I would’ve liked to see the faces of the Demon Princes when they realized their dad just got himself a quadrillion more undead slaves, and had slaughtered another significant percentage of the Empire to do so without batting an eye socket.

If we had not been there, they would have been freaking doomed. The entire Imperial Navy and pretty much every decently populated world in Imperial space would now be undead, lining up against them and the Warp, and pretty much anyone else planning to do something about them.

We just had to come in and upset the apple cart with our No-Time-Seeing us probability-borking existences. Too bad, so sad.

Alas, mucking up the Emperor’s plans had made us more work, and while we could maintain security on the worlds that had sworn to us, we couldn’t go looking for fights. We had a lot of purging of undead to do from behind.

That being said, there were quite a few Gardener clusters that had absolutely no problems with burning worlds to ash en vivus and then re-Seeding them... especially after the Emperor tried to Blacklight them. We could very, very easily convey to them how unnatural undead were, and as creatures wed to Light and Life, they naturally found undead anathemic, no better than the Anti-Life.

Giving the Gardeners cooperating with us vivic circuitry designs to empower through their massive bodies was not a hard decision. They were also leery of the Blacklight and had requested it. As for clusters who were not in partnership, merely getting sent off to other galaxies... well, if the undead found them, that might be bad, but then there’d be these enormous, impossible-to-miss massive targets of enough vivic energy to likely spontaneously feed and evolve entire planets, or even a new world-mind.

Evolution of purpose and capability doesn’t wait for anyone, including starflowers, and ecosystems that can learn interdependency are always more resilient than ones that can only stand alone.

What it meant in real terms is that between feeding on xenosyms, the Gardener clusters were now burning deathworlds out of existence, and there pretty much wasn’t anything said worlds could do about it. There was no need to assemble a Sun Gun, for instance, which would have just ground the whole planet to nothing. Setting it on fire, obliterating the undead, and giving it a massive vivic infusion at the same time to re-establish itself with great speed did the job.

It also meant our task of clearing away all those slaughtered worlds wasn’t going to take nearly as long as the Emperor thought.

Planet-baking was not something the Gardeners liked to use, as they wanted to assimilate the biomass, not cook it. But, undeath and negative energy were very unpalatable, so they didn’t mind so much, especially since they could Seed them and watch them regrow so quickly.

Anatolia even took advantage of the situation three times. Xenosym fleets came in to wipe a trio of systems converted to undeath; the Deathships had already moved on, and one wouldn’t be enough to stop the fleets, anyways. As the entire biosphere of a planet was not necrofied, just the sapients, there was still plenty of incentive for them to go down, crush the undead, and eat everything else.

The Gardeners just came in on the far side of the sun, and when the xenosyms got into planetary orbits after crushing what little resistance there was, they baked them all from eighty million miles away, set the planet on vivic fire, and fed the falling corpses of the xenosyms to the unwhite flames blazing below.

Three more World-minds began to grow in those systems, not that we were telling anybody. The Banner Curseline Gated a couple in to usher the process along.

Since the Emperor was giving us the opportunity, there was considerable debate about proceeding with this kind of thing. Wipe an undead world, wipe a xenosym fleet, make a World-mind... it was quickly agreed that if the three events came into confluence, to go ahead and make some more World-minds.

The World-minds were still off the Emperor’s radar, we were pretty sure. All of them had layers of obfuscation and system-wide Wards around them now, were invisible to the Warp, couldn’t be scried, etc. He was powerful, sure, but He couldn’t match the raw power of a planetary intelligence that had learned how to think in both real time and geological time. A telepathic attack would be a non-starter, and trying to scry it would be a joke.

The only threat to a World-mind was an actual fleet-scale or bigger attack, or the direct assault of a Warp God, both of them very unlikely, and made even more unlikely by the Sun Guns in place around their stars.

The Emperor could only watch His brand-new worlds of undead recruits begin to wink out, one after another, to the tune of at least a hundred per month... starting with the most populous, most fortified, and most developed. The Portals to Gloom He found and ripped open were chokepoints that could only admit so many undead at a time, or materials or whatnot, meaning He was now racing a clock as Forgeworlds, Crownworlds, Habworlds, and the like began to burn and die.

We wiped the top three hundred worlds He converted in the first three months, mostly by Gardening them from an AU away. That was tens of trillions of undead, and irreplaceable manufacturing capacity, all of which had taken millennia to build up. We wiped it all away as readily as He had wiped away the living, meaning He got almost nothing out of Animating those populations at all, save for the numbers He managed to send streaming out into Gloom through those relatively tiny Portals.

The Gardeners worked down the list of most-developed worlds, the White Fleet worked up from the least, and the Elvar detonated Sunburst Bombs somewhere in the middle as they were completed. The Xenosyms sometimes came in, set up a happy coincidence, and about a World-mind a month started coming into being...

-------

The Sunburst Bomb going off in Gloom was plenty big, and you could see it millions of miles away, the raw Radiance cutting through drifting shadowplasm and umbral ether like knives of hard reality.

The Emperor had found the Gloom Gate to Hephaestus III, one of our Forge worlds. The receiving Portals had been destroyed, but he had enough gathered undead psionic might to force the thing open from this end, albeit it would appear in some random location... which some of our own high-order Psions Divined out.

When it opened, and the undead began to march out in a wave of black netherplasm and soul-chilling cold in a blok neighborhood of Hephaestus Prime, preceded by waves of incorporeals, the Sunburst Bomb was shot on through the Portal and detonated in Gloom, while some lesser Radiant Pulses obliterated the first waves coming through the Portal.

I was on the far side, standing next to two Shadowknives to watch the show on the horizon. As the hyn were targets like anyone else to the undead, who were freaking everywhere, the hyn had no problems offing them.

While the natural environment was definitely friendly to the undead, Gloom itself was completely uncaring if they lived or died... and all blowing a Sunburst Bomb did was create some tremendously thick shadows in response for a moment, before it naturally expired and the default twilight returned. The Plane wasn’t hurt at all.

Tens of millions of undead, especially incorps, were instantly fried, dissipated, and Gloom got to eat them, feasting on the interplay of Radiance and Negative energy very happily, indeed.

“You’re right, the Land is definitely approving of the meal you just gave it. From a neutral to negative position, the undead here have become big feasts ready to be served,” Brother Compos Shadowknife, who I’d met so long ago in his Font under the mountain, and was still Colby’s main amour, told me. “You’ll find no resistance from the Gloom on wiping them, even if you bring in Light-bearers... just so long as you leave after they are gone.”

“Yes, yes; us and them kill one another, while it stands and profits. I’m aware of the mindset.” Since I was using it against the Warp and the Emperor actively, I could hardly complain. His smile was knowing, but non-judgmental. Gloom was at least as ruthlessly pragmatic as the Land, if not moreso, because it wasn’t a major Plane. “Any other gatherings to report?” I asked a specific section of the Markspace.

After it split and leveled out, Gloom was much, much bigger than before, which made it harder to get around. Distances between important places had increased anywhere from ten to a thousand-fold as the great ‘flat’ world of Gloom was laid out, rather than encased in a sphere, and had grown considerably in the bargain.

The fastest way to get around was Shadow-jumping, which often involved knowing the real-world equivalents of the Shadows something on the Mortal Plane cast on Gloom, and jumping between them. The Shadowknives had been working on a Veilwalking equivalent that was many times faster on the edges of shadows, and often had Bonded Psions along who could Shadowjump and get them to where they were needed faster now.

Having The Map was always a huge bonus, although the fact was Gloom was always slowly and subtly in motion, meaning The Map had to be constantly updated.

The place was literally too big for the hyn to monitor; trillions of square miles of flat, shadowy territory, begging to be filled with Stuff, which was naturally expanding into all new areas. New shadows were being grown from reflections on the Prime, creating ever-expanding grasslands, forests, waters, hills, and mountains.

But, they were Void Brothers. They always knew where to go for the important stuff.

-There are undead forces gathering at two other Portals,- /came back from some considerable distance, where two other Shadowknives were observing events from the shadows. -The one at mine seems to be stirring up some after your light show over there. Their Ritual to force the Portal open seems to be dying down...-

“That is unfortunate,” I remarked, to the snickers of the two Brothers next to me listening in. Nichawa and Pontiffa had a strong Mentat population, and had not only discovered the appearance point of the Portal, they had deflected it to a Dead Zone with nothing living around to threaten. Only Nichawa had a Sunburst Bomb, but for our purposes, Anti-matter would work just fine, too.

-Confirmed they are backing off here, too,- the other Brother watching /informed us. -You know, you should have just rebuilt the Portal and dropped the bombs here, anyways.-

I looked at the Brothers next to me, they looked back at me, and I politely /asked nobody in particular, -I need a thousand Bonded Psions to each Nichawa and Pontiffa Prime, to link into those Portals before they completely depower so we can bomb the fuck out of the undead on the other side!-

I most certainly never claimed I had all the good ideas.

Gates and Rifts flew open. Thousands of people moved as the Metaconcert Ritual needed to do the job was sent down and set up with telepathic speed. The Mentats on the two planets were a bit wide-eyed as a whole bunch of Ten and higher Beacon Psions came flooding out of nowhere, dumped what they were doing telepathically to the locals... and the locals got some very big and quite ferocious smiles on their faces as they went from being the defenders to the attackers!

------

Ten minutes and something like ten thousand PSP each later, the fading Portal the Emperor’s forces had stopped powering up suddenly began to glow and light up as a connection was established to the far side. The startled undead stared at it, and then belatedly realized what was happening.

By reflex, they formed up to attack and march into the opening that was being created, as was the original intention. The Emperor’s attention had shifted, and He didn’t look back quite in time to tell them to RUN AWAY! quite fast enough.

Happy coincidence, not.

Over a million miles thataway, and two million miles over there, some very bright lights went off. One was glorious and radiant undead-eating fun, and the other was the heat and fire of atoms being reduced to pure energy, raging out to take their vengeance upon the world.

For the millions of undead gathered up around that Portal, they were both equally effective. Anti-matter does a fine job ravaging space for the few moments it is around, which did for the incorporeals, too.

-There’s going to be a lot of stuff around the sites of the Sunburst Bombs,- I /said calmly. -Credit it to the hyn, and see how much we can scoop up. - There, uh, wouldn't be around the anti-matter blast radius...

Heck, we had working Portals up at those Sunburst locations! The people on Nichawa and Hephaestus were going to have quite a bit of salvage they could pull out of there from the would-be invaders... and Gloom wouldn’t mind getting rid of the mass from the Mortal realm, surely...