An hour and 20 minutes later, Fort Galatan arrived at the tactical position at the right time.

The Nova Warriors, Grey Knights, and other combatants stationed in the Star Castle were ready for another battle against heretics and betrayers, but when they arrived, they were told that everything was settled—and that only a few things left to help with were cleaning the battlefield.

This is, of course, both thankful and infuriating. However, when they saw the Midnight Lord's menacing fleet facing only a lone light patrol painted with the sign of the Dark Angel, this feeling turned to doubt and vigilance.

Immediately afterward, they received a communication from the Glory of Maculag. The Regent himself spoke to them personally, inquired about the current situation, told them that it was a false order, coming from an irrefutable security flaw in the system. They need to carefully assess and judge the current situation, and the dark angels with black armor on the ships a little further away can be trusted.

In the process, Robert Killiman's voice was as calm and confident as ever, but anyone who wasn't blind could tell that he was clearly suppressing the anger in his heart. But the regent's forgery of the seal could have a terrible effect, and no one thought about the outrage, and the warbands were only instructed to complete their assigned tasks in a step-by-step manner after a brief period of confusion in the scheduling.

With a question mark on their stomachs, they approached the Lionmane, and immediately confirmed that the Midnight Lord's ships had all deactivated their weapon systems, lowered the Void Shield, and slowly approached the direction of the Star Castle in a slaughtering manner. They sent a small force to tentatively land a few random Midnight Lord ships, and then, in the course of this mission, they discovered more inexplicable facts:

The dust had indeed settled - they had met no decent resistance, the mortal crews had tremblingly expressed their willingness to submit and obey Astarte's orders, and their renegade cousins had mostly become ...... Shaky.

For Astarte, the scattered corpses were nothing to fear, but the way in which this fact was created was unsettling to all. There were no scars from bullets and swords, no smell of burning promethium, no signs of damage from energy beams or any other weapon that could be thought of. The dead Midnight Lords had struggled in place, but there was no clue of what had caused them pain and hurt them.

Over the course of fifteen hours of cleanup, the Empire cleared out forty-eight thousand two hundred and nine corpses from the Chaos ships, presumably belonging to Midnight Lord Astarte. The reason they had to use this ambiguous description in the report was that the vast majority of the corpses had been reduced to a mass of minced flesh in the power armor - a simple environmental survey and autopsy would show that they had been "chopped up" like this while still living for a long time.

Of the more than 48,000 corpses, about 12,000 were barely in full human form. While they had apparently suffered similar brutality, having their flesh stripped from their bones inch by inch, to put it coldly, the injuries alone might have affected their movements, or even left them dying, but they weren't supposed to actually kill a reformed Astarte warrior.

They didn't understand what was really going on with these Midnight Lords, but Konrad Coz himself knew it. Once again, the Eighth Legion was defeated by his own cowardice, and did not carry out his original judgment to the end. In this process, only about 1,500 children actually "passed" the path of judgment, and at that time, there were 15,437 people who were still suffering under his essence, but he still chose to stop everything.

He let go of the ties of the contract, reclaimed his true nature, and watched what was to happen with only the most basic senses—and then, to his despair, discovered that after he had brought to a halt what had been happening in subspace and returned everything to the rules of reality and physics, many of the children who had survived his trial, fifteen thousand and two, to be specific, died swiftly within the next ten minutes.

The physical damage caused by the trial should not have killed them, but what really killed them was the sudden relaxation after a long period of extreme tension in their nerves. Astarte, with his strong physique and two hearts, will die of heart failure, which might make it to the list of the most ridiculous jokes in the galaxy - if there is such a thing.

And yet such a ridiculous joke, on this day, on this fleet, beyond anyone's expectation, repeated eleven thousand five hundred and two.

——

"I don't want to talk to you." The image of the Midnight Lord Primordial flickered under the projection of the Empire's standard communications equipment, like a weak ghost.

"The fleet you feared has been submissive, and apart from the five thousand four hundred and thirty-three Midnight Lords who are still alive, only the corpses of my heirs remain, and the roughly 140,000 mortals who have already been frightened by them and broken their backbones. I've got you covered with a two-sided crisis, and all you need to do is clean up the rest of the mess a little bit - isn't that what you're best at? So don't bother me now, let me be alone for a while. ”

"Do you think I went to the trouble of contacting you to hear you boast like this?!"

Robert Killiman yelled at the device with a bruise on his forehead. It was true that he was so angry that he almost lost his mind because the other party forged his seal and issued orders privately, but the acumen of the original politician also made him notice at the same time, and the current Conrad Coetze behaved completely different from the one he had remembered earlier.

Coetze, stained with a little blood and dirt in the communication video, looks pale, melancholy, cynical, and neurotic, almost like the clean, contented mutinous agent that Kiliman had seen in the council chamber of the Lionmane just over a day earlier, and who had no scruples about making a fuss about Rika Fujimaru.

Now Conrad Coetzes is much closer to the state he was in 10,000 years ago.

These thoughts lingered in his mind for only a microsecond, and did not affect the next angry rebuke of the imperial regent: "Don't you know what you did before this?!" Your actions have dealt a devastating blow to the entire fleet, and indeed to the entire Empire's chain of command! Have you thought about the possible consequences of all this?! ”

"I helped you find a vulnerability that existed in the system 10,000 years ago, no thanks." "As for why I did it, it's because I'm bored." When you decided to lock me up, didn't my little warden warden warden remind you that it was best to find me something interesting to do? ”

This act of rightly beating a rake made Killiman angry for a while. He was stuck for a moment, so he couldn't stop Coetze's next sentence: "What about Fujimaru Rika?" I've got something to look for her. ”

"She's recuperating." Killiman replied instinctively, and then remembered his original purpose: "But you don't want to go anywhere, just stay in the Lion's Mane!" I'll send someone else credible—"

"—and then give away their lives in vain? It doesn't matter who or what you're going to send? Coates unceremoniously interrupted his tirade, "The obvious fact is that you can't lock me up, Robert. I thought what had just happened was enough for you to realize that. ”

After the words fell, they all fell silent for a moment. Killeman didn't speak for a moment because he realized that Coetzes was right, and that he needed a little time to figure out how to properly hold him up—it wasn't easy to rule out the system of genetic testing in the process, and even the original needed to be quiet and think for a while; And Koz, meanwhile, surprisingly, was thinking about something.

"Forget it." After a brief silence, the Midnight Lord's primordial body spoke first with a bored expression, "Call your people over." Whatever you want, as long as they don't disturb me, and leave me alone and quiet. The ...... I killed today Enough stuff, I'm sick of it—whoever or whatever you sent, they should be glad for that. ”

After saying that, he didn't even look at Kiliman's reaction, and unilaterally cut off the communication. The latter, on the other hand, while feeling an almost uncontrollable rage as a result, calmly and rationally realized that something must have happened to Koz during this time.

Miwoo (six o'clock)

(End of chapter)