The Archmagos departed, his heart heavy with worry.
Halfway through its journey across the void, just as the transport cleared the asteroid belt, its thruster arrays fell abruptly silent, like a snuffed-out candle.
Several frigates closed in, encircling the vessel. High-powered scanning instruments monitored every inch of the transport's hull without a single blind spot. After the STC was carefully extracted, several blasts of searing plasma swallowed the transport ship whole, leaving not a speck of dust behind.
Upon the bridge, the Archmagos, still undergoing inspection within the vacuum isolation chamber, stared at the "All Clear" scan results. The worry in his eyes only deepened.
Arthur, having teleported back to the Dawn, watched the Archmagos's operations with mild surprise. After finishing his mission report, he decided to head toward the bridge.
Halfway there, a young Inquisitor shuffled past him like a walking corpse.
She kept her eyes cast down in silence, her heavy thoughts weighing like lead in her gaze. She looked completely overwhelmed with anxiety.
"Aglaia."
Arthur's voice made the Inquisitor stop dead in her tracks, the hem of her black inquisitorial robes rippling with a metallic sheen from the sudden halt.
Arthur looked at the Inquisitor. The scanning abilities inherent to Transmigrators recorded her physical appearance, then swiftly cross-referenced his knowledge reserves to display the individual's hormone levels and psychologically analyze her mental state.
Traces of unwashed Holy Oil lingered between her fingers, marks left behind by gripping a quill tightly through days of endless report writing.
"You look troubled?"
"Lord Arthur."
Aglaia composed her expression. She did not mind that her loss of composure had been discovered. Only here on the Dawn could she safely vent her emotions and begin to think clearly again.
"Pierred needs to be hurled into the local star due to Chaos contamination, and I am currently agonizing over this. I do not have Pierred's contamination data, and my brief interaction with my mentor cannot be mentioned."
She truthfully confessed her distress to the knight. When she lifted her eyelids, Arthur saw the fine, dense bloodshot lines edging her irises, resembling cracks squeezed into existence by invisible chains.
The Archmagos's demands were simply too abstract.
Of course, as the top Throne Agent of her class, Aglaia was certainly capable. She could coordinate the interests of various factions to align their testimonies, utilize her network to blockade the navigational routes to Pierred, and even induce collective amnesia among non-core personnel.
But what was she supposed to do about the data?
No matter how outstanding her past academic records were, this was her very first time facing Chaos contamination directly. She genuinely did not know the specific data metrics for large-scale Chaos corruption, and the Inquisition's public archives certainly would not teach such things.
Her initial reports had never even considered the fall of Pierred. At most, she had planned to help the Archmagos cover up the Abominable Intelligence issue. She had been too busy cutting ties with her old mentor before, and now that everyone was dead, she was being asked to reconstruct the exact degree of Pierred's Chaos contamination.
Aglaia felt as though the entire universe was conspiring to torture her.
It was simple: she dared not fabricate it. Blindly feeding false intelligence was a surefire way to have Officio Assassinorum operatives spawn in the shadows around her.
Yet she also dared not refuse to write it. Without sufficient and logical justification, she could easily be executed by the Ordo Excorium, the branch dedicated to investigating planetary losses, for the crime of wasting Imperial assets.
Her face-to-face encounter with her old mentor was completely off the table; she was still busy severing those ties. The best way to handle this was to claim she had never even set foot on the planet, and had instead intercepted the Chaos contamination in a decisive and perfectly logical manner.
Furthermore, she could not simply assassinate the Archmagos, the very person who had raised the problem, leaving her trapped in this endless, agonizing loop.
"Hmm."
Arthur nodded, signaling his understanding.
"..."
Aglaia bowed respectfully to her guarantor.
She was already entertaining thoughts of grabbing the Archmagos and self-destructing together.
Rustle.
Just as she placed her hand over her chest, a thick file composed of heavy parchment dropped into Aglaia's arms.
"Here is the data. You can use it as a reference."
Arthur had been investigating the area from the moment he first entered Pierred. Every stage of the Chaos proliferation had been recorded.
Had Rameses not reacted quickly enough to let him jam the ritual, the Rift would have expanded, and the entirety of Pierred would have been dragged into the Warp.
In theory, without their intervention, Pierred would indeed have vanished silently, along with that Tyranid swarm.
"..."
Aglaia instinctively used her psychic powers to isolate her immediate surroundings. After confirming there were no prying eyes, she activated her stealth field and unrolled one of the documents.
It was a detailed log of the Chaos Cult activities within the Hive City at the time of their initial landing.
"?"
"Read it when you are alone."
Arthur waved his hand and promptly walked away.
"Thank you, my Lord!"
Aglaia bowed deeply, never expecting that a casual yet sincere response would earn her such unforeseen assistance. She then hurriedly made her way to her small quarters on the Dawn to write her report.
Arthur had barely taken two steps before he encountered Dantioch, who was staring intently at the Schola Progenium.
This man, forged of steel both inside and out, had once again welded that ten-thousand-year-old iron mask to his face. The wrinkles around his eyes were as deep as knife cuts, and even his footsteps carried a heavy, anxious weight.
'Is he blaming himself?'
Arthur could tell at a glance what the Warsmith was thinking. He undoubtedly believed that his actions from ten thousand years ago had caused the current catastrophe.
Ten thousand years ago, due to Warp storms stirred up by the Evil Gods, the light of the Astronomican from Terra was blocked. Dantioch subsequently ignited the Pharos beacon to guide the Loyalists still remaining in the Segmentum Ultima.
Later, to counter the Traitor offensives, Dantioch was forced to overload the Pharos beacon. The out-of-control psychic beacon had, to some extent, attracted the arrival of the Tyranid swarm.
Arthur felt somewhat surprised.
These were facts they had only learned from the "GW Black Library." How did Dantioch know about this?
Dantioch had recently been paying close attention to these Xenos that the Transmigrators highly prioritized. Perhaps he had discovered some connection there.
No wonder the Warsmith had been analyzing technology like a madman lately.
Honestly, Arthur felt there was no need to pin the massive blame for the Tyranid swarm entirely on Dantioch. The swarm traveled so slowly, and the Galaxy was the only major star system in the vicinity. Their arrival was only a matter of time.
Furthermore, according to Cawl's genetic testing, the primitive gene sequences of this Tyranid swarm could be traced back to the dangerous organisms of Fenris and numerous other death worlds. It was virtually certain that the swarm had arrived in the Galaxy ten thousand years ago.
Such relentless self-blame was highly inadvisable.
He had asked Romulus to compile another data package, which contained the detailed metrics from the Archmagos's genetic tests on the Tyranids, cross-referencing them with several native biological organisms of the Galaxy.
Arthur shoved it into Dantioch's hands and strode away.
Archmagos Cawl's expertise in biology was, after all, extremely trustworthy.
After wandering around the ship and secretly returning a few mischievous children to their parents, Arthur pushed open the doors to the reception room at the top of the bridge.