"Attack."
The order came from the Bridge of the Soul of the Sea of Sand, calm, clear, and without a trace of hesitation, like the soft song of a scimitar leaving its sheath.
The next second, a tide of destruction was unleashed.
Gokbuli, commander of the Second Legion's First Great Company, watched with ice-cold eyes behind the lenses of his Helmet Visor.
Leading his finest assault companies, he rode in a heavy assault boarding pod, like one of the first moths plunging toward the flames through a storm of steel. The pods broke free of their warships and fell toward the immense shadow that filled the entire viewport, resembling a grotesquely malformed planetary structure.
The Planetary Construct.
The name had never been more apt.
Its surface was no natural landscape, but a patchwork of countless twisted metal structures, exposed energy conduits, honeycomb gun batteries, and Force Field nodes flickering with ominous light. Like a mechanical planet subjected to wanton modification, it reflected a cold sheen beneath the light of the Stars.
It was enormous, so vast that the boarding pods looked like arrows fired at a castle.
But arrows could be deadly enough.
The prolonged orbital bombardment had already overloaded and shattered the construct's ghostly blue energy shield. What now lay exposed to the vacuum was its relatively vulnerable outer armour.
At the last moment, the boarding pods' engines roared as they adjusted their orientation. Their sharp rams drove deep into the metal shell like hot knives through butter.
Boom!
The violent explosion came not from the boarding pods themselves, but from the Melta Bombs that followed.
Precision charges detonated, their intense heat instantly vaporizing the thick alloy gates and ripping a massive breach through the silver barrier, its molten edges dripping.
The pressure within the construct found an outlet.