After the impromptu strategy meeting, Supreme Grand Master Azrael led the Dark Angels away without hesitation. As the other Chapter Masters had suspected, the Dark Angels had volunteered for the purge of heretics merely as a smokescreen. Their true objective was tied to matters far more secret—matters that could never be made public.
To purge these secrets entirely, the Dark Angels would need to remain on Vigilus far longer than any other force. What stirred Azrael's deepest urgency was a single word: Fallen.
Reports from a detachment of the Angels of Absolution confirmed the appearance of the Fallen on the battlefield. Further investigation revealed hints that the Black Legion was preparing some horrific weapon of warp-born destruction.
Though fragmented, these clues pointed to something grave. The Dark Angels had to act swiftly—to uncover the truth and erase it.
Azrael checked the seals on his boltgun, his gaze scanning the storm-choked skies of Vigilus. Poison winds howled overhead, heralding doom. He exhaled slowly, words falling softly from his lips.
"We have no choice. For the Lion."
This would be a thankless battle. One without triumph or songs. But such was the burden of the First Legion.
Elsewhere, the burdens were no lighter.
Chapter Master Marneus Calgar of the Ultramarines had been grievously wounded and taken to the medicae chambers shortly after the war council. In his absence, it fell to the likes of Commander Doom and Lord Dante to take charge of the evacuation of civilian populations.
Commander Doom stood atop the ferrocrete tower of a devastated forge-complex, his blade held high as he roared litanies of hatred and retribution. With a fresh magazine slammed into his bolter, he descended into the chaos of the battlefield, returning to the savage streets of Vigilus.
The traitor horde was crumbling. Countless assaults against Imperial fortifications had shattered their numbers.
The moment the Doom Slayer's battle-horn resounded, they faltered. Many fled—into rifts of corrosive gas—or were torn apart in the enfilade fire of the Imperial guns.
Commander Doom wasted no time on prisoners. The Argento-Forge facilities were at capacity, and every second lost was a life unrescued. The Doom Slayer moved with brutal precision. The heretics died quickly, and his forces advanced with minimal casualties, cutting a path through the wilderness of the Datorian industrial zone.
Datoria burned behind them, its foundries belching fire and molten steel. Daemonic abominations were consumed in inferno storms.
Doom and Dante rallied the Imperial Legions, driving them toward the nearest extraction zones. Toxic sludge and chemical fog turned the landscape into a living hell, but the Astartes did not falter.
Through that blighted wilderness, they ran.
Doom, his soul aflame with conviction, swore an oath to the Gene-Father:
To lead the Emperor's people away from this dying world. To shield the innocent. To hold the line.
He did not know where Dukel was—only that the Lord of Destruction fought on. Somewhere. Everywhere. And that was enough.
Deep beneath the crust of Vigilus, within a rift choking with warp-gas and unnatural fog, two demigods clashed.
Dukel and Mortarion.
The landscape around them writhed—an unholy place nearly ten thousand meters beneath the surface. Warp-fire bled from the walls of a buried, corrupted temple. Here, the veil between reality and the Immaterium had all but vanished.
Raw warp energy screamed between them.
Each time Dukel's sword struck, it unleashed storms of flame—divine fire that scoured plague and impurity alike.
Mortarion hissed, retreating into the mist, blurring himself from sight. Dukel felt the oath from Doom resonate in his heart—silent, distant, but real. And he accepted it.
At that moment, communiques from the front flickered through the warp-cogitators embedded in his armor.
News of Sanguinius. Of the Lion.
The Angel and the Lion had set off with a hunter fleet to track the echoes of Horus. Guilliman remained on Vigilus, leading the broader front alongside Dukel. Every Primarch wanted answers. Dukel no less than the others.
But the Lion—Lion El'Jonson—had found something.
Clues to Horus's location. Real leads.
A flicker of hope entered Dukel's gaze. With the Lion hunting, Horus would soon have nowhere left to hide.
Yet this was not the time for hope.
The evacuation had begun. The battle with Mortarion neared its end.
Dukel had held back throughout the engagement, not because he could not win, but because he dared not unleash his full might.
To defeat Mortarion too quickly would force the Daemon Primarch to resort to ruinous weapons—tainted devices that could obliterate entire districts.
So Dukel held him here, drawing out the fight. Stalling. Saving lives.
Humans are the Emperor's currency, he reminded himself. And he would spend none unless forced.
Now, the battle brought them to a vast circular dais etched with screaming faces and grasping arms. The floor pulsed with the screams of trapped souls.
"Brother," Dukel growled, stepping forward, "let's end this."
He struck.
Mortarion reeled under the fury of the assault. The scythe he wielded—icon of death—barely caught Dukel's blade in time.
But something had changed.
The Lord of Death could sense it—Dukel's aura had transformed. Life itself surged from his body. In warp-sight, Dukel was a burning supernova, his spirit a beacon of heat and light so blinding that it pierced the toxic mists.
Mortarion winced. The warp around him howled in terror. His mist shimmered, destabilized by Dukel's force of will.
The Daemon Primarch gritted his teeth and raised his scythe. There was no time for words. Dukel's assault came swift and unrelenting.
Mortarion had his own goals. The longer he could delay Dukel, the better. But now, every blow shook him. The burning blade gathered power. Each strike landed heavier than the last.
To counter him, Mortarion fell into the ancient formation of Seven—a numerological construct tied to plague and fate.
He whispered equations under his breath, tracing invisible glyphs to predict Dukel's moves.
Numerology is truth. It had once shown him the Emperor's secret webway project. It would serve him again. It had to.
But Dukel's fury was not a number.
It was fire.
And it was coming.
Now, ten thousand years later, Mortarion's understanding of numerology—the forbidden art of interpreting the galaxy through esoteric calculus—had deepened immeasurably.
He counted Dukel's strikes silently.
When the twenty-second blow came, Mortarion felt something he had never experienced before—dread. Red spectral flames flickered around Dukel, and then, inexplicably, his blade vanished.
Mortarion's eyes widened. For the first time in millennia, he doubted his calculations.
The sword has already pierced me... but it hasn't even swung.
The thought shook him to his core. The numbers—so long his trusted guides—spoke in past tense. Every outcome he computed was already concluded.
Retreat to the left? Death.
Step back to the right? Pierced through the heart.
Fly into the air? His legs already severed.
No matter how he moved, no matter how he adjusted his position, the answer was always the same: He had already been struck.
Cause and effect had inverted. The sword's consequence had manifested before the act itself. The blow had not yet landed, but its result had already unraveled through reality.
In that moment of madness and cold realization, Mortarion did the only thing left to him—minimize the damage.
He swung his scythe in a wide arc, carving open the warp-stained platform beneath his feet and leapt down into the depths.
And then—Shunk!
His left wing was impaled mid-fall. Dukel's sword, a wraith of fire and fury, plunged perfectly into the wound.
Red flames ignited the corrupted flesh.
"Mortarion," Dukel said, his voice edged with genuine surprise. "You actually managed to evade a direct kill."
"You too," Mortarion hissed, gritting his teeth against the agony ripping through his body.
Elsewhere on Vigilus, Doom, Dante, and the heroes of the Imperium pressed toward the final evacuation point.
Toxic fog wrapped the land like a burial shroud. The retreat was harrowing. Mutated warbands, roaming daemon hosts, and terrain torn apart by warp energies turned every step into a crucible.
Still, the Space Marines forged ahead. Every minute mattered.
A brave pilot risked everything to extract civilians. On the first run, a geyser of noxious gas erupted from the planet's core, compressed pressure forcing a poison volcano into the sky.
The second time, as they neared escape velocity, blasphemous daemon-engines emerged—flesh-welded wings and iron maws—forcing a brutal dogfight high in the storm-choked sky.
On the ground, the Space Marines reached the blackened shores of a caustic lake. Green bubbles burst across its surface, releasing foul mists.
In the distance, they spotted the fire-lit beacon of an Imperial evac point—one of only twenty-two secure launch zones.
Doom contacted the defenders and received grim news: Chaos cultists and Death Cult zealots had begun launching probing attacks on the evac site.
The heretics didn't seek to destroy it—they wanted to steal it.
Before Doom could finish the exchange, the ground shook violently. Cracked buildings fell into themselves, and the lake burst its banks, releasing a flood of corrosive fluid.
It was an ambush.
Massive mechanical towers emerged from hidden alcoves. War machines—unlike anything ever classified—rose from the mire, their carapaces bristling with diseased cannons.
The gunners were animated corpses—bloated with tumors and fused to the steel, cackling madly as they rotated their weapons.
Then came the footsteps.
Heavy, slouching, and endless. Plaguebearers by the hundreds shuffled from the fog—heralds of Nurgle's foul will.
The battle erupted with no time for hesitation. Doom, Dante, and their warriors fought without rest.
Power armor blistered under chemical rain. Bolters jammed. Ammunition ran low.
Only Doom, blessed with Argentum energy, fought unceasingly. But his brothers—Ultramarines and Blood Angels alike—were nearly spent.
They clung to their mission: protect the civilians. Every life mattered. Every second they bought meant another soul saved.
The legions closed ranks, forming layered mobile defense lines. Legion Librarians unleashed devastating psychic blasts, purging heretic hordes in fire and holy lightning.
Doom assumed full command, directing tanks, Knight walkers, and Hell Bombers to retaliate against the daemon artillery.
Dante, ever the war-angel, coordinated the assault troops. Blood Angels and Ultramarines surged forward together, breaking the first wave of Daemon Engines and Plague Drones.
One daemon engine barreled toward the line, a mass of metal, bone, and furnace fire.
Dante met it head-on. His blade sang.
He drove it into the creature's core. The bound daemon inside screamed as it died, foul ichor spilling onto the desecrated ground.
No one cheered. The vox crackled with dire news: the evac point was still under siege. Reinforcements were impossible.
Then came Titus.
With Calgar wounded, he had assumed leadership of the Ultramarines. And he did not falter.
Titus led a charge—not a defense. He aimed to break the heretic lines and create a corridor for retreat.
At the head of his formation, Titus encountered a Great Unclean One—swollen, vile, and wrapped in rusted pipes spewing methane.
The creature lumbered forward, filth splashing in waves around its legs. From the bubbling lake, fresh daemons emerged—dripping and howling—beginning another ambush.
Titus narrowed his eyes behind his helm and raised his sword.
"By Guilliman… this filth ends now."
...
TN:
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