"Hah!"
Yuki was blasted backward, but his physical conditioning and control over his own body were far superior to what they had been years ago. He effortlessly adjusted his posture mid-air, successfully neutralizing the residual kinetic shockwaves.
By contrast, in that raw display of strength just now, it was actually Shalaxi—a Greater Daemon—who had been shaken back.
The daemon swung its staff, manifesting thousands of psychic orbs around its form. One look was all it took for Yuki to instantly deduce what the Greater Daemon was planning. He broke into a sprint as the psychic orbs pursued him in a rolling bombardment.
From a distance, Hopper and the others, who were locked in combat with a massive tide of daemons, also noticed the duel.
"That entity... it is likely a Greater Daemon of Slaanesh."
The Emperor's Champion of the Black Templars wanted to intervene, but the Black Sword still signaled to him that this was not his foe. The visions he had received also told him that this was not the enemy for whom the Emperor required him to lay down his life. Aside from him, no one else here possessed the baseline parameters to match such a foe.
An unnamable, venomous fury began to grow wildly within Hopper's heart.
Why? Why am I always denied absolute power? Why do the enemies facing the Imperium of Man always seem to be favored by fate?
Why must humanity remain bound by these ridiculous shackles, while those daemons run rampant?
A brilliant radiance began to bleed from Hopper's gauntlets.
"This is—"
Sensing a bizarre anomaly, the Emperor's Champion prepared to speak, but Scott intercepted him. "Do not forget that among us, you are not the solitary vessel to have received the Allfather's grace."
Hopper was a Living Saint officially sanctioned by the Ecclesiarchy, and she had manifested the Emperor's divine blessings across multiple prior campaigns. Combined with her striking beauty and long-immutable youth, the Emperor's Champion could only drop the matter, redirecting his absolute focus back to holding the line against the daemon horde.
With a single sweep of her blade, Hopper cleaved through dozens of daemons. The golden radiance and blood-red aura enveloping her frame violently intersected and vied for dominance. Within the span of a heartbeat, a pair of colossal wings of light erupted from her back.
One half of the wings was pristine gold, the other a stark, bloody crimson; one side felt warm and radiant, while the other radiated a cruel, biting chill.
Hopper took flight, leaving the surrounding Space Marines completely awestruck.
"Are we... are we actively witnessing the ascension of a Living Saint?"
Scott remarked dryly, "Drop the theological commentary. We have no reason to obsess over it at this juncture. Liquidate the daemons first."
Hopper's hyper-evolution instantly drew Yuno's attention. She fixed her gaze onto the flying Battle Sister; the energy radiating from her vessel did not appear to stem exclusively from the Emperor—
Before she could process the thought further, a highly familiar psychic fluctuation consolidated within the coordinates.
"Slaanesh, you wretched parasite. You had best scrub yourself clean and present your essence on a steamer basket!"
"Oh? So you favor that manner of play? Yuno, I have been yearning for your essence this entire time. Yet you spend every waking microsecond exchanging endearments with that little paramour of yours, completely shutting me out."
"Get lost. If you harbor a desire to avoid being directly consumed by my matrix, you will collapse this sorcery immediately. I have a main fleet to feed on the outside."
"Come and make me."
The spatial coordinate anchoring Slaanesh and Yuno instantly collapsed into an unobservable, hyper-dense orb of light, sealing them into an isolated, one-on-one duel.
"Dammit, what is the meaning of this theater?!"
Yuki found the sequence of events entirely baffling. While he had anticipated that this engagement would deteriorate into absolute chaos once initiated, this layout was profoundly absurd. Hopper had executed a hyper-evolution, while Yuno and Slaanesh had essentially locked themselves into a private deathmatch.
"For a creature of your origins to have scaled to such a baseline of power... highly commendable."
Shalaxi materialized directly before Yuki. For a rare change, physical lacerations marred its form, though Yuki's own condition was roughly identical to the daemon's.
"With the raw strength you command at this present juncture, standard Greater Daemons likely lack the parameters to match you. Perhaps within a few short decades, not even a Primarch will possess the capability to slay you."
" Merely incapable of slaying me?"
"To have ascended from a baseline mortal human to this precise tier... what exactly remains to fuel your dissatisfaction?"
"I intend to forge an existence that comfortably eclipses the Primarchs, friend."
"Nurturing ambitions is a healthy enterprise—"
"You had best look directly behind you."
Shalaxi's instincts flared. It spun around, only to discover that Hopper had already materialized directly within its blind spot. At a range this compressed, how had it failed to register her approach?
Regardless of the variables, Shalaxi immediately directed its psychic reserves to project a defensive aegis. Yet, completely defying its estimations, Hopper shattered the shield through sheer physical momentum, driving her blade deep into Shalaxi's torso.
A mixture of golden promethium fire and vivid crimson blood spilled continuously from the rupture. This solitary strike inflicted a far more devastating structural toll on Shalaxi than the protracted war of attrition Yuki had just waged.
"Dammit... she really has transformed into a Living Saint."
Yuki knitted his brows. He lacked an intimate structural understanding of the precise mechanics governing a Living Saint. If her vessel was explicitly being channeled by the Emperor, her ceiling of combat potential became entirely unpredictable.
No matter how immense Hopper's prior strength had been, she had ultimately remained bound within the strict biological thresholds of humanity. Even if she deployed the finest master-crafted armor and pushed her conditioning to its absolute peak, he could have comfortably secured her termination. But now, given the sheer violence of this manifestation, she threatened to comfortably eclipse the historical baseline of Saint Celestine.
Yuki sensed an exceptionally dangerous shift in the tactical landscape. Within a fraction of a second, Shalaxi was violently repelled, crashing into the rubble right before his feet.
"How are you struggling this severely to contain a solitary human?"
"Why don't you cycle into the vanguard and test her yourself?!" Shalaxi snarled.
"I think I'll decline that particular invitation."
Shalaxi strained every nerve just to intercept Hopper's relentless, overlapping sword arcs. "Do you truly harbor the assumption that this female houses exclusively the essence of the human Emperor? Her vessel has explicitly been saturated by the blessings of Khorne as well! The moment my essence is banished from this grid, you are invariably her next objective!"
Yuki was perfectly aware of that reality, but that was a tactical variable to be calculated only after they had secured their extraction. The paramount objective at this microsecond remained the total destruction of the local psychic conduits!
Calculating the variables over a single microsecond, Yuki launched himself directly toward Shalaxi.
"You can sit the rest of this out!"
Shalaxi was already struggling to manage the dual-natured energy radiating from Hopper; confronting a synchronized flank assault from Yuki at this juncture compounded its tactical predicament exponentially. It executed a rapid retreat, its long spear thrusting forward to impale the ostensibly weaker Yuki first.
Unexpectedly, Hopper stepped into the line of fire to absorb the thrust, providing Yuki with an open operational window to drive a heavy strike straight through Shalaxi's torso, tearing an immense cavity through its form.
"Hopper! Redirect your advance to reinforce Yuno! The architectural core anchoring this dimension is situated inside that coordinate—destroy it!"
Hopper fixed her gaze onto Yuki, the unyielding fury burning within her eyes remaining entirely undiluted. Then, with a violent sweep of her wings, she launched herself toward the brilliant orb.
The sphere of light was blinding.
The wings gracing Hopper's frame unleashed an unprecedented crescendo of raw energy, slicing a massive fissure straight through the perimeter of the orb.
Within the pocket, Yuno and Slaanesh had been engaged in a brutal war of attrition for a considerable duration. The manifestation of the Dark Prince was leaking foul, necrotic ichor, while Yuno's own physical vessel bore several distinct lacerations.
Even though Hopper was currently acting as a dual-vessel for the synchronized blessings of both the Emperor and Khorne, executing a direct, frontal elimination of these two entities remained well beyond her parameters. However, she had officially earned the structural right to intervene in their theater.
The blade clasped within her gauntlets was saturated by an interlocking sheen of two distinct colors, before her entire physical frame was consumed by the blinding radiance. Transforming her entire being into a literal lance of absolute energy, she drove her trajectory straight toward the manifestation of Slaanesh.
The Dark Prince's avatar existed as a shifting mass of humanoid mist. Confronted with the sudden intrusion of two exceptionally familiar divine signatures, the deity looked thoroughly unimpressed.
"Dammit... when I extended an invitation to your domain back then, you declined to participate. Didn't I explicitly decree that you were to withhold your hand from this theater? You had best prepare yourself for what follows."
Slaanesh was forced to redirect its absolute baseline of power to anchor its defenses. Seizing the exact microsecond the Dark Prince's attention fractured, Yuno bypassed the defensive perimeter entirely, driving her trajectory straight toward the central column of light anchoring the pocket dimension.
That coordinate served as the absolute architectural nexus of the psychic conduits.
"I have endured this prison long enough."