On the left-flank warzone, the axis of advance for Operation "Spine-Break" was a path through hell itself, paved with steel, flesh, and superhuman will.
I Am Not God led his formidable composite force like the sharpest scalpel in the Emperor's arsenal, driving along the precise route Macharius had plotted, thrusting deep toward the core of the Heldrake's domain.
Every step forward was paid for in blood. Each meter was bought through savage close-quarters fighting. Chaos had recognized the threat this strike force represented, and drew its most elite, most twisted reserves from every direction to block their path.
The first to surge against them were the servants of Nurgle. Bloat-hulks the size of hillocks heaved and oozed forward, trailing clouds of lethal pestilence. Their oozing tendrils and corroded weapons crashed down to swamp the vanguard.
In answer came the massed frag-cannon volleys of the Ventrilian Noble Army, the precision melta-fire of the Tempestus Scions drop-troops, and the chainsword of I Am Not God himself, blazing with its [Holy Bane] effect, anathema to the Chaos-touched.
Gold-lit sword-flashes strobed through the green tide of rot. Each strike opened wounds in the hulks that refused to close, edges smoldering with faint golden fire.
When he finally drove the chainsword into the festering core-sac of one such monster, it dissolved into a boiling lake of pus with a wretched death-wail. The [Thirteenfold Holy Destruction] counter ticked silently to [8/13].
---
The warning came not as sight but as sound — something that shredded sanity before the mind could name it.
Noise Marines. Slaanesh's beloved. Their sonic weapons could turn flesh to pulp and metal to scrap, striking directly at the soul. The strike force's formation buckled. Soldiers clawed at their ears in agony, their movements gone sluggish and uncoordinated.
At the critical moment, the Blood Angels rapid response teams and the anti-psyker detachment of the Hebrew Blade Legion stepped forward. The Blood Angels silenced the din with bolt-gun thunder. Hebrew Blade surgeons performed a rite of sonic warding, throwing a barrier around the worst of it.
And I Am Not God, powered by the mental fortitude granted by the Living Saint's blessing, moved through the mind-flaying noise like an arrow loosed at full draw.
He plunged into the Noise Marines' ranks and let his chainsword roar — a howl that briefly, impossibly, drowned out the blasphemous music — and sawed several of them apart along with their instruments. [9/13].
---
The corridor bend gave no warning. They ran headlong into a squad of World Eaters in brass and blood-red plate, bearing down like derailed locomotives.
These Chaos Space Marines had abandoned ranged weaponry entirely, swinging chainaxes and great blades, hurling themselves into the countercharge with pure, consuming frenzy. The remnants of the Ultramarines and Dark Angels met them instantly, and the air turned into a storm of bolt-rounds and power sword collisions.
I Am Not God did not try to match these post-human warriors in brute force. He moved like a ghost through the melee, chainsword probing for the seams and joint-gaps in World Eater armor.
Working in precise concert with his Astartes battle-brothers and exploiting the [Holy Bane] effect to its fullest, he stripped the sword arms from two World Eaters in quick succession. When a third left himself open in a rage-blind lunge, I Am Not God drove his blade through the faceplate. [10/13]. [11/13].
---
The most dangerous moment came without warning, without a sound — a rent tore open in the Warp, and the Possessed Marine was simply there.
His body had been radically mutated. Half his frame was sheathed in pulsating daemonic flesh. Both arms had become enormous bone-blades. The pressure of Khorne's blessing radiating from him was suffocating.
He did not pause upon arrival. He tore a flanking Sentinel walker apart with his first swipe, then his single crimson eye locked onto I Am Not God, who had been directing the clearance of the last resistance.
The Possessed Marine screamed in a voice that was no longer human, and launched himself forward at a speed that surpassed anything they had yet faced.
I Am Not God felt it — genuine, mortal danger. He threw himself into full retreat and called all surrounding Imperial Guard fire onto the creature. Lasfire and solid rounds barely scratched its shields and carapace. Two Ultramarines who moved to intercept were thrown aside like broken toys.
In the instant before impact, the Errant-class Knight Titan crashed a single enormous step forward and interposed its heavy ion shield between the Possessed Marine and I Am Not God.
Bone-blade met ion shield in a blinding eruption of energy. The Knight was shoved back, metal feet grinding runnels in the ground, but it bought half a second.
Half a second was all he needed.
I Am Not God burst from behind the Knight's flank. His single arm swung the chainsword in a maximal arc, every gram of strength, every fragment of will, every last surge of the Living Saint's blessing driven into one strike.
He did not aim for the Possessed Marine's heavily armored front. He aimed for the junction where daemonic flesh met power armor — the ugliest, most grotesque seam, and therefore almost certainly the most structurally unstable one.
"For the Emperor!!"
The chainsword's teeth spun to a screaming blur, wreathed in blinding gold-light, and drove deep into the writhing union of flesh and metal.
"GHHHROAARRR!!" The Possessed Marine erupted in a howl of mingled agony and fury. The daemonic half of his body began to convulse, swelling, twisting, the daemon inside beginning to consume its own host.
While the monster was locked in that internal crisis, the accompanying Paladin-class Knight's main gun finished charging. The thermal cannon fired.
The shot was point-blank, center mass.
BOOM.
The Possessed Marine ceased to exist in a thunderclap of fire and daemonic shrieking. [Thirteenfold Holy Destruction: 12/13]!
---
I Am Not God dropped to one knee, breathing in harsh, tearing gasps. Several new wounds had been added to his body, deep enough to show bone. The phantom pain from his missing arm was reaching its limit. But the task counter stood at its final step.
He raised his head.
Through the drifting smoke, through the gap his people had torn open at the cost of their lives, the ultimate objective of this entire advance finally came into view.
The Heldrake.
It was not on the ground. It soared through the massive dome blown open in the middle levels of the Hive City, hovering nearly a hundred meters up. The shadow cast by its immense body swallowed a vast stretch of ground below.
At close range, it was far worse than it had appeared from a distance. Its four mismatched heads sprayed different varieties of breath-weapon in continuous sweeping arcs, vaporizing any Imperial unit that tried to approach. Its blasphemous armor flickered under sustained bombardment from Titans and long-range fire, but the psychic shielding held, stubbornly self-repairing with every hit. Countless lashing tendrils and anti-aircraft growths thrashed through the air, swatting down Tempestus Scions mid-drop and blasting gunships from the sky.
"Warhound Titans unable to get an effective lock... standard attacks insufficient in damage output..." He ran the tactical assessment in seconds.
Macharius's plan called for them to create a window for a killing strike from the Titans, but first, they had to make the Heldrake stop — or at minimum, expose a weak point.
"All units!" His voice came out hoarse and ragged over the command channel. "Concentrate fire on the wing-root energy nodes and the primary energy core on its underside! Do not conserve ammunition! Hold its attention! Give the Titans their opening!"
"For the Emperor! Open fire!"
On his order, every remaining weapon in the strike force cut loose simultaneously. Ventrilian heavy guns, Tempestus Scions melta-weapons, Astartes bolt and plasma fire, Knight Titan autocannons and missiles — a torrent of fire in every color poured upward like a reversed waterfall into the enormous creature above.
The Heldrake shrieked in fury. Several of its heads swiveled downward, breath-weapons carving across the surface and vaporizing entire sections of the surrounding troops. But the concentrated intensity of the attack had its effect. Its attention was drawn. Its movements lagged. Portions of its shielding began to overload and flicker.
Now.
"Warhound Titans! Target: abdominal core, offset left! Combined fire! Now!" He bellowed into the comms.
The Warhound-class Titans had been waiting for precisely this moment. Their plasma annihilators reached full charge. The gun-muzzles blazed. Two massive columns of annihilating energy shrieked through the air and hammered into the Heldrake's belly.
BOOOOOM!!
The detonation lit the entire mid-level of the Hive City in blinding white. The Heldrake released a world-shaking scream of pain. The armor on its underbelly had been blown apart, exposing the core structure beneath — pulsating, churning, leaking foul energy. Its enormous body lurched. Its flight attitude destabilized. It began to lose altitude.
"It's hurt! Altitude dropping! All melee units, prepare to engage! Astartes! Knights! With me!"
He saw the crack of light open up. The last chance. He gathered the final reserves of his strength and ran, alongside the charging Ultramarines, the Blood Angels, and the two Knight Titans, toward the projected impact zone.
The Heldrake did not fall completely. It clawed at the air in low-level flight, twenty-odd meters from the ground, struggling to pull itself back up while its remaining heads and tendrils lashed at the "insects" closing around it.
The battle entered its most savage and chaotic phase — a boarding action on a living mountain. Astartes ignited their jump packs and fought their way onto the creature's back, battling daemonic guardians and growth-tissue up there. Knight Titans hacked at the wound in the creature's belly with their melee weapons. Imperial Guard poured every available round into the wings and tendrils.
I Am Not God watched the melee for his opening. He saw the Paladin-class Knight drive its power fist into the edge of the gaping abdominal wound, wrenching it wider.
There.
He erupted in one final burst of everything he had left. He ran up the Knight's pauldron and leapt — his missing arm wreaking havoc with his balance, his will overriding it. The chainsword's teeth caught the lip of a curling, heat-blackened shard of metal at the wound's edge. With a single arm, he hauled his broken body upward and onto the monstrous creature.
The Heldrake felt the little "insect" land. It rolled. It heaved. It shook itself with everything it had, trying to throw him free. Tendrils whipped around him like steel-cable flails. Daemonic shrieks filled his ears from every direction.
I Am Not God was a leaf in a hurricane. Only his right hand, clamped around anything solid he could find, kept him attached to the blasphemous surface of metal and flesh. He crawled, inch by inch, toward the exposed, pulsating core.
The wounds across his body tore open further. Blood marked every inch of his path. Pain and exhaustion pulled his consciousness toward a grey fog at the edges, but the obsession of that final step of [Thirteenfold Holy Destruction], and the echo of Macharius's words — witnessed by the Emperor and the Imperium — held him together.
Closer. Closer still.
He reached the position directly above the core.
It was a terrible organ. Constantly pulsating. The four colors of Chaos corruption flowed through it like corrupted blood — a heart twisted into something no longer remotely biological. Below him, the Heldrake's desperate thrashing continued, and the suicidal efforts of the Imperial troops still bought him time.
No hesitation. No battle-cry.
He gathered everything that remained: his strength, the weight of every sacrifice made on this road, his unshakeable conviction in humanity, and the last light of the Living Saint's blessing. He poured it all into the hand that held the chainsword.
Then he threw himself forward, head down, like a falling meteorite, and drove his blade into that polluted heart with total, irreversible commitment.
"Emperor... witness this."
The chainsword's roar and the Heldrake's final death-cry merged into a single sound that tore at the soul. The teeth sank deep into the core. Holy golden light and blasphemous dark energy collided at the point of entry, consumed one another, and annihilated.
The Heldrake's titanic convulsions ceased all at once. All four heads drooped lifelessly. The psychic shielding surrounding its body collapsed entirely, its radiance extinguishing in seconds.
The immense body lost every last thing supporting it, and fell.
It fell carrying I Am Not God with it, down through the ruined air, toward the scorched black earth below.
CRASH.
A pillar of smoke and dust erupted into the sky, swallowing everything.
When it began to clear, what people saw was the Heldrake's mountain-sized remains, and atop the highest point of those remains, a single figure. Supporting himself with a chainsword driven into the wreckage. Drenched in blood from head to foot. One arm missing. Body ruined.
Standing like a pine tree in a storm.
The system notification appeared with a radiance unlike anything that had come before, blazing across I Am Not God's own vision, and simultaneously across the interface of every player who had been watching this battle:
[I Am Not God has completed the Legendary Mission: Thirteenfold Holy Destruction (13/13)]
[The road of the mortal has reached its end. The sacred gate now stands open.]
[The gaze of the Lord of Mankind has rested upon you for a long time.]
[With a mortal's flesh, sacred deeds were performed. The Emperor's will was made manifest.]
[The covenant is fulfilled.]
[The blessing... descends.]
In the next instant, an indescribable golden light — a billion times more blazing than anything the Living Saint's state had ever produced — detonated like a supernova. With I Am Not God at its epicenter, it consumed the entire battlefield of Heralius Hive City in a single, all-devouring instant.