Chapter 902 - 901

"Impossible! Absolutely impossible!" Kazar's first reaction was utter disbelief.

How could this flesh-born race possibly dare declare war on them?

The Infinite Empire was unquestionably the greatest power in the galaxy. During the War in Heaven, which had raged for thousands of years, they had defeated both the Old Ones and the C'tan.

It had been a catastrophic war that engulfed the entire galaxy.

Countless star systems had burned, and numerous species had been driven to extinction.

In the end, the Necrons had emerged victorious.

Even in its current state of decline, the Infinite Empire was not something any other species could challenge.

Once all the Necron dynasties awakened, they could set the stars ablaze once more and annihilate every enemy in their path!

Yet the truth remained before him. This flesh-born race really had gone to war against the Necrons.

"Your species has made a foolish decision by attempting to challenge the galaxy's true rulers," Kazar said.

His voice carried absolute certainty.

"Even if you exhaust all your strength destroying every dynasty in this region, you will have affected only a tiny corner of the Infinite Empire.

"We possess thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of dynasties equal to or greater than these. You can never win."

To the Necron Overlord, these flesh creatures had started a foolish war that could only end in their own destruction.

They would lose everything in a crushing defeat, just like all the other extinct species that had come before them.

"The fools are you xenos, along with your Silent King.

"You seized human territory, murdered our people with your Blackstone Veil, and expected humanity to submit in fear. But your efforts were futile.

"All you have done is stoke humanity's fury and draw our people closer together. Now you xenos will face mankind's retaliation. Victory will always belong to humanity!"

Tyberos's voice was resolute. He firmly believed humanity would achieve ultimate victory.

He even went out of his way to emphasize the righteousness of their cause. The Necron Empire had invaded human territory first.

Humanity was merely striking back to defend its homeland.

As Chapter Master of the Carcharodons, Tyberos always kept the Savior's ideals close to heart. Even his words were filled with righteous conviction.

What?!

Kazar's thoughts nearly ground to a halt.

What did he mean, the Necrons had invaded human territory?

Wasn't this entire region the domain of Kazar's dynasty? Humanity had invaded the Necrons' homeland, fought its way to their very doorstep, entered the Overlord's royal chambers, and dragged him from his own stasis casket!

And they called this a counteroffensive?!

Besides, the Necrons had always been the rulers of the galaxy. The entire galaxy belonged to them, and all the species within it were their servants.

How could anything they did possibly qualify as an invasion?

Of course, that was merely how the Necron xenos saw things. According to the borders drawn by the New Imperium, the galaxy had belonged to humanity since time immemorial.

Moreover, the Silent Zone had originally contained numerous human worlds, nearly all of which had been destroyed by the Necrons' Blackstone Veil.

The Silent King even intended to expand that veil across the entire galaxy.

This was no mere invasion. He sought nothing less than the extinction of the human species. Humanity had no room left to retreat.

Simply put, the conflict between humanity and the Necrons could no longer be resolved.

Only war remained.

"Stay in your cage, prey. Perhaps one day, you'll get to see your Silent King imprisoned beside you."

Tyberos had no interest in wasting any more words on the xenos Overlord.

He threw Kazar and his stasis casket into a transport, then joined Malakim in dealing with the remaining high-ranking xenos.

Every powerful xenos they eliminated now would save countless human lives in the future.

Rumble!

A distant pyramid tomb collapsed. Necron Destroyers awakened within the ruins and opened fire on the human lines.

These specialized xenos units, their minds consumed by madness, were extremely dangerous.

Tyberos and the others received an emergency order. They immediately changed course and led their warriors to suppress the threat.

In the pitch-black void, the curtain of fire created by the space battle continued to burn. Countless warships raced through the darkness, unleashing salvo after salvo.

The remains of the shattered planet still burned, while molten fragments of its exposed core glowed a deep crimson.

That red light was reflected in Guilliman's eyes, darker and richer than blood.

"We may have to witness scenes like this many more times," Roboute Guilliman said, his voice subdued as he stared at the planet's remains.

It had been a Tomb World, but watching an entire planet die before his eyes still left him deeply unsettled.

"Roboute, the only thing we can do is make sure it doesn't happen to a human world," the Khan replied.

They had launched the Reclamation Crusade precisely because they could not allow the Blackstone Veil and the flames of war to reach humanity's major territories.

If that happened, countless civilized worlds and untold numbers of human beings would be plunged into misery far worse than anything they had suffered during the previous ten thousand years of darkness.

Throughout that dark age, humanity had faced endless xenos threats and the corruption of Chaos, but those had amounted to little more than a slow, continuous loss of blood.

At least humanity had still been able to breathe.

The threat posed by the Silent King, however, was the equivalent of a knife being drawn across humanity's throat.

Human life could not survive wherever the Blackstone Veil spread.

That ancient ruler possessed the power to destroy mankind and drive the human species into extinction.

"Everything depends on whether Brother Eden and the rest of us can withstand the pressure and contain the war within the Silent Zone, rather than allowing it to spread into human territory."

A trace of exhaustion showed on Guilliman's stern face.

The pressure on him was immense. This battle had been nothing more than the encirclement and destruction of a single Necron dynasty, yet it had nearly annihilated an entire star system.

And within the broader Reclamation Crusade, this amounted to no more than a minor skirmish with the Necrons.

The true war had not even begun.

Humanity certainly possessed an advantage in numbers, and the force currently deployed was only a vanguard fleet.

Yet during the fighting, Guilliman had still witnessed the terrifying strength of the Necron military.

Those beings of living metal felt no emotion and knew no fear. They would employ any devastating technology or tactic available to annihilate humanity.

The Reclamation Crusade fleet might currently be sweeping aside every xenos dynasty it encountered, but no one could guarantee what would happen once it met the main strength of the Necrons.

"The Silent King…"

A towering and majestic figure flashed through Guilliman's mind.

The godslayer.

When Guilliman had previously faced the Silent King, his entire body had trembled. It had been an instinctive reaction to an overwhelming threat.

At that moment, he had realized something.

He could not defeat the Silent King.

The Necron ruler was a truly mighty sovereign, comparable to the Emperor himself. He was not an opponent a Primarch could handle. Even if Guilliman joined forces with his Primarch brothers, they might still be unable to defeat him.

Once the Reclamation Crusade fleet advanced deeper into the Silent Zone and encountered the Silent King and his armies, the Imperium and humanity would face their first true challenge.

Hum.

The enormous strategic hololith at the center of the bridge lit up. Images and markers shifted rapidly across its surface.

The intelligence division had received new reports from the reconnaissance fleets and was updating the map.

Guilliman, the Khan, and the others looked up.

Large regions along the galactic fringe were covered in crimson.

Their expressions turned grave. Everyone present understood what that color meant and the magnitude of the threat it represented.

"Gentlemen, the war between the Silent King and the Stormlord has begun.

"Their forces are now engaged in intense warfare centered on the Hypnoth System.

"Fighting has erupted across hundreds of sectors simultaneously, and the number of fleets involved is beyond calculation," Tako said slowly, a slight tremor entering his voice.

"According to our intelligence, this is merely the beginning. Neither side has finished mobilizing its reserves.

"With our current forces, any direct intervention would place us under enormous pressure, especially if both sides turned their fleets against us."

Guilliman and the others fell silent.

The intensity of the conflict had far exceeded their expectations.

Truthfully, even those among them who had participated in the Great Crusade had never fought a war spanning so many regions at once.

Those territories contained millions of strategic objectives, each with its own unique circumstances. Coordinating the fleets alone would have been enough to break nearly any commander.

Even the Primarchs could not sustain a level of cognitive strain beyond the physical limits of an organic mind.

There was, of course, a simpler and far more idiotic solution. They could gather every fleet into a single armada and push straight ahead.

But sending such a massive force wandering across space in search of the enemy would waste an enormous amount of resources. It would also leave them vulnerable to being steadily worn down from the flanks.

This demonstrated just how terrifying the Silent King and Imotekh the Stormlord truly were.

Their immense data-processing and hyperlogical capabilities allowed them to command wars across hundreds of sectors simultaneously. They could redirect fleets for decisive surprise attacks and alter the course of the entire war.

In truth, without the Machine Goddess, the Imperium would have struggled even to assemble an expeditionary force of this size.

The only human currently capable of maintaining such an intense level of thought was the Savior himself.

Unfortunately, he was not present with the fleet, and fleet command had never been his greatest strength.

Everyone turned toward Guilliman.

As temporary supreme commander of the Reclamation Crusade fleet, the Lord of Ultramar carried a tremendous burden.

How well the fleet performed would depend entirely on his abilities.

For some reason, they could not help feeling that Guilliman looked considerably older than he had before.

"Gentlemen, please allow me to review the relevant intelligence before I formulate our deployments," Guilliman said, swallowing hard. His voice had become hoarse.

With that, he turned and walked toward the supreme command chamber like a warrior marching into a duel.

The command chamber and its endless intelligence files were now the Lord of Ultramar's battlefield.

Sooner or later, he had to face them.

Guilliman did not emerge from the supreme command chamber for several days.

Billions of intelligence reports and streams of battlefield data poured continuously into the Reclamation Crusade's command nexus through astropathic transmissions and the psychic network.

...

Inside the supreme command chamber, Guilliman hunched over the virtual tactical display, reviewing files and marking the relevant regions.

The lines across his forehead had deepened, and his hairline had begun retreating once again.

Paper documents were rarely used anymore, but the volume of electronic files was even more terrifying. They crashed down upon him like an endless flood.

With the assistance of the command staff, Guilliman worked to understand every available detail about the war. The intelligence covered hundreds of sectors, vast numbers of planets, and the dispositions of both friendly and enemy fleets.

Space warfare was vastly more complicated than a ground campaign.

Its battlefields were incomparably larger, threats could come from every direction, and enemy forces could cross vast distances in sudden leaps.

A single oversight might cause a fleet to encounter far more enemies than expected and place it at a fatal disadvantage.

Fortunately, the Machine Goddess possessed enough computational power to process most of the raw intelligence, extract the relevant information, and deliver it to the command staff for further analysis.

Without her, the Reclamation Crusade fleet would have been completely incapable of processing so much information. Its commanders would have been reduced to stumbling blindly through the war.

Guilliman had already realized that the old Imperium, before the reforms to its computation, communications, and command systems, could never have fought a war of this scale against the Necrons.

The two sides' military systems operated on entirely different levels. Once war began, the sheer volume of intelligence and complexity of command would have shattered the old Imperium's rigid command structure.

During the Great Crusade, for example, the Primarchs' fleets had largely fought their own separate wars. Most had no idea what was happening on other fronts, much less any reliable way to coordinate with them.

After the Great Crusade, the situation had become even worse. The Imperium's system for conducting large-scale warfare had ceased to exist altogether.

Such a rigid command structure could manage smaller enemies, but it was incapable of waging a war between entire species.

As Brother Eden had once said, without information warfare and a modernized command system, the Imperial fleet's only possible fate was to have the Silent King run it ragged like a dying dog, then string it up and beat it senseless.

Historically, the old Imperium had lost far more battles against the Necrons than it had won. Only when it possessed an overwhelming numerical advantage could it achieve a costly victory.

And those battles had been against scattered Necron dynasties awakening in isolation.

Now, numerous dynasties had gathered and united. Their Tomb Fleets were vast, and the threat they posed had increased exponentially.

The Imperium's sole stroke of good fortune was that it was no longer the same Imperium as before.

Humanity now had the right to compete with the Necrons for mastery of the galaxy.

"The Necrons' methods of warfare are still more advanced than ours. With entities such as the Silent King supporting them, they can transmit information faster than we can and coordinate military operations across several sectors at once.

"Humanity's only true advantage is our numbers."

After reviewing a report on a battle between the Silent King's and the Stormlord's Tomb Fleets in one particular sector, Guilliman rubbed his burning temples and sighed.

The xenos fleets displayed astonishing coordination in both their arrival times and rate of fire. They could even precisely intercept individual shipborne projectiles without disrupting the rhythm of the larger battle.

In space warfare, that was an enormous advantage.

There was nothing humanity could do to eliminate that disparity. The Necrons were essentially a fully mechanized species whose consciousnesses had been converted into information.

They were fundamentally different from humanity.

Their minds could link through cortical fields, allowing them to transmit information with almost no delay and reach decisions far more quickly.

Brother Eden's reforms to the Imperial command system had made it barely capable of fighting the Necrons, but the situation remained far from optimistic.

Guilliman's brow furrowed as his worries deepened.

The Imperium's strategic objective was not merely to defeat the Necrons. Humanity needed to win an overwhelming victory.

If mankind defeated the Necrons only at the cost of devastating losses and a drastic reduction in its future potential, the younger species of the galaxy could exploit its weakness. Humanity would also be poorly prepared for the possible arrival of the Great Devourer.

Guilliman had conducted countless simulations, yet none showed humanity achieving a decisive victory.

In the best possible outcome, the Reclamation Crusade fleet would lose more than half its strength while crushing the Necron fleets currently known to them.

After that, the two sides would be trapped in a prolonged war of attrition, each attacking the other's territory.

Humanity's greater resilience would eventually allow it to win.

But the price would be the destruction of hundreds of thousands of civilized worlds and the deaths of countless human beings.

That was the nature of a war between species. Every living being belonging to two civilizations would be thrown into the struggle.

The galaxy was simply that cruel.

And compared to the alternatives, this was already an extremely low price.

To win the War in Heaven and ensure their survival, the Necrons had exhausted the future potential of their entire species.

They had even sacrificed their souls.

The thought made Guilliman hunch lower. The immense weight of his responsibility left him struggling to breathe.

Hum.

At that moment, the command nexus's highest-priority communicator lit up and projected a waist-up hologram.

It depicted a towering and majestic xenos Phaeron whose presence seemed to eclipse even Guilliman's.

"Eden!"

The instant Guilliman saw the hologram, emotion overwhelmed him. His eyes practically glistened with tears.

He knew exactly who this was.

The Savior who had infiltrated the enemy's ranks.

The Emperor of the Imperium.

His closest friend, his brother, and the man he trusted above all others.

The moment Eden appeared, much of the crushing weight lifted from the Lord of Ultramar's shoulders.

This was humanity's true pillar of strength.

Guilliman knew that if Eden was contacting him now, there had to have been a new development.

He had found a way for humanity to win this war!

Eden's reassuring voice came through the communicator.

"G-Man, write this down. I'm making the following changes to our deployments…"

(End of Chapter)