No one could have imagined that a "small thing," barely ten meters long, would possess the power to annihilate a battleship—or even an entire fleet.
Darok's system boasted a formidable void fleet, spearheaded by the Retribution-class battleship.
Retribution-class vessels were among the Imperium's greatest instruments of war, a bulwark during the turmoil of the Age of Darkness, when humanity lost vast repositories of ancient knowledge and nearly every Gloriana-class battleship had been retired from active duty.
To the High King of Darok, this 13-kilometer colossus was not merely a warship—it was a symbol of dominion, a keystone in his ambition to sunder the Imperium's authority and carve his own fiefdom among the stars.
Maintaining such leviathans demanded astronomical resources and the highest rites of the Mechanicum, overseen by the Fabricator General and countless Magos.
The mainstay of Darok's fleet, the Lunar-class cruisers, were themselves kilometer-long monstrosities, clad in void shields and armed with batteries of light spears and macro-cannons. Even the smaller escort ships, a mere five kilometers in length, were behemoths to mortal eyes.
And yet, in the endless void of the Darok Cluster, the Imperial Sparks—each no more than ten meters across—drifted like motes of dust beside these titanic vessels.
If someone had once claimed that such tiny constructs could obliterate an entire battlefleet, they would have been scorned as mad.
But now, in the glare of exploding warships, the Spark's terror became undeniable.
Those ships that attempted to intercept the Imperial Sparks were torn asunder within minutes. To the naked eye, it appeared as though the Sparks simply phased through the hulls—an instant later, reactors ruptured, and ships died in radiant supernovae.
In truth, it was the catastrophic chain reaction triggered by the Spark's penetration—tearing open plasma drives and atomizing critical systems.
The fleet commander, refusing to trust his senses, ordered immediate system diagnostics, suspecting some blasphemous data-viruses at work—illusions sown to cloud the mind and sabotage judgment.
In the void, such deception was common: micro-sensor swarms could feed false readings, sever command networks, and paralyze entire flotillas.
But after exhaustive checks, the answer came through the vox-net—cold and merciless: no anomalies detected.
Everything they witnessed was real.
The commander's heart sank.
He prayed it was merely a nightmare from which he would soon awaken, his adjutant assuring him that no losses had occurred, that the carnage was but an enemy trick.
But faith could not overturn fact.
On the auspex, an Imperial Spark flickered to life once more, accelerating at an impossible rate. Within seconds, it achieved near-light speed, heedless of the universe's laws.
At such velocity, its kinetic energy was apocalyptic. No voidship dared intercept it. Instead, they scattered, desperate to evade.
But then—vanishment.
The Spark vanished from all scans, not because it had exceeded the speed of light, but because it had activated a virtuality-jump device—an arcane relic enabling translocation between realspace and the Imperium's engineered virtual realms.
The Darok fleet lost all contact. Panic spread like fire among their ranks. They could no longer predict where—or when—the next strike would fall.
Moments later, shrieking alarms blared across multiple ships. Hull integrity failed. Temperatures soared beyond survivable limits. Infernos engulfed compartments within seconds.
And all from a simple, horrifying cause: a perfect circular hole bored through the stern, molten metal dripping from the seared armor.
Void shields had collapsed under the onslaught. The outer plating, designed to withstand even the fury of macro-torpedoes, had been effortlessly breached.
The wound still smoldered, bathing nearby bulkheads in hellish red.
The ship's construction materials—adamantine, ceramite, and rare alloys engineered to withstand the fury of the warp—offered no defense.
Historically, only deep-space torpedoes of catastrophic yield, launched from weapons platforms the size of small moons, could hope to pierce such defenses.
Now, it had taken a Spark—no larger than a gunship.
Before the engineers could finish assessing the damage, fresh klaxons screamed.
Something else had bypassed the void shields—falling onto the decks unnoticed.
Automated light spear batteries spat fury into the void—but struck nothing.
Fear gripped the Darok crews.
They were not battling enemies of flesh and blood, but specters—unseen, unstoppable, inevitable.
They held their breath, awaiting the next blow.
It came swiftly.
Merciful, in its way.
An Imperial Spark bored through another vessel's hull and rampaged through its command deck, reducing the bridge to molten slag in an instant.
The Darok fleet, once a proud arm of defiance, was reduced to drifting wreckage—and despair.
They could feel the air heating up—and in mere seconds, the heat became unbearable.
Everyone in the control room, even those clad in fire-resistant voidsuits, began to spontaneously combust. Amidst wretched screams, the crew perished one by one.
When the protective materials failed, their bodies were vaporized in an instant.
The Empire's Sparks—tiny in size, impossibly fast, and capable of slipping between the material and immaterium—were nearly impossible for even the most advanced Imperial augur arrays to track.
The commander of the Darok fleet was gripped by a crushing sense of helplessness.
He could only watch, powerless and despairing, as the proud vessels he once considered extensions of his own being were annihilated, one by one.
Perhaps, he thought, in the next moment, his own end would come.
Facing the certainty of death, he found little fear left in his heart—only an overwhelming bitterness.
Even now, he could not fathom how the enemy had struck them down so effortlessly.
There was no evidence, no visible assault, no triumphant fleet looming on the horizon.
The Imperial vessels, anchored calmly at the edge of the system, showed no signs of aggression.
"What we are facing is no ordinary foe... it is a phantom of flame, a vengeful spirit, the nameless wrath of the gods themselves!"
The Darok commander descended into madness. His mind, shattered again and again by the impossible horrors before him, could only scream insanity into the vox-channels.
He worshipped the Red Flame that destroyed him, hailing it as a divine retribution, offering frantic, desperate praise.
No one responded. No one tried to stop him.
The once-mighty Darok fleet—ships that had been their homes, their fortresses, and their pride—were now nothing more than incandescent wreckage drifting silently through the void.
From the surface of Darok, its people gazed upward and witnessed their fleet blooming into a constellation of silent firework-like explosions.
The spectacle lasted for hours, each eruption painting the skies with terrifying beauty.
All across the planet, burning wreckage fell from orbit, carving blazing scars across the heavens like falling stars.
Above them, the Imperial Sparks lingered—glowing like new suns, hanging in the void.
Under the baleful glare of these dozens of artificial stars, the entire world seemed to ignite, basking in a terrible, unnatural brilliance.
Looking upon this nightmarish scene—dozens of false suns illuminating the heavens—the people of Darok were seized by an overwhelming panic, as though the gods themselves had passed final judgment upon them.
Yet it was not only the Darok populace who struggled to comprehend the devastation.
Even the captains of the Imperial Navy, hardened veterans of countless void wars, stared in mute awe at the results of Dukel's command.
Who were they?
Where were they?
What had they just witnessed?
Had they not been taught that naval warfare was about hurling macro-cannon shells, firing lance batteries, invoking the Emperor's name, and ramming the enemy with prow-mounted rams?
If this was void warfare... then what had they been doing all these years?
In the Imperium, a voidship is far more than a war vessel. Each mighty ship is a self-contained city-state, home to tens of millions—generations born, living, and dying within its armored womb.
For the sons of the Imperial Navy, a ship was not merely a weapon, but a sacred dwelling granted by the God-Emperor Himself.
They had devoted their entire lives to studying naval strategy, battling xenos, heretics, and traitors across the void.
They had fought against fortress worlds, battled hive-fleets and ancient xenos monstrosities, and even clashed with Ork Kroolkrumpa hulks the size of moons.
The annals of the Imperial Navy were written in blood, loyalty, and honor.
And yet, now—seeing an entire battlefleet, including Retribution-class battleships, annihilated without so much as a proper engagement—they realized the true scale of Imperial might when wielded by Dukel, the Living Saint.
The Darok fleet had been reduced to a shattered graveyard of drifting hulls.
The Imperial salvage flotillas had to laboriously carve a safe passage through the wreckage so that their own fleet could advance.
As they piloted their warships through the debris fields, the captains gazed solemnly at the ruins of what had once been a proud enemy.
Victory should have tasted sweet—but a deep unease gnawed at their hearts.
They had fought countless wars—but never one so... effortless.
Efficient. Merciless. Burning.
The very image of destruction incarnate.
Meanwhile, back on Darok, despair spread like wildfire.
The fleet they had depended on for salvation was gone—annihilated without warning or mercy.
High King Caligus watched silently as the lights on his tactical hololith winked out, one after another.
Then came the reports: the orbital starport was under attack. Moments later, a series of detonations tore through the vox-channels.
The signals from the high orbit satellites ceased.
Outer space was lost.
From the surface, the people of Darok witnessed a terrible sight: a colossal Imperial warship descending, bearing the twin-headed Aquila upon its ramming prow.
The terror among the nobles and knightly houses—those who had tied their fortunes to the High King—reached fever pitch.
All the strength they had mustered, all the pride they had boasted, had been undone in less than an hour.
And not even by a full Imperial crusade—just a fragment of its power.
The realization was staggering.
The Imperium of Mankind had not forgotten them.
The Imperium had returned.
And the Imperium demanded vengeance.
Panic swept across Darok's ruling caste.
High King Caligus stormed around his palace chambers, face contorted with rage and fear.
They had gambled—and lost.
For decades, they had believed themselves safe, isolated by the madness of the Great Rift, protected by the chaos engulfing Vigilus and the surrounding sectors.
Astropathic messages had spoken only of disaster, betrayal, and ruin across the Segmentum.
The Eye of Terror yawned wide, and everywhere there was war.
Surely, Caligus had reasoned, the Imperium was too weak to enforce its will.
Surely, he had thought, they could declare independence without consequence.
And in truth, the Empire had not sent many troops.
But it turned out... they had not needed to.
The bad news was that before the Imperial fleet had even fully entered the Darok system, dozens of Sparks had already annihilated every spaceborne defense.
Warships, civilian craft, orbital platforms, weaponized satellites—obliterated in moments. Darok was now a toothless beast, utterly exposed to the mercy of the Emperor's forces.
Above them, the heavens churned. The sheer size of the approaching fleet pressed down on the people of Darok like a physical weight, suffocating them in terror.
Yet the High King still clung to hope.
He rallied the Knight Households, commanding them to mobilize their elite retainers to man the fortress-citadels scattered across the surface.
The Imperial fleet drew nearer, slipping into high orbit. But they did not unleash Exterminatus-class weaponry, no cyclonic torpedoes or planetbreaker barrages rained down to scour the surface.
That restraint lit a spark of hope in the High King's heart.
He thought back to the young woman—Efilar, they had called her.
"Womanly mercy." The High King sneered bitterly.
He believed he understood her. He believed wrong.
Efilar's delicate appearance was a deceit. Back on Ophelia VII, she had crushed rebellion across dozens of worlds with merciless precision. She had not exterminated populations wantonly—but neither had she ever shown true mercy. Her will was steel.
Now, she fulfilled the orders Dukel had assigned her: the testing of new Imperial wargear.
The Sparks had merely been the harbingers.
The real storm began when the sky wept fire—dense waves of airdrop capsules descending like a meteor shower.
From the ash-choked impact zones, warriors of the Catachan 22nd Infantry Regiment emerged, one after another, like iron beasts from their pods.
They were mere mortals—untouched by the surgical blessings of the Adeptus Astartes—but the ground shook beneath their synchronized, thunderous march.
Each soldier piloted a single-occupant combat exo-suit, a machine standing over three meters tall.
Born from a union between the Mechanicus's noospheric network systems and the dark sciences of the Virtual Realm, these suits were marvels of battlefield technology.
A compact reactor bound directly to the operator's nervous system turned man and machine into one.
While mortal frailty limited them from reaching the full combat prowess of a Primaris Space Marine, they were still monstrously superior to anything fielded by conventional forces of old.
Most importantly—they were cheap.
Nearly 10,000 Catachan mech-warriors deployed from the burning skies in waves, an unstoppable tide of metal and flesh.
Across the broken fields, Tech-Priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus chanted binharic liturgies, the oily hiss of hydraulic lines echoing around them as they sanctified the landing.
Steel-shod boots stamped onto the rebel world, one after another.
Targeting matrices flickered to life inside the warriors' helms, highlighting enemy concentrations.
And then came Efilar's voice, cold and commanding, flooding their vox-channels:
"Kill all who stand in your way. Noble or commoner—it matters not. Your mission is to conquer this world as swiftly as possible. No quarter."
The Saint's voice was merciless, without the faintest tremor of hesitation.
And so, in the name of the Emperor, the slaughter began.
...
TN:
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