Great Rift, fringe battlefield
The Imperium of Man's expeditionary fleet, under the command of four Primarchs, arrived at the edge of the Great Rift.
The sight before them was enough to make the souls of even the most fearless Space Marines tremble.
The entire Great Rift was no longer merely an ugly scar stretching across space. It had become a crazed, boiling cosmic furnace, a gigantic festering wound that spewed indescribable things every moment.
The Rift itself had expanded to an astonishing extent, its interior churning with streams of Chaos energy that no known color could describe.
Countless twisted, blasphemous monsters—creatures whose mere sight could drive mortals insane—poured from it like an endless tide.
They came in every form. Some resembled rotten stellar behemoths; others were masses of flesh crudely assembled from countless limbs; still others were composed entirely of pure malice and distorted physical laws. Screeching, writhing, and tearing at the membrane of reality, they frantically sought to flood into the material world.
Standing directly against this torrent of Destruction was the Hilling Empire's Seventh Expeditionary Fleet.
Its warships stood like silent, steadfast dikes, their formations strict and unyielding.
Superweapons far beyond the Imperium's understanding fired repeatedly. Every salvo was not a simple explosion, but the "erasure" of vast swathes of space along with the monsters within, or their conversion into harmless streams of fundamental particles.
The glow of the energy shields rippled violently beneath the monsters' frenzied assaults, yet they remained unbreakable.
This was a war on an unimaginable scale, brutal beyond measure. Hundreds of millions of monsters were destroyed every second, yet the creatures pouring from the Rift seemed endless.
Occasionally, enormously massive entities with more fixed forms and an ancient, suffocating aura of evil would attempt to force their way through the barrage.
Their very existence