The moment the withdrawal order was issued, the fleet rapidly formed up and extracted.
The heavily damaged ships departed first; once repaired, they would be restored into viable combat assets to be thrown back into the fray. In the Rangdan War—this grueling war of racial survival—every single ounce of combat potential was absolutely vital.
The star system was already shattered, removing any necessity to head toward Mandeville points. Warships tore through realspace on the spot, entering the Warp to make their escape.
Seeing the human fleet commence its withdrawal, the morale of the Rangdan armada surged, and they scrambled forward to give chase.
"All fleets, cease pursuit." The command was dispatched with perfect timing, utilizing absolute authority to order the fleet to abandon its chase of the humans. "The armada will halt and refit on-site, preparing to resume the offensive into the Imperium of Man."
Deep within the palace of the flagship in the rear, the psychic fluctuations of the Rangdan Overlord betrayed its slight exhaustion. It commanded its throne to descend from the air, temporarily allowing itself a moment of relief.
"Overlord of Sorrow, why did you order the cessation of the pursuit?"
A psychic wave swept in from the void, laced with demanding interrogation, seemingly highly dissatisfied with the fleet abandoning the chase. "Our morale is currently at its zenith; we should strike while the iron is hot and hunt them down."
Contempt flashed within the crimson eyes of the Overlord of Sorrow. It questioned inwardly: The Silent Overseer—this brainless, idiotic fool—just how exactly did it ascend to the rank of Overlord?
Talk of striking while the iron is hot?
Their massive army had pressed upon the borders, yet despite the immense disparity in forces, the humans had refused to retreat, choosing instead to wage a stubborn, unyielding resistance. Now, they were leaving just like that, without a single shred of hesitation. What exactly did the underlying meaning behind this represent? Could this creature not ponder for even a single moment before speaking?
The Overlord of Sorrow sent back a helpless psychic ripple in counter-question: "What was the purpose behind the humans choosing to resist? Now that they are retreating without a moment's hesitation, what do you think is waiting for us ahead?"
The Silent Overseer did not reply immediately. After a protracted silence, it finally sent back another psychic transmission: "I understand. The humans' initial defensive line further back has been completed. Then we shall halt and refit on-site."
Receiving this answer offered the Overlord of Sorrow a modicum of solace as it sat upon its throne, buried in thought. Though this newcomer was reckless and impulsive, it was at least still receptive to counsel; though slightly dull-witted, it had not yet crossed into the realm of the utterly incorrigible.
"Appease the soldiers of the various septs and compile the specific casualty logs. The humans have left, but we too have suffered catastrophic losses. In this engagement, we possessed an absolute numerical advantage, yet we still failed to break into the interior of the Imperium of Man. We won the tactical battle, but we have failed our strategic intent."
Dispatching one final psychic wave, the Overlord of Sorrow closed its crimson eyes to rest its mind, waiting for the commencement of the next conflict.
"Understood."
With the consultation between the two Overlords concluded, the Rangdan fleet ceased its pursuit, filling the public comms channels with mockery of humanity's cowardice and impotence.
Guilliman and Junior completely ignored the clamor of the xenos, resolutely executing their strategic displacement to preserve their surviving assets and organize the next defensive campaign.
During the two-hour extraction window, the Void Stalker utilized ultra-long-range bombardments to pulverize numerous foundered warships, ensuring that critical intelligence would never fall into enemy hands. By the time the final warship successfully extracted, the internal bays of the Void Stalker were completely packed with vessels, and its armored blast-doors slowly ground shut.
The Rangdan Star-Gazers observed meticulously, focusing entirely on the movements of the human Ark-ship. That warship was far too powerful; its unknown engines possessed an astronomical energy output that had withstood the frantic, saturated bombardments of thousands of warships, its shield energy decaying at a glacial pace. Furthermore, whenever its ultra-long-range main batteries fired, a Battle Moon's shield system would instantly overload, unleashing an output energy level comparable to a solar flare.
In the eyes of the Star-Gazers, the titanic human vessel accelerated smoothly, utilizing a short-range intra-system warp-jump to reach the outer rim of the star system. This point left it deeply perplexed; it could not understand why the humans had not entered the Warp directly from within the system. This system contained no allied forces, nor did it possess any preservation value.
After a brief moment of calculation, it raised the threat alert level by one threshold, cataloging it as: Target exhibiting anomalous movements.
In the very next instant, the Star-Gazer finally understood exactly why the human warship had gone to the system's outer perimeter!
Across the vessel's 500-by-600-kilometer prow—a vertical deck spanning three hundred thousand square kilometers—a colossal hexagonal grid-plate at the dead center began to slowly slide open.
Then, deep within the axial conduit, it witnessed a blue sun burning—
"MAXIMUM ALERT!!!" A psychic shriek echoed violently across the warning channels, jolting the refitting Rangdan fleet awake.
"Dimensional conduit locked. Channelling Blue Supergiant energy!" On the bridge of the Void Stalker, Gamma Boötis swiftly rattled off reports, the hololith displays projecting the data of the main battery.
Around the rim of the 150-kilometer-caliber hexagonal main cannon, Nuur crystals flared into life, channeling the raw power of a star from hyper-dimensional space, unleashing it at faster-than-light speeds.
"Spacetime folder active. Intercepting the entirety of the energy generated by the Blue Supergiant within the next ten seconds."
Gamma Boötis's mechanical voice was cold and pitiless, his thoughts hardwired into the ship's cogitators as he displayed the warship's status: "Conduit containment fields active. Heat dissipation systems online. Adjusting warship attitude; target locked onto this system's star."
"Attitude locked. Firing countdown: Ten— Nine—"
With the ship positioned safely in the outer rim, warriors and technicians laid down their tools, looking out from the upper decks toward the front of the warship to witness the death of a mature, yellow star.
Within the Rangdan fleet, aside from the shriek of alarms, no other commands could be heard. The sprawling armada descended into absolute chaos as the artificial intelligence's warnings echoed like a funeral knell: "Stellar-class energy detected. Target is this system's star. Countdown to peak energy threshold: Seven— Six—"
"A direct impact will rapidly accelerate stellar fusion, triggering a violent supernova explosion. Ensure defenses are prepared against supernova-grade gamma-ray bursts."
The gravitational fields within the system turned violently chaotic. To escape the supernova's blast radius, warships frantically activated their Warp engines, tearing open the fabric of realspace. Because the refitting fleets had been packed close together to exchange logistical supplies, a catastrophic cascade of collisions erupted.
"Flee this place at all costs!" The Overlord of Sorrow issued its final directive as its personal flagship tore through the material universe, initiating its flight from realspace.
The artificial intelligence's crisis prediction concluded, its hololith projections simulating the firing trajectory: "High-energy beam dispatched. Faster-than-light velocity; visual projection imperceptible to the naked eye. Direct impact with the star estimated in ten seconds."
"Calculating supernova detonation timeline. Calculating arrival time of gamma-ray bursts—"
"Our fleet has one hundred and twenty seconds remaining to extract."
One hundred and twenty seconds! This timeframe appeared lengthy, yet in reality, it was brutally brief.
The captains of numerous warships that had already powered down from combat readiness fell into sheer despair. Before they could even restart their Warp drives, the gamma-ray bursts had already swept over them, vaporizing the warships entirely. They could only look on helplessly as those vessels whose Warp engines had remained online tore through realspace, escaping into the Empyrean.
Yet even for those that initiated their Warp drives, the situation was far from optimistic. Battleships and other colossal vessels needed to distance themselves from allied craft to prevent Warp rifts from causing assimilation phenomena, which would cause two vessels to overlap and fuse together. Furthermore, with an extraction window of a mere hundred and twenty seconds, many massive warships did not even have enough time to turn their prows.
Under the same starscape, two entirely different perspectives unfolded.
From the upper decks of the Void Stalker, one could look down to see an azure beam of light spewing forth, accelerated by the dimensional conduit as it struck the bright star in the distance. The star was currently brilliant, exceeding its conventional luminosity by tens of thousands of times, yet it was invisible to the naked eye; because the distance was far too vast, the transmission of light suffered a severe delay.
The ship's intelligence was exceptionally considerate, overlaying a simulated projection onto the observation viewports to mask the blinding reality.
The fusion reactions within the star accelerated violently, destined to reach the critical threshold of a supernova explosion within a single minute.
"We can no longer linger in this system. The warship is preparing to underway. The supernova is imminent, and the gamma-ray bursts will arrive shortly."
Gamma Boötis broadcasted a ship-wide notification. The bombardment had ceased, the azure beam trailing its fading tail into the far distance. The axial cannon plates slowly slid closed, and the energy output of the blasted Blue Supergiant waned, sinking back into silence within hyper-dimensional space.
Ahead of the Void Stalker, a colossal Warp rift tore open. The engines of the Ark-ship roared with immense force, driving its titanic hull directly into the abyss.
The star collapsed rapidly, massive quantities of neutrinos spewing outward from its core as its luminosity surged exponentially. Under normal circumstances, a supernova explosion would require an immense span of time, yet the bombardment had forcefully catalyzed the process.
A blinding new star rose within the cosmos. Before the star perished, the brilliance of its final bloom reached billions of times its conventional output!
Colossal plumes of radioactive elements erupted outward, spreading toward the system's outer rim alongside the gamma-ray bursts, vaporizing every shred of physical matter in their path. The star had nurtured this system; in its death, it would destroy it entirely.
The gamma-ray bursts were invisible to the naked eye, yet wherever they passed, matter was utterly annihilated. The Rangdan fleet was vaporized in total silence, dissolved into nothingness. They had no time to flee, nor did they even have enough time to utter a final shriek, dying with an unyielding hatred for mankind.
Before a cosmic cataclysm, the iron fleet was as weightless and trivial as nothing at all. High-energy particles dismantled the artificial constructs from their most fundamental structures, and the residual subatomic particles continued their flight into the wider universe.
Perhaps hundreds of years later, some civilization would look through an astronomical telescope and clearly witness what had occurred in this stretch of space, marveling at the terrifying horror of cosmic disasters.
But now, there was only ruin and death.
The stellar light faded away, and all things returned to a dead silence.
The war between two empires had caused the void to tremble and a star to face extinction. Yet, this was merely the beginning.