In the dark, boundless universe.
There should have been only eternal darkness and silence.
Yet above Is III hung a strange color—not a normal gaseous celestial cloud, nor stardust.
It was as though a scarlet wound had suddenly opened in the fabric of reality.
Tens of thousands of glowing blood vessels writhed along the edges of the rift, staining the entire sector a dark pink like a biological chamber.
"This is... a Chaos rift. Activate the Gellar Field, now!" A terrified roar shrieked over the communication channel. Then, the Gellar Field readings on the Blood Raven barge's instruments suddenly surged into the red critical zone.
Some viscous, rust-scented air seeped into the sealed compartment. Strange Warp energy drifted through the ship, while gloomy whispers came through the communication channel, prompting Morians to immediately cut off all communications.
"Chaos."
"Space has been torn apart."
"We need to hurry."
Far away, the T'au witnessed an even more shocking and despairing sight. The outlines of the three frigates ahead were collapsing like melting wax figures. Semi-transparent tentacles extended from warped folds in space, each one covered in the writing of every extinct language in the Milky Way.
"The people aboard..."
Were probably all dead.
They did not even know how the enemy had attacked them to cause such a catastrophe.
It had taken only an instant.
The rift stretched over a hundred light-years long.
Its enormous body could devour and contain dozens of star systems.
On the scale of the physical universe, it was one hundredth the width of the Eye of Terror.
It sounded small, but to the Tau Empire, it had swallowed nearly a quarter of their sectors.
A quarter of their sectors.
It completely encompassed four core worlds.
T'au lay at its edge.
And the First Dome World was within