From the fleets orbiting the exterior of the dyson sphere, a missile was launched. The torpedo sped across real space, arcing away from a brooding Inquisitorial black ship.
A two stage cyclonic torpedo: The death of worlds. The trajectory would take it through the Black Reef’s exterior opening, through its thinning atmosphere and into the artificial sun at its core. The Inquisition’s gunnery officers calculated that the explosive reaction from the destruction of the sun would create enough force to shatter the sphere, destroying it entirely.
Under normal circumstances, at least. But daemon worlds are unnaturally resistant to exterminatus. Like a cancer, the crucible breach grew on the interior of the artificial world. An unstable warp rift directly into the hades gate. On its own, the breach was temporary and reversible, but Deg’is’ik’lik had other plans.
As the cyclonic torpedo impacted the sun, the charge detonated. A titanic explosion ripped across the micro-star, vaporizing it instantly. A shockwave of energy, of unimaginable scale, shot towards the interior surface of the artificial world. But this cataclysmic power was captured, drawn towards the set of six specifically constructed warp anchors. Where the anchors stood, the landscape disintegrated; the sphere itself cracking under the pressure of a dying world. Millions of pieces of debris broke off and spun away into the void. This energy, the death throes of the black reef, was harnessed by the anchors and transmitted to the breach before they crumbled into dust.
And so in the final moments, at the event horizon of defeat, the plan came to fruition. The energies required to complete the transformation of a world as large as the Black Reef could only be supplied by a force as powerful as exterminatus, eagerly supplied by the imperials.
The ritual was complete. The Black Reef had been rebirthed. The landscape was hellish and unnatural, ever shifting, a writhing of reality itself. In absence of a sun, it was lit from within by an unearthly glow. The detached and shattered plates of the sphere held suspended in their moment of destruction by the power of the warp. Every life had been extinguished in an instant.
Every life but one. Deg’is’ik’lik stood at the Center of the newly formed daemon world, the beginnings of a warp storm forming around it, and smiled. This was how the Black Reef was meant to be. This would be the beginning of this galaxy’s undoing, and it started here in the Gulf.