He tossed a thermite charge into a pool and released its energy, bringing the water to a boil and throwing up a massive cloud of steam.
For someone seeing a thermite charge used like that for the first time, the sight really was a little shocking.
Especially at night—when the pool itself started to glow from the thermite, it even looked strangely dreamlike.
But what they were witnessing now wasn't some small pond. It was a "lake-sea" that covered roughly seven percent of the planet's surface. A single warhead nearly lit up the entire expanse, flaring without pause as it kept evaporating seawater.
Steam poured out in staggering quantities, spreading in all directions.
From a synchronous orbit, the scene looked like an unprecedented spectacle—almost a "miracle" in its own warped way.
If you didn't know what you were looking at, you might even think it was beautiful: immortal mist drifting across the world.
But once the camera zoomed in enough to make the ground-level details clear, it was hell.
A unit that had been about to move out near the Dead Sea—just over three hundred people—were caught closest to it. Their bodies were boiled alive by that terrifying steam.
They were cooked into sludge, and when they collapsed, they softened and sagged like clay dolls left soaking in water.
And somehow, watching people get boiled into mush didn't trigger the same violent nausea.
Compared to earlier footage—soldiers being ripped apart and chewed up by the bugs—this was, in a sick way, less "viscerally" horrifying.
Then the ship shifted its view to the nearest city: a steel forest of towers.
It was smaller than the one Mr. Golden Toilet had been in before—maybe a third the size.
The death fog was rolling in like a tidal bore. At its current speed, it would arrive in less than a second.
Yet the people in the city seemed not to have grasped the danger at all. They looked like they were still preparing to ship supplies to the front.
That made Tessa go cold with urgency. Warn them—now—tell them to brace for impact.
In the next moment, the city's alarms seemed to finally sound. They'd realized something was wrong.
But then she saw smoke rising from the base of the distant metropolis—an urban mass that from far away resembled a colossal iron anthill.
Smoke?
No. Not smoke.
It was superheated steam—so hot it was forcing its way up through the ground.
A heartbeat later, fires broke out. Explosions followed in quick succession—clearly the unimaginable heat had reached some facility and set off a chain reaction.
Tessa watched as huge pipelines bulged and warped, then ruptured, blasting out jets of gas—steam, she assumed.
But when a lick of flame touched that jet, it ignited instantly, roaring into a towering pillar of fire—like natural gas being vented from a drilling rig.
And it wasn't just one place. It was everywhere.
Even water mains—pipes meant for drinking and sanitation—turned into nightmare flamethrowers.
Some kind of combustible gas leak, then?
Wait—
A possibility hit Tessa so hard it made her chest tighten.
If water is boiled, evaporated, turned fully to vapor, and driven past a critical threshold, steam can dissociate into hydrogen and oxygen—gases that are lethal and, worse, highly flammable in the right mix.
And those sudden eruptions of fuel—those might be hydrogen and oxygen, separated from the steam and swirling together—then ignited.
The camera pulled back again.
A vast swath of land was exhaling mist. Here and there, tiny sparks of fire winked into being, then vanished.
And now Tessa could finally hear what had actually happened.
An Imperial force called the Deathwatch had issued an Exterminatus order.
They had launched cyclonic torpedoes to annihilate all surface life on this planet.
The function of the cyclonic torpedo was to boil the planet's water sources—to keep driving the temperature higher until superheated steam blanketed the entire world, scalding and burning every living thing on the surface.
Even the planet's deeper layers were affected. As the steam was compressed and forced past a threshold, it would break down into combustible gases.
Then those gases would be ignited, torching the already cooked world in a second, final burn.
The scattered flashes she was seeing now—those little, fleeting fires—were the earliest effects: the torpedo's initial energy release had dissociated nearby water into flammable gas on the spot. That gas mixed into the boiling steam and drifted outward.
There wasn't much of it yet. It would burn out quickly, and it wouldn't cause a major firestorm.
But once the steam's temperature kept rising—especially after the second cyclonic torpedo struck and accelerated the process—the planet would be "cooked" fast. Combustible gas would flood the atmosphere.
And then the world could be set alight with terrifying ease.
This was Exterminatus.
And on this planet, there were still nearly twenty billion Imperial civilians and soldiers.
They would be boiled in agony—watching their own flesh cook, soften, and slough away—dying, quite literally, as something being prepared in a pot.
And in the end, they would be burned again, erased like garbage tossed into a furnace.
Such a monstrous order—
Tessa's body trembled.
The one who gave it was a butcher, a demon, a devil—
She couldn't accept it. But after hearing the full context, she understood how dire the situation was, and she fell silent.
The other side—daemons—were trying to tear the hell-rift wider. If it wasn't dealt with immediately, if their plan succeeded, that breach would tear open at least this entire star system.
And the Imperium had precedent. They'd seen warp catastrophes before—like the Great Rift that had nearly split the galaxy in two…
So, for the safety of the Imperium, for the safety of the galaxy, destroying one planet and sacrificing twenty billion lives was "worth it," compared to preserving the Imperium's million worlds.
A classic trolley problem: only one track can be chosen.
In that case, the person giving the order shouldn't be painted with pure malice.
Because giving that order was torment, too.
Even if it was to protect the Imperium, the fact remained: he had personally ordered the deaths of tens of billions of lives. That truth could never be erased.
He would spend the rest of his life inside that guilt—
inside nightmares.
And so, as the second cyclonic torpedo was about to fire, Tessa felt pain on her lips.
She'd been biting down too hard. She'd bitten through skin. She could taste blood.
Then—right at the brink of launch—an opening appeared.
The purpose of Exterminatus here was to clear the daemon horde, allowing the Deathwatch to carve a direct path to the core of the hell-rift.
So if there was another way—another method to let Deathwatch reach the rift's central point without having to fight through oceans of daemons—then stopping Exterminatus wasn't impossible.
That alternative wasn't as simple as having his ship pick up the Deathwatch and, using that ghostlike "phasing" ability, jump directly to the target.
There was a problem: his ship couldn't carry that many people.
Correction—people, yes. But the Deathwatch carried significant equipment, and there was no way to haul it all aboard.
As for expanding that wide-area "spectral" ability to cover them as a moving shield—by his own account, the warp's interference made it impossible. He could only maintain it around the ship itself.
But…
There was still a way to open a road for the Deathwatch.
He would use his nature as an Untouchable to carve them a path.
An Untouchable?
Tessa didn't fully understand—he hadn't explained it clearly—but it was a kind of person who countered psychic power. A natural bane to the warp.
He demonstrated it: even the Salamanders around him looked violently uncomfortable, and most ordinary people nearly passed out on the spot.
At first, Tessa didn't really grasp what that meant for fighting daemons—what advantage it gave.
Not until the moment they actually made contact with the enemy.
Daemons with physical bodies dropped out of the air like drones that had suddenly lost signal—systems dead, tumbling to the ground.
And the ghostlike ones—the translucent, mist-thin daemons—simply unraveled, collapsing like fog dispersed by a sudden wind.
And then, the gates of hell—the Rift—were right in front of them.
(End of Chapter)
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