"Charges ready to detonate, my lord!"
The engineer's booming voice cut through the faint static on the short-range Communications Channel.
Beyond the safe distance where Lorgar stood, several Word Bearers Techmarines were carrying out their final checks.
High-explosive earth-penetrating warheads had been precisely placed at several precalculated stress points along the mountainside, structural weaknesses identified by Berick's rapid sonic scan.
The warheads blinked with dangerous red lights, countdown figures silently ticking across their miniature screens.
Lorgar stood atop a jutting rock, his gaze piercing through his Helmet's augmented display as he calmly monitored every detail of the demolition sites.
But the greater part of his attention spread outward in all directions like invisible tendrils.
His psychic perception field was fully extended, meticulously scanning every fluctuation in the surrounding environment.
The flow of air, the faint life processes of microorganisms deep within the soil, the wingbeats of distant insects, the friction of wind against leaves, the minute changes in stress within the rocks as the explosives were placed...
Countless streams of information merged into a torrent, pouring into his transcendent mind.
Yet within this seemingly normal sensory picture, an indescribable sense of resistance quietly emerged, like a streak of oil in clear water.
Something was wrong.
Lorgar's brow creased slightly beneath his Helmet.
His psychic energy had detected no definite threat, no abnormal psychic fluctuations, no concealed malice, not even any clear signs of large creatures moving nearby.
Yet a persistent sense of wrongness remained, as though an extremely thin veil that distorted reality had been draped over this very space.
He could feel that something was wrong. An instinct born of a Primarch's intuition and extensive combat experience whispered a warning.
But whenever he tried to focus, to use logic and analysis to grasp the source of that wrongness, it