Painting while surrounded by Daemons was no easy task.
At least, that was what the servant thought.
Picasso disagreed. He paid no attention at all to the Daemons crawling on the ground around him in fear. All he thought was that as long as they did not rush up and claw him to death before he finished painting, it would be fine.
"More heretics have been dropped in!"
"Alert Star's sky is burning! It's burning!"
Between hurried strokes, Picasso occasionally looked up at the sky.
At the farthest edge of his vision, tens of thousands of Drop Pods were being deployed from countless Strike Cruisers beyond the Antarctic orbit. Some belonged to their side, and some to the enemy.
The Drop Pods' afterburn ignited the sky.
This was a widely recorded description in historical accounts, used to capture the sight of Space Marines at war in a single sentence.
However, such records were almost entirely found in historical materials from more than ten thousand years ago.
Back then, the Ecclesiarchy had yet to be established. The Imperial Truth guided people not to fear supernatural mysteries, telling them there was no need for fear. Even those terrifying and grotesque evil creatures were merely organisms from an unknown alternate dimension, not Daemons.
Back then, the Emperor could still walk among mankind, and all the Gene-fathers fought side by side.
The Astartes were still organized into Legions rather than Chapters. Hundreds of thousands of Astartes would be thrown into battle after battle during the Great Crusade, liberating human worlds enslaved by xenos one after another.
Within Terra's Imperial Palace hung a painting depicting the full panorama of human warfare. After the Battle of Lion's Gate on Terra ended, the Renegades accepted an apology from Imperial representatives before that painting.
That painting was the