The Saviour's fleet group had completely sealed off this vital nexus.
It was like a gigantic metallic ring amid the stars, encircling one key region of the Vostonia Meta-Sector after another.
"This is impossible. How can there be such a colossal army?"
The Anointed's chieftain, Asavar Kul, stared at the sight, and the killing urge in his heart was instantly snuffed out.
Devotees of Khorne feared nothing and would raise their blades to any mighty foe—but that was only when there was at least a chance of victory that such courage would flare.
Right now, there was no chance of victory at all against this might.
The Anointed's fleet was only a few dozen warships. How were they supposed to stand against the Saviour's tidal wave of metal behemoths?
Compared to the Saviour's fleet group, their ships were like ants at the foot of a mountain. Even the notion of resisting was laughable.
To put it bluntly, they didn't even have the qualifications to die trying.
"Hold your tongues and shut down all signals."
Asavar Kul's voice unconsciously softened. His usual bellowing volume dropped as well, as if he was afraid that terrifying existence might hear him.
He forced his trembling body under control. "Navigators, full retreat. Do not provoke that one's fleet."
There was no way to fight this battle. Better to slink back to base and hide.
He had no choice. The Saviour's name carried weight even within Khorne's own realm, second only to the Blood God himself. If they could surround and hunt that being, Khornate followers would go mad with excitement.
But in the face of such an overwhelming disparity, all those memories of terror tied to the Saviour surged back up.
Fear bit deeper than devotion.
Yet there was no response at all on the Anointed's command channel, which left the chieftain puzzled. He roared, demanding:
"Answer me! Do you dare question the orders of a Champion?!"
Asavar Kul's anger began to rise.
He knew this kind of retreat was a great humiliation, yet there was nothing he could do.
The Chaos Champion had, for once, become clear-headed, fully aware of the gulf between himself and the Saviour. He did not even have the right to take part in the hunt, much less to face the Saviour's armies in isolated battle.
Retreat was the only option.
Just as he was fuming to the point of wanting to kill someone, a message finally came through on the channel—its voice shaking uncontrollably.
As though something truly horrifying had happened.
"By the Blood God, we can't retreat. The space behind us has already been occupied, we can't even get a shot at entering a Warp transit lane.
We're… we're finished!"
"So the silence on the channel isn't contempt for the retreat order. It's fear."
Realising this, Asavar Kul actually felt a little lighter.
Then he immediately grasped the real meaning and felt even greater fear. "What did you say? Our Warp routes are blocked?!"
Before the Khornate Champion could demand more details, he felt the surrounding space ripple, followed by the glare of the Warp.
One after another, flashes bloomed all around the fleet—that was the Saviour's armadas, mass-translated in from the Warp!
Asavar Kul looked through the viewing dome at the dense mass of vessels around them, and the terror in his heart surged.
"Blood God above… we've been encircled by that being!"
Now, in front of the Anointed's fleet was an insurmountable wall of ships, and behind them a new wave had just translated in, sealing them in from the rear as well.
It was a pincer from both sides, and they were trapped in the middle.
To make matters worse, thanks to the mass-translation, the Anointed's fleet had, by pure misfortune, ended up dead centre within the greater armada.
"M-my lord, surely the Saviour won't notice us… right?"
The Anointed's lieutenant asked in a trembling whisper.
There could hardly be a more hopeless situation than this. Through their observation ports, all they could see in every direction—front, rear, left, right—were the Saviour's warships.
An enemy so vast blotted out the void around them.
It was no different from jumping in on a 'surprise boarding raid' on the enemy's main base, only to realise your side has sent exactly one ship—you—and the enemy's entire main force happens to be at home.
The Anointed's fleet was utterly small and utterly helpless.
Vmm—
They not only cut all power to their drives, they shut down every light, signal and flame. Everyone held their breath.
The entire fleet's vessels did their best to pretend they were nothing more than a cluster of drifting asteroids in the void.
They could only hope that by doing so, they might fool the Saviour's armadas.
"Seer, can we really fool that existence?"
Asavar Kul turned, uneasy, to the warband's Chief Sorcerer, their wisest member.
Even so, this tactic was hard for him to believe in.
"My lord, this is all the Anointed's fleet can do…"
The Chief Sorcerer wiped the sweat from his brow and kept his voice as steady as he could. "All we can do now is beg for the Blood God's protection, and hope we last until the Saviour's fleet departs.
Rather than being discovered."
The sorcerer could tell that the Saviour's armada was only pausing here to rest. As long as they held out until it moved on, they'd be fine.
At least for now there was no sign they'd been spotted.
"Hey, do you think that Chaos filth fleet is trying to act like an asteroid?"
"Mm, it kind of looks that way. They don't seriously think such a clumsy disguise will work, do they?"
"Blood God fleets really are brainless, hahahaha."
"Keep your voices down while you gossip, would you? It'd be rude if those Chaos abominations heard you."
"Lord Voladi, should we run a deeper sweep for the main force behind this Chaos flotilla?"
At that moment, voices from the Saviour's fleet commanders came over the Anointed's open channels, talking openly.
The tone was merry.
The Saviour's officers had long since noticed the Anointed's ships. That tiny Chaos flotilla sitting in the middle of their battle-group was like a firefly in the night.
It stood out that much.
But to Asavar Kul and his warriors, those lighthearted jibes sounded like death sentences.
"No, impossible. We've been discovered by that being!"
The Khornate Champion's long-rotted heart hammered in his chest, as though it were about to burst free of his ribcage.
It had been a very long time since he'd felt fear so strong it triggered a physical reaction. Even his breathing turned ragged.
"N-no… maybe they're lying to us on purpose, trying to trick us into panicking and exposing ourselves?"
The lieutenant's hunched, decayed frame trembled.
He couldn't accept the truth and clung to this last straw.
The next instant, his voice cut off abruptly.
Because the bridge of the flagship suddenly flared with light. Blinding beams lit up every hideous, despairing face.
They had been found. That was an iron-clad fact.
Floodlights from the Saviour's fleets were sweeping across them. Countless beams were focused on the Anointed's ships.
All that combined illumination turned into a great cone of light, pinning each vessel's position in the void like a spotlight.
At the same time, throughout every hull of the Anointed's fleet, they heard the stern voice of a Saviour-fleet commander:
"In the name of the Saviour, all you abominations within, hear this! You are now surrounded by His Majesty the Saviour's fleet. Immediately disembark, kneel with your hands behind your heads, and await judgement.
Otherwise, you will be met with annihilating fire!"
The commander's tone brooked no argument, ordering the Anointed to abandon ship en masse and wait to be processed.
If not for the fact that the Adeptus Mechanicus wanted certain Chaos warships preserved for research, they would already have opened fire and scrapped these abominable vessels.
The power disparity was so vast that mere threat was enough to accomplish their aims.
However, the Saviour's commanders had overlooked one factor: how much humiliation Khornate faithful could endure.
They could not accept surrendering to the so-called False Emperor in shame.
"No! I will never bow to that pretender Emperor! Such threats carry no honour.
If you have any guts at all, come and defeat me! Meet me in a blood duel!"
Asavar Kul bellowed into the open channel, battle-axe raised.
He would rather die in combat than submit in disgrace.
"False Emperor! Fight me!"
The Khornate Champion burned his bridges, hurling wild provocations in the hope of drawing out the Saviour or some high-ranking warrior on the other side.
Even if he died in such a duel, it would be a glorious end.
His words plunged the channel into a brief silence, then a tightly clenched, furious yet controlled voice from one of the Saviour's commanders came through:
"Target: the Anointed's fleet. Second, Fourth and Fifth battle-groups, full salvo!"
The Chaos filth had just insulted His Majesty the Saviour. That crossed a line the commanders could not forgive.
"Blood God, wait, wait! We haven't finished talking! We can surrender, we can still negotiate!"
The lieutenant and the other non-Khornate members went chalk-white, doing their best to salvage this looming catastrophe.
But it was far too late.
The Saviour's armadas had already opened fire. In an instant, the unleashed beams burned the Chaos creatures' retinas and filled their sight.
Their void shields popped like soap bubbles. More lances and torpedoes slammed into their armour.
A single broadside from those lines of warships was all it took to tear the entire fleet into blazing, fragmented wreckage.
…
In the void.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—
A vast Chaos fleet arrived, surging waves of unclean power distorting the surrounding space.
On the outer hulls of every warship in this Chaos armada, there was the same terrifying emblem: a leering, monstrous eye.
This was the symbol of the Ten Thousand Eyes warband.
The Ten Thousand Eyes were a large warband commanded by the Fallen Angel of Chaos, Seraphax, who in practice ruled over countless worlds within the Imperium's dark half.
They commanded numerous armies, including masses of warp-tainted beastmen, and their might was considerable.
This major Chaos warband had ravaged the Gloaming Reaches for years on end.
Their name alone inspired terror.
Aboard the Malign Eye.
In the desecrated cathedral hall, where the shattered remains of a statue of the Emperor lay toppled, an unholy throne had been forged in their midst. Facing it stood two snarling, blood-caked iron crosses.
The blood-red iron crosses were studded with spikes and runes, each bearing the symbol of a Primarch—one for the Lion, one for the Saviour.
The Lord of Ten Thousand Eyes, the terrifying undivided Chaos Sorcerer—Seraphax—planned to hunt these two Primarchs, using them as sacrificial offerings to utterly defile the Emperor's soul.
To make the Master of Mankind into a true dark king.
"Ah… the prophecy shifts again. We shall take part in this great hunt, join in this victory, and seize yet more delicious spoils."
A forbidden lamp floated over Seraphax's shoulder, his whole form wreathed in sickly green warp-fire.
His voice was like the hiss of ten thousand venomous tongues. "A pity we failed to pen in the Lion and that… Saviour at Avalons. Otherwise, we would not have missed that destined moment.
We could have entered the hunt from the very start."
Chaos would win in Vostonia. That much, in his eyes, was beyond doubt.
But how Chaos won, and who exactly claimed that victory, were entirely different questions.
A faint worry flickered through Seraphax's gaze: that some other Chaos faction might steal the prize he had set his eyes on.
He had to ensure that at least one of the two—Lion or Saviour—was brought to this desecrated cathedral, then use their flesh and bones in a sorcerous rite.
Only then could he trigger that ancient, blasphemous array.
To achieve this, the Lord of Ten Thousand Eyes had stripped his territory of troops, assembling every force he could and rushing them to the Vostonia Meta-Sector.
This was a fleet capable of smashing any major fortress-nexus, boasting thousands of warships.
Its presence was fearsome beyond words.
With such a force, he would even dare raid the outskirts of the Sol System.
This was the backbone of Ten Thousand Eyes' confidence. Seraphax could not bear the thought of a Primarch being snatched up by some disgusting Chaos god and ruining his plans.
He needed meticulous arrangements and flawless scheming, so that at the decisive instant he could strike and steal the kill.
"My lord, we are about to reach the outer region of the Vostonia Meta-Sector. Once there, the fleet will lie low, awaiting the moment foretold."
The Fallen Angel commander, Belar, knelt on one knee as he reported to his master.
As he spoke, the tremors running through the Malign Eye's bridge intensified.
That meant the flagship and the fleet were about to tear free of the Warp, completing their transit and reaching their destination.
"That is the destined place spoken of by prophecy. There, we shall witness our final opportunity."
Seraphax nodded, satisfied. He had cast the auguries nine times, and every result had been the same.
There could be no mistake.
Chaos Sorcerers held the number nine in special reverence. It meant boundless change and the convergence of fate.
Just as his words fell, the ship bucked. Outside the upper galleries, the glitter of countless lights came into view.
They had dropped out of the Warp and re-entered the void.
The Lord of Ten Thousand Eyes issued a fresh order. "Raise every masking screen and go to ground. Dispatch scouting vessels to penetrate the core of Vostonia."
He stared at the star-map hanging in the air, woven from sorceries, and pointed to a world named "Calisde."
"I have a very clear premonition. The Saviour and the Lion will converge there and clash with the Chaos gods' avatars in a ferocious struggle.
We need only wait. Then…"
Seraphax's ambitions soared as he plotted his glorious campaign and the ideal moment to strike. When two beasts of that magnitude tore at each other, they were bound to be left covered in wounds.
The Ten Thousand Eyes only had to stay hidden and then, at the perfect second, bare their fangs and sink poison into Lion and Saviour alike.
To drag them down into utter darkness and agony.
But before he could finish, a subordinate interrupted him.
"My lord, we are in serious trouble."
Belar's voice shook. "The fleet of Ten Thousand Eyes seems to have already been detected by the Saviour—and has fallen into a massive encirclement!"
The Fallen commander was so stunned he had not even remembered to perform the proper obeisance before making his report.
Seraphax's brows drew together in a faint frown of displeasure.
He loathed being interrupted. To him, that was a profound disrespect, a desecration that demanded punishment.
Then understanding dawned, and his expression froze in disbelief. "Impossible. My prophecy cannot—"
Before he could finish denying it, he fell silent, embarrassed.
Because the truth was right before his eyes.
Those specks of light outside were not distant stars at all, but the glow cast by warships. The fleet's auspexes were screaming with hostile contacts, so many that the sensors briefly overloaded.
All of which proved one simple fact: they had entered the Saviour's encirclement.
Worst of all, the flagship of the Hope Primarch, Emperor of Humanity—the Dreamweaver—was right there in front of the Malign Eye.
The baroque ramming-spur on that leviathan's prow was almost poking into the Malign Eye's viewing dome.
"It's over. It's all over…"
Seraphax sagged back into his throne, feeling his limbs go weak as the sudden reversal hammered at his mind.
A campaign planned for a thousand years, a grand crusade, and at the very first step they had blundered straight into the heavily fortified main base of the enemy?
And the opposing fleet was so vast it blotted out the stars, its numbers a hundred, a thousand times greater than his?
The war was over before it had even started. With what, exactly, were they supposed to fight such a foe?
Outside, the void erupted in blossoms of light—the last flare of dying ships.
The Chaos masses of Ten Thousand Eyes watched the Anointed fleet meet its end.
A terror-famous warband in the Gloaming Reaches snuffed out in an instant, without the slightest chance to resist, swallowed in a storm of fire.
More terrifying still, the Saviour's fleet deployed boarding parties and servo-automata to comb through the wrecks for surviving Chaos warriors.
Those captured were entombed in special cruciform execution-engines drifting in the void, to be burned by holy light.
These were the latest inventions of a research branch affiliated with the Inquisition, made to instil dread in the hearts of Chaos.
The cruel yet strangely sacred devices floated across the galactic darkness, shedding pale radiance.
The Chaos beings trapped within them screamed as their souls were torn apart.
It was agony on a spiritual level, spreading far into the surrounding Warp and chilling any who felt it.
Unless someone intervened from outside, the sentence would go on and on, until the prisoner's soul was utterly annihilated.
The horror of the sight and the desolate screaming left the Ten Thousand Eyes warriors deeply shaken.
With the Anointed's miserable fate in full view, no one in the warband had the nerve to make a single aggressive move.
Every one of them could feel it: the morale of their fleet had collapsed.
Seraphax, however, did not simply curl up and give in. He drew a long breath and sketched out a new plan.
"There is still a way. If we can mount a boarding strike and smash the Saviour's flagship, seize the Saviour himself, we may yet escape this place alive."
Warp travel and sorcerous teleportation were both locked down. Their only remaining option was boarding action.
In this galaxy, it was a tried-and-true method for overturning a battlefield.
The Lord of Ten Thousand Eyes mustered his most elite bodyguards.
He intended to launch a desperate boarding assault on the Saviour's flagship before the imperial fleets opened fire in earnest.
It was their last shred of hope.
At that same time, inside the Dreamweaver's sacred bridge-hall.
"Whose brilliant idea was it to pick this assembly point? To anyone else, it'd look like the Chaos home base…"
Eden stared out at the Chaos fleets arriving one after another and felt just a little annoyed.
He had come here mainly to use the massed imperial fleets as cover, disguising his own position so the enemy wouldn't know which front he was actually on.
But he had barely arrived before the Chaos warbands started dropping in like dumplings into a pot.
All lining up in one spot, apparently.
Still, that had its upside too. With so many of them showing up together, he could take the chance to cull them en masse. If he let them finish gathering on their own terms, that would be a real headache.
"Ten Thousand Eyes… Seraphax?"
Eden skimmed the intel on the Chaos fleet directly ahead of the Dreamweaver and frowned slightly. "These idiots are pretty bold. Open a channel to them."
He remembered this lot as the ones who'd been scheming to corrupt the Emperor into some kind of dark god. And he just so happened to be interested in exactly that sort of knowledge, in order to prepare for any future 'blackening' of His Radiant Dad.
Vmm—
A massive psy-comm array projected a signal into the Malign Eye.
With the blessings of the Machine-Goddess woven into the Saviour's own psychic might, and at such close range besides, the transmission reached its target without the slightest interference.
An instant later, an apparition of the Saviour appeared in the Malign Eye's desecrated hall.
"Seraphax, what exactly do you think you're doing?"
Eden narrowed his eyes at the Lord of Ten Thousand Eyes and the bodyguard retinue gathered behind him, his expression very much that of an elder brother catching a younger sibling in the act.
"S-Saviour?!"
Seraphax also saw the towering psychic projection, and reflexively stepped back.
Having one's secret plotting shattered like this was a bitter blow—made worse when he took in the scene behind the Saviour.
It was a throne-hall, and behind the golden-armoured Saviour stood two Primarchs, with more legendary warriors and Custodians arrayed beyond them. The sheer power represented in that image formed a living sacred fresco.
Any pious imperial believer would immediately recognise the composition as mirroring the hallowed epic art of the Emperor mustering his strength on Terra.
The vision's awe shattered Seraphax's mental defences. He understood in that moment that even if he launched his boarding attack, he would simply be throwing lives away.
There was no point.
Worse, he might earn himself a particularly horrific execution and an eternity of torment.
"Saviour, perhaps we can… talk this out."
The Lord of Ten Thousand Eyes quietly lowered his weapon, his will to live in overdrive, and gave a small bow.
He did not share the Khornates' rigid notion of 'honour' and had a far more flexible bottom line.
He could talk. He could be loyal.
Seraphax swallowed and spoke in a grave tone,
"You may harbour doubts, yet in truth the Ten Thousand Eyes are also a part of mankind. We too wish to block the hateful schemes of the Chaos gods alongside the Imperium…"
His voice grew more resolute as he went on. "The fleets of Ten Thousand Eyes are willing to cooperate with you and accept your command!"
The meaning could not have been clearer.
The Lord of Ten Thousand Eyes was 'explaining' that they had come all this way to reinforce the Saviour.
At this point, he had no choice but to be loyal.
Loyal!!!
(End of Chapter)
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