This is the bonus chapter for reaching 300 Powerstones.
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The nine artifacts smashed into the ground simultaneously!
It wasn't an attack.
It was the final, completing action of the ritual.
CRACK!
Centered around the daemon, the ground within a five-hundred-meter radius split open.
It wasn't a crater from an artillery shell.
It was the tearing of space itself.
Fissures glowing with a spectral blue light—inside which countless phantoms of eyes and books writhed—spread outward like a spiderweb!
These rifts were not static. They slithered and branched out like the tentacles of a living creature, greedily sucking up the Chaos energy spewing from deep underground!
From within the fissures, the first to pour out were more Blue Horrors. Not dozens, but hundreds!
They chittered and swarmed, blotting out the sky!
Then came the higher-tier Pink Horrors. What coalesced in their claws wasn't electricity, but pure Chaos fire capable of melting through tank armor!
The Blue Horrors didn't attack directly; instead, they flew in swarms around the Aru forces.
Wherever they passed, the soldiers' lasguns suddenly jammed. The tanks' targeting systems inexplicably failed. The comms channels filled with twisted static. They were warping probability, making misfortune the new reality.
But it wasn't over.
Amidst the Bloodletter's roar, the fissure beneath its feet erupted with a geyser of boiling blood!
Crawling out from the blood spring were more Bloodletters: five, ten, twenty!
And things even more terrifying than Bloodletters.
Flesh Hounds—three-headed monstrosities devoid of skin, their raw muscles exposed, moving so fast they left afterimages on the retina!
Skull Cannons—mobile artillery platforms forged from a fusion of living flesh and metal. What was loaded into their barrels wasn't ammunition, but compressed rage and agony.
Every shot blew basin-sized craters into the armor of the Leman Russ tanks!
A Daemon Legion.
A genuine, fully structured Daemon Legion had descended upon this artillery-scorched wasteland.
"OPEN FIRE! OPEN FIRE!!!"
The Aru forces reacted fast enough.
Tank cannons roared, Sentinel lascannons flashed, infantry pulled their triggers, and a net of firepower instantly enveloped the area.
But this time, the results were completely different.
The Tzeentchian Daemons were impossibly agile. Under the cover of probability manipulation, most of the attacks inexplicably missed.
The Khornate Daemons simply didn't care about getting hurt. The more wounded they became, the more excited they grew, and the faster they charged!
A Flesh Hound zig-zagged through the bullet hail, leaped into the air, and lunged at a Sentinel walker. Its three massive, blood-drenched maws clamped onto the walker's leg joint simultaneously!
CRUNCH!!!
Amidst the groans of twisting metal, the walker crashed to the ground.
The cockpit was cleaved open by a Bloodletter that arrived a second later. The driver inside didn't even have time to scream.
"Psyker Detachment! Interfere!!" Kaspar roared.
The remaining twenty-odd Psykers exerted themselves simultaneously, driving purple psychic threads toward the subterranean fissures in an attempt to plug the energy leak.
The Herald of Tzeentch smiled.
It raised the mirror held in one of its nine arms and pointed it at the Psyker Detachment.
Reflected in the mirror were the blindfolded faces of the Psykers.
And then!
Beneath those blindfolds, the augmented brains implanted with computational arrays suddenly overloaded simultaneously.
"AHHHHHHH!!!"
Amidst agonizing screams, the heads of seven Psykers exploded like watermelons!
Their minds were instantly flooded by the endless, infinite Chaos knowledge reflected in the mirror. A biological brain's storage capacity has limits; Tzeentch's knowledge does not.
The remaining Psykers broke off their casting in terror, but it was too late.
The Herald of Tzeentch waved its scepter:
"I grant you... an eternity of seeking knowledge."
"Logic overriding... To understand is to serve."
"Current highest priority directive: Remove the barriers to understanding."
The surviving Psykers suddenly froze.
They turned mechanically and ripped off their blindfolds. Beneath the cloth, their eyes were gone, replaced by spinning mechanical augmetics flickering with streams of data.
Speaking in an inhuman voice laced with electrical static, they chanted in unison: "Knowledge... must be understood."
They turned around. Their psychic power was no longer directed at the daemons, but blasted straight into the nearest Aru infantry square!
"The Psykers have turned traitor!!!"
"They've been corrupted!!"
Panic spread like a plague.
A Daemon Legion charging from the front, corrupted Psykers backstabbing from the rear, and Tzeentchian Daemons constantly fabricating "accidents" on the flanks...
The formation of the Aru forces instantly collapsed.
"RETREAT!!!"
Kaspar practically squeezed the word through his mechanical vocal cords:
"All units! Leapfrog retreat! Fall back to Aru City!!"
"Abandon heavy equipment! Light retreat!!"
"MOVE!!!"
The General's order was decisive.
But on a battlefield, there is often a very thin line between a decisive retreat and a total rout.
And when that line is caught by daemons...
It becomes a slaughter.
"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!!"
The wounded Bloodletter led the charge. Swinging its massive axe with its one remaining arm, it caught up to a retreating Leman Russ tank and buried the blade deep into its engine block!
Bathed in scorching metal shrapnel and the explosive firelight, it threw its head back and laughed maniacally.
Flesh Hounds darted through the fleeing infantry, every pounce bringing a rain of blood.
–
Forty minutes later.
When the last batch of battered Aru stragglers stumbled back to the defensive outposts of Aru City, the 8,000-strong army that had marched out earlier was reduced to just over 3,200 men.
Their heavy equipment was almost entirely lost. Out of thirteen Leman Russ tanks, only three returned, all heavily damaged.
None of the five Hellhound flame tanks made it back; they were too slow and became priority targets for the daemons.
Out of twenty Sentinel walkers, four survived.
The Psyker Detachment was completely annihilated—they were either dead or had turned traitor.
The Redblaze Wasteland Industrial Zone had completely fallen.
It had become a forbidden zone corrupted by Chaos energy and infested with daemons.
Standing on the city walls, Kaspar Aru looked at the distant region shrouded in spectral blue and blood-red auras. For the first time, the red light of his cybernetic eye looked incredibly dim.
The mechanical right half of his face remained cold and emotionless.
But on his left, flesh-and-blood cheek, the muscles twitched involuntarily.
He knew that after today, his position within the Consortium was finished.
No.
The entire Aru Group might be finished.
And the cause of all this was a group of miners who should have obediently worked themselves to death on an assembly line, and a suppression operation that should have been a sure thing.
"Lord Kaspar..."
The adjutant approached cautiously. "How do we... report this to the Security Council?"
Kaspar remained silent for a long time.
Then, he raised his mechanical right hand. The metal fingers tapped in the empty air, pulling up a comms interface.
His voice regained its calm—the cold, ruthless calm of a Consortium executive:
"Transmit the following report to the highest-priority channel of the Ximans Trade Consortium Security Council."
"Title: Preliminary Report Regarding the Sudden High-Intensity Warp Contamination Event in the Redblaze Wasteland and the Emergency Response of the Aru Group Defense Forces."
"Report contents are as follows:"
"1. A massive Chaos contamination event occurred in Industrial Sector No. 3 of the Redblaze Wasteland. The source of the contamination is suspected to be related to the Sector 7 crash incident from eighty years ago."
"2. The Siclaeman Insurgency are confirmed to be heretical cultists. Their rebellion was aimed at unsealing the subterranean Warp anomaly."
"3. Under the command of Kaspar Aru, the Aru Group Defense Forces decisively intervened immediately upon the incident's outbreak and successfully routed the main rebel force."
"When the rebels merged with the Warp anomaly and the situation rapidly deteriorated, the Defense Forces took resolute measures, including heavy artillery saturation, which delayed the spread of the contamination and successfully prevented further Chaos expansion."
"The contamination has been contained within the industrial zone, buying critical time for planetary defense."
"4. Recommending the Council to immediately initiate Maximum Emergency Response. Contact the Atens Knight House, the Conmo Psyker Dynasty, and the Order of the Omnissian Mind to convene an emergency quad-lateral summit and instantly activate the Aurelian Crisis Joint Defense Pact."
"Furthermore..." He paused.
"In the name of the joint lawful governors of Aurelian IV, transmit an emergency distress signal to the Governor-Militant of the Eastern Fringe and all nearby Imperial Navy patrol fleets, requesting the intervention of specialized anti-Chaos forces."
"Recommending the Council to pressure the Planetary Governor to petition the Imperium for authorization to employ all necessary purification methods, up to and including Exterminatus, should the situation become uncontrollable."
"Recommending the evaluation and preparation for the initiation of Final Purification Protocols to permanently eradicate the threat in this sector."
The adjutant drew a sharp breath.
Final Purification Protocols.
That was the polite, legal Imperial euphemism for requesting extreme measures—such as orbital bombardment—to deal with a Warp contamination that threatened an entire planet's order.
Its severity was second only to a true Exterminatus.
"Lord Kaspar, this..."
"Do it."
Kaspar turned and walked down from the city wall.
The red light in his cybernetic eye had stabilized, shining even colder than before.
The losses had already been incurred.
What he needed to do now wasn't regret, but damage control.
And... shifting the blame.
"Also, double the experimental volunteer quota for the families of those useless trash in the Intelligence Department. Tell them their family members died heroically in the line of duty, and this is the Consortium's... pension for their families."
"And state that our forces suffered heavy casualties, which was the necessary and heroic price paid to contain a threat capable of destroying the entire planet. The focus of the report is on early detection, early warning, and buying time, not the losses themselves."
"Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir..."
The adjutant's hand trembled slightly as he recorded the orders.
Kaspar didn't look back again.
He walked toward the command vehicle, his mind already calculating how to package a failed suppression operation into the glorious achievement of discovering and fighting back against a Warp anomaly at the upcoming quad-lateral summit.
As for those dead soldiers?
The routed troops slaughtered by heretics?
The workers who had become sacrificial offerings for the anomaly?
They didn't matter.
On the Consortium's ledgers, human lives had always just been an operating cost.
And what he had to do now was ensure that this cost had been spent worthily.
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Next Goal = 300 + 150 = 450 Powerstones.