Explosions, destruction, death, the wailing of the dead gods was silenced by the very space around it.
Darkness, darkness encompasses everything. The brighter the light, the deadlier it is.
Blinding lights engulfed the glowing eyes of the Reaper battleships. They can't fire back. They can't even properly move, their enemy surrounded them on all sides and started to rotate like a clock while firing their cannons.
Their position are bombarded without stop. The bombardment is so intense that it may even create a black hole.
They have nowhere to hide, they have no one to call for help. They have nothing and they are but a pig waiting his executioner to deliver the last blow.
The central intelligence of the Reapers are stunned, this level of power far surpassed what they've even fought against on the span of millions of years combined.
This level far surpassed the civilization that created them. They surpassed the leviathans both in terms of power, military might, technology, and battle tactics and even aesthetics if you'll want to include that.
For the very first time since this machine construct or the brain of the whole reapers was first created it experienced fear.
The fear of the unknown as it had an imaginary shiver on its wires. Even with the magnetohydrodynamic cannon of a capital ship Reaper was fired and hit directly what looked like at least for the central machine intelligence an energy shield. The. cannon fire was shrugged off and the consequences it gave to their enemy are but a slight shake and throwing them off the formation most likely due to the force behind the cannon.
The Machine Intelligence can only surrender the fate of this fleet and decided to recall every fleet it sent out.
The whole battle only lasted at most 10 seconds from the moment the whole formation of the Imperium was initiated. But the damage is insane.
The very space itself curved as if a black hole was present. Time literally was affected just by the first salvo of the ships. Time slowed down on this part of the star system.
The power behind the cannons was so powerful that the explosions resulted into a Schwarzschild radius for the epicenter of the explosion which lasted for about a fraction of a second.
A scar on space that will have the humans and alien species in the future jaw drop and be completely in awe of this. They'll be curious on what happened here, what sort of technology or being or beings is or are capable of doing these, literally having the power to curve the space itself is but the last thing you'll want as your enemy.
The 10 second time is certainly more than enough for the starfighters to be launched but they didn't even reached their target as it got blown apart by the intense bombardment from all sides.
On a random starfighter, the crew are talking to each other as they breezed through the floating almost microscopic debris of the destroyed battleships of their enemy. Trying to see if there are still possible survivors or people trying to escape, not that it's needed but just a standard SOP other than doing a routine scan.
"Don't you think this is pretty easy? We haven't even tried to use the full capabilities or even show off our superb fighting formations, yet, the battle is over." said the pilot as he turned on the autopilot and let his copilot plot the course of the starfighter.
"They are probably mercenaries of this galaxy. But that doesn't make sense why we're here fighting them. The colony we have here is hidden and has no foreign contact." replied the copilot who just finished the plotting of the course and turned his seat to face his comrades.
"Anyway, it's not our job to think, that's for those smarty pants. Have you already forgotten about the phrase that our military academy always made us remember? Never question the orders! You're already a Level 2 citizen and from the looks of it you'll finally be a level 1 yet you don't act like one! You should know that our family took thousands of years to attain our Level 3! You should be thankful as you're almost Level 1 already." scolded a repairman as he sat on his chair while shaking his head.
The pilot and copilot just sat there, thinking about something deeply.
"But don't you really think something might be weird regarding our deployment? I mean we have a colony here, just 4 light years away from this star system. I think, these men might've threatened the colony so they sent us. Or, there's an administrative blunder or a blunder in general that happened and we're here to clean someone's mess." theorized the copilot as the mechanic just shook his head once more without batting him an eye before speaking.
"Nevertheless, just keep everything to yourselves. You wouldn't want to have bullet flying to your direction anytime soon right? I heard the comissars of this fleet are pretty brutal and I have no balls to try and see if this is true."
...
The battle ended as fast as it started. The Imperium fleet opened portals and entered it with the portal back to their universe as the destination.
Once they reached it, they used the portal and returned home and the space returned to its original look as if nothing happened.
The Reapers was quick to adjust as the machine intelligence immediately recalled everything and regrouped on some place in the space between galaxies.
They braced for an enemy attack as the formation they used are clearly focused on defense because they put the destroyers and capital ships on overlapping firing range to cover every possible blind spot of each ships.
The machine intelligence is clearly fearful of the not coming enemy. It maintained this position for months, and even years but nothing came not even a probe whatsoever.
This made the machine intelligence theorize things such as the enemy didn't know where are they, or the enemy has no similar fleet of that power and it's the most powerful, and many more.
The machine intelligence then decided to fall asleep and wait for the actual time to wake up once more to continue its job while being constantly in high alert for the signs of the Imperium.
...
Terra, days later after the battle...
Terra is quite the same, nothing major really happened except for a couple of changes in the overall way the things work around here.
A meeting convened by the Primarchs, High Lords, and the Emperor in secret happened and they decided that changes needs to be made on things.
You can't stop changes from happening as evident from the now infamous organization of that technopriest.
Some of the changes are the legalization of the different political factions within the greater Imperium. They, however will be kept under the watchful eyes of different hidden spies and a custodian must always be present on their meetings. The decisions of their organization would also be put under strict audit and they can't have any sort of privacy.
They're like people on the leash just like the Level 5 citizens. But the people on the position that actually knew what happened was giving their absolute support for this change.
It's better to immediately leash and control the dog before it bites you. That's the thing that runs on their mind.
The normal people, those from the Level 1 down to level 5 didn't really paid that much attention to this matter as it wouldn't really affect them in any way.
However, a change that they really paid the most attention in to was a big one. A big change, as big as the change a billion years ago that supported the creation of the Auxiliary army which was actually met with intense resistance mainly from the humans.
This change is of course related to the new round of stimulus package for the poorest of the poor galactic superclusters. Such a thing is considered some sort of blessings from the gods which is technically is.
Regarding the investigation, it's better not talk about it. The custodians are known for their composure yet even they almost cringed on the wrongdoings and list of laws which the organization broke.
What they did is basically what the french did on 1939 ish where they invaded Germany through the Ardennes and just kind of called it a day and retreated.