The gate screamed—and the Covenant answered.
—
Thanatos fired first.
The Quake Cannon roared—a tectonic howl that split the ridge and the horizon alike.
The shell struck the Great Unclean One square in the gut, burrowing deep before erupting in a geyser of molten rock and liquefied filth.
The detonation hurled slabs of burning flesh skyward, each fragment trailing smoke thick as tar.
—
Kaelthorn's mortars answered immediately, salvo after salvo pounding into the crater that had been the daemon's chest.
The explosions overlapped—each impact turning more of its body into steaming ruin.
The bloated colossus lurched forward, a grotesque parody of motion, half its torso missing, rivers of black pus pouring from the wound.
—
The Covenant did not stop.
Morvhar and Cinerion's Avengers swept their arcs across the corpse, tungsten shells carving through blubber and bone, cutting it apart piece by piece.
Each volley stripped away another layer of corruption until the thing was no longer a creature—only a burning, collapsing mound of flesh dissolving under its own liquefied weight.
At last, it fell.
The Great Unclean One hit the plain with a noise like a collapsing cathedral, its final exhalation a cloud of oily vapor that hissed against the burning ash.
And still, the Knights fired—until even the smoke stopped moving.
—
To its left, the Keeper of Secrets danced through the firestorm, its mirrored mask glinting between muzzle flashes.
The daemon's four scissor-limbs struck faster than thought, carving through burning corpses to close the distance.
Morvhar and Cinerion's Avengers roared together again, tungsten rivers cutting the air. Each salvo hammered the Keeper back, step by step, its skin peeling in layers of violet light.
Then a beam cut the haze—a single line of white sunfire.
Morphael's spear ignited, punching through the daemon's mask and out the back of its skull.
For a heartbeat, it stood—frozen, incandescent—before collapsing into ash that turned to smoke before it struck the ground.
—
"Two down," Maeric voxed, his tone dry, taut with adrenaline.
—
"Out of what, exactly?" Isera replied coldly.
"They'll come back."
—
"Then we'll kill them again," Thrykos rumbled.
—
Thanatos shifted, the Eternal Toll's vast frame grinding across the ridge. Its reactor's growl deepened, runes flaring white-hot as the Quake Cannon realigned.
"Target—red-winged," Obol ordered.
Every Knight's targeting reticle locked as one. Lances, cannons, Avengers—all turned skyward.
—
Thanatos fired again.
The Quake round screamed across the field, carving a trench through the ashen ground as it flew. The shockwave hit like a seismic charge, punching clean through the Bloodthirster's guard and tearing the daemonic shields apart.
The shell didn't stop.
It drove onward—a comet of molten stone and burning air—
—until it froze mid-flight.
The world shuddered.
A shimmer rippled through the haze, colors bending as the Lord of Change caught the shell in invisible talons.
Its staff flickered, glasslight veins crawling through the air around the suspended round.
Then—
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Three proximity shells from Kaelthorn burst just past the barrier—precision-perfect.
The explosions hammered the Bloodthirster's flank, vapor and shock knocking it from the sky. The great beast staggered, its molten wings thrashing wildly as it tumbled.
It hit the plain in ruin——and before it could rise, twin rivers of tungsten fire met its flesh.
Morvhar's Avenger and Cinerion's crossed their arcs, tracers burning through brass and bone until the monster split open like a burst forge.
The Bloodthirster died screaming, its roar collapsing into ash and smoke.
—
"Again—that damn bird is the last one left," Maeric muttered, his eyes locked on the towering silhouette of the Lord of Change.
—
The creature floated amidst its rippling shield, witch-light bleeding through the cracks in reality around it.
"This is already the sixth wave," Caldrin growled, voice low through the vox.
"Just how long will they keep coming?"
—
"Doesn't matter," Obol answered. His tone carried no fatigue—only the finality of iron.
He stood at the center of the ridge, the Eternal Toll's reactor a sun behind him, his shadow falling across the burning plain like a monument to defiance.
"They come," he said, "and we kill."
—
Every gun turned skyward.
Auto-turrets roared from the ridge, their muzzles flashing in relentless rhythm.
Phorxys' lightning lances burned white scars across the storm, Kaelthorn's mortars howled, and the twin Avengers of Cinerion and Morvhar swept their arcs together like twin reaping scythes.
The Lord of Change writhed inside its shrinking ward, witch-light faltering under the rain of iron and sunfire. Its screams came as layered echoes—half-voice, half-reality tearing itself apart.
Then Thanatos spoke.
THOOM!
The Quake Cannon thundered once more, the shell punching through the haze like a falling star.
It hit center mass.
The sorcerer-bird's body ruptured in a blossom of fire and distortion, its wings scattering into ribbons of molten color that peeled into nothing.
The sixth wave broke.
—
But the gate did not still.
Obol turned back toward it, his lenses flaring with reflected light.
The rift convulsed, roaring as it vomited fresh horrors—a new tide of crimson, green, violet, and blue.
The air itself screamed as the light reformed within.
Then shapes emerged—first a claw, then a wing, then the bloated bulk of the same four abominations they had already slain five times.
The Lord of Change, the Bloodthirster, the Keeper of Secrets, and the Great Unclean One—reborn again, as if death itself had no meaning here.
Obol's voice came low, weighted like stone.
"Seventh."
—
Obol watched the gate pulse and thought in the cold math of the Throne.
The old salvos had stripped flesh and torn wings, but the breach simply reknit itself—light and shadow pulling back into form like a wound that refused to close.
Fire and iron buried it, but still it healed.
Same 'Xenos'.
Same wave.
Same death.
Slightly smarter every time.
"They're adjusting," Thrykos muttered.
—
"They've been adjusting," Obol replied. "We keep ahead. New plan."
He switched channels. "Auspex—report. Full return. Now."
—
The machine was little more than a skull wired into a pillar of cogitator banks and sensor prongs, half-buried in ash. Its eye-lenses flickered to life as the command reached it, vox-grille crackling with dead ritual sound.
A chime. A static.
Then, a flattened, fleshless voice:
"<< ACKNOWLEDGE // QUERY-INGEST // TRANSLATING >>"
Runes scrolled across Obol's vision as the auspex streamed raw data into his helm.
"AUSPEX RETURN: NON-STANDARD BIOFORM
MATTER COHESION: VARIABLE / UNSTABLE
MASS READING: NON-CONSISTENT
ENERGY SOURCE: NON-THERMAL / NON-FISSION
FORM RECONSTRUCTION DETECTED
KINETIC PATTERN: NON-BALLISTIC, NON-TERRAN
PSYCHIC ECHO: ++ PRESENT ++
NOOSPHERIC CORRUPTION: ++ ENCOUNTERED ++"
—
"REALSPACE CLASSIFICATION — INVALID
PROBABLE ORIGIN — EXTRA-REAL
ANNOTATION — WARP ANOMALY"
The report ended with a mechanical hiss.
—
Obol stared at the data with a colder stillness.
"Warp based entities?," he said at last.
The words seemed to chill the noosphere itself.
For a heartbeat, no one spoke.
—
Maeric broke the silence first, voice low and taut.
"Warp-spawn? Out here? That's—impossible. There's no rift, no nav-void storms. This world is clean."
—
"The gate is the rift," Thrykos said, flat and clipped.
The phrase turned in Obol's skull. He let a razor-smile touch his mouth.
—
"If this is a warp-bleed," he murmured,
"then we prevent it from leaking."
—
A tight silence.
Engines and distant screaming filled it.
"With what?" Maeric asked.
—
Obol did not look away from the gate.
"Isera," he voxed,
"connect me to the Bastion. Direct command link. I will speak to them myself."
—
There was no hesitation from her, only the quick, crisp reply of a Knight born to obey under fire.
"Channel opening..."
"Routing through secure command relay. Stand by…"
"link is live, High-Scion."
—
The noosphere flickered—connection runes aligning.
Static hissed in Obol's helm for a heartbeat, then stabilized.
"Bastion command receiving," came a distant voice across the storm.
"We hear you, Lord Obol."
—
Obol's reactor-heart burned behind him like a rising star as he spoke.
"This is High-Scion Obol Kharon The Fifth of House Kharon."
"I require access to your experimental systems reserve—immediately."
—
A pause. Then Bastion command returned, cautious.
"Specify request."
—
Obol's voice sharpened, cutting through war and distance alike.
"Gellar field components."
—
The line went dead-quiet for a moment.
Then—static, a clipped breath, and a voice edged with disbelief.
"Negative, High-Scion. Confirm request."
A pause.
"Did you say Gellar field components?"
—
"I did," Obol answered.
—
"You're asking for a ship-grade void safeguard. Those systems are not deployable groundside. Nor are they authorized for combat dispersal."
—
Obol's tone did not shift by a hair.
"Authorization is mine."
—
"It's not a question of authorization," Bastion Command pushed back, voice hardening.
"Even if we could break seal on the reserve vault, a Gellar projector is useless dirtside. The field matrix is calibrated for—"
"—for warp intrusion," Obol cut in.
"And that is what we face."
—
A stunned beat at the other end. Someone cursed off-vox.
Another voice whispered, "Is he serious?"
Then, tight and controlled.
"High-Scion, with respect—Gellar-field collapse outside the void would risk catastrophic backlash. Spatial torsion. Groundside implosion. Reality shear events."
"You're asking us to deploy a system designed to repel unreality by tearing it apart."
—
Obol's reply was iron.
"Yes."
—
The Bastion fell silent again—longer this time. Then came the slow exhale of a man realizing he had been dragged onto a blade's edge.
"…By the Throne and The Omnissiah. You intend to cut the rift with it," the commander muttered.
—
"No," Obol said.
"I intend to box it."
Silence...
"I want four Gellar Harmonizers," he continued.
"Uncoupled from auxiliary reserve. Pattern PH-Σ or higher. Full integrity coils intact."
—
Someone swore openly on the other end.
"Harmonizers?" the commander snapped.
"Obol, those are field anchors—static emitters. They're meant to reinforce a ship's Gellar envelope when it weakens. They do not project fields on their own."
—
"They will," Obol replied,
"once we force them to."
—
"That's not how this works! A harmonizer is inert without a field core—"
"what do you plan to use as a generator?"
—
Obol looked out across the burning horizon, helm lenses reflecting the gate's violent light.
"Seven reactors."
—
A murmur rippled across the Bastion link—shock, anger, disbelief.
"That's madness," the commander hissed.
"Knight reactors weren't meant to run Gellar harmonics—you could fry your cores."
"Or rupture the lattice and—"
"—and tear the gate apart," Obol interrupted.
"Exactly."
—
"You'd be creating a micro-Gellar cage. Groundside."
"Without shielding. Without a navigator to tune it. Without fail-safes."
—
"Yes."
—
"If the harmonics spike, if the coils desync—you'll shear reality."
"You could ignite the warp bleed into a full catastrophic incursion."
—
"If we do nothing," Obol said, voice flat iron,
"that happens anyway."
The Bastion fell to a dead, suffocating silence.
"Four harmonizers. Four corners," Obol continued, his tone hard as tempered iron as targeting runes bloomed around the gate in his lenses.
"We place them in a square—one at each quarter of the breach."
"When they link, they form a cage. A Gellar box."
—
He tapped the holoslate with a knuckle; coordinates flared in response:
Bottom-Right.
Top-Right.
Top-Left.
Bottom-Left.
Each point stabbed into the tactical map like a spear.
"Once this starts… no one flies near us again," he finished.
—
The channel held its breath.
Then—slow, steady, grim.
The vox crackled back to life.
"...Understood. Emperor watch you, House Kharon."
A long pause...
"Covenant, this is Bastion Command," the voice returned—lower now, stripped of ceremony.
"Your request is… received. Annexing four Gellar Harmonizers from auxiliary reserves."
A short pause..
"Be advised—Harmonizers require calibrated warp-damp arrays or they will detonate under harmonic recoil."
"We are sending a Magos Dominus to oversee lattice-bind, and…"
Another voice cut in—cold, refined, carrying a weight older than war.
"...and two of House Orpheon. Navigators."
The noosphere flickered with unease.
Navigators. Warp-touched. Cursed—and vital.
—
"We will guide the lattice," the Navigator said,
"and help you box your storm."
The channel sealed with a hard click. The slate went dark.
"Deployment underway," Bastion Command had said.
"Reinforced M.U.L.E.s inbound. ETA—sixty Terran minutes."
"Hold the line until delivery."
—
Obol did not let the noosphere fill with idle noise.
He breathed once—long and steady—like a bell taken before the toll.
"Hold the line," he echoed, voice flat.
"We buy them time. We box that maw."
—
Isera's reply came as a single rune-set—acknowledgment and open uplink.
The Bastion was sending men and metal, and with them a Magos and two Navigators to braid the harmonizers into a lattice.
It was a desperate thing to attempt—to raise a Gellar field across a planet's wound—but desperation was a currency they now spent without hesitation.
"Serve the lattice," Obol ordered the servitors.
"Ready the pylons for forward deployment."
—
Before them, the ash plains shifted.
The screaming came first—rising like a storm tide—then the ground itself seemed to move.
Bodies spilled forward in a roiling mass, falling over one another as they poured from the gate.
Claws raked spines, hooves crushed skulls, limbs broke and were trampled under—nothing slowed the advance.
From the rift came the same colors again.
Crimson. Violet. Plague-green. Warp-blue.
And then came the same four shapes—unchanged, untouched by death, marching as though they had never fallen at all.
The Bloodthirster plunged through the tide, wings spread wide, axe screaming molten arcs.
The Keeper of Secrets followed, claws flexing in silent mockery.
The Great Unclean One lumbered behind, swollen and rotting, dragging screaming bodies into its maw as it walked.
And floating above them came the Lord of Change—whole again—its staff raised, cloaked in warp-light.
Obol stepped forward and planted Thanatos like a wall of iron between his House and the endless tide.
—
The next hour of war had begun.
"Vaerin—delay fuses," Obol ordered, voice low.
"Crater-line hold until they step in. Time the detonations to the march."
—
A quick rune-flash answered. "Understood, High-Scion. Fuses staged—hold on my mark."
—
Servitors scuttled, clamps and glands whirring as mortar racks depressed angle by angle. Pyro-locks clicked into safing grooves; runes blinked amber in patient sequence.
Obol swept his helm-lenses across the plain. Lines of Nurglings shambled forward, waves of crimson and violet pressing like a tide—straight into the rivers of pits the Knights had sown.
"Mark." Vaerin's voice cut calm as ice through the link.
A heartbeat later, the earth answered.
At first, only a whisper—mortar shells thudding into churned ash, settling in the dark mouths they had carved.
Then came the thunder.
Not one blast—but many.
A rolling chain of detonations marched down the line, staggered perfectly to cadence—each charge waiting, waiting—then erupting only when daemon flesh stepped over it.
The plain tore open.
Craters bloomed in order, a man-made fault line ripping through the advance.
Bodies were thrown skyward like torn banners—burning, spinning, shredded by buried charges.
The daemonic tide slammed into ruin. Nurglings and plague-masses vaporized in bursts of soot and ichor. The larger brutes stumbled, legs blown out from under them, bellies split by concussive force. Crimson and violet warriors piled into the deadfall, crushed by their own numbers. The march snarled into a single heaving knot of bodies—jammed, tangled, trapped.
Perfect.
It did not end the host.
It crippled it.
Where the ground had become a grave, the enemy was now a wall—piled, pinned, unable to flow.
Smoke clawed at the sky.
Ash rained.
The air tasted of iron and rotting fire.
—
Thanatos strode left, each step cracking the scorched earth beneath its weight.
The snarling horde was now only a smear at the edge of Obol's vision—distant, irrelevant. The true target lay ahead.
The gate hung in the distance like a wound in reality, suspended over the scarred plain.
Obol lined Thanatos directly along its flank, sighting the cannon not at the enemy—but beyond them. The Quake Cannon rotated with deliberate precision, tracking a line that would carve straight past the rift.
He lowered the barrel.
Then he fired.
BOOOOOOM.
The Quake shell struck like a falling continent.
The earth split in a long, violent tear that howled across the battlefield—a trench ripped in a dead-straight line that passed beside the gate and kept going, vanishing into haze beyond.
Stone buckled and ash geysered.
The land convulsed in a shrieking avalanche of debris.
Obol gave no time to watch it settle.
"Servitors—move. Trench one. Lay emitters. Anchor deep. We build along the line."
—
The command pinged, and like iron carrion the servitors descended—hover-racks whining as they drifted into the fresh dugout. They vanished down the trench's length, racing toward the far end, lowering brass pylons into the shattered bedrock.
One by one, each emitter flared to life with a pulse of cold blue static.
A line was drawn.
A wall was being born.
Obol checked the countdown pulsing on his display—an unblinking red rune marking time until the Bastion's delivery.
50:00
He exhaled through the vox, more growl than breath.
"Fifty minutes."
—
Thanatos shifted toward the right flank.
Obol lowered the Quake Cannon, aligning the barrel for another trench shot—
—and the sky split overhead.
A shrieking mass of wings and claws tore down from the stormfront—Furies and Screamers raining like jagged meteors, some dived and some hurled.
By the Bloodthirster.
It flew beside the Lord of Change, shielding the witch-bird with its own bulk while scooping fresh Furies from the swarm and casting them downward like ammunition.
The first corpse hit Kaelthorn's shield with a wet, cracking slam—then another—then a dozen more. Black blood smeared across the barrier in rotting sheets as bodies stacked and burned on the crackling hex-field.
Kaelthorn grunted over the link, voice taut.
"Pressure rising on the shield—bleed-off at sixty percent!"
—
Above, Vaeleen swore as Phorxys' lightning lances shrieked skyward, trying to thin the descending storm.
Caldrin joined her fire with stubborn fury—but it wasn't enough.
—
The sky host was no longer charging—they were bombarding, turning their own dead into siege rounds.
Obol lifted his gaze from the earth.
The trenches would have to wait.
He watched another corpse slam into the hex-field and smear downward.
The Bloodthirster roared above, hurling fresh Furies with murderous rhythm.
Obol exhaled—not weary, but annoyed.
"Vaerin," he voxed, voice flat as slate.
"Drop your shield output to twenty percent."
—
There was a beat of stunned silence.
"Twenty—?" she began.
—
"We're not stopping a siege," Obol cut her off.
"We're shaping it."
Another body slammed into Kaelthorn's barrier and burst.
"We'll use the field generators to wall this… living catapult. Do it."
Acknowledgement runes flickered. Kaelthorn's shield began to dim.
—
Kaelthorn knelt, the great Aegis lowering with a groan of sanctified hydraulics.
Hex-light rippled off her frame as she braced, drawing power back into her core.
Servitors swarmed over her greaves and pauldrons like metal-robed insects, locking power conduits into her spine and throat vents, refeeding her reactor through humming coils.
With Kaelthorn's frontal bulwark reduced, the field-generator line took the strain.
The first bodies hit hard.
A Fury slammed face-first into the new barrier and slid down it, leaving a streak of burning warp-ichor.
Then came another.
Then a dozen more.
The shield shuddered—not breaking, but flexing. Warped flesh cooked on its surface.
Some daemons pushed through, molten and shrieking as their bodies burned against the energized field.
Obol did not move.
This was expected.
The less concentrated shields acted like oil against the chaos carrions, the lesser creatures that slipped through the gaps were slowed and immediately torn apart by servitor-mounted autocannons, shredded before they ever touched Imperial ground.
The line held.
And the clock kept ticking.
—
"Isera, have the auto-turrets aim skyward," Obol ordered.
"Lead the target."
—
"Acknowledged," Isera snapped, already moving.
"Auto-turrets—Deflection fire protocols."
Servitor logic-engines shrieked as new firing solutions streamed across their cogitators. Every turret pivoted skyward—not to track the enemy, but to anticipate them.
They didn't fire at the Furies and Screamers.
They fired ahead of them.
Long streams of tracer fire ripped into empty air—lines drawn by unseen geometry.
Curtains of iron hung waiting like traps.
The first Furies hit them at full speed, impaling themselves on the storm.
Bodies burst mid-flight, torn apart by their own momentum.
Screamers sliced through the webs of gunfire—only to break apart a heartbeat later, shredded by a second net of overlapping trajectories that caught them as they banked.
The turrets were no longer defending.
They were hunting—cold, mechanical patience made flesh in iron.
—
With all the groundborne generals held at bay—
the Great Unclean One mired, sinking deeper with every salvo;
the Keeper of Secrets herded and harried by overlapping Avenger fire—
the true danger loomed above.
The Bloodthirster had ceased its reckless plunge and now circled like a starving carrion-lord denied its feast, hurling Furies and Screamers down in volleys like living artillery.
Beside it, the Lord of Change hovered in cold calculation, staff raised, weaving unseen currents into lethal geometry.
"Servitors," Obol voxed,
"prep Kaelthorn's mortars for liquid payload. Attach promethium canisters to the round collars. Shear-pins armed. Delayed separation fuses."
—
The command relays clicked. From the M.U.L.E. stacks, a swarm of tracked servitors crawled toward Kaelthorn, mechanical limbs assembling clamp-rings and fuel cages with ritual precision.
Vaerin turned from behind the glow of her shield lattice.
"My lord… what are you planning?" she asked, wary but steady.
—
Obol did not look at her.
His lenses stayed fixed on the witch-bird above, its ward shimmering as it bent incoming fire from the sky.
"We drown the sky," he said.
A beat—so small the noosphere seemed to hold its breath, "blind them."
He finally looked at her, voice flat as iron.
"We pour holy fuel onto that ward—coat it until the witch-bird can't see."
"Make the shield a curtain of oil."
The Quake Cannon locked into firing position with a hydraulic growl.
"They will be caged."
—
Vaerin's answer was a snap of teeth and gear.
"Understood, High-Scion."
Servitors moved as one practiced organism.
At the muzzle-racks they clipped cylinders of promethium into harnesses.
The M.U.L.E. supply-casks unlocked and disgorged soft-metal canisters in a measured, mechanical ballet.
Bronze fingers—tech-arms whirring—threaded mortar tips through clasp-rings.
Each round was fitted with a low-yield charge and a servitor-forged puncture sleeve: a hollow spike that twisted through the canister's base and sealed with a ritual clamp.
The spike would hold the fuel sealed until ballistics and gravity did the rest.
"Low yield, delayed burst," Vaerin confirmed, voice bright and tight across the link.
"Fuses set to separate above the bird."
—
Kaelthorn's mortar nuzzled the canister-burdened rounds like a throat taking a vow. Hydraulic clamps bit down. A final servitor wrench set the timing rune.
The ordnance bay hissed; the mortars began their cycle.
Pop—pop—pop.
Kaelthorn's mortars spat their payload in brutal rhythm, six low-yield shells ripping skyward in a staccato climb.
They arced high, contrails tearing black scars across the iron heavens.
For a heartbeat they were nothing but motion and sound—fuses ticking their short litany, metal screaming against the wind.
At apex, the servitor-spikes did their work.
Mag-locks released. The puncture-sleeves twisted free with a mechanical hiss.
One by one, the canisters peeled loose from their carriers, separating cleanly.
The shells continued harmlessly past—spent, falling dead.
But the canisters hung—perfectly—right above the witch-bird's ward. Held there by nothing more than momentum and Vaerin's perfect mortar geometry.
—
Then gravity claimed them.
Promethium rained.
Black, heavy streams spilled from each pierced cylinder—thick, clinging, alive with chemical hunger.
The liquid hit the ward and crawled across it, coating every inch in a suffocating skin of holy fuel. It slid down the curvature of the shield and pooled into a dark sphere—the witch-bird trapped inside a trembling globe of oil.
A blind cage.
A waiting execution.
—
The Bloodthirster raged behind the curtain of fuel—roaring blind, hurling Furies in wild, furious arcs. Broken bodies punched through the oil-choked air and slammed against Kaelthorn's shield, smearing down its hex-light surface in shrieking streaks.
Wings snapped. Bone cracked. Claws scraped uselessly against iron. Every miss only fed the daemon's frenzy—each roar louder, more mindless, a beast denied its hunt.
Obol watched in cold patience.
Another Fury came spinning down—blind, burning, dripping black promethium in long greasy trails.
It hit the ground before Thanatos and tumbled, folding in on itself. Half-melted wings beat uselessly against the ash. It screeched as it mindlessly tried to reach him.
—
Obol's vox carried the faintest note of satisfaction.
"Ah," he said, voice calm and unhurried,
"so now you know the choice."
His helm tilted slightly.
"Hide behind a curtain of holy oil… or punch through it and fall like a stone."
—
Thanatos shifted a fraction, gears growling.
One titanic foot rose and came down like a judge's hammer.
CRACK.
The blinded Fury vanished beneath the Eternal Toll's heel—reduced to a burst of ash and a wet hiss.
Obol didn't bother to watch it smear.
He just smiled.
—
Then came a shape too large to mistake.
A vast mass tore through the dripping veil of promethium—horned, burning, furious.
The Bloodthirster had chosen its answer.
It roared and charged, wings folded tight as it punched through the black curtain.
For a heartbeat, it seemed unstoppable—brass and rage made flesh, a falling war-god.
Then the fire took hold.
The promethium caught along its wings first, clinging in black rivulets before blooming into sheets of ravenous flame.
The membranes charred in an instant—curling, rotting to ash—until nothing remained but burning skeletal spars jutting from its back.
The Bloodthirster tried to beat them.
Once.
Twice.
Nothing answered.
With a sound like a collapsing forge, gravity claimed it.
The blackened bull plummeted—one burning comet of muscle, brass, and hate—screaming as it fell, trailing molten blood like a falling star of ruin.
"Maybe I'll ask you to read my Emperor's Tarot next time, High-Scion," Caldrin voxed, amusement threading through the gun-thunder.
—
"Prophecies are for priests, Caldrin," Obol replied without looking back, eyes still on the burning veil where the Bloodthirster fell.
"We deal in inevitability."
—
A fresh burst from Thrykos hammered the Keeper's flank, tungsten chewing through violet hide in spirals of gore.
It reeled, howling as it stumbled in fury.
"And inevitability," Caldrin rumbled,
"seems to piss them off."
—
Obol didn't smile.
The Throne whispered calculations across his lenses—movement patterns, funneling arcs, behavioral traps. The Keeper moved as he expected.
Good.
He opened the command channel.
"Cease fire on the violet one," Obol ordered, voice flat and absolute.
"Maeric. Thrykos. Stop herding it. Let it roam."
—
There was a beat of static—surprise bleeding into the link—before Maeric answered.
"You want us to stop pinning it?"
—
"We don't need to kill it yet," Obol replied.
"Let the sheep grazes."
He turned his helm toward Phorxys, lenses narrowing.
"Lady Vaeleen—you will leash the creature. If it makes a move on our line, you drive it back. Hard."
—
A low, electric hum rolled across the vox as Vaeleen powered Phorxys' lances, arcs of white energy crawling up the prongs.
"With pleasure, High-Scion. Let it wander—I'll keep it out of our teeth."
—
"Tight intervals," Obol said.
"Minimal expenditure. We bleed them of momentum, not ammunition."
Acknowledgement runes flickered across the Covenant's noosphere.
Vorgane's cannon disengaged from its old firing lane, sweeping toward deeper targets. Morvhar's Avenger returned to measured volleys, no longer baiting the daemon.
The pattern shifted cleanly, purposefully.
Across the field, unchased for the first time, the towering Keeper straightened—coiling, calculating.
It took one step toward the line.
A bolt of lightning slammed into the ash before it—blinding, brutal, a white barrier carved by Phorxys.
The daemon recoiled, snarling.
The message was clear.
your cage is invisible—but it is here.
—
The Keeper of Secrets hesitated.
For the first time.
It looked over its shoulder—not in fear, but in disgust.
Behind it, the mountain of rot writhed helplessly, half-swallowed by molten trenches, its putrid mass bubbling like a corpse sump dragged into a furnace.
Above, the witch-bird flailed inside a dripping black sphere—promethium still cascading down its burning ward as it struck blindly, wings hammering uselessly against its own prison.
And before it, the Bloodthirster lay broken and smoldering in a crater—fallen not in fury, but in foolishness.
The so-called lords of the warhost.
Trapped. Blinded. Shamed.
And it—it—stood alone.
No challenge. No worthy prey. Nothing.
A sound escaped it then—a low, corrosive hiss seething from behind its mirrored mask. Metal scraping silk.
Hatred given breath.
Its claws carved trenches in the ash—not to strike, but simply to feel something break.
Then it turned toward the Knights—
—and saw their backs.
They were not even facing it.
—
Thanatos' Quake Cannon was already booming toward the right flank.
Morvhar and Cinerion had moved past him to corral the front.
Kaelthorn's shield anchored in the rear while Vorgane and Morphael reinforced the lattice.
Phorxys did not so much as aim at the Keeper—she simply waited.
They had dismissed it.
—
The Keeper's beauty-curved limbs trembled with fury.
Its lips peeled back, and it let out a long, warping shriek—not a roar, not a battle-cry—but a scream of pure insult, hatred sharpened to a killing edge.
It snapped its claws forward.
And charged.
—
The Keeper's scream dragged across the battlefield like razors through glass.
Then It charged—four scythed limbs tearing trenches behind it, mirrored mask warped with murderous rage.
Obol did not flinch.
He watched it come, a smear of violet hate crossing the burning plain—and his lips curved.
"Predictable," he murmured.
—
Six waves had taught him everything he needed to know about this one.
The violet general never stayed still.
Never attacked from range.
Never tolerated being ignored.
It craved the center of the stage.
And Obol had denied it.
Thanatos shifted just a fraction—enough for his voice to carry across the link.
"Hold fire on it," he ordered.
Calm.
Absolute.
—
Morvhar let off the trigger. Cinerion backed a step. Kaelthorn kept its shield braced but didn't move to intercept. Even Vorgane ceased its covering volleys. They parted—not in retreat—but in invitation.
Only Phorxys moved.
She did not fire.
She only waited.
—
The Keeper thundered across the gap, all grace gone, only hunger driving it now.
Faster. Closer. Almost at the gunline—
—Obol's smile sharpened. The Throne's sigils pulsed with his quiet satisfaction.
—
25:00
"Twenty–five minutes." Obol's voice was a low wind through the Throne.
He did not look to the left where the violet mass barreled.
He walked the other way.
Thanatos moved with him—each step a pounding doom-beat in the ash—while Obol angled the Quake Cannon toward the right flank, sighting runes flickering across his lenses.
Behind him, the Keeper came screaming.
It thundered forward in blind fury, mirrored mask warped with rage, claws carving trenches through the scorched ground.
—
BOOM—BOOM—BOOM.
Phorxys struck.
Three lances of white sunfire detonated just ahead of the charging daemon.
The blasts didn't wound it—they lifted it.
The Keeper was thrown off its feet, cartwheeling head over heels, crashing down in a spray of violet ichor and shattered pride.
—
Cinerion was already moving.
The Duelist Knight slammed down like an executioner descending from the gallows.
One titanic heel pinned the daemon's sternum, grinding it into the ash with a seismic crack.
The Keeper shrieked and clawed madly—but Cinerion did not budge.
"You're as ugly as ever," Maeric voxed, voice dry enough to cut steel.
—
His sabres split at the hafts, retracting into dagger grips. The Knight leaned down.
SHUNK. SHUNK.
Both blades drove through the Keeper's shoulders and deep into the earth below, crucifying it to the ground.
Warp-flesh writhed and split around metal; violet ichor sprayed and hissed like acid on the wind.
The daemon spat and screamed, thrashing in humiliation. Its remaining limbs lashed wildly, carving deep gouges into Cinerion's armored greaves—but the adamantine held.
There was no leverage.
No escape.
—
"Struggle all you like," Maeric growled, forcing the sabres deeper with mechanical strength.
His chains groaned as the blades locked, binding the daemon in place like anchors.
"You're not here to fight," he finished.
The Keeper writhed beneath him.
"You're here to stay still."
—
Cinerion rose, leaving both sabres buried to the hilts in the daemon's shoulders, pinning it to the ground like an insect on an iron altar.
The weapon-chains feeding from his underarms tautened as he locked the clamps, ensuring the Keeper wasn't going anywhere.
The pinned fiend writhed, shrieking hate in a dozen voices—but every move only drove the blades deeper.
Maeric ignored the sound entirely then turned his helm toward the ridge.
"How much longer until the drop, High-Scion?" he called over the vox, voice cutting through the storm.
—
Obol did not answer immediately.
Thanatos' frame shifted as he finished carving the second trench line, another gouged scar cutting straight toward the gate's flank. Servitors were already moving in behind him, gliding down into the torn earth to anchor more emitters.
He checked the tactical chronometer flashing across his lenses.
20:00
"Twenty minutes," he answered.
—
Maeric exhaled once, steady.
"Plenty," he said—and strode back toward the line, chains rattling behind him as the Keeper howled under the weight of his sabres.
The world was no longer a battlefield.
It was a machine of war.
The Great Unclean One lay half-submerged in burning glass, sunk waist-deep where Vaerin's mortars had broken the earth.
It still twitched, still tried to rise—but each time it did, Morvhar's Avenger barked another burst, driving it deeper into its burning grave.
—
The Bloodthirster was fully grounded, crippled—its wings nothing but charred stumps, burned away by cascading promethium.
It clawed forward in fits of mindless rage, dragging itself like a dying beast—but Vorgane shadowed every advance, cannon roaring, blasting it back into the crater it had fallen into.
—
Overhead, the Lord of Change was neither dead nor free—trapped inside a sphere of black promethium, its vision smothered, wings beating uselessly against flame-slick air.
Its shimmering barrier flickered and failed, unable to breathe through the suffocating curtain of fuel. It did not fall—but it no longer ruled the sky.
—
And at the center of it all, shrieking and thrashing beneath a titan's heel—
—the Keeper of Secrets was pinned.
Cinerion stood over it like a headsman over an execution block, one massive foot crushing the daemon's chest into the ash.
Both reaper sabres were buried through its shoulders and into the ground, their chains coiled tight to Cinerion's arms, binding the creature in place like sacrificial stakes.
—
The servitors continued moving like a silent tide.
They worked in the shadow of the Bastion ridge, pushing forward toward the gate—turning no-man's-land into architecture.
Dozens of them swarmed through the trenches Obol had carved, their tracked limbs grinding steadily across the ash.
Cable-spools unreeled behind them in black steel rivers—thick power conduits veined with glowing data-lines.
Each segment was blessed with stamped sigils of insulation and warding, hammered in by Mechanicum rites before deployment.
They worked without voice, without hesitation.
—
One team scaled Thanatos, mag-clamps hissing as they latched onto the titan's carapace to secure the primary conductor.
Others crawled along Cinerion and Morvhar, grafting heavy couplings into their reactor housings. Blue sparks danced as the line drank power from each god-machine.
More teams reached Phorxys and Vorgane, slotting the conduits into their dorsal ports, bolting them down with binder-plate seals.
The last link was driven into Morphael, locking the chain of power—six Knights feeding into the seventh.
All lines converged on Kaelthorn.
—
The Stormshield Knight stood rooted at the center of the ridge, knee braced, reactor burning bright beneath armor now etched in corded power lines.
Servitors clamped the final node into the shield generator at its spine—huge copper coil housings now rattled with barely restrained force.
Kaelthorn became the anchor.
The heart of the lattice.
The power that would feed the harmonizers when they dropped.
A deep hum rolled across the battlefield as six reactor signatures merged, bleeding energy into Kaelthorn until the shield flared—not bright, but heavy, a field that pressed against the world like a storm front made of iron and will.
Even under that rising power, artillery thunder still shook the ridge; the war had not paused for them to build this machine.
—
Within his throne, Obol watched power runes stabilize.
The operation was ready.
He checked the chronometer.
10:00
"Ten minutes," he muttered—just loud enough for the link to hear, just quiet enough that no one mistook it for despair.
There was no despair in him.
Only time. And war.
—
A burst of binharic static crackled over the command channel—sharp, metallic, precise.
<< REPORT-STATE // NODE-LATTICE COMPLETE >>
<< POWER-CHAIN STABLE // FRAME: OPERATIONAL >>
<< STATUS: CAVEA QUADRATA FORGED // AWAITING HARMONIZERS >>
—
Obol gave a single nod.
"Box is complete," he voxed.
"Refill your power and firing solutions."
—
No cheers. No affirmation. Just readiness.
The Knights answered in motion—reactors growled as they rerouted output, armor plates shifted with the grind of continental stone. Ammunition drums locked home.
Heat vents cycled. Targeting arrays spun back to life.
—
From the heart of the gate, beyond the writhing press of daemonflesh, something leaned forward.
A shape.
Vast. Winged. Wrong.
Its outline cut too sharp to belong to shadow—too deep to belong to matter. Reality recoiled from it, folding back like scorched cloth.
Then they saw it again.
The eight-pointed star burned in its chest—not worn, not carved. Alive. Watching.
A single glaring iris of molten orange opened in the darkness, ringed by an abyss that devoured the light around it.
It stared straight through the breach.
And it smiled.
A slow, deliberate baring of fangs—too long, too perfect to be mistaken for mortal cruelty.
Not rage. Not hunger.
Amusement.
Mocking.
Curious.
As though some ancient truth had just been confirmed—and the thing inside the gate was pleased.
The air bent around it—not from heat, not from gravity, but from will.
A will vast and old beyond counting.
A will now fixed on Obol Kharon V.
It did not speak.
It did not need to.
Its grin said everything.
Show me more.
—
Every Knight felt it—pressure without weight, a gaze like a hooked chain dragged down the spine.
No machine-spirit warning.
No incoming charge.
No counterstroke.
Just that smile.
That knowing smile.
A shiver rippled across the noosphere.
"Why is it letting us?" Vaeleen asked, voice low, brittle.
Phorxys' lightning field hummed around her like a nervous heartbeat.
No one answered.
Because every one of them already knew the truth in their gut—
It wasn't letting them out of weakness.
It was waiting.
The noosphere held its breath.
Even the machine-spirits seemed to hesitate.
—
Then—
THOOM.
The heavens split.
Four shapes tore through the clouds, fire streaming behind them like descending comets.
Parachutes burst open in violent bloom, canvas whipping hard as they wrestled gravity.
Four M.U.L.E. crates.
Reinforced. Black-cased. Cyclopean in mass.
They fell along the trench-lines Obol had carved, each one descending toward a corner of the soon-to-be cage:
Bottom-Right.
Top-Right.
Top-Left.
Bottom-Left.
The four corners, the harmonizers had arrived.
—
WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. WHAM.
The ground convulsed beneath the impact. Servo-spine anchors fired and bit deep, driving steel claws into the fractured earth to hold against the tide to come.
Four anchors of iron.
Four corners of the Box.
The skeleton of a cage that would bind a rift in reality.
Obol watched them settle, dust storms curling up from each cratered landing site. His lenses narrowed.
"That's our hour," Caldrin voxed.
"Bastion delivered."
—
But Obol did not answer. He did not look away from the gate.
Because it still watched.
The pale figure stood just beyond the veil—motionless, patient, inevitable. One claw traced idle patterns along the inside of the breach, dragging sparks of unreality that dripped like molten glass.
Mocking them.
Waiting for the next move.
—
The M.U.L.E. crates hissed as internal locks cycled open.
Armor plating split and unfolded like brutal iron petals, steam venting in harsh plumes.
From the Bottom-Right crate—closest to Thanatos—a loading ramp slammed down.
They stepped into the warzone without a word.
Magos Dominus.
And two Navigators of House Orpheon.
—
The Magos came first—a towering figure of red and iron, half-hidden behind a forest of mechadendrites. Servo-skulls drifted around him like carrion birds.
His lower body was a column of tracked machinery, tractor-treads grinding ash as he descended. His voice box clicked once, cycling through binharic dialects before settling on a cold, metallic Gothic.
"Magos Thale Serekin. Designate: Ordo Macrotech. I will bind your lattice."
—
Beside him came two figures who moved like no humans should—gliding rather than walking, their long void-cloaks trailing faint starlight.
Their eyes were veiled with silver filigree. Their skin death-pale. Their presence bent the air around them—not through mass, but through something deeper.
Navigators.
The Emperor's witches of the stars.
Here—on a battlefield.
The taller of the two inclined his head, his voice a smooth, unsettling calm.
"We will guide the pattern," he said. "Shape the lattice. Anchor it to realspace."
—
His counterpart spoke without turning, as though her sight lay in every direction at once.
"You built the cage, Lord Obol. Now hold it shut while we lock its teeth."
—
Thanatos dipped its head in acknowledgment, reactor light reflecting off the Navigators' veils.
Behind them,
servitors began unloading the rest of the harmonizer assembly—coils and reinforcement pylons the size of Basilisk barrels, each one crackling with a low, caged power that made the air taste like lightning and ozone.
Massive transmission conduits were dragged out next—fat, ribbed cables sheathed in sacred copper mesh and ward-plate sigils.
The Magos turned his hood toward the Gate, lenses glinting beneath iron cowl.
"Begin the rite," he intoned.
—
The servitors moved as one.
Brass pylons slammed into the ground around the Bottom-Right harmonizer, locking into the trench walls Obol had carved.
Load-claws fed thick power conduits into the harmonizer spine. Circuit-tongues clicked. Hexagrammatic wards burned faint and cold along steel.
A deep, rolling hum began to grow—like the first breath of something vast and ancient beginning to wake.
—
The two Navigators flinched—not in fear, but in pain.
Something unseen rippled through reality, brushing them like claws beneath flesh.
They turned toward the Gate—not by sight, but by sensation alone.
Their breath misted in the warm air.
The taller one spoke first, voice thin as cold mercury.
"The warp… bleeds here."
—
His counterpart's gloved hand tightened, knuckles pale beneath velvet.
"No… not bleeding."
"Hunger. It pulls. It wants."
Both veiled heads turned to Obol in unison—their gaze felt, not seen.
"Do you feel it, Knight-Lord? This world is already slipping. The veil here is thin."
—
Obol's answer came like a hammer.
"Then we stitch it shut—before it tears."
—
Magos Thale Serekin rolled forward, mechadendrites rising behind him like an iron halo.
"Vocal exchange is inefficient," he intoned.
"The harmonizers must be secured. Protection grid must be raised before the pattern collapses into full warp breach."
—
Above them, the Gate screamed again—another shockwave coursing across the battlefield as daemons spilled from fire and shadow.
Obol watched the horizon burn and spoke with quiet finality.
"Then speak while we work."
"We don't have the luxury of time."
—
A shell screamed overhead and detonated somewhere beyond the ridge. Ash rained down like black snow.
The Magos halted beside Thanatos, optics ticking as he studied the Quake Cannon now half-buried in fortification cabling and reactor feeds. Servitors still cycled shells into its breach.
His vocoder crackled—disapproval rendered in static.
"Your Knight-mounted heavy ordnance has been modified without sanctioned Mechanicum oversight," he observed.
"Macro-class weapons of this pattern require Rite of Core-Binding and priestly sanction before—"
Obol did not turn.
"You're here now, Magos."
—
A brief pause. The priest regarded him—silent calculation in the whir of lenses.
Then—acceptance.
"Compliance. Ritual oversight commencing."
—
A mechadendrite unfolded and pressed a burning cog-sigil onto the cannon housing.
The machine-spirit within growled, appeased by the formal blessing even as distant artillery thunder shook the sky.
Metal shrieked as the first harmonizer was hauled from its crate—an obsidian pillar of coiled emitter-rings and layered ward-plates, etched with sigils older than the Imperium.
Four servitors strained beneath its weight as they carried it toward the trench before Thanatos. Hydraulic clamps locked. The base connected.
The pillar sank into place with a seismic clang, slotting perfectly into the waiting lattice frame.
—
The Gellar cage was beginning to take shape.
Runes along the harmonizer's spine began to wake—one by one—like stars flickering in a dead sky.
<< HARMONIZER NODE—INITIALIZING >>
The air thickened.
Static crawled along armor plates.
Servo joints crackled.
Even the falling ash seemed to hesitate—suspended in a moment that did not belong to realspace.
Then a voice cut across the link.
Low. Raw. Wrong.
"Stop."
—
One of the Navigators stood at the trench's edge—bareheaded now, as if the helm had become meaningless.
His skin was corpse-pale beneath the war-fires, and though his third eye was bound in silver wire and sealed in black wax, power still leaked from it, bending the air like heat over a forge.
He was not looking at the Knights.
He stared at the Gate.
"Something is coming," he said.
—
The second Navigator staggered, bracing herself against the harmonizer frame.
Not from fatigue—but impact.
She had felt something hit her that nothing else could feel.
The Gate pulsed—once.
A pressure rolled across the ash plains—not sound, not force.
A presence, vast and deliberate, brushing against reality like the passing of a leviathan in deep water.
Knight reactors growled in instinctive warning.
Auspex feeds spiked into static.
Noospheric channels warped under an invisible weight.
The Navigator's voice was a shudder of breath.
"It knows what you are building, Lord Obol."
A beat. The wind died. Even the Gate fell silent.
"The Warp… resists."
—
A beat of silence.
Obol didn't move.
Didn't blink.
"Good," he said. "Let it try."
—
The Magos stood at the base of the first Harmonizer—Bottom-Right—unmoving beneath the rain of ash and warp-fire.
War howled around him, but he worked like he was in a cathedral—ritual precise, utterly unshaken.
His mechadendrites moved with cold grace, locking couplings and rune-seals into place with merciless efficiency.
Brass locks sealed. Power glands hissed. Warding sigils burned along the harmonizer's plated spine as he inscribed activation runes with a servo-hand.
"Primary node connected," he intoned, voice metallic and bare of emotion.
"Stabilizing power. Engaging phased linkage."
—
The harmonizer pulsed once—dark and dormant
—then awakened.
A low boom rolled from its core, deep enough to be felt in bone.
Runes along its frame ignited like opening eyes.
Above,
turbine coils unfolded and began to spin, tasting the warp-pressure bleeding from the Gate.
The first pulse hit the world like a heartbeat.
Obol felt it through the Throne before he heard it—
a pressure, a weight, a hum like iron being dragged across stone.
—
He looked down.
The cables grafted to Thanatos' spine began to glow—faint at first, a deep ember—then brighter as they fed on the chain of Knights now bound together.
The glow traveled along the umbilicals like veins lighting inside a god-machine.
He followed it with his lenses—
from Thanatos to Cinerion,
Cinerion to Morvhar,
Morvhar to Vorgane and Morphael,
across to Phorxys—
and finally into Kaelthorn—the anchor.
The power lines throbbed—restrained, violent potential humming inside iron skin—
seven reactors feeding one purpose.
Every Knight felt it,
a low charge shivering through their limbs,
a subtle tightening of internal systems,
the distinct, undeniable sense of linkage.
Not seven engines now.
One.
—
"Bottom-Right harmonizer online," the Magos confirmed.
Then—
A scream split the sky.
The sphere of black promethium that smothered the Lord of Change convulsed—then detonated outward in a violent eruption of warp-light and boiling fuel.
FWOOOOOOM—
A wave of burning promethium burst across the heavens like a wounded star, raining down in molten sheets.
"Cover—now!" Obol roared.
Thanatos moved before thought—interposing itself between the Magos, the Navigators, and the falling storm.
The Eternal Toll's hull rang as the black rain hammered against it, liquid fire sliding down its armor in churning rivers.
Field generators howled—Kaelthorn's shield buckled, hex-light writhing under the assault as burning fuel splashed and clung like tar.
Servitors peeled back from the harmonizer tower, throwing themselves against the falling fire to protect the newly risen node. Metal bodies hissed and melted beneath the rain, but none broke rank.
And then—silence.
The last droplets of flame slid from Thanatos' armor and hit the ground with a sound like dying steam.
Above them, the Lord of Change hung exposed—its shimmering ward finally broken, feathers scorched, wings trembling.
The witch-bird was naked now, no longer a hidden god-thing behind a shield.
Obol didn't hesitate.
"Fire," he said. The order was death.
"Kill the bird."
—
Every turret along the trenches pivoted skyward as one.
The ridge erupted.
Autocannons screamed. Heavy stubbers stitched burning chains of tracers through the sky.
Phorxys' lightning lances split the air with white forks of annihilation.
Vorgane's battle cannon thundered. Morvhar's Avengers spat tungsten fury.
The storm found its mark.
The witch-bird howled—feathers igniting as shells punched through its now-feeble wards.
One wing ripped free in a spray of molten blue ichor.
Another volley cored its chest.
A final burst took its head, shredding it into a spiral of oily colors that peeled away from reality like torn paint.
The Lord of Change died screaming.
Again.
Its body came apart in ribbons of swirling unreality—devoured by the warp winds that had birthed it.
But its death was not a victory.
It had been a warning.
The Gate roared.
—
The world split beneath it as new ranks surged forth—not a tide this time, but an army.
Heavy, horned warriors of brass thundered forward—Heralds of Khorne, chain-axes blazing with warp-fire, earth cracking beneath their charge.
Sleek killers draped in violet silk and mirror-mail flowed beside them—Heralds of Slaanesh, their movements too fast, too flawless, too cruel to be mortal.
Corpse-swollen priests in rotting vestments dragged plague cauldrons across the ash—Heralds of Nurgle, laughter bubbling like swamp gas in their bloated throats.
And above them drifted shapes of living sorcery—Heralds of Tzeentch, cloaked in blue flame, staffs glowing with visions of futures that deserved to die.
Each carried a banner.
Each banner bore a sigil.
And every sigil—burned with the power to unmake a world.
The Heralds had come.
—
Obol's lenses narrowed.
"Cinerion," he voxed—flat, cold, decisive.
"Kill the purple one—then move to the Top-Left. You will hold that corner."
—
Cinerion moved.
The reaper sabres tore free—ripped out of the Keeper's shoulders in twin geysers of violet ichor. The daemon shrieked, a warping discordant scream—
—but Maeric ended it.
SHHK—KRAK.
The sabres crossed in a single merciless stroke, shearing through the daemon's neck. The horned head spun once in the air—then fell, steaming, into the ash.
Cinerion's heel came down.
CRUNCH.
The skull burst like rotten fruit beneath fifty tons of adamant.
The corpse twitched once, warped muscle spasming—and went limp.
"Purple's done," Maeric voxed. Not triumphant. Just a report.
Weapon-chains snapped taut as the sabres recoiled into guard position.
Cinerion turned without another glance, stepping off the ruined body.
"Advancing to Top-Left," he confirmed, already moving across the battlefield toward his assigned corner of the coming cage.
The Keeper would return—it always did.
They all did.
But when it came back—it would return inside a prison.
—
Cinerion strode past the Top-Left harmonizer marker, chains rattling as his reaper sabres snapped into a duelist's guard. Then he waded into the oncoming horde—and began the harvest.
Every swing carved bodies by the dozen.
Crimson berserkers split from hip to shoulder.
Blue horrors burst into shrieking embers.
Rot-flies dropped in smoking heaps.
Flesh-hounds lost heads and limbs in silver arcs.
It was butchery—clinical, inevitable—a Knight-Duelist scything filth from the soil of a dying world.
—
Obol did not watch long.
Thanatos turned—heavy, deliberate—and faced right toward the Bottom-Right harmonizer.
The Magos waited there, unmoving, a red-iron monolith amid the storm.
"Reminder : Bottom-Right harmonizer online," Serekin intoned, vox flat and cold.
"Lattice accepts power. Structural resonance—stable."
—
Thanatos dipped its helm in a single, heavy nod.
"Vorgane—Morphael. Move. Guard the Magos," Obol ordered.
—
Their rune-acknowledgements chimed in perfect sync.
"Let's go, husband. The High-Scion commands," Isera said—her voice like a blade drawn across iron, punctuated by the crackle of Morphael's thunderstrike gauntlet powering up.
—
Caldrin's laugh came low and feral from behind his helm.
"You've got my front—I've got your back."
—
"Other way around," she shot back without missing a step.
"Semantics."
—
The Magos threaded forward along the trench line, mechadendrites weaving like metal serpents as he advanced toward the Top-Right corner of the Box.
Vorgane thundered to his left, seismic claw locking into assault configuration as its battle cannon rotated with deliberate menace, tracking shifting silhouettes in the smoke.
Morphael moved on his right, stride iron-steady. Her thunderstrike gauntlet flexed like a fist eager to break continents, while the thermal spear in her other hand guttered to life—white fire bleeding along its length as she took position.
Together, they advanced—shielding the Magos in a wedge of armored inevitability.
One, a moving fortress of artillery and iron.
The other, a hammer of precision and wrath.
—
Below the ridge, the ash plains convulsed.
The Heralds came.
They did not rush like the rabid tides before them.
They advanced in grim formation—disciplined, hateful, chosen.
Banners of flayed skin snapped in the sulfur wind.
Brass and warp-metal armor clattered like execution chains. Their march was unified—ritualistic.
Eight in number. Champions of the four unholy powers.
Crimson juggernaut riders thundered at the fore, iron hooves pulverizing the burning earth.
Sleek fiends of impossible grace slithered between them, blades like mirrored fangs.
Corpse-bloated priests lumbered in their wake, tolling bells of skin and pus.
And above them drifted avian warlocks, trailing coils of blue witchfire as their staffs whispered ruin.
Heralds of Slaughter.
Heralds of Decay.
Heralds of Excess.
Heralds of Sorcery.
They came for the harmonizers.
—
Vorgane met them first.
The ground shuddered as the Warden-Knight took a single, earth-cracking stride forward—looming over the charging Herald cavalry like a titan of judgment.
Its seismic claw clenched.
THOOM.
The world broke.
A shockwave rippled outward in a brutal ring of annihilation—earth splitting open, stone liquefying as tectonic force detonated beneath the ash.
The front rank of juggernaut riders simply ceased to exist—brass, bone, and daemonflesh vaporized in a blast of molten ruin.
Their mounts died mid-charge, bodies bursting under quake-force pressure.
Heralds were hurled like broken idols, tumbling end over end before slamming into the dirt in steaming chunks.
But the survivors came on.
A massive Herald of Khorne—runes carved into his brass skull—tore free from the wreckage, roaring challenge as he charged Vorgane alone.
His chainaxe screamed, hungry for metal, hungry for flesh.
—
Vorgane met him with a sideways hammer-sweep of the seismic claw.
CRUUUNK—
The Herald was swatted from existence—his body folding sideways in midair before detonating into a rain of teeth and iron.
Another vaulted off a dead juggernaut, chainblade whirring as it leapt for the Warden's optics—
Vorgane caught it out of the air.
The seismic claw snapped around the Herald like a titan's trap.
Metal strained. Bone popped. The daemon screamed.
—SQUELCH.
It burst, spraying the trench in pulverized gore.
—
Morphael plunged into the wake of destruction.
A Herald of Slaanesh darted low, gliding on bladed limbs, moving faster than any mortal eye could follow.
It didn't matter.
Morphael felt its trajectory—turned with it—caught it.
Her thunderstrike gauntlet smashed down like the fist of an executioner.
WHAM.
The Herald flattened under the blow—armor and flesh atomized in a single shockwave of force. It didn't die. It ceased.
Another came at her side—a four-armed fiend laughing silently behind a mirrored veil.
Its blades sang as it struck.
Morphael didn't step aside.
Her thermal spear roared.
FWOOM.
Warp-flesh ignited. The Herald dissolved into a column of screaming violet fire, stumbling backward before falling and writhing into smoke.
—
A Nurgle Herald lumbered forward next, swollen with boil-pocked filth, dragging a rusted bell behind it.
It began to laugh, a wet gurgling noise—then Morphael punched straight through its chest and crushed the bell along with the creature in one brutal motion.
SPLORCH.
But the Heralds did not come alone.
Two Tzeentch sorcerers hovered behind the front, staffs raised, hurling warpfire that boiled the air into impossible colors.
Reality bent where their flames struck—spirals forming in space itself, pulling Vorgane sideways into nonexistence.
—
There was a crackle—and a snarl over the vox.
Morphael braced, stepping over the Magos to shield him with her own hull.
Vorgane staggered, armor warping and contracting as physics convulsed along its left flank. Warning runes screamed across Caldrin's screens as systems buckled beneath the warp-pressure.
The Heralds of Tzeentch pressed their assault, warpfire coiling like serpents around their staffs, power building to a killing crescendo—
But Vorgane did not fall.
Morphael did not break.
Together, they held the line—not with finesse, but with absolute dominion.
Every charge died against them.
Every Herald who entered reach was crushed.
—
And still, beneath the storm of ichor, flame, and broken worlds—the Magos worked.
Slow. Precise.
Untouchable.
He moved like a machine that did not understand fear—mechadendrites weaving around him, sealing clamps and etching rite-runes into adamantine as he bound the second harmonizer into the trench frame.
"Secondary node—phase alignment complete."
"Engaging harmonic tether."
The runes along the tower pulsed—once—then ignited.
FWOOOOM
A concussive wave rippled outward from the Top-Right corner of the forming box—not fire, not force, but reality hardening.
The effect was instant.
Heralds closest to the node convulsed.
Their forms bent, shuddered—glitching like broken reflections.
One snarled and tried to charge—
—only its legs remained behind.
Another opened its jaws to shriek—
—its head vanished, erased by nothing.
Then the harmonizer locked fully.
And reality took them back.
They didn't die—they were unwritten.
One by one the Heralds blinked out of existence, erased as if they had never stood there at all. Lesser daemons followed—imploding in silence, vanishing before their corpses could even hit the ground.
—
The Magos voxed, voice as calm as machine-oil on stone.
"Top-Right harmonizer online."
"Gellar lattice expansion—33%—stabilizing."
A second pulse rippled across the battlefield—deep, resonant, alive.
Its coils spun, runes igniting one after another like a string of awakening stars.
The tower vibrated as it locked phase with the first node across the field, power crackling between them in unseen arcs.
—
Thanatos felt it.
A low growl rolled through its adamant frame—the tremor of rising force building across the lattice.
The umbilical lines binding Knight to Knight brightened, threads of molten power surging along their armored veins.
The war-machine chorus rose—one pulse, one grid, one purpose.
The Box was half awake.
"Second node linked," the Magos confirmed, utterly devoid of triumph.
"Phasing stable. Field alignment within acceptable deviation. Two remain."
The words were simple. But every Knight knew what they meant:
They were winning time—and the Warp knew it.
—
Thanatos took a step toward the Top-Left line—reinforcement already calculated, thrusters cycling—
—when a low growl rumbled to his right through the Throne.
BOOM
The Quake Cannon barked one last time, vaporizing what remained of the grounded Bloodthirster.
The blast tore the daemon apart—brass spine, torn muscle, molten bone—scattering it in a rain of glowing shards.
"Almost forgot about you," Obol muttered, voice stone-flat.
—
He locked the breech, detached the cannon, and let the massive weapon drop with a seismic clang. Servitors swarmed over it immediately, clamping to reload.
Thanatos was already moving.
The Eternal Toll strode into war, reactor howling, armor blackened and runed in killing light.
Obol sealed the Thermal Lance to the gauntlet mount—locking runes flashed—and his Reaper Chainsword revved alive, teeth glowing like a furnace-blade.
Ahead,
Cinerion carved alone—sabres whirling, violet ichor spraying in arcs of murder.
But something slithered through—an elite daemon, all hooked limbs and chitinous plates, gliding low into Cinerion's blind flank.
Obol didn't shout warning—he acted.
—
Thanatos crashed forward, a charging monolith of steel and fire.
The chainsword came down in a brutal diagonal execution.
SKRREEEECH—CHUNK
Warp-flesh split like wet parchment.
The daemon fell in two shuddering halves before dissolving into greasy violet smoke.
Obol raised his Thermal Lance beside Cinerion, fire hissing from vents as he locked formation beside his brother-in-arms.
"I'll hold your left," he voxed.
Maeric answered without bravado—just iron focus.
"Good timing, High-Scion."
—
Obol gave a single nod—nothing more—and turned his gaze upward just as the sky throbbed.