Briggs glowered at the void ahead, and it kind of quivered back in his direction.

He had gotten sick and tired of the xenosym swarmfleets long, long ago, but there were just so damn many of the things, and he had so many other things on his plate that he couldn’t address them properly.

He had been fighting their raiding fleets for decades, and the amount of manpower, ships, and time they had cost him was one of the biggest drains on his advancing, growth, and consolidation. Opportunists used his duty to fight them to pull away from him, then clamored the loudest when it was their turn to be saved.

Well, no, not the loudest. The loudest was when they were dispatched to fight them, and died screaming. He had long ago ceased to permit himself to be used, and it was a marvelous way to clear out the predatory and greedy chaff from the worlds he was taking over.

But he had put the decades to good use, as had the kids.

Getting ahead of the production curve had been a slow, arduous process. Places to mine. Factories to make. Innovations to undertake. Science to stabilize. Making the equipment necessary to make the next tier of equipment, repeating over and over again as the Tech Level rose.

A normal TL rise like they had rammed through would take place over centuries normally, decades at the very best, but the initial ones had actually taken place inside a couple years. There had literally been no way to disseminate the upgrades widely, because production could not keep up with innovation.

That had finally changed with access to the Ruk, and somewhat closer work with the Elvar... and getting their own tech to TL20.

TL20 didn’t let them do anything they couldn’t do at 17, but it let them do it faster, cleaner, more cheaply... and finally, FINALLY, they had started mass replication.

TL20 could print TL18, which could print TL16. Thus, the only things that needed to be assembled by hand were the highest tier, and you could Print anything lower, it was just a matter of scale, hands, and materials at that point.

Localized and specialized production that had been unable to keep up with the massive scale of needs, and had at its core centered on supporting the increasing TL, had started truly going into scale.

They had completed the Worldring around Janus, the first such thing built in human space in two thousand years, and at a higher TL than anything before the Emperor sat on His Throne on Tellus.

Janus was not ideally set to be a place of government, culture, trade, or military influence, but it did just fine on the science and innovation end, and was quite hard to reach now that it was cut off from the Warp.

It was also a pretty nice place to live, once the Warp Storm restored the planet, and its people took pains to keep it so. Those who didn’t made nice Ducal Marines.

Getting a second Reaver Fleet made had taken years, made more difficult by the massive uptick in activity by the Xenosyms. If they had all come at once, it might have been impossible... but if they all came at once, Warp Storms would have likely wiped a lot of them, and all in all, the individual forces of the Abyss were far less dangerous than the overwhelming numbers the Xenosyms had possessed.

Had. Past tense.

His pale violet eyes flickered over to the gravity readings, research into which was pushing TL21, and with Angeltech, probably exceeded it.

There were no Anti-Life within a hundred light years. Perhaps they realized it was the end of their vast fleets, and that Nature had spit up a cure for the travesty they had inflicted on the galaxies.

That cure was the Gardeners.

The void around him was filled with dead and dying Xenosym motherships and carriers. It was also filled with a lot of Gardeners.

The Starflowers were brilliant and ominously deadly, swooping down out of the black of the void and lighting up as they came down upon the hapless Xenosyms, wrapped them up, and proceeded to turn them into crushed mulch.

The smaller Gardeners swarmed in to digest the bioships the Reapers were taking out, focusing on eating and getting bigger, while the larger ones actually helped with the fighting.

The various energies the bioships used didn’t bother the Gardeners much, able to counter and absorb them, having long mutated to take on their rival biovores. Getting shot with explosive spores and bioweapons was like throwing sugar candy at them. Mass-driven spikes and the like were often allowed to punch right through them, or simply stick in them and be slowly broken down by acids that, when psi-charged, could almost eat space, let alone some crunchy neo-organic superchitin.

The Tribute had been loaded out with Blacklight Beamers, its internal production facilities basically restricted to nothing larger than cutters at this time, putting together advanced Crescent starfighters and a lot of missiles more often than not. He could still produce anything up to the size of a heavy cruiser on the internal lines, as needed, and the Tribute had been one of the places kept on the edge of technology upgrades, just in case.

With just the Tribute, he could rebuild everything, if it was lost. He would just need time and materials. The internal structures were still at 17-18, but the tech was sitting at solid 20 for good reason.

The Second Dark Fleet was reaping the length of this Xenosym swarm, leaving drifting carcasses bigger than the Tribute behind, surrounded by floating spawn.

TL20 Angeltech optimized to fight a single foe, especially a biotech race already using Weird Science to somehow survive in space, was hideously deadly stuff, and they had the techniques down to a science and an art, now.

Sure, the Xenos could self-evolve, but they were limited by genetics and the materials of their bodies. They were alive. So much of what they were and could do was dependent upon massive amounts of psionic energy.

Psionic energy could be disrupted. Living cells could be instantly killed. Inert matter was useless to the biovores, and they didn’t have symbiotic small races helping them out with TL20 technology to advance their mindset and their culture.

The TL20 Blacklight Beamers had one final innovation that really put the nails in the coffins of the Xenosyms. Ronnie had found a way to bounce the Deathlight off the Dark Matter that was strewn through every Life Spiral in the Xenosyms, and use it to spread the beams through their most obdurate shells and chitin like superconductors.

The control factor the Anti-Life had baked into these things had become their doom. It didn’t matter anymore if they had a psi-reinforced shell twenty meters thick. The Dark Matter formed a nice path for the Deathlight right through it. Beamers could play over those shells and skins, and Deadshots could detonate against them, and they would go right on through to the essential cells within.

Thus, the only thing the Reapers had to worry about was point defenses and shields, and breaching those was an art they’d gotten very, very good at.

Dead mountains of biomatter floated in the void behind him; the ones ahead squirmed in fear and writhed, trying to escape the silence and death that was coming upon them. Breaking formation just allowed them to be picked off more easily, as the ships didn’t have to worry about concentrated return fire at that point. A single cutter with Deadshot railgun loads would become a lethal threat.

This final xenosym fleet extended the length of a solar system. It had preyed on the Khagan Sector and outlying elements of the empire for literally thousands of years, and was likely the source of the infiltration that had doomed the colonists aboard the Celestial Tribute so long ago.

The Tribute was playing an old and grand march, the Corunsun family theme for millennia, watching all this with great satisfaction. Going to major battle mode to carry out this final assault was a deliberate choice on Briggs’ part... the Tribute had many, many ghosts to lay to rest, they had not all been purged, and this would be the moment of their release.

He would also take his Rantha Hagspawn Level to Nineteen when it was done. When he brought this fleet over and wiped out the third and last xenosym fleet, he would hit Twenty.

He could not address the Warp until the Xenosym were no longer a problem. The Anti-Life, for all the danger they represented, would be virtually trapped inside a heliosphere, and even if they could obliterate a whole system by themselves, being caged forever meant they would never dare to do such a thing. The Ruk’s Dark Matter Singularity Shells would soon obliterate them helplessly. At least outside the heliospheres they could run... and they did run.

Being able to move Sun Guns around and pick them off if they even got close to a heliosphere was a thing, too. Strangely enough, he had many more of them now than he had twenty years ago, and they were protecting many a key system.

Any fleet invading a system with a working Sun Gun deserved what it got. Naturally, that meant sabotage of such a thing became a great priority.

When the keepers of a Sun Gun were Gardeners, it became a little difficult to suborn them. They could try going after the production facilities, but only Marked were allowed to work on the lines, and the modules were at least Beacontech quality.

There was the potential of trying to poison the Gardeners, which made him smile.

The Gardeners were more than willing to give up on migrations and stick around one system, as long as they could continue to grow. This effectively turned them from absentee seeders and reapers into actual Gardeners.

The way to do that was to supply them with viable, natural biomass. Naturally, ecumenoplis worlds and Forge Worlds that had wiped their biospheres had literally nothing to offer in this regard. Having a Gardener or two running a Sun Gun to safeguard a system was a huge thing... if the starflowers could be trusted. They were totally pragmatic, and if they were pissed off, they could wipe a planet. If they were in agreement, it was a great symbiotic working relationship.

So, worlds that could generate steady tithes of biomass would be capable of getting a Gardener to hang around. In addition, the Gardeners could Seed other worlds in the systems with life that could grow there, and who knew what could become of that? Refining longer-term E-Elements was also a thing...

It was totally at odds with the Cult of Man, but that was being crushed under the words of the God of the Machine everywhere. They’d be digging out fanatics forever, of course, but that was just a fact of life when dealing with religious conflicts.

He totally intended to kill their God-Emperor asshole at the right time, anyway.

Their strategy was right out there. Everyone knew it. If the God-Emperor died and His soul entered the Warp, He could marshal the souls there and break the Warp Gods.

It was right there. It was on the table. All He had to do... was die.

That, of course, was an impossible decision for a lich, who were literally defined by their refusal to die.

Which meant He would have to be killed.

The Six Demon Princes were slogging their way towards Tellus, system by system, fight by fight. Neither force was impatient, and having to reduce planets to burning cinders was indeed a thing they had to do, or those billions of undead would become something that could be thrown on ships and hurled at them... or maybe transported to the Imperial Palace to face off against them, who knew?