People stared wide-eyed as the rulers they had once revered, even worshipped as gods, revealed their most vicious, greedy, and hideous faces on the screens.
Then the deathly silence broke.
It was towering anger, roaring like mountains and raging seas! Like magma trapped deep beneath the earth's crust for millions of years, the instant it found an outlet, that fury erupted with enough force to burn everything to ash!
"Liars! Robbers! Murderers!"
"Kill them! Kill those bloodsuckers!"
Below the square, the Underhive residents who had been forced at gunpoint to kneel on the icy flagstones were the first to rise! No longer lambs waiting for slaughter, they picked up the weapons the guards had dropped. Their reddened, bloodshot eyes fixed on the nobles in the viewing stands, who had already gone pale with terror and were searching for a way out.
The will of the people, like an interstellar powder keg set alight, exploded in that instant!
"Seize them! Put them on trial!"
"For justice!"
Countless awakened citizens roared with earth-shaking fury and surged like floodwaters through a broken dam toward the viewing stands and the mansions of the nobles who had long lorded it over them. The elite guards tasked with protecting those nobles saw the overwhelming evidence of their crimes, watched their comrades remove their helmets and shed tears of shame, and faced the unstoppable will of the people rolling toward them like a tsunami. They, too, laid down their weapons. Many even turned their guns around and joined the furious crowds.
This uprising, powerful enough to tear the entire planet apart, did not become a bloody massacre, nor did it plunge Nostramo into anarchic chaos.
Because Konrad stood there.
The Primarch in judicial robes stood like an unshakable pillar amid the storm. Through the deterrence of his