anwhile, on the other side of the battlefield.
Upon the bridge.
Miriael danced with impossible lightness, flourishing the Blade of Agony, dismantling the synchronized assault of Lucia and Leonardo once more with a posture she deed flawlessly elegant.
The Blade of Agony swept aside their weapons as effortlessly as parting tall grass, followed instantly by a thrust as venomous as a striking serpent, which then contorted mid-flight into a barrage of twisted, insidious strikes.
Had the two not evaded with microscopic precision, they would have undoubtedly suffered catastrophic wounds.
Miriael giggled, preparing to press her advantage, yet her footwork abruptly stalled.
She tilted her head slightly, a flash of bewildernt crossing her features.
From that direction... what an overwhelmingly potent fluctuation of the immaterium!
What was happening?
However, the Slaaneshi Daemon Prince rapidly comprehended what had transpired.
The warp-tether binding her covenant with the Chaos Lord, Malvin, had just been violently severed.
"How truly unfortunate. The Chaos Lord has perished?"
Combining the psychic shockwave she had just sensed with the sudden severance, she deduced the truth and chuckled softly. "That was the work of the psyker who departed via warp teleportation monts ago, was it not?"
"I presu she is your remaining comrade? A genuinely powerful wielder of the warp... it is simply a pity her intellect is so woefully deficient."
Miriael shook her head, letting out a piercing, mocking giggle.
"Had she remained to encircle alongside you two, she might have actually posed a credible threat. But now, the paradigm has shifted entirely."
Her gaze swept maliciously over the Living Saint and the Custodian before her. "During our little dance, the venom weeping from the Blade of Agony has already seeped into your veins. Your physical vessels are decaying; your martial efficacy is vastly diminished from when we comnced. Even if that psyker were to frantically teleport back right this microsecond, it is an absolute impossibility for you to threaten now."
"What a profoundly idiotic choice."
Concluding her mockery, Miriael once again engaged the dark blessing bestowed by Slaanesh, extending her empathic senses to gorge upon their emotional states.
To Miriael's imnse satisfaction, this ti, the emotional states of her enemies were no longer impossibly, unnervingly calm.
Living Saint Lucia remained largely composed. She treated Miriael's mockery as nothing more than passing wind, her heart undisturbed, her holy resolve as unbreakable as adamantium bedrock.
Yet within the mind of Custodian Leonardo, those provocative words managed to birth a fleeting, microscopic sliver of doubt.
Although this doubt was instantaneously strangled and failed to cascade into negative emotional turmoil, the re discovery of its existence was enough to fill Miriael with euphoric joy.
The only blemish upon this perfection was that the Living Saint possessed the direct aegis of the False Emperor, while the Emperor's Custodian Guard possessed an absolute, flawless record of zero chaotic corruption across ten millennia, rendering them exceptionally difficult to crack.
Had they been ordinary Imperial warriors, such as Adeptus Astartes or Sisters of Battle, the negative emotions festering within their minds would have been violently magnified by the Daemon Prince's aura. Once accumulated to a critical threshold, it would induce spontaneous chaotic corruption, shattering their resolve entirely.
"My appetite is far from sated. Let us continue this rapturous dance!"
Miriael raised the Blade of Agony once more, assuming an impossibly seductive and lethal guard, preparing to unleash another torrential, tempestuous flurry of strikes.
Yet her towering, daemonic fra suddenly froze, gripped by an inexplicable paralysis.
And it was not rely her. Even Lucia and Leonardo standing opposite her, who should have seized this microscopically rare opening to strike, halted their movents in exact unison.
All three entities present distinctly perceived it: on the far side of the chamber, a wholly and utterly anomalous presence was exponentially intensifying.
The Slaaneshi Daemon Prince slowly turned her head, shifting her gaze.
Her eyes finally locked onto the mortal who had been standing silently by the breached blast doors, rely observing the engagent until now.
The physical exterior of this mortal had not altered in the slightest. He rely stood there in silence. Yet the aura radiating from him was no longer sothing that could be ignored; rather, it had beco blindingly, suffocatingly prominent.
Sothing was violently fluctuating around him, carrying a sensation that was fundantally alien to the current reality of the material universe.
It was as if into a world comprised entirely of liquid, an immovable, undeniable solid object had been forcefully and violently inserted. It was grotesquely out of place, yet terrifyingly real. An absolute anomaly.
What was that?
anwhile, at this exact mont, Rowan was experiencing an unimaginably profound sensation.
Since boarding this corrupted strike cruiser, they had slaughtered over a hundred Chaos Space Marines and a massive horde of Chaos cultists.
The souls of those elite units, alongside the executed Chaos Sorcerers, possessed an existential weight vastly surpassing that of ordinary Astartes.
Coupled with the execution of the Chaos Lord, who possessed a considerable mastery of the immaterium himself, by Cybia, the final threshold for his ascension had been instantaneously breached.
The existential equivalent of one hundred thousand mortal souls had been successfully harvested.
"Hah, I genuinely believed I would never achieve this grade in my entire existence."
Rowan murmured.
The ontological density anchoring his physical form, his existential tric, was hyper-accelerating under the infusion of this harvested soul-weight. Like an inferno fed by endless fuel, it bridged a chasm he had previously never dared to imagine crossing in a single breath.
Internal Existential Density: 200 units -> 300 units.
Ambient Reality Suppression Field: 60 units -> 40 units.
"Is this the absolute authority of a Tertiary-grade reality architect?"
Rowan extended his hand. A sphere of blinding, incandescent plasma spontaneously manifested within his palm. He slowly clenched his fingers, and the plasma was erased from existence as casually as it was ford. "This sensation... it is fundantally different from before."
Through his newly evolved perceptual lens, he could clearly feel the materium surrounding him radiating an overwhelming sense of malleability, akin to wet clay.
Unlike the fragile, limited authority of a Secondary-grade architect.
A Tertiary-grade weaver of reality experienced a qualitative, apocalyptic leap in both their sphere of influence and the sheer, tyrannical weight of their dominion.
Within Rowan's mory, nurous highly classified archives regarding this specific classification flashed through his mind:
Such as the Tertiary-grade designated Supersonic Girl, who, rely by possessing the thought I want to run faster, effortlessly shattered the sound barrier. rely by holding the innocent belief that a certain clandestine researcher was a good person, she subconsciously overwrote the man's entire personality to perfectly match her delusional fantasy;
Or the entity who casually warped their own flesh into a localized wormhole; or the one whose single scream induced catastrophic psychic hemorrhaging in all baseline humans within a kiloter radius; or the one whose sheer, fanatic adherence to materialism forced all localized warp anomalies to temporarily cease functioning; or the one who, rely upon harboring a fleeting thought of malice, caused their target's physical structure to collapse into a paradox and violently unmake themself...
These were the horrifying truths of what a Tertiary-grade architect could achieve!
"What in the Warp are you... no, what manner of god are you?"
A voice shattered Rowan's contemplation.
He raised his head. Miriael, whose arrogance had been boundless monts prior, had entirely abandoned her theatrical deanor. Her towering fra was slightly hunched, adopting an unimaginably tense, hyper-vigilant combat stance.
She had completely disregarded the two lethal adversaries standing re paces away from her.
A surge of dark amusent rose within Rowan's heart, recalling the absurd circumstances of his abduction by a certain Golden Entity.
He smiled faintly and delivered a deadpan response:
"I am no god. I am rely a completely ordinary human from Terra."
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