191: Chapter 191 Reinforcements Arrive

The light from the closing of the firmament had not yet dissipated when the counterattack of the Four Chaos Gods reached a state of frenzy.

Karbha had one arm severed by the emperors sword, yet in a fit of wild laughter, he swung his heavy axe with his remaining limb, sending Corax flying. Mortarion's plague cloud was reduced by seventy percent by Corax's shadow scythe, but the remaining thirty percent was enough to bring the Living Metal armor of two Nullifier nodes to life—not as a repair, but as a mutation, a corrupted temple whispering to Nurgle that the Human Federation engineers could not yet comprehend.

Magnus's single eye locked onto Guilliman, as the wreckage of the Thousand Sons and the Ultramarines merged into a metal graveyard in the void, indistinguishable from one another. Meanwhile, Angron, the most crazed butcher under the Blood God, had already smashed through four arbiter-class ships and was launching his seventeenth charge against Alpha-01's annihilation.

Fulgrim had still not personally intervened. He simply stood in the center of the battlefield, smiling and twirling, his liquid metal body reflecting all the brilliant yet desperate light of this slaughter. He was admiring it.

The outer defenses of the Keystone-7 node had completely fallen. Two of the three main power wells had overloaded and exploded, and the last one was emitting a strained, overburdened wail.

If this node fell, the first festering gap would appear in the newly stitched firmament. The Four Chaos Gods would pour back into reality through this opening like bloodthirsty flies, and by then, the Human Federation would lack the resources to perform a second closure in the short term.

In Alpha-01's optic nerve interface, the tactical prediction module highlighted a number in eye-searing red:

Remaining Window Time: Eleven Minutes.

"Order all units still capable of maneuvering," his voice sounded like iron blocks chiseled from ten-thousand-year-old permafrost, "to close in on me. We must buy time for the solidification of the firmament."

Suddenly, a message with a priority exceeding all tactical data links flooded the channel, forcibly projecting a segment of text and coordinates directly onto the retina of every Human Federation Commander:

Abyssal Scythe Fleet, arrived at designated positions.

Jump engine cooling countdown: Thirty-two seconds.

Error correction complete. Target lock-on finished.

— Lei Huan.

Alpha-01 was stunned for a moment.

Then he smiled—a long-awaited, genuine smile, like a battle-hardened veteran hearing the horn of reinforcements in a desperate situation.

"All fleet units," he took a deep breath, "clear a firing window for the abyssal scythe."

Thirty-two seconds later.

At the edge of the Eye of Terror, in the core airspace where the legions of the Four Chaos Gods were most dense, most frenzied, and most certain of their victory.

The void tore open.

It wasn't the murky, pus-and-blood-dripping tear of a Warp rift. Instead, it was sliced open by a force that was absolutely sharp and absolutely precise.

A spectral blue light, like a spear of judgment thrust from the nothingness, pierced accurately into the battlefield. As the light dissipated, a massive fleet appeared before everyone's eyes: eleven eternal-class titan ships, far more slender and colder than regular eternal-classes, their hulls flowing with the unique jurisdictional iridescence of star god fragmentss, already deployed in an arrowhead formation.

The abyssal scythe. The sharpest expeditionary blade of the Human Federation, having completed its devastating strike against the vanguard clusters of the Behemoth Swarm, had finished its specialized anti-Chaos modifications in the deepest reaches of the Extragalactic Systems.

The main cannons of the eleven Titan ships fired in the same second.

It wasn't dark gold. It was colorless.

The Starfall Cannons, ultimate weapons driven by gravity modulation laws extracted from star god fragmentss. No light, no heat, no explosion. Eleven ripples of jurisdictional distortion, undetectable by the human eye and only indirectly confirmed by sensors through the sudden disappearance of targets, swept through the densest areas of the Chaos Fleet at the speed of light.

Three corrupted Emperor's Children battleships collapsed inward, turning into neutron-star-level pinpoints of light under the desperate pressure of their own mass before evaporating.

The gravitational constants of the rotting cores of two Nurgle plague star-fortresses were rewritten; their own decayed mass was insufficient to maintain their structure, causing them to spread out like lanced boils, scattering and diluting into interstellar dust that could not recombine.

A legion of Bloodletters in the midst of a collective blood sacrifice, including three Bloodthirster, were enhanced by localized strong interaction forces. The strong nuclear force between them and their surroundings instantly increased to forty-seven times the normal value, welding them into a mass of immobile, inseparable crystalline sculptures that could only freeze eternally in silent wails.

And all of this took only 1.7 seconds.

A brief, unbelievable silence fell over the battlefield.

Khorne's furious roar stuck in Karbha's throat. Nurgle's rotting hymns slipped from Kugath's festering lips. Tzeentch's words of change, for the first time, could find no suitable paradox to describe the facts before them. Slaanesh's ecstatic singing abruptly went out of tune.

On the perfect face of Lady Slaanesh, the Daemonette of Sound, an expression called confusion appeared for the first time.

She opened her mouth, attempting to recalibrate that voice which could make stars fall, but what greeted her was a synchronized volley from the secondary batteries of the eleven eternal-class titan ships.

Dark gold, purple-blue, and the colorless ripples of C'tan laws simultaneously overwhelmed this pleasure-seeker.

The highest-ranking Daemon Prince of Slaanesh, the mouthpiece of the Prince of Pleasure, melted in the void.

Her body peeled away, decomposed, and evaporated layer by layer like beeswax thrown into strong acid. She sang until the very end, but that song had fallen from a soul-eroding heavenly melody into a tuneless, harsh, and unlistened-to wail.

"No—!" Fulgrim's perfect face contorted for the first time into a hideous mask of rage and pain. He reached out with his liquid metal arm, trying to save the last fading note of Shalaxi, but caught only a handful of cold void.

His gaze swept across the burning battlefield, past the vast and silent silhouettes of the abyssal scythe, past the regrouping main forces of the Human Federation, and finally landed on Keystone-1 in the far rear—on that cold yet seemingly satisfied figure gazing at him through a holographic image.

Han Zhe.

"You—" Fulgrim's voice sounded like tearing silk, "how dare you—"

Han Zhe did not answer. He merely tilted his head slightly, as if examining a damaged exhibit.

Then his voice spoke through the broadcast, as calm as if reporting logistics data:

"The remains of the Prince of Pleasure have completed the first stage of analysis in the Tomb of Time."

"Thank you, as the second high-level avatar, for participating in the research."

Fulgrim fell silent.

At that moment, every demon, every Primarch, and every cursed warrior under the Four Chaos Gods saw something on the face of Slaanesh's Eternal Groom that they had never seen, and never thought they would see on the face of a traitorous Primarch:

Fear.

The eleven volleys from the abyssal scythe had torn away the sharpest fangs of the Chaos Legion.

But the tide of battle had not yet turned.