I listened to Azure’s idle report on the obliteration of a Warp Fleet with some amusement. It was only an agriworld system, and a whole Sector Fleet had been devoured and was burning vivic out there in the void. The vivisizing hulks were shoved together by the Gardeners who’d slagged half the fleet, including all the big ships; wrapped up and crushed the remaining quarter of them as they tried to flee; and were polite enough to gather up the other ten ships and the thousands of starfighters that the Rainbow Squadron had blasted all the fuck up and toss them into the pile, too.

Then they went back to sunbathing and digesting their meals. Six of them were going to Split, so the cluster was going to stick around, and the amazed inhabitants of the Virgo worlds found themselves riveted to the scene of the massive starflowers orbiting the sun and soaking in the light... carefully not letting their shadows fall across the two inhabited planets and moon.

Those Scarlet Hate Legions baddies are pretty nasty buggers. Pink-hued Love channeler girl is the best one at boosting civilians to fight them...

Ahem! Chalice started humming some of the theme songs from Annie’s girls’ compilations, although dozens of kids had designed the choruses and themes. One of the quirky aspects of having weird Soulborn genetics is that Ranthas didn’t get bored easily. We could stay interested in something for an incredibly long time, so making hundreds of seasons of similar plotlines and characters and themes and stuff was only exercises in optimizing all the applications of mass media for an eager audience.

And damn, that shit was catchy. No wonder so many girls came to G&G with secret dreams of being Anita Acorn the Sun-Shooter, Goth Gina the Grinner of the Boole, or Tekla Browser the Mech-Runner, or maybe berserk Ferala the Claw of Wrath...

Of course, Gale the Night Nurse, empathic healer and all-around support girl for the rest of them, was also an ideal for the more peaceful among them...

Were there toons for the lads, and mixed? Sure enough. The Briggs weren’t going to be out-arted by the girls, and they had bunches of Hero Journey and Team Toons and Common Man Stepping Up vids out there, that were certainly tons and tons better than the dross shit the Imperials had turned out. Practically every male we’d recruited for the past fifty years knew who the Dura Knight and Adamant Avenger were, from street punk to noble sot, and the fact you could actually grow up to be someone like him was motivating them.

And if not him, well, there were always a ton of inspiring supporting characters...

=========

There was no doubt that this had been the best opportunity for the Warp to take a stab at the Emperor since he had Fallen. Unfortunately, they had kicked over a beehive they had no idea existed, and were now being wrong-footed from many sides.

Unable to match the speed and strategic power of the undead fleet and its ability to assemble and disperse to harass their forces, the forces of the six Demon Princes were forced to gather together for pure protection, the Warp Storm of their assembled power neutralizing some of the power and capability of the undead. It’s hard to be inertialess when space is twisting around you and your ship wants to go in multiple directions at the same time.

Their destruction of worlds was even more merciless, because the systems going forwards generally weren’t populated by the living anymore, anyway. Any thought of using them as slave labor and sacrifices for the glory of the Warp Gods was a moot point, and now their Omega Sanctions literally involved reducing the mantle of the planet to a molten surface that would consume the billions of undead on the planets below.

The forces of the Emperor, if not brilliant, were relentless and untiring, capable of fighting a war of attrition without the slightest thought for their own lives. Even with the Warp gods mucking up time-viewing, the undead commanders were more than competent, and the Emperor was naturally a strategic and tactical genius able to make full use of His remaining assets...

Of course, there was a wild factor involved in all this.

We didn’t interfere in the grudge match that was redefining galactic history. We fought the not quite as endless as before swarms of the xenosym, occasionally catching them in Sun Guns; popped some Anti-Life who got careless; blew away any undead we ran across with maximum prejudice; and did the same to any Warped who cared to intrude on our territory.

Ship production and crew training was taking place across the galaxy, and crews were being constantly brought into place as hulls were completed and rushed into service. Billions died screaming under Blacklight, under world-eaters, under opportunistic invading elder races, and under the screaming fire of the Warp, and there was nothing for it but to keep fighting as the population of humanity ate the losses, and ever more people joined the fight.

Worlds prayed, and other worlds were Blessed, and endured onslaughts that nobody thought they could. Armies marched across planets, fleets filled the skies with city-sized ships, and numberless hordes scrambled to devour all in their path.

If the Warp Gods wanted a show, they were getting one of the highest order. Perhaps it was distracting them from what was really happening, or perhaps they just didn’t care, still thinking they were invulnerable in the Warp, and their only true competition was the undead bastard on the Crystal Throne and the Empire of Undeath He was now dominating.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It probably rankled that He hadn’t completely suppressed and annihilated the living population of Tellus, but the world-city had been made to be defensible, and once His adjustments to the tech were subverted and lost, the living made a right go of Killing Them All. Sure, millions a day were dying in the fighting, but with a population that had started at hundreds of billions, that literally didn’t matter much at all, and the Emperor couldn’t afford to dispense the billions of troops that would be needed to settle the matter in a reasonable amount of time.

The proliferation of vivic Weapons and munitions among the living was worrying, too, as were more and more Null Psions with their Mindclaws and Mindshields appearing among the natives of Tellus, as if rising up in numbers in direct reaction to the presence of the unliving.

Did He acknowledge our efforts at all? Did He think our efforts to contain Him were futile? If we weren’t dealing with all the extraneous shit He was ignoring, did He really think we would be failing to confront Him right now?

The furthest systems of the Imperial Sector out of the advance paths of the Demon Princes ended up being the luckiest; last to be attacked and last to be converted meant we could often get there in time to prevent their destruction and/or reanimation. We couldn’t do it everywhere, of course... too many systems, worlds, and places the Emperor could strike first. But not even the Emperor could defend all the worlds He was converting to undeath, and we were plenty ready to vivify the worlds in His wake if He got there first.

If the undead didn’t much like it when they got to remember dying twice, their worlds certainly ended up profiting regardless. They were certainly quieter, but life was blooming where often it had been burned away.

The conflicts between the dead and the afterlife in the Imperial Sector dragged on and on; so many star systems, so many ships and worlds. The undead were tirelessly making and sending out new Deadships, upgrading standard Imperial hulls with systems designed long ago and tested out for millennia, and hurling them into the fight against the Warp.

Likewise, a constant stream of crews, soldiers, munitions, ships, and supplies came out of the uncounted worlds lost within the Abyss.

Looking on from outside, some of the conflicts made no sense whatsoever, as both forces would drop off armies, Warp Events would bring in even more demons, and the two forces would engage in mindless battles over irrelevant territory, while the fleets that could annihilate the ground forces would take their fights elsewhere, and just let the ground fights drag on and on...

Well, if they wanted to occupy billions of themselves mindlessly bashing on one another, we didn’t feel any inclination to intervene. If one of these forces landed on a world belonging to us, our inclination was to bomb the field army into pulp if it was Warped, and Whitelight it if it was undead.

Armies were used if you didn’t have ships available, or had to capture an asset. There were no assets that we lightly considered more valuable than the armies. After all, we were pretty sure we could replace any tech assets with the speed of multi-planet manufacturing capabilities. The idea of wasting a billion lives or something to recapture a weapons depot was stupid. Better to blow the depot and spend the time and money saved making another depot somewhere else.

We weren’t Mechanists, after all. But hey, if it conveniently created a source of vivus for a planet, not going to argue with their stupidity and ego-flexing.

The gathered Warp Fleets proceeded forwards with brutal force. The Emperor had the edge in ships and absolute morale, but the Warp Fleets could retire to the Warp at any time and had the absolute advantage, as the undead no longer dared to Helljump. The Empire could converge on any assaulted systems, but couldn’t stop them from materializing in said systems at all.

However, cracking the Warp became harder and harder as they progressed towards the increasingly necrotized inner regions of the Imperial Sector, and the Princes had to materialize further and further outside the systems, giving the Emperor’s fleets more time to get to them and continue the fight.

Still, worlds burned, ships blew apart rather than be necrofied, and undead and demons tore at one another in numbers not worth counting.

Where they passed, we came through and whitewashed everything, just some celestial janitors cleaning up major messes. If neither party particularly liked the impression that we were slowly gathering around them, well, one still thought He had some sort of trump somewhere, maybe in the Imperial Palace...

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-I want every Terrestrial Beacon on every world fed into a Solar Furnace within an hour. If it can’t be done, nuke it!- I /stated in no uncertain times. -DM! An in-depth analysis of all the Terrestrial Beacons on every profound level you can make out. I want it assumed they are at TL 20 or even 21, and HOW they are at that level!-

The Emperor had to have some reason he was ignoring us, and felt confident in doing so. He was losing troops, and literally could not replace them without sacrificing ever more living. Kill the living, greater and greater inability to replace them.

But if all He wanted to do was kill us, well, then?

What did all developed worlds have in common with the Imperial Palace? The Beacons.

The smallest of them barely radiated beyond a solar system, yet still served as navigational aids to a knowing Navigator. Their psychic power went without mention.

Every single developed world.

The Crystal Throne could be seen throughout the galaxy. The Crystal Throne could thus touch every single Beacon.

If the power of a billion necropsions got channeled through the Crystal Throne, reached out and touched a Terrestrial Beacon, what could happen, what would happen on the other side? The Beacons could already talk with one another; what could the Crystal Throne do to its lesser duplicates?

-------

The idea that the Beacons might be the most ultimate timebomb of the Emperor went out through Markspace, and with the knowledge that the time-seeing bastard might be looking for any action against the Beacons, Nulls and Sources boiled into motion.

It was quickly determined that the best way to get rid of them fast was to nuke them and center the city’s shield on them to contain the blast. If that wasn’t immediately possible, reducing them to slag with a bombardment from orbit was also a fast and viable option.

Landing a Solar Furnace maw-down on top of them was also used a few times.

The Beacons were abandoned by news of ‘incoming terrorist threat’, always effective, and their subsequent destruction certainly didn’t hurt that image at all...