Shadows in the Sand (Warhammer 40k, story)

[BuilderOne]

One held him beneath the shoulders. Another supported his legs. Together they lowered their heads, braced beneath the weight of their armor, and charged. Their boots struck the black glass in perfect unison.

They came to a sudden halt twenty feet short, dust and warped black glass cracking underfoot.

Koron stopped with them, as the absence surrounding him struck the barrier first.

Click to shrink...

It's a hilarious scene. I'm reminded of that "Use your head" meme from Toy Story

"She simply needs to find the last of her armor."

Click to shrink...

Oh? Look like the Lion knows something. Another Chenkov's gun?

 

[Talon88.1]

It's a hilarious scene. I'm reminded of that "Use your head" meme from Toy Story


Oh? Look like the Lion knows something. Another Chenkov's gun?

Click to shrink...

Ha! I had not actually thought of that, but damn it, it fits

And less Chenkov, this ones happening pretty soon.

 

[Fragment of Serenity]

At some point, I really need to have a scene where something along the lines of "the warp means it works this way and there is nothing that can stop it" and the response is "physics says 'get bent, weirdo". The resultant release of energy then cracks the planet in half.

 

[Talon88.1]

At some point, I really need to have a seen where something along the lines of "the warp means it works this way and there is nothing that can stop it" and the response is "physics says 'get bent, weirdo". The resultant release of energy then cracks the planet in half.

Click to shrink...

I can make that happen

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Seventy-Two

---

Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

"She simply needs to find the last of her armor."

Guilliman, one hand braced against the writhing crimson-black flesh beneath him, turned his head toward his brother.

The movement cost him.

Even through the Lion's helm, even with its filters dragging what little purity they could from the arena's diseased air, his breath still rasped against his throat like broken glass.

"...I have no idea who you are talking about."

"Neither do I."

A tumbleweed slowly rolled by, the only sound in the silence.

It was the silence of three demigods, a dying Primarch, and an entire galaxy watching through servo-skull eyes as the absurdity settled between them.

"...Brother."

"Yes," the Lion said. "I know how it sounds."

Angron's growl rolled through the arena, deep enough to shiver the wet floor beneath their boots. His tail dragged behind him, blood hissing as it cut shallow furrows through the living meat.

The Lion did not look away from him.

"But the little whisper-man on my shoulder told me an ally is on her way."

Guilliman stared.

"...What."

Mortarion leaned forward, both hands wrapped around Silence. The great scythe rested easy in his grip, though his hunched back bowed by the smallest measure beneath the weight of rust, rot, and centuries of surrender dressed up as wisdom. Flies crawled through the rents in his armor. Spores drifted from him in lazy, corpse-pale clouds.

"Brother," he rasped, voice wet behind the rebreather's corroded grill, "are you certain your ten-thousand-year nap did not invite an early onset of dementia?"

"I am sound of mind, traitor."

"I am sure." Mortarion's dead eyes flicked toward Guilliman. "And where is this whisper-man now?"

"On my left shoulder."

The Lion's expression did not change.

"He is very small."

The Lion glanced toward his left pauldron.

The little robed figure clung to the edge of the dark green ceramite with both tiny hands, its brown hood tilted up toward him. Within the shadow of that hood, nothing resembling a face could be seen. No eyes or mouth. No gleam of spirit-light.

It whispered again, as though it had taken offense at Mortarion's tone.

The Lion's eyes narrowed.

Curious.

They could not see this entity.

Either way, a topic for later.

The toxin was growing in his chest.

He felt it with every breath. A damp heat behind the ribs. A slow, ugly pressure working its way deeper with each pulse of his hearts. The cuts across his cheek throbbed where Mortarion's rot had taken root, the skin tight and fever-hot beneath the blood.

He did not have much time.

Neither did Guilliman.

Angron was the louder threat. The obvious one. A red storm of muscle, iron, and divine hatred, circling with murder in every step.

But Mortarion was the true problem.

His spores filled the air. His patience poisoned the battlefield. His willingness to strike at Guilliman made every exchange a trap, and every breath the Avenging Son took inside the arena brought him closer to the edge.

For the next few minutes, the Death Lord was the greater danger.

So the Death Lord would fall first.

The Lion lifted the Shield.

Fealty sat low, ready at his hip.

Then the Lord of the First charged.

---

Captain Gabriel's thumb flicked the safety of his bolter off.

All around him, the gathered forces of the Imperium waited.

Silence held sway behind the hastily fortified battlements, not the silence of calm, but the silence of warriors counting heartbeats and ammunition. Astartes stood shoulder to shoulder behind walls that rose chest-high even on their armored frames, thick slabs of ceramite and adamantine dragged into place by servitors and Dreadnoughts. Lower firing ports had been cut for the Skitarii and heavy weapon platforms that filled the gaps between transhuman giants, their optics glowing red through the gloom, their gun-mounts tracking the black horizon with insectile patience.

The walls could withstand many a foe.

But the horizon was black with them.

"Restius," Gabriel said.

Behind him, within the cramped circle that now served as their communication hub, his battle-brother answered without looking up. Cables ran from his armor into a rack of vox-gear and borrowed cogitators, their screens jittering beneath waves of interference. He already knew the question.

It was the same one his captain had asked twice already.

"Enemy forces are estimated at near eleven thousand," Restius said. "Auspex detects roughly three thousand traitors, six thousand cultists, and two thousand demonic signatures."

He swallowed.

A small, human thing, despite the armor, the gene-forged body, and the century of war in his voice.

"Engine acoustics near three hundred. The few scans that have managed to punch through the interference put enemy air cover at over a hundred craft."

"Understood."

There was nothing else to say.

Gabriel flicked the safety back on.

Four hundred Astartes from a dozen Chapters. One hundred Custodes. Six hundred Skitarii. Three hundred heavy weapons platform servitors. Four Custodian Dreadnoughts.

With generous rounding, fifteen hundred loyalist soldiers stood against eleven thousand foes striking from three sides, while demons and demigods battled behind a barrier of the foulest warp sorcery.

And their hopes lay in the places Gabriel would have preferred to avoid.

Four of the five Grey Knights knelt near the barrier, silver armor washed blue-white by the ritual circle glowing beneath them. Their heads were bowed. Their voices were low. The air around them bent and shivered as they forced a linked portal open across impossible distance, tying this nightmare beachhead to Tigurius and the gathering reserves back at Imperial HQ.

Enough, hopefully, to allow a withdrawal once the barrier came down and the Primarchs were secured.

If the portal stabilized.

If the line held.

If the barrier fell before the enemy reached them.

Gabriel looked past the Grey Knights to the wall itself. The sorcery rose like a wound in the world, crimson-black and wetly luminous, its surface crawling with half-formed faces that pressed outward and vanished before they could scream. Beyond it, shapes moved. Giants. Monsters. Brothers killing brothers beneath a sky that had forgotten mercy.

They needed time.

Time was rapidly becoming a resource he could no longer afford.

Four minutes to contact.

His gaze climbed toward the summit of the arches, where another hope, a heretical one, dragged himself up a wall of bone and screaming flesh with his bare hands.

No banner. No litany. No angelic light.

One mortal-shaped absence crawling toward the heart of a god-wound with explosives on his back.

Gabriel flicked the safety off.

If he lived through this, his after-action report was going to be a nightmare.

---

Koron grunted and kicked his foot loose from another snapping mouth.

Its teeth cracked against his armor plates as the grapple on his left arm whined, hauling him higher along the screaming arch. The bone beneath him flexed like muscle. Veins as thick as power cables pulsed under the surface, carrying red light upward in ugly, rhythmic surges.

'Thirty-eight feet to the top,' Sasha said, her diagnostics and computations burning through his available threads as she devoured the data they had accumulated on the warp barrier. 'You have a plan?'

'Yeah,' he replied down the link, pushing off again and covering several feet in a single jump.

'...And that plan would be?'

'...In development.'

'Lovely.'

'You got one?'

'...No.'

'See? We'll be fine.'

Moments later, they reached the top of the arches.

The apex was not a platform.

It was an altar.

The eight arches met in a crown of bone and blood three hundred feet above the arena floor, forming a broad platform of living matter. An eight-pointed ritual circle had been carved across its surface, each line packed with black rot, red ash, and clotted blood.

Twelve robed figures knelt around it.

They had been human once, or near enough for the distinction to be a cruelty. Their bodies were swollen beneath plague-stiffened vestments, shoulders hunched, spines bent, voices bubbling through lungs that had long ago forgotten clean air. Flies crawled across the waxy skin of their throats. Every chant came out wet.

Around them stood twelve demons.

Blood-red. Horned. Too tall. Too lean. Massive blades hung low in their clawed hands, the molten edges dripping light onto the meat beneath their feet. Their heads twitched with barely contained hatred, their attention split between the priests they guarded and the mortal crawling closer to their god-work.

In the center of the circle lay another demon.

It had been opened from throat to groin.

Its ribs had been pulled wide like the petals of some obscene flower, and within the red ruin of its body, something green and wet bloomed. A plague-heart pulsed there, fat and rancid, each beat pushing red light and corpse-yellow fog through the lines of the circle.

Koron made his way closer to the inner barrier as another section of screaming flesh tried to bite his boot.

"Rael," he said over the vox. "I found the source."

Static hissed back, broken by the distant roars of Primarchs battling below.

"Describe it."

"Twelve priests around a ritual circle. Nurgle markings, I think. A dozen big red horned demons with swords standing guard."

"Bloodletters," Rael said.

"Lovely name," Koron muttered, watching the demons turn toward him. "One more in the center of the circle, with its chest slit open."

Below, Rael went very still.

Koron's sensors crawled across the scene, marking heat blooms, warp-flare, pulse timing, output channels. The circle was not simply glowing. It was breathing. Every line fed into the opened demon, and every pulse from the thing inside it fed back into the barrier below.

"It's not dead," Koron said, "though judging by the screaming, it wants to be. Its ribs are spread out, and there's something growing inside the cavity. Green. Wet. Looks like a tumor pretending to be a flower. Every time it pulses, the circle lights up red and green."

No answer came.

"Rael?"

Below, behind his silver helm, Rael's face lost what little color remained to it.

"That is not a barrier," the Grey Knight said.

Gabriel turned toward him.

"What is it?"

Rael's gauntlet tightened around his spear.

"A shared channel."

Koron looked across the apex, toward the opened Bloodletter and the plague blooming inside its chest.

Sasha's voice was very quiet in his ear.

'Two gods through one wound.'

Rael heard only Koron's breathing.

Then the mortal whispered, "They built this to kill a Primarch."

"No," Rael said. "They built it to make the killing mean something."

His gaze rose to the screaming wall, to the ritual meat, to the vast enclosed arena below where brothers murdered brothers for the eyes of a watching galaxy.

"This is not a cage. It is a mouth."

Above, Koron nodded and advanced.

The Bloodletters moved with him.

Their molten blades came up from their sides, slow and eager, dragging trails of orange light across the meat beneath their clawed feet. One by one, they spread into a line between him and the priests, horned heads twitching, black tongues sliding over teeth made for tearing.

"Rael," Koron said, "how dangerous are Bloodletters?"

"Lesser demons," came the quick, professional reply. "No ranged attacks. No psyker might. Powerful melee combatants. Inside your null-aura, they should be significantly weakened."

Then a slight grunt came over the line, almost swallowed by static and the thunder of battle below.

"Even so, do not let them close."

"Got it." Koron rolled his shoulders, feeling the meltabombs shift against his back. "I'm ready to hit the barrier up here on your mark."

"Copy."

Both arms came up.

The grapples fired into the crimson flesh, drills biting deep into the warp-born meat just outside the ritual barrier. The arch screamed beneath the impact, a dozen mouths opening along its surface before the drills tore through tongue, gum, and bone.

Koron crouched low, settling into a runner's stance as the lines pulled taut.

Below him, three hundred feet down, the gathered forces of the Imperium turned as one toward the barrier. Astartes raised bolters. Custodes lifted guardian spears. Skitarii targeting lenses burned red through the smoke. Servitor weapon platforms whined as their barrels spun up.

'It's weird, not having the gravity-plates,' Koron said.

'I wouldn't know,' Sasha replied, keeping her voice light even as the numbers continued to burn across his vision. 'I never had to worry about inner ears. I had gyroscopes.'

'Lucky. They—'

"Now!" Rael shouted over the comm.

The entire Imperial force opened fire.

The world became thunder.

Heavy bolters roared. Lascannons screamed white through the poisoned air. Plasma burst against the barrier in miniature suns, while guardian spears, autocannons, volkite, melta, and every blessed weapon the Imperium could bring to bear hammered the crimson-black wall from below.

Koron launched.

His grapples reeled in hard, dragging him forward as his boots tore through meat and gristle. For one savage instant, he was flying toward the ritual circle, the Bloodletters waiting beyond it with their blades raised and their hatred burning bright enough to stain the air.

Then he stopped dead twenty feet from the ward as his absence smashed into it.

Warp-lightning screamed across the invisible surface as the edge of his null-zone smashed into the barrier. The impact threw blue-white fractures through the air, crackling outward from a point he could not touch but could feel pushing back against every part of him.

Koron growled under his breath.

His boots skidded backward through the living arch. Meat tore beneath his heels. Both grapple lines groaned as their winches hauled him forward, motors whining, housings heating, every internal warning flaring yellow across his vision.

Every muscle in his body strained.

Every cybernetic tendon locked.

And inch by inch, he pushed against the damned wall.

Seconds dragged themselves apart in his eyes. His teeth clenched hard enough to ache as the ward pressed against the border of his existence, trying to find something to grip and finding only Sasha's silver thread braided through the hole where a soul should have been.

Come on you bitch, let me in!

A fraction of give.

Koron hauled himself forward harder, shoulders and back bunching beneath the armor as he shouted over the link.

"It's giving! Keep going!"

He did not hear a reply.

He did not need to.

The roar of weapons fire doubled as every gun turned from the perimeter and unloaded into the barrier.

Another fraction.

Before him, the Bloodletters shifted. Clawed hands tightened around hilts of bone and brass as they gathered around the spiderweb of cracks spreading from his contact point. Their rage rolled against him, hot and eager, but inside the edge of his null-zone it came muted, stripped of divine music, reduced to animal violence and hate.

Behind them, the priests voices rose in a guttural wail. Bloated hands reached toward the bruised sky. Fluid-filled throats warbled and tore as their chant became panic, their god-work shuddering beneath a pressure it had never been meant to endure.

But the cracks remained.

Growing with every second, as his null-zone chewed deeper into the wall.

"Almost in!" Koron shouted, feeling the heat of his grapple winches seep through the metal and into the flesh beneath.

'What are you planning to do about the demons waiting with swords?' Sasha asked, eyeing the eight-foot-tall demonic blenders.

'I'll figure that out once it matters!' he snapped back, sweat rolling down his neck as he—

The barrier cracked apart in a shower of manifested Warp, as though the air itself had become glass.

The Bloodletters charged.

Taloned toes dug into screaming flesh. Tongues lolled from fanged mouths as molten blades descended.

Koron hurled himself left.

Molten edges scraped across the blue-white flare of his shield. His shoulder hit the floor hard enough to jar the breath from his lungs. He rolled through the impact, legs tucked tight, then pushed off with both hands and sprang back to his feet in one smooth motion.

The demons did not hesitate.

They came baying for his blood, howls scraping a chill down his metal spine, their blades dragging fire through the air as the cracked ward bled dying light around them.

For a moment, his fingers inched towards his pistol, only for cold, ugly facts to stop him.

Whatever was happening, gravity was strange beyond his twenty feet. Firing the pistol outside the zone could be disastrous.

Even the smallest possibility of the displacement shot ending up in an ally or himself, meant he could not take the risk.

Instead, he would have to ignore Rael's advice.

Predictive models bloomed across his sight, ghostly images born of mathematics.

In some, he dodged.

In others, he blocked.

In some, he won.

In others, he died.

He was an engineer.

A military one, yes, but an engineer before anything else.

But even engineers had to know how to fight.

And for once, there was nothing here to try and save.

The genestealers had worn the faces of humanity, predators pretending to be people so they could better devour them.

Chaos cultists and Astartes might be saved, given time and resources, of which there was never enough.

But demons?

True, warp-born demons?

They were shards of powerful monsters that ate and drank the suffering of others. Ancient predators that gorged themselves on the wellspring of life itself.

No.

Not with Guilliman so close to the edge.

Not with Angron's screaming humanity still ringing in his ears.

'Sasha,' he said, their time compressed as he spun all six threads of his mind into one unified rope.

'Be ready to take over the cybernetic limbs.'

'Ready.'

His arms shifted, plates opening, retracting, overlapping. Tools withdrew deeper into the forearm. Armor snapped into place over the knuckle actuators, metacarpal frame, and articulated finger struts with hard, final clicks.

Sensation faded.

Enough to feel.

No longer enough to bother.

The work they were about to do did not need exacting precision after all.

---

The Bloodletter knew prey.

Prey screamed.

Prey ran.

Prey bled hot and bright and beautiful beneath the eye of the Lord of Skulls. Prey filled the air with fear, and fear became rage, and rage became song, and the song became the hand that drove the blade.

This one had fear.

It had smelled it.

The little metal thing had come through the cracked ward stinking of sweat, pain, burned machinery, and mortal terror. It had been small. Breakable. Wrong, yes, wrong in the way cold ash was wrong inside a furnace, but still prey.

Then something changed.

The Bloodletter charged.

Its hellblade fell.

The prey moved.

It had seen faster prey. It had seen slower.

This was... wrong.

The prey moved correctly.

The blade scraped blue-white light and found no meat. The prey rolled beneath the cut, rose without the stuttering panic mortals carried in their bones, and turned toward the next strike before the first had finished missing.

The Bloodletter snarled.

Around the prey, the song thinned.

The red thunder of the Blood God did not vanish. Nothing could silence Him. Nothing could silence rage. But within the circle of the prey's absence, the song became distant, as though heard through stone and deep water. The Bloodletter's limbs felt heavier. Its hatred remained, but the joy of it guttered.

The prey looked up.

The thing's helm gave no expression.

Its breathing steadied.

Its hands opened and closed once, plates locking over metal fingers with small, final clicks.

The Bloodletter saw paths then, born of instinct carved into its essence.

It saw the little thing dead beneath twelve blades. It saw its skull split. Its limbs pulled free. Its spine torn loose and raised high beneath the red sky.

But it also saw other endings.

A blade turned by a wrist that should not have known the angle.

A knee destroyed by a strike too small to matter until the leg failed.

A throat opened not by strength, but by timing.

A hellblade caught for half a heartbeat, just long enough for the wielder to die.

The Bloodletter hissed.

The prey was still sweating fear inside its flesh.

It simply no longer listened.

The Bloodletter lunged again, and this time the little metal thing came forward to meet it.

It swept its greatsword down, aiming to split the metal thing from shoulder to hip. It was heavier inside the thing's empty space. Slower.

Fast enough still.

Until it was not.

The thing's arm snapped out like a spear, orange-white light bursting along its length.

Heat bloomed across the Bloodletter's neck.

Heat, pain, and the tickle of ants chewing beneath its flesh.

As it discorporated, it saw what the prey had done, and its lips peeled into a feral grin.

Not prey.

Good.

A death by a fellow predator was worthy.

---

The thermal blades jutting from Koron's forearms snarled with captured heat, the faintest shimmer of gravitic distortion thrumming alongside the glow.

His legs bent.

He moved under the beheaded demon as it fell, using its body to hide from the next of its kin already charging.

The Bloodletter's blade cleaved through its dead brother's torso with ease.

Then it howled as Koron's left-hand blade sank into its thigh, his right burying itself in the demon's chest before ripping down in a spray of black blood and false organs.

Two down.

Ten to go.

One Bloodletter on the right.

One on the left.

Right high, toward his neck.

Left low, toward his hips.

Arm blades catch. Right leg forward.

A third demon.

The blade-tip speared through the remains of its brother and buried itself in Koron's chest, his shield flaring as it caught the strike.

It had pulled the same trick he had.

Plates opened along his arms. His organic right arm emerged, the left little more than the shoulder and six inches of stump where the regrowing limb ended.

The grav-shear formed above his right palm, tiny emitters flaring to life as the sphere of shaped gravity crashed into the demon's blade.

He had expected resistance.

The crimson energy he had found burning beneath Angron's flesh had curled the boundary into smoke.

This did not.

The sword shredded apart beneath the tidal forces.

The broken splinters spun away as the shear buried itself in the Bloodletter's chest, coring out the warp beast's spine in a spray of black blood and burning marrow.

Three down.

Nine to go.

Two seconds before the next reached him.

The demon on the right skittered its blade up his forearm, snapping the edge toward his chest.

Duck. Close the gap.

Spiked knee rising to create distance.

Tilt two degrees off-center. Half step right. Full step left. Slide past the knee strike.

Right cyberlimb hooks under and lifts.

Balance taken.

Left cyberlimb fires at the second demon.

Lightning crackles.

Thunder claps.

Not dead.

Right arm pushes grav-shear into the lifted demon's hips and up through the chest cavity.

Dead.

Four down.

Eight to go.

New contact.

Left arm catches greatsword. Hurls over back.

Demon deflects.

Half second bought.

Two demons sweeping wide to flank.

Survival odds decreasing.

Wounded demon snaps spiked tail.

Purposefully fall back over it. Cyberlimbs catch. Rebound.

New contact's sword misses by three centimeters.

Grapple snaps out. Buries itself in the demon's skull. Catches on horn.

Pull.

Roll over its back.

Distance between flankers.

Thermal/grav-shear forearm blade cuts through its neck on the follow-through.

Five down.

Seven to go.

Wounded demon: one-point-two meters away. Advancing.

Two flankers: line ruined. Charging. Impact in two-point-nine seconds.

More demons charging. Wider angle. Encirclement in three-point-two seconds.

Predicted strikes multiplied across his sight.

Twelve.

Twenty-six.

Fifty-three.

Survival odds collapsing.

Untenable.

Change the field.

Ritual circle disruption: best option.

Distance: thirteen-point-three meters.

Demons slower.

Estimated activity window: four seconds.

Enough.

Meltabomb timer: two-second delay.

Through ritual circle.

Air contamination outside null-radius: extreme.

Inside radius: nominal.

Bomb activated.

Release.

Helmet audio sensors auto-muted.

---

The explosion above was distant, dull even to Abaddon's transhuman hearing.

The result, however, was not.

The barrier visibly flickered.

He cast his senses toward it, holding his features in the calm, implacable mask he wore for the servo-skulls.

Something had happened at the anchor point above the arena.

Abaddon looked to the corpse-worshipping fools beyond the wall, their weapons silent for the moment, their hope not yet brave enough to become sound.

Below, the Lord of the First still battled the Red Angel and the Death Lord.

Abaddon had to admit, the First was an instrument of martial skill without peer. His bladework was a thing of terrible, cold beauty, his footwork precise yet far from predictable. Every step denied certainty. Every cut punished assumption.

As much as he hated the thought, Abaddon was not too proud to recognize fact.

If he faced the Lion with only a blade, the First would take his head in six moves.

Which was why Abaddon never intended to face him with only a blade.

Setting the thought aside, he cast his senses up the stream of warp energy, feeling the joined, writhing threads of the gods power beneath his fingertips.

Khorne's blunt wrath, all heat and motion and copper in the mouth.

Nurgle's touch, slow and spoiled, bile pooling at the back of the throat.

He could feel it now.

See it.

The smoking ruin of his creation.

How?

How?!

The barrier was intact. Those blasted Grey Knights were still below, and the power they had displayed so far was nothing compared to the might of two gods pouring themselves into the rite, eager to see the last sons of the Anathema laid low.

The central runes had been blasted apart. The priests were little more than bloated, pus-oozing piles of gore. The Bloodletters had vanished, their essence sent screaming back to their father.

The other seven points of the greater rite remained, but without the central nexus, they were running on whatever power had already been banked.

A dying machine still spinning because momentum had not yet abandoned it.

But more importantly...

No souls existed within the enclosed space.

No intruder.

No martyr.

No assassin.

No witch-light. No offering. No lingering scream.

Only damage.

Only absence.

What had happened?

---

Koron gulped down air, wiping sweat from his brow before his helm snapped shut.

The central runes were gone.

The rest of the massive, complex rune-circle was still intact.

And the barrier was still up.

"Rael," he said, grunting as he pulled two more meltabombs from his back. "Sending you my video feed. Tell me what else I have to blow up."

 

[zpiderpig]

Threadmark?

 

[Talon88.1]

Threadmark?

Click to shrink...

Gah! Added, thanks for the catch!

 

[BuilderOne]

"Rael," he said, grunting as he pulled two more meltabombs from his back. "Sending you my video feed. Tell me what else I have to blow up."

Click to shrink...

Any engineer worth his salt knows 2 things: how to build, and how to blow things up

 

[Talon88.1]

Any engineer worth his salt knows 2 things: how to build, and how to blow things up

Click to shrink...

Damn skippy
And meltabombs are very user friendly.

 

[Talon88.1]

Chapter Seventy-Three

---

Reminder dear listeners, the Voxbox remains open at all times!

---

Guilliman could feel the moment approaching.

Heat gathered across his brow, distinct from the fever-furnace burning beneath his skin as his body fought Mortarion's toxins. Every breath scraped hot through his lungs. Tension drew tight across his neck and shoulders as he watched Lion duck, turn, and parry beneath the unrelenting assault of Angron and the Death Lord.

Silence hooked against the Shield's edge with a shriek of metal and diseased bone, dragging Lion's guard wide and forcing him to answer Mortarion while Angron's blade was already screaming down toward his exposed flank.

Lion twisted beneath it.

Angron's cloven hoof stamped into the stone where he meant to step, pulverizing the arena floor and denying him the advance. Broken stone leapt beneath the impact. Mortarion used the stolen instant to withdraw, wings spreading behind him through the drifting smoke, ragged membranes shedding greasy droplets into the air.

They were adapting.

For all the hatred between the two demon Primarchs—for all the snarled insults, contemptuous glances, and ancient bitterness—they were learning how best to fight the First.

The realization chilled Guilliman more deeply than Mortarion's poison.

Lion vanished.

For an instant there was only shadow beneath Angron's blade, then a swirl of green leaves and cold silver rain swept across the scorched arena floor. The air smelled suddenly of wet earth and deep forests, impossibly clean amid blood, ash, and plague.

He reappeared behind Mortarion.

Dark green plate emerged from the rain like something ancient stalking between trees, and the Shield drove forward toward the Death Lord's spine.

Angron had been waiting.

His barbed tail came around with the force of a siege ram.

It smashed into Lion's side.

Ceramite shrieked beneath the impact. Plates buckled inward. Guilliman heard the crack even over the roar of battle, followed by something far quieter.

A grunt.

Blood snapped through the air in a bright crimson arc from wounds punched beneath the broken plate.

For a moment, Lion lost his balance.

Against almost any other foe in the galaxy, even that would have meant nothing.

Lion was already correcting. One boot scraped across shattered stone. His shoulders turned. The Shield was already coming back into line, sword rising with it, every movement economical and exact despite the blood spilling down his flank.

Against a demon Primarch, a heartbeat was an eternity.

Mortarion took a single backward step.

Then drove the spiked haft of Silence into Lion's chest.

Plague-bone struck ceramite with a wet, splintering crack.

The breastplate split.

Guilliman saw the impact travel through his brother's body. Saw his spine bow beneath it. Saw black-green fragments of armor spin away trailing blood.

Then he vanished again as shadow swallowed him.

Cold rain hissed against scorched stone. Leaves tumbled through smoke that had never known a forest. He emerged on the far side of the arena, several dozen meters away, Shield raised and sword held low at his side.

He gave the wound nothing.

No bent posture.

No ragged breath.

Lion stood as he always stood: straight-backed, silent, and composed, as though pain itself required permission before it could touch him.

The blood betrayed him.

It ran from beneath the cracked breastplate in thin streams, slipping across the plates of his abdomen before pattering steadily onto the stone.

Guilliman nearly stepped forward, stopping only as his hand tightened around empty air.

Damn the lack of a weapon.

Damn the poison burning through his veins, the torn flesh beneath his armor, the weakness that made every movement feel as though Mortarion had poured molten iron into his bones.

His brother had crossed ten thousand years to save his life.

Like hell would Guilliman stand here and watch him be ground down.

He shifted his weight forward—

An explosion tore through the arena from above.

The vaulted darkness overhead flashed white.

Something enormous ruptured beyond the arches, and broken flesh and bone came raining down in screaming chunks. Demonic howls struck the barrier. Severed limbs tumbled end over end through the smoky air. Sundered souls burned from within as they fell, flesh collapsing into sparks and greasy black ash before they ever reached the ground.

The barrier flickered as an intricate spiderweb of cracks raced across its surface.

Guilliman stared upward.

Outside the field, his sons moved almost instantly.

Power weapons hammered into the weakening barrier.

Blue-white lightning crawled across its surface beneath each strike. Terminators leaned into their blows with both hands, armored boots grinding trenches into the floor. Dreadnought fists crashed against it like artillery shells, each impact sending concentric fractures racing farther through the failing field.

Bolter fire thundered beyond them.

Someone was shouting.

Then another voice.

Then dozens.

For the first time since the barrier had sealed around them, Guilliman could clearly hear the battle outside enough to distinguish men from gunfire.

Behind his helm, Guilliman felt a grin begin to form.

His eyes found Abaddon.

The Warmaster still sat upon his throne as though the battle beneath him were some private performance staged for his amusement. Black plate swallowed the arena's failing light, broken only by baroque ridges of gold and the dull gleam of trophies worked into the armor. His pale face remained fixed upon the summit of the arches.

Guilliman followed his gaze.

Another explosion rolled through the small platform.

Muscle jumped in its seams. Dust spilled from the arches in pale curtains.

A second blast followed.

Then a third.

Each detonation punched deeper into the platform above, cracking support ribs and sending slabs of warp-flesh tumbling against the barrier. The structure groaned with every impact, bone grinding against bone.

By the fourth, Guilliman could see daylight through the fractures.

A section of the upper platform buckled inward, scattering rubble and burning fragments across the barrier below.

Still insufficient to tear the structure completely apart.

Enough, however, for Guilliman to finally see something on Abaddon's face.

Nothing so crude as surprise.

The Warmaster had carried the Long War for ten thousand years. Discipline had been carved into him alongside hatred.

His expression remained carved from pale stone.

Only the fingers of the Talon of Horus moved, the great claws flexing against the arm of the iron throne.

The barrier cracked further.

It bowed inward under another impact, its translucent surface rippling like glass caught beneath an ocean. Fractures crawled through it in branching lines of white and violet while the field screamed under the strain.

Beyond it, his sons.

Astartes roared their defiance through bolter fire and battlecry. Custodians struck in grim silence between shouted commands, auramite flashing through smoke and weapon-light. Dreadnoughts hammered the failing wall with fists meant to crack bunkers.

The arena trembled beneath them.

Then shadow fell across Guilliman, colder than the smoke overhead as the warmth bled from the air around him.

His gaze snapped upward.

Black ceramite filled his vision first, layered in cruel ornamentation and edged in gold dulled by ten thousand years of war. His eyes climbed past the trophies, the chains, the sigils of the Chaos United, until they reached Abaddon's face.

Close now.

Close enough for Guilliman to see the fine lines around those pale eyes.

Close enough to smell scorched metal, old blood, and the ozone reek of Warp-tainted machinery.

The Talon of Horus hung above him.

Its immense fingers were spread wide, each claw a razor-edged blade of black metal catching the strobing light of the dying barrier.

Abaddon looked down at him.

"Enough theater."

The Talon drove downward.

Its fingers folded together as they descended, forming a spearpoint aimed directly at the center of Guilliman's chest.

He saw exactly what Abaddon intended.

Punch through the breastplate, then close the claw and tear his spine out through the front of his body.

Guilliman had enough time to understand it.

A streak of sunlight through smoke.

Abaddon screamed.

The sound tore from him raw and furious as his killing blow was knocked off course inches from Guilliman's chest.

The Emperor's Sword jutted through the Talon.

Golden fire erupted from the wound.

Black metal glowed around the blade. Flesh beneath it blistered and split, spraying blood that hissed into steam before it reached the ground. The flames clung greedily to the ancient gauntlet, pouring through cracks in its armor like molten metal.

Abaddon staggered at the same moment the barrier came apart, shattering inward in a storm of luminous fragments.

His sons charged through them.

Terminators thundered across broken stone, each footfall heavy enough to shake dust from the fractured arches. Dreadnoughts followed through the breach like walking fortress towers, armored shoulders smashing loose masonry aside as weapons blazed over them.

Custodians came in gold.

Among the ruin near the breach, Acastian rested on one knee, his throwing arm still extended.

Guilliman looked from him to the sword buried through Abaddon's gauntlet.

The mad bastard had thrown the Emperor's Sword like a javelin.

Abaddon clawed at the flames crawling across the Talon.

His free hand closed around the burning metal.

Fire leapt onto it instantly.

He ripped it away with a snarl, armor smoking as ancient, animal instinct shouted its warning: touch the wound, tear away what burns.

The Emperor's fire cared nothing for instinct.

Guilliman rose up.

His right hand closed around the sword's hilt.

Heat flooded through his arm and into his chest, fierce enough that for an instant he thought the blade had set his veins alight.

Then he understood.

Mortarion's poison recoiled, the Warp-spoil burned from his blood in shrieking motes of corruption. The fever eating his organs broke beneath the golden heat, toxin after toxin incinerated as the Sword's radiance poured through him.

His back straightened.

His breath came easier.

His vision sharpened.

Guilliman twisted the blade free.

Abaddon snarled as the wound through the Talon tore wider.

Metal screamed.

Black blood sprayed.

Drach'nyen came for Guilliman's head.

The Emperor's Sword met it.

Fire struck shadow.

The collision detonated across the arena.

Golden flame surged from Guilliman's blade while darkness poured from Drach'nyen in writhing sheets. The air between them warped, screaming beneath forces that had hated one another since before either warrior had been born.

Guilliman rolled the strike aside.

Then riposted.

The Sword carved across Abaddon's breastplate.

Protective fields burst around the Warmaster in concentric flashes. One after another they shattered, dying in sparks as the blade crossed them, until golden fire kissed black armor and left a molten line burning across Abaddon's chest.

Shadow engulfed him.

He vanished.

Guilliman turned—

Abaddon reappeared twenty paces away amid a curl of black flame.

His lips had peeled back from yellowed teeth.

He flexed the Talon.

Only two of the five fingers answered properly.

Guilliman stepped toward him.

His knee struck the floor.

The strength that had flooded through him vanished almost as quickly as it had come.

The fire had cleansed him, but his body remained a ruin.

Pain surged through his abdomen. Freshly repaired muscle screamed around half-knitted wounds. His lungs convulsed as though offended by the very concept of continued service.

Then the arena disappeared beneath gunfire.

Bolters hammered. Adrathic weapons spat annihilating brilliance. Melta fire turned drifting debris to vapor. Plasma howled overhead while las-fire stitched red scars through the air.

Every weapon converged upon Abaddon, Angron, and Mortarion.

Gold slammed into place around Guilliman.

Custodian shields locked edge to edge.

Guardian spears lowered over them.

Broad auramite shoulders filled his vision as the Ten Thousand braced themselves between their wounded Primarch and the Warmaster.

Hands seized Guilliman beneath the arms and across his armor, and hauled him backward. Several Custodians strained together, dragging him with every scrap of gene-wrought strength their bodies possessed while others closed ranks over the space he had occupied.

Somewhere beyond them, an officer was screaming for the Lion to disengage.

Dreadnoughts answered.

Ancient war machines lumbered into the melee, fists wrapped in crackling power fields. One crashed into Angron's flank hard enough to shift the demon Primarch several inches. Another drove itself toward Mortarion through clouds of plague-smoke, armor already corroding beneath the fumes.

More Custodians flooded into the opening.

A wall of auramite and burning guardian spears formed itself between two Primarchs and damnation.

There was no doctrine for this.

No sensible battle plan.

Only bodies.

Only seconds.

Only men placing themselves where death would have to go through them first.

Abaddon strode into the wall.

He raised one hand before his face.

Obsidian wards flared around him.

Bolter shells vanished against them. Plasma burst into sheets of blue-white fire. Adrathic beams twisted apart and disappeared into hungry darkness.

Abaddon kept walking.

His teeth showed through the glare.

Then he reached the Custodians.

They met him together.

Guardian spears stabbed toward his throat, his hearts, the flexible joints beneath his arms. Misericordia blades flashed toward gaps in his plate. Weapons wrought by artisans whose crafts had required generations to perfect struck with the precision of warriors bred from birth for a single purpose.

They died.

Drach'nyen moved.

The blade carried the shadow of humanity's first murder.

The death of empires lived within its edge.

A demonic weapon that had once forced even the Emperor of Mankind to pay a terrible price.

Guardian spears met it and came apart.

Power fields burst.

Auramite opened beneath the blade as though some unseen hand had drawn a line through molten wax. Defensive shields unraveled into streams of fading light.

One Custodian lost his spear.

Then his arm.

Then his head.

Another drove his weapon into Abaddon's shoulder even as Drach'nyen entered beneath his ribs.

A third caught the demon blade upon his shield. The same stroke divided shield, arm, and torso.

Abaddon advanced through them.

Yet every meter cost him.

Adrathic beams chewed at his wards.

Guardian spears struck his plate.

Bolter shells burst across his joints.

Blades forced him to parry.

Bodies forced him to step around them.

Every Custodian demanded a motion.

A turn.

A strike.

A fraction of thought.

Each death bought fractions of a second.

Those fractions were all Guilliman needed.

Behind the wall of mankind's greatest warriors, he retreated.

Every step sickened him.

Bile rose in his throat. His lungs burned from poisons freshly purged. Stitched organs pulled painfully inside his abdomen while bones still knitted beneath damaged muscle and reinforced plate.

The Apothecarion had rebuilt him with skill, desperation, and what Guilliman strongly suspected was mounting personal resentment.

Four days.

The number surfaced with absurd clarity.

Four days since his previous battle with Abaddon.

Four days since he had been crucified against the wall of a Dark Age facility.

Four days between that and an arena deathmatch involving two demon Primarchs and the Emperor-damned Warmaster.

He could almost hear Calliade.

The Apothecary's voice emerged from memory with perfect, infuriating precision.

Bed rest.

Limited exertion.

Allow the organs to knit.

Try, for once in your impossibly long and catastrophically irresponsible life, to remain in one location.

Guilliman suspected Calliade might genuinely weld him to a bulkhead after this.

The threat had begun to seem medically reasonable.

His sons opened a path ahead.

Armored hands caught him whenever his legs faltered, one beneath his arm, another pressed against his back, half carrying him toward the portal burning at the far end of the arena.

The Grey Knights stood around it like statues carved from silver.

Warp-light spilled between them, the portal's edges twisting through colors human eyes had never evolved to understand. Psychic wards burned across the floor around their boots while the opening shuddered under the strain of being maintained inside a place so saturated with Chaos.

Safety lay through it.

Or something sufficiently close.

Behind him came the sound of Custodians dying.

Guilliman glanced over his shoulder.

Abaddon was still advancing.

Slowly.

Too slowly.

Guilliman's eyes narrowed.

A guardian spear stabbed toward the Warmaster's throat.

Abaddon caught it upon the Talon, twisted, and tore its wielder forward into Drach'nyen.

Another Custodian attacked.

Abaddon killed him too.

Measured.

Deliberate.

Almost leisurely.

Guilliman knew how fast Abaddon could move.

More importantly, he knew the bastard could teleport.

Twenty paces had disappeared beneath shadow moments earlier.

The Warmaster could have crossed this distance already.

He had chosen not to.

Understanding settled into place.

Abaddon was savoring it.

The Ten Thousand were trophies laid conveniently across his path, and he had every confidence that Guilliman could be reached whenever he wished.

He intended to let the Primarch approach escape.

Let hope take shape.

Then appear before him.

Face to face.

Because Abaddon would want to see Guilliman understand.

A thought entered Guilliman's mind.

Reckless.

Desperate.

Tactically obscene.

He could think of several passages of the Codex Astartes that would object on principle.

Guilliman looked once toward the portal.

Then back toward Abaddon.

Beneath his brother's helm, his grin returned.

He gave the order.

---

It was almost refreshing, being able to simply let loose and kill.

So much of Abaddon's existence was politics wearing the skin of war.

Ensuring none of the Four went too long without the proper sacrifice. Measuring what favor might be purchased with blood and what debt would be created by accepting it. Remembering every oath, bargain, insult, promise, threat, and account cultivated across ten thousand years of the Long War.

Always watching.

Always measuring.

How he could win.

How he could lose.

How the innumerable currents of destiny and history coiled around one another until cause became consequence became cause again, an Ouroboros forever devouring its own tail and somehow remaining whole.

Such was the nature of the Warp.

A monumental headache.

Killing was honest by comparison.

There was something beautifully uncomplicated about driving Drach'nyen through a man and feeling the resistance disappear.

And the opportunity to butcher the golden warriors of the Corpse-King was a rare pleasure indeed.

They came at him without hesitation.

Auramite flashed beneath the weapon-fire filling the arena, each Custodian rendered momentarily incandescent as plasma and las-fire strobed across polished plate. Guardian spears formed a forest of crackling blades around him, thrusting toward the vulnerable seams of his armor with machine-perfect coordination.

Their skill was undeniable.

Nowhere near the level of the First, of course.

Nor the paper-pushing Primarch being hauled through the ruins of his own rescue.

No mortal creature could truly keep pace with beings such as them.

But the Custodians came closer than almost anything else humanity could still produce.

One spear glanced from his gorget and gouged a molten channel through the black ceramite beneath.

Another struck his breastplate hard enough to flare three layers of wards in succession.

A blade slipped beneath the Talon of Horus and nearly found the softer armor at his elbow before Abaddon twisted aside and opened its wielder from shoulder to hip.

They showed no fear.

A wall of gold and blades dared him to advance and demanded payment for every step.

Abaddon smiled as he paid it.

Drach'nyen swept sideways.

A guardian spear parted at the haft. The Custodian behind it had just enough time to adjust before the demon blade passed through auramite, flesh, and spine.

Abaddon continued moving before the two halves struck the floor.

Another warrior took his place immediately.

Good.

His wards flashed beneath another impact.

Better.

Such pleasant distractions, however, were always short-lived.

Beyond the fighting, the Grey Knights still held their portal.

Silver-armored figures stood around the whirling gate with weapons lowered and psychic lightning crawling across their armor. The air around them bent beneath the pressure of their ritual, reality stretched thin enough to become translucent.

Through the opening came shifting glimpses of somewhere else, motion, hard light and the scent of smoke.

Between Abaddon and Guilliman, Astartes from dozens of Chapters had packed themselves shoulder to shoulder. Crimson, black, blue, green, white, bone. Heraldry from across the fractured Imperium formed a living barricade around their wounded lord.

Some braced shields.

Others knelt with rifles leveled.

Every one of them had apparently decided that his own body represented acceptable fortification.

An expected, if useless, response.

Guilliman was almost at the gate.

Abaddon decided he had indulged the moment long enough.

Reality bent.

The arena stretched around him.

For an instant, the stone beneath his boots seemed to fall away into impossible depth. Straight lines curved. Distance folded inward. The roar of battle became a low, wet murmur as the Warp sank its claws into material space and squeezed.

The place where Abaddon stood and the place where he wished to stand became adjacent.

One step. Perhaps less than one.

He would not kill Guilliman from behind.

There would be no blade through the spine while the Avenging Son crawled toward salvation.

Abaddon wanted him to see.

Wanted recognition.

Wanted the architect of the Imperium's final lie to see whose hand ended it.

The Warp released its grip.

The world snapped back into shape.

Abaddon stood before Guilliman.

Drach'nyen was already descending.

The Emperor's Sword rose to meet it.

Golden flame and snarling darkness collided hard enough to punch dust outward from the floor in a perfect ring. Lightning crawled across the nearby walls. Loose stone lifted and shattered beneath the pressure of forces that had no place within sane reality.

Abaddon struck again.

Guilliman parried.

A third blow came low.

The Avenging Son twisted aside and answered with a thrust that scraped burning gold across Abaddon's cuirass.

Blade struck blade too quickly for mortal eyes to follow.

Drach'nyen shrieked through the air.

The Emperor's Sword answered in sheets of incandescent fire.

Each collision sent concussive waves tearing through the battlefield, whipping cloaks and banners outward and forcing nearby Astartes to brace themselves against the floor. Shadows stretched in impossible directions. Dead oaths whispered from nowhere. Demonic faces surfaced briefly within the black wake of Abaddon's sword, mouths open in silent screams before dissolving again.

Guilliman fought well.

Even ruined, poisoned, stitched together, barely able to stand without assistance.

Infuriatingly well.

The Primarch caught a downward cut, rolled it aside, and attempted to take Abaddon's wrist.

Abaddon withdrew just enough.

Then returned the motion as a slash across Guilliman's chest.

Drach'nyen bit through the blue plate.

A clean line appeared across the breastplate, shallow enough that blood did not yet follow.

Guilliman staggered back one step.

Abaddon followed with half of one.

Then stopped.

The Primarch had collapsed to one knee.

Abaddon stared.

A wet rasp dragged through the filters of the winged helm.

Another.

Guilliman's chest rose too quickly, each breath shallow and bubbling with fluid somewhere deep in his lungs. One gauntleted hand planted against the floor to keep him upright while the other maintained its grip upon the Sword through what seemed to be stubbornness alone.

Surprise lasted only a fraction of a second.

Elation replaced it.

So.

The weapon had purged Mortarion's poison.

It had not restored the body underneath.

Around them stood Guilliman's sons.

Strangely, none intervened.

The nearest Astartes had his blade already drawn. Another stood scarcely three meters away with a bolter aimed directly at Abaddon's skull.

Custodians remained among them, guardian spears lowered. Their fingers tightened. Joints flexed. Weapons shifted by millimeters.

Yet none stepped between Abaddon and their fallen father.

Curious.

Abaddon lifted Drach'nyen.

The point settled before Guilliman's face. The demon whispered around him, eager enough that black vapor curled from its edge.

A new possibility unfurled in Abaddon's thoughts.

Crueler than killing him.

Far more useful.

"Yield, failed son."

His voice carried easily through the ruined arena.

"Swear yourself to me, and I will permit you to live."

The winged helm slowly tilted upward.

Guilliman looked at him.

For one strange instant, Abaddon thought he saw something behind the metal.

A smile.

"Now."

Every Loyalist moved.

Astartes hurled themselves sideways.

Custodians abandoned their formation and threw themselves flat.

The warriors nearest Guilliman seized the Primarch and dragged him bodily across the stone as Guilliman himself rolled with them, an order clearly anticipated and finally given.

Abaddon's satisfaction vanished as heat touched his back.

The sudden, savage pressure of an industrial furnace opening directly behind him.

Every sensor in his armor began screaming, threat runes flooding his vision.

Energy readings spiked beyond sane battlefield scales.

Abaddon started to turn.

He managed half a step as he raised Drach'nyen.

Wards ignited across his armor, rune after rune blazing into existence as every defensive instinct hammered through him at once. Black light thickened around his body. The Talon of Horus came up to shield his head.

Behind him, the Grey Knights' portal churned like a wounded star as a barrel pushed through.

Meters of reinforced housing, machinery designed for engines large enough to stride across cities.

The bore alone was broad enough to swallow a man.

Abaddon knew that weapon.

Everyone who had ever commanded armies knew that weapon.

A Volcano Cannon.

A Titan-killer.

For perhaps the first time that day, Abaddon had absolutely nothing clever to say.

Behind his blazing wards, his mouth opened.

Whatever words came out were swallowed by the cannon's roar.

---

+Hold output!+

Helix-47's binharic shriek tore across the vox-net hard enough to clip several lesser channels into static.

Around him, the Imperial command yard had become an altar to desperate engineering.

Reactors intended for entirely different machines had been dragged into a rough circle around the Shadowsword. Generator banks sat on improvised ferrocrete pads, cabling as thick as a man's torso snaking between them in glowing bundles. Capacitor housings had been bolted to the tank's flanks wherever there had been room, while priests, servitors, and Techmarines swarmed across the assembly like frantic insects around some wounded metal god.

None of it belonged together.

Which, Helix reflected, was a theological distinction best examined later.

Before them, the Shadowsword continued to fire.

The Volcano Cannon poured its wrath through the Grey Knights' portal in an unbroken lance of white so bright that every nearby surface had been reduced to stark planes of light and shadow. The air around the barrel warped into rippling glass. Dust lifted from the ground and flashed into sparks. Every exposed piece of metal nearby radiated furnace heat.

Warning runes bled crimson across every display Helix possessed.

Capacitor housings glowed cherry-red.

A bank of sacred breakers began flashing messages that translated, with varying levels of liturgical dignity, to stop doing this immediately.

Somewhere deep inside the Shadowsword, a relay exploded.

The blast punched sparks from an access hatch and carried three servitor-thralls with it.

Their replacements were already moving before the bodies hit the ground.

From within the tank came Tech-priest Ipsol-4's ecstatic cry.

+Archmagos! The Machine screams! In pain and wrath, she demands more power! More power to slay the Archtraitor!+

Helix's optic lenses contracted against the glare.

Across half a dozen internal channels, he could hear the Shadowsword protesting through thermal alarms, pressure warnings, voltage spikes, and increasingly creative machine-code obscenities.

Both of his arms, as well as every mechadendrite attached to his spinal manifold, rose.

+By the Motive Force, she shall have it!+

Commands burst outward in a storm of binharic.

+Feed the blessed capacitors! Feed them until they glow with purpose!+

Several adepts froze for approximately half a second.

Then obedience overcame self-preservation.

Switches slammed closed.

Reactor output climbed.

The white lance intensified.

A generator bank immediately began producing black smoke.

One of its warning bells started ringing with such frantic insistence that a priest turned and struck it with a wrench.

Across the yard, a Tech-priest shrieked over the vox.

+Archmagos!+

Helix rotated three optics toward him.

The priest stood waist-deep among ruptured coolant lines, his hands and mechadendrites dancing across a manifold that had begun spraying boiling vapor in every direction.

+Pressure collapses in sacred pumps seven, nine, and fifteen!+

Helix snapped a tendril toward him.

+If the coolant lines fail, teach them devotion! Open the reserve veins!+

The priest nodded and immediately tore open three emergency valves.

Coolant surged through the pipes.

Two lines burst.

A nearby servitor caught fire.

No one had time to acknowledge either development.

Another voice cut across the channel.

+Thermal excitation exceeds tolerance thresholds! Barrel integrity failure projected in twenty-seven seconds!+

Helix glanced toward the weapon.

The Shadowsword's enormous barrel had gone from black to dull red beneath its cooling shroud.

The orange was bleeding through.

Metal groaned.

The sound was deep enough to be felt through the soles of his feet.

+Recite the Canticle of Thermal Apology and keep the barrel aligned!+

A chorus of binharic prayer erupted around the tank.

Coolant flooded the barrel shroud.

The result was instantaneous.

Steam exploded across the command yard in a white wall, swallowing priests, servitors, and half the Shadowsword before being torn apart by the superheated air surrounding the beam.

Helix extended his legs to see over it.

The barrel was still glowing.

Several systems insisted it was now glowing more.

He muted them.

+The Machine is experiencing no overheating!+ Helix-47 declared across every Mechanicus channel.

The holy lie carried with all the authority of an Archmagos.

+She is experiencing righteous anger! Vent only enough wrath to prevent apotheosis!+

Behind him, Arthus-Phi—one of the few adepts to survive the orbital spire—sent an urgent burst of binharic directly into his private channel.

+Archmagos, even with supplemental coolant, the barrel is melting! We must disengage the beam!+

Helix turned.

Arthus-Phi stood beside a diagnostic altar surrounded by a constellation of red warning glyphs. Smoke curled from his robes. One cracked optical implant had still not been replaced since their return from the spire.

The barrel groaned again.

A glowing droplet of metal fell from its underside and splashed against the ground.

Helix considered the available evidence.

+No. Do not disengage the beam!+

Arthus-Phi stared at him.

Helix spread his mechadendrites toward the portal.

+If the Machine-God wished us to stop firing, He would not have placed the Archtraitor in front of the barrel!+

Several Techmarines turned toward him.

More adepts joined the chant.

Helix cranked his external speakers to maximum output.

The resulting feedback squeal briefly stunned a nearby servitor.

He raised both arms toward the Shadowsword, robes snapping in the thermal wind, brass icons of the Omnissiah clattering against his chassis.

+The Machine screams because she hates him!+

His voice rolled across the encampment.

+Today, we shall honor her hatred with amperage!+

The gathered priests roared their approval.

Power climbed again.

The Shadowsword screamed with them.

For several glorious seconds, man and machine achieved perfect spiritual unity through mutual disregard for operating tolerances.

Then it ended.

The portal snapped shut.

There was no thunder.

No collapsing vortex.

Only a single, unnervingly delicate crack.

Impossible geometry folded inward.

The closing gate passed through the end of the Volcano Cannon and sheared several meters of superheated barrel away with surgical precision.

The severed section vanished with the portal.

The beam, however, continued firing.

Without the gate to receive it, the unbound lance of stellar-white energy blasted across Imperial Headquarters.

+DISENGAGE! DISENGAGE! DISENGAGE!+

Hands slapped emergency controls.

Techmarines tore breakers open.

Servitors yanked physical disconnects.

Someone used an axe.

The Volcano Cannon finally died.

Silence crashed down over the yard.

Smoke rolled across the encampment in slow black banks.

Cooling metal ticked and popped.

Warning runes flickered across Helix's vision, lingered briefly as though reconsidering their usefulness, and began dying one after another.

Somewhere inside the Shadowsword, something large and extremely important made a sound like a cathedral bell being murdered.

Then silence.

Helix remained motionless.

Steam drifted around him.

A burning cable fell from somewhere overhead.

Across the yard, priests and Techmarines slowly looked toward one another.

Helix surveyed his students.

His peers.

The sons of Mars.

Several possessed scorched robes.

A Techmarine had somehow acquired a servitor arm that did not appear to belong to him.

Helix quietly lowered himself onto an overturned ammunition crate.

He brushed a layer of ash from his robes.

"There was no innovation here today."

No one moved.

Helix folded his hands.

"The machine spirit was simply…"

His optics passed over the half-molten Shadowsword.

"…angry."

Several adepts glanced around.

Biosigns spiked sharply.

One Techmarine looked toward the collection of illicit generator banks, auxiliary reactors, and capacitor assemblies surrounding the tank.

Then toward Helix.

He nodded first.

"Indeed."

The others looked to him.

The Techmarine drew himself upright.

"What holy spirit would fail to exceed her ordained limits when given the opportunity to slay the Archtraitor?" He inclined his head, barely a degree.

"Truly, a blessing of the Omnissiah."

Several priests immediately murmured agreement.

Helix studied them.

Then glanced over both shoulders.

His voice dropped.

"No report shall mention the secondary capacitor bypass."

One of the adepts blinked.

"What secondary capacitor bypass?"

Helix-47 inclined his head.

"Good man."

His optics shifted toward the tangled field of stolen machinery surrounding them.

Several generators bore forge markings from entirely different departments.

One still had a handwritten sign hanging from its side.

COMMANDER RESERVE POWER — DO NOT REMOVE

Helix stared at it.

Someone quietly took the sign down.

"Now," he said, "several generators appear to have migrated from their sanctioned locations."

A Techmarine looked toward the wreckage.

"How unusual."

"Extremely."

Helix rose.

"We should perform maintenance before the Inquisition arrives."

---

The Lion heard the cannon before he saw what it had done.

The roar rolled across the battlefield like a god clearing its throat.

Stone trembled beneath his boots. Dust shook loose from the shattered arches. For half a heartbeat, even Angron's assault faltered, the Red Angel's blade hanging motionless as his burning gaze snapped toward the far side of the arena.

Mortarion turned with him.

Plague-smoke curled from the vents of the Death Lord's armor, briefly washed white by the radiance tearing across the battlefield.

A lance of incandescent light had struck Abaddon.

The Warmaster was almost impossible to distinguish within it.

His silhouette flickered at the heart of the beam, black armor swallowed by white fire as the Volcano Cannon drove him backward through the arena floor. His boots carved trenches through molten stone before the ground finally gave way beneath him.

Then he disappeared into it.

The beam followed.

Earth erupted in sheets of glowing debris. Mud flashed into steam. Broken walls vanished into clouds of incandescent dust as Abaddon was driven through them, leaving behind a molten furrow that stretched across the battlefield like the scar of some colossal blade.

And still the beam continued.

The Warmaster remained somewhere at its center.

Still being pushed backward.

Still, somehow, refusing to disappear entirely.

For one peculiar moment, the battle paused.

Lion stared toward the smoking trench.

Angron snorted.

Mortarion's vast wings gave a single irritated flick.

Lion raised the Emperor's Shield.

Then all three returned to the considerably more immediate matter of killing one another.

---

Dirt ceased to exist beneath his heels.

Stone liquefied beneath his boots and ran away in glowing streams as the white beam drove into him with the force of a collapsing star.

Abaddon threw every ward he possessed into its path.

Black energy poured from the seams of his warplate in whipping banners. Runes carved into armor older than empires blazed one after another, defensive fields collapsing inward until every scrap of protection he commanded had been forced onto a single point before his chest.

The Volcano Cannon pushed against them.

Inches.

That was all that separated Abaddon from annihilation.

A few trembling inches of darkness between the incandescent beam and the flesh beneath his armor.

He tried to step aside.

The beam moved him instead.

His boots tore trenches through molten ground. Ruined masonry exploded against his legs. Entire slabs of stone flashed into vapor as he was driven backward through them, the battlefield peeling apart around him.

Too much force.

Too much energy.

There was no blow to turn.

No blade to parry.

No trajectory to evade.

This was a catastrophe one survived by enduring it longer than it wished to exist.

Heat stripped the air from his lungs. Pressure crushed against his breastplate hard enough to make ancient ceramite groan. White brilliance filled every optic, every sensor, every remaining gap in his vision until the world became nothing except pain, light, and the shriek of overburdened wards.

Through it all, he saw movement.

Beyond the beam.

Beyond the gate from which it came.

The Avenging Son was half stumbling, half being carried toward the portal, armored hands locked beneath his arms as his sons dragged him toward escape.

Using the same gate through which the cannon hunted Abaddon's life.

No.

Guilliman reached another step.

No.

The portal shimmered around him.

No no no no.

Abaddon's awareness snapped upward.

Toward the broken arches.

Toward the ritual circle.

The rite itself was ruined.

Shredded Warp-flesh marked where directing runes had once burned. Symbols crafted through sacrifice dissolved into oily smoke. Channels of power writhed blindly through the remnants, severed from the geometry that had given them purpose.

The ritual would never function again.

The reservoirs remained.

Storage runes still pulsed within the wreckage.

Still full.

Abaddon seized them, and tore them open.

The Warp poured through the broken circle in a black torrent.

It struck Abaddon like another weapon.

His spine arched.

Every muscle locked.

Darkness flooded into his armor, raced along its sigils, and erupted from the edges of his wards in sheets of violet-black lightning. Voices came with it—pleading, laughing, roaring, promising—thousands of demonic mouths speaking through the same instant.

His failing defenses surged.

The beam shuddered.

The Talon of Horus had been trapped against the cannon's fury, its wounded claws buried inside the blazing collision point.

He dragged it outward.

An inch.

Metal screamed.

Another.

The ruined fingers locked around nothing, refusing every command his armor sent them.

Another inch.

The Talon broke free.

Black lightning crawled across its claws.

Abaddon slashed at the air.

Reality opened.

A jagged wound appeared beside the Grey Knights' portal, black at its center and lined with snapping violet fire. The surrounding air buckled inward. The silver-armored Knights staggered as the geometry of their gate twisted violently against them.

Abaddon dragged the Talon sideways.

The wound widened.

The portal screamed.

Then came apart.

The Volcano Cannon vanished with it.

Silence arrived so abruptly that Abaddon almost mistook it for deafness.

He stood alone within the furrow the beam had carved across the battlefield.

Stone glowed beneath him.

Dark power sloughed from his armor in fading streams. His warplate smoked. Runes guttered across his chest.

The Talon of Horus hung at his side, two claws responding cleanly while the others twitched around weak sparks of half-dead lightning.

Abaddon drew a breath.

It hurt.

His grin formed anyway.

"Not enough, Guilliman!"

His voice carried through the ruin.

He spread his arms, the Talon's surviving claws catching the twisted light spilling from the shattered arches above.

"Even your god-killing machine could do no more than slow my steps!"

The words rolled across the arena.

Then Abaddon reached once more for the power waiting around him.

The Four answered.

Their gifts wrapped themselves around him with familiar hunger.

Khorne offered strength drenched in rage.

Nurgle offered endurance vast enough to watch civilizations rot.

Tzeentch whispered possibilities into the spaces between thoughts.

Slaanesh promised sensation sharpened beyond mortal comprehension.

Payment rendered across ten thousand years.

Oaths fulfilled.

Sacrifices made.

Debts carefully balanced.

Abaddon accepted exactly what he intended to accept.

One step.

The ground cracked beneath his boot.

Another.

Black power swelled through his body, threading itself through muscle and tendon, bone and nerve, then layering over his warplate like a second invisible skin.

Enough to strengthen.

Enough to hasten.

Enough to kill.

Never enough to change what stood beneath.

That balance had destroyed better men than most civilizations ever produced.

Abaddon had practiced it for millennia.

He bent space again.

The battlefield folded.

Demonic faces slid past him in the dark between places—horned, fanged, weeping, laughing—pressing close enough that their breath misted across his armor.

Then reality released him.

Abaddon emerged behind the Lion.

Drach'nyen was already moving.

Its edge swept toward the back of El'Jonson's neck.

Angron attacked at the same instant.

His blade came down from above with both hands behind it, less sword than executioner's block given motion. Fire streamed from its edge.

Mortarion's Silence rose from below.

The scythe dragged a cloud of bloatflies behind it, its plague-stained blade trailing strings of yellow pus and blackened blood through the air.

Three killing blows.

One descending.

One rising.

One level with the neck.

A lattice of death closing from every direction.

Against almost anything ever born, it would have produced a corpse.

Lion El'Jonson bent one knee.

That was all.

His head dipped beneath Drach'nyen with scarcely an inch to spare.

His free leg snapped outward.

The toes struck Silence on the side of the blade and knocked Mortarion's rising cut down. The scythe buried itself in the dirt, sending plague-soaked soil spraying across the arena.

At the same instant, the Emperor's Shield rose.

Angron's sword smashed into it.

The impact drove the Lion lower, boots grinding into the earth, yet the Shield turned the blow aside by inches.

Toward Abaddon.

He jerked back. The demon blade passed close enough to his helm that its heat washed across his face.

Then there was nobody between them as Lion dissolved into smoke and shadow. Green leaves swept through the space he had occupied. Cold rain flashed briefly against Abaddon's armor, absurd and clean amid the heat and filth of the arena.

El'Jonson reappeared beyond them.

Between the Astartes and Custodian lines.

Dark green armor streaked with blood.

Breastplate cracked.

One side visibly damaged beneath Angron's earlier strike.

His sword remained steady.

The Shield remained raised.

Only the slight rise and fall of his shoulders betrayed the effort.

Abaddon glared at him.

For the second time that day, he revised a private assessment.

Yes.

Yes, indeed.

Blades alone?

Six moves.

---

Guilliman drew a slow breath and forced himself upright.

His armor protested every inch.

Servos whined beneath cracked plate. Internal braces groaned against the weight of his frame. Somewhere near his left hip, a damaged actuator clicked with every shift of his stance, the sound small and mechanical beneath the distant thunder of weapons fire.

Still, the armor answered him.

The Hand of Dominion hung from his left fist as a scorched ruin. Several fingers no longer closed properly. Its power-field emitters had burned themselves dead through repeated attempts to cave Angron's skull in.

His right hand, however, once again held the Emperor's Sword.

Golden fire moved along the blade in slow, steady waves.

Its heat sank through Guilliman's gauntlet and into his arm, gentle beside the inferno it had unleashed against Abaddon. Around him, its presence seemed to push back against the terror clinging to the Imperial line.

He watched one of his sons straighten.

Another adjusted his grip on a chainsword with hands that had trembled moments earlier.

A wounded Terminator drew a deeper breath.

Even the Custodians seemed to settle into themselves, guardian spears rising fractionally as the golden light passed over their auramite.

Tiny changes.

A mortal observer might never have noticed them.

Guilliman did.

Astartes knew fear.

Anyone who claimed otherwise had simply never watched one prepare to face three monsters who had helped break the galaxy.

Guilliman stepped through the line.

As he passed one of his sons, he laid the ruined Hand of Dominion briefly against the warrior's shoulder.

The Marine gave a single nod.

That was enough.

Guilliman emerged beside his brother.

The Lion stood with the Emperor's Shield raised and Fealty held low at his side, dark green armor battered almost beyond recognition. Blood still marked the fracture in his breastplate. One pauldron hung slightly lower where Angron's tail had crushed the plate beneath it. Rainwater from whatever impossible forest followed his shadow-walking still glittered across the armor in tiny silver beads before evaporating in the arena's heat.

Guilliman planted his feet.

Both hands wrapped around the hilt of the Emperor's Sword.

Across the battlefield, the traitors waited.

Lion glanced sideways.

His eyes traveled down Guilliman's stance, then back up.

He nodded once, sharp and certain.

"Your stance has improved."

Guilliman nearly smiled.

"I have had quite a bit of practice since you went for your walk."

"More of a nap."

"Ah. So you were being lazy."

"In my defense, I was stabbed."

"So was I."

The Lion's eyes shifted toward him.

"Oh? Who?"

"Fulgrim. You?"

"Luther."

Guilliman's amusement died.

"…I'm sorry."

The Lion looked forward again.

Something old and quiet passed behind his eyes.

"We can discuss it later."

He raised Fealty.

The sword's point settled directly on Abaddon.

"For now, the First Captain is mine."

Guilliman tightened his grip on the Emperor's Sword.

"Only if I do not reach him first."

Across the ruined arena, Abaddon began walking toward them.

Drach'nyen swung lazily beside him, tracing slow circles through the dust. Black vapor crawled from its edge and vanished before reaching the ground. His armor still smoked from the Volcano Cannon's punishment, molten scars glowing dull red across the breastplate while wounded wards flickered like dying stars around him.

He walked with the confidence of a man who had already decided how the story ended.

Angron rolled his shoulders.

Then reached up and cracked his neck.

The sound carried through the sudden lull like branches breaking in a winter forest.

Samni'arius dragged behind him, its edge digging a glowing furrow through the packed earth. Fire licked from the blade. Blood steamed where it touched the ground.

Mortarion descended beside them.

His wings beat slowly, each vast stroke stirring clouds of flies and plague-smoke. He hovered several inches above the earth, robes hanging in filthy tatters beneath corroded armor. The blade of Silence glistened with thick yellow pus that stretched into strings before falling onto the soil below.

Where the droplets landed, the dirt blistered.

Abaddon surveyed the Imperial survivors.

Bodies covered the arena.

Astartes lay tangled among Custodians. Broken shields jutted from churned earth. Weapons still burned where dead hands had released them. Chapter banners hung shredded beneath the ruined arches, their colors almost lost beneath soot and blood.

"Is this all?"

Abaddon's voice rolled across the battlefield.

His eyes moved over the surviving Astartes, the wounded Custodians, the Dreadnoughts venting smoke behind them.

"Is this all the might the Lord Commander of the Imperium can call to his side?"

"Enough to ruin your theater," Guilliman answered.

He forced strength into the words.

His defiance came out threadbare.

His lungs burned. The Sword's warmth held him upright, yet his body remained stitched, cracked, bruised, and deeply offended by every decision he had made during the last four days.

It would have to do.

Abaddon gave the faintest shake of his head.

His eyes remained fixed on the two brothers.

"Theater or otherwise, you have lost."

He raised Drach'nyen.

Its point passed between Guilliman and Lion, indicating the horizon beyond them.

Guilliman looked.

An army darkened the distance.

Chaos Astartes moved in ranks through the broken structures surrounding the arena. Demonic shapes loped among them. Engines crawled behind banners marked with the eight-pointed sigil, while the ground itself seemed to discolor beneath their advance.

"Your portal is shut," Abaddon continued. "My armies will be here within two minutes." He lowered the blade. "Yield, both of you, and I will allow your sons to live."

Guilliman never discovered what Lion intended to say.

Their sons answered first.

The roar rose from behind them.

Chapter sigils lifted through the smoke.

Colors drawn from across an Imperium fractured in half, surging together around the gold of the Custodes.

Weapons rose.

Bolters thundered.

Plasma coils screamed.

Melta fire painted the air white.

The combined volley crashed toward Abaddon as the Astartes charged.

Guilliman felt his smile spread wide behind the Lion's borrowed helm.

Pride hurt almost as much as the wounds.

He welcomed it anyway.

His voice joined the roar, primal and wordless.

He surged forward with his sons.

His brother came with him.

For a handful of glorious seconds, Guilliman forgot the fractures, the poison, the calculations, the endless weight of an Imperium that always needed one more war won.

There was only the charge.

Only his sons.

Only his brother beside him.

Whatever came next, they would meet it together.

Chaos was unimpressed.

Abaddon raised his hand.

Mortarion mirrored him.

Black fire coiled around the Warmaster's fingers.

Jaundiced light gathered around the Death Lord.

The two powers twisted together for a single moment.

Then burst outward.

The Rotwind came with them.

Guilliman had endured Mortarion's aura before.

The slow poison.

The invisible decay.

The crawling sickness that entered through breath and blood and the tiniest flaw in a seal.

This was different.

This Rotwind was plague given weather.

It struck the Imperial charge like an ocean hurled sideways.

The world vanished.

Dust filled Guilliman's vision.

Warp-light flashed through the storm in diseased greens and bruised yellows. Fragments of rotted flesh spun through the gale, tiny strips of skin and clotted matter called into existence by Mortarion's presence and whipped into blinding clouds.

Banners disappeared.

Chapter sigils vanished.

Men became shadows.

The vox exploded with warnings, prayers, and screams.

Someone shouted for his squad.

Another voice began reciting a litany and vanished beneath static.

Then the wind rose again.

The gale became a hurricane.

Guilliman lowered his head.

Debris hammered his armor.

A shard of stone struck his shoulder hard enough to twist him sideways. Acidic rain hissed across the plate. Paint blistered from his forearms. Gilding peeled away in curling strips, leaving raw metal beneath.

He stepped forward.

His body screamed.

Every injury woke together.

Cracked bones ground against stitched muscle. Half-healed organs shifted painfully beneath the armor as he demanded motion from flesh that had been begging for rest since the battle began.

Another step.

The wind pushed against him with the strength of a living thing.

Golden light flickered through the storm to his right.

Lion.

His brother stood crouched behind the Emperor's Shield, both feet dug into the churned soil.

He stepped.

The Rotwind shoved him back half the distance.

He stepped again.

Then again.

Slowly, impossibly, Lion forced his way through the hurricane until he came level with Guilliman.

Rain and plague-water steamed from the Shield.

His pale hair whipped around his face, a wry grin appearing beneath narrowed eyes.

"They seem to have developed a severe case of haphephobia!"

Guilliman stared at him.

Even through the gale, he heard it clearly.

He reached across and clamped one hand around Lion's pauldron.

"Then let us cure them of it!"

Lion laughed once.

"No need!"

Guilliman leaned closer.

"What?"

"The whisper-man says our reinforcements are here!"

Guilliman had exactly enough time to once again wonder which deeply concerning individual his brother had decided to call the whisper-man.

Then the storm surged.

Guilliman braced.

The impact never came.

Golden flame filled his vision.

The Rotwind broke around it.

One instant, the gale screamed through the arena with enough force to peel armor from stone.

The next, silence descended.

Plague-clouds burned away.

Black fire vanished.

The fragments of rotted flesh became motes of ash and disappeared.

Only a soft ringing remained in Guilliman's ears. A gentle warmth settled across his face. For one heartbeat, he remembered another hand.

A cool cloth pressed against his forehead. His mother sitting beside him while fever crawled through his childhood body, her fingers brushing damp hair away from his brow.

The memory struck deeper than any weapon had managed that day.

Guilliman buried it immediately.

There would be time for ghosts later.

He raised his eyes.

Wings filled his vision.

Great, luminous wings stretched across the battlefield, ephemeral and impossibly solid at once. Light moved through them like sunrise through stained glass, each feather outlined in molten gold.

A figure hovered before him.

Hope caught in Guilliman's throat.

His heart stopped.

If one brother could return…

The thought came unbidden.

Terrible in its tenderness.

Perhaps…?

The light softened.

Reality returned.

The woman before him remained radiant.

Her wings were magnificent, but…

They lacked the vast, feathered beauty Guilliman remembered framing his brother against Macragge's cerulean skies.

Her hair was silver.

Sanguinius had been crowned in spun gold.

There was also the unavoidable matter of height.

She was approximately six feet too short.

Hope quietly folded itself away.

The woman half turned toward him.

Her wings barely moved, only the faintest flutter disturbing their radiant edges. Silver eyes glowed with a power Guilliman could sense and utterly failed to identify. Golden armor and scarlet cloth framed her, while a sword of flames burned in her right hand.

She smiled.

"Greetings, my lords."

Her voice carried strangely through the battlefield, clear and calm despite the explosions beginning again beyond her wings.

"Your father asked me to lend you all a hand."

Guilliman's eyes widened with recognition. Relief followed a heartbeat later.

"Ce—"

Lion stepped forward, gaze sharpened. "And you are…?"

Her eyebrows rose.

"Ah. Apologies."

She inclined her head.

"I am Celestine, a Living Saint of the Emperor of Mankind."

Guilliman clamped his brother's shoulder again. "I'll explain later. But she is an ally, and a welcome one."

Lion looked at him.

"If we live through this," Lion finally said, "I am going to need a drink."

"Seconded."

Then Lion raised the Emperor's Shield.

His gaze locked onto the Red Angel.

"Angron."

Guilliman stepped forward, raising the Emperor's Sword.

"Abaddon."

His vox chimed.

A tiny, cheerful jingle played inside the borrowed helm.

Guilliman froze.

He knew that vox-notification.

"Actually," Koron's voice said over the line, "would you mind teaming up with the other big guy to fight Angron?"

Guilliman closed his eyes.

Then muted his external speakers.

"Koron."

A pause.

"Where are you?"

Another.

"And why?"

---

High above the arena, Koron stood amid the smoldering remains of the ritual's power source and stared down at the Red Angel.

From here, Angron looked less like a warrior than a moving catastrophe.

Fire crawled across the brass and blood-dark plates of his armor. Each sweep of his wings stirred ash through the shattered arches below, and even at this distance Koron could feel the pressure of him through the Warp-flesh beneath his boots: rage given mass, hatred wrapped in muscle, brass, and flame.

Koron keyed the comm.

"Above you. And because—"

His left arm shifted.

Metal clicked beneath the plating as the final stages of reconstruction finished. Panels flexed apart along his forearm, exposing a nest of silver filament, black alloy, and fresh mechanical grafting still slick with coolant.

"—I need Angron distracted for this to have a chance of working."

Behind his wrist, four hydraulic arms ratcheted backward in sequence.

They hauled the long metal spike deeper into the reassembled limb.

Compressed air hissed from the joint as a metal pillar extended from the elbow.

Locking teeth engaged.

The spike seated into place with a heavy metallic thunk that Koron felt all the way through his ribs.

Green diagnostics flickered across his vision.

Below, Guilliman's voice came over the vox with the slow, careful cadence of a man who had learned through repeated experience that asking Koron a question could make the situation considerably worse.

"Koron."

Another pause as he considered his words.

"What are you trying to do now?"

Koron looked down through drifting smoke, dissolving warp-flesh, and the last dying embers of the ritual.

At Angron.

At the chains buried through flesh and armor.

At the Warp boiling around him.

At the invisible hand beyond all of it.

His fingers curled once.

The limb answered.

Koron swallowed the fear rising in his throat.

"…I'm trying to save someone."

 

[Fragment of Serenity]

Well, I applaud his balls.

Shake my head at his arrogant stupidity, but applaud the balls on him none the less.

Let's hope that trying to save a monster doesn't get Too many people killed.

 

[Talon88.1]

Well, I applaud his balls.

Shake my head at his arrogant stupidity, but applaud the balls on him none the less.

Let's hope that trying to save a monster doesn't get Too many people killed.

Click to shrink...

Honestly? Fair enough