53: Chapter 53: The remains of Tyrannosaurus weren't even cold yet. The Overlord added a line to the battle report: "This is the victory you wanted."

The battle report following the total annihilation of the Tyranid vanguard tendril was edited by the Overmind within the Hive Mind and sent simultaneously to all members of the War Council via a quantum-state link. When Marcus Aurelian read this report on the main screen of the Wrath of the Emperor's bridge, the fracture in his right arm was emitting subtle healing pulses under the military doctor's portable scanner. The format of the report was concise to the point of being cold—the numbers of destroyed Spore Cysts, Cyst Ships, and Genestealers were listed in three lines, while the combat effectiveness evaluation of the Titan-Eater was a string of unadorned performance figures. Finally, a note was attached: The Tyranid vanguard tendril has been completely annihilated, and the Gene-Devourer Counter-template has been deployed to all Brood Queen nodes. The Tyranid genetic samples recovered by The Swarm will complete targeted integration in the next incubation cycle. Marcus Aurelian, this is the victory you wanted.

Marcus stared at the last line for a long time. The military doctor reminded him that he shouldn't lean on the table with his fractured arm for the time being, but he didn't hear it, simply reading the battle report again from beginning to end. In his twenty or thirty years of military service, he had received countless battle reports—it was the Imperial Navy's custom to package a pyrrhic victory as glory, gloss over losses, and exaggerate the enemy's wreckage several times over. But the Overmind's report had not a single word of embellishment. It took what humans called "victory" and wrote it as a harvest using the most objective data.

Bern walked up from the flank of the bridge, his Psychic Talisman still dim and lifeless. After scanning the emotionless data in the report, he said, "Calling the total annihilation of the Tyranid vanguard tendril 'the victory you wanted,' listing battle losses as performance parameters, and treating our salvation as an incidental note in a data archive. It's not mocking us; it's telling us—this is enough. He gave the Imperium a turn it can go out and announce."

Shortly after, Nephilak's encrypted quantum communication lit up in the tactical projection, overlapping with the hangar footage of the Eternal Echo. He finished reviewing all the supplementary texts of the covenant before speaking: "All filed terms of the void covenant have been verified by the Core Matrix. Humans, you will next receive a formal inquiry from the High Lords of Terra to Speaker Marcus—at that time, please clarify in your response that it is The Swarm, not you, who is allied with the Solemmnace Dynasty. By the way, tell your Emperor that when my race went to war with the Old Ones, your sun hadn't even begun hydrogen fusion." Marcus replied with an expressionless "Received," then turned to the communications officer and ordered a formal report to be sent to Terra, attaching Nephilak's original words at the end. Then he reopened the holographic star map, where the cold green outline of the Blackstone Defense Line and the pale blue markers of the Imperial control zone remained side-by-side. Outside the defense line, the Tyranid Drop Pods, swept into debris, were being decomposed and recycled lap by lap under the patrol of Brood Lord formations.

At the same time, the Titan-Eater was descending from Metallis's orbit into the atmosphere. As it passed through the industrial cloud layers, it retracted its four-limbed piercing bone blades, and the seven sets of Resonance Chambers in its chest and abdomen switched from fire-control mode to low-power standby. At the gap in the Forge Temple's dome, Drones were repaving its docking platform with adamantium-chitin composite materials, and the umbilical interface between the platform base and the blackstone engine was docked under the guidance of mechanical arms. It lay on the creep, the cold green light patterns of its void-level core becoming dim and long during the synchronized pulses of the blackstone engine. A Brood Queen monitored the core's cooling feedback nearby while sharing the Tyranid genetic data recovered by the Drones with the Overmind. The Gene Analysis Sac produced a new detailed decoding: the Tyranid gene-devouring sequence could not only be reverse-compiled by The Swarm, but the bio-alloy structure of some symbiotic chambers also happened to fill the micro-cracks in the Zerg living carapace caused by high-energy particle impacts.

The Overmind reviewed all gene integration plans within the Hive Mind and approved the start of targeted incubation for a new batch of Ultralisks and Brood Lords. The adamantium-chitin composite material would be mixed with the Tyranid bio-alloy recovered from the wreckage according to a new formula, while the newborn Zerglings and Hydralisks would be pre-implanted with gene-devourer counter-modules and improved symbiotic armor during the embryonic stage. All engines of the Blackstone Defense Line remained at full power for anti-psychic suppression, while the leviathan mothership's Living Railgun arrays were re-calibrating using the Tyranid wreckage, incorporating the weaknesses exposed when piercing the command neural layer into the next generation of ammunition templates.

A new batch of Ultralisks on Graia's orbit were breaking out of their shells. Drones were decomposing the newly recovered Tyranid symbiotic tissue into nutrient slurry along the creep pipes and injecting it into the Larva Incubation Chambers. Brood Lords continued to patrol the perimeter of the defense line, clearing the remaining Tyranid spore clouds piece by piece. After finishing the assessment of the current state of the joint defense line of the two races, the Overmind composed a short broadcast in the Hive Mind and pushed it to all Brood Queen nodes: "The genetic samples of the Tyranid vanguard tendril have been recovered and integrated. Tyranid devouring methods have lost their effectiveness before this defense line, but the main fleet has not yet deployed its main force. Our human allies are about to receive inquiries from the Imperial heartland—let them deal with the politics. The Swarm continues to feed."