"What happened!?"
An inexplicable silence had fallen over the smoke-shrouded position.
The lingering spore clouds were deathly quiet.
An Astra Militarum soldier nervously clutched his Lucius Lasgun, staring into the hazy yellow clouds and trying to make out his next target.
Mangled corpses lay everywhere in the trenches.
There were fragments of dismembered human bodies, as well as Hormagaunts that had leaped into the trenches only to be hacked apart by Chainswords.
Not far away, the remains of a Tyranid Warrior lay crookedly on the ground outside a dugout entrance.
Blood pooled across the trench floor.
"Have our defenses fallen? Did the swarm pass us by?"
At another firing position several meters away, another Astra Militarum soldier worked up the courage to pop out of his firing shelter, where his view had been restricted. He then strained to look around.
The soldiers at the rear position a dozen meters away were also looking around, cautiously keeping watch.
Someone called out to him, loudly asking whether he had spotted anything.
Yet all that remained was silence.
The frontline commanders along the defensive line naturally noticed the anomaly as well.
Although the clouds of spores had not dispersed, the swarm's screeches seemed to have vanished.
The once-ceaseless beating of wings in the sky had also fallen silent.
At some point, the Tyranids' flying units had completely disappeared.
The Imperial forces' air arm had already been depleted in battle. Large numbers of Valkyrie bombers and Avenger attack aircraft had taken off and never returned. With the enemy's status unknown, using transports as reconnaissance aircraft was not a practical option.
As the Emperor's cheapest currency, human lives were sometimes worth less than a machine. Dozens of reconnaissance squads across the various fronts put on respirators. They would venture into the thick fog to find