V3 Chapter 78: Daemon Primarch, the Red Angel Angron Descends into the Mortal Realm
Huron stood atop the high walls of the Thorn Palace.
Towering gun turrets rose behind him, their massive barrels roaring without pause, hurling shell after shell toward the cultists massing in the distance. Explosions fell one after another across the Ash Plains, swallowing great numbers of men and vehicles in flame.
Ever since that unexplained power had taken hold within him, the defence installations around the Thorn Palace had changed visibly as well.
According to the tech-sergeants, the machine spirits within them had entered a state of near-inexplicable excitation. Ammunition fed into the breeches without pause, fire control systems adjusted their firing angles on their own, and hit rates had already exceeded what the equipment should ever have been capable of.
Even some defence batteries that had long since fallen into disrepair had started functioning again.
Their machine spirits were rejoicing.
Only now did Huron truly understand what Duvette had said before, and only now did he grasp why Guilliman had been willing to hand supreme command of the ground war to that one mortal.
Here was someone wearing the skin of a "mortal" and nothing else about him mortal at all. Following his command might genuinely have been the right choice.
A single drop of liquid fell suddenly onto Huron's bare face.
He frowned faintly, wiped it away with his gauntleted left hand, and looked down at his fingertips.
Blood.
Blood-red and vivid.
Huron raised his head.
More droplets fell from the darkened sky, striking the Thorn Palace's high walls, its gun turrets, and the Astral Claws' armour plating alike. Within seconds, the scattered drops had swelled into a driving downpour.
Blood covered the entire battlefield.
Huron stood in the rain, watching blood run slowly down his silver-blue Terminator armour.
The temperature around him was climbing.
The stench of burnt flesh, superheated metal, and blood mixed together and hung over the entire wall. Heavy war drums began to sound in the distance, and the whine of chain weapons echoed again and again across the land.
And a roar.
It came from somewhere deep within the mist of blood, and yet seemed to sound directly inside every mind at once.
The entire battlefield began to shudder.
Cannon fire still fell in the distance, but this tremor came from the ground itself. Cracks split open across the Ash Plains, and the blood-rain gathered into rivers, flowing endlessly along the fractured earth.
White skulls began rising slowly out of the blood.
There were only a few at first, but they soon piled up thick within the fissures. Faint red light burned in their eye sockets as they drifted onward with the flowing blood.
The veil of reality was straining under the pressure of the Warp beyond it.
Huron's breathing quickened.
An inexplicable fury rose up from somewhere deep inside him, swiftly taking hold of his thoughts. His fists clenched, and his gaze began drifting, beyond his own control, toward the Astral Claws standing near him.
Voices over the comm channel grew increasingly chaotic.
Several captains began growing violent-tempered; one snarled over a perfectly ordinary order, and another demanded they charge straight out of the Thorn Palace at once, to tear the enemy on the plain apart with their own hands.
Huron felt the very same urge.
He wanted to leap from the high wall.
He wanted to swing his weapon.
He wanted blood to cover everything in his sight.
Just as his fury was on the verge of spiralling out of all control, a cold, clarifying calm suddenly settled over his mind.
The fury was forced back down at once.
Huron's clenched hands slowly relaxed, and the arguments on the comm channel died away just as fast. Several captains fell silent, seemingly bewildered by their own loss of composure moments before.
Huron understood at once.
That surge of fury had come from the Warp.
And what had freed them from it was, once again, Duvette's power.
Huron raised his head and looked out beyond the Thorn Palace.
A thick fog of blood had already covered the plain between the palace and the primary hive city. An endless roar carried out of that mist, so dense that no one could tell how many enemies it truly held.
Huron put his helm back on.
"All forces, hold the line."
He watched the mist of blood drawing steadily closer.
The real enemy had arrived.
Guilliman still stood on the Macragge's Honour's command deck.
As commander-in-chief of the entire crusade force, he had to remain here until the situation was fully out of hand. Intelligence from both the void war and the ground war streamed into the command deck without pause, and updates on the boarding action within the ship kept arriving before him as well.
Fortunately, Duvette had already taken over both the ground battle and the fighting aboard ship.
The main lines on Badab Prime were steadily stabilising, and the World Eaters who had boarded the Macragge's Honour had been split apart and surrounded. Guilliman could therefore devote most of his attention to the void battle.
By now, the Macragge's Honour and the Conqueror were bound fast together by the Beast Claws' chains.
Neither of the two ancient flagships had room left for any large-scale evasion; all they could do was keep adjusting their angle, shifting their most heavily damaged sections out of the other's main gun arcs. Void shields flickered out and reignited again and again, while macrocannons and lances kept hammering at one another's armour.
They were like two prisoners chained together.
Every blow had nowhere to land but on the other.
The Macragge's Honour carried the stronger firepower, and the Imperial warships around it held the numerical advantage as well. The Chaos fleet had already lost several cruisers, and the vessels that remained kept falling back under the Imperial fleet's mounting pressure.
If the battle continued along this course, victory would come soon enough.
But the unexpected always finds a way.
Guilliman stood before the viewport, watching the void outside, warped and stained by the corrosive pressure of the Warp.
A stench of sulphur mixed with scorched metal suddenly spread across the command deck.
Several officers glanced instinctively at the environmental sensors, but the instruments registered nothing harmful in the air. The temperature on the bridge began to climb, and the lighting flickered briefly into a dull red.
Then everyone present felt it: a surge of anger.
It came from somewhere far away, and yet it was closing in at tremendous speed.
Guilliman's head snapped around.
In the void off the Macragge's Honour's port side, a red rift had appeared.
At first it stretched no more than a few metres.
Red light spread slowly through the darkness, and the rift began stretching rapidly outward at both ends. The void around it began bending inward, red lightning crawling and flickering along the edges of the tear.
Something on the far side of that tear was clawing its way through reality.
There was no finesse to that force at all.
Only pure, brute strength and fury.
The rift suddenly widened.
Blood sprayed out of the void itself, blooming into a dark red mist in the vacuum. A mass of brass fragments, broken chains, and burning corpses scattered out through the tear, carried onward by their own momentum.
A massive figure burst out from the depths of the Warp.
Guilliman recognised him at a single glance.
Angron.
His long-fallen brother.
The Red Angel spread his broad, fleshy wings wide, dark red flame burning across the membrane between them. The Butcher's Nails sat driven deep into his skull, their cabling fused into daemon-warped flesh.
The massive chain-axe Spinegrinder and the daemon sword Samni'arius hung chained fast to his wrists.
Flames of blood wreathed Angron's body, red lightning crackling ceaselessly across muscle and jutting bone.
He opened his mouth and roared.
Sound could not carry through the void, and yet every soul aboard the Macragge's Honour heard that roar within their own mind. Glass instruments across the command deck shattered at once, and several officers dropped to their knees, clutching at their heads.
Guilliman did not move from where he stood.
He watched Angron fold his wings and accelerate.
The Red Angel became a burning meteor, hurtling straight for the Macragge's Honour.
"Brace for impact, port side!"
Guilliman's order rang out across the bridge.
The next instant, Angron struck the flagship.
The moment of impact, the Macragge's Honour's outer port-side armour buckled inward.
Red cracks born of the Warp spread across the armour a moment before impact, adamantium framework and plasteel bulkheads crumbling under the corrosive pressure of Khorne's power. Angron then slammed into the hull itself, driving thousands of tonnes of shattered metal on ahead of him.
He punched straight through several hundred metres of the ship's depth.
Outer compartments, gun galleries, and three tiers of crew decks were torn open in his wake. Massive girders supporting the armour sheared away at their joints, and whole sections of the hull warped under the impact.
Explosion after explosion sounded from deep within the hull.
Air vented out through the breach into the void, sweeping crew members and unsecured equipment out with it. Emergency blast doors began sealing shut, but before some of them could close, a second shockwave from Angron's passage had already torn through the deck.
A corridor several hundred metres long buckled inward at its centre.
Lighting failed section by section, and servitors began crawling along the walls toward the damaged zones to begin repairs. More blast doors slammed shut, sealing off the ruined compartments.
Angron still did not stop.
He finally slammed to a halt inside the heavy cargo transfer hall where the Novamarines First Company held position.
The shockwave rolled outward in every direction.
The hall's bulkheads bulged outward on both sides, and a mass of cargo platforms tore loose from their rails. Dozens of heavy containers were hurled into the air, tumbling across the deck and slamming into whatever lay in their path.
The two Novamarines Terminator veterans and three World Eaters nearest the point of impact were shattered outright by the blast.
Only a deep crater remained at the centre of the hall.
Shattered plating glowed dull red in the heat, broken pipes venting steam and fuel out around it. Great chunks of metal wreckage kept raining down, the din of their impacts drowning out the gunfire elsewhere.
A low, grinding sound rose from beneath the wreckage.
A massive hand reached out and gripped the crater's edge.
Angron rose slowly from the ruin.
A broken girder ran clean through his abdomen, its end jutting out through his lower back. His left wing had been torn open by the ship's armour, the ruined membrane hanging loose behind his shoulder.
The Red Angel glanced down at it.
He gripped the girder and tore it straight out of his own body.
Blood poured down onto the scorched deck and burst into dark red flame at once. Muscle deep within the wound began to contract, and shattered bone knit itself back together with a grinding, screeching sound.
His ruined left wing still bled, though its torn membrane had already begun to close.
Angron raised his head.
Inside the heavy cargo transfer hall, the Novamarines Terminators were still fighting the surviving World Eaters. The impact had scattered both sides' formations, and after a brief moment of chaos, everyone had raised their weapons once more.
Angron spread his wings.
He let out a roar.
Then charged straight at whoever stood nearest.
It made no difference to him whether Novamarine or World Eater stood in his path. Spinegrinder tore great sprays of flesh loose with every swing, while Samni'arius ran through anyone who came too close.
A World Eater had barely raised his chain-axe before the great weapon cut him in half at the waist.
Two Novamarines Terminators raised their storm shields together, trying to check Angron's charge. The Red Angel slammed straight into them, shattering the shields along with the arms holding them, and hurled both veterans back into the bulkhead behind.
The remaining Terminators reformed their line fast.
Storm bolters and heavy weapons opened fire together.
Countless bolter rounds detonated against Angron's body, tearing his skin and shattering the bone spurs jutting from it. Several heavy rounds even carved visible gouges into his chest, blood spraying freely from the wounds.
But none of it amounted to more than a scratch to him.
His wounds closed almost as fast as the shells could open new ones. Angron kept coming through the fire, and in a few strides had already crashed into the Terminators' formation.
Spinegrinder swept through.
Three Novamarines went down at once.
Samni'arius punched through another Terminator's breastplate, hoisting him high into the air, then flung him at a still-howling World Eater some distance away.
In only a few breaths, the thirty Terminator veterans and the boarding World Eaters together had been reduced to fewer than ten men standing.
Tiberius Malkarion, Captain of the Novamarines First Company, stood at the centre of what remained.
The storm bolter in his hands kept firing without pause.
Round after round struck Angron's chest and head. The Red Angel came on through the gunfire regardless, his massive shadow slowly falling over Malkarion.
The magazine ran dry fast.
Malkarion cast the storm bolter aside and raised the power fist on his other hand.
"For the Emperor! For the gene-father!"
He roared and charged straight at Angron.
The power fist, its disruption field crackling, slammed into the Red Angel's chest.
Angron raised Spinegrinder.
The great axe fell.
Malkarion's body was split open, Terminator armour and all.
The remaining Novamarines and World Eaters still did not retreat, but their resistance lasted only a short while longer. By the time Angron straightened up again, not a single warrior in the entire cargo hall was left standing.
Blood ran slowly across the tilted deck.
Angron turned his head toward a passage standing open in the distance.
Heavy footsteps sounded from within it.
A new killing was approaching.
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