That unnatural black storm tore across the firmament of Amarah Prime like a festering wound. Amidst the rolling inky thunder, several crescent-shaped Necron aircraft glided forth in silence. They bore no roar of jet engines, only the bone-chilling hum of ionizing air.
Facing the towering mountain of the hive city below, the lead Necron fighter did not hesitate. Several missiles streaked directly toward the primary spire.
There were no earth-shattering explosions, nor rising mushroom clouds. The moment a projectile touched the hive spire, matter was forcibly annihilated. A localized sphere of eerie darkness expanded instantly, erasing everything it touched—steel, concrete, and hundreds of millions of lives—in a heartbeat. When the black sphere dissipated, the once-magnificent hive was half-gone, the cut as smooth as glass, as if a god's giant spoon had scooped a piece out of a cake.
Only then did the shrill wail of anti-air sirens belatedly pierce the heavens.
Almost simultaneously, the Imperial detection arrays finally caught those ghost-like energy fluctuations. Having waited in orbital and ground bunkers for far too long, wings of Imperial interceptors roared toward the dead zone like a swarm of angry hornets.
These fighters were not fresh from the forge; every single one bore the blackened soot of past combat. Inside a cockpit, a pilot bound for death gripped the control stick, feeling the vibration of the airframe, and couldn't help but remark over the vox: "Hey, the bird feels light today. Feels like the wind is pushing my backside."
His wingman's retort came instantly: "No kidding. To squeeze out every bit of mobility, the tech-priests and deck crews bored holes in the main frame. Of course it's light. If you fly too hard and it falls apart, just consider it an early delivery on your duty to the Emperor."
This gallows humor on the brink of death did not last long.
"Silence!" the Wing Commander's voice rang out, cold as iron. "Is there still nothing on the augurs?"
The light atmosphere vanished instantly. Everyone entered combat status, the chatter ceasing.
"Nothing."
"No signal."
"Total blank, Captain."
The replies were brief and orderly, yet thick with suppressed tension.
"Maintain formation. Continue toward the target zone," the Commander ordered.
The fighters punched through the heavy black clouds, drawing extremely close to the halved hive city. At that moment, the previously dead augur screens suddenly began to flicker frantically.
Beep-beep-beep-beep—!!
The piercing alarm nearly ruptured the pilots' eardrums. The radar screens, blank just a second ago, were now densely packed with red hostile signatures. Thousands of blips scrambled across the displays; the fire-control systems let out an overloaded whine, unable to lock onto a single physical target.
"Holy— Captain! What do we do? Everything's a target! Fire control won't lock!" a pilot shouted.
The Commander looked at the screen full of dancing red static and sighed deeply. This situation wasn't entirely unexpected; against this level of technological dominance, electronic equipment was nothing more than a decoration.
"Everyone except Zobayan, shut them down," the Commander's voice was terrifyingly calm. "Use your eyes to fight. Use your instincts to fly."
"Understood—"
The moment the pilots cut power to their augurs, the engagement began.
Or rather, the one-sided slaughter commenced.
Without warning, a Thunderbolt heavy fighter on the far right of the formation was struck by an arc of ghostly green electricity. It wasn't a missile or a laser, but an energy lash that moved like sorcery. The fighter shattered like wet paper, disintegrating in mid-air into a green fireball.
Only then did they realize with horror that the Necron fighter that had just crushed their comrade like a bug had been flying right alongside them the whole time—they just couldn't see it.
"Break! Break! Follow the contingency! Groups three and four, distract them! I'm going for the rear!"
The Commander yanked his stick, and his hole-riddled fighter groaned as if on the verge of falling apart. He was the ace of the entire wing, confident he could bite the enemy's tail in the chaos.
But reality was cruel.
This wasn't a dogfight.
The human fighters rolled, maneuvered, and popped flares frantically in the air, trying to catch a glimpse of that spectral silhouette. But no matter what they did, they couldn't even see the enemy's exhaust before teammates began vanishing from the vox channel one by one.
"I can't see it! Where is it?!"
"Above you! Watch— kzzzt—"
"For the Emperor! I'll take you with— Boom!"
Every fighter's fall was swift and clinical. There were no intense duels, only cold executions.
The Commander's eyes were bloodshot as he stared into the void outside his cockpit, searching for that crescent-shaped reaper. He felt an unprecedented sense of frustration and rage; his brothers were dying, and they were dying for nothing!
What made the survivors' skin crawl even more was the rhythm of the deaths.
In these split seconds of life and death, the pilots couldn't calculate time precisely, but their keen intuition told them the interval between each shoot-down was hauntingly consistent.
This was a deliberate choice. The Necrons were toying with them.
"Bastards! Show yourselves!"
The static in the vox grew quieter until only two heavy breaths remained. Aside from the Commander, only Zobayan was left, the two of them flying through the atmosphere in tandem.
Suddenly, Zobayan let out a distorted cry:
"I'm being painted black!"
The Commander froze, his palms slick with cold sweat. Something was wrong. None of the dozen pilots before them had reported a radar lock before they died. The technology possessed by that Necron pilot allowed it to pick them off one by one from stealth; there was no need for the redundant act of active radar painting.
The only explanation sent a chill down the Commander's spine: it was mockery.
The xenos found this slaughter too boring; it was intentionally "holding back," giving its prey a sliver of meaningless "hope" just to increase the thrill of the hunt.
Sure enough, inside Zobayan's cockpit, the frantic static on the augur screen vanished. The display became crystal clear, showing a single, piercing crimson dot. What made Zobayan's hair stand on end was that the dot was directly behind him, so close it felt like it was breathing on his neck.
"It's behind me! It's—"
Zobayan's voice cut off abruptly. A blinding green light consumed his fighter, the last trace of his existence in this world.
Now!
The Commander had no time for grief. Using the fleeting moment Zobayan had bought with his life, he slammed past the throttle gate, pushing the battered fighter to its absolute limit.
"Machine Spirit, hold together!"
He roared, yanking the stick back. The fighter performed a localized Pugachev's Cobra at extreme speed, followed immediately by a snap-roll that defied human physiological limits. Massive G-forces slammed into him, as if an elephant were sitting on his chest.
In that instant, the acceleration hit a terrifying 12G.
The Commander's retinas flooded with blood, and his vision went pitch black. For two whole seconds, his consciousness slipped into the dark, leaving only muscle memory to clamp onto the controls.
When his vision flickered back to life like an old television set, he saw he had succeeded. This dance on the edge of a blade had miraculously allowed him to cut into the inner circle, landing right on the enemy's six o'clock!
Through the cracked canopy, he finally saw the killer of his squadron for the first time. It was a bizarre, moon-shaped craft, shimmering with a heart-stopping green glow. It had no rivets, no seams—it was as smooth as if carved from a single piece of obsidian.
In this moment, the fires of human vengeance converged at his gun muzzles.
"Die!!"
The Commander gritted his teeth and slammed down the trigger. The heavy bolters beneath the wings let out a thunderous roar, pouring out armor-piercing rounds like a storm, carrying the kinetic energy to tear through anything as they lunged at the crescent fighter.
A guaranteed hit. At this distance and this angle, even a god couldn't dodge.
However, what happened next shattered every understanding the Commander had of physics.
The Necron fighter didn't bank, it didn't deflect an aileron, it didn't even change its heading. It was as if an icon on a screen had been dragged by a mouse; without any acceleration process, it instantly shifted sideways several hundred meters.
The bolter fire struck nothing but empty air, tearing useless trails through the clouds.
Then, the crescent fighter came to an abrupt, jarring halt in mid-air before reversing and flipping in a way that completely ignored the laws of inertia.
By the time the Commander reacted, the green crescent was no longer in his sights. It was above him, hovering inverted, the cockpit facing his canopy as if silently mocking humanity: You are but vermin.
Then, it slid gently behind the Commander, like a reaper placing a hand on his shoulder.
It was over.
Watching the green energy begin to pool and glow, the ace pilot felt not fear, but a sense of the absurd.
"Motherfucker" a split second before being decomposed into atoms by the Gauss beam, the Commander uttered his final desperate words, "This isn't aerodynamically possible!"