The massive fleet once again tore through the skies of Colchis. Like a range of moving metal mountains, the shadows it cast covered nearly half of Perfect City. This time, it lacked the suffocating pressure of its first arrival, but carried an equally unquestionable, institutionalized grandeur.
The treaty was signed with extraordinary ease—so easily that Lavoisier and the other senior figures of Earthly Heaven were left somewhat dazed. The core clauses concerning sovereignty, military affairs, and resources had already been more or less settled during a virtual battlefield brawl between a god and a primarch in Zhou Beichen's room, amid snack bags and video game background music.
All that remained in the official document was to repackage those verbal agreements in the Imperial Department of Justice's convoluted yet rigorous terminology.
Two vastly different legions had arrived alongside the fleet.
One of them was impeccably organized and grimly disciplined. Their power armor was a deep, solemn red, their shoulder plates branded with the Imperial Aquila. They stood in silent ranks, like a burning, silent forest of steel. This was the Seventeenth Legion led by Lorgar Aurelian—the Imperial Apostles.
The other appeared... more ornate. Countless inscrutable runes were engraved upon their crimson power armor, while faint psychic light flowed through the gaps in their plating, lending them a scholar's restraint and mystery. They were the Thousand Sons, Magnus's legion.
When Magnus, at the Emperor's signal, walked toward his sons, the scene fell utterly silent.
Several Thousand Sons captains—sorcerers who had immersed themselves in the path of psychic power for years and possessed no small degree of pride themselves—could scarcely believe their eyes as they watched their gene-father approach.
This Magnus still had dark red skin and a single eye, but the princely arrogance of a sovereign of knowledge, the pride that had