Amalaga huddled amid the ruins, repairing and evolving his body until it was as useful as before. Then he wandered through the wreckage, searching for any usable scrap to build a signal transmitter.
He arrived at the headquarters of the Tu-Xiaowake Institute, established on T'au. He had never expected to have a chance to come here, so he had not left behind any research materials related to degraded specimens at this laboratory headquarters.
There were giant mech-bees he had used to swindle research funding, along with some other worthless junk.
Beneath layers upon layers of collapsed buildings, he built a high-powered signal generator and broadcast an emergency distress signal across the nearby star systems.
"Maybe I should have kept a few ships..." Amalaga sighed. Now, he could only sit here and wait for the T'au frontier fleet to come investigate.
A small fleet came from a nearby sept world to investigate T'au's loss of contact. As they crossed into this empty star system, they were shocked by everything before them.
The core of the Imperium, the pride of the T'au, the birthplace of all glory had now become a twisted, silent, shattered grave. Half the planet had been stretched and warped like taffy, twisted into a braided mass, while the other half was shrouded in thick black storm clouds that hid the surface from the naked eye.
"Oh... my... this... Greater Good..." The accompanying Ethereal was utterly lost. In that instant, his entire worldview collapsed.
The members of the other castes were equally panicked. Tears streamed down their faces as they had no idea how to face this brutal future.
"Stop crying! We should go down to the planet. According to the distress signal, perhaps the Ethereals survived?"
A Fire Caste commander slapped the table several times, drawing everyone's attention.