Time: M42.012 Location: Ultramar System · Castor VI Defense Line POV: Ultramarines · Captain Titus

  ■ Day 78: Being Chewed Alive

  This was not a war.

  It was a process of being slowly ground down.

  That missing 5% had become 78 days of attrition. Titus had come here under Guilliman's orders, leading the rebuilt Second Company to recim Ultramar. The early engagements were manageable. Then the fires of war drew more greenskins, and the Waaagh! energy spread like a contagion with no cure.

  "Captain..." Static bled through the vox. Six of them remained in the entire defense zone.

  His hearing had long since filtered everything out. What remained: the screaming of servo-systems pushed past their tolerance threshold, and the dull percussion of his own heartbeat inside his helmet.

  This was the st command node of the Second Company. The only ember still burning.

  Tens of thousands of greenskins surrounded them on all sides. On the horizon, the Gargant designated The Smasher was rotating its main cannon into position. The psma charge building at the muzzle annihited every shadow within hundreds of meters, bleaching every scratch on Titus's armor into stark white relief.

  It was preparing to erase them.

  Titus tightened his grip on the power sword. The bde's charge had long since failed. The Chapter motto—Courage and Honour—was buried under dried blood and acid scoring, rough as scrap iron beneath his gauntlet.

  He looked up.

  The same sky as every day for 78 days. A churning, rust-colored ceiling that never cleared, never changed. Suffocating. Permanent.

  ■ An Anomaly in High Orbit

  One second before the Gargant fired, the sky changed.

  Not a nce strike. Something far beyond that.

  In high orbit, the debris field of Ork warships—hundreds of kilometers thick, a steel wall that had sealed the sky since the beginning—underwent a violent, instantaneous transformation. The wreckage did not explode. It was repelled. The way two magnets of identical pority reject each other when forced together: total, uniform, without spark or fme.

  Titus watched as the clustered debris hurled itself apart in both directions simultaneously, as if each piece had suddenly found every other piece intolerable. No detonation. No fire. An invisible force had simply pried the red sea of steel open from its center.

  A corridor appeared. Geometrically precise. Several kilometers wide. Edges clean enough to suggest calcution rather than accident.

  Through it, for the first time in 78 days, Titus saw stars.

  Cold. Still. Indifferent.

  Three lead-gray rectangur warships slid into low orbit along the opened channel. Constant velocity. Perfect formation. The way liquid metal fills a mold—without hesitation, without excess.

  Their hulls did not reflect starlight.

  They absorbed it.

  ■ The Meteor

  They did not fire nces. They unched no torpedoes.

  They performed one action: acquire, accelerate, release.

  A section of Ork cruiser wreckage—thousands of tons of dead steel—was seized by an invisible force in orbit. It held motionless for a fraction of a second, as if time itself had stalled. Then it began to move. Slowly at first. Then with the violence of a stone snapped back by a cable under unbearable tension.

  At the moment before impact with the gray hull, a repulsive force of equal and opposite magnitude hurled it away.

  No engine exhaust. No energy discharge. Only the structural shriek of metal twisted past its tolerance by instantaneous acceleration and abrupt termination.

  The wreckage became a meteor.

  It did not burn on atmospheric entry. It dragged a pale condensation trail behind it—the low-temperature signature of air dispced faster than it could respond.

  BOOM——

  Sound arrived after the event.

  Titus saw the Gargant's upper armor spread and compress like a surface struck by a stone dropped into water. Then the entire structure folded inward. Silently. The kinetic energy released in that instant reduced a hundred-meter war machine—and every greenskin within five hundred meters—to a uniform yer of compacted metal fragments and organic matter distributed evenly across the ground.

  The shockwave cleared the rest like dust.

  What remained was silence. And a radius of absolute stillness so clean that even the particute had been stripped from the air.

  The noise stopped. The heat stopped. The stench of 78 days stopped.

  Titus stood in it. His own breathing inside his helmet. And a cold—not the cold of temperature, but the cold of something operating at a precision that had no room for sentiment—climbing slowly up his spine.

  For the missing 5%, the sky had returned something approaching a thousand times over.

  It carried no warmth. It offered no comfort. It was simply, ruthlessly, sufficient.