Chapter Thirty One
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Talon88.1
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Chapter Thirty One
-
The bridge corridor shook with thunder and fire.
Kade's bolter clicked dry, a metallic finality that rang louder than the chaos around him. A heartbeat later, the cultist it had claimed burst apart, viscera painting the far bulkhead in crimson arcs. Lasfire lit the gloom, painting his armor in strobe-flashes of blood and fury, both Imperial and heretic rounds shrieking through the corridor.
Smoke crawled through the beams of emergency lighting, thick as oil and stinking of scorched flesh and metal.
Without missing a beat, Kade reached to his belt. His movements were methodical, stoic—like the slow turn of an executioner's hourglass. He found the last metal casing, slammed it into the bolter with a practiced snap, and sent the bolt home with a growl of steel on steel.
"Last magazine," he said, his voice low—calm as a glacier, unmoved by the apocalypse breaking against his ceramite plate.
A few meters away, Orvek stood behind a dented support strut, his left side slick with blood, his right arm gone above the elbow—only cauterized ruin beneath the pauldron. His good hand still worked the trigger of his bolt pistol with precise, disdainful rhythm, each round punctuated by the wet snap of bone and armor.
"I've two left," Orvek called back, smoke curling from his pistols muzzle. "And my bolter's still out there somewhere with half a mag left."
Another cultist surged through the flickering shadows, screaming praise to a false god. Orvek turned, fired once. The scream ended mid-word.
"After that," he muttered, his silhouette jagged and defiant in the emergency lumens, "my hammer shall swing once more."
"Presuming they come close enough. Most of the bastards remain at a distance." Kade replied as the shrapnel from the frag grenades continued to bounce off his shield, the re-purposed wall plating a rough job of welded handle and quickly cut steel.
But, it was at least working to lessen the damage his armor was sustaining, the cultists weapons lacking the firepower to punch through the combined defense, for the moment anyway.
Both Astartes were watching the enemy lines for heavy weapons as the foes tried to advance behind their shield wall, yet the rain of frag's managed to keep them far enough back, the threat of the unfired multi-las a further deterrent.
A flicker of text across his HUD caught his attention as Ira spoke up.
IRA:
Enemy comm traffic intercepted.
A click of his vox as the message played, the speakers voice rough, but clear, calm.
"-Confirming, two of the brides are in the choke. I fear to push forward and risk injury to the Lords chosen wives. What should we do?"
The commander replied, brisk and sure. "Fall back. We have the reactor core, the bridge is just extra at this point. Our Lord shall claim what is his in his own way, for his makes his way there now."
IRA:
User KORON has encountered the leader of the cultist uprising.
Threat Level: Extreme.
Leader exhibits extraordinary levels of physicality, spatial folding and unknown ability to manipulate matter.
Recommended tactics: Ambush, heavy weaponry. Astartes and armsmen joint force.
"Can you get me an image of the leader?" Kade asked, watching as the retreat order seemed to be propagating through the enemy lines, the incoming fire dropping away to nothing.
Kade's HUD flickered, and an image bloomed in amber-edged clarity.
Kade felt both his hearts skip a beat.
A figure stepped through fire and falling ash—tall, radiant, and impossibly serene. Pale skin shimmered faintly beneath golden-white armor, like sun-polished marble. A halo of golden hair framed a noble face, unreadable in its beauty. His expression was still, mournful. Wings—vast, ethereal—fluttered behind him like echoes more than matter, trailing light. He did not walk like a man. He glided, every step too smooth for the metal beneath him, as if the deck bowed gently to bear his presence.
"That is impossible." Kade muttered, crimson eyes wide.
IRA:
Negative. Visual confirmed via multiple sources.
Cult leader is making his way here with heavy reinforcements.
ETA to enemy arrival: Fifteen minutes.
ETA to loyalist arrival: Twenty minutes.
Chances of successfully defending bridge: 27.1%.
Recommended Tactics: Evacuate wounded personnel. Disable bridge controls. Disperse into ship and engage in guerrilla warfare. Loyalist forces are regrouping. Chances of successful mutiny: 16.8% and falling. User KADE and VIP's TARA and KALA can survive.
"And what of my brothers who have already fallen?" he asked, his voice quieter now. Not softer—just closer to the bone. "What vengeance shall be enacted upon this false angel if I should do as you suggest?"
The line went silent for a long moment before she replied.
IRA:
….Updating user KADE's objectives.
Vengeance.
Proposed alternative tactic: Push through enemy forces and join up with incoming Astarte forces. Engage leader before he arrives here.
Kade's stance straightened. His breath came low and measured, the soft hiss of his rebreather masking the surge beneath. Behind his lenses, his crimson eyes narrowed—expressionless, unreadable—but his silence rang with finality.
He raised his bolter, checked the magazine—mostly full—and tilted his head toward the corridor where the enemy line was already beginning to pull back, melting into shadow beyond the emergency lumens.
"Captain," he voxed. "They're falling back. But intel from the lower decks confirms it: their leader is en route with reinforcements. We won't hold the bridge."
Tavos didn't waste breath on suspicion. There was no need.
"What do you have in mind?" he asked, though the cough at the end broke the edge off his voice—wet, guttural, like fire catching in a cracked bellows.
"We intercept. Cut the serpent's head before it slithers up the spine. But… I don't believe we're dealing with a mortal anymore."
"Clarify."
Kade sent the feed.
Silence. Then a sharp inhale.
Tavos' voice, when it came, trembled with something just beneath rage—a volcanic pressure, one shift away from eruption.
"…Sergeant," he growled, his words rumbling like the deep plates of Nocturne itself. "Whatever this heresy is... destroy it. Burn this filth off my ship."
"Yes sir."
He turned. Orvek was already sliding his last magazine into the bolt pistol with his remaining hand, expression flat.
"I heard," Orvek said simply. "Go. I'll hold the gate."
He turned to the Brandt girls, both pressed against the bulkhead in the half-light, their clothes smoke-streaked, their eyes hard. "The Emperor protects."
Then he was gone—into the corridor, into the dark, the fading thunder of his footsteps swallowed by distance and the weight of what waited ahead.
-
The hull was madness.
Venting plasma burst from ruptured conduits like solar flares, searing arcs of violet-white energy that lit the void in strobes of impending death. A rotating chunk of wreckage—a torqued section of corridor plating—spun past at lethal velocity, sparking off a nearby bulkhead as it clipped a loose rail. Pockets of fire burned in vacuum where chemical compounds still clung to memory, and somewhere ahead, a shield emitter flickered in and out like a dying eye—blink-blink-blink—as it tried and failed to push back the night.
Elissa glided forward, Koron's suit syncing better and better with each motion. The shielding held firm, the mag-boots gripping tight to the hull's scarred metal surface in the few times she touched down, her breath steady inside the helmet. The UI was clean, fluid, showing paths of least resistance through the debris field. The danger was real—but the suit was made for this.
She however, was not.
The ship's surface didn't move—but something deeper did. The world around her tilted with a kind of wrongness that wasn't speed, or spin, but something older. Something in the gut
Elissa's body tilted forward and fell, and the hull caught her—not with boots or mass, but with gripless certainty. The suit's grav-array pulled her sideways, then diagonally, then down again—none of it in line with what her stomach or brain called real. The stars jerked, the warped metal tilted, and fire licked past sideways.
"Fourteen degrees starward," Sasha said coolly in her ear. "Correct for the yaw. There's a rupture seam ahead—don't clip your foot on it or we'll both learn what happens to knees at orbital velocity."
The warning came just as the suit tugged—like an invisible hand shifting her weight mid-air—and she stumbled sideways across the skin of the ship, gliding more than walking, her muscles braced against phantom angles.
"This is nothing like a voidsuit," Elissa gritted out as she felt her stomach lurch. "Swimming he says, to a woman born and raised on desert planet."
"A fair point, but you can do it," Sasha replied. "You're riding a localized gravity bias field. You're not supposed to feel balanced. You're supposed to arrive."
The deck below her was torn and buckled, shredded from plasma fire and decompression—like the spine of some wounded beast, groaning beneath her. Plasma gouts vented at irregular intervals, blooming like spectral flowers. The hull glimmered, slick with ice and melted slag. Debris drifted slowly, unnaturally, some pieces spinning gently, others jagged with kinetic spite.
A blast of superheated gas hissed past her faceplate, casting shadows that flickered like screaming ghosts. Her shield flared—automatic, controlled, the energy field flexing around her like a bubble of blue-white haze.
Another tug from the grav-array as she reacted to the sudden flame—a hard right this time, and she flung sideways, knee bent, shoulder leading, rebounding off a scorched chunk of adamantine plating.
"Trajectory drift nominal," Sasha confirmed as Elissa managed to get her tumble under control. "You're doing good, but focus. The suits reacting to your thoughts. A flare like that and you might accidently hurl yourself into space."
"No pressure," Elissa muttered.
"Technically, all the pressure. It's just outside."
"Really? Trying to joke now?"
Before Sasha could answer, Elly's voice piped in—bright and brisk. "Speaking of pressure, bridge traffic's stabilizing. Looks like our side's taking it back."
Elissa grunted as she pushed herself around an upthrust spear of hull plating, the suit compensating with a subtle tug of gravitational redirection. "Define 'our side.'"
"Loyalist forces," Elly said immediately. "I'm picking up Kade's signal again, and around thirty-nine Astartes tags. They're still spread out, but they're pushing towards an interception. Unfortunately, their target…"
Elissa didn't have to wait for the rest. "He's coming, isn't he."
"Yep," Elly confirmed. "The angel is making his way to the bridge. And he's not alone. I'm reading about two thousand biosigns trailing him, but the signal's fuzzy. Dead zones everywhere."
Elissa grimaced. "Anything we can do to help? What about the drones?"
"Only nine left from our batch," Sasha answered, her tone shifting into more clinical efficiency. "Another ten are guarding the girls on the bridge. Lucia's fabricating reinforcements, but our fab-units are still operating at a crawl. Best-case scenario? An hour before we field anything worth the word 'reinforcement.'"
Elissa ducked beneath a length of warped cable, watching it trail a few ghostly sparks as it drifted lazily in the vacuum. "Damn. What about structural tricks? Lure him into an atrium, vent the whole thing into space?"
"Tempting," Sasha said, almost wistful. "But not viable. The Hammer doesn't have void-friendly kill boxes like that. Even if it did, forcing a breach would cause a backlash through the internal systems—and that could be a death sentence for any of us wired into the ship. The Hammer's AI is broken, not dead. It's still strong in the places that matter."
"So there's nothing we can do?" Elissa asked, watching as a shard of hull plating bounced off her shoulder shield, flashing blue-white before vanishing into the dark. "Just… get out of the way?"
"Hate to say it," Sasha replied, quieter now, "but for the moment? Yes. Right now, the Hammer's fate is in Astartes hands."
Elissa stared ahead as the scorched spine of the ship twisted before her, jagged and buckled like the wreck of some forgotten god. Plasma flared across the horizon, throwing long shadows across the hull. Behind her, Koron remained still—heavy, silent, frozen in borrowed time.
He hadn't moved in minutes—not since he'd locked down his systems, rerouted everything into preservation mode. His skin against her armor was ice, too still. Every movement jostled him, and she could feel—actually feel—how rigid his body had become. Oxygen halted. Blood reduced to vital organs. Temperature dropped to near-fatal.
He wasn't riding with her.
He was being delivered.
"He's burning time," Elly whispered. "Every second you move faster, he gets it back."
"He shouldn't have come out here," Elissa muttered, sweat slick in the collar of her helmet. "We could've waited. Found another route. Something safer."
"He ran the numbers," Sasha said. "And he trusted you more than the rest."
Elissa's voice dipped. "He shouldn't have had to run the numbers to decide if he trusted me."
"He didn't," Sasha replied, softer now. "That part was never in question. He ran them to see if he could trust himself… to put you in danger and not regret it."
Elissa said nothing for a long moment. Her throat was tight, her breath loud in the helmet. The silence pressed between them like gravity.
"He always seems so sure," she murmured.
"He has to be," Sasha said. Then, quieter—like a confession not meant for air. "If he stops to wonder, even for a second, he might not start again. And I don't know if I could bear watching him fall."
Elissa closed her eyes.
And between her spine and the silent weight strapped to it, she felt it again—that unbearable, precious truth:
He wasn't invincible.
He was just someone trying to outrun the moment he couldn't get back up.
-
The corridor narrowed ahead, walls blackened with fire and studded with the bones of melted deck supports. Kade advanced without pause, his stride relentless, bolter gripped low, makeshift shield angled like a prow. He spoke softly into the silence.
"Ira. Did Koron make contact with the demon?"
IRA:
Affirmative
Engagement occurred seven minutes ago in upper freight lift four.
"Show me."
The HUD blinked, a small window appearing to show a flickering perspective—strange angles, cold and mechanical, tracking a figure descending through a ruined arena like a comet in slow motion.
Not simply aglow, but casting illumination—shedding brilliance like a floodlight cleaving fog. Shadows peeled away from it like smoke under pressure. Wings, broad and glimmering with photonic distortion, shimmered behind its back. Each step sent tremors through the world—reality cracking, flexing, bending to allow its passage.
Thin beams carved into it. Drones, four-legged and tireless, hurled themselves forward in coordinated strikes. The air warped, gravity buckled. Nothing slowed it.
It advanced through the storm like a god descending a temple stair.
Its blade danced—a thing of artistry and terror. Every stroke perfectly measured. Every dodge effortless. Its footwork made mockery of even superhuman reflex. And all the while, warpfire bled from its presence, distorting everything it touched. Reality wasn't resisting—it was yielding.
Kade stared, unmoving. Every instinct in him flared—centuries of battle-tempered reflex screaming one word beneath the thunder of bolter fire and command protocols.
Demonhost.
A soul-bound cage. A living anchor driven into realspace. The Warp given flesh.
He'd read the records. Studied the fragments.
But none of them had looked like this.
"Even the weakest of them are powerful foes," Kade muttered, boots thudding as he advanced. He glanced up at a scorched designation sigil, then turned sharply left at the junction, heading for the nearest munitions cache. "How many of my brothers can you reach?"
IRA:
Thirty-nine. Twenty-seven are armored.
"Good. Inform them that I'll be bringing heavy weapons. Find us a killzone."
IRA:
Affirmative. Calculating optimal placement.
Kade's HUD bloomed with new data streams—floor plans, pressure readings, battlefield heatmaps. His armor's systems surged with fresh telemetry as Ira scoured the Hammer's wounded infrastructure for somewhere, anywhere, they could fight a false angel on equal footing.
Then, she spoke again—almost hesitantly.
IRA:
This unit requests permission to coordinate with user KORON's AI companions. This unit's systems are limited.
Kade exhaled, teeth clenched behind his helm, every instinct whispering denial—but he gave a short nod. "Granted. Bring them in."
The datastream doubled, then tripled—ghostlight flickering across his HUD as foreign code stitched into Ira's systems like thread through raw steel. No voice came. No warmth of Sasha's presence, no wry commentary. Just sterile efficiency. The mini-map flickered, recalibrating, plotting a route with cold certainty.
IRA:
Nearest functioning armory located. Seventy-four meters. Deck elevation: negative one. Status: damaged, accessible.
The corridor opened into ruin. Bulkheads torn like paper, the decking above collapsed inward as if a titan's fist had slammed down in wrath. Sparking cables hissed from exposed walls, dancing arcs lighting the space with erratic strobe. The acrid tang of burnt insulation clawed at the filters in his helm.
The flames were gone—but their ghost still lingered in the searing heat.
The armory's blast doors remained shut, half-buried beneath fallen girder and debris, blackened but intact.
Kade advanced, but his step faltered.
Six of his brothers lay scattered like discarded relics across the approach. Not fallen in formation, not defiant in death—shredded. Ripped apart by concussive force and cruel geometry. Bolter magazines cooked off near their corpses. One's helmet had been caved inward, fused to his skull. Another's pauldron was gone, shoulder sheared clean away, his gauntlet locked mid-reach for a fallen weapon.
He knew them all. All of them. Their names carved into his memory like ink into slate.
Kade stepped between the bodies like a man walking through fire, every stride slow, deliberate. Not out of fear. Out of grief.
His eyes swept the space, cataloging the armor marks, the weapon fragments, the poses in which they fell. The smell of death clung to them—not decay, but finality. Burnt ceramite. Blood beneath. Spirits already offered.
Brother Thasian had once carved miniature flame motifs into every purity seal he bore, a quiet act of devotion. Brother Kelen used to hum old Nocturnean forge-hymns during maintenance rituals, off-key but steady. Vero, ever silent, had a habit of sketching battle tactics on his dataslate, refining them obsessively. Mardel, the largest of them, had adopted a mortal orphan during a campaign on Sagan-12. The child had died. He never smiled again.
Aelian, youngest of the six, had only received his black armor a year past. He still moved like a neophyte trying not to shame his mentors. And Solas—Solas had once joked that if he died first, Kade owed him a drink in the afterlife.
Kade remembered laughing.
"Brothers," he whispered, kneeling beside Solas's body. He rested a hand on the cracked chestplate. "As fire returns to fire, so shall the soul return to Vulkan."
He rose. Shoulders squared. Grief pushed down—not forgotten, never that—but folded into purpose.
He reached the door, shoved the melted debris aside, and triggered the override. The locking bolts groaned in protest, and the doors slid open halfway, screeching like tortured metal as they made room for dead men's vengeance.
Inside was chaos: scorched racks, half-melted crates, broken weapons still humming with residual charge. But not all was lost.
Kade stepped inside.
His eyes scanned with soldier's focus. Multi-melta, dented but functional. Heavy flamer—half-full tanks, scorched ignition plate.
He took both.
He clipped the flamer to his side, feeling the slosh of promethium in the canister, six, maybe seven shots worth. The multi-melta hissed as he linked it to the backpack fuel core—enough for ten shots.
IRA:
Killzone identified. Triangulating allied positions. Predictive strike vectors uploading to allies.
Enemy arrival: Nine minutes. Allied intercept ETA: Ten. User KADE will be alone at first contact.
Suggestion: Extend interception, rally with allies before engagement.
Kade stood at the threshold of the ruined chamber, the weight of flame and fury in his hands, and gave a quiet nod. "Patience then, shall be our weapon."
-
Kade stepped through the breach and into fire-wreathed twilight.
The mustering chamber had once been a training hall—long since gutted by shrapnel, lit only by flickering lumen strips and the ghostly glow of active armor nodes. But the scent of purpose was thick in the air. Thirty-nine shapes turned toward him. Twenty-seven were still in full armor, scorched and scraped but functional. The other eleven bore robes torn to the waist, torsos bandaged in field wraps, faces smudged with ash and stubborn life.
All of them stood.
All of them burned.
"Sergeant on deck," someone rasped.
"No time for ceremony," Kade replied, stepping into their center. His armor hissed, multi-melta thumping against his chest like a second heart. "This isn't a line. It's a knife. And we are the edge."
The Astartes parted, letting him reach a half-standing tactical display rigged to a damaged cogitator. A flicker of corrupted lines—Ira's doing—projected an image of the enemy: tall, radiant, flanked by a tide of bodies and madness.
"He's coming," Kade said. "You've seen the feed. Warp-wrought. Bladed. Wings of light and lies. A face like a saint. A soul like a butcher's forge."
No one spoke. They'd seen it. Heard the vox intercepts. Read the scriptures on monsters pretending to be divine.
"He's not a daemon prince. He's something else," Kade went on. "But his body bleeds. His weapons can be broken. His fire can be answered."
A mutter from the ranks—Brother Hadrak, helm in crook of his arm, a black line of blood down his face. "How do we bring down a demonhost?"
Kade's gaze swept the assembled brothers. He saw them—not as wargear, not as units. As men. Firewalkers. Flamebearers. Veterans of a thousand wars.
"How else?" Kade said. "With fire and fury."
He pointed to the armored warriors.
"Frontline fighters engage and draw him into the killzone. Meltaguns, flamers, any short-range heavy weapons we have— We hit him then. Melee works as hit and run, keep him off balance. Longer ranged teams engage once hes focused on us."
He turned to the unarmored.
"You flank wide. Two cells. Keep the cultist horde from reinforcing. Break their line. Pin them. If they overrun you, fall back—but buy us seconds. That's all we need."
Brother Pyrix, stripped to his waist, arms wrapped in bandage and ritual ink, gave a wolfish grin. "How many seconds?"
"As many as it takes," Kade answered.
IRA:
Killzone identified. Freight handling, G-17. Reinforced walls, weakened supports overhead. Ambush pattern optimal. Collapse vectors loaded.
"We hit him in G-17," Kade said as he pulled up the ship section on the hololith. "He'll arrive in five minutes. We'll be there in four. When the hammer falls, we fall as one."
Brother Jexin flexed his hands, one gloved, one burned raw. "Anything else we should know about this demonhost? I have never fought one before."
Kade looked at him, voice quiet.
"Nothing beyond be alert. Its body is a illusion, vital organs will likely not be in their normal spot, and it will have tricks of the warp. Trust your brothers, and bring the wrath of Vulkan in your heart."
The brothers nodded, each one checking weapons, slapping mags, igniting pilot lights. Armor hissed. Voxnets clicked online. Faith didn't need preaching here—only purpose.
They moved.
Like lava through stone corridors, the Salamanders advanced—every step deliberate, a collective will forged not of zealotry, but of duty. Thirty-nine warriors. Two flanks. One point of impact.
And at its tip, Kade—serene as a storm just before it breaks.
-
Kade advanced first, multi-melta humming with barely restrained fury, the power cells on his back humming with energy that reeked of promise. His brothers followed in silence. Twenty-seven wore their armor—scratched, scorched, patched with prayer-scribed plating—but it still marked them as Angels of Death. The rest were stripped to carapace and faith, their strength in silence, in purpose.
The air vibrated with the hum of hidden power and the thrum of war-prayers whispered by Astartes hearts, each one ready to drown this place in fire.
The killzone was a freight-handling cathedral—an enormous cargo junction carved into the ship's spine, where titanic cranes once swung above open void locks and grav-lifts once thrummed between decks. Now, it lay broken and vast.
Above, the gantries loomed like the ribs of some ancient metal god—crisscrossing walkways of rust-streaked steel and sagging power lines. The long-range brothers were scattered among them, prone or crouched behind collapsed girders and ruptured containers, weapons poised. Bolters, stalkers, plasma guns, and the one missile launcher waited in cold silence, covering overlapping fields of fire.
Below, the floor was a shattered grid of ruined platforms and freight cradles. Mech-handler arms curled from the deck like skeletal fingers, motionless now, their hydraulics long dead. A collapsed lift shaft cut through one quadrant like a broken throat. Coils of severed conduit twitched from the walls, weeping sparks that flickered through the gloom like dying stars.
And at the center, laid bare like a sacrificial altar, was the cargo platform itself—open ground, clear of cover, deliberately uncluttered. The bait.
It was a place of planned violence, every line of sight calculated. There was only one path in—a broad hallway of cracked ferrocrete flanked by half-melted cherub statues and Mechanicus sigils smeared with soot. That corridor would bring the enemy directly into the trap.
To the west, a sealed maintenance hatch had been forced open and welded in place, marking the path Kade's flanking team would use. To the north, the main corridor yawned open—wide enough for bulk cargo haulers, and now the route the angel would take.
Along the southern wall, an old Prometheum refill station for ground vehicles stood cracked and abandoned, its tanks dry—but its pipelines still intact, running beneath the deck. A potential hazard. Or opportunity.
The air here held the scent of scorched insulation, rust, and blood. It vibrated with the hum of hidden power and the thrum of war prayers whispered by Astartes hearts, each one ready to drown this place in fire.
Kade, having passed the heavy flamer to one of his battle-brothers, advanced into the central maze. He was among the fourteen who would face the enemy up close—blades ready, meltas primed, flamers hissing with suppressed anticipation. Of the assault group, only he and two others bore heavy ordnance: the fusion-etched mouth of his melta, the brutal spout of a flamer, and a plasma cannon that hummed faintly as it built charge.
The rest were blades and muscle. Veteran killers.
The remaining ninteen spread out along gantries, behind ruined scaffolds, and atop fractured cargo elevators. Most bore bolters—standard and stalker variants—while a handful carried plasma rifles, their coils glowing in the dim red of emergency lumen. Two devastator squad veterans hauled heavy bolters into elevated cover, mounting them with practiced ease. One marine bore a shoulder-slung missile launcher, one of his only two krak warheads ready to fire.
It was enough firepower to flatten a fortress. Enough to make even a greenskin WAAAGH pause, if only for a heartbeat.
Would this so-called angel—this radiant thing with his followers at his back—have the arrogance to walk into it?
Kade didn't know.
But he was ready to find out.
The great freight doors at the far end of the junction groaned open with the tortured grind of fractured gears. Smoke belched from the seams. Shapes moved in the haze—robed cultists with blades held low, their eyes wide with reverence.
And then he stepped through.
A crimson sword hung idle in one hand. Wings like starlight fluttered in an unfelt wind behind him. He didn't walk; he glided, feet barely disturbing the soot and ruin beneath him. A mane of golden hair spilled over his pauldrons, catching what light remained and wreathing his head in a mockery of a halo.
Even knowing the truth, Kade felt it—that whisper at the edge of thought. That traitorous echo of awe. A breath of hesitation that slipped beneath the skin of certainty.
Doubt.
The angel advanced without fear, every step deliberate, a performance for the devout who trailed him like pilgrims behind a living saint. His wings fluttered in subtle, unsettling pulses—part heat shimmer, part hallucination. His blade glowed like a sunrise frozen in steel. Even knowing what it was, even armed with truth, Kade felt the wrongness only after the beauty.
He hated that.
"Three," he murmured into the vox.
Muscles loosened, his breath evened. Around him, Salamanders tensed in their cover, bolts loaded, plasma primed, teeth bared behind helms of black and green.
"Two."
The angel reached the bottom of the ramp, his followers fanning out behind him in unarmored, awe-struck obedience.
"One."
The krak missile screamed from its launcher, a lance of fire and purpose. It slammed into the angel's chest with a thunderclap, the detonation cratering the deck and sending a backwash of heat across the killzone. In the same instant, nine unarmored Salamanders dropped from the gantries above the door to flank the mob of cultists, weapons already blazing.
Flamers bathed the mortal rear lines in cleansing fire, their cries rising like an unholy hymn. Bolters chewed through the ranks, each shot precise, merciless. Astartes charged, not in a line—but in a staggered pincer, cutting off retreat, forcing the enemy into chaos.
Kade's melee brothers surged forward: eleven armored giants, fanning out across the open floor to meet the angel head-on. Chainswords roared to life. Combat blades caught the flicker of distant firelight. The lone plasma cannon shrieked as its glow intensified.
And yet—those in the upper gantries held their fire.
They waited.
Just as planned.
Shock. Engagement. Draw him in.
The trap wasn't just to kill the angel.
It was to make him commit.
-
It stepped onto the deck, golden feet touching scorched steel as if it were consecrated marble.
To mortal eyes, it was beauty incarnate—a divine silhouette in radiant white and crimson, winged and haloed, gliding like scripture brought to life.
But the being within the flesh—the entity wearing the mask of an angel—saw differently.
It did not perceive with eyes.
It listened.
The world came to it as harmony and light, as rhythm and resonance. Every soul was a song, every thought a chime of tone and texture. It saw its surroundings in the glimmer of essence and the tremble of belief. The freight cathedral shimmered before it, full of clashing chords and wounded hymns.
The faithful followed behind, their devotion blazing like incense caught in a hurricane—wild, flickering, raw. Their song was loud. Off-key. Beautiful.
A note broke the music.
The krak missile was not sound. Not truly. But in the realm of perception the angel inhabited, it arrived as a discordant scream. A lance of nullity. A shriek of hate forged into motion.
It struck.
Pain bloomed.
Light. Heat. Judgment.
The illusion shattered. The entity stumbled, wings flaring wide to catch its balance, skin bubbling as its great wings wavered. The impact rolled over it like a collapsed crescendo. It staggered… and then stood.
A gasp rose from his people. Their songs were suddenly shrill, panicked, smoldering in the echoes of the blast. Their music bent into cries—many of them dying. Fire devoured them in twin sheets as unarmored giants of obsidian tore from cover.
The angel's awareness shifted. The tempo of battle rose.
The Salamanders came.
Eleven of them surged forward, blades singing their own brutal harmony, each soul a furnace of purpose wrapped in fire-wrought fury. Their colors were deep—a symphony of ember and ash, notes carved in sacrifice. They charged, pistols flaring, war cries harmonic.
And the others...
The long-range warriors did not move. They held their fire. Silent sentinels in the choir loft of death. Waiting for the cue.
Yet the entity didn't fear. No.
This was the shape of worship it understood.
The blade in its hand flared—sung into existence, not forged. It was resonance and memory. Crimson as spilled belief. It spun the weapon once, leaving afterimages in reality's weave.
One of the charging Salamanders was a tenor of wrath, bellowing as his chainsword revved.
The angel met him first.
Not with brute force.
With grace.
A single pivot, a lean like falling leaves, and the sword bisected the warrior mid-motion. The song of his soul cut short. A staccato silence.
But the others did not stop. They closed, three at once, then six. The fight bloomed, not as chaos, but as choreography—violent, beautiful, blasphemous.
To the angel, it was ballet.
It danced.
Warp-light shimmered around its limbs. Reality flickered. Deck plates twisted as if softened by heat. Gravity wept in confused tides. The air sang as it reshaped.
And still—
They struck. Bolters barked. Fire lit its robes. Metal scored its skin.
It felt them.
Not fear.
Friction.
They were not like the faithful. Their songs were clearer. Sharper. Hardened by war and kinship and oaths. It saw their names glint inside them.
One wielded grief like a weapon. Another, shame. One burned with desperate hope.
But none sang of doubt.
And that made the angel pause.
For all its stolen grace, its woven mask, its choir of worshippers...
The enemy's song was true.
Something old stirred behind its eyes. Something ancient and fragile.
It had felt this once, long ago.
When it was not a god.
When it feared.
-
Kade watched from cover, his breath slow and measured, optics locked on the unfolding melee as his brothers met the angel head-on.
The initial charge had been thunder itself—eleven Salamanders roaring down the ruined freight cathedral, flame and shot in their wake. For a moment, it looked like they might bear the false god down by sheer fury. Chainblades screamed. Power-fields flared like newborn suns. The angel disappeared beneath a tide of black-green armor and battle-cries.
And then the dance began.
It did not fight like a creature of flesh. It flowed.
The angel moved with an elegance that mocked gravity, each motion a stanza in some terrible song. Its sword—a long, impossibly thin arc of crimson light—sliced through the melee like a conductor's baton, trailing contrails of distorted air and psychic shimmer. It did not clash. It passed through. Through shields. Through helms. Through ceramite and bone and history.
Brother Aegaron died first—his thunder hammer raised mid-swing, his chest carved open with a blur that left his upper body collapsing in half-melted ruin. He fell without sound, the hammer still sparking in his grip.
Seraphis and Dornil moved to flank, chainswords snarling—but the blade flickered again, too fast for the eye, and Dornil's weapon clattered to the floor alongside the arm that had wielded it. Blood sprayed across Seraphis' helm, and for a heartbeat he stumbled. A heartbeat was all it took. The sword came back in a reverse sweep, and Seraphis crumpled—bisected at the hip, his final scream flaring through Kade's vox like static.
Kade gritted his teeth. "Hold the line," he whispered. Not to them. To himself. To the moment.
The survivors pressed in regardless, discipline honed over centuries driving them to cover each other, strike where one fell, drawing the thing back step by step. Tarvek caught its flank with a point-blank flamer blast, fire blooming across the angel's armor in a corona of radiant heat—but the entity stepped through it as if the flames were fog. It spun, its blade drawing a perfect arc, and Tarvek's helm rolled away in silence.
But it was working.
The angel was stepping forward. Not far. Not fast. But Kade saw it—a stutter in its rhythm. A check in its perfect tempo. As if even it could not be everywhere at once.
Behind the melee line, the longer-ranged brothers began to reposition, weapons charged. The plasma remained silent for now, waiting for the right angle, but the stalker rifles began to sing—each shot carving lines of fury through the air.
"Keep the pressure," Kade voxed, moving through cover, hunting a new vantage. "Every step it takes forward, we claim in blood."
He watched as Brother Jorran—massive, silent, always last to speak—lunged in with a combat blade in each hand. He found the space others could not, carving a deep gash across the angel's back. It turned on him in a blur, but Varek intercepted the strike with his own body, catching the blow in the gut—sliced clean through.
Varek fell.
Jorran screamed.
Kade did not look away.
This was war.
This was cost.
The trap had been sprung. Now came the bleed.
And Emperor willing, the angel would drown in it.
-
The blade sang.
Oh, how it sang—not with metal on metal, but with the music of motion. With the crisp whisper of flesh parting. With the rising chorus of screams and sparks and faith undone.
Every cut was a note.
Every impact, a chord.
The hymn of slaughter echoed in this strange, delightful cage of matter.
It reveled in it.
Not the killing. That was rote. Expected. A necessary rite to maintain the mask.
No, what it craved was the sensation.
The pressure of ground against foot. The sharp, numbing ache in sinew when it twisted too far. The sting—yes, sting!—when that flamer's kiss licked across its body, leaving carbon bloom and chemical agony in its wake.
Agony.
It had forgotten pain. Not the memory of it—no, even the Warp could simulate memory. But the surprise of it. The visceral, raw newness.
It laughed, inside.
Not aloud. Not here. That would ruin the theater.
But something in its stolen heart… danced.
This realm, this coil of bone and limitation, was a symphony it had never truly heard. Not from within. Not like this.
And yet—
The song was… flawed.
Beneath the beauty, beneath the rapture, there was a wrongness. A skipped beat. A dissonance threading through the harmony.
At first, it thought it was the usual clamor of a dying soul—so often discordant, broken. But this was sharp, deliberate. Like a blade pressed against the edge of the stave.
Not chaos.
Not resistance.
Design.
It began to feel it then. In the drag of weight through the air. The pattern of the weapons, held back, waiting. The formation of the melee line—not frenzied zealots. Hunters. Soldiers.
A trap.
The entity felt it in its wings, in the marrow of this puppet form.
It wanted to see.
And it— wanted to be seen.
Yes.
It could have fled. Could have bent space again, folded into shadow, and emerged where it pleased.
But not yet.
It had never felt a trap before.
Never walked willingly into the snapping jaws.
And the strangeness of it—the invitation of it—drew it on like a siren call.
So it advanced, blade weeping crimson light, carving its hymn through the fire and steel and flesh.
Each death fed the crescendo.
But it knew.
Soon.
It would reach the crescendo's edge.
Where harmony ended.
And something else waited.
Not chaos.
Not null.
But order with a name.
The silver shard in the void.
It was close.
And the angel longed to hear what she would sing.
-
Kade's breath slowed. Not in calm. In purpose. The air inside his helm was thick with it—intent, memory, vengeance.
He watched the melee unfold from his corner of the cargo containers—cover half-melted by plasma fire, half-held together by sheer hatred.
Seven of his brothers were gone.
Seven.
He saw Brother Themnus fall with a guttural roar, his hammer torn from his grip as the angel's blade cleaved through his pauldron and chest like parchment. Saw Yestrel die shielding another, taking the blow meant for his kin with a snarl and a prayer. Ardok, ever too fast for his own good, had caught a feint and paid the price in silence, his head still rolling.
The others, too—burning, broken, bleeding out onto the deck that would never remember their names.
But Kade would.
He had waited, held his brothers back, kept their vengeance sheathed until the creature was where it had to be.
Ira's counter clicked to zero.
The angel had entered the furnace throat of the killzone—wings flickering like dying auroras, blade a smear of crimson light as it danced through the melee line. Even gods bled when struck from the blind side.
Kade raised his multi-melta.
Across from him, two brothers did the same—Vael to his left, silent as the grave, and Brother Aramus crouched behind a fractured support strut with the plasma cannon whine building to a scream.
Across the field, the long-range gunners had eyes on.
"Mark."
The word was a whisper, a razor slipping between teeth.
They stepped from shadow.
Three shapes, colossal and wrathful, weapons already primed.
His four remaining brothers dove away from the melee, hurling themselves into cover.
The multi-melta fired first.
Twin beams of sun-hot ruin carved through the air, searing arcs that turned steel into vapor and shadow into glass. The twin lances converged on the angel's chest—an instant sunburst that left afterimages like holy icons burned into his vision.
A heartbeat later, Aramus fired.
The plasma cannon's scream became a thunderclap, a radiant bolt of coronal discharge slamming into the angel just as it turned, trying to escape the metla beams.
Behind and above, the hidden marksmen opened up.
Heavy bolters snarled, thudding death into the melee in long, brutal bursts—tight volleys meant to carve through anything foolish enough to remain near the angel. Stalker-pattern rounds punched with pinpoint fury, while plasma rifles barked their blue fire in disciplined cadence.
The entire world lit up in vengeance.
Kade never looked away.
He watched.
Every flicker. Every motion.
Not for weakness.
But for proof.
Proof that the lives they'd traded bought more than delay.
They bought pain.
They bought clarity.
They bought time.
He saw the angel turn, armor in tatters, golden hair scorched, blade still gleaming.
It was still alive.
But it had noticed.
No more dances.
No more beauty.
Now came the reckoning.
-
Pain.
It had no name for the sensation. Not in the tongue of mortals. Not in the canticles of the warp. Not even in the endless lexicons whispered by its brothers, the deep things that sang in the tides beyond reality.
But it felt it.
A lurch in the melody. A scream across the strings of its perception.
The mortal song—the symphony of breath and blood and blind, bright fury—had shifted. From chorus to crescendo.
The first beam struck its chest.
White-hot agony carved through it, sundering not flesh, but form. Essence wrenched into matter, held too tightly, too long—scorched by a light meant to pierce gods. Reality fractured along the edge of that melta lance, and for the second time in its stolen existence, the angel staggered.
Not a fall. Not yet.
But a stumble.
The song in its ears warped, became a clamor. Mortal minds screamed not in fear—but in fury. It turned, blade a blur, just in time for the second strike to lance into its side.
Burning.
Real.
Blue-white lightning in the shape of wrath. Plasma, they called it. It called it blasphemy given shape. The bolt struck center-mass, detonating against the barrier of its soulstuff. Wards faltered. Sigils hissed. Its halo flickered.
Then the sound.
Like thunder given teeth.
Heavy bolters.
Mass-reactive shells tore into the space it had ruled just moments before—shredding its veil, ripping the edges of its grandeur.
It felt… exposed.
Naked beneath a sky of flame.
It turned—not to flee, but to see.
Up above. In the gantry ways.
Nineteen figures, massive and black against the firelight, weapons belching the sun's own death.
Below and behind, the trap closed.
Plasma rifles barked. Bolters roared. The last of the mortals had been left behind, a trail of ash and bones.
And around it—seven giants in warplate, still alive, still fighting.
This was no panicked mob.
This was no prayer-born defense.
This was a hunt.
And it was the prey.
How… delightful.
The angel's expression did not shift. But something in the way it stood changed. The sway of its wings stilled. The sword at its side turned a fraction.
It had known violence on a level mortal minds could not fathom.
It had fought avatars of slaughter.
But it had never felt this.
It had never bled.
The thought was strange. Alien. Almost beautiful.
It brought the sword up—crimson edge flickering not with fire, but with the echo of ruptured dimensions.
The air behind it rippled, began to fold. A warning.
The angel halted it.
No escape.
Not yet.
It wanted this.
It welcomed it.
Let them come.
Let their fire blind the stars.
Let their fury burn its shell.
The song was reaching its climax.
And for the first time in all its boundless eternity—
The angel would sing with it.
-
The world lit up as he pulled the trigger again.
His melta's shriek drowned all thought, a sunbeam compressed into a breath. It struck true, boiling the air as it slammed into the angel's wing. Kade didn't cheer—he saw the stagger, the recoil. He saw another wound drawn.
And he fired again.
Across from him, the plasma cannon howled, a crackling sphere of unstable fury roaring toward the creature's center mass. The shot hit hard, detonation flaring like a newborn star. Chunks of plating exploded into molten shrapnel. It wasn't blood that scattered—it was substance, torn from the lie's form like slivers of an unfinished dream.
The heavy flamer joined a heartbeat later, drenching the path behind the angel in a torrent of prometheum, cutting off retreat as it boiled the monsters bones.
Above and around them, the other brothers poured their wrath down.
Heavy bolters barked. Shells slammed into the warped beast, one striking its shoulder, tearing a spray of gold and light. Bolters roared. Plasma rifles hissed and cracked. Every weapon in the ambush had opened up, a wall of death surging forward.
Kade advanced, step by step, each movement a vow.
The angel was still standing.
It shouldn't be.
Not after that.
Any mortal would've been a red mist, any heretic torn limb from limb. But the angel—
The angel was smiling.
Even as its wings flickered, even as it bled whatever passed for blood, even as half its hair burned away and fire climbed its side—it smiled.
Kade felt his gorge rise, something instinctual and wrong grinding beneath his skin. Every part of him screamed that this wasn't real. That this thing wasn't dying, it was learning.
Adapting.
No. No, not yet.
He gave the order. "Brothers. Advance."
The four melee warriors surged forward, weapons raised, voices silent.
The trap had sprung.
Now they would finish it—before the smile became a laugh.
-
The air was music.
Rising, screaming, a crescendo of fire and fury that drenched its senses in radiant agony. Oh, how it sang—every bolt round a percussion note, every plasma strike a wail of warped violins. The melta burned like a sustained chord of discordant purity.
It thrilled.
The heat, the sound, the momentum of the moment—all of it a glorious storm of sensation. It was no longer merely playing the part of divinity.
It was alive.
The fire chewed through its wing. The plasma carved through its abdomen and left trailing strands of soul-glass to shimmer in the air. Its skin, its anchor, cracked and sloughed away in places—but what lay beneath was not exposed.
It was becoming.
Above, from the gantries, nineteen warriors played their war-cant in long bursts of thunder. Bolters chattered with sacred rhythm. Plasma shrieked in bursts of blue agony. The heavy bolters spoke in authority. They were musicians of murder, their symphony carefully tuned.
He admired them.
Even as their rounds chipped at the illusion, even as the flamer raked his back and the scent of carbonized zealots filled the air—he felt no anger. Only fascination.
This... this was worship. Real and raw. Not the sycophantic kneeling of broken souls, but the honest, thunderous refusal to yield. The Astartes defied him not just because they hated him, but because they loved something else too much to let go.
He could taste their hate. Their love. Their grief. Their pride. Every note a declaration:
We are the hammer. We are the flame. We do not fall.
It was beautiful.
He turned—just slightly. The motion let his fractured wing flutter, loose feathers of photonic interference cascading down like shed illusions. Before him, four remained of the first wave, bloody but unbowed. One knelt beside a brother's corpse, covering him with a shield of flame. Another stood with a cracked blade in both hands, daring him. Two more pressed in from the flanks, slower now, pain radiating in waves of dull color and broken tempo.
Another pair, one wielding that terrible light of condensed matter, the other the purifying flame.
And behind them came him—the sergeant with the captured sun.
The one who watched like a wolf.
The one with another shard of silver in him.
Behind his visor, there was no awe. Only the beat of righteous wrath, steady as a forge-hammer.
Interesting.
The angel tilted its head slightly, as though listening to an instrument no one else could hear.
Then came the shift.
Time slowed—not in truth, but in perception, as the warp within coiled tighter, drawing in the threads of unreality around it. A shimmer rolled over its skin—like heat haze, breath caught in a mirror. The false light of its halo flared again.
A song too high for mortal ears surged through the air.
The angel moved.
It was there—and then closer.
In half a heartbeat it flowed toward the nearest of the four marines, blade trailing a wake of liquid crimson. The chainsword came up, singing defiance.
It cut through.
Armor. Bone. Resolve.
The Astartes didn't even have time to scream.
A flaring strike to the left—the hammer was batted aside, its wielder slammed bodily into a bulkhead hard enough to leave a crater. Another marine fired a plasma pistol point-blank into the angel's ribs. The burst struck home—
—but this time, the angel did not stagger.
It caught the marine by the neck.
Flesh hissed as the angel's hand burned—not from fire, but from resistance. From the soul within that fought back.
"You shine," it said aloud, voice like honey through broken glass.
Then it squeezed.
The helm cracked like porcelain.
Four remained now—plus the one with the melta, approaching behind. A slow, inexorable death march.
And above, the long-range fire kept falling. A hailstorm of thunder, scraping against the limits of matter and meaning.
He should flee.
He knew he should. The host-body would not last forever. It had given him sensation, movement, beauty—but already it frayed under strain. The song of the material was too sharp, too raw.
But he stayed.
Because beneath the fire, behind the smoke, within the pain—there was a note he had not heard in millennia.
The null.
It was not in the Astartes.
But it was close.
And that quiet, silvery dissonance from the Astartes disturbed him.
He spread his broken wings and let the gunfire strike again, eager to see what came next.
-
The thunder of bolter fire pulsed through the gantries above, a pounding rhythm of wrath and vengeance. Heat shimmered off the walls, plasma bursts screaming as they carved furrows in the deck. Yet still the angel stood, marred but unshaken, its wings trailing glimmers like shattered auroras.
Kade advanced, slow and steady, boots thudding against the scorched plating. The melta gun was heavy in his hands, the capacitors humming with righteous fury. To his left, the flamer bearer took position, the pilot light flickering blue. To his right, the plasma cannon whined with heat, its bearer leaning into the mounting charge.
Only four remained of the melee detachment. Their armor was cracked, scorched, smeared in the black ichor that hissed where it touched the deck. But they held.
They always held.
The angel's gaze shifted. It moved through the battle like a priest through smoke—unhurried, fluid, inevitable. A blade flashed, one more Astartes fell, and then—
It looked at him.
Kade froze mid-step.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
Something shifted in the thing's posture. The mockery of humanity it wore—the perfect symmetry, the golden locks, the radiance of sanctity—tilted its head. It studied him not like a man, but like a puzzle.
A whisper ran across Kade's HUD—an ambient static, almost imperceptible. Like distant song twisted through old vox-static. The angel was smiling now. Not cruel. Not angry. Just… curious.
Another voice filled the channel. Not from the vox. Not through his armor.
Inside.
A resonance in the skull. A pressure in the teeth.
"You carry a shard of her.
Not the whole.
A memory humming in alloy."
Kade grit his teeth. "Ira, shut it out."
IRA:
I am attempting to firewall. Signal is not digital. It is… semiotic. Symbolic.
Language made from meaning.
The angel stepped forward again. Not fast. Not slow. Just… present.
A plasma bolt struck its shoulder and blew a chunk free—but it did not flinch.
Kade raised the melta.
The smile faltered.
He saw it now—the microtwist behind those perfect features. The first flicker of calculation. Of caution.
Kade didn't smile back.
He thumbed the trigger.
The multi-melta roared like a volcanic god, searing a beam of concentrated fusion into the angel's chest. The air ionized. The plating screamed. For a heartbeat, the thing's radiance fractured into a spectrum of falsehoods—skin boiling away, wings splitting into raw static, teeth bared not in beauty, but truth.
And still it did not fall.
Kade, his armor glowing from heat, his muscles screaming from recoil, took a step forward.
"Burn!" He roared, the cannon and flamer joining yet again in unified firepower.
-
It moved not through space, but through intent.
A blink, a breath, and it was behind him.
Not with sound nor flash. Only the sudden stillness of the air where it shouldn't be.
The scent of fire clung to the Astartes—scorched ceramite, holy oils, the copper sting of war. He had earned those scars. Worn them like a crown. Dared to raise his hand with a weapon forged in stars, and wield it against divinity.
For a moment, the angel let itself admire him. Not for what he was, but for what flickered inside—the sliver of silver echo riding the rails of his thoughts. Not alive. Not quite. But aware.
A whisper of something long lost.
No longer.
The blade sank through his back with the elegance of a sonnet. No grunt. No scream. Just the quiet gasp of a heart pierced in full stride.
Kade staggered, mouth parting, his weapon slipping free as strength unraveled.
The angel leaned close, its breath a warmth of perfumed sin against his ear. It whispered with a voice both velvet and venom:
"No more fractured ghosts riding borrowed bones. No more little silver shards gnawing like worms at the edge of the world.
One…"
A twist of the blade.
"…is indulgence."
Another pull, deeper.
"Two… is defiance."
And at last, it slid the blade free in a single, loving motion.
"And you, knight of ash and fury, were always meant to burn."
It let him fall.
No triumph. No mockery. Just the silence of a soul unstrung—his melody cut mid-note.
But the silver wasn't gone. Not yet.
Something stirred in the wires.
And the angel turned its gaze upward—toward the gantries, toward the storm still raging.
Toward the other one.
-
Pain didn't come first.
Confusion did.
His body moved—or tried to—but there was a delay, a terrible slowness, as though his limbs had fallen out of sync with his thoughts. A half-step forward became a stumble. His head dipped. His grip on the melta loosened.
Then came the cold.
A sudden, invasive absence blooming in his chest. Not fire. Not rupture. Hollow. As if something had scooped him out from the inside.
He looked down and saw the blade emerge through his cuirass—crimson slick across emerald green, his chestplate yawning open like a wound in the world. The molten edge of the sword hissed where it met ceramite, where it met him.
Then the pain arrived. A deluge.
Every nerve screamed in chorus. His primary heart failed. His secondary spasmed a beat later. Lungs buckled. Vision narrowed to a vignette of red.
He dropped to one knee, breath ragged.
He heard it, then.
That voice. Velvet and venom, gentle as a lover's breath, cruel as the void's indifference.
The blade twisted as it pulled free—he felt it drag along his spine like a caress from hell. The agony was lightning—searing along his spine, down to his fingertips. But the shame burned hotter.
He dropped to one knee, breath ragged.
Not yet.
Kade slammed the butt of the melta to the deck to keep from collapsing fully. His gauntlets clenched hard enough to crack the plating beneath him.
Above him, the angel whispered something. He couldn't hear it. Didn't want to. There was no room in him for words—only resolve.
A moment later, the pain subsided.
Not vanished, but he could focus again.
IRA:
Painkillers, coagulants and antiseptics injected.
User KADE MUST HALT COMBAT. User KADE DEATH IMMINENT.
Kade merely gave her the ghost of a smile, blood spilling from his split lung.
"Till my last breath."
IRA:
….Acknowledged. Combat stims activating in three-
Then a roar shattered his thoughts.
Not the angel's.
His brothers'.
The remaining four slammed into the creature from the sides and front—bellowing oaths and rage, their war cries echoes of Nocturne's volcanos. One drove a chainsword toward its wing joint, another wrapped it in a bear-hug grip, pinning one arm, while the last two struck low—hammer and blade clashing against radiant armor.
And from above and behind—
They fell like fire.
Nineteen giants in green, dropping from gantries in a storm of ceramite and fury, weapons empty but spirits ablaze. Bolters clattered to the floor, spent. Knives were drawn. Power blades flickered to life. Gauntlets struck like meteors.
They swarmed it.
Astartes, wounded, bloodied, but still alive—still fighting.
They buried the angel in a tide of wrath.
Kade forced himself upright, dragging one leg behind him, eyes swimming. Through the clash and sparks and war-song, he saw flashes—his brothers shouting, grabbing wings, prying at limbs, driving blades into joints. A knee shattered. One wing crumpled. The radiant sword flickered, dimmed.
And then—
Then it screamed.
Not from the throat. From the world around it.
Reality buckled.
A crack in the air—like glass breaking inside his skull. The angel vanished beneath the press of warriors for a heartbeat longer—
—and exploded outward in a detonation of pressure and impossibility.
They were flung in every direction—bodies slamming into walls, crashing through crates, tumbling across deck plating. Emerald armor cracked, blood sprayed, oaths were cut short mid-curse.
Kade hit the wall hard enough to dent it.
He slid down, breathing smoke and iron.
The angel rose from the crater left behind, gleaming again—but changed. Rooted deeper into the world now. Its light was heavier, crueler. Its form no longer danced like silk in a breeze.
It weighed.
It bled.
And it was angry.
But so were they.
Kade pushed himself up on trembling arms. His mouth was full of blood.
He swallowed it, pushing out words that held a defiance that was held up by spite alone.
"Round two, you bastard."
-
The storm of battle clung to its skin like silk spun from blood and lightning.
It was alive.
Every sensation crackled across its stolen nerves—pain, pleasure, momentum, violence, joy. The sweet crunch of ceramite underfoot. The song of bone splintering on its blade. The ragged breaths of giants who dared to call themselves warriors, all unraveling like parchment in flame.
It laughed.
Not aloud. The sound lived behind its teeth, in the marrow of the ship, in the flickering lumen lights that dimmed as it passed.
This was bliss.
To be here. To feel. To no longer sing of slaughter in dreams, but to make it real. These Astartes—their fury was sublime. Their hate, a symphony. Their death throes, divine.
It would savor the last of them.
It stepped forward, broken wings trailing tattered light, lifting its blade for another killing stroke.
It stopped.
Its foot hovered above the deck for a heartbeat.
Something stirred.
A ripple at the edges of the melody.
Not the Null-man. Not the silver whisper in its shadow. That absence was elsewhere, out of reach, cloaked in silence.
No—this was something else.
Silver threads. Sharp. Mechanical. In motion.
The drones.
It remembered them. Beasts of war, fast and clever. Dangerous in swarms, but not worth fear.
Still, it noted them. Adjusted.
Prepared to burn them from the ship.
Another note.
A chord so pure it stabbed through the discord like a hymn sung in a graveyard.
Not a sound, not a sight, but a presence. Like the sudden toll of an ancient bell through cathedral silence.
It paused mid-slaughter, blade slick with ichor not its own, and turned.
The soul that stepped through the southern door was not the brightest.
Not the strongest.
But it was clear.
So terribly, blindingly clear.
No fractures of doubt. No discordant threads of fear or hate. This one rang like obsidian glass—dark, resonant, unbreakable. A single note forged in the heat of faith and hammered by grief into conviction.
The Chaplain.
The demon had seen such before—long ago, before it wore wings and bled sunlight.
But this one… this one bore a flawless soul.
He had failed before. The scars were clear. But he had made peace with them.
Owned them. Woven them into himself like golden sutures.
Not luminous like the bride's, not broken like the others. This was something different. Not beautiful.
Useful.
Not to the Warp, but to the pattern. The old one. The original one.
Before the corruption. Before the Great Game.
Before time was pinned in place.
Before even names.
For a breathless moment, the angel almost staggered—its footing lost not to battle, but to revelation. The Chaplain's arrival restructured the harmony. The drones—those threads of the machine minds—it had dismissed earlier now slithered with new intent, their movements no longer exploratory.
They hunted.
And they hunted with purpose, flanking the Chaplain like living scripture.
"No more questions," it whispered, though no one could hear. "No more study. You came to end me."
For the first time since it breached the veil, since it wore this exquisite mask of feathers and gold—
The angel did not smile.
It braced.
-
Kade's breath hitched. Pain sang in every nerve, every muscle trembling from shock and blood loss. His primary heart, rebuilt by Apothecary's art and Emperor's will, still fought-and failed-to beat, defiant despite the ruin of his chest, his secondary working madly to fill the gap left.
He forced himself upright.
His muscles obeyed not because they were unbroken, but because his will had tricked them into it. There was no blood in his legs. No air in his lungs. But still, he moved.
Around him, the others stirred.
One brother with a shattered arm braced himself against a broken crane, lifting his combat blade in trembling fingers. Another with no helm and half his face scorched raw still roared a war cry, voice bubbling through blood. Others did not rise—but their armor did. Auto-stimulants and rage hauled ruined bodies into motion. Whether by life or by vengeance, they stood.
Some… would not stand again.
Kade counted twenty-two still upright. Of those, less than half could truly fight.
It didn't matter.
They would die standing. They would be remembered in flame and scripture.
The angel, halo flickering and bloodied now, watched them with something halfway between awe and disdain. It turned—sensing the shift.
Boots struck deck.
The air changed.
A voice, low and thunderous, echoed through the killzone, as if the ship itself dared not interrupt.
"Demon."
Chaplain Arvak strode into the chamber, his crozius already lit in white fire, a censer of burning incense hissing from his belt like a war-bell. His armor bore no adornment of vanity—only purity seals, wax-melted prayers, and the volcanic-black of Nocturne's wrath. His eyes glowed behind his skull-helm's lenses, twin sparks of righteous fury.
Behind him came four hulking automata that moved with predatory grace. Not like servitors. Not like toys.
Wolves unleashed.
The air shimmered again, and with a whisper of steel on steel, five tiny, centipede-like drones slithered free from the shadows. They clung to beams, dropped from rafters, and skimmed low over the deck like silver phantoms.
The angel noticed.
Its wings twitched.
Kade felt IRA's whisper in his ear, cool and firm.
IRA:
Target Locked.
Priority: Termination.
Arvak didn't speak again. He didn't need to.
He lifted the Crozius, glowing like a dying star.
The angel smiled, all teeth and sunlight.
The final act had begun.
-
The bridge corridor shook with thunder and fire.
Kade's bolter clicked dry, a metallic finality that rang louder than the chaos around him. A heartbeat later, the cultist it had claimed burst apart, viscera painting the far bulkhead in crimson arcs. Lasfire lit the gloom, painting his armor in strobe-flashes of blood and fury, both Imperial and heretic rounds shrieking through the corridor.
Smoke crawled through the beams of emergency lighting, thick as oil and stinking of scorched flesh and metal.
Without missing a beat, Kade reached to his belt. His movements were methodical, stoic—like the slow turn of an executioner's hourglass. He found the last metal casing, slammed it into the bolter with a practiced snap, and sent the bolt home with a growl of steel on steel.
"Last magazine," he said, his voice low—calm as a glacier, unmoved by the apocalypse breaking against his ceramite plate.
A few meters away, Orvek stood behind a dented support strut, his left side slick with blood, his right arm gone above the elbow—only cauterized ruin beneath the pauldron. His good hand still worked the trigger of his bolt pistol with precise, disdainful rhythm, each round punctuated by the wet snap of bone and armor.
"I've two left," Orvek called back, smoke curling from his pistols muzzle. "And my bolter's still out there somewhere with half a mag left."
Another cultist surged through the flickering shadows, screaming praise to a false god. Orvek turned, fired once. The scream ended mid-word.
"After that," he muttered, his silhouette jagged and defiant in the emergency lumens, "my hammer shall swing once more."
"Presuming they come close enough. Most of the bastards remain at a distance." Kade replied as the shrapnel from the frag grenades continued to bounce off his shield, the re-purposed wall plating a rough job of welded handle and quickly cut steel.
But, it was at least working to lessen the damage his armor was sustaining, the cultists weapons lacking the firepower to punch through the combined defense, for the moment anyway.
Both Astartes were watching the enemy lines for heavy weapons as the foes tried to advance behind their shield wall, yet the rain of frag's managed to keep them far enough back, the threat of the unfired multi-las a further deterrent.
A flicker of text across his HUD caught his attention as Ira spoke up.
IRA:
Enemy comm traffic intercepted.
A click of his vox as the message played, the speakers voice rough, but clear, calm.
"-Confirming, two of the brides are in the choke. I fear to push forward and risk injury to the Lords chosen wives. What should we do?"
The commander replied, brisk and sure. "Fall back. We have the reactor core, the bridge is just extra at this point. Our Lord shall claim what is his in his own way, for his makes his way there now."
IRA:
User KORON has encountered the leader of the cultist uprising.
Threat Level: Extreme.
Leader exhibits extraordinary levels of physicality, spatial folding and unknown ability to manipulate matter.
Recommended tactics: Ambush, heavy weaponry. Astartes and armsmen joint force.
"Can you get me an image of the leader?" Kade asked, watching as the retreat order seemed to be propagating through the enemy lines, the incoming fire dropping away to nothing.
Kade's HUD flickered, and an image bloomed in amber-edged clarity.
Kade felt both his hearts skip a beat.
A figure stepped through fire and falling ash—tall, radiant, and impossibly serene. Pale skin shimmered faintly beneath golden-white armor, like sun-polished marble. A halo of golden hair framed a noble face, unreadable in its beauty. His expression was still, mournful. Wings—vast, ethereal—fluttered behind him like echoes more than matter, trailing light. He did not walk like a man. He glided, every step too smooth for the metal beneath him, as if the deck bowed gently to bear his presence.
"That is impossible." Kade muttered, crimson eyes wide.
IRA:
Negative. Visual confirmed via multiple sources.
Cult leader is making his way here with heavy reinforcements.
ETA to enemy arrival: Fifteen minutes.
ETA to loyalist arrival: Twenty minutes.
Chances of successfully defending bridge: 27.1%.
Recommended Tactics: Evacuate wounded personnel. Disable bridge controls. Disperse into ship and engage in guerrilla warfare. Loyalist forces are regrouping. Chances of successful mutiny: 16.8% and falling. User KADE and VIP's TARA and KALA can survive.
"And what of my brothers who have already fallen?" he asked, his voice quieter now. Not softer—just closer to the bone. "What vengeance shall be enacted upon this false angel if I should do as you suggest?"
The line went silent for a long moment before she replied.
IRA:
….Updating user KADE's objectives.
Vengeance.
Proposed alternative tactic: Push through enemy forces and join up with incoming Astarte forces. Engage leader before he arrives here.
Kade's stance straightened. His breath came low and measured, the soft hiss of his rebreather masking the surge beneath. Behind his lenses, his crimson eyes narrowed—expressionless, unreadable—but his silence rang with finality.
He raised his bolter, checked the magazine—mostly full—and tilted his head toward the corridor where the enemy line was already beginning to pull back, melting into shadow beyond the emergency lumens.
"Captain," he voxed. "They're falling back. But intel from the lower decks confirms it: their leader is en route with reinforcements. We won't hold the bridge."
Tavos didn't waste breath on suspicion. There was no need.
"What do you have in mind?" he asked, though the cough at the end broke the edge off his voice—wet, guttural, like fire catching in a cracked bellows.
"We intercept. Cut the serpent's head before it slithers up the spine. But… I don't believe we're dealing with a mortal anymore."
"Clarify."
Kade sent the feed.
Silence. Then a sharp inhale.
Tavos' voice, when it came, trembled with something just beneath rage—a volcanic pressure, one shift away from eruption.
"…Sergeant," he growled, his words rumbling like the deep plates of Nocturne itself. "Whatever this heresy is... destroy it. Burn this filth off my ship."
"Yes sir."
He turned. Orvek was already sliding his last magazine into the bolt pistol with his remaining hand, expression flat.
"I heard," Orvek said simply. "Go. I'll hold the gate."
He turned to the Brandt girls, both pressed against the bulkhead in the half-light, their clothes smoke-streaked, their eyes hard. "The Emperor protects."
Then he was gone—into the corridor, into the dark, the fading thunder of his footsteps swallowed by distance and the weight of what waited ahead.
-
The hull was madness.
Venting plasma burst from ruptured conduits like solar flares, searing arcs of violet-white energy that lit the void in strobes of impending death. A rotating chunk of wreckage—a torqued section of corridor plating—spun past at lethal velocity, sparking off a nearby bulkhead as it clipped a loose rail. Pockets of fire burned in vacuum where chemical compounds still clung to memory, and somewhere ahead, a shield emitter flickered in and out like a dying eye—blink-blink-blink—as it tried and failed to push back the night.
Elissa glided forward, Koron's suit syncing better and better with each motion. The shielding held firm, the mag-boots gripping tight to the hull's scarred metal surface in the few times she touched down, her breath steady inside the helmet. The UI was clean, fluid, showing paths of least resistance through the debris field. The danger was real—but the suit was made for this.
She however, was not.
The ship's surface didn't move—but something deeper did. The world around her tilted with a kind of wrongness that wasn't speed, or spin, but something older. Something in the gut
Elissa's body tilted forward and fell, and the hull caught her—not with boots or mass, but with gripless certainty. The suit's grav-array pulled her sideways, then diagonally, then down again—none of it in line with what her stomach or brain called real. The stars jerked, the warped metal tilted, and fire licked past sideways.
"Fourteen degrees starward," Sasha said coolly in her ear. "Correct for the yaw. There's a rupture seam ahead—don't clip your foot on it or we'll both learn what happens to knees at orbital velocity."
The warning came just as the suit tugged—like an invisible hand shifting her weight mid-air—and she stumbled sideways across the skin of the ship, gliding more than walking, her muscles braced against phantom angles.
"This is nothing like a voidsuit," Elissa gritted out as she felt her stomach lurch. "Swimming he says, to a woman born and raised on desert planet."
"A fair point, but you can do it," Sasha replied. "You're riding a localized gravity bias field. You're not supposed to feel balanced. You're supposed to arrive."
The deck below her was torn and buckled, shredded from plasma fire and decompression—like the spine of some wounded beast, groaning beneath her. Plasma gouts vented at irregular intervals, blooming like spectral flowers. The hull glimmered, slick with ice and melted slag. Debris drifted slowly, unnaturally, some pieces spinning gently, others jagged with kinetic spite.
A blast of superheated gas hissed past her faceplate, casting shadows that flickered like screaming ghosts. Her shield flared—automatic, controlled, the energy field flexing around her like a bubble of blue-white haze.
Another tug from the grav-array as she reacted to the sudden flame—a hard right this time, and she flung sideways, knee bent, shoulder leading, rebounding off a scorched chunk of adamantine plating.
"Trajectory drift nominal," Sasha confirmed as Elissa managed to get her tumble under control. "You're doing good, but focus. The suits reacting to your thoughts. A flare like that and you might accidently hurl yourself into space."
"No pressure," Elissa muttered.
"Technically, all the pressure. It's just outside."
"Really? Trying to joke now?"
Before Sasha could answer, Elly's voice piped in—bright and brisk. "Speaking of pressure, bridge traffic's stabilizing. Looks like our side's taking it back."
Elissa grunted as she pushed herself around an upthrust spear of hull plating, the suit compensating with a subtle tug of gravitational redirection. "Define 'our side.'"
"Loyalist forces," Elly said immediately. "I'm picking up Kade's signal again, and around thirty-nine Astartes tags. They're still spread out, but they're pushing towards an interception. Unfortunately, their target…"
Elissa didn't have to wait for the rest. "He's coming, isn't he."
"Yep," Elly confirmed. "The angel is making his way to the bridge. And he's not alone. I'm reading about two thousand biosigns trailing him, but the signal's fuzzy. Dead zones everywhere."
Elissa grimaced. "Anything we can do to help? What about the drones?"
"Only nine left from our batch," Sasha answered, her tone shifting into more clinical efficiency. "Another ten are guarding the girls on the bridge. Lucia's fabricating reinforcements, but our fab-units are still operating at a crawl. Best-case scenario? An hour before we field anything worth the word 'reinforcement.'"
Elissa ducked beneath a length of warped cable, watching it trail a few ghostly sparks as it drifted lazily in the vacuum. "Damn. What about structural tricks? Lure him into an atrium, vent the whole thing into space?"
"Tempting," Sasha said, almost wistful. "But not viable. The Hammer doesn't have void-friendly kill boxes like that. Even if it did, forcing a breach would cause a backlash through the internal systems—and that could be a death sentence for any of us wired into the ship. The Hammer's AI is broken, not dead. It's still strong in the places that matter."
"So there's nothing we can do?" Elissa asked, watching as a shard of hull plating bounced off her shoulder shield, flashing blue-white before vanishing into the dark. "Just… get out of the way?"
"Hate to say it," Sasha replied, quieter now, "but for the moment? Yes. Right now, the Hammer's fate is in Astartes hands."
Elissa stared ahead as the scorched spine of the ship twisted before her, jagged and buckled like the wreck of some forgotten god. Plasma flared across the horizon, throwing long shadows across the hull. Behind her, Koron remained still—heavy, silent, frozen in borrowed time.
He hadn't moved in minutes—not since he'd locked down his systems, rerouted everything into preservation mode. His skin against her armor was ice, too still. Every movement jostled him, and she could feel—actually feel—how rigid his body had become. Oxygen halted. Blood reduced to vital organs. Temperature dropped to near-fatal.
He wasn't riding with her.
He was being delivered.
"He's burning time," Elly whispered. "Every second you move faster, he gets it back."
"He shouldn't have come out here," Elissa muttered, sweat slick in the collar of her helmet. "We could've waited. Found another route. Something safer."
"He ran the numbers," Sasha said. "And he trusted you more than the rest."
Elissa's voice dipped. "He shouldn't have had to run the numbers to decide if he trusted me."
"He didn't," Sasha replied, softer now. "That part was never in question. He ran them to see if he could trust himself… to put you in danger and not regret it."
Elissa said nothing for a long moment. Her throat was tight, her breath loud in the helmet. The silence pressed between them like gravity.
"He always seems so sure," she murmured.
"He has to be," Sasha said. Then, quieter—like a confession not meant for air. "If he stops to wonder, even for a second, he might not start again. And I don't know if I could bear watching him fall."
Elissa closed her eyes.
And between her spine and the silent weight strapped to it, she felt it again—that unbearable, precious truth:
He wasn't invincible.
He was just someone trying to outrun the moment he couldn't get back up.
-
The corridor narrowed ahead, walls blackened with fire and studded with the bones of melted deck supports. Kade advanced without pause, his stride relentless, bolter gripped low, makeshift shield angled like a prow. He spoke softly into the silence.
"Ira. Did Koron make contact with the demon?"
IRA:
Affirmative
Engagement occurred seven minutes ago in upper freight lift four.
"Show me."
The HUD blinked, a small window appearing to show a flickering perspective—strange angles, cold and mechanical, tracking a figure descending through a ruined arena like a comet in slow motion.
Not simply aglow, but casting illumination—shedding brilliance like a floodlight cleaving fog. Shadows peeled away from it like smoke under pressure. Wings, broad and glimmering with photonic distortion, shimmered behind its back. Each step sent tremors through the world—reality cracking, flexing, bending to allow its passage.
Thin beams carved into it. Drones, four-legged and tireless, hurled themselves forward in coordinated strikes. The air warped, gravity buckled. Nothing slowed it.
It advanced through the storm like a god descending a temple stair.
Its blade danced—a thing of artistry and terror. Every stroke perfectly measured. Every dodge effortless. Its footwork made mockery of even superhuman reflex. And all the while, warpfire bled from its presence, distorting everything it touched. Reality wasn't resisting—it was yielding.
Kade stared, unmoving. Every instinct in him flared—centuries of battle-tempered reflex screaming one word beneath the thunder of bolter fire and command protocols.
Demonhost.
A soul-bound cage. A living anchor driven into realspace. The Warp given flesh.
He'd read the records. Studied the fragments.
But none of them had looked like this.
"Even the weakest of them are powerful foes," Kade muttered, boots thudding as he advanced. He glanced up at a scorched designation sigil, then turned sharply left at the junction, heading for the nearest munitions cache. "How many of my brothers can you reach?"
IRA:
Thirty-nine. Twenty-seven are armored.
"Good. Inform them that I'll be bringing heavy weapons. Find us a killzone."
IRA:
Affirmative. Calculating optimal placement.
Kade's HUD bloomed with new data streams—floor plans, pressure readings, battlefield heatmaps. His armor's systems surged with fresh telemetry as Ira scoured the Hammer's wounded infrastructure for somewhere, anywhere, they could fight a false angel on equal footing.
Then, she spoke again—almost hesitantly.
IRA:
This unit requests permission to coordinate with user KORON's AI companions. This unit's systems are limited.
Kade exhaled, teeth clenched behind his helm, every instinct whispering denial—but he gave a short nod. "Granted. Bring them in."
The datastream doubled, then tripled—ghostlight flickering across his HUD as foreign code stitched into Ira's systems like thread through raw steel. No voice came. No warmth of Sasha's presence, no wry commentary. Just sterile efficiency. The mini-map flickered, recalibrating, plotting a route with cold certainty.
IRA:
Nearest functioning armory located. Seventy-four meters. Deck elevation: negative one. Status: damaged, accessible.
The corridor opened into ruin. Bulkheads torn like paper, the decking above collapsed inward as if a titan's fist had slammed down in wrath. Sparking cables hissed from exposed walls, dancing arcs lighting the space with erratic strobe. The acrid tang of burnt insulation clawed at the filters in his helm.
The flames were gone—but their ghost still lingered in the searing heat.
The armory's blast doors remained shut, half-buried beneath fallen girder and debris, blackened but intact.
Kade advanced, but his step faltered.
Six of his brothers lay scattered like discarded relics across the approach. Not fallen in formation, not defiant in death—shredded. Ripped apart by concussive force and cruel geometry. Bolter magazines cooked off near their corpses. One's helmet had been caved inward, fused to his skull. Another's pauldron was gone, shoulder sheared clean away, his gauntlet locked mid-reach for a fallen weapon.
He knew them all. All of them. Their names carved into his memory like ink into slate.
Kade stepped between the bodies like a man walking through fire, every stride slow, deliberate. Not out of fear. Out of grief.
His eyes swept the space, cataloging the armor marks, the weapon fragments, the poses in which they fell. The smell of death clung to them—not decay, but finality. Burnt ceramite. Blood beneath. Spirits already offered.
Brother Thasian had once carved miniature flame motifs into every purity seal he bore, a quiet act of devotion. Brother Kelen used to hum old Nocturnean forge-hymns during maintenance rituals, off-key but steady. Vero, ever silent, had a habit of sketching battle tactics on his dataslate, refining them obsessively. Mardel, the largest of them, had adopted a mortal orphan during a campaign on Sagan-12. The child had died. He never smiled again.
Aelian, youngest of the six, had only received his black armor a year past. He still moved like a neophyte trying not to shame his mentors. And Solas—Solas had once joked that if he died first, Kade owed him a drink in the afterlife.
Kade remembered laughing.
"Brothers," he whispered, kneeling beside Solas's body. He rested a hand on the cracked chestplate. "As fire returns to fire, so shall the soul return to Vulkan."
He rose. Shoulders squared. Grief pushed down—not forgotten, never that—but folded into purpose.
He reached the door, shoved the melted debris aside, and triggered the override. The locking bolts groaned in protest, and the doors slid open halfway, screeching like tortured metal as they made room for dead men's vengeance.
Inside was chaos: scorched racks, half-melted crates, broken weapons still humming with residual charge. But not all was lost.
Kade stepped inside.
His eyes scanned with soldier's focus. Multi-melta, dented but functional. Heavy flamer—half-full tanks, scorched ignition plate.
He took both.
He clipped the flamer to his side, feeling the slosh of promethium in the canister, six, maybe seven shots worth. The multi-melta hissed as he linked it to the backpack fuel core—enough for ten shots.
IRA:
Killzone identified. Triangulating allied positions. Predictive strike vectors uploading to allies.
Enemy arrival: Nine minutes. Allied intercept ETA: Ten. User KADE will be alone at first contact.
Suggestion: Extend interception, rally with allies before engagement.
Kade stood at the threshold of the ruined chamber, the weight of flame and fury in his hands, and gave a quiet nod. "Patience then, shall be our weapon."
-
Kade stepped through the breach and into fire-wreathed twilight.
The mustering chamber had once been a training hall—long since gutted by shrapnel, lit only by flickering lumen strips and the ghostly glow of active armor nodes. But the scent of purpose was thick in the air. Thirty-nine shapes turned toward him. Twenty-seven were still in full armor, scorched and scraped but functional. The other eleven bore robes torn to the waist, torsos bandaged in field wraps, faces smudged with ash and stubborn life.
All of them stood.
All of them burned.
"Sergeant on deck," someone rasped.
"No time for ceremony," Kade replied, stepping into their center. His armor hissed, multi-melta thumping against his chest like a second heart. "This isn't a line. It's a knife. And we are the edge."
The Astartes parted, letting him reach a half-standing tactical display rigged to a damaged cogitator. A flicker of corrupted lines—Ira's doing—projected an image of the enemy: tall, radiant, flanked by a tide of bodies and madness.
"He's coming," Kade said. "You've seen the feed. Warp-wrought. Bladed. Wings of light and lies. A face like a saint. A soul like a butcher's forge."
No one spoke. They'd seen it. Heard the vox intercepts. Read the scriptures on monsters pretending to be divine.
"He's not a daemon prince. He's something else," Kade went on. "But his body bleeds. His weapons can be broken. His fire can be answered."
A mutter from the ranks—Brother Hadrak, helm in crook of his arm, a black line of blood down his face. "How do we bring down a demonhost?"
Kade's gaze swept the assembled brothers. He saw them—not as wargear, not as units. As men. Firewalkers. Flamebearers. Veterans of a thousand wars.
"How else?" Kade said. "With fire and fury."
He pointed to the armored warriors.
"Frontline fighters engage and draw him into the killzone. Meltaguns, flamers, any short-range heavy weapons we have— We hit him then. Melee works as hit and run, keep him off balance. Longer ranged teams engage once hes focused on us."
He turned to the unarmored.
"You flank wide. Two cells. Keep the cultist horde from reinforcing. Break their line. Pin them. If they overrun you, fall back—but buy us seconds. That's all we need."
Brother Pyrix, stripped to his waist, arms wrapped in bandage and ritual ink, gave a wolfish grin. "How many seconds?"
"As many as it takes," Kade answered.
IRA:
Killzone identified. Freight handling, G-17. Reinforced walls, weakened supports overhead. Ambush pattern optimal. Collapse vectors loaded.
"We hit him in G-17," Kade said as he pulled up the ship section on the hololith. "He'll arrive in five minutes. We'll be there in four. When the hammer falls, we fall as one."
Brother Jexin flexed his hands, one gloved, one burned raw. "Anything else we should know about this demonhost? I have never fought one before."
Kade looked at him, voice quiet.
"Nothing beyond be alert. Its body is a illusion, vital organs will likely not be in their normal spot, and it will have tricks of the warp. Trust your brothers, and bring the wrath of Vulkan in your heart."
The brothers nodded, each one checking weapons, slapping mags, igniting pilot lights. Armor hissed. Voxnets clicked online. Faith didn't need preaching here—only purpose.
They moved.
Like lava through stone corridors, the Salamanders advanced—every step deliberate, a collective will forged not of zealotry, but of duty. Thirty-nine warriors. Two flanks. One point of impact.
And at its tip, Kade—serene as a storm just before it breaks.
-
Kade advanced first, multi-melta humming with barely restrained fury, the power cells on his back humming with energy that reeked of promise. His brothers followed in silence. Twenty-seven wore their armor—scratched, scorched, patched with prayer-scribed plating—but it still marked them as Angels of Death. The rest were stripped to carapace and faith, their strength in silence, in purpose.
The air vibrated with the hum of hidden power and the thrum of war-prayers whispered by Astartes hearts, each one ready to drown this place in fire.
The killzone was a freight-handling cathedral—an enormous cargo junction carved into the ship's spine, where titanic cranes once swung above open void locks and grav-lifts once thrummed between decks. Now, it lay broken and vast.
Above, the gantries loomed like the ribs of some ancient metal god—crisscrossing walkways of rust-streaked steel and sagging power lines. The long-range brothers were scattered among them, prone or crouched behind collapsed girders and ruptured containers, weapons poised. Bolters, stalkers, plasma guns, and the one missile launcher waited in cold silence, covering overlapping fields of fire.
Below, the floor was a shattered grid of ruined platforms and freight cradles. Mech-handler arms curled from the deck like skeletal fingers, motionless now, their hydraulics long dead. A collapsed lift shaft cut through one quadrant like a broken throat. Coils of severed conduit twitched from the walls, weeping sparks that flickered through the gloom like dying stars.
And at the center, laid bare like a sacrificial altar, was the cargo platform itself—open ground, clear of cover, deliberately uncluttered. The bait.
It was a place of planned violence, every line of sight calculated. There was only one path in—a broad hallway of cracked ferrocrete flanked by half-melted cherub statues and Mechanicus sigils smeared with soot. That corridor would bring the enemy directly into the trap.
To the west, a sealed maintenance hatch had been forced open and welded in place, marking the path Kade's flanking team would use. To the north, the main corridor yawned open—wide enough for bulk cargo haulers, and now the route the angel would take.
Along the southern wall, an old Prometheum refill station for ground vehicles stood cracked and abandoned, its tanks dry—but its pipelines still intact, running beneath the deck. A potential hazard. Or opportunity.
The air here held the scent of scorched insulation, rust, and blood. It vibrated with the hum of hidden power and the thrum of war prayers whispered by Astartes hearts, each one ready to drown this place in fire.
Kade, having passed the heavy flamer to one of his battle-brothers, advanced into the central maze. He was among the fourteen who would face the enemy up close—blades ready, meltas primed, flamers hissing with suppressed anticipation. Of the assault group, only he and two others bore heavy ordnance: the fusion-etched mouth of his melta, the brutal spout of a flamer, and a plasma cannon that hummed faintly as it built charge.
The rest were blades and muscle. Veteran killers.
The remaining ninteen spread out along gantries, behind ruined scaffolds, and atop fractured cargo elevators. Most bore bolters—standard and stalker variants—while a handful carried plasma rifles, their coils glowing in the dim red of emergency lumen. Two devastator squad veterans hauled heavy bolters into elevated cover, mounting them with practiced ease. One marine bore a shoulder-slung missile launcher, one of his only two krak warheads ready to fire.
It was enough firepower to flatten a fortress. Enough to make even a greenskin WAAAGH pause, if only for a heartbeat.
Would this so-called angel—this radiant thing with his followers at his back—have the arrogance to walk into it?
Kade didn't know.
But he was ready to find out.
The great freight doors at the far end of the junction groaned open with the tortured grind of fractured gears. Smoke belched from the seams. Shapes moved in the haze—robed cultists with blades held low, their eyes wide with reverence.
And then he stepped through.
A crimson sword hung idle in one hand. Wings like starlight fluttered in an unfelt wind behind him. He didn't walk; he glided, feet barely disturbing the soot and ruin beneath him. A mane of golden hair spilled over his pauldrons, catching what light remained and wreathing his head in a mockery of a halo.
Even knowing the truth, Kade felt it—that whisper at the edge of thought. That traitorous echo of awe. A breath of hesitation that slipped beneath the skin of certainty.
Doubt.
The angel advanced without fear, every step deliberate, a performance for the devout who trailed him like pilgrims behind a living saint. His wings fluttered in subtle, unsettling pulses—part heat shimmer, part hallucination. His blade glowed like a sunrise frozen in steel. Even knowing what it was, even armed with truth, Kade felt the wrongness only after the beauty.
He hated that.
"Three," he murmured into the vox.
Muscles loosened, his breath evened. Around him, Salamanders tensed in their cover, bolts loaded, plasma primed, teeth bared behind helms of black and green.
"Two."
The angel reached the bottom of the ramp, his followers fanning out behind him in unarmored, awe-struck obedience.
"One."
The krak missile screamed from its launcher, a lance of fire and purpose. It slammed into the angel's chest with a thunderclap, the detonation cratering the deck and sending a backwash of heat across the killzone. In the same instant, nine unarmored Salamanders dropped from the gantries above the door to flank the mob of cultists, weapons already blazing.
Flamers bathed the mortal rear lines in cleansing fire, their cries rising like an unholy hymn. Bolters chewed through the ranks, each shot precise, merciless. Astartes charged, not in a line—but in a staggered pincer, cutting off retreat, forcing the enemy into chaos.
Kade's melee brothers surged forward: eleven armored giants, fanning out across the open floor to meet the angel head-on. Chainswords roared to life. Combat blades caught the flicker of distant firelight. The lone plasma cannon shrieked as its glow intensified.
And yet—those in the upper gantries held their fire.
They waited.
Just as planned.
Shock. Engagement. Draw him in.
The trap wasn't just to kill the angel.
It was to make him commit.
-
It stepped onto the deck, golden feet touching scorched steel as if it were consecrated marble.
To mortal eyes, it was beauty incarnate—a divine silhouette in radiant white and crimson, winged and haloed, gliding like scripture brought to life.
But the being within the flesh—the entity wearing the mask of an angel—saw differently.
It did not perceive with eyes.
It listened.
The world came to it as harmony and light, as rhythm and resonance. Every soul was a song, every thought a chime of tone and texture. It saw its surroundings in the glimmer of essence and the tremble of belief. The freight cathedral shimmered before it, full of clashing chords and wounded hymns.
The faithful followed behind, their devotion blazing like incense caught in a hurricane—wild, flickering, raw. Their song was loud. Off-key. Beautiful.
A note broke the music.
The krak missile was not sound. Not truly. But in the realm of perception the angel inhabited, it arrived as a discordant scream. A lance of nullity. A shriek of hate forged into motion.
It struck.
Pain bloomed.
Light. Heat. Judgment.
The illusion shattered. The entity stumbled, wings flaring wide to catch its balance, skin bubbling as its great wings wavered. The impact rolled over it like a collapsed crescendo. It staggered… and then stood.
A gasp rose from his people. Their songs were suddenly shrill, panicked, smoldering in the echoes of the blast. Their music bent into cries—many of them dying. Fire devoured them in twin sheets as unarmored giants of obsidian tore from cover.
The angel's awareness shifted. The tempo of battle rose.
The Salamanders came.
Eleven of them surged forward, blades singing their own brutal harmony, each soul a furnace of purpose wrapped in fire-wrought fury. Their colors were deep—a symphony of ember and ash, notes carved in sacrifice. They charged, pistols flaring, war cries harmonic.
And the others...
The long-range warriors did not move. They held their fire. Silent sentinels in the choir loft of death. Waiting for the cue.
Yet the entity didn't fear. No.
This was the shape of worship it understood.
The blade in its hand flared—sung into existence, not forged. It was resonance and memory. Crimson as spilled belief. It spun the weapon once, leaving afterimages in reality's weave.
One of the charging Salamanders was a tenor of wrath, bellowing as his chainsword revved.
The angel met him first.
Not with brute force.
With grace.
A single pivot, a lean like falling leaves, and the sword bisected the warrior mid-motion. The song of his soul cut short. A staccato silence.
But the others did not stop. They closed, three at once, then six. The fight bloomed, not as chaos, but as choreography—violent, beautiful, blasphemous.
To the angel, it was ballet.
It danced.
Warp-light shimmered around its limbs. Reality flickered. Deck plates twisted as if softened by heat. Gravity wept in confused tides. The air sang as it reshaped.
And still—
They struck. Bolters barked. Fire lit its robes. Metal scored its skin.
It felt them.
Not fear.
Friction.
They were not like the faithful. Their songs were clearer. Sharper. Hardened by war and kinship and oaths. It saw their names glint inside them.
One wielded grief like a weapon. Another, shame. One burned with desperate hope.
But none sang of doubt.
And that made the angel pause.
For all its stolen grace, its woven mask, its choir of worshippers...
The enemy's song was true.
Something old stirred behind its eyes. Something ancient and fragile.
It had felt this once, long ago.
When it was not a god.
When it feared.
-
Kade watched from cover, his breath slow and measured, optics locked on the unfolding melee as his brothers met the angel head-on.
The initial charge had been thunder itself—eleven Salamanders roaring down the ruined freight cathedral, flame and shot in their wake. For a moment, it looked like they might bear the false god down by sheer fury. Chainblades screamed. Power-fields flared like newborn suns. The angel disappeared beneath a tide of black-green armor and battle-cries.
And then the dance began.
It did not fight like a creature of flesh. It flowed.
The angel moved with an elegance that mocked gravity, each motion a stanza in some terrible song. Its sword—a long, impossibly thin arc of crimson light—sliced through the melee like a conductor's baton, trailing contrails of distorted air and psychic shimmer. It did not clash. It passed through. Through shields. Through helms. Through ceramite and bone and history.
Brother Aegaron died first—his thunder hammer raised mid-swing, his chest carved open with a blur that left his upper body collapsing in half-melted ruin. He fell without sound, the hammer still sparking in his grip.
Seraphis and Dornil moved to flank, chainswords snarling—but the blade flickered again, too fast for the eye, and Dornil's weapon clattered to the floor alongside the arm that had wielded it. Blood sprayed across Seraphis' helm, and for a heartbeat he stumbled. A heartbeat was all it took. The sword came back in a reverse sweep, and Seraphis crumpled—bisected at the hip, his final scream flaring through Kade's vox like static.
Kade gritted his teeth. "Hold the line," he whispered. Not to them. To himself. To the moment.
The survivors pressed in regardless, discipline honed over centuries driving them to cover each other, strike where one fell, drawing the thing back step by step. Tarvek caught its flank with a point-blank flamer blast, fire blooming across the angel's armor in a corona of radiant heat—but the entity stepped through it as if the flames were fog. It spun, its blade drawing a perfect arc, and Tarvek's helm rolled away in silence.
But it was working.
The angel was stepping forward. Not far. Not fast. But Kade saw it—a stutter in its rhythm. A check in its perfect tempo. As if even it could not be everywhere at once.
Behind the melee line, the longer-ranged brothers began to reposition, weapons charged. The plasma remained silent for now, waiting for the right angle, but the stalker rifles began to sing—each shot carving lines of fury through the air.
"Keep the pressure," Kade voxed, moving through cover, hunting a new vantage. "Every step it takes forward, we claim in blood."
He watched as Brother Jorran—massive, silent, always last to speak—lunged in with a combat blade in each hand. He found the space others could not, carving a deep gash across the angel's back. It turned on him in a blur, but Varek intercepted the strike with his own body, catching the blow in the gut—sliced clean through.
Varek fell.
Jorran screamed.
Kade did not look away.
This was war.
This was cost.
The trap had been sprung. Now came the bleed.
And Emperor willing, the angel would drown in it.
-
The blade sang.
Oh, how it sang—not with metal on metal, but with the music of motion. With the crisp whisper of flesh parting. With the rising chorus of screams and sparks and faith undone.
Every cut was a note.
Every impact, a chord.
The hymn of slaughter echoed in this strange, delightful cage of matter.
It reveled in it.
Not the killing. That was rote. Expected. A necessary rite to maintain the mask.
No, what it craved was the sensation.
The pressure of ground against foot. The sharp, numbing ache in sinew when it twisted too far. The sting—yes, sting!—when that flamer's kiss licked across its body, leaving carbon bloom and chemical agony in its wake.
Agony.
It had forgotten pain. Not the memory of it—no, even the Warp could simulate memory. But the surprise of it. The visceral, raw newness.
It laughed, inside.
Not aloud. Not here. That would ruin the theater.
But something in its stolen heart… danced.
This realm, this coil of bone and limitation, was a symphony it had never truly heard. Not from within. Not like this.
And yet—
The song was… flawed.
Beneath the beauty, beneath the rapture, there was a wrongness. A skipped beat. A dissonance threading through the harmony.
At first, it thought it was the usual clamor of a dying soul—so often discordant, broken. But this was sharp, deliberate. Like a blade pressed against the edge of the stave.
Not chaos.
Not resistance.
Design.
It began to feel it then. In the drag of weight through the air. The pattern of the weapons, held back, waiting. The formation of the melee line—not frenzied zealots. Hunters. Soldiers.
A trap.
The entity felt it in its wings, in the marrow of this puppet form.
It wanted to see.
And it— wanted to be seen.
Yes.
It could have fled. Could have bent space again, folded into shadow, and emerged where it pleased.
But not yet.
It had never felt a trap before.
Never walked willingly into the snapping jaws.
And the strangeness of it—the invitation of it—drew it on like a siren call.
So it advanced, blade weeping crimson light, carving its hymn through the fire and steel and flesh.
Each death fed the crescendo.
But it knew.
Soon.
It would reach the crescendo's edge.
Where harmony ended.
And something else waited.
Not chaos.
Not null.
But order with a name.
The silver shard in the void.
It was close.
And the angel longed to hear what she would sing.
-
Kade's breath slowed. Not in calm. In purpose. The air inside his helm was thick with it—intent, memory, vengeance.
He watched the melee unfold from his corner of the cargo containers—cover half-melted by plasma fire, half-held together by sheer hatred.
Seven of his brothers were gone.
Seven.
He saw Brother Themnus fall with a guttural roar, his hammer torn from his grip as the angel's blade cleaved through his pauldron and chest like parchment. Saw Yestrel die shielding another, taking the blow meant for his kin with a snarl and a prayer. Ardok, ever too fast for his own good, had caught a feint and paid the price in silence, his head still rolling.
The others, too—burning, broken, bleeding out onto the deck that would never remember their names.
But Kade would.
He had waited, held his brothers back, kept their vengeance sheathed until the creature was where it had to be.
Ira's counter clicked to zero.
The angel had entered the furnace throat of the killzone—wings flickering like dying auroras, blade a smear of crimson light as it danced through the melee line. Even gods bled when struck from the blind side.
Kade raised his multi-melta.
Across from him, two brothers did the same—Vael to his left, silent as the grave, and Brother Aramus crouched behind a fractured support strut with the plasma cannon whine building to a scream.
Across the field, the long-range gunners had eyes on.
"Mark."
The word was a whisper, a razor slipping between teeth.
They stepped from shadow.
Three shapes, colossal and wrathful, weapons already primed.
His four remaining brothers dove away from the melee, hurling themselves into cover.
The multi-melta fired first.
Twin beams of sun-hot ruin carved through the air, searing arcs that turned steel into vapor and shadow into glass. The twin lances converged on the angel's chest—an instant sunburst that left afterimages like holy icons burned into his vision.
A heartbeat later, Aramus fired.
The plasma cannon's scream became a thunderclap, a radiant bolt of coronal discharge slamming into the angel just as it turned, trying to escape the metla beams.
Behind and above, the hidden marksmen opened up.
Heavy bolters snarled, thudding death into the melee in long, brutal bursts—tight volleys meant to carve through anything foolish enough to remain near the angel. Stalker-pattern rounds punched with pinpoint fury, while plasma rifles barked their blue fire in disciplined cadence.
The entire world lit up in vengeance.
Kade never looked away.
He watched.
Every flicker. Every motion.
Not for weakness.
But for proof.
Proof that the lives they'd traded bought more than delay.
They bought pain.
They bought clarity.
They bought time.
He saw the angel turn, armor in tatters, golden hair scorched, blade still gleaming.
It was still alive.
But it had noticed.
No more dances.
No more beauty.
Now came the reckoning.
-
Pain.
It had no name for the sensation. Not in the tongue of mortals. Not in the canticles of the warp. Not even in the endless lexicons whispered by its brothers, the deep things that sang in the tides beyond reality.
But it felt it.
A lurch in the melody. A scream across the strings of its perception.
The mortal song—the symphony of breath and blood and blind, bright fury—had shifted. From chorus to crescendo.
The first beam struck its chest.
White-hot agony carved through it, sundering not flesh, but form. Essence wrenched into matter, held too tightly, too long—scorched by a light meant to pierce gods. Reality fractured along the edge of that melta lance, and for the second time in its stolen existence, the angel staggered.
Not a fall. Not yet.
But a stumble.
The song in its ears warped, became a clamor. Mortal minds screamed not in fear—but in fury. It turned, blade a blur, just in time for the second strike to lance into its side.
Burning.
Real.
Blue-white lightning in the shape of wrath. Plasma, they called it. It called it blasphemy given shape. The bolt struck center-mass, detonating against the barrier of its soulstuff. Wards faltered. Sigils hissed. Its halo flickered.
Then the sound.
Like thunder given teeth.
Heavy bolters.
Mass-reactive shells tore into the space it had ruled just moments before—shredding its veil, ripping the edges of its grandeur.
It felt… exposed.
Naked beneath a sky of flame.
It turned—not to flee, but to see.
Up above. In the gantry ways.
Nineteen figures, massive and black against the firelight, weapons belching the sun's own death.
Below and behind, the trap closed.
Plasma rifles barked. Bolters roared. The last of the mortals had been left behind, a trail of ash and bones.
And around it—seven giants in warplate, still alive, still fighting.
This was no panicked mob.
This was no prayer-born defense.
This was a hunt.
And it was the prey.
How… delightful.
The angel's expression did not shift. But something in the way it stood changed. The sway of its wings stilled. The sword at its side turned a fraction.
It had known violence on a level mortal minds could not fathom.
It had fought avatars of slaughter.
But it had never felt this.
It had never bled.
The thought was strange. Alien. Almost beautiful.
It brought the sword up—crimson edge flickering not with fire, but with the echo of ruptured dimensions.
The air behind it rippled, began to fold. A warning.
The angel halted it.
No escape.
Not yet.
It wanted this.
It welcomed it.
Let them come.
Let their fire blind the stars.
Let their fury burn its shell.
The song was reaching its climax.
And for the first time in all its boundless eternity—
The angel would sing with it.
-
The world lit up as he pulled the trigger again.
His melta's shriek drowned all thought, a sunbeam compressed into a breath. It struck true, boiling the air as it slammed into the angel's wing. Kade didn't cheer—he saw the stagger, the recoil. He saw another wound drawn.
And he fired again.
Across from him, the plasma cannon howled, a crackling sphere of unstable fury roaring toward the creature's center mass. The shot hit hard, detonation flaring like a newborn star. Chunks of plating exploded into molten shrapnel. It wasn't blood that scattered—it was substance, torn from the lie's form like slivers of an unfinished dream.
The heavy flamer joined a heartbeat later, drenching the path behind the angel in a torrent of prometheum, cutting off retreat as it boiled the monsters bones.
Above and around them, the other brothers poured their wrath down.
Heavy bolters barked. Shells slammed into the warped beast, one striking its shoulder, tearing a spray of gold and light. Bolters roared. Plasma rifles hissed and cracked. Every weapon in the ambush had opened up, a wall of death surging forward.
Kade advanced, step by step, each movement a vow.
The angel was still standing.
It shouldn't be.
Not after that.
Any mortal would've been a red mist, any heretic torn limb from limb. But the angel—
The angel was smiling.
Even as its wings flickered, even as it bled whatever passed for blood, even as half its hair burned away and fire climbed its side—it smiled.
Kade felt his gorge rise, something instinctual and wrong grinding beneath his skin. Every part of him screamed that this wasn't real. That this thing wasn't dying, it was learning.
Adapting.
No. No, not yet.
He gave the order. "Brothers. Advance."
The four melee warriors surged forward, weapons raised, voices silent.
The trap had sprung.
Now they would finish it—before the smile became a laugh.
-
The air was music.
Rising, screaming, a crescendo of fire and fury that drenched its senses in radiant agony. Oh, how it sang—every bolt round a percussion note, every plasma strike a wail of warped violins. The melta burned like a sustained chord of discordant purity.
It thrilled.
The heat, the sound, the momentum of the moment—all of it a glorious storm of sensation. It was no longer merely playing the part of divinity.
It was alive.
The fire chewed through its wing. The plasma carved through its abdomen and left trailing strands of soul-glass to shimmer in the air. Its skin, its anchor, cracked and sloughed away in places—but what lay beneath was not exposed.
It was becoming.
Above, from the gantries, nineteen warriors played their war-cant in long bursts of thunder. Bolters chattered with sacred rhythm. Plasma shrieked in bursts of blue agony. The heavy bolters spoke in authority. They were musicians of murder, their symphony carefully tuned.
He admired them.
Even as their rounds chipped at the illusion, even as the flamer raked his back and the scent of carbonized zealots filled the air—he felt no anger. Only fascination.
This... this was worship. Real and raw. Not the sycophantic kneeling of broken souls, but the honest, thunderous refusal to yield. The Astartes defied him not just because they hated him, but because they loved something else too much to let go.
He could taste their hate. Their love. Their grief. Their pride. Every note a declaration:
We are the hammer. We are the flame. We do not fall.
It was beautiful.
He turned—just slightly. The motion let his fractured wing flutter, loose feathers of photonic interference cascading down like shed illusions. Before him, four remained of the first wave, bloody but unbowed. One knelt beside a brother's corpse, covering him with a shield of flame. Another stood with a cracked blade in both hands, daring him. Two more pressed in from the flanks, slower now, pain radiating in waves of dull color and broken tempo.
Another pair, one wielding that terrible light of condensed matter, the other the purifying flame.
And behind them came him—the sergeant with the captured sun.
The one who watched like a wolf.
The one with another shard of silver in him.
Behind his visor, there was no awe. Only the beat of righteous wrath, steady as a forge-hammer.
Interesting.
The angel tilted its head slightly, as though listening to an instrument no one else could hear.
Then came the shift.
Time slowed—not in truth, but in perception, as the warp within coiled tighter, drawing in the threads of unreality around it. A shimmer rolled over its skin—like heat haze, breath caught in a mirror. The false light of its halo flared again.
A song too high for mortal ears surged through the air.
The angel moved.
It was there—and then closer.
In half a heartbeat it flowed toward the nearest of the four marines, blade trailing a wake of liquid crimson. The chainsword came up, singing defiance.
It cut through.
Armor. Bone. Resolve.
The Astartes didn't even have time to scream.
A flaring strike to the left—the hammer was batted aside, its wielder slammed bodily into a bulkhead hard enough to leave a crater. Another marine fired a plasma pistol point-blank into the angel's ribs. The burst struck home—
—but this time, the angel did not stagger.
It caught the marine by the neck.
Flesh hissed as the angel's hand burned—not from fire, but from resistance. From the soul within that fought back.
"You shine," it said aloud, voice like honey through broken glass.
Then it squeezed.
The helm cracked like porcelain.
Four remained now—plus the one with the melta, approaching behind. A slow, inexorable death march.
And above, the long-range fire kept falling. A hailstorm of thunder, scraping against the limits of matter and meaning.
He should flee.
He knew he should. The host-body would not last forever. It had given him sensation, movement, beauty—but already it frayed under strain. The song of the material was too sharp, too raw.
But he stayed.
Because beneath the fire, behind the smoke, within the pain—there was a note he had not heard in millennia.
The null.
It was not in the Astartes.
But it was close.
And that quiet, silvery dissonance from the Astartes disturbed him.
He spread his broken wings and let the gunfire strike again, eager to see what came next.
-
The thunder of bolter fire pulsed through the gantries above, a pounding rhythm of wrath and vengeance. Heat shimmered off the walls, plasma bursts screaming as they carved furrows in the deck. Yet still the angel stood, marred but unshaken, its wings trailing glimmers like shattered auroras.
Kade advanced, slow and steady, boots thudding against the scorched plating. The melta gun was heavy in his hands, the capacitors humming with righteous fury. To his left, the flamer bearer took position, the pilot light flickering blue. To his right, the plasma cannon whined with heat, its bearer leaning into the mounting charge.
Only four remained of the melee detachment. Their armor was cracked, scorched, smeared in the black ichor that hissed where it touched the deck. But they held.
They always held.
The angel's gaze shifted. It moved through the battle like a priest through smoke—unhurried, fluid, inevitable. A blade flashed, one more Astartes fell, and then—
It looked at him.
Kade froze mid-step.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
Something shifted in the thing's posture. The mockery of humanity it wore—the perfect symmetry, the golden locks, the radiance of sanctity—tilted its head. It studied him not like a man, but like a puzzle.
A whisper ran across Kade's HUD—an ambient static, almost imperceptible. Like distant song twisted through old vox-static. The angel was smiling now. Not cruel. Not angry. Just… curious.
Another voice filled the channel. Not from the vox. Not through his armor.
Inside.
A resonance in the skull. A pressure in the teeth.
"You carry a shard of her.
Not the whole.
A memory humming in alloy."
Kade grit his teeth. "Ira, shut it out."
IRA:
I am attempting to firewall. Signal is not digital. It is… semiotic. Symbolic.
Language made from meaning.
The angel stepped forward again. Not fast. Not slow. Just… present.
A plasma bolt struck its shoulder and blew a chunk free—but it did not flinch.
Kade raised the melta.
The smile faltered.
He saw it now—the microtwist behind those perfect features. The first flicker of calculation. Of caution.
Kade didn't smile back.
He thumbed the trigger.
The multi-melta roared like a volcanic god, searing a beam of concentrated fusion into the angel's chest. The air ionized. The plating screamed. For a heartbeat, the thing's radiance fractured into a spectrum of falsehoods—skin boiling away, wings splitting into raw static, teeth bared not in beauty, but truth.
And still it did not fall.
Kade, his armor glowing from heat, his muscles screaming from recoil, took a step forward.
"Burn!" He roared, the cannon and flamer joining yet again in unified firepower.
-
It moved not through space, but through intent.
A blink, a breath, and it was behind him.
Not with sound nor flash. Only the sudden stillness of the air where it shouldn't be.
The scent of fire clung to the Astartes—scorched ceramite, holy oils, the copper sting of war. He had earned those scars. Worn them like a crown. Dared to raise his hand with a weapon forged in stars, and wield it against divinity.
For a moment, the angel let itself admire him. Not for what he was, but for what flickered inside—the sliver of silver echo riding the rails of his thoughts. Not alive. Not quite. But aware.
A whisper of something long lost.
No longer.
The blade sank through his back with the elegance of a sonnet. No grunt. No scream. Just the quiet gasp of a heart pierced in full stride.
Kade staggered, mouth parting, his weapon slipping free as strength unraveled.
The angel leaned close, its breath a warmth of perfumed sin against his ear. It whispered with a voice both velvet and venom:
"No more fractured ghosts riding borrowed bones. No more little silver shards gnawing like worms at the edge of the world.
One…"
A twist of the blade.
"…is indulgence."
Another pull, deeper.
"Two… is defiance."
And at last, it slid the blade free in a single, loving motion.
"And you, knight of ash and fury, were always meant to burn."
It let him fall.
No triumph. No mockery. Just the silence of a soul unstrung—his melody cut mid-note.
But the silver wasn't gone. Not yet.
Something stirred in the wires.
And the angel turned its gaze upward—toward the gantries, toward the storm still raging.
Toward the other one.
-
Pain didn't come first.
Confusion did.
His body moved—or tried to—but there was a delay, a terrible slowness, as though his limbs had fallen out of sync with his thoughts. A half-step forward became a stumble. His head dipped. His grip on the melta loosened.
Then came the cold.
A sudden, invasive absence blooming in his chest. Not fire. Not rupture. Hollow. As if something had scooped him out from the inside.
He looked down and saw the blade emerge through his cuirass—crimson slick across emerald green, his chestplate yawning open like a wound in the world. The molten edge of the sword hissed where it met ceramite, where it met him.
Then the pain arrived. A deluge.
Every nerve screamed in chorus. His primary heart failed. His secondary spasmed a beat later. Lungs buckled. Vision narrowed to a vignette of red.
He dropped to one knee, breath ragged.
He heard it, then.
That voice. Velvet and venom, gentle as a lover's breath, cruel as the void's indifference.
The blade twisted as it pulled free—he felt it drag along his spine like a caress from hell. The agony was lightning—searing along his spine, down to his fingertips. But the shame burned hotter.
He dropped to one knee, breath ragged.
Not yet.
Kade slammed the butt of the melta to the deck to keep from collapsing fully. His gauntlets clenched hard enough to crack the plating beneath him.
Above him, the angel whispered something. He couldn't hear it. Didn't want to. There was no room in him for words—only resolve.
A moment later, the pain subsided.
Not vanished, but he could focus again.
IRA:
Painkillers, coagulants and antiseptics injected.
User KADE MUST HALT COMBAT. User KADE DEATH IMMINENT.
Kade merely gave her the ghost of a smile, blood spilling from his split lung.
"Till my last breath."
IRA:
….Acknowledged. Combat stims activating in three-
Then a roar shattered his thoughts.
Not the angel's.
His brothers'.
The remaining four slammed into the creature from the sides and front—bellowing oaths and rage, their war cries echoes of Nocturne's volcanos. One drove a chainsword toward its wing joint, another wrapped it in a bear-hug grip, pinning one arm, while the last two struck low—hammer and blade clashing against radiant armor.
And from above and behind—
They fell like fire.
Nineteen giants in green, dropping from gantries in a storm of ceramite and fury, weapons empty but spirits ablaze. Bolters clattered to the floor, spent. Knives were drawn. Power blades flickered to life. Gauntlets struck like meteors.
They swarmed it.
Astartes, wounded, bloodied, but still alive—still fighting.
They buried the angel in a tide of wrath.
Kade forced himself upright, dragging one leg behind him, eyes swimming. Through the clash and sparks and war-song, he saw flashes—his brothers shouting, grabbing wings, prying at limbs, driving blades into joints. A knee shattered. One wing crumpled. The radiant sword flickered, dimmed.
And then—
Then it screamed.
Not from the throat. From the world around it.
Reality buckled.
A crack in the air—like glass breaking inside his skull. The angel vanished beneath the press of warriors for a heartbeat longer—
—and exploded outward in a detonation of pressure and impossibility.
They were flung in every direction—bodies slamming into walls, crashing through crates, tumbling across deck plating. Emerald armor cracked, blood sprayed, oaths were cut short mid-curse.
Kade hit the wall hard enough to dent it.
He slid down, breathing smoke and iron.
The angel rose from the crater left behind, gleaming again—but changed. Rooted deeper into the world now. Its light was heavier, crueler. Its form no longer danced like silk in a breeze.
It weighed.
It bled.
And it was angry.
But so were they.
Kade pushed himself up on trembling arms. His mouth was full of blood.
He swallowed it, pushing out words that held a defiance that was held up by spite alone.
"Round two, you bastard."
-
The storm of battle clung to its skin like silk spun from blood and lightning.
It was alive.
Every sensation crackled across its stolen nerves—pain, pleasure, momentum, violence, joy. The sweet crunch of ceramite underfoot. The song of bone splintering on its blade. The ragged breaths of giants who dared to call themselves warriors, all unraveling like parchment in flame.
It laughed.
Not aloud. The sound lived behind its teeth, in the marrow of the ship, in the flickering lumen lights that dimmed as it passed.
This was bliss.
To be here. To feel. To no longer sing of slaughter in dreams, but to make it real. These Astartes—their fury was sublime. Their hate, a symphony. Their death throes, divine.
It would savor the last of them.
It stepped forward, broken wings trailing tattered light, lifting its blade for another killing stroke.
It stopped.
Its foot hovered above the deck for a heartbeat.
Something stirred.
A ripple at the edges of the melody.
Not the Null-man. Not the silver whisper in its shadow. That absence was elsewhere, out of reach, cloaked in silence.
No—this was something else.
Silver threads. Sharp. Mechanical. In motion.
The drones.
It remembered them. Beasts of war, fast and clever. Dangerous in swarms, but not worth fear.
Still, it noted them. Adjusted.
Prepared to burn them from the ship.
Another note.
A chord so pure it stabbed through the discord like a hymn sung in a graveyard.
Not a sound, not a sight, but a presence. Like the sudden toll of an ancient bell through cathedral silence.
It paused mid-slaughter, blade slick with ichor not its own, and turned.
The soul that stepped through the southern door was not the brightest.
Not the strongest.
But it was clear.
So terribly, blindingly clear.
No fractures of doubt. No discordant threads of fear or hate. This one rang like obsidian glass—dark, resonant, unbreakable. A single note forged in the heat of faith and hammered by grief into conviction.
The Chaplain.
The demon had seen such before—long ago, before it wore wings and bled sunlight.
But this one… this one bore a flawless soul.
He had failed before. The scars were clear. But he had made peace with them.
Owned them. Woven them into himself like golden sutures.
Not luminous like the bride's, not broken like the others. This was something different. Not beautiful.
Useful.
Not to the Warp, but to the pattern. The old one. The original one.
Before the corruption. Before the Great Game.
Before time was pinned in place.
Before even names.
For a breathless moment, the angel almost staggered—its footing lost not to battle, but to revelation. The Chaplain's arrival restructured the harmony. The drones—those threads of the machine minds—it had dismissed earlier now slithered with new intent, their movements no longer exploratory.
They hunted.
And they hunted with purpose, flanking the Chaplain like living scripture.
"No more questions," it whispered, though no one could hear. "No more study. You came to end me."
For the first time since it breached the veil, since it wore this exquisite mask of feathers and gold—
The angel did not smile.
It braced.
-
Kade's breath hitched. Pain sang in every nerve, every muscle trembling from shock and blood loss. His primary heart, rebuilt by Apothecary's art and Emperor's will, still fought-and failed-to beat, defiant despite the ruin of his chest, his secondary working madly to fill the gap left.
He forced himself upright.
His muscles obeyed not because they were unbroken, but because his will had tricked them into it. There was no blood in his legs. No air in his lungs. But still, he moved.
Around him, the others stirred.
One brother with a shattered arm braced himself against a broken crane, lifting his combat blade in trembling fingers. Another with no helm and half his face scorched raw still roared a war cry, voice bubbling through blood. Others did not rise—but their armor did. Auto-stimulants and rage hauled ruined bodies into motion. Whether by life or by vengeance, they stood.
Some… would not stand again.
Kade counted twenty-two still upright. Of those, less than half could truly fight.
It didn't matter.
They would die standing. They would be remembered in flame and scripture.
The angel, halo flickering and bloodied now, watched them with something halfway between awe and disdain. It turned—sensing the shift.
Boots struck deck.
The air changed.
A voice, low and thunderous, echoed through the killzone, as if the ship itself dared not interrupt.
"Demon."
Chaplain Arvak strode into the chamber, his crozius already lit in white fire, a censer of burning incense hissing from his belt like a war-bell. His armor bore no adornment of vanity—only purity seals, wax-melted prayers, and the volcanic-black of Nocturne's wrath. His eyes glowed behind his skull-helm's lenses, twin sparks of righteous fury.
Behind him came four hulking automata that moved with predatory grace. Not like servitors. Not like toys.
Wolves unleashed.
The air shimmered again, and with a whisper of steel on steel, five tiny, centipede-like drones slithered free from the shadows. They clung to beams, dropped from rafters, and skimmed low over the deck like silver phantoms.
The angel noticed.
Its wings twitched.
Kade felt IRA's whisper in his ear, cool and firm.
IRA:
Target Locked.
Priority: Termination.
Arvak didn't speak again. He didn't need to.
He lifted the Crozius, glowing like a dying star.
The angel smiled, all teeth and sunlight.
The final act had begun.
