Warhammer: Start with a dog.

Chapter 835 His Astounding Wisdom
Diocletian Kroos has just received his lord's latest order: "to become Ramizan Carlos's Shield and servant."

Therefore, the tribunal acted without hesitation—although he did not carry his halberd, the speed and strength of the Imperial Guard were extraordinary, and he blocked the demon and the judge at a speed that the boy could not even see with his naked eye.

With a loud bang, Dirk delivered a kick to Eisenhorn, sending him flying as expected.

The old judge crashed into an elegantly decorated gallery wall, and blood and fragments splattered everywhere, falling to the ground like a small waterfall, as bones pierced through internal organs.

But the tribunal's strike at the demon missed its mark.

Don't misunderstand, Diocletian's speed was definitely on par with his opponent's, and his attack did not miss. It was just that he had no weapon, so he directly used the silver tray in his hand to slash at his opponent like a fist blade. As an old adversary of the Unborn, Diocletian was very confident that he could make his opponent's soul disappear immediately.

But Cherubel burst into laughter, and Diocletian felt his perfect body suddenly lose its balance—his forearm, along with his sturdy, gleaming gold armor, had been neatly "swallowed" by the incandescent sphere, the cut so clean, until his powerful heart pumped out the blood of the Imperial Guard like a shower of flowers.

"Damn it!" Peturabo BC's words of shock and anger finally reached everyone's ears. "He thinks the Imperial Guard might be a 'padded' force, and after studying the text, he believes Cherubel is actually—"

Who is "he"? This thought flashed through Diocletian's mind in a flash, only half of it.

The white doves had already rushed over like arrows released from a bow, and Peturabo BC's weapons had all opened fire. The overwhelming surge of energy rushed towards the white sphere of light that Cherubel had transformed into and the small black shadow of the white doves between them.

Diocletian's eyes widened in fury, the shadow of his comrades' deaths and his lord's injuries during the War of the Nets ten thousand years ago instantly gripping his heart.

"My lord!" he roared, lunging towards the white dove, wanting to use himself as a shield to protect his king.

A buzzing sound.

Ripples of spatial vibration.

Then the room seemed to darken for a moment, and a towering black shadow swept past.

The lights then returned to normal.

"what happened?"

Lamizain sat behind his desk, blinking.

Perturabo BC's face was grim, the energy particles from his weapon's muzzle still lingering; Diocletian, clutching a white dove, tumbled to the side, seemingly unharmed except for missing a hand; Eisenhorn slid to the base of the wall, his blood staining half of it like a blooming scarlet flower; Magna's shield, activated from the bridge throne, had appeared in the room; and Zaun stood bewildered, blinking in disbelief.

Cherubel lost his form as a ball of light and returned to the body of the demon host. The chains clattered as the physical cage fell to the ground on the other side of the desk, and his body slammed heavily in front of Ramizan, scattering documents and data boards all over the floor.

"I...I don't know, sir, but I think I just saw it..."

Peturabo BC turned his stern gaze to Zan'o.

"What did you see?" Ramizan spoke first. "I didn't even see it clearly... That ball of light that rushed over was Cherubel, but what was that dark shadow?"

The boy swallowed hard.

“A giant… a very tall, shimmering giant.” Just like I had seen before, the boy muttered to himself, “It suddenly appeared out of there, and suddenly the whole room was filled with it, and then Cherubel fell down and it disappeared.”

He pointed to the wall.

The people in the room looked up and saw the same wall in the office, painted in an elegant Schönbrunn yellow, where some decorations were protected by force field niches.

The faded oil paintings, anatomical drawings of human bodies from various angles, and manuscripts in incomprehensible languages ​​were all splattered with Eisenhorn's blood, but none of them landed on the surface of the objects—the flow of time within the static force field was infinitely close to stopping, so the blood droplets were now just "suspended" on the surface of the invisible range of the force field, eternally falling towards their original landing point in eternity.

The object the boy was pointing to was rather unusual: it was a feather that had originally been protected in a static field, but now its pure white surface was stained with the scarlet of the judge's blood.

The kinetic energy from Eisenhorn's impact with the wall seemed to momentarily deflect the stasis field generator on its base, causing the feather to fall from the wall into the pool of blood, drinking in the psionic blood of the Inquisitor. Now, a faint golden light was rapidly dissipating from its surface, suggesting that whatever it had just summoned had already vanished.

“This feather is…?” Ramizan walked over, bent down to pick it up, and examined it in his hand. “But I don’t remember putting this feather in when I was setting up my office…”

“It’s one of my collections,” Peturabo BC said solemnly. “It was originally an unused beacon, a summoning token, or rather, a contract item, but now…”

The demon border guard stopped speaking and narrowed his eyes: You can't say it was wasted; in fact, the timing of the summoned being was just right.

Otherwise, the impact of Peturabo's weapon, which he had just fired so fiercely, with Cherubel's collision would likely have turned the entire cabin into a scorching hell, like the core of a star.

"But such coincidences are truly strange to me."

The pigeon struggled to climb out of Diocletian's arms and spoke what Peturabo BC had been thinking.

"It just so happens to be a summoning beacon, it just so happens to have fallen out due to the impact, it just so happens to have landed in a pool of blood and been activated by the blood of a psionicist, and it just so happens to have been summoned at the critical moment... uh... just so happens to have intercepted this... uh... what are the chances of that?"

Lamizain looked at the pigeon strangely. "You couldn't even see what was summoned?"

"Ahem, that..."

Clearly, someone didn't quite believe the pigeon's reasoning, but thankfully Perturabo BC spoke up, "I didn't see it clearly either. You couldn't see it clearly even with my Primarch's Eye, could you?"

"I thought he at least had some sense of observation..."

“It’s not a matter of eyesight,” Peturabo BC said. “It’s normal that we can’t see him because the thing that appeared cut away a portion of that space in that instant. And it’s precisely because he’s so powerful that he was able to compress Cherubel back into this body in an instant.”

"Oh. Well, this powerful being seems quite friendly; it left immediately after solving our most pressing problem."

"That is the meaning of the covenant made on the summoning beacon."

"This is too much of a coincidence...but..."

Ramizan approached the seemingly unconscious Cherubel, "His form and attack power just now..." He glanced at Diocletian, who, as expected, would be the one to be sacrificed at the crucial moment, and whose face was pale.

“I knew something this powerful couldn’t possibly be a demon. Otherwise, how could a demon that even Diocletian couldn’t defeat be so easily controlled by mortals? Eisenhorn has no idea what he was actually looking for. Although I only skimmed through his biography (Perturabo BC and the Dove both seemed hesitant to speak), I think he and his opponents are wrong to believe that something that can be banished and bound by rune contracts must be a demon…”

Mr. Ramizan Carlosini confidently made his deduction: "Based on the key clue of the Necronomicon, I believe that the Necronomicon is actually a means used by an ancient lost necromantic dynasty to control the fragments of the Star God as slaves... and Cherubel is actually a fragment of the Star God!"

"..."

"..."

"Regardless of whether it was originally or not."

"Hey! What are you saying! I think this reasoning makes a lot of sense!"

Peturabo BC continued in his concluding remarks, "I think it is now, Magna, can you hear me?"

A positive response came through the bridge communications.

"Immediately adjust the surrounding confinement field to a state suitable for suppressing the Star God fragments. In addition, I need a hyperdimensional cube cage, the sooner the better."

(End of this chapter)