He felt it, those sensations. They were vivid. Intense. Dreadful.

All in all, unpleasant.

  The rumbling shock that transferred upward from the galvanized steel flooring of the ship’s command deck grew worse with every millisecond that passed. At first, it was not so bad, he thought, but his instinct whispered grimly: this is merely the beginning.

The structural steel screeches and quakes like a serpent, propelling bodies into the air effortlessly. The grippy, almost abrasive coating on the floor could not hold onto the sole of his-- or anyone’s boots, and just in a blink of an eye, crashed his body into a wall with a loud bang, followed by visceral crunching noise that emanated from bags of meat and bones crashing into metal.

Fortunately for him, everybody was to be in a full atmospheric combat suit, and whatever remained of the reinforced adamantium exoskeleton prevented his brain from being instantly crushed by the sheer momentum that was applied to the spacefarer’s body.

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Time slowed down, his eyes beady and unfocused, staring into the vast swathe of darkness like jaded glass lenses; the world inside his mind blanked out as it tried to register what just happened for a fraction of a second, yet unfortunately, time to gather himself together is a luxury at this point.

He knew what is still to come, not just with years of experience but with his literal eyes: a wedge-shaped ingot of black metal creeps into his field of vision, closing in rapidly when everything else is at a standstill. He knew it more intimately than anybody else, for he was the first to use one on the battlefield. And the next one. And one after that.

Ah. Those starblasted hogs want him deader than dead.

  A composite armor-piercing projectile swam across the vast black noiselessly, propelling it a muzzle velocity measured in nearly one terajoule of energy as it drove itself into what was left of the citadel’s vast armor plates still shielding the Type C zero-point reactors. Shockwaves came, each mightier than the last: The nanosensors onboard the payload roused awake after a microsecond of delay, confirming successful penetration, then initiated its low-yield nuclear warhead, splitting what’s left of the hull into billions of shards of plastic and composite armor, sending a rain of white-hot sparks splashing on the shield bubble of other ships surrounding it.

Absentmindedly staring, his mind was almost blank yet fully occupied with the spectacle before his eyes, as his vision was filled with a small sun shining on the deck that flares out whips of brilliant yet baleful white of an antimatter explosion. His time has come, and Arslan is powerless in front of it, only able to absently grit his teeth, resenting the irony of it all.