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The flanking position on the Tayloc Plain.
The Voskcani Armored Company received its orders and moved at full speed. Twelve Leman Russ main battle tanks spread into a wedge formation, their heavy treads grinding the rubble of fortifications to dust as they pushed hard toward the high-ground coordinates.
Battle cannon barrels elevated. The chanical locking chanisms shrieked as they tracked the two positions closing in at inhuman speed.
Infantry couldn't stop the Ogryns?
Then drown them in steel and crush them to pulp.
The NCO commanding the company had no intention of fighting fair. The mont two tall figures draped in tattered canvas stepped into the kill zone, he made the call without hesitation and ordered a full-battery volley.
The battle cannon muzzles belched orange fire.
High-explosive rounds dragged lethal trails across the sky and slamd into the earth. Tons of soil erupted skyward. The superheated blast wave scorched everything around the craters to ash, and the coaxial heavy bolters stitched a death net through the air with no blind spots.
At the center of all that fire and smoke, Horus didn't slow down for a single step.
His stride shifted to its absolute limit. A chain of terrifying afterimages stretched out behind him.
He forced his way through before the second artillery correction could land, collapsing the final hundred ters down to five.
The traitor driver of the lead Leman Russ saw it happen. His scalp went cold. He yanked the control levers on pure instinct, trying to reverse.
The Primarch was already on him.
With nothing but bare flesh and blood, Horus dropped his center of gravity in one motion. His massive hands drove like iron clamps into the gaps of the tank's reinforced blast-proof plating.
His arms erupted. The great tendons crossed and pulled taut like cables of steel.
This body, born to conquer the galaxy, unleashed its full might.
A main battle tank weighing nearly seventy tons was torn free of the earth. The traitors watching could not process what their eyes were telling them. Chassis facing skyward, the tank was wrenched from the ground and hoisted high above Horus's head.
The gunner, suspended in midair, was too stunned to even scream.
Arms swung back. Force applied. Release.
That sixty-ton lump of steel scread through the air and ca crashing down headlong into the armored formation behind it.
BOOM!
Massive objects collided. Shattered armor plates flew in every direction. The defensive line that had looked impenetrable monts before was torn wide open by a single thrown tank.
The breach opened. The slaughter arrived.
Kullen followed close behind and broke into the position. The veteran knight's Power Sword traced a lethal arc of blue light, and every traitor who tried to fill the gap was split in two by the disintegration field on the spot. The old soldier ignored the front entirely, focusing on clearing the scattered skirmishers on both flanks who were angling for ambushes.
Behind the crater, Kaelen braced the captured sniper rifle and watched the battlefield ahead.
He sucked in a sharp breath.
Horus tearing apart an armored line with his bare hands. That power, beyond all reason, was a living definition of what it ant to be a god of war.
"Gene-Primarchs are all monstrous freaks of strength..."
He murmured it to himself.
His gaze pulled back to the traitor command post.
Clive was pouring nearly all of his attention into the frontal assault by the Cadian 8th Regint. That loyalist force, led by Ursarkar Creed, was counterattacking with reckless abandon. The line that had been expected to hold for two hours hadn't lasted half an hour before it started to buckle.
Before he could even work out a plan for committing his reserves, the artillery positions outside the command tent went completely silent without warning.
"What's happening? Why has the frontline artillery support stopped?!"
He grabbed the communications array and bellowed into it.
Only a flat electromagnetic dead tone answered.
The guns outside had stopped.
The silence was unnatural. It made his scalp crawl.
Clive pushed aside the command tent's flap.
One look was all it took. His breathing stopped.
The 3 layers of defensive positions arranged around the periter had been reduced to a mixture of scrap tal and shredded flesh. The ground was littered with the wreckage of heavy weapons, every piece of it physically dispatched to whatever ca after. His most prized personal guard, those fully ard elite veterans, lay in heaps across pools of blood like dead dogs. Without exception, every single one had been killed in a single strike.
A hundred ters away, two tall figures were striding forward, stepping over the broken bodies of traitors.
A hundred ters. A mortal sprinting flat out would need 10 seconds or more to cover it. For a gene-Primarch, it was the blink of an eye.
"Open fire!"
Clive scread it until his voice cracked.
The dozen surviving guards raised their plasma guns and lta guns and held down the triggers. Superheated plasma spheres scorched the air into distortion. The beams wove a death net.
The targets vanished.
A gale rose from nowhere. Horus's form broke through the limits of speed, trailing a sharp shriek of displaced air.
By the ti the guards found the enemy's outline again, death was already standing in front of them.
The sound of a power knife cutting through ballistic armor was light and clean. Horus didn't even shift his gaze. He swung the blade casually. Limbs flew. With neural reaction speed like lightning, killing mortals didn't require conscious thought. It ran on pure instinct, carved into his genes.
The last guard was kicked from the side by Kullen. His sternum shattered. He flew back over ten ters and didn't move again.
Clive stood frozen, his mind completely blank.
The giant draped in canvas stood before him and blotted out the sky. The crushing pressure radiating from the Primarch drained this senior traitor commander of every last ounce of strength, including the strength to draw the bolt pistol at his hip.
Horus extended his left hand. His broad palm, covered in calluses, locked firmly around Clive's skull and lifted the oath-breaking traitor directly off the ground.
The pain of his skull being compressed was agonizing. Clive's legs kicked uselessly in midair.
"You..."
A broken half-sound caught in his throat. The despair of facing sothing he couldn't na. He had thought he was dealing with two genetically mutated Ogryns.
To hell with Ogryns. What kind of mutant had this speed? This strength?
The Shepherd of Wolves was in no hurry to close his fingers.
He looked directly through his eye lenses into those bloodshot eyes.
"If you die and can carry a ssage to Ezekyle Abaddon." Horus's voice was level. "I hope you tell him this."
Clive's eyeballs bulged outward.
Absurd.
This mutant had just spoken the na of the Chaos Warmaster.
"The Lord of the Lunar Wolves, Lupercal, awaits."
The words fell.
Five fingers closed.
Bone cracked with a sound that set teeth on edge. Sothing indescribable sprayed. Clive's head, bearing the title of general, was crushed in the Primarch's hand into a sar of red and white. The headless corpse hit the ground with a wet slap and scattered blood and shredded flesh across the earth.
The supre commander was dead. The command system's nerve center went dark.
Every officer on the Voskcani Iron Armor Regint's front line lost all tactical directives from headquarters at the sa mont. For an army that relied on tight coordination, the severing of the chain of command was far more lethal than any loss of manpower. Without centralized control, the traitor line fractured into isolated pockets, each fighting its own battle, none able to cover the others.
The one who seized that fatal opening was Ursarkar Creed, who had been ready and waiting.
The 8th Regint's commander, cigar clenched between his teeth, showed the razor-sharp instincts of a hunting hound. No probing. No hesitation. He committed every last soldier across the entire line without reservation.
The infantry of the Cadian 8th Regint advanced alongside their Leman Russ tanks like a bone-cleaving blade honed to its absolute edge, cutting precisely into the weakest junction of the traitor defensive network.
War horns sounded. Battle cries shook the plain. Tens of thousands of Cadian soldiers advanced shoulder to shoulder, wading through mud and filth and blood, pushing flat the traitors' fortifications with bayonets and lasguns. This was not rely a military counterattack. It was a desperate, all-or-nothing fight to reclaim the dignity of the Imperium.
The traitors' armored vehicles were concentrated and destroyed. Their infantry was cut off and encircled. This was a one-sided annihilation that left no prisoners.
The scales of battle tipped.
➤ Next: Victory
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