After the earth-shaking roar and the echoes of collapsing structures had faded completely, the deafening explosions gave way to an almost motionless, unnerving stillness.
Amid the ruins of the Thirteenth Junction, High Admiral Sechter leaned on his bloodstained Lasgun, its charge exhausted. Every crease in his wrinkled, smoke-grimed face had frozen in utter shock.
Beneath his grizzled brows, eyes that had witnessed too much death, too much collapse, and too many impossible things were now wide open, staring unblinkingly into the distance at the vast metal graveyard. Moments ago, it had stood like death incarnate; now it was a mass of twisted, broken wreckage, with the occasional final shower of sparks bursting from within.
His lips parted slightly, as though he wanted to say something.
But in the end, no sound escaped his parched throat.
His fingers trembled around the weapon's grip, his knuckles white from holding it too tightly.
Major Leki stood a short distance from Sechter.
His tattered coat fluttered limply in the occasional gust of hot wind.
His expression was even more of a spectacle than Sechter's, a distorted mixture of horror, wild joy, disbelief, and bewilderment.
Instinctively, he reached for the "Imperial Lectitio Divinitatus" at his waist, the book he never went without. That volume chronicled countless heroic epics of the Imperium of Man and Lorgar's teachings, and he sought some passage that could explain the sight before him.
A giant had fallen from the sky, hacked open a xenos megastructure capable of instantly killing an Imperial Titan with an axe, then crawled inside and "torn it apart with his bare hands" from within?
What fucking passage of the Lectitio Divinitatus described fighting like that?
His one intact eye, the right, nearly bulged from its socket as he stared at the fallen colossus and the towering