The instant lightning struck, Nolan was already moving.
He raised the Dawnbringer high, the war hammer's enormous head trailing a low, resonant hum as it built momentum, and brought it down on the demon bear with everything he had.
The impact was not simply loud. It was felt. A shockwave rolled outward from the point of contact, visible as a ring of compressed air that flattened the dust and debris around them, and the demon bear's scream came half a second later, a sound less like pain and more like the involuntary terror of a creature that had never once expected to be hit that hard.
The huge monster tumbled backward down the passage like a thrown stone, bouncing once off the concrete wall before rolling to a stop in the corridor beyond.
Nolan stood at the center of the aftermath. Fracture lines spidered outward from his boots, cracking through the concrete floor in every direction, spreading in a radius that widened with each breath he took.
He heard the low hum from within his power armor settling as the impact forces distributed themselves through the frame. He drove the Dawnbringer into the ground, and the war hammer held his weight for a moment as he straightened and took a slow, deliberate breath inside the skull-faced helm.
He did not pursue.
Instead, he turned and called out to the two Raven Guard champions who were already pulling themselves upright from the gravel-strewn floor, shaking debris from their cracked pauldrons.
"Out. Now."
They needed no further instruction. Both men reacted instantly, sprinting for the passage exit with the trained economy of warriors who understood that an order given once in that tone was not repeated.
Behind them, the demon bear began to recover.
The creature lay at an angle against the passage wall, the upper half of its skull caved in, most of the rear of its head simply absent. The red energy that pulsed constantly beneath its matted fur poured into the wound like water filling a vessel, moving with a liquid, purposeful intelligence. Flesh knitted. Bone replaced itself. The missing tissue at the back of its head swelled outward, compressed masses of muscle and cartilage pushing through the gap with wet, rapid urgency, growing visibly with each second.
The lumps rose and spread across its body, working down through the brown fur in waves, new tissue bloating and hardening as the red energy fed it.
The demon bear's eyes opened.
They were the wrong color now. The gamma contamination had done something to the red light behind them that had not been there a minute ago, something rawer and less controlled.
It raised its head. Shook it once, heavily, spraying fluid across the passage walls. Then it oriented on the light coming from the exit and charged.
The passage thundered with its footfalls.
The Raven Guard champions were already through the entrance and fanning wide. Beyond the passage mouth, the open ground of the Chernobyl facility spread before them: broken asphalt, scattered debris, the distant shapes of the damaged plant structures lit by the grey sky above.
Nolan was at the exit when the demon bear reached it.
He had the Dawnbringer in both hands.
The swing was horizontal, not overhead. It connected with the side of the demon bear's body at full force, just as the creature crossed the threshold.
The result was not a blow. It was a detonation.
A mass of flesh and tissue exploded outward from the impact point, the force hollowing out more than half the creature's midsection in an instant. Shattered ribs and segments of spine spun into the air. The mutated organs that had replaced the bear's original anatomy were suddenly and brutally exposed, steaming in the cold radioactive air.
The creature staggered but did not fall.
The Raven Guard champions opened up immediately, their bolters cycling hard, rounds hammering into the demon bear's skull with the concentrated rhythm of practiced fire. The impacts suppressed it, driving its head down, keeping it from orienting, buying the seconds they needed.
Nolan's breathing was loud in his own ears now, heavier than he would have liked.
He swung the Dawnbringer again.
The war hammer came down on the exposed spine with the same absolute finality the Emperor's justice always carried. The crack that followed was deep and final, a sound that traveled through the ground as much as the air, and the shockwave that erupted from the impact threw up a ring of fractured asphalt that spread outward to a radius of tens of meters.
When the debris settled, the demon bear was in two pieces.
Both halves continued to move.
Nolan let the Dawnbringer drop. The vibranium armor encasing his arms trembled with the residual force still cycling through his joints, a fine shaking he could not immediately suppress. He activated his power armor and stepped forward without pause, reaching to his side and drawing the Heart of the Furnace.
He pulled the trigger.
The plasma weapon discharged in a continuous stream, spheres of superheated matter rolling from the muzzle in rapid succession, each one landing and spreading across the demon bear's head and upper body with a hiss that overwhelmed every other sound. The orange-white light was blinding at close range even through the helmet's filters. The red energy still pulsing from the creature's torso flickered, contested, and then failed to keep pace with the rate of destruction.
The head ceased to exist.
Nolan held his thumb on the trigger until the muzzle's heat indicator climbed past the warning threshold, then released it.
The silence that followed was strange. Radioactive wind moved through the broken landscape. Something crackled in the structure above them.
He stood for a moment, his skull helm angled down at what remained. Then he turned the eyepiece slightly toward the Dawnbringer, half-buried in the asphalt at an angle, its head still faintly warm.
"First," he said quietly, "it is a hammer. Second, the stopping power from a blunt strike is remarkable. The only problem is the weight."
He exhaled slowly, steadying his breathing, and began the process of recalibrating his rhythm.
Then the air changed.
A series of blue geometric barriers flickered into existence around the open ground in rapid succession, different sizes assembling and locking together in the space of a breath, the unmistakable lattice of a teleportation platform beginning its cycle.
The ground shook with the arrival.
White-painted power armor landed first, the Space Marines of the White Scars already moving into defensive positions the moment their boots touched the asphalt. Behind them, the silhouettes of two Knight armors resolved out of the teleportation glow, nine meters of adamantine and war plate settling heavily onto the broken ground, their sensor arrays sweeping the perimeter.
The reinforcements from the Twin Islands base had arrived.
The bridge of the Helicarrier was a quiet place.
That was the nature of a vessel crewed entirely by automatic servo robots. They moved with the unhurried precision of mechanisms designed for exactly one task each, navigating around each other in the dim operational lighting, executing their assigned functions without pause, without comment, without any of the noise that a human crew generated simply by existing.
Bucky stood at the control platform with his back straight, sleeves rolled to the elbow, the Adeptus Mechanicus emblem on his metal arm visible to anyone who cared to look. He had developed the habit of carrying his hands behind his back when he was on the bridge. It had been a practical decision, initially. The servo robots responded more fluidly when the human element of the command structure projected stillness.
Over time it had simply become how he stood.
He was not, strictly speaking, required to be here. The Helicarrier could navigate itself. The servo robots needed no supervision for routine operations. His role on the bridge was less captain and more anchor, the single human presence that gave the vessel's autonomous systems a point of reference and an authority structure to report to.
He had made his peace with that.
He was reviewing a navigation projection when the sound reached him.
It came from a section of the bridge floor not far from the control platform. A transmission sound. Not the particular harmonic of a Twin Islands base signal. Not anything David had initiated.
Bucky turned.
He reached to his waist and closed his hand around the laspistol before he had consciously decided to draw it. His other hand was already rising toward the servo robots at the nearest station.
"Attention all crew. We have an uncleared transmission event. Prepare for boarding countermeasures."
The words were barely out of his mouth when an elliptical portal opened in the air above the bridge floor. It was purple. The edges of it pulsed with a controlled, steady energy that did not look like any technology Bucky had seen come out of the Twin Islands foundry.
He cleared the edge of the control platform at a run and covered the distance to the portal in seconds, the laspistol up.
A figure stepped through.
Tall. Broad-shouldered. Carrying a hammer in one hand with the casual ease of someone who had never once considered putting it down. The face was familiar before Bucky had fully processed it, the jaw, the golden hair, the particular expression of a man who had just realized he had perhaps made a small error in judgment.
"Long time, Bucky."
Bucky lowered the laspistol.
He did not lower it quickly. He took a breath first.
"Thor." He let the word carry everything that needed to be said for a moment before continuing. "You could have transmitted ahead. One message. That is all it takes. I was thirty seconds from ordering a full counterattack response."
Thor's smile was the smile of someone who knew perfectly well that he was in the wrong and was hoping charm would serve where apology would feel insufficient.
"I forgot," he said. He cleared his throat once and turned slightly toward the portal, which had not yet closed. "Also, this portal was not opened by me. A local friend with certain abilities assisted. Come through, new friends. This is our territory."
The portal pulsed.
A woman stepped out.
She was middle-aged, dressed in a military uniform that sat on her frame with the lived-in comfort of someone who had worn one most of their life. Her hair was orange-red, the color of banked coals, worn loose to the shoulders. Her skin was blue, a deep, natural blue that carried no suggestion of illness or artificiality, marked across the cheekbones and jaw with fine raised protrusions that followed the structure of her face like a secondary architecture.
She looked at Bucky with an expression that offered nothing.
He looked back at her with the same.
The portal was still open.
From within it came the sound of a low mechanical hum, the soft displacement of air that meant something was moving under its own power. A metal cockpit, compact and enclosed, emerged at roughly chest height, drifting forward above the bridge floor without visible support. Inside it, settled into the seat with the unhurried comfort of a man who had spent a great deal of his life going exactly where he chose to go, was an old man. White-haired. Thin in the way that age makes some men thin without diminishing them. His eyes were pale and measured and gave the impression of having seen considerably more than the bridge of one Helicarrier.
He looked around the space with the mild appreciation of someone reacquainting himself with the world.
"I have not been out to stretch my muscles in quite some time," he said. His voice was accented and unhurried. "I find I have missed moving through the world freely." He directed his gaze toward Bucky with something that might have been warmth, if warmth were something this man expressed through restraint rather than display. "Good afternoon, young captain. You may call me Max." A brief pause. "Though those who have known me well, as friends or otherwise, have generally preferred to call me..."