With the fall of this Thousand Sons Sorcerer, the Chaos power of the entire battlefield began a chain reaction of collapse.
Within the Midtown, the distorted Warp Domain began to shatter like glass, cracking and dissipating inch by inch.
Some demons that appeared out of nowhere lost their energy source, their bodies became transparent and ethereal, and they emitted unwilling screams.
Yet it still couldn't withstand the pressure of the rules of real space, and gradually turned into ashes.
At the top of the Profaned Spire, the STC spell fragments controlled by the Dark Mechanicum sage instantly became chaotic in energy.
The rainbow-colored runes flickered wildly, their brightness uncertain, maintaining the energy output of the Profane Barrier intermittently, like a faulty light bulb.
The once thick barrier is thinning and dimming at a visible rate, and will eventually dissipate completely into the air.
The Imperial Fleet on orbit unleashed its full firepower without hindrance, with Macro-cannon and light spears relentlessly bombarding the remaining Chaos positions, blasting fortifications into dust.
Freed from the constraints of their servile identity, the Cultists's Pauper Princes instantly descended into chaos.
Some threw down their weapons and knelt to surrender, some fled in all directions like madmen, and some even turned against their former comrades, raising their knives at them.
"Charge!! Annihilate the heretics!" The Imperial Army commanders seized the opportunity and issued the order for a general offensive.
The soldiers shouted as they charged out of their bunkers, following the tanks and armored vehicles, and launched an assault on Chaos's last stronghold.
The Orks, not to be outdone, roared and charged ahead, scrambling to "harvest the toys."
Caught between two attacks, the annihilation of the Chaos army seemed imminent.
No one noticed that Atia, who fell from the sky, did not vanish into thin air like ordinary demons and Psyker, with his half-broken body disappearing as his soul dissipated.
The remaining half of his face had its eyes tightly closed, and instead of bleeding from the wound, it emitted an eerie blue light.
Rena paused slightly as she swooped down, her icy blue pupils contracting slightly.
She sensed something was wrong.
Atia's soul aura had indeed vanished, as if forcibly ripped from his body by some force, bursting like a bubble and disappearing in an instant.
Logically, without the support of a soul and Psychic Power, this physical body, which had been transformed by Chaos energy, should have instantly decayed and disintegrated.
But it didn't; instead, it was like a container, accumulating something even more terrifying.
Without hesitation, Rena gathered even more concentrated purple Psychic Power in her right claw, preparing to completely destroy the mangled body.
But just as her claws were about to strike...
Atia's only remaining left eye suddenly opened.
There is no white in the eye, and no pupil.
The entire eyeball was filled with an extremely dazzling azure light.
A terrifying Psychic Power pressure, far exceeding the level of Atia himself, suddenly erupted from that half-body.
Like a sleeping deity, He finally opened His eyes.
Darkness completely enveloped the ruins of Saint Garus Castle.
It wasn't the gradual dimming of nightfall, nor the surging of colorful light released from the Chaos rifts, but an absolute, utter darkness.
It was like a heavy obsidian dome, pressing down from the sky, swallowing all the light, and obliterating the afterimages of gunfire, the shrieks of demons, and the screams of soldiers.
Even the smell of gunpowder in the air was fading rapidly, as if it had been sucked away by something.
The only source of light was the shattered head of Atia's mangled body.
It has a skull as its frame and brain as its core, with a deep blue vortex spreading outwards.
The vortex's edges were as sharp as blades, and its center was constantly collapsing, pulling in all the light, heat, and fragments of souls within its reach.
That was not fire, nor Psychic Power light, but a forming black hole, a cold star fueled by the Warp and ignited by despair.
Lynn stood beside the broken pillar, his limbs trembling uncontrollably.
The stone bricks on the ground trembled, and fragments floated into the air, drifting like feathers towards the center of the blue light.
He tried to steady himself, but found that even breathing became difficult, as if some invisible force was drawing air out of his lungs.
Following the nasal cavity, throat, and pores, it draws the soul towards that vortex.
He gritted his teeth, veins bulging on his forehead, and forcefully pushed the traction back into his body.
Beside him, Doudou and Toothy also froze at the same time.
The massive bodies of the Ogryn leaned forward slightly, as if their backs were being pulled by invisible chains.
Meanwhile, Toothy's rock-and-roll mech emitted a piercing whistling sound from its twin saws. Although the Orks and Tyranids's physical condition allowed them to barely stand, their movements were noticeably slower.
On the battlefield further away, the human soldiers were not so lucky.
Those Vanguard were just cheering for the counterattack, those Sisters of Battle charging with Chainsword, those PDF veterans crouching behind cover reloading...
Their movements froze in an instant. Then, a chilling scene unfolded.
Fine, pale blue light threads seeped from everyone's seven orifices.
Those threads of light flowed slowly from the eye sockets, ear canals, nasal cavity, and mouth, as fine as spider silk, yet carrying the warmth of living beings.
Unaffected by gravity, they slowly floated upwards, like countless streams flowing against the current, converging towards the blue vortex in the sky.
The soldiers, their souls ripped from their bodies, trembled violently, their pupils dilated rapidly, and some opened their mouths wide, yet no sound came out.
Some people knelt on the ground, clutching their temples with both hands, their fingernails digging into their flesh.
Some people had their eyes rolled back, foaming at the mouth, and their bodies convulsing in unnatural ways, like a wrung-out rag.
One after another, row after row, hundreds and thousands of Imperium soldiers lost consciousness within seconds, like puppets on strings.
The extracted strands of soul light converged into flowing streams, rising against the darkness and pouring into the blue vortex.
With each filament of light entering, the vortex spins faster, the blue light brightens, and the invisible suction becomes stronger.
In the sky, the Dragon of Frost that Rena had transformed into abruptly stopped its dive the instant the Psychic Power erupted.
Her wing membranes deployed urgently, whipping up a violent headwind that propelled her hundreds of meters away from Atia's mangled remains.
The icy blue dragon eyes contracted violently, and the cold Tyranids will deep within them was instantly suppressed to the extreme.
She sensed it.
That's not Atia at all.
That Thousand Sons Sorcerer was long dead; his soul was devoured by something at the very last moment of his fall.
His body was nothing more than a door, a reserved passage, a vessel that had been cleaned and was waiting for a new owner to move in.
At this moment, occupying this mutilated body is an existence far beyond the level of mortal beings.
The aura was cold and vast, so stable it seemed not like a living thing, but rather like a machine that had been running for billions of years—precise, indifferent, and utterly undisturbed.
Rena hovered in the air a hundred meters away, her wings trembling slightly, and the surface of her blue scales shimmered with a fine purple light.
She forcibly mobilized all the Psychic Power nodes in her body, covering her entire body with the defensive shield of the Shadow in the Warp, barely resisting the suction force pulling at her soul.
Her gaze passed over the swirling blue light, fixed intently on the changes in the mangled body.
The remaining skull fissures of Atia began to expand outward from that point of blue light, the cracks spreading across the entire surface of the skull.
Immediately afterwards, the skull collapsed inward, and the bones, flesh, and armor fragments were compressed into a core point of light the size of a fist in an instant. The vortex suddenly contracted inward and then exploded.
A silent explosion.
A circular shockwave spread outwards from the point of light, leaving the space as smooth as if it had been ironed.
The shockwave swept across the ruins, across the straggling soldiers in the square, and across the broken spires of the castle, silently yet carrying an irresistible, mysterious power.
The moment the shockwave swept through the darkness, the Veil darkness that had been obscuring the sky shattered.
It didn't peel off little by little, but rather collapsed like an entire glass dome that had been shattered.
Countless black fragments flew in all directions, burning and melting in mid-air, turning into wisps of blue smoke.
The light of day reappeared, but it was neither the radiance of stars nor the color of the atmosphere.
It was a deep, dark blue, as profound as the undercurrents at the bottom of the deep sea, as cold as ice that had been frozen for millions of years.
The sky Uptown is being dismantled and pieced back together into another space.
Lynn looked up, his pupils suddenly contracting.
The skyline that was once filled with castles, streets, Hive City is rapidly distorting and blurring, like ink on a canvas being washed away by water.
Instead, there was a vast, boundless void, dotted with the blurry outlines of distant nebulae and countless still, suspended meteorite fragments.
The ground beneath our feet is also changing.
The foundation of Saint Garus Castle emitted a dull cracking sound, and the entire building, along with the ground within hundreds of meters around it, was uprooted, like a giant tree that had been pulled upside down, suspended in the void.
Broken bricks, fractured columns, and overturned statues all remain in their original, severed positions, floating around the castle ruins to form a fragmented island of land.
In the bridge command room of the Gemstone, everyone's eyes were fixed on the image of the planet that was splitting, reorganizing, and being redefined on the main screen.
"Your Highness, the spatial coordinates of the Saint Garus Castle area are undergoing a drastic shift!"
The radar officer's voice cracked:
"The entire area... was stripped from the surface of Brevis by some kind of Warp force field!"
Dominic slammed his hand on the control panel, his red hair leaping like flames in the flashing siren lights.
"Can you lock the location?!"
"Unable to lock on! No such coordinates found on the star map! It... it's been dragged into the interlayer at the edge of Warp!"
Everyone was stunned.
That wasn't Chaos rift, nor was it a conventional method of demonic invasion; it was the entire battlefield being forcibly "cut" into another layer of reality.
It's as if a god casually picked up a puzzle piece from the table and placed it on another chessboard.
At the edge of Warp, between layers, lies a desolate and silent cemetery.
Atia's mangled body, or rather... the movements of Tzeentch's avatar remained calm.
His Psychic Power formed the right half of his body, with blue light condensing into smooth lines that outlined the sharply defined contours of his limbs.
Countless slender Psychic Power extended outward from behind the shoulder, intertwining and weaving, eventually coalescing into an unusually large single wing.
The pterygium was covered with countless eyeballs, each blinking at a different frequency, its gaze sweeping in all directions.
He hovered in the center of the void, his remaining right arm slowly rising, his five fingers clenching in mid-air.
The movement was slow, yet it carried an irresistible sense of pressure, as if the universe itself was following the movement of His finger.
"Witness my divinity!"