The cold agreement brought no warmth whatsoever.
The Necrons and the Men of Iron, the two most merciless scourges in the Milky Way, began sweeping through all the remaining Enslaver-contaminated worlds within the T'au Empire, two torrents of destruction flowing side by side.
Even though their inhabitants had already been reduced to puppets in the Enslavers' hands.
The disappearance of each Sept World meant the utter annihilation of tens or even hundreds of billions of lives.
Efficiency was the only criterion.
Under the Men of Iron's Matter-Fusion Ray Arrays, planet after planet became a mineral sphere of churning lava. The flesh-and-blood creations on their surfaces, along with the Enslavers themselves, turned to ash in flames of molecular disintegration, leaving only metal-rich scorched earth awaiting extraction.
The Necrons' Gauss Disintegration Fields were like cosmic erasers, silently wiping away planets and the filth upon them. All that remained were bands of sickly green dust around the fleet, like cold wreaths laid for departed civilizations.
The remnants of the T'au could not even imagine such a pace of extermination.
Once the contested zones in the last dozen or so systems had been reduced to cosmic dust or resource stockpiles within mere weeks, the Men of Iron's Titan Ship fleet and the Necrons' Tomb Ship fleet turned their cold sensor arrays toward the T'au Empire's remaining homeworlds, which had not yet fallen completely.
The Enslaver plague was still spreading among the T'au, surging from one Sept World to another.
The T'au struggled to resist their controlled kin, struggling to find a chance to survive.
Yet what awaited them was annihilation at the hands of the Necrons and the Men of Iron, victims and captors alike.
Despair was like icy seawater, and the pressure of death almost left the T'au Ethereals unable to breathe.
The