I reached up, Briggs reached down, and hauled me up weightlessly.

I smirked, able to read their shock despite themselves. I was literally right in front of them, some of the most powerful people in the galaxy, equipped with all sorts of alternate senses, clinging to that wall, and they hadn’t seen me, my Tails, my Wings, or my Arms in front of them until I took Briggs’ hand.

“Contessa Rantha...”

That sepulchral voice came out of the throat of the Emperor, and if it held a note or six of anger in it, it was still under control.

“Heya, Bones. Nice to see you again so soon,” I replied calmly, Chalice in one hand, Faith in the other, Paten and Host waiting in my Arakne Arms, Tails poised, Wings burning. I elbowed Briggs with a ding. “Heya Fuzzy!”

He reached over to noogie my head. “Hag!” he replied affectionately, the grinding brass gone from his voice, now as wonderfully deep, tonal, and commanding as ever.

There was a grinding clink as some very big weapons held in armored undead hands were leveled our way. Faith promptly grew to full Tower size, as did Rhythm, which dropped off Briggs’ bracer and also expanded to full size.

“You just go on and shoot while your boys do the same from your backs,” I spoke up.

“Unless, you know, you just kill them all with the wave of your hand you were going to,” Briggs added genially.

There was silence, but they didn’t shoot. Neither did we, of course.

“What are you speaking of, Pretender?” scoffed the Wyrm Prince behind them, waving around that bigass flaming Sword of his. “You think we fear this walking corpse?”

Briggs was nothing if not a nice guy at heart. “It has nothing to do with fear, Your Highness. It has to do if, anytime within the last five thousand years, you’ve dared to drink the Imperial Infusion, or eat the flesh and blood of a non-Fallen Legionnaire.”

The six Demon Princes all froze despite themselves.

“Records of the Legions indicate that the six of you are responsible for completely wiping out a minimum of three Battalions of Legionnaires each, and completely looting their stock of Infusions to make your own Fallen Brethren, since you can’t make them directly yourselves.” My voice held the sad, inevitable, schadenfreude tone of someone who knows something bad is going to happen, and is just waiting to see it.

“The Emperor only had to wait for you to get close enough to kill you. I think you should be prepared to join your brothers,” Briggs added kindly.

“No! This is not possible!” screamed the Tiger Prince, and the Emperor slowly and grandly turned around on him, those empty eye sockets blooming with terrible darkness.

---

They screamed as utter blackness reached out for them. Multicolored Warp defenses were passed through without resistance as the siren call of stolen genetics formed a link they could not break, and the utterdark poured into them.

Their screams were all the things. Great and grandiose dreams crushed, once and for all. All their greatest fears realized. Final recognition of the madness that had taken them, and the consequences that had come due. Realization that they had been used once, twice, and now thrice, and that they were not masters of the galaxy, but just little pawns who had served their purpose, and were being Summoned obediently and powerlessly back to the side of the one they hated and feared the most.

To serve Him forever.

We could both feel the power of the Emperor blazing out, reaching out into the bloodlines of all those hapless Fallen Legionnaires and any Warped elites who had dared feast on the blood of Legionnaires. They too screamed and died as the negative energy blazed forth from inside them, and the Emperor took them.

The shooting began to tail off sharply. A great aura of necroic power burned through the air, and dispelled the power of the Warp with cold finality. There were ripples and pops as the demons wavered, faltered, and were unable to act. They were mowed down with terrible finality by the once-living Warped who had fought so madly at their sides, and now killed them in complete harmony with the rest of the Emperor’s undead troops.

Without the presence of the Chaos from the Warp, the Axiomatics also lost their anchor on the mortal plane. Purloined techno-avatars stilled, disassembled, and crumbled in place, even without more shooting to hurry them on the way.

There were Warped Elites who had never tasted the genes of the Emperor, but the suddenly revitalized numbers of His troops, turning their weapons against their former allies, the demons in their systems burned away for power, was too much to go against.

His power went out into the stars, to the many circling Warped ships, and the Warped there who had indulged in unholy appetites also screamed, died, and turned upon their fellows. As they tended to be the most elite and officers of those ships, the immediate carnage immediately crippled said ships, and in their moments of defense, the death ships of the Empire swooped in and assaulted them mercilessly.

-------

The Demon Princes rose from the floor, their once Warp-blessed armor burning with necroic energies feasting on the freedom and life and chaos of the Warp. With grim and heavy footsteps, they marched forward and took up positions behind their long-dead brethren to either side of their undead father, all of them staring at the two of us.

“Impressive,” I noted to Briggs.

“Yeah, His Majesty definitely had some long-range plans come to fruition here,” Briggs agreed sagely. “Five thousand-plus years, setting a genetic trap for the rebellious little scoundrels. Good planning, gotta admit.”

“I do, I do,” I agreed. “You all done with the Animations, Old Bones?”

The burning black skull sockets, those crystal bones with black marrow, that black crown of a floating halo, all looking so contrasting to that golden armor, were turned upon us.

“You seem unduly confident for the position you are in,” the hollow voice of the Emperor rang in the air, more telepathy than sound. “What further plans do you have? Do you think you can escape from here so easily, now that you have been drawn in?”

The floor reverberated with the steps of countless thousands of troops, millions of them, on all levels. They stayed just out of sight from the side chambers of the throneroom, as this was indeed an epic confrontation and the like, but they were all converging this way. Out in space, our Marks assured us that the Warped fleet was being massacred... and then the dead were rising to claim the ships there.

“Oh, our plans basically finished up eight minutes ago,” I blabbed, having drawn the long straw.

“Eight minutes...” He trailed off, and his skull jerked back, to where the ceiling had been replaced from a recent hole, so as not to show the stars beyond.

And The Light hit the Palace. My timing is nothing if not really good.

----------

My role had been scout and saboteur, clearing the way for these two forces to get together and beat one another up.

Briggs’ role had been to lead them in, getting his Source leadership out in front of them and making the Warp stronger, an extra edge, making sure there was no stalemate.

After all, we wanted all the main players to get together.

As for our ships out there, they were mostly there for distraction purposes. All the Tens, the Coronals, the Umbrans, whatever... they were a temporal distraction for the Emperor, who had no choice but to keep a very close on whatever they were doing, so He could counter them.

All the important stuff actually happened on the other side of the sun.

It was only one Gate, circled by Interdiction Fields and Void Brothers to disguise the distortion in the Veil and not set off any alarms.

The Gardeners had come out on the other side of old Sol, and staying as close to it as they dared, circled around it to get into place, way inside Mercury’s orbit.

The undead outside saw the sun suddenly go black, in waves as the shadow reached them at the appropriate times. There were only some minor empty gaps between them.

Stealth ships had the position of every ship and target of interest down to the square meter. A wall of light focused through the bodies of over four hundred Gardeners concentrating almost an entire hemisphere of the sun swept across the battlefield.

The Warp Fleets were the first targets, as eight minutes ago they’d been in largely fixed orbits, while the Deathships had rapidly moved since then. At least a million square miles of very, very intense sunlight from not too far beyond the corona focused on them, and things went all wrong.

Their shields couldn’t take that much energy, and evaporated, followed instantly by their hulls as matter went straight to plasma without passing the states in between. Two-hundred-meter-wide points of annihilation swept across them, and the ships of the Warp blew into newborn polycolored stars.

Did I mention I’d adjusted the surviving shields of the Imperial Palace to lose their reflective function? I was sure I had. Oh, right, just talking about it with the girls...

One billion square miles of hyper-intense sunlight turned black the center of the sun, and drove across the Imperial Palace.

That was a lot of rads, and not all the Emperor’s Mechs or all the Emperor’s Undead could do a damn thing to stop it.

Everything became superheated plasma without exception as that beam crossed the Imperial Palace exactly once, at the leisurely speed of about a mile a second, and consumed everything.

Briggs and I stood there chatting as the Emperor turned His empty eyes on us, Seeing what was happening out there, and knowing there was nothing He could do to stop it.

He tried to Teleport out, probably to some hidey-hole on the far side of the galaxy, a living world He would turn undead and proceed to rebuild. There was no way any lesser power could catch or confine Him...

Except Mah Fuzzy and I had long popped our Interdictions, and the Emperor wasn’t going anywhere.

He could feel His servants being snuffed, and even the reflections of their souls evaporating under that much electromagnetic hello-how-are-ya, just like being at the heart of an atomic explosion. Blackness gathered around him, warping the rules of reality as He disregarded us from His thoughts, and made to survive this catastrophe.

It crossed over us.

------

At pretty much the same moment, four hundred or so of the kids cut Rifts in space to precise coordinates. Sitting right next to them were big crystalline prisms, pointing right through those Rifts, and being TK-aimed by Mentats with True Seeking going.

The power source was naturally the focused light of a million square miles of illumination from being too close to old Sol.

That up-to-the-second targeting data was for all those death ships that had been moving around, and were now retreating from being caught in those annihilating blasts of photonic fury.

The beams were positioned to go through two of the ships who were close enough together, and Spriteli got cheeky and took down three of them as solar lasers vastly stronger than anything a battleship or even planet could possibly generate cut through the deathships... and spread some vivus as they did so.