Standing amid the ruins, Saul keenly sensed the change beneath his feet. It was a surge of violent energy from the planet's core, powerful enough to wipe out the entire surface biosphere.
He frowned slightly.
He could disregard the fate of those brainwashed T'au xenos; their tens of millions of lives were nothing more than numbers to him. But he could not let hundreds of thousands of brave, loyal Imperial soldiers perish alongside these lunatics in their suicidal act.
"Such... repulsive obsession."
He raised his right hand again, even though it was already trembling slightly from his earlier outburst of power.
"Quiet!"
He spread his fingers, and strands of gentle yet unyielding golden light shot from his fingertips. They instantly pierced the thick crust and sank deep into the crumbling earth like threads stitching a wound closed.
Drawing on his already overtaxed divinity, he forcibly suppressed and soothed the dozens of planetary core energy wells on the verge of full eruption. His immense psychic power coursed along the veins of the earth like a vast golden net, trying to bind the raging fire at the planet's heart.
"Stop... now!"
Under his all-out intervention, the energy chain reactions in the cores of most of the wells were forcibly broken. Magma poised to erupt was pressed back down, and the cracks stopped spreading.
Yet everything came at a price.
Three energy wells nearest the epicenter had suffered total structural failure. Even under Saul's suppression, their collapse could no longer be reversed.
BOOOOM-!!!!!!!!!!
A colossal explosion, more magnificent and more terrifying than any before it, finally erupted.
An enormous, dazzling sphere of white light rose from the planet's core and instantly swallowed everything.
The instant that sphere expanded, the vast Viola Fortress City, along with the mountains and rivers for hundreds of kilometers