Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
A piercing shriek tore through the lead-gray sky, the wail of metal grinding and shuddering against the atmosphere at extreme speed.
Twenty rents were brutally torn through the heavy clouds, laden with dust and radioactive fallout, like a filthy curtain slashed by invisible blades.
Twenty Storm Eagle Gunships burst through the billowing smoke and flashes of ionization, making their brazen appearance like steel birds flying out of ancient myth.
Their armour plates were covered in battle scars and the seams of fresh welds. Their paint was as black as the midnight void, but their wings, engine cowls, and most conspicuous flank sections bore unmistakable Legion Insignia: an open hand outlined in rough steel lines, its knuckles sharply defined, as though it held the power to command machinery and crush flesh.
The gunships maintained a tight, efficient wedge formation, their engine nozzles trailing blue ion wakes across the sky.
The land beneath them was an endless, suffocating expanse of ruins.
Buildings that might once have formed cities were reduced to jagged skeletons of reinforcing steel and foundations melted into glass.
Mountainous heaps of mechanical wreckage filled what appeared to have been industrial districts, adorned only by rust and the scorch marks of energy overloads.
Enormous craters pockmarked the planet's surface, filled with liquids of unknown composition that shimmered with uncanny colors.
Death and destruction were the only themes here, silence the eternal backdrop, broken only briefly by the roar of the Storm Eagles' engines.
Silent giants crowded the cramped troop compartment of one of the lead gunships.
They wore jet-black Power Armour matching the gunships, its surfaces engraved with binary prayers and gear reliefs representing technological blessings and mechanical doctrine.
Behind their faceplates, their breathing was low and synchronized, like the heartbeat of a sleeping beast.
There