Then, under the astonished gazes of everyone present, the very hand Guilliman had just used to comfort Leandros suddenly shot upward.
With his fingers curved like iron talons, he thrust his hand straight into the seemingly empty air behind Leandros!
Hidden within a rift in the Warp, the Tzeentch demon felt a sudden jolt of shock and an instinctive shiver of dread.
*This Guilliman…
didn’t the intelligence reports say he has almost no psychic talent?*
*How could he perceive my presence so quickly and with such precise accuracy?*
*I clearly suppressed all my psychic fluctuations to the absolute minimum!*
But a moment later, the demon eased its panic.
*Even if he can sense me, so what?*
*Such a minuscule rift in reality is impossible to penetrate with bare hands for a Primarch without powerful psychic abilities!*
*The barrier of the realspace universe is indestructible to material entities like them!*
However, its wishful thinking was ruthlessly shattered in the very next second.
Guilliman’s palm pressed firmly against the invisible spatial rift!
To the Ultramarines, their gene-father’s hand looked as if it were pressing against an invisible, incredibly thick wall.
The wall seemed to resist and push back, preventing even Guilliman’s hand from immediately penetrating.
But immediately after, the Smart Atoms within Guilliman’s body—originating from the Viltrum Regent—began to mobilize and converge at an unprecedented speed!
Like billions of miniature stars, they flowed down his arm and gathered in his palm.
Guilliman could clearly feel that this was a unique kind of power.
It originated from the Viltrumites’ near-idealistic, absolute belief in and control over their own capabilities, yet it also resonated and fused wonderfully with his innate, intricate connection to the Warp as a Primarch!
In a sense, a Primarch was already a minor god of the Warp walking the physical world!
Now, aided by the power of the Smart Atoms—a power originating from the absolute peak of materialism, yet touching upon the realm of idealism—Guilliman’s Warp essence was stimulated and strengthened like never before!
*Open…
for me!* Guilliman growled in his mind, and his palm suddenly exerted massive force!
*Crack!*
Guilliman’s hand had actually crushed the physical barrier of realspace with sheer, brute strength!
His entire forearm vanished into thin air in an instant, as if reaching into another dimension!
Within the Warp, the Tzeentch demon did not even have time to react before it felt a massive hand, clad in scorching and pure power, penetrate the boundary between illusion and reality.
With absolute precision, like a vice grip, it clamped tightly onto the collar of the demon’s grey robe woven from shifting lies and forbidden knowledge!
“How is this possible?!”
“No psychic power?”
“No… is this also psychic power?”
“But why… what kind of psychic power is this?!”
The demon unleashed a silent shriek, its very understanding of reality completely subverted.
The power it felt shared a common origin with Warp energy, both touching upon the fundamental essence of the universe, yet they were entirely different.
Warp energy was an ethereal power of the soul, wild and chaotic; whereas the power Guilliman was using right now carried a cold “order” and “certainty” born of the material universe!
How could material reality and illusion overlap in such a manner?!
This completely transcended its comprehension of cosmic laws!
Just as it was extremely difficult for a demon to invade the realspace universe—which was heavily protected by physical laws—without external aid, it was infinitely harder for a material entity to actively barge into the volatile Warp with bare hands!
At the very least, they would need the aid of technological constructs like a Warp drive, wouldn’t they?
Yet Guilliman had simply used raw strength to tear through the rift between reality and illusion, grasping its core!
In the next instant, an irresistible, wildly violent force surged from that hand!
The Tzeentch demon felt as though it had been struck head-on by a falling star, or thrown into a black hole with infinite gravitational pull!
Its body of pure energy and spirit was violently dragged out of its hiding place in the Warp by that colossal force!
It could clearly feel its illusory bodily structure being squeezed and crushed piece by piece by the ordering power of realspace contained within that giant hand!
At the same time, the material world’s natural rejection of Warp entities burned its skin like billions of red-hot branding irons!
Every ounce of rule-backlash and spatial rejection would be inflicted upon it without reservation!
“Aaaaargh—!!!”
The Tzeentch demon let out an indescribably agonizing soul-shriek.
The unspeakable pain of its existential essence being torn apart flooded its entire consciousness.
It struggled desperately, unleashing reality-warping warpfire and mind-corrupting psychic shocks.
But the hand gripping it was like an eternal foundation forged by the Emperor himself—unbelievably firm, unyielding to any force!
And so, under the dumbfounded gazes of the Ultramarines, Guilliman’s forearm, which had disappeared for a fraction of a second, violently snapped back from the void!
And dragged along with his arm into the material world was a Tzeentch demon—its form twisting and shifting, radiating a bizarre blue light and the stench of corrupt knowledge!
It was like a grotesque fish dragged from the deep sea onto the shore, writhing and screaming in agony in the air of the material world.
It was completely out of place in the grand plaza of Macragge, filling the air with sacrilege and discord.
Guilliman had pulled a living demon straight out of the Warp with his bare hands!
Held aloft in the realspace air by Guilliman like a helpless chicken, the Tzeentch demon stared at the unreadable, deep blue eyes of the Primarch so close to it, and let out a desperate, piercing psychic screech!
It knew very well that it was completely finished this time.
Demons like them championed change and intrigue, loving to sow chaos within order, but that certainly did not mean they liked to court death!
Its strength was respectable even among the ranks of the Changer of Ways, but compared to an enraged Primarch, it was practically nothing.
Though it possessed an immortal essence within the Warp and would eventually reform after being crushed, that process would require a vast amount of time and accumulation, and its strength would heavily decline.
When that happened, the other demons it had once looked down upon would surely seize the opportunity to ride roughshod over it!
Those bastards would literally take a shit on its head and expect it to hand them the paper!
For a demon surviving in the highly hierarchical yet chaotic Warp, that was a humiliation far worse than death!
Still…
since it was going to “die” either way, if it could mock this Primarch renowned for logic and order before being banished, it would be well worth the price!
At the very least, it would have bragging rights among its fellow demons!
With this thought, the Tzeentch demon actually calmed down, bringing its pointless screaming to a halt.