Datch used Rick's portal gun to open portal after portal, continuously summoning original Astartes and sending them onto the battlefield.
They wore heavy power armour, and the crests of their parent Chapters were engraved on their shoulder plates.
Those parent Chapters included the Imperial Fists, Ultramarines, Blood Angels, Salamanders, White Scars, Raven Guard, Space Wolves and others.
There were also successor Chapters such as the Dark Angels, the Carcharodons and the Lamenters.
Their armour, a fusion of Necron and Eldar technology refined by the C'tan, gave off a cold metallic sheen and was wrapped in energy shields.
Their bolters were levelled, powerful rounds waiting in the chambers.
Each time their combat boots struck the asphalt, they made a steady, dull thud.
The moment they entered the battlefield, they began a merciless slaughter of the Chitauri.
The alien soldiers who had left the New York police and the National Guard helpless
were like paper toys before the Space Marines.
Every time a bolter fired, an entire rank of Chitauri infantry was blasted to pieces.
A single swing of a power sword or chainsword cut flanking aliens cleanly in two.
Above all, the Custodes following Valdor, clad in golden armour and swinging halberds wreathed in bright lightning, charged the enemy.
They moved like refined, efficient killing machines, so fast they left after-images.
Every slash struck precisely at the weakest points of Chitauri armour: the joints.
Chitauri shields and armour were useless against disruption fields and were torn apart with ease.
In the blink of an eye, a single Custodian killed more than a dozen Chitauri infantry.
When he pulled his halberd from the last enemy's chest, his breathing was perfectly steady, as if he had only finished a light warm-up.
Captain America, Black Widow, the Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye, and the other original Avengers had been locked in a desperate battle,
yet now they were surprised to find themselves surrounded by excellent, capable teammates.
Steve Rogers blocked a volley of plasma fire from Chitauri infantry with his vibranium shield.
Just as he gritted his teeth and braced for the next charge, he saw a squad of Ultramarines in blue power armour racing past on both sides.
Crossfire from their bolters blasted the charging Chitauri shock troops to pieces.
Steve straightened in surprise and looked up at the heavily armoured warriors. Before he could open his mouth, they had already passed him and charged the other Chitauri.
Steve noticed that these allies were carrying absurdly large-calibre weapons.
Any weapons specialist would reach the same conclusion at a glance:
No single soldier should be able to carry such a weapon, let alone fire it continuously while standing.
Yet they did. Their physical capabilities had to be terrifying beyond imagination!
The Chitauri were a race of considerable size and technological strength, yet they were utterly powerless before this allied force.
Their ground troops were annihilated, and their air units were shot down one after another by concentrated fire.
From the burning wreckage, countless columns of black smoke rose along Manhattan's skyscrapers.
"What on earth is happening?" On the top floor of Stark Tower, Loki stared at the scene in disbelief.
He stood beside the device that held the Cosmic Cube, which was still shooting a blue beam of energy into the wormhole.
In his hand was the Mind Scepter he had used to control Hawkeye and dozens of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.
This was spiralling out of his control. In fact, it was out of anyone's control.
"This shouldn't be happening!!"
After the Rainbow Bridge incident in Asgard, Loki had fallen into the cosmic abyss, where he had unexpectedly met the cosmic tyrant Thanos.
He had made a deal with him, received the Mind Scepter, and been sent to Earth.
Then he had used the Tesseract to open a wormhole to the Chitauri homeworld,
to bring the Chitauri army to Earth and conquer humanity's homeworld completely.
Yet now the Chitauri were being driven back by a mysterious army that had appeared out of nowhere.
If this failed, Thanos would string him up and whip him with salt water!
Datch had not only summoned the forces of the Imperium of Man; he had also unleashed the C'tan.
These true gods, who manipulate physical laws, adapted to the new environment in an instant.
The gravitational constant and the masses of elementary particles in the Marvel Universe differed only slightly from those in the Warhammer Universe.
For C'tan who could freely manipulate and even subtly rewrite the laws of reality, that deviation was trivial.
The C'tan displayed astonishing combat power and easily destroyed the Chitauri fleet with energy beams.
The Void Dragon raised a hand and released a ray of void energy that crossed the sky.
It cut the entire Chitauri main fleet, which had only just emerged from the wormhole, cleanly in two.
The severed wrecks exploded in mid-air at the same moment, forming dozens of dazzling fireballs.
For a short time, it was as if several scorching miniature suns had burst above New York.
The Chitauri were repelled by the Imperial forces.
Their vanguard lost more than half its strength in the Imperial fleet's first counter-attack.
Their follow-up units came under intense attack from the C'tan and the Imperial forces the moment they emerged from the wormhole.
After defeat upon defeat, the Chitauri commanders finally made the only correct tactical decision of the battle: retreat.
Before leaving, the Chitauri tried to close the portal Loki had opened, but the arriving Imperial forces stopped them and seized complete control of it.
Loki, too, was surrounded by the Imperium during the fighting and mercilessly beaten by the C'tan. His divine body kept him from being crushed, but he was a pitiful sight, covered in wounds from head to toe.
"Enough! I am a god!"
Loki gripped the Mind Scepter tightly in both hands, disbelief, anger, and humiliation on his refined face.
The instant he finished speaking, Zarhulash the Dominator seized him by the ankle.
The Asgardian god of mischief dangled upside down in the C'tan's hand like a rag doll.
Then he was slammed violently into the ground.
Crash…
Again and again, until the impacts left a dent in the floor that perfectly matched the outline of Loki's body, with spider-web cracks spreading from its edges.
Zarhulash slammed him more than a dozen times, made sure he could no longer resist, and finally tossed him aside.
"Sorry, but I am also a god."
Loki lay in the hole, utterly dazed.
The god of mischief's fate, of course, was to become a prisoner. He had to answer for the invasion of Earth; punishment was unavoidable.
And so the Battle of New York ended in a way no one had expected.
The Imperium won an overwhelming victory. The Chitauri main fleet was annihilated, the wormhole was entirely in the hands of the Imperial fleet, and Loki was captured alive.
The Cosmic Cube and the Mind Scepter also fell into Imperial hands and were sealed away.
The Avengers, who were supposed to be the heroes of the Battle of New York, were demoted from protagonists to supporting roles.
They fought bravely, but in the end it was the Imperium of Man that drove out the Chitauri.
The portal remained open after the battle.
On the Nameless One's orders, Imperial Guard and Astartes units headed through it toward the Chitauri homeworld.
They meant to wipe out the alien race that had conquered countless planets for Thanos,
just as the Imperium of Man had done to every xenos civilisation in the galaxy that refused to submit.
Immediately after the Chitauri defeat, the Imperium of Man seized every communications network on Earth and declared dominion over this alien cosmos.
Before the representatives of every nation, an Imperial envoy read out the decree of submission, drafted by Malcador himself and signed by the Emperor.
This Earth would pay a tithe to the Imperium of Man and, in return, receive its protection and technological support.
In response, the President of the United States and many senior officials immediately declared that they would never bow to this threat and would fight to the last drop of blood.
Within a very short time, the government issued an emergency statement full of passionate words about "free will," "democratic institutions," and "human dignity," calling on the whole population to fight fearlessly to the last drop of blood and never submit.
However, the Imperial fleet that had entered Earth's orbit through the portals then trained the bow turrets of its ships on the locations of those politicians.
They changed their tune at once, declaring that loyalty to the Imperium of Man was the duty of every human citizen.
They had the president personally lead a delegation to deliver a formal instrument of submission to the Imperial envoy as quickly as possible.
Watching their own citizens shed their last drop of blood was acceptable; becoming casualties of war themselves was absolutely not.
The Avengers could not accept this.
Captain America in particular was enraged to see country after country sign treaties of submission and raise the double-headed eagle of the Imperium.
In his eyes, the Imperium's system was no different from a dictatorship:
a supreme Emperor and a group of Primarchs holding absolute power with no oversight at all,
and a rigid hierarchy that folded every human and xenos in the galaxy into a single system.
It contradicted everything he had sworn to protect with his life.
Yet the power of the Imperium of Man far exceeded anything he could imagine.
Whether in physical technology or fantastical magic, the Imperium had gone far beyond anything they could conceive.
Moreover, after the Imperium of Man completed its reforms, the lives of its subjects had changed dramatically.
On every planet under Imperial rule, basic medical care and life expectancy were guaranteed by Imperial technology and the blessings of the gods.
Earth's inhabitants quickly noticed their standard of living rising fast.
The tech-priests of the Mechanicus built Earth's first medical outposts in an extremely short time.
Diseases that Earth's doctors had long considered incurable were, to Imperial medicine, basic conditions conquered long ago.
Under the guidance of the tech-priests, basic medical care and life expectancy improved markedly.
Proven strategies for public health, basic education and resource allocation were transplanted directly onto Earth.
Even the homeless who had once wandered the streets of Manhattan were moved by the Imperial Social Welfare Bureau into newly built public housing.
With limited combat power and public opinion behind the Imperium of Man, the Avengers had no ground to stand on.
Any rebellion against the Imperium was doomed to fail.
It would not be a failure caused by oppression, but by being left behind by the times.
The ordinary citizens they had sworn to protect were now queuing at Imperial medical stations for free check-ups and using Imperial-issued data-slates to take advanced introductory courses in public libraries.
In the end, even Stark firmly sided with the Imperium of Man.
There was nothing to be done. They had given us far too much.
What he desperately wanted to learn was all that advanced technology, and the magical runes that could be analysed with scientific methods.
The Imperium of Man had not only taken control of Earth; it was also building faster-than-light tunnels connecting every region of the galaxy.
The structure of the Marvel Universe was similar to that of the Warhammer Universe: a physical real world where physical laws held, and a non-physical world where magic existed, and physical laws were ignored.
Marvel's non-material world was divided into many dimensions, such as the inner dimensions closely tied to Earth.
These were home to the gods Earth's people worshipped, and were ruled by sorcerers, dragons, and other magical creatures.
Beyond them lay outer dimensions completely free of physical law, and fractured regions filled with the negative emotions of intelligent beings and all manner of terrible dark illusions.
In Imperial terminology, it was raw, untamed Warp.
In such a realm, a network could be built with only slight modifications.
Once the renovation plan was finalised, the gods of the Pantheon moved into the Marvel Universe.
They carried out a preliminary sorting of authority in the non-material realms, folding the primitive, chaotic dimensional energies into the Pantheon framework to provide a stable energy foundation for the network.
Besides the Webway, the Imperium persuaded Pom-Pom the Trainmaster to build a Star Rail line in the Marvel Universe.
In this way, the Imperium of Man rapidly built a faster-than-light navigation network in the Marvel Universe, letting humanity travel quickly and safely to every corner of the cosmos.
While the Imperium of Man was busily transforming the Marvel Universe, the Time Bureau, which existed in the void dimension outside time, faced an unprecedented crisis.
The sacred timeline that the guardians of time had corrected again and again and meticulously maintained for centuries
had begun to collapse after Datch invaded the Marvel Universe and summoned Imperial forces to defeat the Chitauri.
Countless timeline branches that had once been severed sprouted from the trunk one after another, far faster than the Time Bureau had predicted.
There were so many, and they multiplied so quickly, that they were far beyond the agents' capacity.
The Time Bureau's leadership dispatched every available agent to prune the branch points.
Yet every time a branch was pruned, a new one grew in its place.
In the Time Bureau's central control hall, the giant screen that had once stably displayed the whole of the sacred timeline
was now filled with countless red branch points, each one a new, uncontrollable branch of the timeline.
The staff responsible for monitoring the sacred timeline were crushed by despair at the sight.
Even Kang the Conqueror, He Who Remains at the end of time, sensed the crisis and immediately issued orders.
"We must eliminate the cause of the sacred timeline's collapse, that mysterious outsider, no matter what."
...