"The crusade begins, Daemons retreat. By the power of faith, victory is assured. In the Emperor's name, purge evil, fight to the end, and never cease."
Hymns such as the Song of the Crusade, the Emperor's Shield, Glory to the Emperor, and the Emperor's Holy Canticle echoed from the artificial vocalizers of broadcast Servitors.
To operate within the Pariah Nexus, the Imperial Navy had been forced to establish additional choirs aboard every Imperial Ship.
Every ship had at least one choir singing hymns around the clock.
These choirs consisted of choral Servitors made from living people who had undergone lobotomies.
Their mechanical implants left them without emotion or fatigue. All that remained was their devotion to the Emperor.
Hymns reverberated through every Imperial Ship, helping the countless mortal soldiers hold their souls together against the Pariah Nexus's banishment of the soul itself and preserve as much of their fighting ability as possible.
Although the civil war between the Stormlord and the Silent King had not ended, that did not mean the Necrons had simply left the Imperium's forces unchecked.
The Tech-sages of the Hephaistos battle group posed a far greater threat to the Necron forces than conventional Imperial troops.
They recklessly tested the creations of ancient technology they had recovered from various ruins. These astonishingly powerful relics inflicted unexpected destruction on Necron and Imperial forces alike.
One sage had once deployed a satellite installation called the Spheric Constellation around one of the Necrons' nodal planets.
It was an armed satellite array spanning thousands of miles, a relic of the Dark Age of Technology.
It consisted of twenty-five orbital satellites.
Yet the sage barely understood these gifts of the Omnissiah. The weapon's identification systems and control architecture had long since failed.
After the ignorant sage activated the weapon, immensely powerful