A full day and night later. The Royal Court Plaza on Planet Dal.
The bedrock that had once been carpeted with the mangled remains of the Dal royal guard was entirely cleared off.
Eighty-six thousand Xenos corpses had been dragged to the edge of the plaza by the Dawn Defense Force's engineering corps. They were piled into a massive mountain of bodies sitting a hundred and fifty feet high, with a base stretching a thousand feet across.
Green gore seeped continuously from the bottom of the pile, converging into winding little streams that flowed into the low-lying areas, turning the entire western half of the plaza into a muddy, sludgy swamp.
Engineers in hazard gear were systematically spraying the corpse mountain with a specialized biological enzyme degrading agent.
That stuff could completely break down organic matter into harmless water and carbon dioxide within a week.
It was just one of the many highly practical technologies Aurelian had developed over the last twenty-three years of constant warfare...
After all, when you're a world rebuilding from the ashes, the one thing you never run out of is dead bodies that need processing.
Over on the eastern side of the plaza.
A thousand standard-issue, dark gray military tents were perfectly lined up in a grid formation, transforming the former slaughterhouse in front of the pyramid into a massive temporary command post and field hospital.
Medics frantically darted between the tents. Stretchers hauled the wounded in and out in an endless rotation, burning through coagulant gel and anti-infection nanites like tap water.
--
At the very top of the pyramid, in King Charles's former throne room.
Paul stood in front of a hundred-foot-tall observation window, his back facing the spot where Charles's throne used to be.
That throne, forged from adamantium and human skulls, had been chopped cleanly in half by his Watcher's Axe just two hours ago.
The scraps had already been shipped down to the Tech-Priests' temporary workshop to be melted down into raw materials.
Standing behind him right now were all the core members of the Crimson Dawn chapter...
Tax Bro, Schrodinger Bro, White Scars, Blood Angel, and G Bro.
Along with a whole roster of veteran player representatives: [Have You Been Loyal Today?], [Don't Ask Me My Orky Senses Tell Me It'll Work], [Execute Old Man the War Criminal], [Paradox Players Aren't War Criminals], [The Imperium's Last Gambler], and [Grandfather Nurgle Loves All].
Helovia stood about half a step behind Paul's right shoulder, gripping her staff and fully clad in her silver-white psychic power armor.
Her long silver hair drifted softly without any wind, buoyed by pure psychic resonance.
She was thirty-four years old now.
The same eleven-year-old girl Paul had scooped out of a miserable worker line out in the Redblaze Wasteland twenty-four years ago.
Today, she was the de facto administrator of Aurelian, the single most powerful mortal strictly beneath Planetary Governor Cage Lawrence.
But standing next to Paul right now, her posture and demeanor hadn't changed one bit from twenty-three years ago.
Standing to Paul's right were the two commanding generals of the Dawn Defense Force...
General Roger Theodore and General Ruhl Montgomery.
Beside them stood the Commander of the Dawn Guard Battalion, Luka Knox.
The same six-year-old boy, the one who had been slowly dying of starvation and disease in his older sister Adela's arms. (TL/N: For those who forget them, they are mentioned in chapter 83)
He was twenty-nine now.
Standing six-foot-five, with a jawline sharp enough to be plastered on any Imperial recruitment poster.
He wore the custom crimson-and-silver commander-pattern power armor of the Dawn Guard Battalion, the Crimson Dawn insignia proudly branded over his left chest plate.
During the grueling twenty-four-hour siege, he had personally led the 3rd Company of the Guard Battalion in a brutal flanking maneuver into the eastern district of the Dal Royal Court.
During the critical window when the Astartes players were bogged down by the Dal royal guard's main force, Luka had used purely conventional mortal troops to violently tear through three separate layers of the Dal defensive lines.
He personally executed fifty-seven elite Dal officers.
Along with over a thousand standard Dal soldiers.
He walked out of that meat grinder with a flawless casualty-to-kill ratio of zero to 1,357.
It was a combat record that easily rivaled, and even surpassed, the majority of the system-augmented Astartes players.
Paul turned around.
His dark gold eyes swept across every single person in the room.
"The Royal Court is entirely under our control."
"The main Dal garrison forces stationed here are essentially annihilated. The stragglers are currently routing toward the other continents."
"Next step..."
"We sweep the entire planet."
"Every single Dal."
"Military or civilian."
"Leave absolutely no survivors."
Not a single person in the room raised an objection.
Even General Roger's notoriously stern face didn't twitch a single muscle.
Through recovered logs and journals, they all had a crystal-clear understanding of what Dal "civilian" daily life looked like.
More importantly, they had all seen the forty-five million, seven hundred and thirty thousand human beings rescued from the livestock pens sitting right behind the Royal Court.
Men, women, the elderly, little kids.
Every single one of them was severely emaciated with dead, hollow eyes.
Every single one of them was covered in overlapping, horrific layers of old surgical scars.
They were the markings of being treated as living, breathing ingredients during the Xenos hunting seasons.
Every scar corresponded to a very specific chunk of flesh that had been carved directly off their bodies.
When the medics conducted the preliminary physicals, they discovered a horrifying reality: the humans who had been penned up for over a decade...
Had their livers, their kidneys, and even sections of their bone marrow repeatedly harvested.
The Dal surgical technology was just advanced enough to keep their "ingredients" alive post-op, purely so they could harvest them again later.
When Luka Knox saw the dense, overlapping web of scars on the rescued survivors with his own eyes, he had stood there in complete silence for a very long time.
Then he walked out to an empty dirt patch outside the pens, bent over, and violently threw up for ten minutes straight.
When he finally came back, there was absolutely nothing left in his bright blue eyes except a terrifying, freezing fire.
So standing right in front of Paul right now, hearing the words "leave no survivors."
His expression didn't change at all.
He just instinctively tightened his grip on the hilt of the compact chainsword hanging at his waist.
"Listen up, everyone."
Paul spoke, instantly pulling the attention of the entire room front and center.
"The Dal Royal Court is ours. Roughly forty percent of the planetary armed forces were wiped out here. The remaining sixty percent are fleeing toward the other hemisphere."
"The orbital fleet has a total blockade on the planet. Not a single Dal ship is getting off this planet."
"What comes next is a long, highly tedious mopping-up and purification campaign."
"But I won't be here to command it."
The room fell into a dead, confused silence for two seconds.
"I'm taking a strike team and heading to a neighboring star system."
Paul's gaze swept over the veteran players.
"There's another annihilation campaign happening over there."
Blood Angel practically answered on pure instinct. "Is this fight... super critical?"
Paul nodded.
Tax Bro, blunt as always, spoke up. "What kind of fight? We purging more xenos like here?"
"The Cleansing of Laeran."
The exact second Paul dropped that name, half the players in the room snapped their heads up.
A highly dangerous glint sparked to life in Blood Angel's eyes. "The 28th Expeditionary Fleet. The Emperor's Children Legion. Primarch Fulgrim..."
He paused, his voice dropping an octave.
"...Slaanesh."
[I'm Not the Regent I'm Just Passing By Guilliman] blurted out without thinking. "Paul, you're not actually planning to..."
He trailed off.
But everyone in the room knew exactly how the rest of that sentence ended.
Interfere with the Horus Heresy.
Actively intervene in Fulgrim's fall to Chaos.
Walk right up to the Four Chaos Gods and try to snatch a key character straight out of their meticulously pre-written script.
Tax Bro sucked in a massive breath of cold air.
"Dude, that is a master plan the Four Gods spent countless eons setting up!"
"You going in there by yourself, isn't that just straight-up..."
He wanted to say suicide, but he swallowed the word right back down.
After all, the guy standing in front of him had literally just gone full dynasty-warriors mode against three Greater Daemons of Khorne twenty-four hours ago.
"I'm not going there to die."
Paul said.
"I'm going there to try."
He turned back around, gazing out the massive window at the quiet, smoke-stained sky.
"To try and see if I can change something."
"Even if it's just a tiny little detail."
"Even if, in the end, I can't change a damn thing."
A highly delicate, loaded silence settled over the room.
Tax Bro scratched the back of his head, muttering under his breath. "Look, Paul, I know you're ridiculously overpowered right now. You chopped up three Khorne Daemons today, and you chopped up a Great Unclean One and a Lord of Change twenty-four years ago..."
"At this point, you're just missing a Slaanesh Greater Daemon to complete the collector's set, right?" White Scars stared straight ahead, entirely deadpan. "Gotta catch all four Chaos Greater Daemons."
Tax Bro glared at him. "That is absolutely not what I meant..."
White Scars didn't blink. "That is exactly what you meant."
A few poorly suppressed, muffled snickers echoed through the room.
Schrodinger Bro didn't laugh with the rest of them. He stared intensely at Paul's back. "Can it actually be changed?"
As a hardcore lore buff, he knew the history of Warhammer inside and out. He obviously knew exactly who Fulgrim was.
The perfectionist Phoenician. The Primarch who fought shoulder-to-shoulder in glorious crusades with Ferrus Manus. The Legion Master who dragged the Emperor's Children to the absolute pinnacle of Imperial glory...
Only to ultimately mutate into a lunatic with a giant snake tail, utterly addicted to sensory overload, who backstabbed his closest brother and personally beheaded him.
"I honestly don't know."
Paul's answer was brutally honest.
"But hope and destiny are both pointing me in that direction."
He raised his right hand. A faint, silver-white psychic glow pooled in his palm.
"The Wisdom trait doesn't lie to me."
"Whatever is unfolding on that planet right now... it requires me to be there."
He lowered his hand, his eyes calm but immovably resolute.
"Whether I can actually change the ending of Fulgrim's fall or not, I have to go."
"If I can change it, the Imperium gains an incredibly powerful ally in the ten-thousand-year war against Chaos."
"If I can't change it..."
"Then at the very least, I'll be there to witness exactly how the Phoenix had its wings broken."
Blood Angel stayed quiet for a long time.
Then, he finally spoke up.
"Paul."
"Do you know just how terrifyingly strong Fulgrim is?"
"He is the Phoenician."
"He is one of the twenty demigods personally forged by the Emperor's own hands."
"Even Warmaster Horus openly admits that Fulgrim is the literal living embodiment of perfect martial arts."
"You're undeniably strong right now, Paul."
"You pulled the wool over Sanguinius's eyes twenty-four years ago, and you just effortlessly 1v3'd three Khorne Daemons today."
"But the Sanguinius thing... you gamed the system."
"Sanguinius never doubted you for a second. Hell, he actively respected you."
"But Fulgrim..."
"Fulgrim possesses absolute, borderline-toxic pride. He is obsessed with achieving the absolute peak of perfection."
"If you stand in his way, I don't care how good your disguise as Custodian Tribune Titus is."
"He will personally chop you into pieces and drag your corpse all the way back to Terra to show the Emperor."
Paul didn't turn around.
"I know."
His voice was incredibly soft.
"Which is exactly why I'm not planning on fighting him head-on."
"I just..."
"I just want to follow my gut and the guidance to go take a look."
"To see if, right before that massive turning point in fate, there's even the tiniest microscopic sliver of an opening."
"An opening to make sure that sword..."
"Never ends up in his hands."
[I'm Not the Regent I'm Just Passing By Guilliman] poked his head out from the back of the crowd.
His face was an absolute mess of deeply conflicted emotions.
"Paul, bro, you're literally trying to snatch food right out of Slaanesh's mouth."
"And you're not just trying to sneak a bite. You're trying to pick up the whole damn dinner plate and walk away with it."
Paul finally turned his head.
A faint, highly amused smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
"And your point is?"
[I'm Not the Regent I'm Just Passing By Guilliman] completely choked on the counter-question.
He opened his mouth, then closed it, slowly realizing he didn't actually have a valid counter-argument.
Twenty-four years ago, this absolute madman had the sheer audacity to pretend to be a Custodian right to Sanguinius's face.
Twenty-four years later, he had the sheer audacity to walk right up to Fulgrim and try to intercept a literal Slaaneshi artifact.
Tax Bro was right. The man's balls were undeniably massive.
--
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