"What?!"
The Soul Grinder let out a roar of pure shock. It felt as though it had collided with an unmovable mountain—no, a neutron star! No matter how its hydraulic engines roared, no matter how its Warp-core overloaded, that massive claw could not advance even a single micrometer.
Clark slowly raised his head.
There was no anger in his eyes, only a cold indifference, as if he were looking at a pile of trash.
"You're getting dismantled, you ugly thing."
The next second.
Clark released his grip.
But he didn't retreat. Instead, he pulled his right hand back into a fist, assuming a perfectly standard charging stance—the kind found only in textbooks.
The surrounding air was instantaneously sucked away by the motion, creating a brief vacuum field.
BOOM!!!
The punch was thrown.
No flashy light shows, no complex psychic techniques.
Only pure, absolute, and irrational physical force.
The moment his fist connected with the Soul Grinder's breastplate, the laws of physics seemed to fail.
The Warp-tempered brass armor, which could withstand Bolter fire, was more fragile than wet tissue paper before this single punch.
The force of the strike tore through the Soul Grinder's chest, through its core engine, through the six mechanical legs behind it, and finally through the solid bedrock at the back of the underground bunker.
BANG—CRASH!
The dozens-of-tons-heavy daemonic engine didn't even have time to scream. Under the shockwave of that punch, it simply disintegrated.
It was like a watermelon pulverized by a shotgun at point-blank range.
Countless shards of burning metal, rotting flesh, and broken gears sprayed backward in a radial pattern, blasting a massive crater over twenty meters in diameter into the rear wall!
The Warp rift that had just torn open became extremely unstable due to the vibrations of this terrifying physical shockwave. It began to flicker violently, as if space itself was terrified by that punch.
Silence.
A deathly silence.
Sergeant Titus remained in his firing stance, but his Bolter had lowered.
He stared ahead, stunned.
The gargantuan daemon was gone. Only a pile of burning scrap remained on the floor.
And the man was still hovering in mid-air. He slowly pulled back his fist and lightly flicked a non-existent speck of dust from his red cape.
"Roar... For... Blood..."
The Bloodletter that had emerged first had narrowly escaped the shockwave of the punch because it had been standing to the side.
Clearly, it was a mindless, low-level daemon. Seeing its companion obliterated in a second, it didn't flee. Instead, taking advantage of the moment Clark retracted his fist, it raised its Hellblade and roared, attempting a sneak attack from behind.
"Look out!" the Space Marine collapsed in the ruins shouted.
Clark didn't even turn his head.
He only tilted his face slightly. Those eyes, originally azure, transformed completely into two golden suns the moment he turned.
ZZZT—!!!
Two high-energy beams of Heat Vision, like God's own scalpels, instantly sliced through the dim space.
The beams swept past.
The Bloodletter, caught mid-leap, froze in place.
Immediately afterward, its body split neatly in two from the waist down. No blood flowed from the cut, as all tissues were carbonized and vaporized the instant they touched the beams.
"AAAAAAHHH—"
The daemon let out one final scream of despair before turning to ash in the golden flames, forcibly banished back to the Warp.
The residual heat of the Heat Vision had not yet dissipated, illuminating the entire underground bunker as bright as day.
Clark hovered in the center of the light.
Due to the high-intensity energy release, golden lines flowed faintly across the surface of his skin. The red glow in his eyes hadn't fully extinguished, trailing two long arcs of light through the smoke. The tattered red cloth behind him snapped in the heatwaves, looking for all the world like a halo behind a deity.
In this moment.
In the eyes of the Ultramarines, he was no longer a mortal.
He wasn't even a common psyker.
He was a miracle.
He was a wonder walking among men.
Sergeant Titus felt his throat go dry, his two hearts pounding frantically in his chest. His mind trembled, his worldview collapsed, and then reconstructed itself in a highly fanatical fashion.
"This power... this pure physical destructive force..."
"This composure... as if shooing away a fly even when facing a Warp daemon..."
"And this face... this face that is almost identical to the depictions in the Codex of the Emperor himself in his youth..."
Titus took a deep breath.
As a veteran of two hundred years, he knew the Imperium held many secrets. Such as erased histories, such as lost Primarchs.
Could it be...
Could it be that in this desperate 41st Millennium, when the Imperium is teetering on the brink, the Great Holy Emperor has finally manifested his will? Has he sent one of his lost scions to return?
"For Macragge..." Titus murmured to himself.
He performed an action that shocked the two battle-brothers behind him.
Clang.
This proud Astartes, this Ultramarine who had not bowed even before a Hive Tyrant, now holstered his Bolter.
He took a step forward, the heavy ceramite knee of his power armor crashing heavily onto the rubble-strewn floor.
He knelt on one knee.
He lowered his proud head, clenched his right fist, and struck it heavily against the ceramite breastplate of his left chest, letting out a crisp CLANG.
This was the highest salute an Astartes gave only to a Gene-Father or the Supreme Leader.
"My Lord."
Titus's voice echoed within his helmet, carrying irrepressible excitement and reverence.
"Sergeant Titus, Second Company of the Ultramarines, salutes you. Please forgive our previous offense... we did not know your... identity."
As Titus knelt, the two Space Marines behind him realized what was happening. It was a genetic instinct to obey a superior. They looked at each other, saw the fanaticism in each other's eyes, and then dropped to the ground in unison.
"Salutations! My Lord!"
In the deathly quiet basement, only the kneeling figures of the three steel giants and Clark, still hovering in mid-air, remained.
Clark: "..."
He looked down at the three marines who had suddenly knelt, and a crack appeared in his originally cold expression of confusion.
[SOL: Sir, according to the Imperial cultural database, this is the highest level of loyalty ritual. They seem to have... misunderstood the source of your genetic sequence.]
[CLARK (Internal): I just wanted to clean up the trash and save a life. Why are they kneeling? What did they just call me? My Lord?]
[SOL: RECOMMENDATION: Remain silent; maintain the status quo. In this universe, a noble false identity is safer than explaining the truth.]
The corner of Clark's mouth twitched slightly. Looking at Titus's extremely pious posture, he knew that explaining he was "actually the son of a Kansas—scratch that—Underhive farmer" would likely be believed by no one.
So, he took a deep breath and adjusted his expression.
He allowed his gaze to become deep and inscrutable once more. His body slowly descended, his toes lightly touching the ground, though he didn't fully land (to maintain his "divine" aura).
He looked at Titus, nodded slightly, and spoke in a tone that neither confirmed nor denied, but was filled with authority:
"Rise, warriors."
He paused, his gaze piercing through the basement toward the distant stars.
"Take me to your commander. This place... needs a thorough cleaning."
Titus snapped his head up, the red light in his oculars flickering.
"As you command! My Lord!"
In that moment, Titus was certain.
The Imperium was saved.
A Primarch had returnedand it was a powerful one too.