[The shells found you on the descent.]
[Large-caliber, direct fire, the targeting solutions from the Iron Circle automata having locked you before you had cleared the apex of your jump. They hit the power armor across the chest and shoulders in a sequence of overlapping detonations, each one blowing adamantium fragments and shattered servo components outward from the impact points in sprays that caught the ash-light. The armor's structural integrity was compromised across most of its upper surface by the time your feet touched the ground.]
[You landed twenty meters from Perturabo and drove forward immediately.]
[Your arm changed as you moved, the flesh inside the ruined sleeve of the power armor reshaping itself, the bone structure pushing outward through the ceramite remnants and extending into a tentacle covered in sharp thorns rather than suckers. The configuration went forward in a wide lateral sweep and caught two of the Iron Circle Domitar automata at the midpoint, the impact throwing both of them backward and off their feet, the heavy shields they carried spinning away separately.]
[The gaps they left in the defensive ring closed before you could exploit them. The remaining automata filled the positions and their heavy ordnance elevated and fired, the rounds coming in at an angle designed to keep you at distance regardless of your approach vector. Perturabo stood behind the line with the patience of an engineer who had built a defensive system and was allowing it to function as designed.]
[David arrived overhead.]
[The swarm came down across the Iron Circle formation from above, the nanomachines working at the automata's surface with the same efficiency they had demonstrated on everything else they had been given to work on. One Domitar unit went under entirely within fifteen seconds, submerged and disaggregated, gone. The others accumulated damage across their outer plating in the spreading pattern of deep corrosion, their surface systems failing first, their structural integrity following.]
[Perturabo threw stasis grenades.]
[He threw them into the air above the swarm's position, casually, with the practiced accuracy of someone who had been using exactly this class of equipment for exactly this situation for a very long time. Each grenade discharged a static force field on detonation, the field expanding outward and locking everything within its radius into a state of complete temporal suspension. The nanomachine swarm stopped. The two Domitar automata that had not yet risen from the ground stopped. The grenades had been precisely placed to cover both threats in overlapping fields.]
[You had already read the grenade trajectory and moved.]
[The edge of the nearest stasis field passed close enough to your frame that you felt the drag at the boundary, the physics of the field attempting to claim the outermost layer of your bone-shell before you were fully clear. You pulled through it and kept moving.]
[The last mobile Domitar automata brought the Forgebreaker forward.]
[The thunder hammer had been built for a Primarch's hand and the automata carried it to Perturabo with the efficient servility of a machine fulfilling its function. Perturabo's gauntlet closed around the haft and the weapon's head crackled with the discharge of its power field, thin arcs of lightning running across its surface as the systems came fully active.]
[He came at you.]
[The Logos propelled its enormous mass forward, the ground registering each footfall as a structural event, and the Forgebreaker came down toward the top of your skull in the opening swing.]
[You stopped your own momentum and dropped to the side. The arm that had reformed into the scythe configuration went forward in the same motion, the bone-blade extending and driving toward the sections of Perturabo's neck that the heavy gorget of the Logos left exposed between the helmet seal and the upper chest plate.]
[The Forgebreaker adjusted.]
[It did not hit where it had been aimed. It hit your left shoulder instead, the full force of a Primarch's swing with a weapon designed for Primarch-scale destruction behind it, the lightning discharge adding its own component to the impact. The bone-shell across your shoulder exploded outward in fragments. The arm beneath it was not severed cleanly; it remained attached by the deeper tissue, the writhing strands of flesh finding each other across the gap and holding, but the structural function of the arm was gone for the moment.]
[The scythe had reached Perturabo's neck.]
[The bone-blade drove through the armor at the gap and into the flesh beneath, opening a wound that began producing blood in significant quantities immediately. The last mobile Domitar automata interposed itself between your extending arm and the point where the scythe had seated, taking the leverage and preventing you from deepening the cut further.]
[You pulled the scythe back.]
[Four bony limbs erupted from your spine simultaneously, driving forward past your own body and into Perturabo's frame, impacting across his chest and abdomen and left arm in rapid succession. The force of four simultaneous bone-spike impacts at close range staggered even the mass of the Logos.]
[Perturabo let the Forgebreaker go.]
[Both his forearms came up and the melta weapons integrated into the vambraces of the Logos pressed flat against the surface of your bone-shell breastplate. His thumb found the firing controls.]
[The discharge went into your chest at point-blank range.]
[The heat moved through the bone-shell and into the flesh and tissue behind it and kept moving, the melta stream not a projectile but a sustained application of thermal energy that had no interest in the structural properties of whatever it was passing through. Most of what had been inside your chest cavity in the area of the discharge became plasma and then became nothing. The bone-shell at the impact site had partially melted but remained present, pale blue, exposed to the air where the flesh around it was gone.]
[You felt the absence of several things that had been there and were not there now.]
[The arm that had been severed at the shoulder had found enough of its own tissue to begin rebuilding. The hand at the end of it was already changing, the palm surface splitting open along a seam that had not been there before, a bone spur extending outward from the opening in a continuous, driven growth.]
[You brought the arm up.]
[The bone spur drove into Perturabo's chest, through the Logos's plating, through whatever the plating had been protecting, and found his heart.]
[He was still upright. You were both still upright, entangled at the distance of an arm's length, the bony limbs still embedded in his frame, his melta weapons still pressed against your chest cavity.]
["Traitor. For the Emperor. For the future of humanity. Let us take this final step together."]
[Your bloodshot eyes held his. His eyes held yours, the rage in them absolute and present and completely without resignation, the resentment of a lifetime compressed into the expression of a man who had decided he was right even now.]
[The melta bomb had been moving upward through your throat since before you had finished speaking.]
[You opened your mouth.]
[Perturabo saw it.]
["Twenty-two—"]
[The fury in his voice had found something under the fury, something that sounded almost like a question, the last word a roar that was also reaching for something it would not have time to grasp.]
[Your tongue found the activation switch.]
[The light came from inside you and went outward in every direction simultaneously, white and total, and the heat that followed it made every other heat that had touched you today feel like a memory.]
[Are you... dead?]