Chapter numbers still correct
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The curtain rose on the battle with Scorchwind's savage charge. Like an enraged white beast, he surged forward, his chainaxe roaring as it tore through the air. With the World Eaters' unmistakable, utterly reckless aura of destruction, he brought it crashing down toward the golden giant's head!
Yet the expected shower of sparks and violent collision never came.
I Am Not God did not even make any dramatic attempt to dodge or block. He simply shifted the Guardian Spear in his hands, seemingly casual, yet precise down to the smallest fraction, and laid it lightly across the descending blow.
"Clang!"
A crisp ring of metal against metal echoed out, sharp but hardly deafening.
Scorchwind felt as though his axe had struck not a spear, but the foundation of an immovable mountain. The recoil surged back through the haft, numbing both his arms and threatening to split the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. Even more horrifying was the sheer strength and control hidden within that seemingly effortless motion. The spear had barely shifted backward at all, yet it had stopped his full-force strike dead, as casually as brushing aside a falling leaf.
And it was not over.
The instant the axe blade was caught, I Am Not God gave the faintest twist of his wrist. The shaft of the spear seemed to come alive, transmitting an exquisitely controlled spiraling force through the point of contact.
Scorchwind felt his grip suddenly slip. Then came an irresistible force, as though the side of his body had been struck by a siege ram!
"Vwoom!"
His heavy, buzzing chainaxe was actually torn from his hands. It became a spinning gray blur as it flew high into the air, traced an arc, then crashed into the sand more than ten meters away with a metallic clang, burying itself deep.
Scorchwind himself staggered backward several steps under the force before barely managing to steady himself. Behind his helmet, his face was filled with stunned disbelief.
The gap... was simply too vast!
This was not a difference in technique or experience. It was a fundamental difference in the very level of their existence!
At that moment, I Am Not God could perceive that distinction with perfect clarity. Through the superhuman senses granted by his Custodian transformation, he could "see" the minute tremors in Scorchwind's muscles. He could "hear" the warning hum of his power armor's servos moments before they overloaded. From nothing more than the angle at which Scorchwind held his axe and the trajectory of his charge, he could even "predict" where the attack would land and what follow-up moves might come afterward.
In his eyes, Scorchwind's movements were ferocious, but riddled with openings and delays that could be exploited with ease.
This was what it meant to be one of the Adeptus Custodes.
They were not mass-produced creations derived from gene-seed. Using lost technology from humanity's Golden Age alongside ancient alchemical arts, the Emperor began with the finest human infants, subjecting them to countless transformations, trials, and eliminations so brutal they bordered on the inhuman. Those who survived were sculpted into unique works of art.
Every Custodian was an individual masterpiece. Their strength, speed, reflexes, senses, intellect, and even loyalty had been pushed to the absolute limit that mortal flesh could bear, and in many respects beyond even the theoretical limits of an Astartes warrior.
They were the Emperor's personal guard, the Ten Thousand, the ultimate symbol of what an individual human warrior could become.
Compared with them, an ordinary Astartes warrior truly stood as a mortal might before something on an entirely different scale of existence. Between the two lay an essential gulf in power.
I Am Not God calmly regarded Scorchwind, who had staggered backward and lost his weapon, but made no attempt to pursue him. Instead, he slowly turned his spear, pointing its tip in succession toward the other two opponents who had yet to move: EndlessSpring of the Death Guard, and See You Tomorrow of the Thousand Sons.
That composure, that sense of absolute control, carried more pressure than any words ever could.
Yet just as the disparity in strength became unmistakable and the battle seemed poised to turn into a one-sided crushing defeat...
Something changed.
A change from a higher dimension.
Above the arena, the pale blue sky projected across the artificial dome suddenly began to twist and stain without warning.
Four blots of different colors, each radiating an intensely disturbing presence, spread across the heavens like thick pigments dripping into clear water.
A violent, unrestrained crimson, as though formed from congealed blood and endless howls of rage.
A filthy, cloying dark green, like a rotting swamp consumed by ceaseless proliferation.
An eerie, shifting blue, filled with spiraling riddles and endless paradoxes.
A decadent, corrupt violet, flowing with the extremes of sensation and the hunger for unrestrained indulgence.
The psychic background noise throughout the arena instantly surged by several orders of magnitude.
The air filled with a bizarre mixture of sulfur, rotting flesh, ozone, and sickly sweet perfume.
An invisible pressure descended upon every being capable of psychic perception. Ordinary soldiers nearly lost consciousness, while even many Astartes warriors felt instinctive discomfort and alarm.
"This is... a direct disturbance from the Warp?!"
In the stands, Magnus, the most psychically sensitive and accomplished among those present, was the first to cry out in shock.
A mixture of suspicion and intense curiosity flared in his single eye as he attempted to analyze this sudden and astonishingly vast Warp phenomenon.
"Something this powerful! This... brazen! Who is doing this? How can they possibly, right beneath Father's gaze..."
His words stopped abruptly.
Because upon the throne, that eternally burning white radiance, gentle yet supreme, displayed a clearly perceptible "movement" for the first time.
The Emperor... glanced at the sky.
It was not a physical raising of the head or movement of the eyes.
It was a "glance" on the level of pure will, one powerful enough to shake the very laws of reality.
There was no blinding burst of light.
No earth-shattering thunder.
Only a sweep of intent carrying something almost tangible: disdain and annoyance.
In an instant...
It was as if the hottest branding iron had been pressed against a sheet of filthy ice, or as though a command with the highest possible authority had overwritten corrupted code.
The four-colored stains polluting the sky vanished without a trace, erased as cleanly as chalk beneath an eraser.
The warped air returned to normal.
The strange odors disappeared.
The psychic background noise dropped back to ordinary levels.
The sky became once again the tranquil, artificial pale blue it had been before.
It happened so quickly that everything from moments earlier might have seemed like a collective hallucination.
But everyone knew it had been real.
Those had been tentative touches from four indescribable beings deep within the Warp, dispersed, rejected, and suppressed by the Emperor with absolute power and will, as casually as swatting aside an inconvenience.
This was one of the fundamental differences between 30k and 40k.
In this era, the Master of Mankind still stood at the height of his power, seated upon Terra. His psychic radiance and the veil of the Imperial Truth were, across most places and times, sufficient to keep the powers of the Chaos Gods firmly outside the material universe.
The Dark Gods might cast a glance into reality or exert some faint influence, but the vast-scale corruption of the 40k era, the direct manifestation of daemonic armies, or the twisting of physical law itself...
For now, such things remained difficult for them to accomplish.
The arena fell into absolute silence.
One could have heard a pin drop.
Warriors and Primarchs alike were shaken by that brief clash between godlike beings, an exchange that lay far beyond the boundaries of mortal comprehension.
Yet it was not over.
The sky had returned to tranquility, but four invisible powers, subtler now and far more "acceptable," seemed to have reached some brief and delicate compromise or exchange with the Emperor's will.
They slipped past the field of absolute expulsion like four tiny, unseen streams and quietly seeped downward.
Their targets were unmistakable.
A furious, blazing crimson thought poured into Scorchwind's body.
A heavy, viscous breath of dark green wrapped itself around EndlessSpring.
An eerie, icy-blue awareness flowed into See You Tomorrow's psychic power.
The violet force circled for a moment, seemingly hesitated, and ultimately did not descend. Perhaps Rivane's "temporary defection" had left it unwilling to offer full recognition, or perhaps there was some other reason.
There were no outward displays of light or shadow.
No obvious surge in power.
Yet Scorchwind suddenly drew in a deep breath, as though his lungs had filled with burning sulfur. The crimson glow in his eyes intensified. The frustration of having his weapon knocked away vanished instantly, replaced by a purer, more primal craving for slaughter and rage.
EndlessSpring felt his vitality become even more "tenacious." A strange, slow, but steady sense of strength flowed through every limb and bone, and even the power scythe in his hands seemed a little lighter.
See You Tomorrow, meanwhile, felt as though icy living water had been injected directly into his psychic pathways. His speed of thought and his sensitivity to the faintest fluctuations of Warp energy both rose in a way that was difficult to put into words.
Upon the throne, the Emperor's white radiance remained serene.
It was as though he had tacitly permitted these "gifts" to enter.
Or perhaps all of it had been part of a grand design that transcended time from the very beginning.