The fluctuations of the Warp were growing increasingly volatile.
Eleven had gone without sleep for dozens of days, forcibly heightening her capabilities by relying on specialized substances provided by the fleet.
Throughout these dozens of days, she pushed her psychic abilities to their absolute limit, blanketing almost the entire star sector and amplifying the psychic output of the entire hive fleet to its maximum baseline.
She bore witness to countless maddening spectacles. She watched the temporal streams twist and turn relentlessly, as historical scenes spanning past centuries, millennia, and even tens of millennia unfolded directly before her eyes.
Guiding the collective gaze of the Hive Mind, she scoured the long river of the past. She beheld the sky-blotting armada of the Space Wolves, witnessed the tragic fall of Prospero, and observed the final, desperate spell unleashed by Magnus to deliver his legion from total annihilation.
Yet none of these memories were what Eleven was searching for.
Ultimately, she pursued a distinct psychic trail across the expanse of space, and these bizarre traces eventually led her directly into an anomalous, sorcerous landscape.
She beheld countless sorcerers chanting incantations and weaving complex rituals around their Primarch. The ritual ultimately manifested a colossal warp vortex, a catastrophic storm that swept across several entire star sectors.
When she finally awoke from the psychic illusions, War was already waiting outside her chamber.
"I have pinpointed their coordinates. A massive convergence of Thousand Sons sorcerers is entrenched there. The encouraging news, however, is that their staging ground appears to be a planet temporarily constructed via warp sorcery. There are several human-populated worlds flanking the system where we can harvest critical biomass and logistical supplies."
Yuno had never subjected Eleven to any form of cognitive conditioning, nor had she deliberately tampered with her mental faculties. Yet Eleven had somehow fundamentally misconstrued reality, perceiving the Tyranids as the literal heralds of the God-Emperor—rendering her far more fiercely loyal to the Imperium than any Genestealer Cultist.
Even War found herself rather bewildered by this quirk from time to time.
"To counter these psychic sorcerers of Chaos, we must deploy a significantly higher density of long-range organisms and psychic strains. Leave Magnus to me, but the ranks of the Thousand Sons will invariably feature other, far more problematic figures who will prove difficult to neutralize."
Eleven displayed absolutely no trace of fear.
"It matters not. For the God-Emperor, every single one of these trials is a challenge well worth enduring."
As the Tyranid forces advanced, the very dimensional fabric of the material universe began to visibly warp under the mounting pressure of their concentrated psychic weight.
Stretching out across the far distance ahead of the swarm, a colossal city materialized with jarring abruptness in the void of space, surrounded by an endless drift of floating megaliths. These shattered stones had likely been arranged as a solemn monument to the memory of ancient Prospero.
"To be completely frank, I am sensing a remarkably grim tactical outlook," War murmured.
Such was the nature of the profane power of Chaos. The psychic barrier enveloping this immense metropolis functioned precisely like a void shield; the structure itself effectively operated as a super-massive warship. Launching a direct, frontal assault against it would invariably incur catastrophic casualties.
However, with the current status of Yuno and Yuki remaining entirely unverified, even catastrophic casualties were a price they were fully prepared to pay.
"Damned Chaos."
Yuno exerted every ounce of her focus to anchor the Shadow in the Warp.
The background synapse projection naturally emitted by the Aether and Kronos fleets was powerful enough to smother almost any standard warp sorcery. However, if the forces of Chaos had executed meticulous prior preparations—or if the Chaos Gods themselves chose to directly intervene— Yuno could still be caught completely off guard in the absence of an established counter-measure.
That was precisely the crisis she faced now.
Her core awareness had been systematically isolated from the wider synapse network. She wasn't particularly concerned for the physical preservation of the primary hive fleets; no entity in the cosmos understood the Swarm better than she did. Even though this scenario was entirely unprecedented, she understood perfectly well that she was merely ensnared within a trap.
The moment she engineered her escape, absolute control would instantly restore itself across the network.
The solitary complication was the spell itself; it had effectively stitched the fabric of the Immaterium and the material universe seamlessly together. The handiwork of Tzeentch was so blatantly obvious it could not possibly be ignored.
Time continuously looped along a strict three-day cycle. The moment the chronological threshold expired, the physical coordinates of the entire fleet were instantly reset to zero.
Though Yuno's active suppression allowed the bio-ships to preserve their internal memory logs across the resets, a brief window of three days was far from sufficient to unravel a crisis of this magnitude.
Compounding the tactical nightmare, Yuki had yet to regain consciousness.
His soul had plunged deep into the shifting currents of the Sea of Souls, anchored exclusively by his psychological link to the synapse network to prevent him from being completely claimed by the void.
"Could they have deliberately engineered this entire trap specifically to target Yuki? Those bastards have taken this joke entirely too far."
Yuno held Yuki tightly against her form. She could distinctly sense his soul navigating the treacherous landscape of the Warp.
If she made the executive decision to dive into the depths of the Immaterium to drag his soul back herself, the stranded fleet would likely be compromised by an even more catastrophic variable.
Fortunately, Yuki was actively fighting back, struggling against the current. All she could do now was wait. The moment Yuki broke free from these underhanded, sorcerous tricks on his own strength, the tables would turn.
Yuno would wait for him.
Survive.
Survive.
The imperative to cling to life was almost invariably the primary programming driving any living organism—even a newly engineered strain born from the bio-tanks of the Tyranids would harbor this fundamental directive.
Under highly specific circumstances, the Hive Mind would occasionally birth unique individual organisms that, despite being denied higher intellect by design, successfully developed their own sentience through spontaneous genetic mutations.
The vast majority of these variants would ultimately transform into the most fiercely loyal assets within the synapse web; a minor fraction, however, were unfortunate enough to go completely undetected.
These minor organisms, gripped by an absolute, frantic desire to cling to life, represented the primal collective desperation of the lowest tiers of the Swarm—the vanguard strains that lacked even a functioning digestive system, destined exclusively to serve as disposable biological ammunition.
Yuki felt the full weight of their profound despair.
He became a Hormagaunt, his physical form instantly torn into ragged, bloody fragments under the terrifying, concentrated heavy fire of an Astra Militarum defensive line.
He became a Termagant, pinned helplessly to the earth and ground into absolute paste under the armored boot of an Adeptus Astartes.
He became a Ripper, a simple consumption strain that should have remained safely ensarled within a secured feeding zone, only to be systematically purged by a specialized Imperial strike team executing a deep-strike insertion into the rear lines.
Survive... survive...
The Tyranids were species driven primarily by a boundless, ravenous hunger, but that did not dictate an absolute absence of alternative emotional spectrums. Though the vast majority of individual organisms lacked the cognitive faculties to think, the neural pathways of the synapse network executed that processing on their behalf.
Yuki felt an absolute, bottomless craving for life.
He fought across an endless succession of bloody warzones, enduring death countless times over, until he reached a point where he began to harbor deep, fundamental doubts about his own existence: What am I, truly?
His personal memories began to fracture and blur; he could no longer comfortably differentiate exactly what he was.
Having spent over fifty years navigating the bleak realities of the Warhammer universe, the duration he had logged existing as a component of the Tyranid Swarm now vastly eclipsed the brief span he had spent living out his life as an ordinary human being.
As it stood now, he couldn't even confidently recall whether he was truly Yuki.
Was he merely an ordinary, specialized Tyranid organism? Had he simply been engineered by Yuno's subconscious matrix to satisfy her deep-seated psychological craving for a companion?
Yuki was slaughtered once more, and he could feel his individual will gradually turning completely numb, slipping into an absolute, listless state of apathy.
Yet, all around him, he could still perceive the fierce, overwhelming desire for survival radiating from the surrounding organisms—they desperately wanted to live.
His fractured consciousness remained tightly cocooned by these mindless beasts, creatures incapable of higher thought that operated strictly on the purest baseline of raw instinct.
Ultimately, a solitary voice pierced through the ambient noise of the void.
"Survive, Yuki!"
Yuno?
Yuno, are you there?*
Yuno, where are you?*
" Yuki?"
He felt it. The chaotic illusions surrounding his mind dissolved into absolute darkness, and countless streams of pure psychic energy began to flow like gentle, trickling rivulets all around him.
The realization snapped cleanly back into focus: he was currently ensnared within a massive, coordinated psychic sorcery. His soul had been violently dragged into the threshold of the Warp, and his deep connection to the Hive Mind had caused the broader network to drift into this limbo alongside him.
" Yuki!"
Accompanied by a sharp, echoing crack, Yuki's head violently ruptured and burst apart, startling Yuno out of her wits.
A split second later, however, fresh bone structure and clean tissue rapidly regenerated back into place. Yuki stared back at Yuno, his expression thoroughly exhausted.
"How long was I out?"
"A few weeks or so," Yuno exhaled softly. "How much time elapsed on your end?"
"A few months, give or take. To be completely honest... I really missed you."
Yuno let out a soft, relieved breath. "Now that sounds more like it."