From high above, the street grid of the UED capital looked like the ripples of a lake after a stone was thrown in, chaotic waves spreading rapidly from several points.
Several Carcharodon Terminator veterans were like red-hot icebreakers splitting the pack, tearing shocking fissures in the UED defense system.
At a military checkpoint in the city's northwest, four guards in powered exoskeletons glanced around nervously.
Their helmet displays were full of gibberish, their comms channels crackled with harsh static—clearly the fruit of the Hui AI's electronic warfare.
Suddenly, the air warped over an empty patch of ground three meters away. In blue-white teleport light, a blood-smeared Terminator suit took shape.
"Open fire! Fire now!"
The captain screamed as he yanked the trigger.
A mesh of orange-red at the muzzle, but the rounds were bounced by the Storm Shield's energy field before they even reached the target, "chiseling" dozens of shallow pits into the walls on either side of the street.
The Carcharodon veteran under fire didn't even raise his weapon.
He slid his left leg back half a step; the hydraulics in his power armor hummed with coiled force, and then—
Boom! Boom!
The ground cracked under the drive of that colossal weight, the several-ton steel body exploding into a near-supersonic short burst.
Splutch—!!
The foremost soldier was turned into a smear of flesh on impact, the exoskeleton's frame twisted into a grotesque shape and crushed into the wall.
The second man had just enough time to show terror before the power claw punched through his chest, the still-beating heart crushed in its palm.
"Mon… monster!"
CLANG— CLANG—!
The remaining two turned to run and had their knees blown out by precise bolter fire.
They fell into their own blood, screaming, as the Terminator walked away without looking back toward the next target, sticky gore trailing long on the pavement from his boot soles.
Scenes like this played out across the city.
At the central square's AA position, elite troops massed around armored units and shield generators to form a defense. They watched the green dots for friendly forces vanish one after another on their tactical screens, cold sweat slicking their hands on their weapons.
"Hold formation!" the commander tried to steady them. "We—"
Kra-khoom—!!
Before he could finish, the shield generator overhead exploded.
CLANG— CLANG-CLANG—!!
Four Terminators appeared from four directions at once. Crossed bolter fire turned the emplacement into a slaughterhouse in an instant.
Troops trying to work the rotary guns were reduced to "parts" with their equipment; the "lucky ones" who ducked into an APC were chewed into chunks along with the vehicle by a power claw.
The whole massacre took less than fifteen seconds. When the last survivor curled up shaking among his comrades' entrails, the Carcharodons were already striding away through the blood.
The fiercest resistance broke out on the forecourt of the presidential palace.
Thirty Presidential Guards in the newest power armor formed a ring formation. Their experimental plasma cannons did, in fact, cause the Terminators some trouble—
One veteran hadn't brought his shield up; a thumb-sized hole was melted into the armor on his left shoulder.
That only roused the Carcharodons' bloodlust.
He plunged straight into the formation, each sweep of the power claw flinging up a rain of blood.
A brave officer slashed a knife into his back, but didn't even scratch the armor; a heartbeat later the officer's upper body exploded under a backhanded punch.
When reinforcements arrived, they found only a hill of bodies stacked in the center of the square.
"They… they never meant to occupy the city…" an officer muttered, slumped in a pool of blood. "They're teaching us a lesson…"
Indeed.
The physical damage wrought by two Astartes squads was actually limited, but the hit to morale was catastrophic.
When ordinary soldiers saw that their most elite special units were crushed like ants, when officers realized not even the presidential palace was safe, the will to resist melted like snow under sunlight.
In the city hall's underground shelter, a staff officer suddenly smashed the tactical display.
Onscreen, whole armored companies were lined up surrendering under white flags.
"It's over!" he told his stunned colleagues with a bitter smile. "We can't even stop one of their recon teams. What war are we fighting?"
At that moment, every surviving soldier's tactical terminal received the same plain-text transmission, signed by the Human Empire's Mar Sara Command:
"All UED military personnel who lay down their arms will receive POW treatment. Those who resist to the end will be killed."
It was appended with dozens of HD clips showing surrendered troops being properly interned.
But this kind of coercive suppression was only temporary.
With no massed force garrison, a handful of Astartes squads alone could never exercise practical control over all of Universe 18 Earth.
And the Carcharodon veteran squad's strategic focus was now on the UED Headquarters—
The complex that symbolized the highest authority of the Earth Federation.
Whoosh— whoosh—!
Two Carcharodon veterans flashed into being in the center of the headquarters plaza.
Before the blue glow of teleport had even fully faded, they shot off like loosed arrows toward different target towers.
The one on the left had bloody golden shark-fins on his pauldron; the one on the right carried a battle flag stained with dried blood.
Their mag-boots shattered the stone paving; each step left a web of cracks in the meticulously polished tiles.
"Enemy contact! Sector A!"
"Second target in Sector B!"
The headquarters guards reacted by the book.
Unlike the outer units whose morale had collapsed, these elite guards in black power armor were true diehards.
Their plasma rifles charged in an instant; blue-white globes sealed every approach in an instant.
"For the Earth Federation!"
The guard captain's battlecry thundered from the armor's vox.
Hundreds of elites fired at once. Crossed fire turned the center of the square into a kill zone; plasma melted the fountain sculpture into glassy flow, heat twisting the air into eerie ripples.
But the two Carcharodons had already anticipated this.
The golden-fin veteran cut hard, the Storm Shield's field refracting the oncoming plasma up into the sky.
He used the momentum to leap, the power claw tearing through three layers of blast-rated glass curtain wall.
Glass fell like a rainstorm, refracting rainbow halos in the sun. By the time the guards swung their guns, he was already into the building's third floor; the hallway cameras' last frame was his claw splitting open a blast door.
The banner-bearing veteran chose a more violent breach.
CLANG— CLANG—!
He charged straight into the barrage, bolters roaring over all other fire.
The first volley flipped three guards behind cover; one round hit a man's visor dead-on and his head burst like a sledgehammered melon, red and white spattering in spokes over the marble behind him.
"Stop him!"
The deputy captain screamed as he shoulder-fired a missile.
Whoosh— whoosh—!
The micro-seekers trailed white smoke and shrieked out, but the veteran slipped them with a sidestep.
Kra-khoom—!!
They slammed into the fountain pool behind and threw up a ten-meter plume.
Using the momentary visual mask, the veteran was already in the lines, the cold gleam of the power claw like Death's smile.
Schhkt—!
The first blocker's armor split lengthwise like paper, the broken spine jutting from the cut.
The second guard tried to grapple and was kicked more than twenty meters, a mangled ruin by the time he hit the flagpole base. The banner veteran, boots splashing through blood, burst into the Sector B tower, leaving only shattered bodies behind.
Inside, the resistance was even more frenzied.
Auto-turrets dropped from ceilings; neurotoxin billowed from vents; a suicide team waited behind every security door.
To an Astartes, it was child's play.
The golden-fin veteran sprinted the corridors, bolters snapping precise shots that erased every defense on the way.
A guard peeking around a corner had his upper body blown apart with a single shot, blood painting an exaggerated arc across the ceiling.
When the elevator shaft was blown, the veteran simply tore open the service hatch with his hands and dropped down the cable. The landing shock blew out the entire atrium's glass curtain wall.
Meanwhile, the banner veteran was crushing his way upward.
Each sweep of his power claw kicked up a spray of blood; the Storm Shield bounced every incoming round back.
On the eighteenth floor's ring hall, he met the stiffest resistance—
A dozen elite guards in prototype power armor wielding railguns that could punch tanks.
"For the Federation!" The captain's roar rattled the hall.
"."
The veteran said nothing. He simply kicked his jump pack.
The flame turned the luxurious carpet to ash and slung him like a cannonball into their midst.
One sweep of the claw, and three headless bodies were still in a shooting stance.
A rail slug screamed past his pauldron and blew a two-meter gouge in the wall, but it didn't slow the slaughter to come.
Seconds later, only severed limbs and sparking armor shards remained.
When the two veterans reached their respective target offices, they shattered the bulletproof windows almost simultaneously.
Glass shards fell like diamond rain onto the expensive carpet. Their prey—the two members of the UED High Council—slumped in leather chairs, faces paper-pale.
"Game over." The golden-fin veteran crushed the emergency call device on the desk in his power claw. "The Human Empire sends its regards."
At that moment, every UED unit still fighting received the latest sitrep.
On every holo, the image of two "venerable" councilors dangling like stray dogs from the fists of steel giants became the last straw.
At the same time—
"We've set the appetizer for what comes next. Time to tear the UED down completely and bring the people of this universe home under the Empire."
With the Carcharodon veterans' succinct report, the entire battlespace fell into an eerie hush.
Only static hissed on the comms, as if even the air had frozen.
The next second, the curtain of space was ripped in two—
Within Universe 18 Earth's gravity well, space wrinkled like silk kneaded by an invisible giant's hand.
A golden vortex more than three hundred kilometers across blossomed out of nothing. Energy arcs along its rim vaporized nearby reconnaissance satellites in an instant. The glow at its heart swelled until Earth's entire night hemisphere shone like day.
The first thing to nose through the vortex was a golden ram at least a kilometer long, inscribed with Han-character runes.
Then the prow loomed—like a mountain range—
The ship's mass dwarfed a conventional Emperor-class battleship; its main battery arrays alone rivaled a space station.
Gigantic energy wings unfurled along its flanks like an angel's pinions, each "feather" a lattice of micro field generators that sent rainbow halos rippling through the vacuum.
"Jesus…"
A UED destroyer's radar operator murmured unconsciously as he saw it.
His screen clocked the ship at a staggering thirty kilometers in length—and worse, hundreds of warships followed in its wake, pouring out of the jump corridor.
The Earth Federation's orbital defenses finally reacted, auto-turrets spitting tongues of hopeless fire.
The shots didn't even reach the giant's shields—escorts ringing it swatted them down.
A UED cruiser tried to launch a nuke; the missile was blown midair by a golden beam the instant it left the bay.
The giant ship's belly opened slowly. Thousands of drop-pods spilled out like a swarm.
They burned orange-red tails through the atmosphere, impact zones blanketing every major military base. More despair for the UED: each pod radiated the same energy signature as the Carcharodons—
Which meant every pod held an Astartes.
On the ground, people stared up at the apocalyptic sight.
By a city fountain, a young mother clutched her trembling child.
In an underground shelter, an old man knelt toward a holo and bowed.
Even UED soldiers still fighting lowered their weapons and stared at the sky in a daze.
"To all inhabitants of Universe 18 Earth," a commanding voice boomed across every channel, even hijacking civilian broadcasts. "The Human Empire Expeditionary Fleet has arrived. Those who lay down their arms will be spared. Those who resist will face purification."
On the giant warship's bridge, a giant in black-gold power armor gazed at the blue planet in the projection.
Liquid gold light flowed over his armor. Each step left a shining print on the deck. When another "Astartes"—over three meters tall in golden plate—asked whether to begin orbital bombardment, the giant only shook his head lightly:
"No need."
By now, the UED Headquarters was a shambles.
The remaining generals found every electronic system out of control. The blue dots for their own forces vanished at shocking speed on the strategic holomap.
Worst of all, even the deeply buried strategic missile silos showed "Access Locked." Clearly that "damned" Hui AI had taken over everything.
"We… should surrender."
A minister finally sagged into his chair, broken.
On the monitor before him, masses of Astartes had breached the last line and were advancing on the command center.
"For those who can still live…"
As the first ray of sunlight swept the terminator line of Earth's morning, the giant ship's main guns turned slowly to bear on the last defiant UED fleet in lunar orbit.
The golden light gathering at the muzzles dimmed the very star.
They didn't need to fire. The motion alone seemed enough to break the last of the enemy's will.
______
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