"You feel it too, don't you?"
Yuno and the Silent King possessed overwhelming power, granting them a far clearer awareness of the catastrophic shift about to tear through the galaxy.
"Are you still refusing to collapse the barrier?" Yuno asked. "If you do not disengage, I will force you to stay locked here with me. The Tyranid swarms will simply spawn a new unified consciousness, and I can hand our race over to that successor without a second thought. But can you hand yours over to a new Silent King?"
Szarekh's necrodermis flared with a brilliant inner light.
The time had come for him to formulate his exit.
Calculations provided by his Crypteks confirmed that the impending Warp Storm would inflict massive casualties on the Tyranid swarms. Crucially, the sudden spatial dislocation would sever synaptic links across the bio-fleet, rendering the swarms leaderless and swallowing vast portions of their armadas into the Immaterium.
Releasing Yuno now posed no significant strategic risk.
Decision made, Szarekh swept his arm wide. The surrounding pockets of absolute void dissolved, restoring realspace to its original geometry.
The instant the seal broke, Szarekh vanished into the void.
Yuno made no attempt to pursue him. The Warp Storm triggered by the opening of the Great Rift was virtually upon them.
She needed to prepare. But before anything else, she had to locate Yuki.
Reaching across the synaptic web, she locked onto his coordinates.
---
*Dammit... it's too late.*
Yuki was still locked in combat with the demonized Harriman. The raw combat output unleashed by this Khorne-blessed Space Marine caught Yuki completely off guard.
Even more terrifying was the warrior's physical state: he exhibited zero structural mutations, appearing simply as an Astartes shrouded in boiling, blood-red steam.
"You monstrous filth!"
Having regained a measure of mobility, Dante charged back into the fray.
Harriman's current state was deeply unnatural, but with time running out, the only mandate that mattered was terminating the alien construct!
"Dammit all! Dante, you absolute bastard—"
Yuki's roar was cut short.
All sound abruptly vanished from his perception.
It felt as though reality itself had ground to a absolute halt, as if someone had triggered a universal stasis lock.
He could observe every microscopic detail in his surroundings with unnatural clarity: the crumbling masonry, the piled corpses, the demonized Harriman, and the critically wounded Dante.
They were still frozen mid-thrust, driving their weapons toward him even as their bodies reached absolute failure.
Yet the Imperial forces had held long enough.
Countless dark whispers flooded Yuki's neural pathways, as whispers from the Immaterium attempted to shatter his mind.
There was still time. Even though the opening of the Great Rift caused massive temporal dilation between Imperium Nihilus and the rest of the galaxy, the primary battle-fleets led by Guilliman would still require objective time to navigate the void.
If he could just kill Dante now, he could still claim victory!
Suddenly, spatial geometry around him began to warp violently.
The shockwaves of the Warp Storm were twisting realspace, dragging physical matter into the Immaterium or scattering it across random coordinates in the galaxy.
"Dammit—!"
Yuki watched the battlefield twist and melt away around him, before he was abruptly deposited into an isolated, ruined corner of Baal.
Scattered around the terrain were disoriented Tyranid bio-forms that had been randomly displaced alongside him.
Yuki sat down heavily on a slab of ruined rock, burying his face in his hands.
"Failed again..."
*Why?*
He had tried to kill Calgar, and failed. He had tried to kill Dante, and failed. He had tried to kill Hope, and failed again.
*Dammit all... is this fate?*
*Fate? Does such a thing actually exist?*
*What in the hell have I been doing for the past century?*
He had spent decades wandering aimlessly alongside Yuno without a clear path of his own, floating through the galaxy like a cosmic drifter and consuming irrelevant targets along the way.
*Dammit... what am I even supposed to do now?*
Yuki felt as though everything he had striven for over the past hundred years was completely meaningless. Yuno was so powerful—what could he possibly contribute?
Regardless of his actions, all they had to do was wait for the main Tyranid hive fleets to arrive.
He could have easily slept away the centuries in a gestation pod on a warship, or simply stayed by Yuno's side until the primary armadas reached this galaxy.
What was his purpose? What was he actually supposed to accomplish?
He wasn't some grand romantic idealist. He and Yuno shared a deep, mutual understanding; though they occasionally held differing perspectives, nothing had ever threatened their bond.
*Ah... why do I even exist in this place?*
High above, a colossal, abyss-like rift tore open across the sky. The Tyranid fleets were thrown into utter disarray by the Warp Storms. Capital ships that had managed to hide, those blessed with sheer luck, or those simply resilient enough to survive the siege opened fire on the disorganized bio-vessels.
Yet Yuki felt no panic for the fleet.
The Tyranids would never fall to an obstacle like this—his trust in Yuno was absolute.
"Sigh... why did I even come to this world in the first place?"
Rain began to fall.
No—it was not rain. It was a torrential shower of blood.
It was not a atmospheric change, but the shattered, piled corpses of thousands of Blood Angels being cast down from orbit, shedding their blood across the sky as they fell.
Yuno stepped up behind Yuki, holding an umbrella above him in a scene strikingly similar to their very first meeting.
"I'm sorry, Yuno."
"It is quite alright, my love. It is no great matter," Yuno said softly. "I have long understood that these events were anchored in place. Under the absolute control of fate, resistance was nearly impossible. But now... we have reached the moment where fate becomes unwritten."
"But... what about me?" Yuki's voice cracked, a rare wave of despair breaking through. "What have I actually done? I haven't accomplished a single thing."
He lowered his head into his hands.
"I've been in this universe for a hundred years now. I can barely even remember my memories from when I was a human. I... I wanted to achieve something for you. You gave me so much—"
Yuno placed her hand gently on his shoulder, feeling the deep, agonizing confusion radiating from his mind.
Dante and Harriman had already escaped. During the brief period when the synapse fluctuated, her immediate priority had been locating Yuki, abandoning the pursuit of all other targets.
Yet with the Great Rift torn wide, every possibility lay open before them.
"Yuno... can you give me a fleet? I want to go out and accomplish something on my own."
"You do not wish for me to accompany you?"
"I... well, at least not like this," Yuki murmured. "Right now, I feel as though nothing I do carries any real meaning. Can't you let me experience this universe on my own terms?"
Yuno's expression darkened slightly.
Noticing her shift, Yuki added quickly, "We can meet up regularly! I just—"
"I can disable those tedious subroutines," Yuno interrupted softly.
"What?"
"I can set the fleets to operate on autonomous, unguided instincts—just as they did before we found you."
"Yuno, you don't understand. If you do that, I'll just—"
Yuno placed a slender finger gently against his lips.
"You do not understand what you mean to me. I have never forgotten your true name, He Yi."
Yuki fell completely silent.
He looked up at Yuno, the turmoil in his eyes slowly settling into quiet resolve.
"I think... maybe I can give it another try."
As silence settled between them, a urgent psychic pulse broadcasted through the Hive Mind from one of the sub-entities:
*"My Lord, My Lady... Eleven is at her absolute limit."*