Two years of travel
Somewhere in the vast universe, where the only sounds were the dance of the stars and the silence of the cosmos, a quiet equilibrium reigned.
The darkness of space seemed infinite, barely broken by the faint light of distant stars.
That serenity, however, was about to be shattered.
Suddenly, thousands of blue portals began to manifest in the void, as if the very fabric of space-time were being torn apart.
The appearance of those portals came with a vibrant energy that resonated through the universe, heralding the arrival of something monumental.
From the portals emerged a vast fleet of ships of different sizes and colors, each with its own identity and purpose: it was the Infinity expeditionary fleet.
It moved through space like a tide of steel and technology, combining warships, transports and colony vessels.
At the head of them all was the flagship, none other than the UNSC Infinity, which after two years had finally emerged from slipspace.
Moments later, the fleet began accelerating toward the nearest system to establish the first colony there.
Hundreds of probes were deployed to the system’s various worlds to verify their viability, and luck was on their side: the system had five planets, three of them capable of supporting human life without further adjustment, and the remaining two habitable only through terraforming.
After several hours of travel, a beautiful planet of vast oceans and green continents finally came into view.
Samuel, seated in the captain’s chair, made the decision to establish it as the new capital world.
Shortly afterward, he was briefed on the state of the fleet and the colonists: everyone was in good health.
Half an hour later, the process of waking the crew from the cryo chambers began, and an hour after that Samuel met with Charlotte to bring her up to speed on the fleet’s situation and the details of the planet they had reached.
The system was named Charum Hakkor, and Samuel chose “Erde-Tyrene,” or simply “Erde,” as the planet’s name, a decision Charlotte enthusiastically backed.
By the next day the entire fleet was fully operational and, under Charlotte’s orders, the colonization of the neighboring systems began.
Each colony ship, belonging to the various families, activated its slipspace drives and dispersed to carry out its mission.
Only the Sorofia fleet, along with the Banfields and the Helions, remained in the system; after a brief discussion about their own plans, the latter two also departed, leaving the Sorofia fleet as the only presence in Charum Hakkor.
Charlotte, in command, opened communications with Reach to report on the state of the expedition.
Meanwhile, the Infinity and the Phoenix-class units began scanning the planet for signs of intelligent life.
The results were clear: there were no advanced civilizations.
Samuel ordered the deployment of a contingent of troops to explore the terrain and confirm the absence of advanced life, and after a full day of searching, nothing was found.
Over the following days, thousands of colonists and soldiers descended to the planet to begin building the first city and start their new lives, a task taken up with enthusiasm and determination.
Over the following months, the first cities rose along with a space station, and the same happened with the rest of the fleet on the other worlds.
After two years, the planet already had more than two billion colonists spread across different regions, devoted to agriculture, building factories, and the shipyards.
The following year, the five thousand colony ships completed their settlement.
To everyone’s surprise, several isolated knight worlds were found during the expansion.
Diplomatic meetings were held with their leaders, and the vast majority agreed to join the new coalition; a minority chose to remain independent, though they agreed to establish trade routes with the new capital.
Five years later
Samuel was in the command room of the Requiem palace, on Erde-Tyrene, watching the tactical screens with an expression that, had he had a face, would have shown pure confusion.
A total of fifteen colony ships had gone months without reporting in, and that disturbed him deeply.
He had sent a fleet of cruisers to investigate the systems where contact had been lost, but that fleet hadn’t returned either.
He didn’t know what they had run into: during the expansion they had faced ork fleets and other hostile races, but their weaponry had always been enough to eliminate them quickly.
He finally made a decision: he would go personally.
The trip to those systems would take only three days, and he wouldn’t go alone.
Deus, Iris and Adán, his usual companions, would go with him, but he would also invite Lunaria, who had recently finished unlocking her psychic abilities.
I have to admit the change between before and after she received her powers was astonishing.
Her aura, which now radiated from her body with an almost palpable intensity, made a world of difference.
If before she could pass for a character out of a fairy tale, now she had become a fairy in her very essence.
Helion Residence, Erde-Tyrene
Every time I came to see Lunaria, I had the feeling of standing before a demigoddess.
Her influence over people was such that there were soldiers from other forces who had sworn her eternal loyalty.
She herself had been a key piece in the negotiations with the knight worlds, many of which ended up joining her house, whether because of her beauty or because of that almost divine aura surrounding her; their lives, since then, had improved greatly.
I walked through the residence’s garden for a few minutes, and there, among the soft shadows of the night, I found her.
Lunaria was sitting serenely in a beautiful white dress with aquamarine-green accents that enhanced an almost unreal beauty.
Her silver hair fell straight over her shoulders, shining in the moonlight, and a delicate silver tiara adorned her forehead, with a green gem that glowed subtly beside the symbol of a rose.
She wore a green blindfold over her eyes; to her right sat a few glass jars of strange fruit, and to her left, sitting silently, was her nanny Surin.
As soon as I approached, she turned toward me.
“Samuel, what brings you here?” Lunaria asked.
“I’ve come to invite you on a mission,” I replied.
“You told me you wanted to practice your abilities, right?”
“That’s right.
I’ve gotten really good with them, and ever since I saw the eldar use their powers, I’ve managed to imitate them.
Look.”
An instant later she began to hum, and reality itself seemed to warp around her, shaping a small dagger made of spectral bone.
“I need more training to create something more complex,” she said, “but I feel like I’m making progress.”
“That’s good,” I answered. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“So?
How are things going?
I heard they’re starting construction on the portals and mapping the sector to chart the best routes.”
“Everything’s going wonderfully, more or less.
In less than three years the second expeditionary fleet will arrive with Charlotte’s sisters, and once the portals are finished, both travel and trade will speed up.”
“But not everything’s fine, is it?”
“You’re right.
A few months ago, fifteen colony ships cut off communications with us.
We sent a fleet to find out what had happened, but it never came back.”
“And what do you think?” she asked.
“That something attacked them?
With our technology and the Men of Iron, there shouldn’t be any force capable of standing against us.”
“That’s exactly what I intend to find out.”
We talked for about twenty minutes about different things and how each of us had been doing.
At one point I noticed a plant next to Lunaria distorting, as if it were submerged in water.
I asked her about the phenomenon, and she explained that it was one of her familiars.
A moment later, the creature deactivated its camouflage, revealing a multicolored jellyfish almost two meters tall, floating calmly in the air.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen any of your familiars,” I remarked, “but you told me you had three.
I only see one.”
“Right, I’ll introduce you.
That one there is Jelly, and these are Sol and Lin.”
At that moment, two small heads peeked out from Lunaria’s hair, one red and one blue, stretching their tentacles toward me as if they wanted to protect their princess.
But the moment I saw them, I leaped backward and, out of nowhere, materialized the incineration cannon used by the Prometheans, leaving Lunaria visibly surprised at my reaction.
The Promethean incineration cannon, materialized in an instant.
“Samuel, what’s wrong with you?
Please, put that weapon away,” she pleaded, alarmed.
“Lunaria, get away.
Those things are dangerous.”
“Are you talking about my three familiars?
They wouldn’t hurt anyone.”
“No, Luna.
Those creatures you carry in your hair are called sirens, or Enslavers.
They’re responsible for wiping out the Old Ones and annihilating countless life-forms during the War in Heaven.
They brought the eldar and the Krork to their knees; they use psykers to open portals of flesh through which they bring more of their kind into the material world.
They’re a plague, so step aside.”
“Are they really that dangerous?
But they always act like pampered puppies with me and my people.
Now that you mention it, they do have an ability called puppet.
I promise you they won’t hurt anyone.”
“Do you know they feed on psykers, and that you’re one of them?”
“Actually, they feed on fruit and my blood, and that’s more than enough for them.”
Sol and Lin, peeking out from Lunaria’s hair.
I looked at her with a frown, but I didn’t lower the weapon.
I asked her more questions, and after a while I ended up putting the cannon away, though I asked her not to show her familiars in public again.
What had caught my attention most was precisely those creatures’ feeding method: fruit and blood.
My curiosity ended up settling on the fruit she ate, and she explained that her familiar Jelly brought it to her.
According to Lunaria, Jelly came from a place called the Void, and used a strange energy native to it, which was also where the fruit and other objects came from.
I asked her to give me some of those objects, along with a sample of her blood, to analyze them.
The next day, she and I set out with the fleet toward the system of the disappearances, determined to find out the truth.
Elsewhere
On one of the Confederacy’s planets, the cities lay silent, empty of any human presence.
All that remained was the color of dried blood and the marks of munitions impacts on the buildings.
The doors of the houses showed clear signs that their occupants had been dragged out by force.
The proud Men of Iron and the Titans lay torn to pieces among the rubble.
But an instant later, the sound of slow chewing would break that silence.
Somewhere among the ruined buildings, a human head rolled across the ground, until a red, unnatural hand grabbed it and lifted it off the ground.
Silence and blood upon a lost world.
In another corner of the galaxy
Black was wearing a white lab coat two sizes too small, rubber gloves stained with something that was definitely not coffee, and a mad-scientist expression that would have made any Saturday-morning-cartoon villain proud.
“Okay, relax,” he told the volunteer in front of him, a guard with the face of a man deeply regretting his life choices, “this isn’t going to hurt.
Probably.”
“That’s exactly what you said two experiments ago, Mister Black.”
“And technically I didn’t lie.
You’re the one who ran off before it hurt.”
When Black understood where he had ended up reincarnated, he took it for granted that he’d drawn the worst part of the story: the famous “forty-first millennium,” humanity turned into a rusty, fanatical war machine, ruled by a corpse sitting on a throne, with daemons crawling out of every crack in the floor.
So when he was assigned to work shoulder to shoulder with a handful of priest-engineers obsessed with metal and binary prayers, he didn’t think twice: he acted exactly the way you’d expect anyone who already knew how all this ended to act.
He’d toss them offhand remarks, half joking, half out of practical resignation—that every machine has a “spirit” that has to be treated with respect, that saying a prayer to a servo-servitor before switching it on never hurts, that the “Omnissiah” was surely looking on them with favor—never imagining that this handful of curious men would take every one of those quips as revealed truth.
Months later they were still writing them down, word for word, on copper tablets.
It was much later, going over stellar dates with an archivist and doing math that didn’t add up, that he realized his mistake: he wasn’t in the year forty thousand or in any rotten future.
He was in the exact same era as Samuel and Lunaria, in a present where the Imperium didn’t even exist as such yet and the universe, against all odds, still hadn’t gone to hell.
“Wait,” he said, processing it out loud, half relieved and half embarrassed.
“So everything I told those guys was a lie.
Well… not a lie.
Advance advertising.
Details.”
He’d spent weeks shut up in that lab, among scrolls requisitioned from shrine world libraries, notes from Mechanicus adepts who still didn’t understand why some random human was asking them so many questions about the Warp, and—his favorite—a pile of contraband manga he’d managed to smuggle out of the Sol system before everything went to hell, although now, technically, that “before” hadn’t arrived yet.
One of those manga in particular was stuck in his head: a bunch of guys who breathed in a specific way and suddenly cut down demons like it was nothing.
Ridiculous.
Beautifully ridiculous.
And, according to his ex-soldier-with-an-engineer-complex brain, technically possible.
And now, knowing he wasn’t late to the party but that it was only just starting, the idea was more urgent than ever: if the future wasn’t written yet, it was worth writing it with something better than a corpse on a throne.
“Look,” he explained to the only two Mechanicus adepts curious enough, or desperate enough, to humor him, “you’ve got machines that zoom in to the atom and flying machines blessed by a red god with a god complex.
Great.
Impressive, even.
But you know what you don’t have?
A normal foot soldier who can see where the axe is going to come in before it gets buried in his chest.
That’s what we need.
Not another, bigger tank.
Somebody who sees the blow coming.”
The idea, at heart, wasn’t crazy at all: if the Warp could twist reality so a daemon could walk, why couldn’t it twist it a little so a human eye could see what it normally shouldn’t?
Not magic, not blind faith, but discipline, controlled breathing and a carefully measured pinch of immaterial energy channeled through the nervous system, like lighting a candle without burning your fingers.
He called it “Piercing Sight.” The name was his “professional” version of what he really meant, which was “seeing the guts of the guy in front of you without having to cut him open.” Months of trials, headaches, two minor fires and an incident with a goat that everyone preferred never to mention again, until at last a soldier managed to hold his gaze steady long enough to see, through the skin of his sparring partner, the exact path of his muscles tensing before a strike, the pulse of blood quickening in his veins, the precise angle at which a knee was about to give.
It wasn’t seeing the future.
It was reading the present with more attention than any human eye was designed to pay.
“That’s it,” Black said, almost breathless, seeing the result for the first time.
“That’s exactly what I wanted.
You’re not reacting to what the enemy did anymore.
You’re reacting to what he’s about to do.”
The second one wasn’t really his idea.
He stole it, with total shamelessness, from a guy named Tanjiro who breathed really hard and cut really fast.
If the body could learn to see more, Black reasoned, it could also learn to stay longer inside each second.
He called this “Enhanced Perception,” and it consisted of teaching the brain and nervous system to process the world at a speed that, to any other human, would look suspiciously like cheating: the entire fight slowed down, not because time changed, but because whoever was living it could finally keep pace with every instant, moving, calculating and responding while the rest of the universe seemed to move in slow motion.
“This isn’t magic,” Black would repeat every time someone asked him, usually with more fear than curiosity, how it worked.
“This is about any ordinary person, with no special gene, no Primarch blood, without any god having laid a finger on them, being able to stand in front of whatever comes out of a portal and have a real chance.
Neither the Emperor nor Khorne is going to give me that for free.
So I had to invent it myself.”
Because, deep down, it was never just science.
Every time a volunteer opened their eyes for the first time and saw—truly saw—the world with impossible clarity, Black thought of two faces he would never see again, of two brothers who never had the chance to anticipate the blow that took them.
No one else, he promised himself, as he jotted the results in an almost-full notebook.
No other big brother was going to have to bury his own for failing to see the inevitable coming.
If humanity couldn’t count on luck, it would count on sight and speed, and this time he was going to make them himself, with his own hands stained with whatever was in those jars.
“Okay,” he announced, addressing his exhausted and slightly traumatized team, “take notes, because this is only just getting started.
As any self-respecting anime villain would say: this is only phase one.”
English isn’t my first language, so there may be some mistakes or inconsistencies along the way.
I hope you can understand, and thank you for your patience and support!