By the time Benedict's forces had moved a full five kilometres away from the Blackstone Spire, the 250-metre tower had shrunk into a thin, tiny shape in their view, and the Battle of Cadia entered its third phase.
The green light atop the Blackstone Spire grew ever brighter, its colour ever richer. Simply looking at that green-black radiance could leave soldiers dazed, numb, and vomiting. Benedict did not dare imagine how terrible it would be to wait beneath the tower itself.
At last, the green light at the tower's peak completely transformed into black light and shot straight into the sky. The Eye of Terror, pushed farther away by these spires, began to expand, as though they had been dragged back toward it.
At the same time, boundless darkness began to blanket the sky, a sight darker than the dead silence of space. Benedict had once seen desolate regions of the cosmos from aboard warships, vast expanses of darkness containing only one or two specks of light smaller than sesame seeds. Those lights came from lonely stars tens of thousands of light-years away.
At that moment, the sky did not even have those sesame-sized specks of light. Pure blackness spread inch by inch, unstoppable. Many believed it was a secret weapon activated by the Black Legion during its invasion. Countless regiments standing upon ground still touched by sunlight fired into the darkness, innumerable laser beams and shells plunging into land whose outlines could no longer be seen.
Benedict joined that war against the darkness as well. At the time, he was still commanding a Leman Russ command tank equipped with a Vanquisher Cannon.
Shell loaded, laser calibrated, shell fired. Having completed the sequence that allowed the machine spirit to perform at its fullest, Benedict fixed his gaze through the viewer