[A Primarch moving at full speed through ordinary Astartes is not a fight. It is a weather event.]
[The energy the grox meat and nutrient solutions had put back into your body was cycling through the restored frame with full efficiency, and every expenditure you made was drawing on reserves that had been properly filled. You moved through the Iron Warriors fortification network like the golden armor was made of air rather than ceramite and adamantium, the storm shield swinging in lateral arcs that cleared multiple targets simultaneously, the chainsword finding the anatomical arguments between Iron Warriors Terminators.]
[They shot at you. The Iron Warriors were siege specialists and their ranged discipline was among the best in either side's Legions, and the fire they concentrated on your towering frame was heavy and precisely directed. You did not dodge most of it. The rounds that found non-critical surfaces of your body were a calculation: the time spent on evasion would cost more than the damage absorbed, given what the body you inhabited was capable of recovering from. You absorbed the fire and kept moving, and the Iron Warriors in your path kept dying.]
[The Imperial Fists worked the fortifications around you, methodical and lethal, their fire coordinated in the way of warriors who had been trained by the finest defensive mind in the Imperium.]
[Then the engines arrived.]
[Iron-grey Thunderhawk gunships, multiple flights of them, their fuselages reflecting the light of the Titan battle overhead, dropping from altitude and taking up positions above the engagement zone. You looked up and began assessing the nearest heavy gun emplacement that was still operational.]
[Six shapes fell from one of the gunships.]
[They were not Astartes. They hit the ground in a ring formation around your immediate position with the weight of machines rather than warriors, each one several meters tall, armored in steel plate, built along the proportions of something designed for continuous heavy combat rather than tactical flexibility. Melee weapons in their grips. Large-caliber cannons on their chassis. The Iron Circle, Perturabo's personal automata guard, Domitar-class, interposing themselves between you and whatever had decided to arrive.]
["A Primarch's bodyguard. The large catch has taken the bait."]
[You said it quietly, through your visor, to yourself.]
[The sky tore open above the Iron Circle formation and the figure that descended through it made the Domitar automata look appropriately scaled for the first time since they had landed. Terminator armor, but not the Terminator armor of a Legion: the Logos, Perturabo's personal plate, a suit that had been built for a Primarch who was also an engineer and who had spent the entirety of his existence thinking about how to make things structurally indestructible. Metal cables ran from the suit into the scarred skin of his scalp. The expression on his face as he hit the ground was arrogance of the specific kind that comes from being comprehensively right about the situation for a sustained period of time.]
["My poor brother. Why are you not at your walls? I was looking forward to seeing your face when my warriors finally cross the threshold of the Palace."]
[His voice carried across the fortification ground without effort, aimed at you the way artillery was aimed, with precision and intent.]
[The Iron Circle closed their formation. You waited until the distance was conversational, then reached up and pulled the adamantium helmet off your head.]
[Perturabo's expression moved through confusion and arrived at shock with the speed of a man whose pattern recognition was extremely fast and whose conclusions were therefore extremely fast and were landing in a place he had not prepared for.]
["You are not Dorn."]
[He stared at your face.]
["I have never seen you before. And yet—" A pause. The metal cables in his scalp moved slightly. "—none of my brothers told me. Not one of them said you were still alive."]
[His voice had dropped to something lower and more personal than the announcement he had opened with.]
["Or has the False Emperor, in his desperation to prolong his own existence, dragged a dead man back from wherever dead men go?"]
[The roar that followed filled the space between the fortifications and pushed outward into the ash-fall, louder than the distant Titan impacts for a moment.]
[You breathed in and let it out slowly.]
["This body belongs to Eleven. You are not wrong about that. But I am not Eleven. I am the Twenty-Second Primarch of the Imperium of Man."]
[Perturabo went still.]
[Then he became louder.]
["I will never acknowledge you as a brother! The False Emperor used every one of us as instruments of his personal rule. That is what we were. Tools. Discardable when the project required it. You are simply one more piece he has picked up and pointed at a problem."]
[The cannons on the Domitar automata began to spin up behind their targeting systems, locking onto your frame with the patient efficiency of machines given a clear objective.]
["Tell the False Emperor that his world ends in this siege. Tell Dorn that his pride and his walls will be ash when our banners are raised over the Palace. Tell the mortals of Terra that their prayers are wasted, because the gods they pray to will be killed by the logic of what humanity actually is. Tell the loyal Astartes that Horus's judgment has descended on them."]
[He leveled one enormous gauntlet at you.]
["And understand that there is nothing you can do about any of it."]
[You listened to all of it with a blank expression and your neck slowly tilting to one side.]
["The primary lesson I have drawn from this siege," you said, "is that proximity to Chaos makes a being either miserable or cognitively diminished. In his case, apparently both. He cannot produce a coherent sentence."]
[You turned your head.]
["David. Now."]
[The Imperial Fists surrounding you were wearing their armor. One of them was not.]
[The nanomachine swarm erupted from the inside of an empty suit of power armor at the same moment Perturabo's artillery barrage saturated your position. The two events overlapped: the rounds came in and the swarm went out, and for the swarm the incoming fire was simply a source of additional mass and energy to absorb rather than a threat to avoid.]
[Your feet hit the ground and you drove upward, the bone scales already rising across your neck and jaw as the mutation responded to the combat state, and you went into the air above the Iron Circle formation and began the descent toward Perturabo.]
["Perturabo. I have come to see you off."]
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