Inside the Seventh Wall.
Before Blazkowicz even fully reached the battlefield, he caught the distinct scent of metallic blood blended with acrid cordite, sweeping over the towering ramparts alongside the relentless roar of artillery and gunfire.
The Imperial Army auxiliary units had set up camp directly behind the wall, where field medics and lightly wounded soldiers were hauling the critically injured and the dead.
In shadowy recesses and safe nooks, Space Marines sat with their eyes closed, resting their minds with boltgun in hand, while others worked quietly to replace damaged ceramite armor plating.
A series of heavy footsteps—far deeper and more thunderous than anything before—echoed through the area. Alerted, the warriors snapped their eyes open, their hands dropping instinctively to the wargear in their laps.
The moment they clearly identified the vanguard causing the commotion, they immediately stood and fell to their knees.
"Praise the Lord of Humanity! Praise the Gene-Sire!"
Mortal soldiers raised their arms and cheered, their exhausted faces instantly glowing with sudden vitality before they clutched their chests and knelt to the ground.
The invincible King of Warriors had arrived!
Blazkowicz offered no verbal response, merely raising a hand to signal that formal etiquette was unnecessary, urging them to continue their work.
Though compassion filled his heart, he could not bring himself to bow or personally comfort the wounded.
As the Emperor was increasingly elevated as a object of religious worship, the Primarchs were drawn into that same divine veneration. Showing even the slightest sign of soft-spoken warmth or open affection could lead to uncontrollable consequences. Mortal men, even those missing limbs, would crawl forward across the deck to press their lips against the cold floor in the absolute highest expression of reverence.
Ignoring them was both a shield to protect the mortals and a measure to keep himself from becoming bogged down in adoration.
The resting warriors rose to their feet one after another, maintaining order across the muster ground, while others quietly formed tactical squads to fall in behind the Doom Marines. The Legion's Space Marines had already received word that Planet VIII was a absolute victory!
The arrival of the King of Warriors on this front signaled that the time had come: Planet VII was about to fight its final, decisive battle with the xenos abominations! Having bled and fought against the Rangdan horde for over a decade, they had waited for this exact moment every second of every day.
Before long, the central avenue behind the wall swelled into an ever-growing column of marching troops, a vast and unstoppable tide surging toward the thundering fires outside the ramparts.
"Open the gate," Blazkowicz stood behind the main portal, signaling the defensive force to unseal the barrier.
"As you command, Sire!"
The Techmarine in charge dared not delay for a single second, rapidly punching commands into the control console to drive the massive hydraulic pumps that pulled the doors apart.
As for whether the Rangdan would attempt to breach the opening, that was not his concern. The King of Warriors stood right here; if the Rangdan caught even a single glimpse of him and didn't turn to flee on the spot, it would be a testament to extraordinary courage.
His mere presence served as the ultimate anchor amid the raging tides of war!
Pfft—!
The pneumatic seals began venting pressure as two hundred-meter-tall, ten-thousand-ton blast doors groaned along their hydraulic tracks, slowly swinging open to either side.
A wave of deafening battle cries flooded through the widening gap, bringing with it an even more oppressive reek of carnage!
Blazkowicz slung the circular saw shield across his back, gesturing for a heavy-armor Iron Man to hand him a weapon. There were no enemy champions among the ranks that demanded a duel; he needed a weapon designed for pure, unadulterated harvesting.
"I believe this will prove suitable, Sire," a mechanical voice buzzed as a heavy metal arm lowered a massive weapon into Blazkowicz's waiting grip.
A triple-barrel rotary beam cannon—standard heavy wargear for Iron Men. Its burst-fire rays possessed an astonishing rate of fire, triggering devastating area-of-effect explosions upon impact.
Arcing lightning crackled across Blazkowicz's hands as his Archon armor fed raw power directly into the external mounting, surging with the tempestuous energy of a C'tan.
"This pathetic toy is hardly worthy," the Void Dragon sneered, spinning the Necron shoulder cannon with eager anticipation to harvest souls. "Allow me to demonstrate the true power of the Sovereign of Matter."
The moment the words fell, a bright green bolt of lightning burst from the power core mounted on the spine of the Archon armor. The lively lightning slithered down his right arm, wrapping tightly around the three barrels of the rotary beam cannon.
Blazkowicz lightly weighed the weapon in his hands; its heft had increased significantly. He did not bother asking what the Void Dragon had done; it was nothing more than the star god's unquenchable desire to witness rivers of blood.
With a light leap, Blazkowicz mounted a heavy-armor Iron Man, standing as tall as possible as he raised the rotary cannon with both hands, aiming it straight through the opening adamantine gate.
Behind him, his Doom Marines guard and the Adeptus Custodes formed a sharp wedge around the Iron Men, powering up their wargear. Meanwhile, squads of Dark Angels branched off toward the wall's stairwells, reinforcing the high battlements to provide covering fire for the charge.
Humanity was ready; the counteroffensive against the Rangdan horde was underway.
Outside the Seventh Wall, Rangdan artillery pounded relentlessly, shaking the fortress shields like a titanic hammer. Within the ruined barbican, gunshots and brutal hand-to-hand slaughter raged everywhere. Rangdan elites and Dark Angels had buried countless dead across the dozen-square-kilometer kill-zone, neither side willing to yield an inch of ground.
As the blast doors slowly parted, a Rangdan War Master on the front lines caught sight of the opening.
Since arriving beneath the city walls, that unyielding portal had only opened passively a handful of times. Every single time it opened, high-tier champions of the human race emerged. During the few critical moments when the Seventh Wall had teetered on the brink of falling, human Primarchs and Custodes had strode forth from that very gate to turn back the tide of doom.
Yet until today, that gate had never opened proactively.
"Warriors of the Rangdan!" The War Master's psychic presence surged with intense emotion as it barked orders to prepare for incoming danger: "The humans have stepped out of their turtle shell! Prepare to receive them!"
"Assault squads stand by! Find the opening and push inside the walls!"
It not only anticipated the threat, but glimpsed a golden opportunity within the gap of the parting doors! To wipe out humanity's precious offensive forces, breach the gate, and take the wall in one decisive stroke—the War Master's tactical judgment was sound, fully aligned with the flow of battle.
As the doors reached halfway, bio-sensors pierced through the thick cordite haze to capture the scene inside, projecting it directly into the interior of its organic wargear.
The War Master's slick tentacles froze instantly. Its pupils dilated, and its body shuddered uncontrollably—it saw a absolute demon—
"HOLD THE LINE! DEFEND!"
Horrified shrieks echoed across every psychic channel. Its body was paralyzed with fear, yet the warning tore from its throat purely out of drilled, reflexive instinct. It stumbled back several paces, the terrified screech draining what little courage it possessed.
A single, distant glance was all it took for its soul to twitch violently beneath the weight of pure terror.
The Rangdan front lines dissolved into sheer chaotic panic. Elite warriors caught sight of that towering silhouette, along with the war banner raised behind him.
A stark black backdrop embroidered in crimson, featuring a blood-red mark that seemed ready to devour their very souls.
"Standard-Bearer Mormos," Blazkowicz depressed the standby trigger as the electric motor whined to life, its barrels churning with green lightning.
"Present, Sire!" Mormos stepped forward, wielding a broadsword in one hand and holding the Legion banner high in the other.
"On my mark!" Blazkowicz let out a low growl as the Iron Man's heavy treads rolled forward, churning up sand and shattered gravel as they thundered out through the gate.
"A GOOD DEATH!" Squad Captain Astelan followed directly behind, letting out a roaring battle cry: "FOR KING NOVIK!"
Thirty Primarch honor guards transformed into black lightning, charging right behind Blazkowicz.
"FOR THE GLORY OF HUMANITY!" Mechanical voices spoke—cold, yet ringing with a unique, fierce resonance—as the Iron Men's treads tore across the earth, activating every weapon platform in unison.
Odysseus ignited his disruption field, raising his broadsword high: "FOR OUR LORD—!"
Countless battle cries thundered to the heavens; though their individual beliefs differed, in this moment they fused into a single, unyielding will to fight for the future of humanity!
"FOR THE LION! FOR THE EMPEROR!"
The fires of vengeance burned bright as the Dark Angels' roars rippled down the entire battle line, inspiring every Legion warrior to fight with newfound fury. They saw that unstoppable figure—the King of Warriors was about to sweep across the battlefield and erase the enemies of mankind.
Countless battle cries coalesced into a single belief, triggering a psychic tremor in the Immaterium. The blazing heat of their emotions scorched the trembling minds of the Rangdan elites. Their hypersensitive psychic faculties, once an advantage, had now become their greatest vulnerability.
"FIRE! FIRE!"
The Rangdan War Master cowered in its forward command post, shrieking in sheer panic as it urged its elites and thralls to counterattack. It knew that if this continued, the line would collapse completely.
The helmet's targeting array locked onto its targets in a fraction of a second. Blazkowicz squeezed the rotary beam cannon's trigger, and its three barrels unleashed a torrent of devastation.
Crimson beams intertwined with eerie, glowing green lightning, striking the enemy lines at the speed of light. From his elevated perch, Blazkowicz poured continuous, overwhelming firepower into the Rangdan positions.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Dense, earth-shattering explosions erupted in rapid succession as the shattering beams swept across the field, igniting a roaring sea of crimson flame. Under this intense bombardment, anything within Blazkowicz's line of sight and range was pulverized into microscopic debris.
Yet that was only the beginning.
The green lightning leaped wildly across the field; after atomizing an alien's body, it instantly arced to the next victim, repeating this cycle dozens of times to harvest every organic lifeform in its path.
Across a fan-shaped arc stretching three kilometers ahead of Blazkowicz, not a single enemy remained standing!
It was not just the Rangdan military forces—not even a rat, a cockroach, or a single microbe survived within that zone.
The Void Dragon laughed with dark, unbridled glee as the Reaper shoulder cannon switched to traction mode, ripping the Rangdan souls straight from their bodies to charge its next lethal shot.
The Iron Men showed no mercy to the xenos.
The unit's weapon platforms opened fire with everything they had—volley after volley of missiles and heavy artillery shelling poured forth alongside disintegration rays and gravity drags. Across the sectors swept by the cybernetic units, the alien invaders were reduced to vaporized mist.
"Lightning," clear yet strange syllables echoed across the battlefield, summoning thunder and storm from the sky.
Tal Rasha held an amplification staff in his grip; serving as the Legion's Chief Librarian, he used his official title to conceal his spoken incantations. Lightning bloomed from the void, crimson bolts crackling downward to annihilate the souls of the living.
"Fire, Frost, Gravitational Distortion!"
Astonishingly powerful spoken spells were unleashed continuously; wherever his gaze fell, every filthy xenos race within sight was wiped clean.
"Rewind Time," Tal Rasha kept a watchful eye on his allies at all times, pulling Dark Angels warriors back from the brink of death.
He cast incantation after incantation until the backfire tore at his throat. Pressing a single hand against his chest, he squeezed out one last spell: "Restoration."