Absurd.
This was the first reaction that surged within Miriael's mind upon hearing Rowan's answer.
Though she was among the younger entities within the ranks of Greater Daemons and Daemon Princes favored by Slaanesh, this was by no ans a reason for shallow insight.
Once, within the palatial chambers of the Six Circles of Slaanesh, she had shared a fleeting encounter with the Daemon Primarch Fulgrim.
It was following the conclusion of a tempestuous rapture.
Fulgrim, finding imnse pleasure upon learning that she had once been a Battle Sister prior to her daemonic ascension, was struck by a grand whim and personally shared certain secrets of ten millennia past with her.
Among these truths, he ntioned that the Anathema chained to the Throne—the very Emperor whom Miriael had worshipped before embracing ecstasy—had during the Great Crusade explicitly denied His own divinity, stubbornly maintaining that He was rely a mber of mankind.
Yet now, ten thousand years later, He sat bound upon the Golden Throne, neither alive nor dead like a rotting corpse, while a fundantally absurd organization calling itself the Ecclesiarchy enshrined that entity as a god, spreading dogma and dragging the entirety of the Imperium of Man into ignorance and darkness, an outco that was laughably pathetic.
If this did not constitute weaving one's own shroud, then what possibly could?
Had she laughed when she first heard this secret?
Miriael could no longer recall.
But at this mont, she was completely unable to laugh.
A bizarre emotion welled up within her heart, unexpectedly forcing a twisted sense of empathy with those xenos races that had been so effortlessly crushed by the Emperor during the Great Crusade.
What an absolute mockery of reality!
"Very well, ordinary human."
Miriael crouched low, completely abandoning her prior frivolity, her expression graver than it had ever been as she leveled the Blade of Agony straight at Rowan, instantly casting all other matters from her mind.
What did it matter what truly lurked beneath this mortal vessel, or what the underlying chanics of that anomalous sensation were? Was he a minor deity of the warp, or so other manner of existence entirely?
Regardless, if she could fortuitously capture or execute him, offering his being to the Prince of Pleasure, it would undoubtedly please Him beyond asure!
And so, in the very next fraction of a second.
BOOM!
Miriael's hoofed foot slamd violently against the ceramite deck plating.
A chaotic tempest of churning kinetic force erupted outward, the sheer magnitude of its impact causing the entire bridge to violently shudder.
Shards of shattered ceramite exploded outward like a circular curtain of shrapnel, yet cutting through the din was the looming, terrifying silhouette of Miriael's massive daemonic vessel.
In a re microsecond, her form shot forward like an artillery shell launched from a barrel, transmuting into a violet-crimson blur amidst the deafening crack of a shattered sonic barrier, hurtling straight toward Rowan.
In the midst of her charge, Miriael naturally crossed paths with the two adversaries she had been engaged with for so long, yet she neither dodged nor parried, completely ignoring the devastating strikes they unleashed in a desperate bid to intercept her.
The chainsword and the Guardian Spear forcefully bit into Miriael's flesh, but because their wielders were already at their absolute limits, the blades rely bit deeply into her fra without inflicting a single mortal wound.
Close, ever closer.
Over such a microscopic distance, moving at the velocity of a Slaaneshi Daemon Prince, if he truly were as fragile and weak as his exterior suggested, erecting any defense should have been an absolute impossibility.
Yet even so, Miriael's mind remained unnaturally clinical, a stark departure from her usual maddened euphoria.
Suddenly, as if registering an anomaly, her thoughts sharpened instantly, triggering an imdiate reaction.
Within her field of vision, a massive wall violently erupted from the deck between herself and her target.
It was this exact wall that forced her to violently arrest her forward montum, her charge grinding to a sudden halt.
By all conventional logic, given the terrifying velocity of a Slaaneshi Daemon Prince, a barrier of any material composition should have failed to offer even a microsecond of delay.
But this wall was a catastrophic exception.
Standing approximately three ters in height and seven to eight ters wide, the barrier radiated a blinding, white-hot azure light, venting a blistering thermal aura that visibly warped the ambient air, reducing the dense ceramite deck plating beneath it to a bubbling liquid slurry.
It was a wall forged entirely of raw plasma!
What?
Miriael froze, and despite her vast wealth of cosmic experience, a jolt of genuine dread pierced her soul.
How in the warp had this thing manifested?
And securely sheltered behind this barrier of plasma, Rowan rely offered a serene smile.
Unexpected, wasn't it?
Within the vast majority of docunted cases, the capacity to manipulate physical matter was the primary conscious authority to manifest within an architect of reality.
This encompassed telekinesis—the manipulation of physical forms absent any chanical contact; transmutation—the wholesale restructuring of one matter variant into another; and the total subversion of the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of mass.
Having successfully ascended to the rank of a Tertiary-grade reality architect, Rowan's command over the physical laws of the material world had experienced an apocalyptic evolution.
An ontological imposition of this magnitude, completely unachievable for him monts prior, was now executed with casual ease!
Yet Miriael swiftly displayed the reflex speed befitting a Daemon Prince of Slaanesh.
In a fraction of a microsecond, she violently contorted her body.
Miriael possessed a clinical understanding of what wounds her daemonic flesh could endure and what would utterly unmake her. Had she committed to slamming head-on into a wall of raw plasma, even a Bloodthirster renowned for its mountain-shattering resilience would have been instantly reduced to ash.
Moving as though her massive daemonic fra was completely unbound by inertia, she pivoted on her heel, executing a sharp arc to forcefully bypass the plasma barrier.
To her mild relief, the velocity at which her opponent manifested these barriers was not entirely localized madness; the expansion of the wall did not inexplicably outpace her own transhuman movent speed.
Finally, Rowan's face filled her vision once more.
Caught you!
An expression of unadulterated ecstasy broke across Miriael's contorted features as her right limb elongated unnaturally, the razor edge of her blade lunging straight for her target's throat!
Incorrect. A clean miss!
Her vertical pupils dilated in shock.
Facing a strike that represented the absolute zenith of transhuman velocity and martial artifice, Rowan's response was profoundly simple.
He rely took a single step backward, slipping outside the reach of the blade.
Yet as Rowan moved, a rapid succession of concussive sonic cracks erupted from the displaced atmosphere, and a suffocating pressure akin to being plunged into the abyssal depths of an ocean saturated his entire form.
This was by no ans a lack of velocity; quite the contrary—Rowan's physical displacent had violently shattered the sound barrier, compressing the very air around him into a physical obstruction.
How could he be this fast!
Miriael was utterly incapable of believing her own senses.
Furthermore, even with her hyper-acute vision, she detected absolutely zero signs of muscular exertion across Rowan's body. It was as if moving at multiple Mach factors was simply a natural condition of his objective reality!
Rowan, however, remained mildly dissatisfied, his brow furrowing slightly.
"Is this truly the absolute limit of my capability?"
A minor disappointnt.
Different reality architects possessed varying ontological specializations.
He clearly recalled that the reality architect designated Supersonic Girl had dossiers in the clinical archives docunting her achieving an impossible velocity of fifty thousand ters per second.
Yet he was entirely incapable of replicating such a feat; forcing his vessel to barely breach Mach two appeared to be his absolute ceiling.
Still, it was tactically sufficient.
Bypassing further hesitation, Rowan calmly extended his bare arm toward the plasma barrier he had just manifested.
His hand of literal flesh and bone plunged straight through the incandescence of the superheated plasma, catching the anomalous substance in a firm, tactile grip.
He pivoted his torso, accumulated his intent, and violently whipped his arm forward!
A torrential wave of roaring plasma, cascading outward like a cosmic tsunami, instantaneously blanketed a massive sector of the bridge, rushing down upon Miriael with catastrophic fury!
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