The Emperor and Horus

Father and son.

Sovereign and Warmaster.

Master of Humanity and humanity's traitor.

The Emperor and Horus stood dozens of meters apart, confronting each other. Though there were only two of them, hundreds upon thousands of different oppositions existed between them.

Every relationship, every concept, separated from the others and clashed upon a higher plane.

The ritual altar gradually began to change. With the Emperor's arrival, everything seemed to be growing clearer.

The dark mist shrouding the Vengeful Spirit gradually dispersed. The Gloriana-class warship seemed to have been completely stripped bare, revealing a colossal skeletal structure.

This glorious warship belonging to the Wolf Lord was being rewritten and reshaped by its master's will. All of it could be accomplished with a single thought from Horus.

Through the transparent barrier, Lox and the others could see countless fires and clouds of dust rising amid Terra's blue-white atmosphere, as loathsome as black worm-eaten patches of rot on an apple.

Everyone had been drawn in by the Vengeful Spirit's gravity field. Looking up, they could see an inverted Terra, as if the ship were about to lose control and crash into humanity's homeworld.

Countless wrecks of warships, orbital debris, and shattered warrior corpses spun at tremendous speed along the orbital path, captured by Terra's gravity.

Among them were no shortage of dead warships several kilometers long, colliding and grinding against one another, scattering blinding sparks.

Enormous Eyes of Horus slowly rose from the altar's surface. Each stood a hundred meters tall, their murky yellow-black eyes all fixed upon the Emperor.

Those eyes seemed to have existed here since time immemorial, projecting their powerful, evil will into the human realm without restraint through their vertical pupils.

Ancient horn calls sounded from nowhere. Countless human cries and sounds of slaughter accompanied them, as though they stood