Warlord Grak and his elite bodyguard, made up entirely of "Nobs," had pushed their way to the very front. His enormous body loomed like a mountain of flesh, radiating oppressive power.
He saw Alexander behind the glass.
That scrawny human in a black uniform, who looked as though a single squeeze would crush him.
Yet he showed not the slightest trace of fear. There was even a hint of... a smile on his face?
Grak felt an unprecedented fury at being treated with such contempt. He raised his enormous power klaw, powerful enough to tear a tank apart, and pointed it at Alexander.
"Little humie!!" His amplified roar penetrated even the thick glass, echoing through the control room. "I see ya! Ya got nowhere left to run! Come out! Get on yer knees in front of me! Maybe I'll give ya a quick death!"
Alexander did not answer him.
He simply raised his right hand, slowly.
Then, before Grak and tens of thousands of Orks, he made a perfectly clear, profoundly insulting gesture.
He drew his thumb across his own throat, lightly, but with unmistakable resolve.
A throat-slitting gesture.
At that moment, time seemed to stand still.
Grak's simple brain froze for a tenth of a second. He could not understand. This little humie, this prey cornered with nowhere to go, about to be crushed into pulp... he was provoking me? He was mocking me?
A volcanic fury, fierce enough to burn away every last shred of reason, swept through his entire body.
"WAAAGH!!!"
He let out the loudest, most furious roar of his life, cranked his power klaw to maximum output, and smashed it into the bulletproof glass, already strained to its limit.
At that very moment, Alexander turned toward Colonel Valeus at the command console and gave him a radiant smile, as innocent as a child's.
He opened his mouth and spoke softly, in a tone almost like a chant:
"Emperor, your feast..."
He pressed the final detonator he had been gripping tightly all this time, connected to every explosive throughout the Iron Temple.
"...has begun!"
There was no sound.
Nor was there any warning.
A pure white light beyond description erupted in the deepest recesses of Granary Seven.
It was more dazzling than the core of a star, purer than a miracle from heaven.
In the first instant of its appearance, it devoured the retinas of every Ork who dared look directly at it, cooking their eyeballs from the inside out.
Then came the heat.
A devastating wave of heat, enough to vaporize steel in an instant and melt stone into magma, raced outward from the epicenter at the speed of light.
The tens of thousands of Orks packed inside Granary Seven and the surrounding passages did not even have time to scream. In that wave of heat, they were instantly carbonized, broken down, and finally reduced to the most fundamental particles in the universe. Their flesh, their bones, their crude armor and weapons-all became meaningless before that absolute heat.
And this was only the beginning.
The air, instantly heated to tens of thousands of degrees, triggered the most terrifying chain reaction.
At that moment, the millions of tons of high-energy grain dust stored in the Iron Temple's hundreds of enormous granaries ignited simultaneously.
-a dust explosion.
The most terrifying, most destructive disaster of humanity's industrial age displayed its divine might in the dark era of Warhammer 40K, in the most magnificent and horrifying way imaginable.
BOOOOOM!!!
If the light and heat before had been a silent pantomime, then now, at last, sound caught up with destruction.
It was a colossal sound beyond measurement by any known unit, a thunderclap worthy of a creation myth.
The entire planetary crust of Viridia Prime groaned in agony beneath that blast. The ground convulsed and the mountains shook, as though divine punishment had descended.
An immense, ever-expanding dark red fireball, more than five kilometers across and composed of pure flame and shock waves, rose slowly from the ruins of the Iron Temple. Like a newborn sun, it licked greedily at the sky, burning an enormous hole through the thick cloud cover.
Around the fireball, visible white pressure waves spread outward like ripples across water.
Wherever the shock wave passed, everything was swept away.
The Orks' vast reserves and war machines stationed outside the Iron Temple were like toys swept aside by a giant's careless hand. Huge "tin cans" were tossed hundreds of meters into the air like scraps of paper, then broke apart in midair. Grak's prized mobile command tower, cobbled together from several mining vehicles, was crumpled into a twisted mass of burning scrap the instant the shock wave struck it.
Hundreds of thousands of Orks seemed so small and helpless before this man-made, world-ending catastrophe. Their bodies were torn apart by savage winds, set ablaze by thermal radiation, and riddled with flying fragments of stone and metal.
Their cries of "Waaagh!", their will to fight, their pure faith in violence-all were utterly crushed by this absolute force, an embodiment of the universe's most fundamental physical laws, leaving not a trace behind.
On the plains tens of kilometers from the Iron Temple, at the positions of the Death Korps of Krieg's 17th Siege Regiment, everyone stopped in their tracks and stared blankly at the immense mushroom cloud slowly rising on the distant horizon, bridging earth and sky.
The world was silent.
The devastating blast would take another dozen or so seconds to reach them.
But the light and heat that burned everything to ash, the violent tremors that shook the earth, and the invisible pressure that seemed ready to wrench their souls from their bodies had already told them, in the most primal way, what had happened there.
For the first time, the soldiers of Krieg-those war machines famed for their fearlessness in the face of death, for treating their own lives as expendable resources of the Imperium-wore an expression called "shock" behind their gas masks.
"...In the Emperor's name."
Commissar Friedrich, a man known for his composure and rigid demeanor, removed his cap and murmured to himself. His face was filled with incredulous awe.
"This is... a judgment."
Colonel Grimm gripped his Power Sword tightly. Even his iron will wavered before the miraculous sight unfolding before him.
Before you continue