The Eldar race had collapsed into ashes in an instant with the shocking birth of Slaanesh.
One of the Craftworlds that had barely survived without being dragged into Slaanesh's maw was Ulthwé.
Within that bleak reality, engulfed in despairing darkness, the Eldar of that place gathered their Farseers and conducted a massive psychic divination ritual, seeking to learn whether even the faintest hope remained for them.
Yet amid the waves of a future black as pitch, what they saw was not hope.
It was a vision too horrific to behold.
They saw a Mon-keigh child grow to adulthood and one day bring a terrible sea of blood to the entire galaxy.
They saw him butcher innumerable Eldar without mercy, ascending as the lord of the Brass Throne and a Greater Daemon of Khorne.
At the sight of savage Mon-keigh and countless Eldar kin slaughtered by that grotesque Greater Daemon, their severed heads piled into immense mountains while red blood flowed in rivers, the Farseers were seized by profound shock and terror.
There, they made their decision.
They would sever this seed of ill omen, destined to bring tragedy upon their people in the distant future, before it could sprout.
Thus the Eldar of Ulthwé assembled an elite assassination team, opened a Webway portal, and secretly infiltrated the planet Nuceria.
But Nuceria, which they had thought a planet of primitive barbarians, was armed with technological sophistication and detection networks far beyond their imagination.
The assassination team was caught by hypersensitive sensors from the moment they entered and immediately became embroiled in a fierce pursuit by Nucerian warriors.
Still, bound together by the heroic mission of preventing the genocide of their species, the Eldar assassins barely succeeded in shaking their pursuers after a savage engagement.
At last, they reached the heart of the rugged mountain range that prophecy had indicated as the place where the seed of ill omen would fall.
Only silence hung over the area. Not even the presence of a human—indeed, of any living thing—could be sensed.
"There."
When the Farseer at the front pointed quietly, they saw a single enormous gestation pod sitting alone.
It was clearly a product of Mon-keigh technology, yet it contained such advanced craftsmanship that even they could not dare guess how it had been made.
But unlike the image they had seen in prophecy, the gestation pod had been kept immaculate, with ornaments resembling traces of Mon-keigh culture hung around it.
The unexpected development left the Eldar, who had risked blood and their lives to reach this place, bewildered.
"What is this? In the prophecy, it was clearly... It seems something has gone wrong."
"We have lost the target. What do you intend to do now? The Mon-keigh pursuit force is drawing closer."
"Even so, I can sense remnants within that pod of the seed of ill omen we saw in prophecy. We will collect them and pursue it another time."
"It could be a trap."
"Even so, we must risk it."
At their leader's command, the Eldar warriors approached carefully, as though they would not permit themselves the slightest lapse in vigilance, their shuriken catapults trained in every direction.
The psykers behind them also readied lethal psychic sorcery that would grind the very souls of anything that emerged.
One Eldar warrior cautiously stepped forward and forced open the entrance to the gestation pod with the sharp blade of his witchblade.
Clack!
As expected, the opened pod was empty.
Yet as he approached to collect even the lingering traces of the powerful presence within it—
Wooooo—!
The entire dark mountain range blazed with light, and Nuceria's elite forces, who had been lying in wait behind a perfect veil of concealment, raised their weapons as one and aimed them at the Eldar assassination team.
Energy barriers already enclosed the area on every side. They were rats in a trap.
Realizing they had fallen into a perfect ambush, the psykers frantically tried to manifest their psychic sorcery.
But their psychic power vanished futilely, like sand slipping through their fingers.
Before the panicked Eldar stepped an Eclipse agent clad in black, ink-dark armor, lightly swinging a staff that throbbed with strange vibrations.
At that instant, the Eldar psykers could not even scream beneath the devastating Pariah backlash that seemed to tear their souls apart. They staggered and collapsed, weeping blood and coughing it up.
Only the Eldar warriors, accustomed to pain and suffering, remained standing with bloodied bodies, barely able to hold their weapons.
Then, breaking the silence, Veronica appeared—along with the child-shaped 'seed of ill omen' cradled warmly in her arms.
The prophecy itself had not been wrong, but reality had twisted far too greatly. The bewildered Eldar warriors desperately swung their weapons, struggling to break through the encirclement and kill the young Angron.
But it was nothing more than futile delusion.
With the power of Eclipse alone, a potent Pariah, more than half the Eldar died vomiting blood without being able to put up any resistance.
The remaining warriors were likewise slaughtered in moments before the overwhelming firepower of Nuceria's elite army.
As he looked at the Eldar strewn about in heaps of corpses, Angron—who had the body of a child barely a year old—turned his head away as if he could not bear the sight and buried his face deep in Veronica's embrace.
"...Tch. I took the child out for a little mountain walk, and why are there so many damned pests trying to ruin it?"
As I clicked my tongue in irritation, one of Nuceria's tribunes hurriedly landed on-site aboard a transport gunship with heavily armored soldiers.
The instant he descended from the craft, he dropped to his knees before me, lowered his head, and broke into a cold sweat.
"My apologies, Noah! The Eldar broke through the perimeter and disturbed your precious rest!"
I let out a deep sigh and asked quietly.
"Forget that. How bad are the losses? Any dead or wounded on our side?"
"No dead! However... three suffered severe injuries in the forward engagement, and twelve were wounded."
Hearing that, I let out another hollow sigh.
Then I turned toward Veronica, who was soothing Angron by gently patting his back.
"Veronica, including this one, how many Eldar raiding parties have come to Nuceria so far?"
"...This makes exactly thirty-one. And this is already the sixth time we failed to intercept them early at the orbital perimeter and allowed them to reach the surface."
At Veronica's calm report, I pressed a hand to my throbbing forehead.
"Haah... I wanted to let Angron grow up naturally on the planet that was meant to become his home. But these insane knife-ears keep pouring out from every direction like cockroaches. I can't relax for a moment."
As my lament continued, numerous Nucerian administrators and senior officers who had arrived after the tribune formed a procession of apologies, begging me not to leave.
First, so that the child would not be frightened, I sent Veronica and Angron aboard a secure private transport.
Then I dismissed the flustered officials, who were still prostrate before me, and put an end to their flood of apologies.
The matter had been settled, but the pleasant family outing that had been full of laughter only moments ago had been completely ruined.
Clicking my tongue bitterly, unable to understand where things had gone so badly wrong, I quietly recalled my first meeting with this little Angron three months earlier—the moment I adopted him as my foster son.
*
At the time when another 'me' on Terra was taking the last priest and his church into the Ark, I had become the administrator of Nuceria—the only territory proclaimed as part of the Ark within the heart of the galaxy rather than beyond it—and ruled the planet together with Veronica.
We had liberated the planet with our own hands. Naturally, we had no choice but to take responsibility for it to the end.
Freeing it and then failing to handle the aftermath properly would have been worse than doing nothing, so we decided to govern it properly while we were at it.
Nuceria, once filled with blood-soaked gladiatorial arenas, changed rapidly.
We carefully selected capable warriors and people of spirit to establish the planet's new foundations. With the constant influx of supplies and modest technological support from the Ark, Nuceria was reborn at an astonishing speed.
Children who had been forced to sharpen blades and learn to wield swords until the day before now slung bags over their shoulders and headed to school.
Slave gladiators who had been condemned to death began living as true warriors defending Nuceria, learning strict discipline and combat.
But such a dramatic process did not come without side effects.
Seeing the Ark's humanity, who displayed a civilization on an entirely different level, and Veronica and me, who ruled them, the Nucerians even began trying to worship us as gods.
Throughout long history, all those who had called themselves gods had met miserable ends.
No matter how mighty they had been, I wished to firmly avoid that grand title, one that could not escape ruin.
But no matter how many times I explained, "I'm not a god. I'm only a human with somewhat unusual abilities," it was obvious that it would not mean a damned thing to people steeped in vicious feudal thinking and blind faith.
In the end, with support from Dharma Temple, I introduced myself through the concept of Buddha: a human being who had attained enlightenment.
The being who cared for them was not a god to be blindly worshipped, but a great superhuman and enlightened pioneer—in other words, a teacher in everyone's heart.
At first, the Nucerians tilted their heads in confusion, asking, "Isn't that the same thing? What's the difference?"
Before long, however, they came to understand the difference for themselves.
The being they had believed to be a god stood at the same level as them rather than in a lofty temple, shared street food with them, met their eyes, and fully showed them the human emotions of laughing simply, becoming angry, rejoicing, and grieving.
Only then did they realize that I was a human, with the same roots as themselves.
I was merely a leader, superhuman, and teacher who possessed the most overwhelming strength and wisdom humanity could attain.
Oddly enough, after I began to be called Teacher, the treatment and respect I received became far more sincere and ardent than when they had forcibly elevated me as a god.
In particular, after learning of humanity's most desperate history, the Cybernetic Rebellion, Nucerian warriors came running to me, fell to their knees, and begged me to teach them how to fight and accept them as disciples.
Civil officials, administrators, and craftsmen also lined up to become disciples, saying they wished to receive my teachings.
Eventually, they even attempted to enthrone me as Nuceria's eternal ruler.
But while I gladly accepted the position of teacher, I refused to become this planet's true ruler.
"The place of the true master who will lead this planet already has an owner. We must all wait quietly for him."
So saying, I continued developing Nuceria.
In truth, Nuceria had retained a considerable number of STC fragments—relics of the Dark Age of Technology—though its nobles had used them in primitive ways.
We restored them one by one, added the Ark's infrastructure, and developed Nuceria's own independent technological strength.
By the time I thought it had become a world reasonably fit to live in, even compared to the Ark—
Along with a subtle distortion in the Warp, a powerful dimensional phenomenon was detected in which coordinates bent at the center of Nuceria's enormous mountain range.
Sensing that the time had finally come, I immediately headed to the site.
There, sitting alone, was an enormous gestation pod that had fallen through realspace and the Warp.
Because we discovered it quickly and acted at once, there was thankfully not a trace of the Eldar I had been wary of.
Yet when I approached to inspect it, the gestation pod's door was already open. Thick nutrient fluid pooled inside, but the most important thing—the baby—was nowhere to be seen.
Following the surrounding tracks and footprints deep into the mountains, we found an unbelievable sight.
A huge native beast that had not yet been exterminated and had wandered deep through the range lay sprawled there, its limbs brutally torn apart by Angron, who still had the body of a newborn.
And in the middle of the beast's corpse was the newborn Angron, sucking blood from his tiny finger as he blankly stared at us.
The Nucerian warriors who had followed me were overcome with shock and deep reverence at the extraordinary sight of a newborn tearing apart such a fearsome monster.
Drawn by the strange pull of the child's soul, the warriors forgot all caution and lowered their weapons of their own accord.
I slowly approached the child and gently held out my hand.
Angron stretched out his adorable little hand and firmly gripped my index finger.
Crunch!
I flinched at the unimaginable grip strength and searing pain that felt as though the bones in my finger would shatter at once.
But being accustomed to every kind of pain, I simply gave the child a gentle smile.
Angron stared blankly at my face for a moment.
Then his little face suddenly crumpled, and he burst into heart-rending sobs as though his chest were being torn apart.
As I panicked, unsure what to do, Veronica immediately realized something and rushed over to forcibly separate my hand from Angron's.
"Noah, have you forgotten?! Think of what you told me about this child!"
At Veronica's words, I realized that Angron possessed the ability to absorb another person's pain into his own body and take it away.
"Ah..."
Realizing my mistake, I looked at the child with a cold sweat, an exclamation escaping my lips.
A moment earlier, the child had instinctively taken fragments of the countless pains I had buried deep inside over the course of my life, using his ability as a Primarch.
With tears welling in his eyes, the child looked at me as though I were the most pitiful person in the world.
When I became so embarrassed that I awkwardly scratched my head, Veronica shot me a glare, looking ready to start lecturing me at once.
And so Angron officially became the adopted son of Veronica and me.
The people of Nuceria called him Angron, as in the original history—a name meaning 'Child of the Mountain.'
But unlike the tragic slave gladiator of the original story, they had clearly witnessed the majestic, awe-inspiring sight of him tearing a savage monster to death in the body of a newborn.
Thus they added a new epithet before his name, one meaning strength.
'Ferox Angron, the Strong Child of the Mountain.'
That was my extraordinary first meeting with Angron.
Once news spread that I had officially adopted Angron as my son, all of Nuceria was swept up in celebration.
Countless people reverently whispered Angron's name, firmly believing that this child would become the lord of Nuceria, whose seat I had left vacant all this time.
But just as everything was proceeding smoothly, whether through a malicious jest of Chaos or not, the Eldar began flooding into Nuceria like mad after seeing prophecies of a false future that had long since been twisted.
That was when my headaches began.
They came from every background and faction.
Craftworlds, Drukhari, Harlequins, even wandering knife-ears roaming the galaxy.
Knife-ears from every imaginable sect sprang up all over the planet, seeking Angron's head. I was beginning to grow thoroughly sick of them.
Fearing that young Angron and I, who had already become Nuceria's idols, might leave the planet because of the knife-ears, the frightened Nucerians trembled with anxiety and tried to hunt down the Eldar as early as possible.
Thanks to the tight security network built by the determined Nucerian army, numerous Eldar assassins were indeed butchered the moment they set foot on Nuceria's surface.
But though fallen, the Eldar still retained echoes of their former height. Somehow, they kept slipping through gaps in the encirclement to seek Angron's life.
Whenever they did, suffocating pursuits erupted, and the damage only grew.
Not long ago, an infiltrating Harlequin assassin even used a relic believed to hold the power of a god to twist time, breach every surveillance network, and penetrate deep inside.
The Harlequin reached Angron as he slept in his cradle, and things nearly became truly disastrous.
If Angron had been an ordinary child, his head would have been taken on the spot.
But that child was a Primarch whose supreme genes I had personally designed.
Driven by instinctive survival, Angron caught the dagger the Harlequin thrust at him with his bare hand and crushed it.
Then he tore off the assassin's arm and used it to rip the Harlequin's body apart in return.
Even as a newborn, a Primarch was still a Primarch.
I was relieved that the child was safe, but the thought crossed my mind that if such things continued, one day a true catastrophe might occur.
In the end, I made my decision.
Until Angron was fully grown and could perfectly protect himself, I would take him to the safety of the Ark and raise him there.
When I announced the news to the Nucerians, massive protests erupted throughout Nuceria in an instant.
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