Its been an eventful few years, before I ended up in this horrible galaxy the most I had to worry about was increasing my combat capabilities faster than the bugs did, and making sure that none of my bases would flood if the ocean decided it wanted to join in on the fun.

Then the sky started raining blood and monsters and my life became a whole lot more complicated, but I had adapted and grown stronger. I even had a few allies now, well a new family member and an ally.

Once we had gotten out of the warp and dealt with the first ork attack Palisade had finally figured out warp travel, or at least figured out how to get in and out without dying or becoming a demon. Moving the ships with a degree of accuracy was an entirely different ordeal, you'd go into the warp, move a bit, hope back out and check where you were then go back and try to use the information of your real space position to move in the correct warp direction.

It was showing mixed success, apparently Isha could steer our ships but well, the dark gods really wanted Isha and putting her on one of our ships was just a good way to lose the goddess and the ships, even now we still had demons showing up on any warp voyage, just less and weakened.

Something about Nauvis and its passive anti demon field made my shield tech actually prevent manifestations, but only on world. Outside the magnetosphere it just made the demons easier to banish, and the specialty made anti demon shields Palisade designed only made them even weaker, not preventing them from appearing at all.

Even these ad hoc transportation methods were enough to let me colonize a few systems, with the minds leading the effort. I am not getting on one of those demon riddled death traps I pretend are functioning warp ships. The walls weep blood, they spontaneously catch fire, and the speaker systems chant in screams. Sure the energy can't actually corrupt anything shielded but it can damn well try and inconvince me.

The three systems I sent fleets out too were almost more barren than my own, which is entirely a lie but none of the planets had an atmosphere or were gas giants. Even disregarding the fact I am more than capable of functioning on planets with no atmosphere or inside of a gas giant the planets aren't exactly resource rich, and one of the systems is apparently where the orks had come from.

That had been a few months of battle in which I failed to acquire a single working piece of ork tech more complicated than a flintlock pistol. Apparently they just make tech work by believing really hard, and no this doesn't also apply to me, I asked Isha.

And yes, the orks had apparently colonized a system without any habitable worlds, they just ignored the fact that the planet had no atmosphere. Though the mushroom ecosystems they left behind had been making one, that still left most of the planet without air or oxygen. I burnt those plants and replaced them with plants Isha said would slowly terraform the planet, along with two others, one habitable world a system. In a few years there will be enough of an atmosphere that Palisade and I can breathe on them. None augmented or super humans are out of luck for at least two decades though.

But now I had 2 gas giants, three more asteroid belts, and 5 rocky barren worlds each smaller than Nauvis. All of these combined are giving me just barely more metal than Nauvis, and without life they don't actually have oil, coal, or natural gas. Though the gas giants have hydrogen and helium in abundance, and hydrogen works just fine as a fuel for nearly all my systems, and I have other methods of making plastics, they are just more time intensive.

And if the problem gets bad enough I can just turn to Isha and ask for a plant that makes plastic fruit or oil. Though apparently the fact I still use plastic is primitive, my buildings are ugly, and I am a barely sentient wrech not worthy to be in the presence of a goddess. I finally get why Isha was so annoyed with her children, the pompus idiots.

First of all I'm actually immortal, second of all I can fold all of them like toothpicks, third of all just because I can't do space magic doesn't mean I can't kick their asses and fourth of all, it won't be long before I make machines that can do it better than they can.

The first time I met one of the eldar Isha had given me a few days warning that they would be showing up. Which meant I needed to clear out a few hundred miles of bug infestation to ensure the outpost they would be landing on wasn't taken or attacked during their visit. And dealing with the bugs was far more resource intensive than fighting any of the demon hordes or ork fleets, I mean some of the bugs were larger than the orks smaller ships, and they were certainly more durable.

One hundred feet was the minimum size for the insects, and my tanks were sized to match, or at least the weapons were.

Also side note, I can't actually pilot eldar ships and they can't warp travel in the first place.

Anyway I had been expecting the eldar to be a bit more downtrodden refuge than they were, given that their empire had fallen and if they died without a shiny rock on them they would have their soul eaten by a torture god. But no, when the farseer and his entourage arrived they did so with great ceremony.

If five ships could be considered 'great' at least, still an armored procession of warriors with admittedly impressive weapons eventually landed on one of my outposts and Isha went out to meet with them, eventually she had asked me to show up, apparently the discussion had turned to who exactly owned the world they were trodding on.

If I never meet another eldar in my life it will be too soon, I mean I don't even know their language but Isha was telling me what they were saying, and more importantly what they were thinking. I mean I get that some of your thoughts will be unkind but still. I can only assume that Isha wanted some sympathy over what she had to deal with.

It had been days of debate before the eldar accepted leaving Isha in my care, and they only did so because Isha refused to leave with them and a mortal isn't moving a god that doesn't want to be moved. If you're wondering why she didn't go with them, well my defenses are a little more adept at dealing with the dark gods than the eldars. And the dark gods certainly wanted her back, but they did end up taking a bunch of seeds and rocks from Isha before they left.

On the next visits I just ignored the eldar, and when they tried to send spies and leave monitoring equipment behind I just let Isha handle it, she was more people person than me and Palisade took after the minds, don't negotiate with someone trying to infiltrate your base, just kill them and deal with it later.

That was the state of affairs for awhile, Palisade and I work on new tech to try and expand our space capabilities and figure out the hell dimension, make slow improvements based on theories Isha could tell us and our own experiments, and slowly build a space fleet and an army that can be deployed from most orbits.

By now I had enough drones, tanks, and spidertrons that saying I could cover a continent with sheer numbers of ground units wasn't an exaggeration, though a good third of that was tied up with the bugs, and that was only at our almost friendly minor skirmishing level. My space drone forces were of similar number, but even greater size. Given that I had to cover most of a planet. Hundreds of thousands of fighters, millions of interceptor drones, tens of thousands of orbital stations, and hundreds of ships.

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My army was coming together.

Then Palisades dad showed up, with an even larger army, and fleet and a mission for his lost son.

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Palisade looked at the screen, it was showing pictures of the approaching fleet, the amount of ships, the estimated sizes, and what all the weapons they could identify were predicted to do. The fleet that had arrived was far more advanced than what he and his father had managed to build, but he had only had a few short years to build it. Still the admission stung, if this fleet had wanted to bomb them into oblivion there would be little Palisade could do to stop it, even the orbital defense grid, his and everyone else's best work would have only bought days or weeks.

Even if all of their fleets were amassed from all of their systems they would have less than an eighth the tonnage and not even that in estimated fire power. The best he could console himself with was that his ships were far more durable than the approaching fleet, and they likely had an equal amount of fighters. It being one of the things the factories, both orbital and ground base, could produce in bulk.

The only chance he could see if a fight broke out was to bunker down behind the orbital shield and mass attacks with disposable bombers and hope they could whittle the fleet down before it broke through the defensive net.

A ground battle would be far more to his advantage, but only an idiot would actually engage in a ground war when they dominated the space front. Well there could be some goals you need an army for, like pacifying a world, but all major centers of resistance should just be bombed.

It was a small relief then that this fleet wouldn't be set against him and his family. His birth father, or his creator, was heading the fleet, he could feel it in his bones and soul and Isha had confirmed it before vanishing into the planet's foliage.

So they were letting the fleet enter the system uncontested, and the minefields had been disabled.

It seemed that his dad had gotten the message that there wouldn't be a fight and the rest of the fleet had stayed at range while one ship, the one with his fathers presence, entered geosynchronous orbit with Nauvis. Then a few shuttles left the ship and Palisade left his control room and headed for the landing pad, his father would likely know which outpost he was on, and even if he didn't when he landed a drone would just give him directions.

Or maybe one of the minds had sent the info to the shuttles, Palisade was a little too worried to concern himself with the minor details. He was going to be meeting his birth father, a god, within the hour. Even if he had already met Isha she freely admitted she was no longer much of a deity, but his father? He was a fully powered god.

What would he be like? Would he approve of what Palisade had done? Would he force Palisade to leave his home behind? Palisade knew he was a tool of war, but would he be treated like one? And what war was he to fight? Was it against the dark gods or some other foe?

His mind burned with unanswerable questions, so much so that he didn't notice as the Maker, his parental father, walked up beside him on the landing platform, both of them were in their power armors, one didn't go about unarmored on Nauvis unless they wanted to be killed. And both were armed for similar reasons.

But even if he didn't consciously notice his parents presence he felt it, to a lesser extent than the blinding light of his father above but it was soothing nonetheless and eventually his thoughts calmed enough that he noticed the Maker's presence beside him.

Palisade felt his parents' mind touch his own after a few moments and allowed the link to open, and he was flooded with the feeling of steady confidence from the maker, they had faced down four gods before and been fine, and those had been actively trying to kill them. This one would be no different.

Through everything that had happened in their time together Palisade had never known his father to falter, panic and worry sure but when push came to shove he always withstood the worst reality and unreality had to offer. It was this calm confidence that no matter what happened they would survive that kept Palisade calm as the shuttle came into view.

They were large, fast, and quiet, armored with an unknown golden metal that Palisade was sure Labyrinthine would love and it wasn't long after they came into view that the shuttles landed, golden figures in power armor marched out and took up position around the shuttles boarding ramps. Then smaller figures marched out, some clad in white armor, some in red and others in unadorned grey. They all joined the formation around the shuttles and Palisade couldn't help but estimate their combat effectiveness, and he felt the Maker do the same.

The golden figures were armored with spears, but the spears obviously had barrels and the armor was advanced, more advanced than his own at first glance, though far smaller and presumably less durable, and they had less built in weaponry. The smaller figures got a different assessment, their armor was somewhat adequate for a disposable unit, and they seemed to only have a fairly standard loadout of obviously mass produced weapons and swords.

The golden figures each had tailored weapons and armors, similar sure but each was different, the smaller figures however? They had good weapons and passable armor sure, but it had numerous flaws. He and the Maker both came to the same conclusion, in a fight aim for the golden ones first, they were the only true threat, the turrets and drones would easily disable the smaller armored soldiers.

He felt something about the unadorned soldiers though, something about them called to his blood and he shared this feeling with his father, and they both subsequently upped the threat level of the gray warriors. If they were affecting his mind they were a more serious threat than their weapons implied.

It was the next figures to exit the platform that stopped their plan making in its tracks, though Palisade had different reasons than the Maker. The Maker was evaluating his chances in a fight against something that screamed danger to his senses and Palisade was laying eyes on his father for the first time.

The golden figure strode out next to what could only be two of his brothers, a large man with blond hair and golden wings and a bald man wearing the pelt of some animal on his armor. Both of them had armors that put the golden warriors to shame and both paled in sheer presence to the man walking just ahead of them.

Palisade would have fallen to his knees if his armor would have let him, even as he stood dwarfing the figure and his brothers in his power armor.

His father had arrived.