Like a steel pillar driven into tofu, the torpedo easily pierced the hive city's densely packed buildings.
Sith was already standing on the outskirts of the hive city, but scattered recruits still lagged behind him.
As the hive city behind them began collapsing inward in a chain reaction under the torpedo's impact, the recruits still inside felt the entire ground beneath their feet begin to tremble.
First came the tremors, then, in the briefest instant, they became violent shaking.
"The hive city! The whole hive city is shaking!"
Brunok was stunned. And not just Brunok-even Sith was shocked by a sight he had never witnessed firsthand.
A hive city could easily span over a thousand kilometers. Rather than a city, it was more like a continent built entirely from piled steel.
And now, that entire "continent" shook violently before Sith's eyes. Amid rising and falling groans of steel, hive spires that towered into the clouds became meteors, crashing down from above the cloud cover.
The scattered recruits lagging behind had no time to dodge. They could only watch as a mass of steel the size of an entire modern city came crashing toward them.
Compared with those few recruits, the hundreds of millions of Genestealers in the hive city watched the surrounding buildings crush together and topple, howling at the sky as they stretched out both hands in a futile attempt to hold up the collapsing structures.
Of course, these Genestealers, which had already lost their individual consciousness, ultimately only became mixed into the endless steel, mere embellishments within the ruins.
Just like the Orks amid the boundless fractured rock outside the hive city.
What was an Apocalypse battlefield? A single orbital strike reduced hundreds of millions of ground troops to ash!
His body rose and fell with the heaving ground.
Even from so far away, the continent beneath Sith's feet became waves, sending "ripples" outward in rings from the center of the Cyclonic Torpedo's impact.
But thankfully, Abaddon had not intended to exterminate Vigilus completely. The torpedo deployed this time was only enough to wipe out a region spanning over a thousand kilometers, so although the hive city's collapse was staggering, Sith, who had escaped outside, merely experienced the ultimate surfing of the 42K era atop the surging rock.
Drawing his gaze away from the scattered recruits and hundreds of millions of Genestealers, Sith swallowed dryly. As his Adam's apple bobbed, he finally barely steadied himself.
Everyone around him stared blankly at the staggering sight. The confidence ground combat had given them vanished at this small demonstration of the mighty power of human technology.
Sith's expression, too, fell still. He merely looked around, taking in the terrifying, apocalyptic scenes across Vigilus.
Countless lances pierced the clouds, burning vast swathes of the continent and everything upon them into glass.
Struck by torpedoes, towering hive cities like mountain ranges immediately became like piles of sand, turning into dust that rained from the sky at the slightest touch.
Amid the jagged rock lay boundless masses of crushed Orks. Several aircraft raced through gaps between the lances overhead, while farther beyond them, an Imperial warship several kilometers long trailed billowing smoke as it slowly crashed into the planetary crust like a colossal beast.
Then an earth-shaking explosion raised a mushroom cloud that thrust straight into space. After blowing apart the cloud cover, it scattered boundless toxic dust at still higher altitudes.
Far away, enormous Void Shields shimmered beneath countless bombardments. Behind the shields, an accelerator cannon as large as a small hive city roared toward orbit.
Smoke from its muzzle scattered along with the dazzling flames, actually forming an immense bank of dense fog that covered the entire expanse of ground below.
Everything around him seemed so enormous that when Sith withdrew his gaze and looked at his own surviving soldiers, over a hundred thousand strong, they did not even amount to a single ant amid these apocalyptic scenes.
The ground beneath his feet was gradually settling again. Facing the people around him, who had finally regained their footing and begun looking toward him, Sith could only turn and look toward the far side of the distant continent, toward the Hyperia Hive Cluster, where Void Shields remained active as it struggled to hold back the armies of Chaos.
"We're heading for Hyperia. We've made the journey once before. Now we'll just make it again."
Sith spoke. The soldiers around him looked at the utterly transformed Ork desert before them, its terrain, landforms, and even natural features all different. They truly could not recall even a trace of what it had once looked like from this sight.
The only connection worth mentioning was the Ork tide, which, even amid widespread extermination, had not perished but instead grown ever stronger.
They watched as, scarcely had the ground settled, endless Orks, mixed with over a hundred Gargants, charged out from deep within a flat expanse of glass hundreds of kilometers across, where everything had melted completely.
On the other side were unholy bolts of Warp lightning falling from the sky, and an army of Chaos containing large numbers of armored vehicles and even Knight walkers.
The two sides fought across ground that had been repeatedly scoured of life, in slaughter beyond mortal imagination. Even ahead of the Chaos army, Warp daemons of every kind had begun to appear.
Through blasphemous rituals, these daemons tore reality apart and poured madly out of the rifts, joining this frenzied free-for-all engulfing all of Vigilus.
And now, Sith had to lead his 101st Regiment through just such a battlefield to reach the Imperium's last remaining territory on Vigilus.
Looking at the troops behind him, without a single vehicle and made entirely of flesh and blood, Sith merely gave them a long look. Then he turned and, with the sky-piercing hive city still collapsing farther behind him, walked toward the boundless glass where battle raged.
A bolt round streaked across the sky, and a mutated Cultist abruptly fell. The Ork Boy facing him had no time to celebrate, for another bolt round blasted its ugly head, adorned with a terrified human head, into pulp as well.
The two fighting sides looked toward the source of the bolt rounds in surprise. On the towering waves of earth, a banner of the 101st flew high. Tens of thousands of human soldiers roared as they flooded across the horizon, pouring fanatically toward the Orks and the Chaos army.
Raise the banner. Open fire.
Pointing toward the two sides locked in chaotic battle ahead, Sith roared to the surging soldiers around him:
"Tell them this place still belongs to the Imperium!!!"
Hyperia.
Endless firepower hammered the Void Shields from the sky, while on the ground, countless daemons surged out of Warp Rifts.
The humans on the fortifications fought back valiantly. Mortals, Astartes, Sisters of Battle, Adeptus Mechanicus, and even the nobles' private troops all poured fire outward, their eyes bloodshot.
But as a smoking aircraft flew through the several lances piercing the heavens, the latest report from the field was personally escorted by an Ultramarine, carried at a hurried pace through the central fortress's successive gates.
In the clamorous command center, everyone looked toward the entrance as the doors crashed open with a loud clang.
Calgar sat above them, his face long stripped of its earlier calm. His brows were furrowed, as though he could not find even a moment's respite.
Watching the Ultramarine who had burst through the doors, Calgar felt the full several seconds being wasted, and the red glow of his left augmetic eye grew even more piercing!
But when the Ultramarine reached the holographic tactical display and placed a marker on Vigilus, which had already fallen completely apart from Hyperia, everyone present instantly widened their eyes.
A low voice rang out directly from the highest seat:
"You're saying we still have a mortal regiment out in the field..."
"Still launching attacks?!!!"