became. Not a single daemon showed up, but I somehow ended up running the biggest Grand Free-for-All on the planet."
It was only now, with the fighting winding down, that Zhou Ye properly remembered what he'd come here to do. He found himself fighting back a laugh.
To be entirely honest — for all the noise it had made, this engagement barely qualified as a starter course in the broader context of this galaxy. Not a single Warp rift had torn open. Not one daemon had physically manifested. By strict military classification, this counted as a conventional war. The cleanup and purification would go on for a while — but compared to a full daemonic eruption, this was barely a footnote.
Zhou Ye still wasn't fully satisfied with the haul. The returns felt a little thin. But then again — the corrupted Titan had been a significant windfall. Absorbing that had been thoroughly satisfying. The only real disappointment was that it had been a Warhound Scout Titan. A Warlord would have been considerably more exciting.
The Dark Mechanicum really were underwhelming in the end. Their entire Academic Exchange force hadn't included a single Titan Legio — just the one unit.
"Overall, not a bad outing. Ran a full salvage sweep of the hive city ahead of the Blood Ravens, so they should be walking away empty-handed this time. If I were a soldier and I abandoned my post halfway through a battle, I'd catch a bolt round. But look at the Dark Angels — they've abandoned their allies mid-engagement to chase down the Fallen Angels so many times it's practically a tradition. And I waited until the outcome was already decided before I slipped off. Honestly, I'm practically a paragon of virtue."
Of course, the Blood Ravens thing had started as a joke and he knew it. In practice, the Blood Ravens were only truly fixated on relics and holy artifacts — they weren't thieves in the blanket sense the memes suggested. When they'd come aboard Zhou Ye's ship earlier, they hadn't touched the supplies, the fuel, or the hull components. The Blood Ravens' reputation, in the most accurate telling, was an obsession specifically with sacred relics — not a compulsion to steal everything in sight.
If they really did go around helping themselves to fuel and provisions and caused a ship to go dark somewhere in the void, they'd have been declared enemies of the Imperium a long time ago.
---o---
With the star's light finally blanketing Aestia in full, the last heretic died to a lasgun shot.
What stretched before Zhou Ye now was a killing field spanning dozens of kilometers in every direction — bodies stacked upon bodies, the scale nearly beyond comprehension. A conservative estimate put the count at several million. And it wasn't only the cultists — a large number of Junkers, gang members, and other conscripted bystanders had been swept into the chaos along the way.
None of that mattered anymore. The war was over.
What came next was the standard procedure — flamer teams to burn the dead — but as it happened, the Necrons' gauss weapons were significantly better suited for that task. And there was no need to worry about the Chaos taint spreading through the cleanup crew, either. The Necron warriors had no souls for daemons to seize, and aetheric corruption couldn't take hold in something with nothing to corrupt. They required almost no resupply to keep functioning. Very little materiel at all.
You had to hand it to the Imperium — when it came to squeezing every last drop out of a resource, it made absolutely no distinction between xenos and its own citizens.
"Still — working alone is its own headache, eventually. I need a warband. But this world isn't the right fit."
The invasion had only just ended. The aftershocks would run for decades. Aestia had three major hive cities and a combined population exceeding ten billion — of that, only the upper and middle hives of the largest city remained intact. Everything else, including the other two hive cities and the badlands between them, was going to require sustained purging. The Inquisition would be maintaining a permanent presence here for the foreseeable future. The White Scars and Blood Ravens were orbiting above. Trying to build a warband here, under those eyes, was a genuinely bad idea.
"When I leave, I should find a Feral World."
Zhou Ye turned the idea over in his mind. A Feral World would be ideal — a population of warriors who didn't know anything, and whom he could shape however he wished.
"My Lord Tech-Priest — the Governor requests your presence at his palace. There will be a great victory banquet. The Angels will be attending as well."
"Understood......"
Zhou Ye accepted without hesitation. He pulled off his full exoskeleton, threw on a plain red robe, and left. No gear at all. He was genuinely curious what the Blood Ravens were going to manage to find on his ship.
He had stated clearly, on the record, that he had undergone virtually no body augmentation.
---o---
What followed unfolded about as Zhou Ye had expected.
Aestia had not only held against the Chaos incursion — it had, in a roundabout way, used the Chaos forces to purge the Genestealer infestation entirely. The cult would eventually return, of course. These things always did. But that was a problem for decades or centuries from now.
So Aestia stood, for the moment, as a clean world. Setting aside the minor detail of a Necron dynasty having taken up residence in the Ecclesiarchy — xenos were not heretics. They caused no corruption. What would be, would be.
At the Governor's palace, the cups flowed freely and the toasts ran long.
Except for a few Blood Ravens who were nursing very noticeably bruised and swollen faces. As for why they were bruised — they had reached toward one of Zhou Ye's combat automata, and received a powered fist to the face for their trouble.
Their captain was currently grumbling under his breath in a corner, nursing his grievances. This deployment had cost them significantly. They'd swept the entire hive city and come away with nothing. They'd tried to get something off the Cogboy and gotten beaten back. A Cogboy with no augmentations — what was even the point of that? And those three Kastalan Robots had apparently been programmed with a specific protocol against the Blood Ravens. Smart enough to be called proper A.I., and the moment any of them got close — iron fist to the face, immediate, no delay.
Zhou Ye paid the grumbling absolutely no attention. He was drinking, and drinking well, when it caught up with him — and then, quite without warning, he leaned back and announced:
"Little pups of the White Scars — gather round. I'm going to tell you a few stories about your father. About Chagatai Khan."
The noise in the banquet hall dropped to silence in an instant. The assembled nobles, who a moment ago had been toasting with great enthusiasm, nearly disappeared under the tables.
Translators note: the author uses em dash too frequently :_:. I'll try change things up