"So, the current situation is that while we were cruising along, Tzeentch caught us off guard and blindsided us with the help of Magnus and the Thousand Sons?"
Yuki briefly organized his thoughts.
"Yes. Right now we are trapped in a time loop with a three-day cycle. Under my protection, our memories won't be reset, but I haven't quite figured out how to break through it yet."
"Can't we just use psychic power to directly brute-force our way out?"
"The psychic reserves of this current body of mine aren't temporarily enough to pull that off, and the other exceptionally powerful psyker in our fleet is currently busy experiencing the lower-class life of the Tyranid Swarm."
Yuki hesitated for a moment. " Yuno, those units wanted to live too, right? Have you been enduring that kind of agony this entire time?"
"I am a collective consciousness. If I don't endure it, who will? It is precisely that agony that gives me my power." Yuno looked at Yuki. "This is who we are. We are a unified whole; the happiness and the torment of every single individual must be shared."
Yuki was struck speechless. "Then, does War exist simply because you didn't want to keep enduring all of that?"
"Do not speak of this topic any further."
Yuno's voice turned sharply stern. Yuki dropped the subject immediately, but Yuno suddenly coughed up a mouth full of fresh blood.
"Dammit, of all times, it has to be now—"
Yuno's silhouette began to rapidly overlap and blur, looking exactly as though countless versions of her from parallel universes were violently collapsing into a single point. Then, in a sudden flash, her form split violently into two distinct entities.
" Yuno!"
Without a shred of hesitation, Yuki instantly recognized which one was the true, familiar Yuno he knew so well.
As for the other entity, her face was twisted into an expression of agonizing, unbearable pain. Her physical form began to rapidly rot and decay at a terrifying speed, yet her exceptionally powerful regenerative capabilities forcibly knit her flesh back together just as quickly.
"Unified One, kill me quickly! I don't want to exist in this universe, I don't want to be manifested here!"
Unlike the other secondary consciousness nodes, Plague Yuno was practically begging Yuno to terminate her existence.
Yuno covered her mouth, taking several steps back. Hearing Plague Yuno's frantic plea, she reflexively extended her hand and said, "Fine, then I shall grant your wish!"
But an instant later, Yuno's hand froze mid-air. She perceived something entirely different within the essence of Plague Yuno.
Yuki noticed it too.
Plague Yuno was in absolute agony; she curled in on herself, desperately yearning to dissolve back into Yuno's prime matrix. For her, simply existing in this material universe was a source of profound torment. Bearing the collective, raw survival instinct of the lowest tiers of the Tyranid Swarm had driven her to the absolute brink of a psychological collapse.
An entity constructed like this would naturally pose no threat to Yuno's authority.
After a brief calculation of the variables, Yuno resolved to preserve her.
"Plague. That shall be your name from this day forward. Stand up, and help us break out of this prison."
"Um, Yuno, does fracturing your sub-consciousness into nodes like this cause any permanent damage to your own raw power?"
"It doesn't. The underlying mechanics are somewhat complex to explain, so you don't need to worry about it."
Yuki knitted his brows. The pristine half of Plague Yuno's face bore a striking resemblance to Yuno, but the severely mangled and shifting state of the rest of her physical form made him feel a deep pang of sympathy. "Her current condition..."
"She likely executed a complete copy of the genetic strands governing vital essence, pushing her toxin and long-range evolutionary adaptations to their absolute maximum baseline," Yuno analyzed. "I only recently utilized the Nurgle pathogens to upgrade our viral genetic data; I didn't expect those sequences to find a practical application so quickly."
With this development, another formidable asset had officially been added to their active combat roster.
Yuki subtly sampled the background psychic currents, but he could detect almost nothing—a testament to the absolute, suffocating potency of the localized sorcery. Magnus certainly carried a significant amount of weight.
"If that's the parameters we're working with, why don't we simply flood this entire spell with raw psychic energy until the structure of the ritual destabilizes?"
Yuno shook her head. "The architecture of the spell here is seamlessly airtight. I calculate that the primary anchors and ritual circles are stationed well outside this active perimeter. Furthermore, the loop resets every three days. Attempting to completely oversaturate this entire pocket of space within a brief seventy-two hour window is going to be exceptionally difficult."
"Oversaturating what exactly would be easier?"
A helpless, highly amused smile played across Yuno's face. "You."
"..."
"Heehee, just kidding. What's the plan? I noticed Eleven and War aren't trapped within this perimeter; can they coordinate an intervention from the outside?"
"To be completely honest with you, I don't place an exceptional amount of faith in their cognitive faculties. While both of them possess sufficient raw combat efficacy, Eleven's brain doesn't function particularly well—she spends half her time blindly reciting prayers into the void. As for War, she's a bit too simple-minded."
"Uh, is War really that kind of person?"
"Do you truly believe you understand my own essence better than I do?"
Yuki was left entirely without a counter-argument. Though he remained fully confident that they wouldn't be marooned here for eternity, the immediate tactical outlook was far from optimistic.
"Um..."
Plague's volatile emotions had stabilized slightly, though tears still welled within the eye of her undamaged profile. "Um... it appears we aren't the solitary entities ensnared within this loop. There are alternative biological lifeforms trapped inside this perimeter alongside us."
"Those fragile mortal strains serve absolutely no purpose beyond providing a minor yield of biomass," Yuno countered dismissively. "Do you honestly expect us to forge a tactical alliance with such creatures?"
Plague shrank back several paces, thoroughly startled by Yuno's sharp tone. "I did not mean it that way. What I meant to imply is that the absolute grid perimeter and feedback loop of this sorcery might be vastly larger than our initial estimations. A spell engineered with such extreme structural precision will destabilize completely if even a minor variable fractures."
"Are you suggesting that if the three of us pool our collective strength to violently disrupt a solitary coordinate of the spell, we can trigger a structural failure to break through?"
Plague shook her head. "No. My suggestion is that we simply wait for War and Eleven to destabilize the spell from the outside, and then we execute a coordinated inside-out breach."
Yuno looked thoroughly unimpressed. "Didn't I literally just explain to you—"
Yuno abruptly cut herself off, her gaze locking onto a specific coordinate in the void of space. Yuki and Plague snapped to attention a fraction of a second later, sensing the exact same anomaly.
"This is—"
Yuki could already clearly discern a brilliant, piercing beam of golden light cutting through the dark.
"This is an absolute cheat, Yuno! Why is it that your consciousness is locked out of the wider network, yet the human Emperor can just breach his way into this loop whenever he pleases?"
Yuno's expression turned remarkably cross. "This—dammit, who the hell says I can't break my way out?!"
Enraged, Yuno unleashed an absolute explosion of psychic energy, her boundless, terrifying power violently shaking the structural integrity of the entire pocket dimension.
Yuki looked on with a hint of surprise. They had attempted similar psychic flexes earlier, so why was it yielding such a massive, tangible disruption now? Could it be that the material universe outside had already sustained a catastrophic shift?
Yuki couldn't quite fathom the broader picture just yet. He watched as Yuno's psychic reserves tore through the fabric of the dimension, while the surrounding hive fleet sloughed off its inertia, driven into a frantic, ravenous frenzy under the absolute stimulation of the synapse network.
Just as Yuki had surmised, an exceptionally bizarre alteration had indeed compromised the battlefield outside—though the exact details were something Yuki could never have anticipated.
Even War and Eleven were caught completely off guard.
They had successfully closed the distance to the distant sorcerer city, but at this very moment, the entire metropolis had been transformed into a roaring sea of absolute promethium fire. The outermost defensive grid had been thoroughly shattered. Granted, the casualties up to this point consisted entirely of inconsequential warp spawn rather than the core architecture of the city, but the sheer violence of the assault was undeniable.
"What in the absolute—"
The arrival of the hive fleet did nothing to de-escalate the chaotic engagement; in fact, the heavy artillery units besieging the sorcerer city immediately swiveled their firing arcs to redirect their bombardment into the approaching Tyranids.
When Eleven and War finally managed to get a clear visual confirmation on the identity of the besieging fleet, their expressions froze into complete, unadulterated bewilderment.
Werement those the Space Wolves?