The raging polar gales sweeping across the flats were torn to shreds under the encroaching tides of Chaos.
The sub-zero landscape began to boil under the corrupting influence of empyrean energy. A thick, crimson fog suffused the air, heavy with the reek of burning sulfur and corroded brass, liquefying the ten-millennia-old permafrost into a slick, muddy mire oozing with putrid blood.
Since the dawning of mankind, the species had never truly broken its embrace with warfare. Terra, the cradle of humanity, had been baptized in the fires of countless conflicts across the ages, its very soil saturated with old blood.
Now, a towering, blood-slick silhouette strode forth from the warp-mist, completely unbothered by the lingering, divine protection of the Emperor that wreathed the throneworld.
"KILL!!!"
A soul-shattering roar erupted from the entity, a localized shockwave of pure malice that forced even the veteran Custodians to falter for a microsecond in their firing rhythm.
A jagged mark of Chaos Undivided burned upon its flesh, the bronze and crimson skin split and ruptured by the dark blessings of the Blood God. Veins of molten, warp-lit fire pulsed through the fissures. Its eyes were entirely consumed by visceral red energy, burning like twin searchlights of unadulterated savagery beneath a crown of butcher's nails, its maw bristling with jagged, overlapping fangs.
Digitigrade, reverse-jointed legs packed with unnatural, violent power gouged deep, bleeding prints into the churned mud. A pair of massive, tattered leathery wings unfurled from its spine. In one clawed hand, the beast gripped a colossal, double-edged greatsword; in the other, it hefted a massive, idling chainaxe that thrummed with a heavy, mechanical heartbeat.
As the monstrosity raised its greatsword to the blood-red sky, the aura of homicidal mania and absolute bloodlust suffocating the flats intensified twofold.
Axion required only a single optical scan to identify the non-human titan towering before them.
The Betrayer of the Imperium. The Primarch of the World Eaters. Angron.
"￥!@#! RAAARGH!!"
Setting foot upon the sacred soil of Terra once more, Angron opened his maw to unleash a torrent of words, but his daemonhood had degenerated his mind so completely into a vessel of pure wrath that he could no longer articulate a coherent sentence.
"For the Emperor!"
The Custodians reacted with the lightning fluidity of their caste. The moment Angron crossed the threshold of the blood-mist and presented a clear target, a merciless torrent of bolt-fire descended upon the Daemon Primarch like a localized storm.
Yet, the mass-reactive rounds did nothing to slow Angron's stride.
The horrific craters torn into his unnatural flesh closed and knitted back together within heartbeats. Reduced to little more than a cataclysmic beast of slaughter, Angron merely raised his chainaxe to casually shield his face from the blinding muzzle flashes.
With a shattering heave of his reverse-jointed legs, he launched himself forward, transforming into a red blur of supersonic kinetic force as he closed the distance toward the nearest Custodian.
Though these personal guardians of the Master of Mankind possessed reflexes that eclipsed any standard mortal, they were agonizingly slow when measured against the god-like speed of a Primarch.
Within a single nanosecond, Angron was upon his quarry. His massive black blade swept out in a brutal, horizontal arc, severing the Custodian clean through the waist.
Even as his bisection caused his lower half to collapse into the bloody mire, the dying Custodian's training overrode the trauma. With cold, unwavering discipline, he raised his guardian spear with his remaining arm and emptied the magazine, burying his wrath directly into Angron's chest.
Unbridled fury and the singular urge to render flesh filled the Primarch's shattered mind.
Angron brought a massive, clawed hoof down upon the warrior's auramite chestplate, the impact crushing the masterwork armor into a mangled ruin of gold and bone. Blood and ruptured organs erupted from the warrior's severed torso. In the next breath, the roaring teeth of Angron's chainaxe fell upon the golden helm, splitting the skull into fragments.
Recognizing that ranged suppression was entirely ineffective against such an entity, the remaining seven Custodians drew four guardian spears and two sentinel blades, executing a coordinated, flanking charge against the towering daemon.
The Shield-Captain leading the vanguard unslung the massive castellan axe from his back, its power field snapping to life with a fierce, crackling disruption arc as it lunged toward Angron's exposed neck.
Yet, the Daemon Primarch simply deflected the incoming thrusts with a casual, single-handed parry of his greatsword, the kinetic backlash shattering the hafts of the guardian spears. He spun his momentum, driving his roaring chainaxe toward the necks of four Custodians in a sweeping executioner's strike.
The remaining two warriors threw themselves into the trajectory, bracing the heavy flats of their sentinel blades with both hands to absorb the blow.
The impact was catastrophic. Both warriors were sent hurtling through the air like broken dolls by the Primarch's monstrous strength.
Before Angron could press his advantage to butcher the downed guards, a glowing power axe clove through the red mist from his blind spot, tracking straight for the traitor's throat.
But at that exact microsecond, another colossal form erupted from the crimson depths. A massive, warp-forged chainaxe etched with the eight-pointed star and dripping with Khornate runes crashed down toward the Shield-Captain.
Woom!
BOOM!!
Two deafening sonic booms detonated across the flats in near-simultaneous succession as blurred, massive shapes cut through the air.
The Shield-Captain suddenly found his target missing; his castellan axe clove through empty air before burying itself deep into the frozen earth. The violent atmospheric displacement from the sonic booms threw the nearby Custodians from their feet.
The Captain ripped his axe from the soil, snapping it back to a high-guard over his shoulder.
The warriors rapidly swept their optics across the perimeter.
Not fifty meters away, two massive, towering shapes were tumbling violently across the frozen ground. A massive horde of Bloodletters and Flesh Hounds that had just begun to pour from the warp-rift were crushed under their tumbling weight.
Thud. Thud.
A heavy, unyielding mechanical stride echoed beside the Custodians. Only then did they register the towering chassis of Axion standing adjacent to them, surrounded by the hovering host of Eight-Legs.
Though the Eight-Legs were engineered for complex structural fabrication rather than open warfare, it did not mean they were defenseless.
While Calamity's Judgment had been structurally compromised by the psychic cataclysm, its massive hull had not been entirely vaporized. Several of the Eight-Legs hovered in the low atmosphere, their heavy industrial plasma-clamps gripping multi-ton fragments of the Warlord Titan's thick adamantium armor plating.
The salvation of the Custodians had come from these very construction automatons.
Moving under the hyper-efficient scanning suites and predictive matrices of Axion's central processing core, the Eight-Legs had swung those massive, fifty-ton chunks of alloyed armor like a pair of titanic rackets, batting Angron and his daemon accomplice clean out of the engagement zone.
"GRAAAHR!!"
The two colossal daemonic entities unfurled their massive wings mid-tumble, driving their talons into the dirt to arrest their momentum and snap back into a balanced fighting stance.
As the red mist parted, the Shield-Captain stared at the second beast, his vocalizer tight with recognition as he uttered its ancient name:
"An'ggrath the Unbound!"
This ancient scourge of the Blood God had plagued the galaxy for millennia. Long before the fires of the Horus Heresy had consumed the stars, he had manifested before the Word Bearers, only to be broken by Lorgar Aurelian. Centuries later, during the Siege of Vraks, he had been banished back to the depths of the Immaterium by the Grey Knights utilizing the sacred blade Arias.
Regardless of his past banishments, the beast was renowned within the hidden archives of the Imperium as one of the most lethal entities to ever claw its way out of the Warp.
Axion cast its ocular sensors across An'ggrath, then tilted its manipulator arm toward the other daemon, offering a helpful, perfectly level clarification for the furious Custodians:
"The other specimen is Angron."
Though the Custodians wore opaque helms, Axion's sensor arrays could easily register the spike in their bio-signs: their righteous fury had reached a boiling point.
Yet, fury alone possessed no kinetic value against the denizens of the Warp.
Angron and An'ggrath were actively bleeding the raw essence of Khorne into the localized environment, accelerating the corruption of the Terran soil. The minor daemons were no longer dependent on the dense crimson fog for material stability.
Like an incoming wave of blood and brass, the daemonic legion surged toward Axion and the small pocket of Custodians.
"Hold the line!" the Shield-Captain bellowed, his voice an unyielding pillar of command.
The Custodians instantly fell back into a tight, impenetrable defensive phalanx. Those stripped of their primary melee wargear stood in the support row, bringing their remaining bolt weapons to bear to unleash disciplined, point-blank volleys. The three frontline warriors swung their sentinel blades in precise, rhythmic patterns, cleaving through the slavering jaws of the vanguard Flesh Hounds.
Within seconds of the lines meeting, Angron and An'ggrath roared back toward the cluster of golden warriors, weapons raised high for the slaughter.
Yet, amidst the deafening chaos of melee, only Axion's auditory sensors registered the heavy, rhythmic grinding of colossal gears echoing from the subterranean shafts below.
VROOOOOOOM!
Several blinding, hyper-concentrated beams of superheated plasma lanced out across the flats, missing the Custodians by mere meters as they slammed into the oncoming daemon horde. The thermal radiation from the passing shots flashed the air into a blistering vacuum.
Where the beams finally found their marks, the kinetic and thermal discharge triggered a series of massive explosions, hurling hundreds of tons of scorched earth and shattered daemonic matter into the sky.
A secondary wave of narrower, hyper-dense laser salvos swept out from the rear, drawing a burning line of death across the flanks of the daemon host.
Angron and An'ggrath were violently caught in the overlapping blast radii, their colossal forms thrown backward into the dirt by the sheer kinetic weight of the bombardment.
The Custodians glanced back over their pauldrons.
Four Warlord-class Psi-Titans had crested the ridge, their hulls wreathed in the ominous, localized black storms of the Ordo Sinister.
The barrels of the Sunfury plasma annihilators mounted to each of their right arms were venting clouds of superheated steam, confirming the origin of the apocalyptic salvo. Simultaneously, the carapace-mounted double-barrelled turbo-laser destructors and Reaver laser blasters tracking above their pauldrons opened fire, lashing the polar flats with an unyielding curtain of light.
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