Something clutched at Aquilius’s leg, and he looked down into the inhuman, emotionless face of a necron. Its slender, skeletal hands scrabbled at his armour, seeking purchase. The wretched thing was missing its entire lower body and had only one arm, but its eyes still burnt with cold, alien fury. Even rent limb from limb, the inhuman imperative to kill drove the creature on. The Coadjutor kicked it away from him in disgust, and drew his chainsword.
Looking out across the nave, Aquilius saw a sea of glowing witchfire eyes in the gloom, closing in around them inexorably. There seemed to be thousands of the alien warrior-constructs closing in around them, far too many for them to have any hope of survival.
It would only be minutes at best before it was over, Aquilius realised.
As if to emphasise the hopelessness of the situation, the Coadjutor heard a gasp of pain and, as he kicked the body of a necron off the wildly revving blade of his chainsword, he glanced over his shoulder to see Librarian Epistolary Liventius fall to his knees, blood pumping from his chest. A gaping hole ran completely through the aged Librarian, and a necron warrior stood over him, its weapon raised. Aquilius cried out and tried to turn, to interpose himself between them, but he was too slow.
With a devastating force, the necron warrior brought the heavy axe-blade of its weapon down upon the Librarian’s skull with a sickening, wet crack. The dark blade was embedded down to the teeth, and while the automaton struggled to pull it free, Aquilius stepped forward and smashed his chainsword across its face. It reeled backwards, but the damage had been done, and Liventius fell face forwards to the ground, the weapon that had slain him still embedded in his head.
There were only four White Consuls left alive now. So many of his brothers had died, so many warriors that were far more important than he – Chapter Master Valens, Librarian Epistolary Liventius, Captain Decimus, Proconsul Ostorius. It seemed perverse that such mighty warriors had been slain while he yet lived.
Aquilius gritted his teeth. If he were to die this day, and it seemed a certainty that such would be his fate, he swore that he would take as many of the enemy down with him as he could. He swore that he would make his ancestors proud.
‘For the Emperor!’ he roared, before hurling himself into the fray.
The Undying One’s head snapped around sharply. The baleful pinpricks of its soulless eyes glowed brightly, and they roamed across the square, searching. Hovering a metre above the ground, the ancient being rotated smoothly on the spot, head turning to and fro as it sought the origin of the energy build-up that it detected nearby.
With an elegant movement it extended one of its slender limbs, and a cloud of tiny scarabs burst from the darkness beneath its shroud. The tiny, robotic insects flew up to the Undying One’s hand as its long, needle-like fingers unfurled. They began to latch onto each other, each scarab grasping its neighbour with barbed leg and mandible. The tiny creatures locked into place and become motionless, forming a two-metre-long staff. Its shape completed, the scarabs melted together to create a smooth, seamless implement. At either end of the weapon, green light flared, creating a pair of energy blades that crackled with barely contained potency.
With a grace far beyond that of its servants, the Undying One swung the twin-bladed staff around it in a glittering arc and waited for its enemy to appear.
Responding to the unspoken orders of their master, the Undying One’s bodyguard stood to attention, energy surging through their long-bladed warscythes.
Surrounded on all sides by endless phalanxes of motionless necron warriors, a shimmering light began to materialise within the centre of the square, swiftly followed by a hundred others. They gleamed and flickered, like dense clusters of fireflies, and within a fraction of a second they began to solidify into ghostly figures. With a sharp crack of displacing air, a hundred Terminator-armoured warriors of the cult Anointed teleported in from the Infidus Diabolus.
The immense shape of the Warmonger appeared amongst them, the immense killing machine one of the few remaining Dreadnoughts capable of such deployment. At the Word Bearer’s fore materialised the Host’s war leader and Coryphaus, Kol Badar, Dark Apostle Marduk at his side.
The Dark Apostle was encased within an ancient suit of Terminator armour, its deep red plates lustrous and gleaming. The armour was edged with barbed dark metal, and thousands of holy passages from the Book of Lorgar had been painstakingly engraved across its plates in tiny Colchisite cuneiform script. His own matted fur cloak was thrown over the immense shoulders of his new armour, and in his right hand he held his staff of office, his deadly crozius arcanum, its bladed tip crackling with energy. In his left he held an archaic, daemon-mawed combi-bolter, a weapon last wielded by the Warmonger himself during the battle for the Emperor’s Palace on Terra.
The Terminator armour had not been worn for over nine thousand years, not since the Warmonger – then the 34th Host’s Dark Apostle – was fatally wounded and had been peeled from it before being interred within his eternal sarcophagus prison. The revered suit of armour had been dutifully repaired, yet no one had ever been bold enough to have donned it since. For millennia it had remained dormant, empty and unused, locked away in the sepulchre of the great hero. Now, at the urging of the Warmonger, it tasted battle once more. Within his skull-faced helm, Marduk grinned savagely, rejoicing in the feeling of power that the suit conveyed. He felt like a god.
His eyes fell upon the Undying One, less than one hundred metres distant. He had faced the creature once before, and recognised it instantly. Even from this distance, he could make out the spinning orb of the Nexus Arrangement set into its chest plate.
‘There!’ roared Marduk, levelling his crozius in the direction of the enemy xenos lord.
‘Target acquired,’ confirmed Kol Badar, his combi-bolter roaring in his hand. ‘Come, my Anointed brothers! Kill for the living, kill for the dead!’
More than three hundred necron warriors separated the Terminators and the Dreadnought from their target. Thousands more surrounded them. As if being suddenly awoken from their slumber, the necrons turned as one to face the Anointed, and in an instant, battle was joined.
‘Death to the betrayer of the crusade!’ boomed the Warmonger, reliving once more battle of days past.
Kol Badar snarled as he gunned down necrons, ripping dozens of them to pieces with each concentrated burst of fire.
‘Close formation! Keep moving!’ he bellowed. Deeper into the enemy formation the Anointed strode, destroying dozens of the xenos machines for each step of ground they gained.
Hot blood pumped through Kol Badar’s veins, his twin hearts hammering in his chest. He closed his power talons around one of the necron’s heads, and with a savage twisting motion ripped it clear. He backhanded another of the xenos automatons, smashing it heavily to the ground. As it struggled to rise, he placed the twin barrels of his combi-bolter against its head and squeezed the trigger.
One of the necrons was lifted off its feet as an Anointed warrior rammed his chainfist into the hapless robotic being’s chest, sending shards of metal spitting out in all directions before it was torn in two. Another was liquefied as combi-melta fire turned its body molten.
Half a dozen of the Anointed were down, felled by the brutally effective gauss weapon fire of the necrons. None of their brethren made any move to aid them. Kol Badar saw more of his battle-brothers, warriors he had fought alongside through countless campaigns spanning the galaxy, fall under the devastating weapons of the necrons. It was horrifyingly effective, even Terminator armour proving to be little protection against their touch. Under each searing volley of crackling energy, armour was stripped away layer by layer, until pallid flesh was exposed and stripped to the bone; a fraction of a second later, and bone too was torn apart at a sub-atomic level.
A beam of energy sliced across his shoulder, cleaving through his armour plating. Kol Badar turned and gunned down his attacker, driving it backwards, only for it to be finished by one of his brethren, who smashed its hea
d from its shoulders with a blow of a power maul.
The Warmonger barrelled through the orderly ranks of the enemy, smashing dozens of the skeletal warriors aside with each sweep of its massive talons. Dozens more were ripped apart as the Warmonger’s heavy bolters tore a swathe through their ranks. Emotionless and seemingly oblivious to the danger they faced, more necrons moved forward to fill the gaps left by their fallen comrades, stepping into the path of the rampaging Dreadnought. Arcing green beams stabbed at the Warmonger’s armoured hull, ripping gaping holes in his carapace that exposed the Dreadnought’s inner workings, but it was not slowed.
A necron warrior before Kol Badar raised its weapon over its head, bringing the axe-head underslung beneath its barrel down towards his shoulder. The Coryphaus caught the blow in his power talons. He clenched his hand into a fist and the weapon crumpled, ghostly green energy leaping in all direction. He smashed the necron across the side of the head with the barrel of his combi-bolter with a sharp, metallic clang, and then stabbed his bladed talons into its chest.
Crackling with energy, his fingertips passed through the gaps of the necron’s ribcage, and with a flick of his hand he sent the corpse-machine flying.
Death was assured. There was virtually no chance that any of them would make it out alive.
Kol Badar began to laugh. He had not felt this alive in centuries.
Marduk smashed his crozius into the head of a necron, exposing sparking wiring and circuitry as it was sundered by the force of the blow. As the robotic corpse collapsed to the ground, a space was momentarily cleared before him, affording him a glimpse towards his target.
The ancient being of living metal was gliding smoothly towards him and the Anointed and Marduk saw that there was only a thin line of enemy constructs that separated him from his immortal foe.
The warriors that marched before the Undying One were unlike any that he had faced thus far. Their bodies seemed to be an armoured mockery of the living, rather than reflections of death as were the other necrons. They moved differently as well, their movements smooth and natural, more like those a living foe, rather than the stilted movements of the lesser warriors. They were tall and slender, easily matching the height of the Terminator-armoured Anointed, though they were a fraction of their bulk, and in their hands they wielded halberd-like warscythes, their blades flickering with green energy.
The Anointed and the elite bodyguard of the Undying One came together with a crash, energised warscythes meeting power mauls and chainfists. The enemy moved with supple grace, their weapons leaving gleaming contrails in their wake as they were whipped around in blinding arcs.
Those weapons proved utterly deadly, shearing through Terminator armour with ease. Marduk glimpsed one of the Anointed raising a barbed power sword to parry a blow scything in towards its neck, only to see the blade of the power sword neatly sheared away. The energised necron weapon continued on into the body of the veteran Word Bearer, slicing him open from neck to sternum.
Having witnessed the shocking power of the warscythes, Marduk swayed backwards out of the way of a hissing blade rather than attempt to block it. His movement was slowed by the sheer bulk of his newly donned Terminator armour, though not as much as he had initially expected.
Marduk turned aside the next blow aimed at him, careful only to allow his crozius to touch the metal haft of the warscythe rather than its energised blade. His return blow all but tore the necron’s head from its shoulders, and the Dark Apostle grinned savagely. What he had lost in speed was more than made up for by the boost in sheer brute strength that the tightly bound servo-muscles of his Terminator armour gifted him.
Battering another enemy aside, his combi-bolter scoring deep wounds across its armoured chest, Marduk surged forward, desperate to close the distance with the Undying One.
The dull ache in his chest, the pain of separation from the warp, seemed all the worse in close proximity to these deadly warriors. He wanted to end this battle swiftly. He did not know how long he could endure the gaping void that seemed to fill him.
The Undying One glided smoothly into the brutal melee, double-bladed staff spinning in its hands. With consummate ease, two of the Anointed were instantly cut down. Both of the warriors were sliced neatly in two with a contemptuous lack of effort. The spinning Nexus Arrangement embedded in the ancient being’s chest spilt its ethereal light before it, taunting Marduk.
Another Anointed warrior was slain, the Undying One’s bladed staff slicing neatly from shoulder to hip, and the two parts of the warrior slid to the ground. The necron lord spun the staff around in a blinding arc, levelling one of its tips at another Chaos Terminator, and a searing blast of energy slammed into the unfortunate warrior. The Anointed warrior reeled backwards, a head-sized hole punched clear through his chest.
Marduk snarled and launched himself forward, coming at the Undying One from the side. He saw the hulking form of Kol Badar moving to attack the ancient being from its other flank, combi-bolter roaring in his hand, and he felt a surge of rage at the thought of his Coryphaus stealing his kill.
The Undying One’s head was turned away from him, focussed on Kol Badar. He stepped in close, lifting his crozius arcanum with all his might, aiming his strike at the fell being’s delicate-looking, slender skull. The blow never landed, for without so much as turning its head, the necron lord parried the blow with one of the energy-bladed tips of its staff, even as the other blade sliced across Kol Badar’s torso, almost eviscerating him.
Turning with a deceptively languid, smooth movement, still hovering a metre above the ground, the Undying One fended off the attacks of both Marduk and Kol Badar with ease. A third warrior entered the fray, power maul striking out. The Anointed brother was instantly slain, an energy blade plunged through his head.
Blood welling from the deep wound slashed across his torso, Kol Badar lifted his combi-bolter, spraying bolts from its twin-barrels. The Undying One’s shroud billowed out around it as it turned, and a dense cloud of scarabs was unleashed upon the Coryphaus, biting and clawing at him. Though the miniscule, robotic insects could do little real damage to him, encased as he was within his Terminator armour, they soaked up the fury of his weapon fire, the bolts detonating well before striking their intended target.
Marduk aimed another strike at his enemy. But again the double-bladed staff came around in a blinding arc, turning his weapon aside. Marduk had prepared for this reaction, and swiftly altered his angle of attack, but this too was blocked, a deft circular parry disarming him neatly, sending his crozius arcanum spinning away, landing several metres away.
Still turning, the Undying One cut another Anointed brother in two as he stepped forward to attack the ancient being, before neatly ramming one of the energy-blades straight through Kol Badar, impaling him on its length.
Marduk lifted his combi-bolter towards his enemy, squeezing the trigger. Before the first bolt was launched from the chamber, the Undying One slid its blade clear of Kol Badar and swung it around. Marduk was knocked back a step, and it was only when he saw blood spraying out in a geyser that he realised something was wrong.
The pain kicked in a heartbeat later, and the Dark Apostle gazed down in disbelief at his severed arm lying on the ground. His combi-bolter was still clutched in his hand.
On the other side of the Undying One, Kol Badar dropped to one knee, blood pumping from his chest wound. The ancient being twirled its staff around in a deft display of skill. A ring of bodies surrounded it.
Necrons closed in on all sides, gauss flayers spitting death, and Marduk, refusing to accept defeat, felt his anger build.
‘Face me, betrayer!’ came a booming cry and the immense figure of the Warmonger burst through a cluster of necrons, smashing them out of its path with a sweep of one massive, mechanised arm. Heavy bolters spewed a torrent of fire before it as it charged.
The Warmonger’s voice was hoarse from leading the Host in their battle psalms, yet it still carried great power and authority. His ey
es were locked on the hated figure of his foe, bedecked in fluted, golden armour.
His crozius dripped blood from its barbed tips, and his armour was pitted with battle damage. He was exhausted, for this battle had been raging for weeks. He could not recall when he had last rested. But none of that mattered, not now that the being that was the focus of all his hatred and bitterness was within his reach.
The bodies of his defeated foes lay strewn about him, their yellow armour splattered with blood. None of them stood in his way now.
As far as the eye could see, the battle raged on, brother fighting brother. It was glorious, and yet it filled him with a deep burning hatred for the one who had, in his arrogance, been the cause of it all.
He licked his blood-flecked lips and clenched his hand tightly around the haft of his crozius as he looked upon the one whose hands were stained with the blood of every noble brother Astartes that had fallen.
Once he had called this man Emperor. Once he had even worshipped him. He spat, as if his mouth were suddenly filled with a vile poison.
Liar. Betrayer of the Crusade. Betrayer of the Warmaster.
He had deceived them all.
‘Now, it is over,’ he said. ‘Your lies shall lead no more brother Astartes to their deaths, false one.’
And on the walls of the largest palace ever constructed, he hurled himself at his mortal enemy, determined to be the one that killed the False Emperor.
‘Now, it is over,’ the Warmonger boomed. ‘Your lies shall lead no more brother Astartes to their deaths, false one.’
The Undying One turned smoothly to face the Dreadnought rampaging towards it, and with inhuman speed and suppleness, it contorted its body like a dancer’s. Bolts sprayed around it, tearing holes through its billowing shroud, but failing to strike its body.
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