The will of the faithful was just as fragile before absolute power.
The situation now was this: like Lorgar all those years ago, if the god you worshipped would not answer you, you could never defeat superhuman warriors armed with the fruits of countless years of science.
"Courage is humanity's anthem" was not wrong, but it was always used in the wrong place, because human history was not written in anthems.
Humanity had endured in the vast galaxy for tens of thousands of years. Its history was recorded in one blood-soaked volume after another, studied by generations of scholars who devoted half their lives to it. None of the xenos roaming the galaxy lacked this so-called courage. Machine lifeforms did not even know what courage was; they simply executed every command with precision. Humanity had no advantage over them in that regard.
Humanity's advantages lay in inheritance and exploration. The former had been "perfectly inherited" by generation after generation of Adeptus Mechanicus sages, while the latter, since the great explorer Land, seemed to have been continued only by Rogue Traders. Only when Belisarius Cawl emerged did that tide, etched into humanity's genes, finally surge again.
The Ecclesiarchy made believers whose only education consisted of hymns to the Emperor rise up and fight, imagining that ignorant courage could overwhelm the enemy. It was nothing but a fool's dream.
The convoy's gunboats took little time to drop a string of incendiary bombs among the believers whose bodily functions had already been severely damaged. The anti-aircraft guns put up reasonably good fire, but under the Astartes' all-out assault, even those still capable of firing would be destroyed within minutes.
The pilot sneered. *I hear your Ecclesiarchy excels at rapidly converting believers into flagellant servitors, creating powerful fighting masses. But do you have the