The Shadow Step deposited him behind a block of ice roughly the height of a Chimera, and Nolan held position there for a moment.
The mining settlement was large and thoroughly abandoned. Equipment that had been impressive once rose from the snow in the forms that heavy machinery takes after years of unattended weather: exposed metal surfaces oxidized, support structures listing at angles that said the ground beneath them had shifted, the largest units half-buried to where only the uppermost sections remained visible above the accumulated snowpack. Whatever had been extracted from this ground had stopped being extracted a long time ago.
The wind carried two things. The smell he had been following, much stronger now. And the sounds: a low, wet, repetitive noise from somewhere near the center of the settlement, and under it, the intermittent sharp impacts that Bloodletters' Hellblades make against solid material.
He moved to where he could see.
The snow in one corner of the settlement was scarlet.
Bloodletters occupied the space in numbers that he put at sixty or slightly above: the tall, red-skinned forms of Khorne's infantry daemons moving across each other's paths in the aimless violence that Bloodletters perform when they have no active target to direct it at, each one carrying Hellblades that caught what little light the overcast offered. Beneath a crashed Land Speeder whose hull had been crumpled against the settlement's central structure, a large Nurgle daemon crouched with something in its embrace, moving with the slow, proprietary deliberateness of something that considers what it is holding to be its possession.
Nolan's eyes moved to the bodies.
There were perhaps a dozen of them visible, more likely under the snow that had accumulated around the settlement's perimeter. Power armor in a deep red that was not quite Blood Angels red: darker, the surfaces marked with a chapter iconography that he could make out on the pauldrons even at this distance. A white shoulder plate on each, bearing the emblem of a raven and a blood droplet positioned in a specific arrangement.
One body near the Land Speeder wore blue: a Librarian, the power scepter still in the hand that had not been separated from its owner.
Blood Ravens. Fifth Company. All of them without life signs, and without the specific quality of rest that implies a dignified end.
Nolan looked at the Bloodletters moving across the scarlet snow.
He had been here approximately thirty seconds.
He stepped out from behind the ice block.
The vibranium power armor's servo assistance was operating at reduced capacity and the weight of the suit was registering in the effort each stride required, but reduced was not absent, and a Primarch's baseline physical capability without power assistance exceeded what most systems were designed to manage in any case. He moved at the pace the terrain and the suit allowed and he did not slow down.
The nearest Bloodletter turned at the sound of heavy magnetic boots on frozen ground.
Forgebreaker came around before the Hellblade it was reaching for could complete the extension. The thunder hammer's head discharged the kinetic and energy load it carried into the daemon at chest height, and the Bloodletter stopped being one solid object and became several. The thunder crack of the discharge rolled across the settlement, and the remaining Bloodletters oriented on it simultaneously with the unified attention of things that have been waiting for violence and are pleased to find it.
The Ten Rings detached from Nolan's forearm and spread out in a fan, five of them targeting the Nurgle daemon in its position under the Land Speeder. The rings drove into the daemon's midsection and arms, the impact force not designed to kill something of that mass but designed to prevent it from moving while larger solutions were arranged. The daemon's embrace loosened. It roared.
Nolan swung Forgebreaker left and then right, the thunder discharges from the impacts leaving trails of ionized air in the frozen atmosphere, a visible record of each blow. Seven Bloodletters in the immediate radius came apart. Three more behind them received the edge of the discharge and staggered.
He reached for his hip.
The plasma pistol came out and he pointed it at the largest cluster of Bloodletters reforming ahead of him and pulled the trigger twice and then continued pulling. The plasma bolts that came out were the bright blue-white of fully charged plasma, each one hitting the packed daemon formation and expanding from the impact point outward in a thermal surge that did not leave intact targets inside its radius. The snow around each impact point vaporized. The Bloodletters in the primary impact zones ceased to be Bloodletters and became dispersed Warp energy, their material forms unequal to the temperatures involved.
The secondary wave of Bloodletters came around the edges of the plasma tide.
An orange-red beam of coherent energy crossed the settlement from a direction Nolan had not yet identified, finding the Nurgle daemon's face at the eye and driving inward. The daemon released its hold on the Librarian's body it had been clutching and raised one massive arm toward the source of the shot. The Ten Rings, still anchored in its midsection, used the moment to accelerate their rotation, cutting rather than simply holding.
The settling snow to Nolan's left moved.
A figure in blue power armor came out from the concealment of a collapsed machinery section, both hands on a force-powered scepter and a quality of determined movement that was at odds with the amount of blood that had soaked through the armor's seals and was freezing in the lines of the ceramite. A Blood Ravens Librarian, alive, and not by much: the pallor in his face was visible even through the blood smearing it, and the effort he was spending to stay upright was evident in every step.
He raised the scepter.
The psychic discharge he released was not large, but it was precise: a sustained strike that found the remaining Bloodletters still caught in the plasma tide and brought them to resolution, each daemon unraveling under the psychic assault with the specific quality of things whose connection to the material plane was already tenuous.
The Librarian put one knee on the ground.
He had been running on something past physical reserves, and the discharge had used the last of it. He looked up, his breathing audible, and shouted in the direction of a collapsed equipment housing forty meters to Nolan's right.
"Cyrus!" The voice carried the tone of someone using volume to compensate for failing capacity. "I am not going to last until you decide this situation is sufficiently under control. Get out here!"
A pause of perhaps three seconds.
Then a figure in scout armor vaulted from the top of the collapsed housing and landed in the snow between Nolan and the Nurgle daemon, which was still occupied with the Ten Rings and the wound to its eye. The scout was carrying something in one hand that was recognizable as a melta device, heavily modified, with components attached to it that bore no obvious relationship to its base configuration and several that appeared to have been attached very recently.
He looked at Nolan.
Then at the daemon.
Then at Nolan.
"Right," he said. He had the specific rapid-assessment quality of someone who has been in bad situations often enough to stop being surprised by new variants. "Unusual Astartes, here is some useful information: my device is on a short timer. Knowledge is power. Don't stand in that spot."
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