Chapter 56: Word Bearers: We Can't Beat Them

"Report, we have entered the third planetary orbit. Contact range is expected within thirty minutes."

The Inquisition fleet, serving as the vanguard for the allied armada, reported once more. Upon detecting the numerically superior allied fleet, the Word Bearers fleet had decisively chosen to retreat.

The enemy surrendered the initiative with astonishing speed.

They were hardly any better than that Dark Eldar Archon who had panicked upon hearing the name of Slaanesh.

Both the Word Bearers and the Inquisition fleet behaved in much the same manner.

The former began fleeing toward the inner system the moment the fleet appeared.

The latter had dismissed Aglaia as inconsequential one moment, only to choose absolute obedience the next.

The Perpetuals watched this spectacle with no small amount of surprise.

"Senior officers within the direct fleet of the Ordo Originum hail exclusively from Terran hereditary nobility. If their current reluctance to engage were reported through proper channels, it would provide the High Lords of Terra with sufficient grounds to execute three generations of their bloodline," Aglaia explained over the encrypted channel, her slender fingers tracing the glowing tactical star map.

"These noble scions are the most loyal arm of the Ordo Originum, and their true identity records are sealed solely within the Inquisitorial vaults."

A ghostly blue stream of data swept across the bionic eye on the left side of the Inquisitor's face, her armored gauntlet tapping rhythmically against a family crest projected in the hologram.

"From the stage of embryonic cultivation, their genome is branded with the principle of family supremacy. While individuals may not fear their own death, no one can bear the cost of having their entire lineage expunged by the Officio Assassinorum."

And those rare rebels? Those few who might not care about their families?

Surely not all several hundred noble descendants could be indifferent to their kin?

In that case, those Terran nobles thoroughly deserved to be purged by the Assassinorum. If they could not even perform their basic duty of cultivating reliable arms for the Emperor's agents, they had no right to live and serve the Emperor!

Naturally, the Assassinorum had no fear of receiving false intelligence intended to threaten these noble scions; those resourceful entities possessed myriad ways to verify the truth of any report.

At least within Aglaia's experience, no Inquisitor of the Ordo Originum had ever successfully deceived the Assassinorum.

"Therefore, as long as one holds the true particulars of these hidden pawns, and as long as one's own stance remains absolutely loyal to the Golden Throne, they will obey like marionettes on strings," Aglaia stated.

Moreover, she possessed her own channels for accessing the internal information of the Inquisition fleet.

"I see," Romulus murmured in understanding.

This felt very much like dealing with daemons whose true names had been compromised.

The overlap between the Emperor and the Chaos Gods was increasing dramatically.

Yet this young Inquisitor Aglaia was quite formidable in her own right.

They had conversed when they first boarded the ship, and all told, it had been barely two years since this young woman had officially emerged from Terra.

In that brief span of time, she had investigated the secrets of a Grand Inquisitor, pursued them all the way to the Pield Sector, neutralized a Dark Eldar stronghold along the way, marshaled an expeditionary fleet and a Prospector fleet, and managed to master the intelligence profiles of everyone under the Grand Inquisitor's command.

One had to admit, such operational capability was extraordinary even among the fiercely competitive ranks of the Inquisition.

Romulus could not help but let out a silent breath of relief.

Although the Imperial bureaucracy was infested with no small number of parasites, the war machines at his side were entirely trustworthy.

The perilous galaxy and the Empire's Schrödinger-esque logistics had long since forged these individuals into an elite capable of carving out a path to survival in desperate dead ends.

Romulus cast his gaze toward the observation dome.

The iron torrent formed by the allied fleet was weaving a containment net using the star as an anchor. The silver-gray warpships of the Inquisition herded the Chaos fleet like sheepdogs, while the crimson energy trails of the expeditionary fleet carved fatal arcs through deep space.

This slow and precise hunt reminded him of the killer whale pods depicted in Earth documentaries.

When the Prospector fleet executed its third tactical redeployment, the pincer formation composed of eight cruisers bore a striking, uncanny resemblance to the spiral formation ancient Terran marine mammals used to herd schools of fish.

"Lord Romulus,"

The voice of Archmagos Cawl resonated through the data-link as his cognitive matrix simulated the tactical situation via sub-processors installed across the various warships.

"Please issue the command."

Under mounting pressure, the enemy had walked right into the trap Cawl had spun. To continue retreating now would require them to fight against the star's immense gravity.

It was an opportune moment for the fleet to rapidly close the distance.

"Proceed according to your own judgment, Archmagos."

Romulus had no prior experience commanding naval warfare. He had not even fully grasped the command architecture of the combined fleet yet, and still harbored a degree of bewilderment regarding the operational doctrines of interstellar naval combat.

Nonetheless, he could roughly deduce that the enemy's intellect was likely somewhat clouded by Chaos corruption; at the very least, they had still factored gravitational effects into their retreat vector.

Cawl did not stand on ceremony. Romulus's willingness to grant autonomy in unfamiliar domains only further earned the Tech-Priest's favor.

Among the high echelons of the Empire today, few were willing to relinquish authority in unfamiliar fields. Most would cling desperately to their power even when utterly clueless—simply because they trusted no one save themselves.

"Inquisition fleet, insert directly from the front. Expeditionary fleet, enter acceleration phase and advance toward the designated coordinates. Carcharodons, maintain route sharing and exercise discretionary freedom."

The plasma turrets of more than a dozen Mechanicus warships rotated in unison, their white-hot energy beams weaving a latitudinal and longitudinal grid of death. They instantly overloaded the void shields, before melting three Word Bearer frigates into boiling clouds of metal.

Mechanicus fleets were generally ill-suited for boarding actions, but this deficiency was naturally offset by a ferocious firepower that far outstripped the Imperial Navy.

The Word Bearer fleet directly abandoned the captured cruiser *Pride of Terra*.

They then formed a defensive wedge centered around the *Desolator*-class battleship serving as the core of their fleet. Countless fanged maws split open across the writhing flesh-armor cladding the hulls of those daemon vessels.

Dark green plasma torrents surged from these fleshy gun-batteries, colliding with the void shields of the Imperial fleet to produce sulfurous ripples.

*Boom—*

A *Cobra*-class destroyer took consecutive hits. The moment its void shield collapsed, the bow observation tower was directly dissolved into a skeletal framework by plasma.

Sound cannot travel through a vacuum, yet the fragments that smashed against the vessel's exterior hull still carried faint echoes of that overwhelming violence.

"Nova cannon fully charged."

A servo-skull transmitted the prompt, accompanied by binary shrieks exploding across the bridge.

The words had barely faded when several more beams of light erupted in the dark void.

A number of ships ground to a halt; at the exact instant they fired, every ounce of power aboard the vessels was drained dry, plunging their glowing exterior lights into sudden darkness.

Columns of light dozens of meters in diameter tore through the battlefield. Any Chaos fighter squadrons caught in their path were instantly vaporized, leaving behind only ghostly trajectories on the sensors. The projectiles, accelerated to near-light speed, struck the cruiser directly after its protective escort was stripped away.

Amidst a brilliant flash of fire, three *Destructor*-class Chaos cruisers were dismantled by more than a dozen rays of light, disintegrating into scattered wreckage across space.

As the shockwaves swept fragments across the sector, the ship-bows of every Mechanicus vessel automatically sounded their sirens.

This was a victory protocol pre-programmed by the Forge World of Mars, causing every ship to vibrate within the vacuum, transforming the destructive beauty of the nova cannon into a binary hymn of praise.