This Is Our Warhammer Journey

“Report, we’ve entered the third planet’s orbit. Estimated to reach contact range in thirty minutes.”

The Inquisitorial fleet, leading the charge for the joint fleet, reported once again. Upon discovering that the joint fleet had superior numbers, the Word Bearers fleet immediately chose to retreat.

They chickened out really fast.

Not much better than that Dark Eldar Archon who bolted the moment she heard about the Demon of Carnal Desires.

Neither the Word Bearers nor the Inquisition fleets were showing any spine.

The former started fleeing toward the inner system the moment they saw the fleet.

The latter—one second they were brushing off Aglaea, and the next, they were following orders.

The transmigrators were honestly surprised by the whole thing.

“Every senior officer in the fleet directly under the Source Retrieval Order comes from Terran hereditary nobility. If their cowardice were formally reported, it would be enough for the High Lords to execute three generations of their bloodline.”

“These noble heirs are the most loyal arms of the Source Retrieval Order. Their true identity files are sealed within the Grand Inquisitor’s cogitator archive.”

The bionic eye on her left flickered with ghostly blue datastreams as her armored glove tapped the family crests in the holoprojection.

“From the embryonic stage, their genomes are imprinted with the principle of family supremacy. Some may not fear personal death, but no one can afford the price of having their entire family erased by the Officio Assassinorum.”

And those rare rebels? The handful who don’t care about their family?

You telling me hundreds of noble brats all don’t care about their bloodlines?

Then those Terran nobles deserve to be wiped out by the Assassinorum. If they can’t even do the one job of raising reliable arms for the Emperor’s proxy, what right do they have to keep serving the Emperor?!

Of course, the Assassinorum isn’t worried about being fed false threats against these nobles—those all-powerful freaks have more than enough ways to verify the truth.

At least in Aglaea’s experience, no Inquisitor from the Source Retrieval Order has ever successfully lied to the Assassinorum.

“So, as long as you have the real info on these shadow plants, and your own loyalty to the Golden Throne is beyond doubt, they’ll obey like puppets on strings.”

That’s how Aglaea put it.

And she had her own channels for accessing internal data about the Inquisition fleet.

“I see.”

Romulus understood. This was like having a daemon’s true name.

The overlap between the Emperor and the Four Chaos Gods was getting way too high.

Still, this junior Inquisitor Aglaea was pretty impressive.

They’d chatted a bit when she first came aboard. She’d only been officially out of Terra for two years, give or take.

In that short time, she’d dug up the Grand Inquisitor’s secrets, tracked them all the way to the Pierde sub-sector, wiped out a Dark Eldar stronghold on the way, rallied both the expedition and explorator fleets, and even mapped out the entire network of people under the Grand Inquisitor’s command.

You had to admit—this kind of capability wasn’t normal, even among the Inquisition, a place filled with monsters.

Romulus couldn’t help but let out a breath.

The Imperium’s bureaucracy may be crawling with worms, but these war machines at his side were worth trusting.

In the peril-ridden galaxy, with the Imperium’s Schrödinger-style logistics, this group had been forged into elites capable of carving a path forward in the darkest situations.

Romulus looked up toward the observation dome.

The steel tide of the joint fleet was weaving a net around the star, anchored by its gravity. The silver-grey ships of the Inquisition herded the Chaos fleet like shepherd dogs, while the expedition fleet’s crimson energy trails arced through the void like fatal brushstrokes.

This slow, calculated hunt reminded him of those orca hunts he’d seen in old Earth documentaries.

When the explorator fleet executed its third tactical reformation, the pincer formation of eight cruisers bore an uncanny resemblance to the spiral pattern used by ancient Terran sea mammals to herd schools of fish.

“Lord Romulus.”

The voice of Tech-Priest Dominus Kaur came through the datalink, his thought-matrix running fleet-wide battle simulations via each ship’s secondary processors.

“Please give the order.”

The enemy was now trapped by the pressure of Kaur’s net. Their only path to flee was through the sun’s gravity well.

It was the perfect time for the fleets to close in.

“Do as you see fit, Great Sage.”

Romulus had no experience commanding naval battles. Honestly, he hadn’t even fully grasped the joint fleet’s chain of command yet, and he was still trying to understand how interstellar naval warfare worked.

Still, he could tell the enemy’s minds were likely warped by Chaos, since they didn’t even seem to factor in gravitational effects during their retreat.

Kaur wasn’t the least bit shy about it. That kind of hands-off attitude toward things you don’t understand actually earned Romulus a bit of favor in the Sage’s mind.

Imperial higher-ups rarely relinquished control in unfamiliar fields. Most would cling to their authority to the bitter end, even when they had no clue—

Because the only one they trusted was themselves.

“Inquisitorial fleet, push the front. Expedition fleet, accelerate and close in on the marked location. Devouring Sharks, maintain route sync and act freely.”

The plasma turrets of over a dozen Mechanicus warships rotated in unison.

Blazing white energy beams lanced out, weaving a grid of death.

In an instant, the enemy’s void shields were overloaded, and three Word Bearers escort ships were reduced to molten metal clouds.

Mechanicus ships generally weren’t built for boarding actions, but what they lacked in close-quarters, they made up for in sheer firepower—far beyond anything the Imperial Navy could muster.

The Word Bearers immediately abandoned the captured cruiser Pride of Terra.

They then reformed around their Desolator-class battleship, the fleet’s core. The daemonic ships’ fleshy armor rippled and split open with massive fanged maws.

Dark green plasma torrents spewed from the fleshy turrets, clashing with the Imperial fleet’s void shields, creating ripples of sulfurous yellow.

BOOM—

A Cobra-class destroyer was struck multiple times. Its void shield collapsed, and its prow observation tower melted into skeletal wreckage under the plasma.

There’s no sound in vacuum, but when the debris smashed against the ship’s hull, it still left a haunting echo of that violent power.

“Nova cannon charged.”

A servo-skull relayed the notification. Binary roars erupted across the bridge.

No sooner had it spoken than several beams lit up the dark void.

Several ships fell into a stasis-like state—their power completely drained the moment they fired, the lights across their hulls blinking out.

Dozens-of-meters-wide beams tore across the battlefield. Chaos fighter swarms in their path vaporized instantly, leaving only ghostly tracks on the sensors.

One accelerated round, near light-speed, slammed into a cruiser that had lost its escort.

With a cascade of dazzling fire, three Despoiler-class Chaos cruisers were dismantled by more than a dozen beams, disintegrating into debris in orbit.

As shockwave-driven fragments swept across the sector, every Mechanicus ship automatically sounded its horn.

This was a victory protocol from Forge World Mars—each ship vibrating in vacuum, transforming the nova cannon’s annihilating beauty into a binary hymn of triumph.