"This is a highly illustrative example of idealism."
"My lord?"
Constantine looked toward the Emperor's face, but standing one step behind, all he could see was black hair bound by a golden laurel crown. Then he saw every battle taking place across the Attilan Star Fortress battlefield. He saw Inhuman civilians clutching their families and weeping beneath fire raining from the sky. He saw mortal soldiers in black Void Combat Suits gritting their teeth, quietly cursing as they replaced the magazines of their Laser Rifles. He saw the Emperor place a hand on the shoulders of Inhuman civilians, soothing their terror. He saw the Emperor pick up a dropped laser battery and press it back into a mortal soldier's hand.
The Praetorian Commander was already accustomed to this behavior from the Emperor. Sometimes, verbal communication was simply an inefficient means of communication.
It was a state akin to sleepwalking. The flow of external time differed from that of the Material Universe.
The scenes Constantine saw extended downward. He saw black flames burning across the decks, and as they followed the Emperor's footsteps, the malicious entities from the Ether Plane silently turned to vapor and vanished. He saw a priestess dressed in blood-red robes, her beautiful face inscribed with mysterious symbols, holding aloft a miniature spark plug from the Star Fortress's secondary power system—actually a Nuclear Fuel rod—and delivering a speech to a group of impoverished lower-deck residents with severe Genetic Mutations.
The Praetorian Commander listened expressionlessly as the priestess Phylira finished her declaration to those Mutants. He had no particular thoughts about it, because these cultists were merely secondary targets on the extermination list—but he still noticed something unusual. On the dim lower decks, aside from the Nuclear Fuel rod in the priestess's hand, other sourceless lights illuminated this procession