The spearhead struck The Deceiver's body. With Alpharius's arm moving up and down, a massive wound had already been torn open.
The effect of temporal stasis ended. Aurora panted heavily, feeling pain throughout his entire body.
At the same time, The Deceiver's body split apart along the wound, and the image he had been desperately maintaining with his fingers began to collapse.
But fortunately, for calculating beings like them, there was no such thing as failure. Even if Plan A failed, there were Plans B and C to follow. At most, it would merely delay the time needed to achieve their goal.
"I never should have admitted you and your legion into the cult," The Deceiver said meaningfully. Frustration and the sense that everything remained under his control spilled forth, winding around Aurora.
Faced with The Deceiver's ambiguous words, Aurora replied with something entirely unrelated. "Tzeentch asked me to send you his regards."
The Deceiver smiled. In the final moment before he dissipated, he reassembled the shattered image before the Void Dragon. However, the fortress displayed within it was no longer the one from before.
The Mountain Array was both an enormous starship and the Imperial Fists' mobile fortress-monastery. Its builder could no longer be traced, but its very existence was powerful proof of just how glorious human civilization had been during the Golden Age.
Its triangular cross-section, thousands of kilometers long, was covered in weapons and sensor domes. Vast golden wings, shaped like directional vanes, were set into its hull and swept backward. Every angle of the void was covered by immensely thick torpedo tubes and relic-like lance batteries. No Imperial battleship... not even an entire Imperial Navy fleet could project as much long-range firepower as one side of the Mountain Array.
Countless battle honors and scars bore witness