The Emperor's Feast

Warlord Grak and his most elite guard, composed entirely of Nobz, had already pushed their way to the very front. His massive body was like a mountain of flesh, radiating oppressive strength.

He saw Alexander behind the glass.

That frail human in a black uniform, who looked as though he could be crushed with a single squeeze.

Yet he did not show the slightest trace of fear. There was even a hint of... a smile on his face?

Grak felt an unprecedented fury at being slighted. He raised his enormous power claw, capable of tearing apart a tank, and pointed it at Alexander.

"GROT!!" His roar, amplified through loudspeakers, pierced even the thick glass and echoed through the control room. "I see you! You got nowhere left to run! Come out! Kneel before me! Maybe I'll consider giving you a quick death!"

Alexander did not answer him.

He merely slowly raised his right hand.

Then, before Grak and before tens of thousands of Orks, he made a crystal-clear, deeply insulting gesture.

With his thumb, he lightly yet decisively drew a line across his throat.

A throat-slitting gesture.

Time seemed to freeze at that moment.

Grak's simple mind crashed for one-tenth of a second. He could not understand it. This grot, this prey cornered with nowhere to go, this thing he was about to crush into meat paste... was he provoking him? Was he mocking him?

A volcanic fury, enough to burn away every shred of his reason, swept through his entire body in an instant.

"WAAAGH!!!"

He let out the loudest, most furious roar of his life, cranked his power claw to maximum output, and smashed it viciously against the already overburdened bulletproof glass.

At that very moment, Alexander turned around and gave Colonel Valeus at the command console a bright, childishly pure smile.

He opened his mouth and softly said in a tone almost like a chant:

"Emperor, Your feast..."

He pressed the final detonator in his hand, which he had been gripping tightly all along, linked to every explosive charge in the Steel Temple.

"...has begun!"

There was no sound.

Nor was there any warning.

An indescribable, pure white light erupted from the deepest recesses of Granary No. 7.

It was brighter than the core of a star, purer than a miracle of heaven.

The instant it appeared, it devoured the retinas of every Ork who dared look directly at it, baking their eyeballs from within.

Then came the heat.

A devastating heat wave, enough to vaporize steel in an instant and melt stone into magma, spread madly outward from the blast center at the speed of light.

The tens of thousands of Orks packed inside Granary No. 7 and the surrounding passages did not even have time to scream before they were instantly carbonized, broken down, and finally reduced to the most basic particles in the universe. Their flesh, their bones, their crude armor and weapons all lost any meaning before that absolute temperature.

And this was only the beginning.

The air, instantly heated to tens of thousands of degrees, triggered the most horrifying chain reaction.

The millions of tons of high-energy grain dust stored in the Steel Temple's hundreds of enormous granaries ignited all at once.

—A dust explosion.

The most terrifying and destructive disaster of humanity's industrial age revealed its divine might in the dark age of Warhammer 40,000 in the most magnificent and horrifying way possible.

BOOOOOOM—!!!

If the earlier light and heat had been a silent pantomime, then now sound finally caught up with destruction.

It was a thunderous crash like something from a creation myth, impossible to measure by any known unit.

The entire planetary crust of Viridia Prime let out a pained groan beneath that colossal sound. The earth shook and the mountains trembled, as though divine punishment had descended.

A gigantic, dark-red fireball more than five kilometers across, made purely of flame and shock waves and constantly expanding, rose slowly from the ruins of the Steel Temple. Like a newborn sun, it greedily licked at the sky, burning an unimaginably vast hole through the thick cloud cover.

Around the fireball, white shockwave gusts visibly spread outward like ripples across water.

Wherever the shockwave passed, it obliterated everything in its path.

The immense Ork reserves and war machines stationed around the Steel Temple's perimeter were like toys casually swept aside by a giant. Huge armored vehicles were blown hundreds of meters into the air like sheets of paper, then broke apart midair. Grak's mobile command tower, proudly assembled from several mining trucks, was crushed into a twisted, burning ball of scrap the moment it touched the shockwave.

Hundreds of thousands of Orks seemed so tiny and helpless before this man-made apocalyptic catastrophe. Their bodies were torn apart by violent air currents, ignited by searing radiation, and riddled with flying stones and metal fragments.

Their "Waaagh!" roars, their fighting spirit, their pure faith in violence—all of it was utterly crushed before this absolute power, representing the universe's most fundamental physical laws, without leaving even the slightest trace.

On the plains dozens of kilometers from the Steel Temple, at the position of the Death Korps of Krieg's 17th Siege Regiment, everyone stopped in their tracks and stared blankly at the enormous mushroom cloud slowly rising over the distant horizon, vast enough to connect heaven and earth.

The world was silent.

That devastating boom would still take more than ten seconds to reach them.

Yet the light and heat that incinerated all things, the violent tremors that shook the earth, and the invisible pressure that seemed ready to tear souls from bodies had already told them, in the most primitive way possible, what had happened there.

The Krieg soldiers, those war machines renowned for their fearlessness in the face of death and for treating their own lives as expendable resources of the Imperium, showed an expression called "shock" behind their gas masks for the first time.

"...In the Emperor's name."

Commissar Friedrich, a man always known for his composure and rigidity, removed his cap and murmured to himself. His face was filled with incredulous awe.

"This is... a judgment."

Colonel Grim gripped the power sword in his hand tightly. Even his iron will wavered slightly before the miraculous sight unfolding before him.