bookpower Chapter 600 600: Grand Finale
Chapter 600 600: Grand Finale
This was a jackpot in every sense of the word. Rhodes was completely satisfied, and he brought everyone back into the Warhammer universe.
There was no reason to linger any longer. Staying in this world would bring them no rewards at all!
With a flash of light, Rhodes, his subordinates, and Isha vanished without a trace.
"Let's hope that in another universe, we'll be strong enough to beat them there!"
Rhodes and the others disappeared into a golden radiance, and the core of the Earth returned to its deathly silence.
...
Back in the Warhammer universe, the Astronomican burned with only a faint but steady light. The instant Rhodes and his companions appeared, they sensed the all-too-familiar aura of Chaos.
"Hahaha! We're finally back."
"Rhodes, you've returned!"
"Father, you've come home," Rhodes's two sons and Elena said, nodding to him.
"That's right. Keep fighting the space Necromancers. It won't be long before we end this war for good," Rhodes said.
This time, he was determined to exterminate every last enemy. During their journey through the arcane cosmos, his power had reached its peak.
System notifications rang in Rhodes's mind, and countless lights exploded before his eyes. A gigantic beast wreathed in blue flames—Magaserpent—slowly revealed itself. Its colossal body coiled upon itself, and the fire spilling from its jaws warped even the fabric of space.
Immediately afterward, the phantom of the legendary ultimate lifeform, Reiblood, appeared, emanating an overwhelming aura of cosmic domination.
There was also the legendary Hyper Zetton, radiating mysterious light, its crystal-like horn glittering with restorative power.
Hyper Zetton (Complete Form)
Alias: Strongest Creature in the Universe, Beast of Annihilation
Power Level: Legendary-Class (Comparable to Ultraman Saga)
Feats: Effortlessly overwhelmed the combined fusion form of Ultraman Zero, Dyna, and Cosmos. Fought a fierce battle with Ultraman Saga, but was ultimately defeated by Saga's finisher.
Dark Zagi (Noa's Dark Side)
Title: Dark Destroyer, Evil Mirror of Noa
Power Level: Legendary-Class (Comparable to Ultraman Noa)
Lucifer (Perfect Lifeform)
Title: Ultimate Undying Organism
Strength Tier: Rule-Level (Indestructible)
Power Level: Super-Legendary (On Par with Ultraman Reiga)
Lugset (Cosmic White Blood Cell)
Title: Incarnation of the Void
Power Level: Legendary-Class (Comparable to the Legendary New-Generation Ultras)
Rhodes first paid two hundred million System Coins to summon a new Tartarus. Then, as per their prior agreement, he used the power of time to send this newly summoned Tartarus back into a past universe.
Thus, a perfectly closed time loop was secured in the timeline.
There was nothing more to say about that. After completely annihilating the remaining Chaos Gods and Tyranids, Rhodes immediately agreed.
Rhodes could also prepare a suitable star system for Tartarus and hand it over to him, allowing Tartarus to build his own kingdom and rebuild the Absolute Race.
"Congratulations, great lord. The ultimate moment is upon us. You will finally rule at the very summit of this universe," said Tartarus, who appeared at Rhodes's side from the present timeline. Dropping to one knee, he offered Rhodes the ultimate tribute.
"No need to be reserved, Tartarus. You can now receive enhancements from the System Shop too. This time, I'll boost you straight to the very highest level—a perfect enhancement," Rhodes said.
Perfect Enhancement—this was the ultimate lottery option that could only be unlocked by upgrading the System Shop to its maximum level. Rhodes fell into brief contemplation.
He chose to bestow Perfect Ultimate Upgrades upon Tartarus, Lucifer, and the Void Monsters Greeza and Iyev—these three monsters in total.
By pushing all their attributes to the absolute maximum, he saved himself hundreds of millions of gold coins.
With the ultimate enhancement, Tartarus's power now matched—or even surpassed—that of a Chaos God. What's more, he could freely manipulate the powers of space-time and travel at will between parallel universes.
As for the remaining two Void Monsters, Greeza and the notorious Iyev, after their perfect upgrades, their might surpassed even that of the Chaos Gods.
The empowered Greeza could maintain its ultimate form while also possessing the Void's Zero Attribute.
These three monsters alone were enough to sweep away the Chaos Gods, so of course Rhodes spent his hard-earned gold to upgrade his monsters, targeting these three bug-tier monsters above all.
"Haha, the gains this time are incredible!" Rhodes laughed confidently as he gazed upon his newly summoned, overwhelmingly powerful monsters.
Starting with the Four Chaos, it was finally time to bring everything to an end.
"Great Master, we have long awaited this moment. Now, begin the ultimate plan," said Tartarus.
Rhodes nodded. This time, he intended to eradicate the Necromancers, the Tyranids, and even the Warp in one go.
The newly summoned monsters—Serpent Mog and the Cosmic White Cell—together with their subordinates, Belial and Angel Zog, set out to exterminate the Tyranids.
Rhodes himself entered the Immaterium with his three perfectly enhanced monsters to confront the remaining two Chaos Gods.
With Nurgle dead and former Slaanesh's Aisha now his wife, only the Blood God Khorne and Tzeentch remained.
The first battle was against the Terran Zerg swarm.
Magaserpent's colossal body, blazing with blue demonic fire so intense it warped space itself, was the first to slam into the insect cloud formed from countless bio-ships.
Right behind it came Lugset, the Cosmic White Blood Cell, finally revealing its true might as a Collector.
Wrapped in the vivid, prismatic energy of the Requiem of Genesis, it weaved through the swarm. When it locked onto massive Zerg motherships and bio-titans, the Requiem of Genesis fired pinpoint beams with unerring accuracy. Targets struck weren't merely destroyed.
Rather, as though erased by a cosmic eraser, the twisted biomass, nodules, and the hive mind's will within them were thoroughly purified from the physical level down to the warp level, reverting back to the most basic state of matter in the universe.
Under this rule-level erasure, the swarm's regenerative and adaptive abilities were completely nullified.
Belial piloted his Giga Battlenizer, hurling devastating blasts of dark energy with every strike, tearing apart the vanguard of the charging Zerg.
The Dark Cosmic Emperor Empera descended like a black sun, unleashing his beam that engulfed entire starfields. Its darkness and destructive might slammed into the swarm's ship shields and organic armor.
The Primordial Destruction Angel Zog floated at the center of the battlefield. Its gigantic, angelic silhouette radiated a suffocating aura of despair. Waves of Primordial Destruction rippled outward; any Zerg they touched, regardless of size, had their life force and structure collapse in an instant, turning them into dust in space.
Five top-tier monsters/aliens from the Ultraman universe, each embodying a different form of ultimate destruction, combined their assault into what resembled a galactic-scale biological catastrophe.
The Tyranid swarm's vaunted numerical superiority, adaptability, and biotechnology crumbled under this hierarchy of absolute power and rule-level blows.
The final Great Devourer too was reduced to ashes by Rhodes's superhuman subordinates. He died without ever understanding why he'd lost or how terrifying Rhodes's true power really was—for he could no longer even glimpse the edges of it.
The death of the Great Devourer brought Rhodes a massive haul of System Coins and System Crystals, which he immediately used to summon a new legion of monsters.
In the Ultraman Universe, a variety of bug-tier monsters were summoned by Rhodes.
Using war to fuel more war was the fastest method.
The Tyranid genocide yielded tens of billions of gold coins, which Rhodes spent without hesitation to further strengthen his monsters, perfecting them in every respect.
Moreover, a large number of Rhodes's spies were also participating in this war. The Space Necromancers' spy AsanethAyu, and the Dark Barbarue who had been planted earlier, both began to play their roles in earnest. Nearly one-third of the Space Necromancers rebelled, catching the Silent King completely off guard.
The Silent King was horrified to discover that his own people had been resurrected in an even more perfect state than before, and that they no longer possessed metallic bodies at all.
The resurrected people raised their battle cries, vowing to reclaim the glory of the brave, annihilate the evil space undead, and cleanse the distortions wrought by the C'tans.
Thanks to Rhodes's earlier arrangements, most of the Necromancer dynasties had already fallen (or, more precisely, had fundamental orders implanted in them to swear fealty to Rhodes).
All Mefilas had to do was activate those instructions and apply psychic interference at the critical moment.
Meanwhile, Yapool unleashed a vast army of Super Beasts onto the battlefield, recklessly rending open space and deploying his Super Beast horde.
Gigantic Super Beast Saurus emerged from dimensional rifts, its enormous claws and tentacles tearing through the toughest tomb complexes of the undead with ease.
The King Joe legions, armed with overwhelming firepower and energy shields, clashed violently with the Necromancers' Destroyers and Exterminator mechs in a storm of steel and living metal.
Heavily modified monsters like Verokron and Vakishim acted as mobile artillery platforms, saturating the battlefield in searing beams and missile barrages.
Their supposedly immortal bodies of living metal crumbled again and again under the monsters' ferocious physical blows and energy bombardments. More fatal still was the betrayal from within, which drove the undead legions' command systems to the brink of collapse.
The once-invincible empire of cosmic necromancy now fell back in chaos like a line of toppling dominos, battered from both within and without. Their demise became the final act in which eerie higher-dimensional powers shattered advanced technology.
The last Silent King was slain by the mighty Hyper Zetton, finally meeting his end.
Rhodes had nearly wiped out the undead races of the universe, and once more he pocketed a vast fortune in gold.
After he defeated these two great enemies in quick succession, the Warp sensed that something was gravely wrong. The last two Chaos Gods, without hesitation, attempted to weave a barrier to stop Rhodes and his monster army.
But a space-time barrier of that caliber was nothing more than paper to Rhodes. Without a moment's pause, he led his monster legions straight through.
A colossal swing of Khorne's blood-soaked axe was effortlessly deflected by Tartarus and sent careening off into a distant temporal disturbance.
Tartarus rewound the timing of Khorne's strike by an instant, suppressing its force before it could explode. Khorne's roaring fury could not even shake the space-time barrier Tartarus controlled. For the first time, the Blood God experienced his power being utterly restrained—and even toyed with—which drove him into a rage.
Meanwhile, the fully enhanced Void Monster Greeza confronted the master of schemes, Tzeentch.
Greeza's Third Form—the Manifestation of Nothingness—was a paradox of Chaos and Order incarnate. Tzeentch's maddeningly complex plots and reality-twisting sorceries, which could unhinge lesser gods, vanished the instant they touched the twisted void field that surrounded Greeza.
Greeza was not resisting or destroying magic. Its very existence symbolized nothingness. No matter how powerful Tzeentch's sorcery was, it simply could not act upon that which does not exist.
What truly terrified Tzeentch was Greeza's bizarre Zero Attribute.
The demon legions under him, endowed with shapeshifting powers and ever-changing attacks, hurled endless assaults, but not only were they ineffective against Greeza—they seemed to feed it, making it even more unpredictable and more powerful.
Tzeentch tried to ensnare Greeza with bottomless knowledge and logical traps, but Greeza's very being denied logic itself. It was the ultimate enigma—unfathomable, unaffected, yet able to absorb every influence and convert it into its own strength. As the master of all change, Tzeentch felt unprecedented frustration... and a faint twinge of fear. In the face of Greeza's nothing, all his schemes and spells were reduced to a joke.
The Void Force was the strongest and strangest enemy he had ever faced—for he was completely unable to attack it at all.
Lucifer, the immortal and undying perfect lifeform (now fully enhanced), became the most despair-inducing presence on the battlefield.
It floated calmly at the center of the conflict, withstanding every attack the remnants of Khorne and Tzeentch (and their Greater Daemons) could bring to bear.
Khorne's bloody axe bit into Lucifer, but each wound sealed over in an instant. At the same time, from the corresponding part of Lucifer's body, a blade of pure energy grew forth, equal or superior in power to the Blood God's axe.
Tzeentch's Daemonic Flames engulfed it, but when the flames died, Lucifer's body burned with a purer, hotter magical fire that lashed back at him.
Every attack hurled at Lucifer—physical, energetic, psychic, magical, or cursed—sank into it like stones into the sea, unable to inflict any meaningful damage. Instead, Lucifer copied, absorbed, and evolved each assault, reflecting it in an even more powerful form.
It was like a flawless mirror, reflecting all violence back on its source—sometimes doubled.
Aisha stood at Rhodes's side, watching with interest as the distorted order of the Warp was being overturned in this final battle. There was no need for her to personally strike down her former comrades; Rhodes's subordinates were more than enough. The strength of these three monsters had completely broken all reasonable bounds.
Tartarus ruled over space and time, Greeza had become the void itself, and Lucifer reflected everything.
Before the absolute might of these three rule-level monsters, Khorne's rage and Tzeentch's cunning seemed utterly powerless.
In the core region of the Warp, under the joint influence of Tartarus's golden light, Greeza's void fluctuations, and Lucifer's ever-evolving radiance, the eternally swirling chaotic energies began to destabilize. Even vast regions of ordered void began to appear.
The chaotic dusk had come.
Khorne's realm was collapsing, and Tzeentch's labyrinth was disintegrating.
Before the greatest monster army Rhodes had ever assembled, the age of the Chaos Gods was inevitably drawing to its end.
The Tyranid hive mind's master brain was completely annihilated by Lugset's Genesis Requiem. Leaderless, the remnants drifted as cosmic flotsam and were easily wiped out by Serpent Mog, Belial, Empera, and Zog. The devouring swarm that had threatened the galaxy for uncounted ages was finally declared extinct.
The core of the Necromancer dynasties was sealed away by Yapool using his extradimensional prisons, while their remaining forces were crushed by the Mefilas aliens' psychic domination and the overwhelming physical destruction wreaked by their monster legions. These ancient tomb worlds were either fully destroyed or brought under Rhodes's control, becoming his new resource hubs and fortresses.
The silent empire of the dead fell truly silent.
Yet, just when it seemed peace had finally returned, an unprecedented abyssal darkness suddenly erupted from the direction of humanity's core domain—the Holy Terra itself!
The Golden Throne, where the Emperor's corpse had rested and where the warp rifts had been suppressed for millennia, had now become the very source of the darkness.
"Rhodes, your time has come. As promised, you must destroy the Dark Emperor and save this universe," the Emperor spoke his final words.
"Leave it to me, Your Majesty."
The agony, despair, and titanic energy that had bound the Emperor for thousands of years—drawn from countless supernatural beings' souls and used to maintain humanity's existence—finally gave birth to the ultimate evil.
A being composed solely of warp dark energy compressed to the extreme slowly rose from the Emperor's ruined body.
Its form was hazy and warped, like a mass of countless despairing faces, or simply the pure embodiment of darkness itself. The terror it radiated was so immense that even Tartarus's heart quaked. This was the immeasurably corrupted, twisted power that the Emperor had accumulated over millennia to suppress the rift, the ultimate crystallization of all negative emotions and despair throughout the human Imperium—the Dark Emperor had been born!
His birth was silent and unexpected. Like a black hole dropped into a still lake, he devoured all nearby light in an instant. Even starlight seemed to flicker and waver before him.
The entirety of Holy Terra, and even the surrounding star systems, were plunged in a heartbeat into a darkness and stillness more terrifying than any warp storm.
What awaited the Imperium of Man, which had just managed to catch its breath, was a threat more terrible than the Four Chaos Gods, the Terran Swarm, and the cosmic Necromancers combined—the ultimate antithesis of humanity's savior, the greatest despair born of the Emperor's own sacrifice.
If no one could defeat the Dark Emperor, the entire universe would be reduced to ash, transformed into ultimate darkness, with nothing left but the dark.
"Darkness... will swallow all..." A cold, hollow thought, as if composed from the laments of tens of billions of souls, swept across the galaxy.
His very existence was the ultimate negation of all order, all life, and all hope—the absolute end of the universe.
"Tartarus!" Rhodes's eyes were more solemn than ever before. He grasped the true nature of this power. It was the ultimate backlash, something even the Emperor's lingering will could no longer restrain.
"As you wish, my Great Lord!"
In an instant, Tartarus's golden figure manifested before the Golden Throne.
"Space-Time Barrier: Absolute Defense!"
A blinding golden light rose like the strongest of dams, separating the Emperor's corpse from the raging torrent of darkness.
With meticulous control of space-time, Tartarus carved out a perfectly still Time Amber within the storm of dark energy.
With the care of a master craftsman, Tartarus took that Soul Amber, which contained humanity's last hope, and respectfully handed it to Rhodes.
Rhodes received it with great care, sensing a faint yet powerful pulse within. "Excellent work, Tartarus. Now it's time to deal with this so-called Dark King." He fixed his gaze on the Dark King, who had now completely separated from the Emperor's body and taken full form. His eyes burned with cold, unflinching battle intent.
The Dark Emperor seemed enraged by Tartarus's actions. His hollow gaze finally turned upon Rhodes and his monster army. He spoke no words; only a pure will to destroy burned within him. Simply by raising one hand, he unleashed a torrent of dark energy, painted in indescribable colors and capable of devouring even light itself. Like a destructive singularity at the dawn of the universe, it roared toward Rhodes and his allies. Wherever the torrent passed, space groaned under the pressure, and matter quietly collapsed into streams of elementary particles.
"Greeza!" Rhodes shouted.
The void monster Greeza, whose body resembled a rift in distorted space, appeared instantly in front of him. Its eerily glowing organs pulsed, emitting strange syllables. When the torrent of dark energy—powerful enough to erase entire star systems—touched the void field surrounding Greeza, a sight unfolded that chilled even the Dark Emperor.
There was no explosion. No impact.
The tremendous flood of darkness poured into an unfathomable abyss; the instant it touched Greeza's body, it vanished without a trace. Not only that—having absorbed this power, Greeza's form twisted into something even more bizarre and unpredictable.
The fluctuations of nothingness it emitted deepened, beginning to corrode even the dark domain the Dark Emperor projected! The Dark Emperor's own attack became nourishment for Greeza.
"Lucifer!" Rhodes gave his next command.
The perfect lifeform Lucifer drifted silently forward. Perhaps sensing Greeza's transformation, the Dark Emperor turned his empty gaze upon Lucifer. This time, instead of a simple energy torrent, he launched countless spears condensed from pure darkness. Each one carried a myriad of negative laws—curses, despair, soul-destruction. A single spear had the power to plunge all life in an entire star system into eternal madness.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Countless dark spears punched through Lucifer's body—but the wounds closed in an instant.
These spears of light were no holy lances, but perfect copies and evolved forms of the dark spears themselves! As though alive, they turned their points, reflecting back at the Dark Emperor, faster and stronger than before!
The Dark Emperor swept his arms, annihilating countless spears of light, yet many still struck his dark body, erupting in blinding clashes of radiance and shadow.
For the first time, faint ripples appeared across his form of pure darkness.
His attack had not only failed—it had rebounded twice over! Lucifer's very existence was a nightmare to all who dared attack it.
"Tartarus, bind his movements!" Rhodes issued the final order.
"Understood! Space-Time Cage: All Things Forbidden!" Tartarus raised both hands high, and golden energy surged out like chains of law, instantaneously wrapping around the Dark Emperor's titanic body.
This was no mere spatial lockdown this time. Tartarus fixed and solidified the very timeline in which the Dark Emperor existed! Under the suppression of space-time law, the dark energies swirling around the Dark Emperor slowed, like insects encased in amber.
He tried to marshal the immense spiritual energies the Emperor had left behind, but Tartarus had already disrupted the flow of time around him; the energy was scattered by the warped temporal currents before it could gather.
The moment Tartarus stabilized space-time, Rhodes moved. He did not charge alone; instead, he fused the ultimate powers he had just gained from the three rule-level monsters into one.
Clenching his left hand, he summoned Greeza's twisted "core of nothingness" into his palm, shaping it into a void shield that could swallow all. In his right hand, he compressed Iyev's authority over reflection and evolution into an ever-shifting Evolution Blade that glowed with the light of perfect replication. Around his body swirled Tartarus's radiant space-time power; with each step, he seemed to stride across the very knots of time and space themselves.
Rhodes, like an incarnation of the universe's three ultimate rules, broke through the Dark Emperor's hastily raised layers of shadowy barriers in an instant and rushed straight up to him, where he hung ensnared by time-space chains, gnawed by Greeza's void, and harried by Lucifer's reflected assaults.
"In the Emperor's name—for humanity, and for the order of this universe—disperse, Dark Emperor!" Rhodes's voice rang out on the level of the soul. The Evolution Blade in his hand exploded with unprecedented light, a brilliance that carried countlessfold copies and amplifications of the Dark Emperor's own power, now turned back upon him. Within that radiance were also woven Greeza's concept of nothingness, and the existence anchor locked in place by Tartarus!
The Evolution Blade, bearing the will to end everything, drove straight into the Dark Emperor's core—the very source of darkness condensed from the Emperor's millennia of pain and despair.
"No—!!!"
Under the combined strangulation of the three rule-level monsters' powers, the newly born Dark Emperor—symbol of the ultimate backlash against the Emperor's sacrifice—burst like a pierced bubble. His vast body of darkness shattered from the core outward, crumbling inch by inch, annihilating, and finally returning to complete and utter nothingness.
The galaxy-shaking terror of his presence ebbed away like the receding tide, vanishing without a trace.
Above Holy Terra, the suffocating ultimate darkness that had shrouded everything faded. The Astronomican's light once again bathed the world below. Though the planet had suffered catastrophe, that light now seemed purer and more stable than ever before.
Rhodes gazed down upon the core regions of the Imperium—first thrown into horrifying panic by the Dark Emperor's advent, and then left in dazed grief and confusion by his destruction.
Tartarus, Greeza, and Lucifer stood quietly behind him as guardians.
In the distance, the Mefilas aliens, the Yapool, Hyper Zetton, Magaserpent, Lugset, Belial, Empera, Zog... all his mighty subordinates stood in solemn ranks.
Aisha came to Rhodes's side as well, her eyes complicated. There was a touch of emotion for her former foe, the Emperor, and his fate—but far more, there was admiration and submission directed at Rhodes.
Rhodes raised high in his hand that wisp of soul-light which symbolized humanity's last hope and indomitable will. It was as tiny as the faintest star, yet, illuminated by the Astronomican, it shone with a stubborn resilience that could not be ignored.
"The darkness is gone. Let order be established!" Rhodes's voice, carried by Tartarus's power, echoed clearly through every corner of the galaxy and into the depths of every survivor's heart.
"The Emperor's sacrifice will not be forgotten. His soul will know peace and rebirth! The Imperium of Man will pass into history—but human civilization will endure and flourish under a new order!"
Rhodes swept his gaze across his monster army, then over the scarred yet reborn galaxy.
"From this day forth, I am the ultimate order of this universe! My name is Rhodes—King of Kings, Lord of Beasts, and the eternal cornerstone of this realm!"
At that moment, the light of the Astronomican seemed to resonate with the soul-light in Rhodes's hand, erupting into a magnificent pillar of radiance that pierced the entire cosmos! That light swept away the last traces of gloom, heralding the dawn of an age of order guarded by absolute power.
"This universe," Rhodes's voice was calm yet laden with supreme authority as it rang in the mind of every loyal follower, "from this day forward, belongs to Order.
I, Rhodes, am King of Kings—and the new Lord of Humanity."
The Astronomican's brilliance seemed to reach its zenith, as if crowning the new master of the universe. A new era of order, ruled by absolute might, began with the proclamation of the Monster King.
After two hundred years traversing the Warhammer universe, Rhodes, with his mighty System, had utterly defeated every enemy.
[END]