Just as Koda was about to finalize his grotesque ascension to daemonhood, several sharp cracks of sniper fire interrupted his transformation. With an illogical, fluid elegance that defied the laws of physics, Koda twisted his body to dodge the incoming armor-piercing rounds. He turned his gaze toward the shadows where the sniper lay hidden, his mouth splitting into a jagged, ecstatic grin before he lunged forward with a burst of unnatural speed.
Kaidel, the Ghost operative, was paralyzed with shock as he watched the monster evade a shot that should have been a certain kill. His heart sank, and he scrambled to reposition, but the daemon's speed was beyond comprehension. In a heartbeat, the distance between them had vanished.
As the enormous, distorted shadow loomed over him, Kaidel realized he had no time to reload his heavy rifle. He discarded the weapon, drawing a monomolecular combat blade from his hip as he braced himself against the twisted titan. "Come then, beast," he spat. "I will not back down."
Koda ignored the defiance, emitting only a discordant, high-pitched tittering. A blur of motion followed—a shadow so fast that even with his enhanced reflexes and psionic tuning, Kaidel couldn't track it. His mechanical hands were severed at the wrist before he could strike, falling into the dirt as a searing, neurotoxic pain began to pulse through his veins.
"Completely powerless..." Kaidel managed a bitter, wheezing laugh. The agony surged toward his brain, a white-hot fire that begged him to scream, but he clamped his jaw shut. He stared intently at the monster with bloodshot eyes, refusing to grant the daemon the satisfaction of his terror.
"Shout for me! Cry out! Why are you silent?!" Koda shrieked, leaning his distorted face into Kaidel's. "If you will not sing for me, then you are useless meat!" He raised a jagged, obsidian blade to deliver the final blow.
However, the killing stroke never landed. A sudden, deafening clang of steel meeting steel rang out, nearly shattering Kaidel's eardrums as a figure interposed itself between the Ghost and the Daemon Prince.
"I'd like to see just how strong Slaanesh's chosen one truly is," Alexei said, his voice a low, predatory rumble. He used his power sword to effortlessly parry the daemon's strike. His pupils had shifted, turning into brilliant golden slits—the eyes of a beast that had never known the meaning of "mortal."
Koda looked down with manic excitement at the tiny human standing before him. "How dare you face me alone?" The daemon had expected to slaughter his way through an entire platoon to reach the commander, yet here the man was, standing in the open, completely unprotected by power armor.
The pleasure of the hunt had been truncated, but Koda decided he would savor the slow deconstruction of this specific soul to compensate.
Alexei remained expressionless as he watched the daemon writhe and chortle. His golden vertical pupils never wavered, locked onto his enemy's vital points. The decomposition field of the power sword in his hand was humming at maximum output, crackling with violent blue arcs of electricity that illuminated the surrounding mist.
Koda watched the "ant" with morbid curiosity, cataloging a thousand ways to flay him. But in an instant, the ant vanished. A slash followed—so blindingly fast that even with his warp-enhanced senses, Koda could only barely roll away.
A deep, cauterized gash appeared across the daemon's torso, nearly severing his midsection. Koda felt a surge of genuine pain as he watched Alexei twirl his blade and begin a slow, rhythmic approach. Staring into those pale golden eyes, a primal flicker of fear sparked within the daemon's mind—a genetic memory of a predator that stood above even the terrors of the Warp.
"You... you are not human. What are you?!" Koda's voice was a mixture of outrage and perverse fascination. His body tensed, and the next moment, all four of his twisted arms blurred into motion as he charged.
"Me? I am the only master here," Alexei replied with a terrifying, cold smile. He didn't flinch as the mountain of mutated flesh rushed toward him; instead, he met the charge head-on.
At this stage of his evolution, Alexei required no ceramite plating to achieve combat feats that surpassed the greatest of the Astartes. To him, power armor was no longer a shield or an aid; it was a constraint, a cage for a body that had become a masterpiece of lethal evolution. He was a monster wearing the skin of a man.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Fierce collisions echoed across the plains, sounding like muffled thunderclaps. Kaidel, lying wounded on the ground, could see nothing but blurred after-images. The shockwaves from their clashing blades were so violent they dispersed the thick pink fog in a wide radius. The sound was deafening, a relentless metallic cacophony that dominated the battlefield.
"This... this is Lord Alexei's true power..." Kaidel stared, his mind reeling. The Governor was holding his own against a Daemon Prince without a shred of armor, and more than that—he was forcing the nightmare back.
Koda's four arms lashed out in a frenzied storm of strikes, but Alexei's power sword was an impenetrable wall of blue light. With every parry, Alexei found an opening, leaving scorched, bleeding rents in the daemon's hide. The "mortal" he had intended to toy with was systematically dismantling him.
"Is this it? Your master's gift didn't even grant you the speed to scratch me? Pathetic," Alexei taunted, his voice steady even in the heat of the duel.
"ROAR!!!!!" Koda screamed in fury, his blades accelerating into a blur as the two combatants moved away from the fortress walls and into the churned earth of the plains.
Sensing their champion's struggle, a group of Noise Warriors closed in, revving their gore-stained chainswords and emitting sonic shrieks to disrupt Alexei's focus.
"GET BACK!!" Koda roared at his subordinates. His perfectionist pride could not endure the humiliation of needing help to slay a single human. But Alexei didn't wait. He dodged a flurry of Koda's slashes and lunged into the circle of Noise Warriors. Before they could even register his movement, three of the Chaos Marines were cleaved in half, their garish armor falling into the mud in pieces.
"Damn mortal! How do you, a lackey of the Corpse-God, possess such strength?!" Koda gasped, pink ichor oozing from a dozen deep wounds. He refused to accept that a human's natural power could exceed his own demonic apotheosis. "You are a stray dog living in the shadow of a dying throne! How dare you compare yourself to me?"
Alexei didn't bother answering with words. His sword hummed as it cauterized the daemon-blood on its edge with a sharp crackle. He lunged again.
"No matter how much a piece of trash is 'blessed' by a god, it remains trash," Alexei said, his words cutting deeper than his blade into Koda's ego.
Driven to madness by the insult, Koda abandoned all pretense of defense. He threw his weight forward, intending to trade his own life to drive his blades through the "ant's" heart. It was a desperate, final gambit.
But Alexei was already ahead of him. In that heartbeat, the flow of time seemed to thicken and stall. Koda felt a sudden, searing heat at his waist. When his senses returned, he realized his field of vision was tilting. He watched as his own lower body remained standing while his torso slid into the dirt.
"You..." Koda lay limply, watching his essence bleed back into the Warp. "No... Master... do not turn away... give me... one more..."
Sssshkt!
Alexei's power sword drove through the daemon's skull, pinning his resentful, dying gaze to the earth forever. Alexei reached down and tore the twisted, horned skull from the evaporating shoulders. He raised the trophy high, pointing his crackling power sword toward the churning sky, his roar echoing across the entire Spire Plain.
"In the name of Aiur, slaughter them all!"
As if in answer to his command, thousands of brilliant white beams of light—the precision fire of the El Guard and the concentrated orbital support of the fleet—erupted across the eastern front, beginning the systematic annihilation of the Slaaneshi host.