202: Chapter 22 Defeating Slaanesh

After the alien remnants in the Far East Star Sector were completely wiped out, the Human Federation ushered in the most critical five years in its history, known as the Great Digestion Era.

The phase technology and space-time manipulation of the Necron Dynasty, the psychic weaving and prophecy arts of the Eldar arks, and the mysteries of causal weapons sealed in the human STC-Ω of the golden age—these three technology systems, which should have been mutually exclusive, were forcibly fused, restructured, and ascended in dimension before the cold will of the Human Federation and the nearly infinite computing power of the adjudicator.

On the seventy-third underground floor of the Tomb of Time Research Station, in a super-laboratory covering three million square kilometers, the creation closest to a miracle in human history was taking shape.

The Source of Order-class ultimate battleship; it was not just a ship, but a mobile terminal for modifying universal laws.

Three hundred and twenty kilometers in length, the hull was forged from law-inert metal parsed from star god fragmentss. Its surface flowed with an absolute black that reflected no light; only at the moment of energy excitation would dark-gold runes of order emerge. Those runes were the ultimate fusion of Necron phase matrices, Eldar rune networks, and STC causal coding.

Its weapon systems no longer distinguished between cannons or missiles; every piece was a conceptual projector:

Causality Eradication Cannon: Locks onto the target's causal chain of existence, deleting all projections of the target in the past, present, and future from the source. Those hit not only die but have never existed.

Phase Fission Field: Forcibly tears the space-time continuity of the target's location, dragging them into fragments of countless parallel realities, never to be reassembled.

Psychic Vacuum Domain: Using Eldar ark core fragments as a medium, it creates an absolute psychic vacuum deep within the Warp; any Chaos entity entering is suffocated to death.

Law Counter-Shield: Instead of absorbing or deflecting attacks, it temporarily rewrites the physical laws of the attack; lasers are rewritten as sound waves, and plasma is rewritten as low-temperature gas.

And most terrifying was its power core, the Five-Fold Law Furnace: Necron eternal energy capture, Eldar psychic extraction, golden age time weapons, Human Federation Vacuum Zero-Point Energy, and Void Siphon. These five coexisted in a forbidden balance, providing nearly infinite energy for the Source of Order-class.

Twelve such ultimate creations were built by the Human Federation and named: Judgment, Adjudication, Purification, Eternity, Truth, order, Law, Finality, The Other Shore, Abyss, Nihility, and Origin.

Meanwhile, the hunt for the Chaos Gods entered its final phase.

Slaanesh, the evil god with the deepest grudge and heaviest losses against humans, finally realized after losing two high-level incarnations, one Primarch, and the entire Council of Keepers of Secrets: continuing to wait deep in the Warp would only result in being slowly devoured by the Human Federation.

He made a decision: to take the initiative and attack, not for victory, but for living space.

He wanted to tear the boundary between reality and the Warp, igniting an unprecedented storm of pleasure, plunging all humans in the eastern sector of the galaxy into eternal ecstasy and despair, using the moment of collapse of trillions of souls to build an unbreakable defensive line for himself.

"Sub-space energy index detected rising geometrically! Source: deep within the remaining half of the Eye of Terror!" The alarm from providence shattered the peace of Keystone-1.

Han Zhe stared at the expanding, nauseatingly brilliant colored vortex on the holographic star map.

"Finally, he couldn't hold back anymore," his voice was calm as usual. "adjudicator, deduce his intentions."

Deduction complete. Slaanesh will launch the Apocalypse of Pleasure. Goal: Detonate the remaining rift of the Eye of Terror, using the collapse of billions of souls as a sacrifice to establish a permanent Warp bridgehead in the physical universe. By then, the entire eastern sector of the galaxy will become his eternal hunting ground.

"Initiate the Ultimate Hunting Protocol," Han Zhe ordered. "All twelve Source of order ships, deploy. Target: Slaanesh's true form."

"order all Warp hunting fleets to coordinate operations. Deploy the Void Barrier network at full power to block all his paths of retreat."

"In this battle, we either capture Slaanesh or completely disperse his essence, making it impossible for him to reassemble for trillions of years."

When the twelve Source of Order-class battleships passed through the order channel forcibly held open by three hundred Nullifier nodes and descended into the remaining half of the Eye of Terror, they were met with a sight enough to drive any mortal insane.

Slaanesh did not hide; his true form—an ultimate existence composed of endless pleasure, pain, desire, and perfection—was suspended right in the center of the rift, its shape constantly shifting, projecting trillions of different ultimate temptations to all observers every second.

Surrounding him was all the assets he had accumulated over trillions of years: the nine remaining Greater Keepers of Secrets, twelve Pioneers of Pleasure, seventy-two Lesser Keepers of Secrets, three hundred and sixty Heralds of Pleasure, countless Slaanesh Daemon Princes and fallen champions, and endless ancient demons awakened by him personally from the depths of the Warp, long forgotten.

It was a profane army large enough to drown any force in the galaxy.

But the Human Federation fleet did not hesitate for a moment.

"All Source of order ships, charge main cannons." Lei Huan's voice rang through the fleet channel; he had once again been appointed as the frontline commander-in-chief.

"Target: Slaanesh's true form. Fire."

The main cannons of the twelve ultimate battleships defined the rules of the universe in the same instant.

There was no light, no heat, no phenomenon that could be captured by conventional sensors. There were only those twelve colorless ripples, like twelve spears of judgment thrust from the void, piercing through the battlefield.

Wherever the ripples passed, Slaanesh's Greater Daemon legions evaporated like dew under the sun. It wasn't death; it was the deprivation of existence. The nine Greater Keepers of Secrets realized they were locked on, but it was too late to make a sound; their past, present, and future were simultaneously deleted by the Causality Eradication Cannons.

The twelve Pioneers of Pleasure tried to split themselves to avoid the attack, but the Phase Fission Field dragged every one of their fragments into different parallel realities, then annihilated them simultaneously in those countless realities.

The seventy-two Lesser Keepers of Secrets were covered by the Psychic Vacuum Domain. Their essence, composed of desire, withered rapidly like flowers losing water, shattered, and turned into nothingness after losing Warp support.

As for Slaanesh's true form, the colorless ripple hit his core directly.

Slaanesh let out the most shrill shriek since ancient times. His perfect body began to disintegrate, the cloak woven from trillions of souls peeled off layer by layer, revealing the primitive, twisted, chaotic essential core within.

"Capture Protocol, initiate!" Lei Huan's command was like thunder.

Eight Source of order ships simultaneously projected a capture field composed of causal chains and phase cages. The field was like a giant hand reaching for Slaanesh's broken body, but at that moment, Slaanesh made a final struggle.

He detonated one-third of his own origin.

It was an explosion beyond any words. One-third of Slaanesh's essence was converted into a pure, ultimate pleasure pulse capable of distorting all laws within that 0.001 second. The pulse swept through the capture field, tearing a tiny, fleeting gap in the indestructible causal chains.

Slaanesh's remaining essence, like a streak of light, escaped through that gap.

He did not flee toward the depths of the Warp, where patrol networks of the human hunting fleets were everywhere. He fled in a direction no one had anticipated: the Extragalactic Systems.

He tore the boundary between the galaxy and the Extragalactic space, dragging his broken body and disappearing into that unknown deep space, which was continuously disturbed by the Void Siphon and secretly monitored by the cold observer.

"Target escaped! Trajectory locked on the Extragalactic Systems, direction: outskirts of the Heart of Silence!" The tracker's voice was filled with disbelief.

"Pursue!" Lei Huan's command blurted out.