She played her part with such perfection that her master bent the tides of war as though they were his own to command. Upon her decks, campaigns were decided before the first shot was fired. She assailed the greatest cities hidden in the Webway, tore through alien armadas that had reigned supreme for millennia, and stood unbroken before every foe the void could birth.
Against the Eldar, she was a storm. Against the Necrons, she was defiance made steel. Against the Krorks, she was the wall upon which their tide broke. In every theater, in every trial, she did not falter.
She confronted all the xenos of the stars — and she won.
She is Sweet Liberty
------------
The transition from faster-than-light travel was nothing short of spectacular—smooth and almost tranquil. The thousand ships of Battlefleet Liberty glided into realspace like celestial beings descending from the heavens. For a brief moment, all that could be heard was the soft whisper of static mingling with the fading glow of distant stars. Then, the reality of their surroundings came into sharp focus.
Before them lay the haunting spectacle the Gate of Liberty —an array of once-heavily fortified worlds now reduced to desolation, drifting ash and silence. Fragments of cities lingered in orbit, their spires and hab-blocks spinning like forgotten remnants in the void. Continents had been cleaved apart, their molten cores cooling into ghostly embers, a poignant reminder of what had once thrived.
Suspended above this eerie tableau, enshrined in the blackness of space, was the corpse of a Blackstone Fortress. Its once majestic geometry had succumbed to fracturing, creating impossible angles. Yet, even in its demise, energy flickered weakly within its depths—the fading pulse of a god-like machine that had witnessed the very end of an era.
Floating nearby were the remnants of the Galactic Net towers—colossal spires that had once served as vital links connecting the Independence Sector to humanity's vast expanse. Irrevocably shattered, their cores vented frozen plasma, a silent echo of their former glory. At the forward viewport of the Sweet Liberty stood Franklin, arms thoughtfully folded behind his back, his reflection shimmering in the soft starlight.
Sovereign's voice rang through the command deck—smooth and steady, a testament to a mind interpreting grief through the lens of statistics. "Confirmed casualties: ten point six billion. Ninety-three percent of planetary surfaces vaporized. The Seraph Logic Network is sealing off exposed data nodes. No signal exchange is possible beyond the sector."
Franklin's eyes sharpened with determination. "Isolation," he murmured, piecing together the significance. "So the Net survives—but only to lock itself away."
He leaned closer to the glass, surveying the wreckage with keen interest. His tone remained composed, yet an undercurrent of memory coursed through it. "Glorblasta…"
This recognition wasn't born of fear—it was the acknowledgment of a past that had returned, a shadow of an old sin.
A tremor coursed through the deck as the sensorium burst into life with a burst of static. Dozens of contacts, hundreds more, began to warp across the holomap—echoes without identifiable drive signatures, mere shadows moving in the depths.
"Sovereign," Franklin said sharply, his voice slicing through the rising hum. "Confirm that interference."
"Confirmed, Primarch. Gravitational readings diverge from debris drift. Signature magnitude—" The AI hesitated, its tone becoming more intense. "—is too large to be natural."
Outside, the stars dimmed as if sensing the change. The Blackstone Fortress shifted subtly, drawn by an unseen force.
Franklin's smirk faded, his expression morphing into that of a predator acutely aware of unseen dangers lying in wait. Without turning to his officers, he decisively stated, "General Quarters. Prepare for immediate action—we're heading straight for Nova Libertas."
------------
The stars screamed.
Battlefleet Liberty tore out of the Inertialess Jump and into a killing field. Space itself was burning. Across the void loomed a sight fit only for gods and madmen—a wall of green fire stretching across the horizon of the system, a fleet ten thousand strong. Each vessel was a mountain of jagged iron and living metal, some as large as continents, their hulls carved with runes of war and laughter. And at their center—the Pride of Gork and Mork, a planetary fortress crowned in plasma storms, its surface crawling with mechanical fungus and writhing energy veins that pulsed like arteries.
Glorblasta had come.
"Contacts… ten thousand, maybe more!" cried one of the sensor officers. His voice cracked despite the augmetic calmers. "Central signature—planet-class! By Liberty, it's alive!"
Franklin stood unmoving on the command dais, gaze fixed on the storm of light gathering ahead. A sun was dying there—no, being born in rage. The Pride of Gork and Mork's main weapon ignited, a beam of impossible magnitude forming at its equator, reality folding in pain around it.
Sovereign's voice was calm, mechanical serenity in the face of apocalypse."Energy output beyond known Exterminatus parameters. Correlation: Stellar ignition. Impact in seven seconds."."
The Pride's spinal cannon ignited, a beam so wide it split the horizon of the system itself, raw energy burning with the power of a Star. The shot was meant not to destroy one ship—but to vaporize a solar orbit, to erase Battlefleet Liberty from existence.
The command deck of the Sweet Liberty shook as alarms flared. Thousands of holo-feeds burst to life, tactical data screaming red.
Elena Koshka, Fleet Admiral of Battlefleet Liberty, shouted over the roar of the warning klaxons.
"General Quarters! All ships, evasive pattern delta! Sovereign, establish gridlock—now!"
Franklin Valorian did not move. His eyes, like twin furnaces behind the golden light of the hololithic table, fixed on the oncoming annihilation.
"Don't evade," he said. "Sovereign—absorb the discharge."
The AI's voice replied with a tone that was both reverent and clinical. "Confirmed. Klein Reflex Portal array opening. Brace for total inversion."
Reality bent.
A black sphere blossomed in front of Sweet Liberty, a distortion so dense it consumed light, time, and matter in a single breath. The beam struck the portal, and instead of fire, there was silence. A silence that devoured.
The Stellar beam vanished—swallowed whole by the void.
On the fleet channels, stunned silence fell. Dozens of captains whispered across comms, disbelief rippling through the ranks. Even Glorblasta's psychic bellow faltered as he felt his blow dissolve into nothing.
Then Franklin raised a finger.
"Return it."
Sovereign's tone was serene. "Coordinates?"
"Right flank, two million Astronomical Units. Dense cluster. Teach them consequence."
"Coordinates locked. Re-emission sequence beginning."
A matching portal tore open amid the Krork formation. The stolen Stellar beam erupted from it like divine vengeance, vaporizing over two thousand Krork vessels in one instant. The shockwave ripped through their psychic field; their formation rippled as warships collided, detonations cascading through the void.
Franklin smiled faintly. "Liberty returns what is taken."
Elena snapped from awe to fury. "Fleet! All batteries open fire! Bring the wrath of Nova Libertas to bear! Frigates, forward screen—torpedo salvos, full spread!"
Across the gulf of space, the Pride of Gork and Mork shifted its trajectory—not in retreat, but in amusement. Its course change was a growl. Its response, a challenge.
Franklin smirked faintly. "You still fight the same way, old friend."
The Pride answered by banking sharply, its fortress engines flaring in a spiral—mockery in motion, a predator circling prey. Then its secondary batteries lit, sending a storm of plasma meteors screaming toward the Sweet Liberty.
"Sovereign," Franklin said, voice calm amid the maelstrom, "Pattern him." "Already mapping," the AI replied, her tone crystalline. "His movements are… conversational."
Each time Sweet Liberty shifted position, the Pride of Gork and Mork replied with mirrored motion—taunting, circling, speaking through velocity and vector. The void itself became a dialogue between titans: one spoke in mathematics and precision, the other in roaring defiance and instinct.
Franklin stepped closer to the viewport, watching the ballet of annihilation unfold.
"He's telling me I should have killed him," he murmured."And what do you tell him, Father?" Elena asked over comms."That I'm correcting that mistake."
His voice snapped to command tone.
"Launch the aircraft. Deploy Armored Cores. Let's remind him what civilization can build."
Yamato Nakajima, calm amid the storm, bowed his head in acknowledgment.
"All wings, launch sequence green. Armored Core detachments—objective alpha: decapitation strikes. Go for their bridges, reactors, and spinal cores."
From the belly of the Sweet Liberty, billions of aircraft ignited—a golden swarm stretching from horizon to horizon. They poured from the hangar decks like liquid sunlight, weaving between laser fire and debris. Beneath them, Armored Cores launched from magnetic catapults—towering transhuman war machines descending upon the Krork fleet like descending gods.
The battle had devolved into an orchestra of annihilation. The void itself burned, every atom screaming as a thousand suns flared and died.
Battlefleet Liberty surged forward, its formation a blazing spear of precision and defiance. Around them, the Krork armada fought with the fury of primitive gods — massive, half-living warships the size of small moons, bristling with cannons that spat psychic energy and molten metal in equal measure.
But size, Franklin knew, was not supremacy.
Krork vessels were grand and grotesque, their architecture more akin to ecosystems than machinery—pulsating veins of green light running through kilometer-long plates of xenos steel and living spores. Each ship was a world unto itself. Yet every meter of armor made them targets—vast silhouettes against the blinding crossfire.
In contrast, Battlefleet Liberty moved with mathematical grace. Destroyers darted through the gaps, unleashing torpedo storms guided by AI precision—one wave to tear open the Krork power fields, the next to drive the payload home. Frigates vanished and reappeared in flickering bursts of inertialess jumps, carving through enemy lines like scalpels.
And above them all loomed Sweet Liberty.
Her guns thundered in impossible rhythm. Nova-cannons fired beams at light speed, each discharge erasing a ship from existence. Disintegration cannons flayed Krork escorts into dust, Her white-gold hull blazed like a second sun, her wake a trail of pure gravitational distortion.
------
The void before him was black as promise.
Glorblasta stood upon the bridge of the Pride of Gork and Mork, the colossal war-planet whose surface bristled with fortress cannons and Stellar Engines. Around him, his Krorks rumbled like a choir of thunder—Trillions of voices, one mind. The air trembled with psychic static as the gestalt thrummed, old and eternal, an echo from the War in Heaven itself.
He remembered that war.
He remembered the metal ones, the soulless kings who thought themselves eternal. The Necrontyr had wielded drives that cut through reality itself—Inertialess, the old ones called them. Efficient, silent, arrogant.
He had watched their gleaming ships rise and vanish without warp or scream, their engines bending gravity like ribbons. And he had learned.
The Krorks had always learned.
The gestalt had found the rhythm of those drives—the way they distorted the fabric of realspace, the subatomic flicker that betrayed their passing. Once the Krorks saw it, the Necrons never escaped them again.
Every time the metal ones jumped, the Krorks were already waiting, teeth bared, guns roaring.
That was how the Webway War began—when the C'tan and their slaves tore at the skin of the Webway to flee the hunt of the green tide.
And now—after eons of silence, when even the stars had forgotten their names—he saw that same light again.
Inertialess signatures.
Thousands of them.
Bright as suns in the cold dark.
"Dakka-Bringer," he rumbled, the name reverberating like tectonic laughter through the bridge. "You brought back the toys of the old war. You think they make you clever." His tusks gleamed as his grin widened. "They make you visible."
The Pride of Gork and Mork reoriented its mass, titanic servos and hydraulics realigning kilometers of gun-decks. The Stellar Cannon—the ship's heart and godkiller—began to charge. Across its length, cyclopean reactors screamed, drinking the light of a star and forging it into death.
He could feel the gestalt flex. A Trillion Krorks fed him their will, their hatred, their joy. The ship pulsed with the rhythm of their collective thought, a psionic heartbeat that made the stars shudder.
"Let's see if yer pretty ship still dances when a planet throws a punch."
The Stellar Cannon fired.
The beam was not light. It was intent made visible—a star's fury compressed into a single instant, capable of vaporizing planets. It scythed across the void toward the distant gleam of gold and white. Glorblasta watched through magnified lenses, savoring the moment, expecting to see the Sweet Liberty torn apart like a paper icon before the gods of old war.
But the beam did not hit.
Space folded.
A black wound opened before the flagship—a perfect sphere of absence, rimmed in quantum fire. The Stellar Cannon's wrath vanished into it, swallowed without sound. For a moment, the entire battlefield froze in stunned disbelief.
Then, half a system away, the wound reopened—and his fleet screamed.
The energy erupted back into reality, now directed into the Krork flank. Two thousand ships vanished, reduced to expanding halos of green plasma and frozen screams. Even through the gestalt, Glorblasta felt the pain—a psychic flare that burned like betrayal.
He leaned forward, grin fading.
"Cheeky bastard."
He turned his gaze toward that distant cathedral of gold and light—the Sweet Liberty, gliding through the fire like an angel born of machine and madness. Each of its guns spoke in lightning; each salvo erased a city-sized vessel from existence.
Krork warships, larger than any Imperial vessel, burned like flares against its relentless precision.
Even ships shielded by ancient Power Fields crumbled under the white fury of its macro-cannons, their armor peeled apart like fruit skin.
"Big," he muttered, half in admiration, half in challenge. "Bigger than she needs to be. He built her that way just to make a point."
He could feel it now, the presence within that ship—the same as before, the same maddening calm that had once faced him across the ruins of Bludskrag. The Dakka-Bringer, the Human Primarch. The only one who had ever spared him.
And that mercy made him stronger.
"Franklin Valorian," he growled, psychic energy rolling off his words. "You made me. Now face me."
Across the gulf of space, the answer came—not in words, but in the quiet certainty of thought, cold and sharp as a blade.
"I made you better," came Franklin's voice through the resonance, smooth and deliberate. "Don't disappoint me."
Glorblasta's laughter cracked the void. His ships echoed it, a billion-fold chorus of defiance that rattled reality itself.
The Pride of Gork and Mork's reactors blazed hotter, its guns cycling for another volley.
"Good!" he thundered. "Then let's show the galaxy what yer better looks like!"
The Krork fleet shifted into war-formation, its vessels weaving together like living tissue. The gestalt roared—Krork faith, Krork fury, Krork genius unified in purpose. Reality twisted around them as their collective will began to rewrite the rules of existence itself.
The second round had begun.
-------
The void burned with ten thousand suns.
The battle had raged for hours—no, days, by the reckoning of mortal ships—and still the heavens were on fire.
From the command citadel of the Pride of Gork and Mork, Glorblasta watched as his vast fleet—a horde of ships the size of mountains and continents—was being whittled down.
It should have been impossible.
It was impossible.
Yet, reality itself seemed to bend to that impossible cathedral of white and gold—Sweet Liberty.
At first, he had laughed. He thought he had the upper hand he had ten times more ships than the Dakka Bringer.
Now, he found himself snarling in disbelief.
His hololiths bled red with casualty runes. Krork warships that should have outgunned any Armada mortals could field, dying like insects.
And when he looked closer—he saw why.
Flies.
Tiny, metallic flies swarming through the void.
He magnified the projection.
The "flies" were aircraft—Millions upon Millions of them, moving like a Swarm. They skimmed across the hulls of his ships, slipping through flickering power fields, decelerating just enough to phase inside the protective layers before releasing their payloads.
Cyclonic torpedoes—miniaturized annihilation.
Glorblasta's jaw tightened. "Clever gitz," he growled, watching one of his battleships—a continent-sized slab of metal and fury—detonate from within, the explosion blooming like a green sun.
"Your flies bite hard, Dakka-Bringer."
He shifted focus.
There, amidst the chaos—the Sweet Liberty.
She was smaller than his attack planet by far, a mere sliver of radiance beside the Pride of Gork and Mork. Yet she fought like a god-machine born of spite and artistry.
Her Nova cannons spat lances of light-speed death that tore through even the strongest hulls. Disintegration arrays painted his vessels in arcs of unbeing. Every shot that struck home was a prayer answered in fire.
When one of his ships—a monstrous dreadnought easily a quarter her length—charged to ram, the Sweet Liberty didn't even flinch.
She Fired her Disintegration batteries, and it ceased existing.
Not shattered. Not broken.
Erased.
The Krork fleet buckled under the unstoppable barrage.
The Pride of Gork and Mork traded blows with the human flagship, the void flashing in silent cataclysms. His stellar cannon bellowed, cracking the void, while the Sweet Liberty's Nova cannons answered in light-speed thunder.
His ship was larger—vastly larger, dwarfing the human vessel by leagues—but every time he fired, the Sweet Libertymoved, slipping between trajectories as though she already knew where his shots would go.
Then came the missiles—countless, unending, streaking from her sides like divine fury. Shield-breakers. They hammered at his planetary fields, each one tuned to disrupt the harmonic frequencies of his shield generators. The first barrage drained his reserves. The second broke the barriers completely.
And then came the rain.
Torrents of Lightspeed Shells and annihilation beams ripped through the crust of his world-fortress. His command deck trembled as kilometers of superstructure buckled, cities of Krork industry burning to plasma.
Still he grinned.
"Now that's a fight."
The hololiths flickered again, and new chaos joined the dance.
Humanoid shapes—giant, winged, and armored—descended through the void. Mechs.
Glorblasta blinked, then laughed incredulously.
The humans were deploying warriors into the vacuum, not just ships.
He watched one land on a Krork dreadnought, rip open a turret, and plant a warhead into its core before leaping away.
Another fell to interceptors, exploding mid-flight—only for the killers to be ripped apart by a swarm of F-66 fighters seconds later.
It was a storm of action and reaction, intercept and interception—a ballet of death.
He turned his eyes inward, into the gestalt—the river of shared thought connecting him to every Krork within a hundred light-years. The psychic storm churned around him, a tide of faith, fury, and instinct.
Then—he felt it.
A tug.
Reality itself leaning.
The threads of causality bending toward the human flagship, all probability tightening like a noose around his throat. He saw flashes—not visions, but inevitabilities: his planet cracking apart, his fleet consumed, his gestalt unraveling.
He laughed.
"Causality, eh?" His voice rolled like an avalanche across the bridge. "So that's how you always win, Dakka-Bringer!"
He could feel the shape of Franklin's mind, cold and crystalline, slicing through the warp like a blade of reason. Geometry given will.
He hated it.
He admired it.
He set his own gestalt against it, letting the green tide twist and coil in response—chaos against order, instinct against intellect.
"Let's see how your logic handles want."
The Pride's guns roared again, and space screamed.
Then something changed on the hololith—a new pattern, a spreading pulse.
Over a million ships had entered the neighboring system. His ships.
The true horde.
Glorblasta's grin returned.
"Thought you'd cornered me, eh? That's the trouble with clever things, Dakka-Bringer. You always think the fight's the point." His laughter shook the bridge. "But you're too busy counting wins to notice the hunt."
The Pride of Gork and Mork and its escort were never meant to win.
They were meant to hold the Dakka-Bringer's gaze—to distract the eagle.
Because Glorblasta understood something about humans—something primal and eternal.
They were petty.
They hated losing symbols.
If you destroyed their armies, they would rebuild.
But if you destroyed their hope, their icon, they would fall to despair.
And if they thought their icon might still live—they would come crawling for blood.
"He always chases. That's his weakness. He can't abide an unfinished fight. He'll burn a galaxy to finish a sentence."Glorblasta whispered, tusked grin gleaming in the crimson light of battle.
He reached out to the control spire, and his gestalt surged in response. The Pride of Gork and Mork began to turn, the surrounding fleets falling back into perfect formation. Plasma drives ignited. Portals began to bloom, shimmering green and hateful.
To the humans, it would look like a retreat.
To Glorblasta, it was bait.
He gave one last glance toward the white and gold leviathan that tore through his armada like a vengeful god.
"Round two, Dakka-Bringer," he rumbled, voice heavy with promise. "This time, I'll come for yer nest."
The Pride of Gork and Mork vanished into the warpstorm of its own making, and the void was left howling in silence.
-------
The bridge of the Sweet Liberty burned in gold and scarlet light, a cathedral of command and fury. Holo-constellations wrapped around Franklin Valorian like the hands of angels; his armor glimmered with refracted starlight. Below him, a thousand ships answered his every word as if his thoughts had teeth.
"Carrier groups, swarm formation. Wings Four through Nine, pivot on Axis Theta—cut their line."
His tone was calm, measured, and maddeningly sure.
Each syllable reshaped the battle itself.
On the tactical projection, Krork icons bloomed and vanished in waves of green fire. Wherever Franklin pointed, something died.
Destroyers turned on a vector no human mind should have been able to compute. Frigates slipped into quantum shadow, reappearing inside the gaps of the Krork formations. Drones deployed in sheets of silver light, scything through green armor and flame.
Franklin stood at the heart of it all, commanding not through panic, but through certainty.
He was no longer fighting the present—he was dragging the future into place.
The strings of causality shimmered in his sight, thin threads connecting explosions, trajectories, and probabilities.
Every time he gave an order, those strings bent, tightened, and snapped in his favor.
When a Krork battery locked onto one of his cruisers, a squadron of bombers was already there, cutting through the void, their cyclonic payloads screaming like fallen comets.
He barely moved his lips when he spoke: "Spearhead formation, concentrate fire on their starboard column."
The reply came in light.
A dozen Krork battleships vanished, reduced to expanding halos of debris.
Across the void, the Pride of Gork and Mork loomed—an entire world wreathed in lightning and flame. It fired a planetary broadside, a lattice of energy that should have stripped Sweet Liberty of every atom. Franklin didn't even blink.
"Reflex array—phase counterfire. Return to sender."
A sphere of darkness swallowed the beam whole.
Moments later, it erupted behind the Krork planet, slicing through the fortress's shield lattice like a god's own judgment.
The bridge crew cheered. Sovereign's holographic form flickered beside him, its serene, synthetic face watching the carnage unfold.
"Enemy fleet down to sixty percent," the AI intoned. "Battle efficiency increasing exponentially."
Franklin smiled faintly, eyes still on the storm. "Of course it is. Victory was decided an hour ago."
He meant it. In his mind's eye, Glorblasta's world was already exploding, its orbit breaking apart under the barrage.
But even as the attack planet burned, Franklin could feel something.
A wrongness, subtle but deliberate.
The threads of causality quivered—pulled taut, then twisted.
The Krork were warping reality back.
Their gestalt consciousness throbbed across the void like a wound in the Warp. The dead began to scream again, ships that had already exploded flickering back into half-existence, probability itself rebelling against him.
Sovereign's tone sharpened. "Temporal anomalies detected. Enemy causality countermeasures—non-linear engagements across multiple vectors."
Franklin's smile thinned. "They're learning."
"Orders, Commander?"
He turned, eyes burning like molten bronze. "We chase."
He saw it—the Pride of Gork and Mork, reeling but alive, turning away. The Krork fleet fractured, retreating in perfect synchrony.
It was the chance he'd waited for, the chance to end the creature he had once spared.
He leaned forward, voice steady. "Lock onto the Pride. Prioritize all drives for immediate pursuit."
"Warning," Sovereign began. "Their phase-signature is unstable. Warp storm density is rising—"
"Then we'll ride the storm."
For the first time in hours, Franklin's smirk returned. "He runs because he knows. This time, there will be no mercy."
Across the fleet, alarms flared. Drive cores roared to life. Reality folded in on itself as the Sweet Liberty and her thousand ships flared white.
"Execute jump!"
The stars screamed—and Battlefleet Liberty vanished into the storm.
"Trillions Dead. Never again."
-------
The void was burning.
When Battlefleet Liberty burst from faster-than-light, they expected pursuit. What they found was apocalypse. A million signatures ignited across every spectrum—plasma storms, warp fissures, the luminous wakes of engines large enough to swallow continents. Krork ships, more numerous than stars in sight, filled the void in concentric waves. Franklin had not pursued Glorblasta; he had charged straight into his jaws.
"Contact! Mass signatures—ten to the sixth magnitude. Encirclement pattern forming. Estimated hostile strength: overwhelming."
Franklin stood unmoving at the observation dais, eyes narrowed at the impossible constellation of enemies. The cold clarity in his tone was worse than shouting.
"They were waiting. They read our jump."
Sovereign's response carried a weight of grim discovery.
"Confirmed. Analysis of the ambush pattern indicates recognition of Inertialess-drive emissions. The Krork gestalt saturates the local continuum—every shift in zero-momentum registers like thunder in vacuum. They can hear us move."
Franklin's jaw tightened. "They turned the laws of motion into a trap."
The hololithic projection flared—Glorblasta's face, half-wreathed in the glow of his world-fortress, the Pride of Gork and Mork. The krork's grin was as wide as continents.
"Checkmate, Dakka-Bringer," Glorblasta rumbled, the sound like tectonic plates grinding. "A thousand against a million. Let's see what your pretty toys can do."
The stars erupted.
Millions of Krork weapons discharged simultaneously—quantum hammers, stellar cannons, and god knows what else. The assault didn't sound; it arrived. Battlefleet Liberty was flayed in a single instant. Cruisers vanished, torn apart before their crews could scream
The Sweet Liberty endured.
Her shields flared, her hull screaming like a living beast as gravitational flux rippled across her Blackstone spine. Yet she did not fall.
Franklin's voice cut through the inferno.
"Order the fleet to fall under the Liberty's shadow. Now. Hide behind the wings of the Archangel."
Admiral Koshka obeyed instantly, her commands sharp as gunfire. "All ships, form up beneath the flagship's shield harmonics! Bring every capacitor online!"
Across the void, the remaining ships tightened formation—huddled like children beneath the glow of a god. Quantum shields overlapped. Klein portals opened in sequence, redirecting energy blasts into nothingness.
But the Krork tide pressed harder.
Hull alarms blared. Quantum shields flickered. Klein portals distorted, bending space into molten auroras.
"Shields at ninety-one percent," Sovereign reported, his tone calm despite the maelstrom. "Eighty-nine. Eighty-three. Primarch, the stress is reaching threshold."
Franklin's hand hovered above the command dais, his eyes fixed on the storm.His voice dropped into a calm that terrified everyone listening.
"Then we end it. Fire the Annihilators."
Sweet Liberty's dorsal lines lit up in sequence, auric veins blazing across her ten-thousand-kilometer frame.
"Graviton Annihilators, full cycle," Sovereign confirmed.
Then the stars died.
Space twisted around the flagship as the Annihilators released their fury—artificial singularities blooming like black flowers across the void. The gravitational waves rippled outward, devouring light and mass alike. Krork ships screamed through the warp-link, some crushed into atoms, others dragged helplessly into the hungry dark.
A thousand suns were born and extinguished in seconds.
For a heartbeat, Battlefleet Liberty saw victory. Then Glorblasta's laughter filled every channel, a thunder rolling through their souls.
"You think Gravity can stop me , Dakka Bringer!?"
The Pride of Gork and Mork flared crimson. Psychic lightning tore across the stars. Glorblasta howled, and every black hole in sight imploded, collapsing under a single titanic burst of gestalt will.
The void went eerily still.
Sovereign's voice crackled across the bridge.
"Annihilators neutralized. Gestalt psychic interference collapsed the gravity wells. However… it has opened their flank."
Franklin's eyes gleamed. "Then that's all we need."
He strode to the command dais, hand hovering over the activation runes of Sweet Liberty's heart.
"Event Horizon Array—prepare sequence. Lowest power. Subsector-wide reset."
"Admiral, the Event Horizon Array will require coupling to Sagittarius A* for temporal constant stabilization. I must remind you—every activation weakens the gravitational lattice of the Milky Way. The core will destabilize further."
Franklin smiled faintly. "Then we'll just have to remind the galaxy who writes its laws."
The Array fired.
The stars went silent.
No light. No sound. Just a spreading bloom of uncolor—a sphere of nothingness that erased the meaning of existence within its radius. The Krork fleet, their planetary fortresses, their millions of guns—gone. Not destroyed, but unmade.
Sovereign's processors screamed with warnings. "Causal baseline destabilizing! Galactic core echo detected—Sagittarius A* spin variation increasing by 0.02 percent!"
Across the void, Glorblasta's laughter echoed through the psychic plane.
"Hah! You'll drown us both, Dakka Bringer! You think you won—but the galaxy bleeds for it!"
And with a final roar of psychic defiance, the Pride of Gork and Mork vanished into the warp—its captain escaping through raw will alone.
In the silence that followed, Franklin stood alone on the command deck. The entire Krork armada was gone—millions of ships erased in an instant.
But the galaxy itself groaned, ever so faintly, in protest.
Sovereign's voice was almost a whisper now.
"Causal echoes spreading from the galactic center. The core remembers, Franklin. It does not forget being rewritten."
He gazed into the empty void where an entire army had once stood, his reflection shimmering in the holographic stars.
"Then it'll just have to forgive me," he said softly. "Because this war isn't over."
--------
The war room of Sweet Liberty was cast in spectral hues from the holographic projection of the battlefield—a slowly rotating galaxy, its sectors bleeding crimson where the Krorks had struck. The lights dimmed to a somber glow as Sovereign's voice, calm and metallic, finished its report.
"Cross-analysis complete. The probability of further ambushes using Inertialess transit: ninety-eight-point-four percent. The Krork gestalt perceives our drives not as light but as ripples—bright as novas to their collective senses."
The Continental High Command stood in grim silence around the hololithic table.
Admiral Elena Koshka's gloved fist clenched at her side.
"Then we're blind and crippled, The Warp's storms make translation impossible, and now our own engines betray us. Every jump could lead straight into another trap."
Yamato Nakajima, ever composed despite the exhaustion in his voice, added:
"Our stealth squadrons confirm it. The Krorks react before we even breach into realspace. They see the drives before we arrive."
The room vibrated faintly as distant thunder rolled through the ship—repairs still underway, the echo of a thousand mechanical servitors laboring in the halls. Franklin stood at the far end of the table, coat unbuttoned, light from the holomap painting his features in stark blue and gold. His eyes, as sharp as ever, were fixed not on the map, but on the swirling darkness where Nova Libertas should have been.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Even Sovereign's voice fell silent.
Then Franklin exhaled. A tired sound. A human sound.
"So. The Warp is useless. The drives are compromised."
"That leaves us with roads we were never meant to walk."
------------
Deep within the Tomb World of Thanatos, in the sanctum of the Celestial Orrery. The universe's holographic model glows like a billion stars suspended in black glass. Each planet hums in harmony with the real galaxy beyond. The Conclave of Celestial Guardians is gathered — Hakmephet upon his obsidian dais, Ashenti and Dzukar maintaining the field lattices, Zotha the Observer floating among data streams.
The Orrery trembled.
For a moment — a fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond — the galaxy skipped.Millions of stars flickered, systems blinked out, and the entire Orrery moaned like a choir of dying suns.
The harmonic hum of reality itself went off-key.
Hakmephet — the Phaeron of Oruscar — rose from his throne, his necrodermis glimmering like mercury in panic.
"Dzukar. Report. Why do the heavens…stutter?"
The Chief Technomancer's fingers flared with cascading hieroglyphs, each rune collapsing into static.
"It is not Warp interference. It is not chronal decay. The data is absent. Not lost — absent. The stars have ceased to have ever been."
The words carried the weight of blasphemy.Necron logic could not articulate absence; absence was for mortals and gods.
Ashenti, her body like a lattice of cold light, extended her plasmantic tendrils into the core of the Orrery. The glow of her essence dimmed as she read the data.
"The Orrery remembers being complete. The records declare no flaw. Yet the coordinates of Segmentum Auriga no longer exist within the fundamental constants of the galaxy."
"Subsector Auriga?" murmured Zotha, the Observer, his voice like the echo of grinding stars. "That is… ten thousand light-years from the galactic core."
Ashenti turned her hollow eyes toward him.
"No. It was ten thousand light-years. It is not anything now."
A silence settled — the kind of silence that only machine gods could create. The Orrery pulsed again, recalibrating. Then a ripple spread through the holographic starscape — like ink bleeding through water.
The map reasserted itself, reconstructing ghost data from adjacent gravity wells, trying to make sense of a void that refused to be quantified.
Dzukar spoke, his tone darkly reverent.
"The Orrery seeks to heal itself. But the wound is conceptual. Someone has edited the curvature of spacetime."
Hakmephet's optics burned emerald fire.
"That is a claim for primitives and Warp-mongers. None but we possess that precision."
Ashenti countered, her voice trembling with raw plasma discharge.
"Phaeron, this is not imprecision. This is a reversal. It is computation beyond our mathematics. Whoever did this used the gravity well of Sagittarius A⁎ as their calibration constant."
At that, Hakmephet froze. Every Cryptek in the chamber halted. The mention of the central black hole—the Orrery's sacred reference point—was sacrilege.
Zotha drifted closer to the holographic projection. The empty region glowed faintly, like a scar where stars once were.
"Something has rewritten the universe by persuading the galaxy's heart to forget."
Dzukar, his logic spiraling toward awe, whispered:
"There are traces," he growled. "Minute gravitational echoes. Quantum tethers anchored to Sagittarius A⁎. Whoever performed this… weaponized the galactic core. That is not Necron science—it is… equivalent."
A/N: Sweet Liberty