Terra had sent Iron Men reinforcements to help the Imperial Fists withdraw, yet what felt even stranger was that the leader of those reinforcements was showing respect to Sigismund.
As the supreme commander of the Pluto defense zone, the Black Knight had heard of the abhorrent Iron Men who had appeared beyond the Empire's former forbidden line on the battlefield of Beta-Garmon. Yet the Empire now seemed to have long since changed its tune.
Its former blanket condemnation of the abhorrent Iron Men had become an exceedingly ambiguous stance. The large number of Stone Men emerging from Terra's Ministry of Internal Affairs revealed some traces of this shift.
When faced with a great enemy, the Empire's bottom line could become remarkably flexible.
Sigismund's brain spun hundreds of times within a single second before he managed to process this rather system-crashing fact.
The Black Knight was not among the oldest generation of Space Marines. By the time he had been recruited from Terra into the Imperial Fists, the Great Crusade had already been underway for quite some time.
He had not followed the Emperor like the first generation of Space Marines had during the wars of unification, nor had he witnessed the strange and monstrous technologies wielded by Terra's savage technobarbarian warlords.
But it was not as if he had never faced similar opponents during the Crusade. Without exception, however, those weakened versions of the abhorrent Iron Men bore nothing but pure malice toward all organic life.
Those steel-bodied monsters could withstand terrifying amounts of damage. Beyond their devastating conventional weapons, many of them carried forbidden technologies beyond his understanding.
Warp vortex cannons, entropic field rays, even unknown technology capable of destroying both the material universe and its corresponding Warp within a certain area, erasing them completely. The Imperial Fists had