~ Every 100 Power Stones = Bonus Chapter! Your votes keep this climbing. Thanks!
Malachi crushed the spine of an Astra Militarum vox-operator underfoot.
The heavy ceramite sole ground through bone with the crisp snap of a dry branch.
As commander of this Word Bearers Terminator squad, he bore the blasphemous title of [Black Fla Patriarch]. Now he would turn the Cadian 7th Company's command post — trenches, soldiers, and all, into offerings for the gods.
Heavy bolter rounds bood in the narrow trench. Severed limbs and shards of flak armor spun through the mud. Two Astra Militarum recruits charged him screaming, lasguns raised. Crimson las-bolts struck his scripture-etched pauldrons and failed to scratch the surface coating.
Malachi swung his left hand. Casually. The power fist tore through the air and slapped both mortals' upper bodies into paste.
"The False Emperor's livestock." He laughed over the comms. "So pathetically weak."
His four Terminator squadmates answered with their own vile howls.
For Chaos veterans tempered by ten thousand years in the warp, slaughtering Astra Militarum on Cadia's surface was no different from a pre-battle stroll through the back garden. Pure, one-sided catharsis.
Then the variable arrived without warning.
The earthen revetnt above collapsed.
Two towering dark shapes dropped straight down into the battlefield.
A Word Bearer in the middle of reloading his bolter didn't even have ti to turn his head.
Kullen's artificer Power Sword was already there.
The blue disruption field split the rain curtain and found the gap in the traitor's neck servo-joint with surgical precision.
No hacking. No wasted motion. Pure structural destruction at the armor's weak point. The blade slashed upward on a diagonal, severing the cervical vertebrae and both major arteries in a single stroke. The horned helt, head still inside, spun into the air.
Malachi's ocular display blazed red.
His system scread hostile unit alerts.
He had barely raised his weapon when the larger shadow was already on him.
This was mass and velocity, nothing more. Horus didn't reach for a weapon. He simply leaned his left shoulder forward and drove it squarely into the center of Malachi's breastplate.
Two armored units, each weighing tons, hit each other head-on.
The shriek of grinding tal swallowed the surrounding artillery fire. Malachi heard his Terminator breastplate shatter, and his sternum with it, followed by the muffled crack of his lumbar spine giving way. The colossal force destroyed the transmission shafts buried inside the Terminator armor.
His entire body left the ground. He hurtled sideways through the air for over a dozen ters, his back slamming through a half-broken reinforced concrete pillar before he collapsed into the muck.
His pain nerves went offline. Malachi found his lower body completely unresponsive. The waist plating had caved inward so severely that his organs and bones had been crushed into a single mass.
"Kill them!" He forced the words through the pain, roaring into the channel.
The three remaining Terminators adjusted their positions fast, heavy firepower swinging toward the two cloaked attackers.
It didn't matter.
3 breaths. The fight was over.
First breath. Kullen dropped into a low sliding step, his Power Sword deflecting the incoming bolter fire. The blade rode the deflected montum and swept upward into the left-side Terminator's armpit. The superheated disruption field churned both hearts and half a lung into shredded at.
Second breath. Horus walked straight into the frontal fire net. Bolt rounds detonated against the edges of his pearl-white pauldrons and left faint scorch marks. He closed the distance in a single long stride, drove his short power blade into the right-side Terminator's knee joint from the side, and wrenched upward. The massive body pitched forward. Horus backhanded the back of the enemy's head. The kinetic force transmitted straight through the helt, and the brainstem collapsed.
Third breath. The last Word Bearer swung his battle-axe at the primarch's neck.
Horus didn't dodge. His free left hand shot out from below, arriving later but landing first. Five fingers clamped onto the traitor's faceplate. Thumb and forefinger dug into the eyepiece lenses.
He squeezed.
CERAMITE SHRIEKED under the primarch's knuckles.
The faceplate caved inward. Blood and fluid gushed through the gaps between his fingers. The corpse slid softly into the muddy water.
Total annihilation.
The surviving soldiers of the Astra Militarum 7th Company huddled in the trench corners and forgot to fire.
It had all happened too fast for mortal eyes to follow.
Dozens of ters away, Kaelen crouched in a shell crater with his sniper rifle braced, watching the entire sequence through his high-power scope.
He'd been looking for an opening to put rounds into the traitor Astartes. There hadn't been one.
A primarch taking the field against Space Marines was pure dinsional slaughter.
Horus walked toward the commander slumped in the mud.
He tore off Malachi's Terminator helt and tossed it aside.
That pale face, covered in blasphemous tattoos, was exposed to Cadia's acrid air.
Malachi couldn't understand it. This was a mortal-garrisoned front line. Where had combat power like this co from, power that exceeded even the Astartes of the Chapters?
"Who are you?" He stared at the approaching shadow.
Horus stopped before him and looked down. Said nothing.
"Erebus. Your Dark Apostle." Malachi's voice was flat. "Has he co to Cadia?"
At the na, a grotesque grin forced its way onto his face, already twitching from blood loss.
He coughed up a mouthful of clotted blood mixed with visceral fragnts and sneered.
"Delusional. Not just you — even if those Chapter Masters ca in person, they wouldn't touch a single hem of the Apostle's robe. You want to kill him?" A wet laugh. "Keep dreaming."
No reaction. Not even a flicker.
Horus raised a hand and lifted the edge of his hood.
During the Great Crusade, this face had been printed on the plazas of countless worlds, recorded as the primary entry in the bridge logs of tens of thousands of warships.
The resolute jawline. The broad forehead. Those deep-set eyes that had surveyed the universe.
No warp mutation. No corruption. The pure, original face of a primarch.
"I am Horus Lupercal."
The gene-primarch's voice reached Malachi's ears.
"Master of the Luna Wolves. I have that capability."
The sneer on Malachi's face went rigid.
He recognized this face.
The Word Bearer veteran's cognition fractured in the span of a single second.
Standing before him was a Horus the Dark Gods had never touched. A dead man the Corpse-Emperor had erased ten thousand years ago.
The fracture passed. What flooded in after it was pure, crushing absurdity.
Malachi laughed. The laughter tore at his shredded lungs and he spat a great gout of bloody froth.
He looked up at the Wolf Shepherd.
"Not dead... You're actually still alive!? Hahahaha."
The laughter was shrill.
He knew he was going to die today. He also knew that the balance of the galaxy and the fate of the Imperium were about to be rewritten.
A whole, uncorrupted Horus Lupercal, for the Chaos traitors, that was a catastrophe.
"Give a clean death, my lord." Malachi rested his head against the broken concrete pillar. "Erebus is not on Cadia. He's in the rear, conducting Chaos rituals."
Horus nodded.
A low-level commander's mouth held no core deploynt intelligence. And cunning Erebus would never have told anyone his position.
He bent down, extended a broad palm, and covered Malachi's skull.
He squeezed.
The muffled crunch of collapsing bone.
Malachi's headless corpse lost its last support and slid into the filthy water at the trench bottom.
Horus straightened up. He tore a relatively clean strip of cloth from a nearby corpse and wiped the blood from his fingers without hurry.
"He's not here." The Wolf Shepherd turned his head toward Kullen as he approached. "He's lucky."
Kaelen slid down from the shell crater, rifle in hand, and jogged over to join them.
The few surviving soldiers of the 7th Company around them helped each other to their feet, watching the two giants with undisguised awe.
When the faceplate had co off, Horus's back had been to the Astra Militarum. The mortals hadn't seen his face. And even if they had, they wouldn't have known it.
"Clean work." Kaelen glanced at the Word Bearer corpses scattered across the ground, then looked at Horus. "What now? Cadia's air defense net is completely gone. Landing squads at this caliber are only going to keep coming. Our platoon has 30 recruits. We can't hold this position much longer."
Horus refastened his canvas hood.
"We don't need to hold it to the death." He surveyed the chaos around them. "The defensive line is too long. Splitting our forces to garrison every point plays right into Abaddon's hands. Creed's command is excellent, but he has too few cards left to play."
In the distance, several more Dreadclaw drop pods slamd into the 8th Company's sector.
The ground shook.
"Kaelen, get word to your platoon. Everyone pulls back to the secondary defense line at Kraft Keep." Horus looked at him, his voice settling into command. "The three of us act as a fire brigade. We hunt the Chaos Space Marines landing near the flanks and command nodes. Abaddon is playing decapitation — so we counter-decapitate. We snap off every assault spearhead he sends down."
"As you will, my Wolf God."
Kaelen answered, gathered his platoon and the remaining soldiers of the 7th Company, and followed the two giants toward the defense lines still fighting for their lives.
➤ Next: Cadia Stands — The Fight Begins
— .—— .—— .—— .—— .——
55 Chapters ready for binging.
3 Daily Updates for all Free mbers.
Read Ahead: Patreon（.）com/DarkGolds
Reviews
All reviews (0)