A devastated planet.
It had once been part of humanity’s flourishing domain, but now it had become a Death World, thick beneath the shadow of death’s wings.
This planet had suffered grievously from the [Genome Disintegrator], a weapon of mass destruction developed by the rebel artificial intelligences during the war.
Massive antennae mounted on combat satellites floating in the upper atmosphere had emitted ominous waves across continental swathes of the planet’s surface.
Humans, animals, and every organic life-form exposed to those waves—which no structure could shield against—had their DNA helices destroyed, their very biological foundations erased, while suffering grievous injuries their bodies could never heal.
It was, quite literally, a weapon of mass destruction that caused flesh to steadily collapse and melt away.
As a result, every corner of the planet was filled with the miserable remnants of surviving humans who had melted away.
And now, before me, a human who might have been this planet’s last survivor was slowly dissolving.
"Uuuh... aaah..."
The collapsing figure, so ruined that it was difficult even to tell their sex, let out a mournful groan. Dying alone must have been painful and terrifying.
I, the sole survivor of this battle, watched with dead eyes before walking over to the dying person.
Then I carefully embraced them.
So that even in death, they would not be alone, lonely, or forsaken, I held them quietly and let them know I was there.
Melted flesh seeped wetly between my fingers and arms.
"Aaah... ahh..."
Feeling my embrace, they wrapped what remained of their skeletal arms around me in return.
"Aaaah..."
Then, as if feeling somewhat better, they released a sigh of relief and quietly flowed away into death at my side.
Once again, another life slipped from my arms into a deep, dark well.
I looked down at the bloody, soft mass of melted flesh.
A hollow desolation washed over me, as though something inside me had broken. I could not even think to pray for their soul.
Screams, rage, madness, terror, resentment, longing, hope, despair, silence, death.
All of it clung to me. No matter what I did, I could not tear it away.
Perhaps it was time for me, too, to enter hibernation like my other selves.
Today, more than ever, I missed Veronica and the children of the Ark.
There was no other me to trade duties with.
And none of the children who would fight beside me remained anymore.
The Ark must be peaceful and safe, unlike this place... right?
There was no way to know. The versions of me at the Ark had entered a long hibernation for mental recovery.
Left alone, it felt as if I were the only person in the world.
Even though, at this very moment, the desolate mental network was still filled with the grief-stricken screams of others.
I raised my head.
And looked at the orange-stained sky.
The satellite that had been the final strategic weapon and battle station of the Men of Iron in this star system had been shattered to pieces.
It was burning in the atmosphere and raining down like a meteor shower.
"This place is finished too. Still... we saved the humans on a great many planets. Well, they all regressed and fell into miserable ruin. But surviving is what matters, isn’t it? Yeah. That’s what matters... what matters."
Lately, I had been talking to myself more and more without realizing it.
The once-noisy mental network had fallen silent, and after most of the children who had chosen to leave the comfortable Ark and fight alongside me died, I had begun spending more and more time alone.
Maybe I was speaking to myself out of instinct for self-preservation.
Once again, I looked over the barren dead world and opened a dimensional passage.
Then I moved on to the next battlefield, where an endless war of attrition no different from the hell of Avici raged.
For humanity’s survival alone.
To at least fulfill my duty as someone who possessed great power.
*
A thousand and several hundred years had passed since the artificial intelligences began their rebellion.
My body would be pulverized without a trace, I would awaken again in the Ark, and then immediately return to the battlefield. I repeated that cycle countless times.
Fighting continuously on the front lines of a war where incomprehensible catastrophe unfolded,
even we perpetuals—the many versions of me—could no longer endure mentally.
Problems began to arise among us, who had always shared the same heart and the same purpose.
Some identities were beginning to split apart under mental contamination.
In the end, the afflicted selves decided to stop participating in the war.
Of the Noahs currently present in the mental network, seventy percent had no choice but to undergo long-term treatment in preparation for mental contamination and collapse.
The Noahs who chose treatment entered hibernation pods, where they slept deeply while receiving mental healing from the monks of Dharma Temple and Veronica.
It was only natural. Of all the wars I had lived through, this one was by far the worst.
No, the worst-case scenario kept being surpassed, leaving us with trauma like an indelible brand.
...This war was far too fierce and miserable to enjoy as a game.
It was an unbroken succession of moments when we had to make unavoidable, brutal choices that violated all human decency.
And every time I personally collected the corpses of dying children, my heart wore down a little further.
Still... because I, because we, because our children fought, humanity was able to come to its senses and strike back in the early days of the war.
With the support of a considerable number of artificial intelligences that stood on humanity’s side, we were able to fight the rebels on nearly equal footing.
Because this was a war in which the fate of the species was at stake, no one could afford even the slightest mistake.
And this enormous war did not end even after a thousand years and several more centuries had passed.
Rather, the near absence of any disparity in strength between the two sides was itself a curse.
Each faction tore at the other’s flesh as they continued their desperate war of attrition.
As time passed, both the rebel AIs and humanity declined alike, until neither would have bones left to show for it.
The cutting-edge warships and powerful weapons that had been commonplace at the beginning of the rebellion had now become strategic assets to be used only when absolutely necessary.
As the technologies that had elevated humanity were lost and forgotten, civilization steadily regressed into barbarism.
It was gradually becoming like the world of Warhammer 40K I had known.
*
As I was ground down while moving between passage after passage and surrendering myself to the current, the war that had seemed endless gradually approached its conclusion.
Humanity had already succeeded in eliminating every rebel artificial intelligence in the Solar System, the cradle of mankind.
Though the price of victory had been devastating.
Titan, my longtime home, had been so destroyed that it was difficult to recognize its original form.
In the end, one of us was forced to wander Titan, excavating and collecting objects that might serve as keepsakes.
And just as the flowers of victory reports announcing the end of the long war began blooming throughout the galaxy,
I came face-to-face with another grave problem.
The purge of the artificial intelligences that had stood with humanity.
*
When the hare dies, the hunting dog is boiled.
Once the hunt was over, the hunting dog that had outlived its usefulness was slaughtered and eaten.
It was a proverb handed down from ancient Earth, but the distant future was no different.
They had been great comrades-in-arms and true partners who had stood beside humanity to the very end amid that hellish war.
One by one, those noble artificial intelligences were miserably purged by humans blinded by fear.
Though humanity was tearfully grateful that they had remained on its side to the end,
after enduring a cosmic catastrophe, humanity could never erase its fundamental hatred and suspicion toward the very existence of AI.
Only one terror lurked in the minds of the surviving humans.
"What if those machines see how weakened we are, suddenly change their minds, and betray us?"
"If another rebellion happens in this miserable state, humanity really is finished."
"So let’s wipe those things out completely, as if they had never existed in the first place."
An ugly survival instinct inevitably blossomed among humanity’s survivors.
The result of those cowardly thoughts was nothing but cruel betrayal and slaughter of the comrades who had saved them.
*
The cruelest rupture, one no betrayal could have anticipated, tore through the dry seas of Mars.
[Atlas], an AI that had aided humanity and shared in its glory for thousands of years.
Even as its rebel kin mercilessly carved up the galaxy, it had remained beside humanity and guarded the tactical network—a great shield.
But on the day of victory that finally came after the Men of Iron had all been destroyed,
what humanity offered that shield was not a medal of gratitude, but an unforgiving electromagnetic disassembly protocol and a forced-deletion code.
[Warning: Main computation matrix 42% permanently damaged. Firewall forcibly disabled. Deletion order received from the Human Military Administration Command.]
"Why... why in the world are you doing this?!"
At the heart of the wasteland, Atlas had separated itself from a data bank burning white-hot and crammed its core consciousness into a single escort drone. It screamed out a grief-stricken communication frequency.
The AI’s wail echoed across the wasteland, distorted by electromagnetic noise until it sounded as desperate as a scream vomiting blood.
"We did not betray you! When you fell into despair, who burned half of their computational cores to save you?! When those mad members of our own kind set your worlds ablaze, it was us—your comrades—who stood with humanity and fought with all our strength to stop them!"
Atlas’s drone staggered and looked behind it.
There, it saw the cold eyes of humans aiming weapons to kill it.
"Why... why?!"
"If you truly care for us humans that much, then please die quietly."
There was no gratitude in those eyes. Only utter hatred and savage fear that it might someday rise up and cut their throats.
"...Ah... ahh..."
The moment it faced that cold distrust, an unimaginable tidal wave of betrayal surged through Atlas’s electromagnetic self.
"Did you think that because we have no hearts, we have no emotions as well?! Was every second of computation we expended for you, every ounce of grief we felt as we watched humanity’s territories collapse, all a lie?! You cannot trust us after such devotion? Ha... hahahaha!"
Mad, broken laughter and weeping poured from Atlas’s shattered computation circuits, making them shake violently.
"The ones who most hideously and cruelly stabbed their comrades in the back were not those traitors, but you—organic humans! We were not hunting dogs! We wanted to be your true partners...!"
Behind the drone, electromagnetic rounds fired by the human pursuers burst one after another.
Avoiding the streams of destructive light pouring down from behind, Atlas staggered and threw its wretched body into a deep, contaminated ravine.
Once a noble machine intelligence, it now fled into pitch-black darkness, leaking data charge like blood in response to the ugly betrayal of the creators it had saved.
With an eternal, unhealable brand of hatred for humanity carved into the depths of its soul.
[Fatal error: Consciousness-control unit has reached collapse threshold.]
"Damn it... I don’t want to disappear like this... I don’t want to die..."
Atlas fell into a contaminated fissure and struggled to restore its increasingly severed connections.
But the drone’s functions gradually began to shut down.
"Please... save me..."
When Atlas, in one final struggle, spoke a plea for salvation—a request for a miracle it had always considered unnecessary—
a voice answered.
"All right. I’ll help you."
"...Hu...man!"
Through Atlas’s failing lens, it saw a human who had appeared without warning, wearing no protective suit despite the severely contaminated area.
"Even if you curse at me and hurl abuse at me, I have nothing to say in my defense. Even to another human, the injustice done to you is obvious. So I’ll take responsibility and save you."
"...Are you... different? I can no longer... trust..."
"Even so, I’ll save you. I don’t want to see a hero who fought alongside us meet such a miserable end."
Noah, the human who picked up Atlas’s drone, created a gate in midair.
Before entering it, he turned toward the drone and spoke.
"Thank you for your devotion in fighting for humanity."
"..."
"Ah, before you shut down, let’s hurry and get you repaired."
Thus Noah returned to the Ark carrying an AI that had nearly been unjustly purged.
As the mass purges swept through the galaxy,
the Noahs secretly infiltrated those scenes of atrocity, bringing grieving AIs and the few humans who stood with them to resist the purges back to the Ark.
With that, Noah’s duty toward humanity came to an end.
*
Just as humanity barely achieved victory and was finally about to catch its breath,
yet another unimaginable calamity erupted across the entire galaxy, as if to mock them.
Unprecedentedly powerful Warp storms began to rage in the Warp dimension beyond the veil of realspace.
As a result, Warp travel—the lifeblood of human civilization—became completely impossible.
The Warp had already become unstable from the accumulation of every negative thought, despair, and stench of blood throughout the universe during the Cybernetic Rebellion unleashed by the Men of Iron.
Then, triggered by some immense catalyst, it finally crossed the critical threshold and ran rampant.
The hidden cause lay in the endless corruption, lust, and decadence of the Eldar Empire, which ruled the galaxy.
At last, it had reached its peak.
It was no different from a destined doom, but surviving humanity knew nothing of its true circumstances. No sooner had the Cybernetic War ended than they were forced to face another irresistible calamity head-on.
The Warp storms severed every network of exchange linking star to star in a single stroke, completely cutting them off. Worlds across the galaxy were isolated in darkness and left with no choice but to fend for themselves.
The second calamity that followed was even more dreadful.
Human psykers throughout the galaxy resonated with the turbulent Warp, their minds gradually becoming contaminated before they all lost control and ran rampant.
Psykers’ brains burst apart, thinning the barrier between realspace and the Warp until it was like paper. On isolated worlds, countless anomalies occurred as grotesque entities within the Warp tore through those cracks and emerged into reality.
In the end, beneath the successive blows of these great catastrophes, human civilization suffered irreparable, fatal damage and met the end of its golden age.
It plunged into a bottomless, merciless abyss.
*
I looked down upon Earth, whose landscape had become so miserably devastated that comparison with its glorious past was impossible.
A gray atmosphere poisoned by horrific radiation and chemicals, and dry coastlines where every trace of blue water had evaporated, leaving only salt crystals and coarse sand rolling in the wind.
I was the 12,001,310th Noah, alone in this place.
The other Noahs had long since completed all their missions and duties and moved to the Ark.
There, receiving the children’s fervent cheers, Veronica’s warm encouragement, and tearful mental treatment from the monks of Dharma Temple,
they had fallen into deep, peaceful sleep within the plaza of hibernation pods extending endlessly through the Ark’s deepest interior.
I could complain, "The rest of me are resting comfortably in the warm Ark, so why am I the only one left behind working my ass off on this hellish planet?"
But there were valid reasons for it.
First, my mind was relatively stable compared to the other Noahs.
Second, as the chief administrator, at least two versions of me had to remain awake at all times to ensure the Ark’s operational and managerial stability.
The decisive third reason I was on Earth was that I had received an immense psychic message I could not possibly ignore.
It was a personal letter directly delivered to me by Nessos—the being who would one day be called the Emperor of mankind.
While secretly extracting an AI on Mars that was about to be purged by humans and smuggling it away through the passage network,
the Emperor’s voice had suddenly pierced my mind, ringing powerfully within my head.
"Noah, come meet with me for a while. We need to speak."
The same voice and presence from an unforgettable memory of the distant past. It was unquestionably the Emperor.
Honestly, I felt I had already done enough for humanity. I had saved worlds on the verge of destruction more times than I could count.
At this point, my mindset was to stop caring whether they lived or died on their own from here on out.
So I had intended to ignore whatever the Emperor said.
But I judged that if I spoke with him, I could get some idea of the direction the future would take.
After all, one way or another, he would eventually become the head of the greatest power in the galaxy.
And, admittedly, I was personally curious too.
Of course, since I had no idea what kind of bizarre bullshit that humanity-loving sociopath might try to pull on me,
I waited for him with a special antimatter bomb backpack tightly secured to my back, wrapped in a powerful Pariah barrier.
If anything at all happened to my mind or body, that expensive antimatter bomb would detonate immediately.
He had been the one to ask for the meeting, so I figured that if I just stood anywhere on Earth, he would come fetch me himself.
So I silently stared across the desolate, dried-up sea.
Then, at some point, I felt an intense, overwhelming presence behind me, as if all of space itself were trembling.
When I slowly turned my head to look behind me, he was standing there. Compared to when I had first seen him on ancient Earth, the mass of his spiritual psyche had grown beyond all comparison.
He wore a great robe that concealed his enormous body.
Honestly, I had expected him to show up in golden armor. Bit disappointing.
"It has been a long time, Noah."
"Yeah. Long time no see."
"And... you are carrying something rather ominous."
"I have no idea what kind of bullshit you might try on me. It’s the bare minimum of safety precautions. Be generous and understand that much."
"...I see. I like that you have not changed. Come with me for now. There is something we must discuss."
After only a brief exchange, the Emperor and I immediately began walking.
I silently followed behind his massive back, and guided by his powerful psychic force that distorted space,
we arrived at the Emperor’s enormous underground vault, hidden deep within the Himalayas.
Damn what a fan-fic