On the scorched killing grounds of Heralius Hive City, Chaos and Imperial forces tore into each other in relentless waves, grinding the entire district down to ash and rubble.
I Am Not God had just thrown the Ogryn squad at a surge of charging Bloodletters, letting their brutal firepower buy a few precious minutes. It had worked, barely.
The big brutes paid for it. Chewed apart by daemon engine fire and concentrated bombardment until only a ragged handful were still on their feet, stumbling through the ruins.
He'd burned more points, and the progress bar for [Thirteenfold Holy Destruction] hadn't moved. Still stuck at "2."
I Am Not God felt the exhaustion all the way to his bones. The fighting never stopped, and the mission showed no signs of ending.
He tightened his grip on the chainsword. The blade was caked with dried blood, the teeth worn down from hours of nonstop use. Around him, Krieg soldiers moved in silence, plugging holes in the line, spending their lives to hold back the tide one second at a time.
He was weighing whether to blow what little he had left on another wave of line infantry when something cut through the noise above him.
A whistling shriek. Completely unlike the Dark Mechanicum's deployment pods. Sharper. Controlled.
He snapped his head up.
Through the rolling smoke, dozens of drop pods tore across the sky like streaks of fire. They trailed gold and shadow as they fell in tight formation toward key positions across Heralius Hive City, the heaviest concentration aimed squarely at his combat zone.
The markings on those pods weren't Ultramarines blue. Weren't Blood Angels red.
They were black. Deep and heavy, with faint green winged emblems barely visible on the hulls.
Astartes. Fresh Astartes.
Dark Angels.
[Dark Angels Third Company responding to summons, deploying to Heralius Hive City combat zone.]
The system message confirmed it. I Am Not God felt a surge of something close to hope. The Emperor's Angels had come again, and they'd brought a whole company with them. He couldn't command them directly, but their presence alone would shake Chaos and pull pressure off his lines.
"Hold the line! Reinforcements are here!"
He pushed the message out to the surviving Krieg soldiers and the scattered players still fighting around him.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The drop pods hit the scorched earth in rapid succession, each impact throwing up waves of dust and debris. Hatches blew open in bursts of steam.
Squads of towering warriors in jet-black power armor stepped out in lockstep. Heavy and deliberate. Green winged emblems stood out sharp on their pauldrons, and many wore deep green cowls over their helms.
The Dark Angels Third Company had arrived.
They got to work almost before their boots hit the ground. Precise bolter bursts hammered traitor firing positions into silence. Plasma weapons and meltaguns punched through exposed daemon units and light vehicles.
Their fire-and-move patterns were textbook clean. Squad coordination seamless. The whole thing unfolded like a machine that had run this exact sequence a thousand times before. They cut through the chaos and carved out stable ground with unsettling speed.
Three of them landed close to I Am Not God's position. They planted themselves at his back in a loose defensive triangle, bolters sweeping steady lines of fire through waves of Nurgle zombies and turncoat Guardsmen.
One of them drew a power sword in a single smooth motion and put down two Khorne warhounds mid-leap. Quick and clean.
I Am Not God let out a slow breath. With these three anchoring his flank, he could finally think straight.
He scanned the field, spotted a gap in the enemy line, broke from cover, and drove his roaring chainsword through a pus-slicked Nurgle zombie hauling itself out of the rubble.
Then something caught his eye.
A figure burst out from the ruins behind the Chaos lines.
Another Astartes in power armor — but something was wrong. The Chapter icon had been physically scraped away, gouged down to bare metal. Crude blasphemous symbols and the eight-pointed star of Chaos had been painted over it in red. The armor's shape still carried a faint resemblance to Dark Angels gear. The weapons pulsed with an oily, ominous light.
"Wait, are those our guys hitting from behind their lines?"
I Am Not God couldn't make sense of it. A misdirected drop pod? A decapitation raid?
The confusion didn't last long.
The three Dark Angels standing with him — who had been firing in disciplined, metronomic bursts — went still all at once. Not pausing. Stopping completely.
Every helmeted head snapped toward the armored figure charging out from the enemy formation. Even through sealed armor and drawn cowls, I Am Not God could feel the shift. Something cold and absolute and almost fevered snapped into place across all three warriors simultaneously.
No words. No calls for orders. One warrior raised his hand and made a short, opaque gesture.
Then they moved.
Like a trigger had been pulled at the highest possible priority. The daemons closing in stopped mattering. I Am Not God stopped mattering. The Krieg soldiers beside him stopped mattering.
Jump packs fired. Three black shapes launched themselves straight at the revealed Astartes.
The traitor hadn't expected that kind of charge. He roared and brought his power sword up, pumping Chaos psychic energy into the air to disrupt the attack. He was dangerous — genuinely dangerous. The first Dark Angel to reach him took a wound bad enough to drop him in seconds.
But the other two didn't back off. They pressed in with the kind of close-quarters aggression that barely registered self-preservation. Their bolters filled every gap the blades left open. The traitor's power core was punched through. His helmet came apart.
It was over fast. The traitor dissolved in a dissipating smear of foul light.
Of the three Dark Angels, one was in bad shape and got dragged into cover immediately, a comrade jamming in emergency injections. The other two pivoted without a word and went back to work, tearing through the Chaos units that had pushed forward during the assault.
I Am Not God stood there for a moment, processing what he'd just watched.
That extreme, almost pathological focus on a single target. The total willingness to ignore everything else — every other threat, every other allied casualty — to get to that one figure. The Dark Angels' way of war was something close to fanatical.
But they'd killed a powerful enemy. And whatever their reasons were, that outcome worked in his favor.
He exhaled and turned back to the fight. The Krieg soldiers nearby had gotten a small boost from watching the Astartes work. They were tightening up their firing lines.
For a moment, the battlefield felt like it was breathing again.
BANG.
Close range. I Am Not God spun toward the sound.
The Krieg soldier on his left — five meters out — didn't exist anymore from the chest up. Blood hit the scorched ground. No warning. No time. Just gone.
The shooter wasn't a daemon. Wasn't a traitor.
It was the Dark Angels warrior who had just finished getting his wounded comrade to cover. He stood a short distance away, bolter barrel trailing a thin thread of smoke. His faceplate aimed directly at I Am Not God and the remaining Krieg soldiers.
"What the hell?! What are you doing?!"
The rage hit before the shock could even settle. These were supposed to be reinforcements. They were supposed to be on the same side. Why was a Space Marine killing Krieg soldiers?
The Dark Angels warrior didn't answer. He adjusted his aim slowly, as if settling on the next target. When his voice came through the external vox, it was completely flat.
"The First Legion has no secrets."
The bolter fired again.
I Am Not God didn't think. Something that had been sharpened by weeks of combat and the Living Saint's blessing kicked in before his brain caught up. He threw himself forward and sideways, chainsword swinging to intercept and break the line of fire.
The Krieg soldiers behind him recovered faster than he expected. They brought their weapons up and opened fire on the Dark Angel. Las-beams and solid rounds pinged off the power armor without doing real damage, but it created noise, pressure — something to push against.
I Am Not God got inside the warrior's reach. Chainsword met power sword in a spray of sparks. Every muscle screamed. Fury layered on exhaustion layered on total bewilderment.
The Living Saint's blessing was doing something real. It had to be, because he was keeping up. Every blow he threw was everything he had — the kind of fighting that spends everything and saves nothing back.
"We're people too! You're killing your own side! Why?! SAY SOMETHING!"
The Dark Angels warrior parried and struck back in silence. Precise and relentless. There was a flicker of something in the way he moved — a brief recalibration, as if he hadn't expected this level of resistance from a mortal.
He didn't stop.
After another brutal exchange, the voice came through the vox again. Flat and final, like it was the only explanation that had ever existed or would ever need to:
"The First Legion has no secrets."
The Dark Angel found the opening. The power sword came in at an angle that levered the chainsword wide. The bolt pistol was out in the same instant, drawn in one fluid pull.
BANG.
At that range, there was nowhere to go.
I Am Not God took the hit square in the chest. White light and red swallowed everything.
Then nothing.
[You have been killed by "Dark Angel."]
---
On the respawn waiting screen, I Am Not God drifted in the dark.
That flat, mechanical voice was still sitting in his head. The bolter's crack. The soldier's silence.
Rage. Absurdity. No answers at all.
And underneath everything else — quiet, cold, and hard to name — something that felt a lot like dread.