Tearing Reality Apart with Bare Hands

Then, under everyone's astonished gaze.

Guilliman's hand, which had just comforted Landros, suddenly rose.

His fingers curled like claws and thrust straight into the seemingly empty air behind Landros!

The Tzeentch daemon hidden within a crack in the Warp froze in shock, then trembled instinctively.

(This Guilliman... Didn't the intelligence say he possessed almost no psychic talent?

How could he detect my presence so quickly, so precisely?

I had clearly suppressed all psychic fluctuations to the absolute minimum!)

But a moment later, the daemon relaxed slightly.

(So what if he can sense me?

Such a tiny crack in reality is simply impossible for a Primarch without powerful psychic abilities to penetrate with his bare hands!

The barrier of the material universe is impregnable to beings of the physical realm!)

Yet its fleeting hope was mercilessly shattered in the very next second.

Guilliman's palm pressed firmly against that invisible spatial fissure!

To every Ultramarine present, their gene-father's hand seemed to be pressed against an unseen, incomparably thick wall.

The wall seemed to resist him, reject him; even Guilliman's hand could not immediately penetrate it.

But then, the Smart Atoms within Guilliman's body, derived from the Vitruum Regent, began to mobilize and gather at an unprecedented speed!

Like billions of miniature stars, they flowed into his arm and converged in his palm.

Guilliman could clearly sense that this was a unique kind of power.

It stemmed from the Vitruum people's almost idealistic absolute faith in, and mastery over, their own abilities.

Yet it also resonated and merged wondrously with the countless innate ties between his genetic Primarch nature and the Warp!

In a sense, Primarchs were Warp demigods walking the material world!

At this moment, aided by the Smart Atoms—a power born from the pinnacle of materialism yet touching the realm of idealism—

Guilliman's Warp essence was stimulated and strengthened as never before!

"Open...!"

Guilliman growled inwardly as his palm suddenly exerted force!

"Crack—!"

A sharp sound, like shattering glass or space itself keening in agony, rang clearly in the ears of every sharp-sensed Space Marine present!

Guilliman's hand had actually crushed through the barrier of reality itself!

His entire forearm vanished into the air in an instant, as though it had reached into another dimension!

Within the Warp, the Tzeentch daemon had no time to react.

It only felt an enormous hand, burning with blazing, pure power, pierce through the boundary between illusion and reality.

With impossible precision, like iron pincers, it seized the "collar" of its gray robe, woven from ever-shifting lies and knowledge!

"How is this possible?!

No psychic power?

No... Is this psychic power too?

But why... What kind of psychic power is this?!"

The daemon let out a soundless shriek, its understanding of reality being overturned.

The power it felt shared the same origin as Warp psychic energy, both touching the essence of the universe, yet they were utterly different.

Warp psychic power was ethereal soul-energy, wild and unrestrained;

but the power Guilliman wielded now carried a cold "order" and "certainty" born of the material world!

How could matter and illusion overlap in such a way?!

This completely exceeded its understanding of the laws of the universe!

Just as daemons found it difficult to fully invade the physical world, which was firmly protected by physical laws, through their own power—

for an inhabitant of the physical world to actively enter the ever-changing Warp with bare hands was even more difficult than ascending to heaven!

At the very least, wouldn't one need some technological construct like a Warp engine?

Yet Guilliman had simply used brute force, tearing through the fissure between reality and illusion with his bare hands and gripping its core!

Then, an irresistible force, violent beyond measure, surged from that hand!

The Tzeentch daemon instantly felt as though it had been struck head-on by a falling star, then cast into a black hole with endless gravity!

Its body, formed of pure energy and consciousness, was violently dragged from its hiding place in the Warp by that immense force!

It could clearly feel the structure of its illusory body being squeezed and crushed bit by bit by the hand's "orderly" power, which belonged to the material universe!

At the same time, the natural repulsion the physical world held toward Warp entities—

burned every inch of its "skin" like billions of red-hot branding irons!

It had not been summoned through a ritual, nor had it descended through its own power. It was being forcibly dragged into the material world!

Every backlash of the laws, every spatial rejection, would be inflicted upon it without reserve!

"Screeeech—!!!"

The Tzeentch daemon unleashed a soul-shriek so piercing it defied description.

Indescribable Pain, born from its very existence being torn apart, flooded all its senses.

It struggled desperately, unleashing psychic flames that distorted reality and mental shocks that beguiled the mind.

But the hand gripping it was like an eternal cornerstone forged by the Emperor, unimaginably firm and utterly immovable!

Thus, beneath the dumbfounded gazes of every Ultramarine, Guilliman's arm, which had vanished for an instant, suddenly withdrew from the void!

And appearing in the material world along with that arm was—

a Tzeentch daemon, forcibly dragged from an illusory dimension, its form constantly twisting and shifting, radiating an eerie blue glow and the stench of knowledge—

a Tzeentch daemon!

It was like some grotesque fish dragged from the depths of the sea onto shore.

It writhed and screamed in agony in the air of the material world, utterly at odds with the solemn Macragge Square, filled with blasphemy and discord.

Guilliman had seized a living daemon from the Warp with his bare hands!

The Tzeentch daemon dangled in the air of the material world, gripped by Guilliman as though he were holding a chick.

Staring into the Primarch's unwavering azure eyes at such close range, it released a desperate, piercing psychic blast!

It knew perfectly well that it was completely finished this time.

Daemons like them revered change and trickery, delighting in creating chaos amid order, but that absolutely did not mean they enjoyed seeking death!

Its strength ranked among the notable ones beneath the Changer of Ways, but compared to a gene Primarch in a raging fury, it was simply not enough.

Though it possessed an undying essence within the Warp and could slowly regenerate after being crushed.

That would require a long time and immense accumulation, while its power would suffer a drastic decline.

By then, the other daemons it had once trampled beneath its feet would surely seize the chance to ride roughshod over it!

Those bastards truly were capable of shitting on your head while making you hand them the paper!

For a daemon surviving in the strictly ranked yet utterly chaotic Warp, that was humiliation even harder to accept than death!

Still... since it was "dead" either way.

If it could fiercely mock this Primarch renowned for reason and order before being banished, that would make the price worthwhile!

At least it would have something to boast about before its fellow daemons!

With that thought, the Tzeentch daemon calmed down instead and stopped its pointless screaming.