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Abaddon's massive fra left afterimages as he moved. Black-purple warp lightning crackled around him, carrying enough destructive force to level a building, and he drove it all straight at Horus.
No feints. No wind-up. Pure, crushing violence.
Horus didn't move his feet. He held Saint Celestine's blazing longsword in a reverse grip, golden sacred fire roaring along the blade, and flicked his wrist.
CLANG!
The dull tallic boom detonated inside the underground bunker. Everyone's eardrums scread.
The blazing longsword and the daemon sword Drach'nyen t with pinpoint precision.
Abaddon's cleave — a strike that could split a Dreadnought in two — stopped dead in mid-air. Horus had caught it one-handed, without so much as shifting his weight.
Sparks cascaded. Black-purple resentnt-fire and pure golden fla tore at each other where the blades locked.
"Is this all the progress you've made, Ezekyle?" Horus lowered his gaze to the son standing inches from his face.
Then he put force through his wrist.
Physical might that utterly exceeded the output limits of Terminator Armour surged down the blade like a collapsing mountain.
Abaddon's knees buckled. The adamantium floor beneath him cracked and cratered under the pressure.
The Chaos Warmaster ground his teeth. The Talon of Horus on his right hand scread through the air, driving straight for the Wolf Shepherd's abdon.
It found nothing.
Horus was already gone. He sidestepped, let the lethal claw pass, and brought the longsword down in the sa motion — a heavy, deliberate slam across Abaddon's shoulder plate.
The kinetic force launched the Great Despoiler off his feet. He hit the ground and gouged a long, deep trench through it before stopping.
This was not a duel between equals.
This was a one-sided lesson.
"Warmaster!" The Justaerin veterans nearby had finally had enough.
Three Terminator veterans raised their heavy bolters and charged forward roaring, trying to cage Horus in a web of fire.
"Insolence."
Horus didn't turn his head. His blade lashed back in a reverse sweep.
A golden arc blazed through the passageway. The lead Terminator was bisected at the waist, gun and all. The heavy ceramite parted like brittle shell.
The sword's montum carried Horus forward. His left fist drove out.
The second veteran's chestplate exploded across a wide area. Several tons of armored body slamd into the rock wall and stopped moving.
The third man got his finger to the trigger. The blazing sword tip ca up from below and punched through his neck servo-joint. His head left his shoulders.
Three elite warriors dead in a single breath. The remaining traitors stood frozen, not one of them daring to move.
"You've grown old, Father! Your thods are the sa as they were ten thousand years ago!"
Abaddon dragged himself upright from the rubble. He was breathing hard, his face twisted, envy and madness churning together behind his eyes.
No matter how many gifts the warp had poured into him, in a purely physical fight, he could never cross the chasm that separated a man from a Primarch.
If flesh couldn't bridge that gap, then it was ti to change the ga.
Abaddon raised the Talon of Horus.
That weapon had belonged to the Wolf Shepherd himself during the Heresy. Worse, its claws had once drunk the blood of Sanguinius, Primarch of the Ninth Legion, and had once pierced the chest of the Master of Mankind upon the Golden Throne.
Ten thousand years of simring in the warp. Two Primarchs' blood and anguish, boiled down into sothing concentrated and vile. It had beco the most venomous curse in the galaxy.
"See clearly what you have done!" Abaddon roared.
He forced a massive surge of warp energy into the claws.
A visible black-red psychic storm bypassed the physical plane entirely and blasted into Horus's completely undefended mind with the force of a collapsing star.
Pure psychic corruption. A forced replay of history.
The lights in the passageway strobed violently.
Horus's sword arm froze mid-raise.
His pupils contracted to pinpoints. The bunker, Abaddon, the broken bodies, all of it vanished.
What burned across his retinas instead was the Wolf-God throne aboard the Vengeful Spirit. Opulent. Blasphemous. His.
On that throne's dais, a figure that wore his face stood in a pool of blood. Swollen with the power of the Four Gods, radiating evil from every inch of its fra, it grinned down at sothing beneath its feet.
The brother with the most perfect wings in the galaxy.
His beloved. Sanguinius.
He watched that fallen self cackle as it tore the Angel's wings apart. The clean snap of bone drove into his ears. Then he watched it raise Worldbreaker and bring it down on the Angel's noble head.
Red. Everywhere, blinding red.
The scene lurched.
That sa fallen self raised the sa claw and drove it into the Emperor's chest. Blood poured in great dark torrents down golden power armour.
"No..."
A shuddering howl tore from Horus's throat.
His pure soul t its most fatal backlash.
Guilt. Remorse. An agony that made him want to stop existing. Every crushing weight he had fought to keep buried since his awakening was ripped open at once, without rcy, by the storm of resentnt.
He could endure a daemon prince's full-force strike. He could not endure the sins he had committed with his own hands.
Kael had told him. He had heard the words. But hearing it had never been the sa as seeing it, and now he was seeing it.
CLANG!
The blazing longsword's tip dropped. It knocked against the floor.
The Wolf Shepherd's towering fra swayed. His defensive stance was gone.
"All you can do now is live inside your guilt, Father!"
Abaddon's grin split wide with satisfaction.
He knew this weakness perfectly. A Wolf Shepherd who had reclaid his humanity and his sanity would always be crushed by the weight of what could never be undone. This was the proof of humanity's frailty.
"Die, Father."
Abaddon stepped forward.
Drach'nyen rose high in his left hand. The blade burned with black-purple resentnt-fire. It tore through the air and ca down hard toward Horus's completely unguarded neck.
Creed's eyes went wide enough to split. Saint Celestine's breath stopped.
"For the Emperor! For the Lion!"
A furious roar cracked the air.
A black-armored shape slamd in from the flank and crashed into the killing blow's path.
Cullen drove his power pack past the overload redline. He surged forward and threw both hands up, his master-crafted power sword raised to et the daemon blade.
BOOM!
The armour on both his arms shattered.
The gap between an ordinary Astartes and the Chosen of the Four Gods was simply too vast. The instant the blades t, the force behind Drach'nyen drove Cullen down onto one knee. Bone cracked, loud and clear.
He didn't yield an inch.
He held that daemon sword suspended above Horus's head.
"Out of my way! Lapdog of the False Emperor!"
Abaddon's rage spiked. He raised his right foot to kick this obstructive Son of the Lion apart.
In the nearby bunker.
Kael had the standard-issue lasgun up in both hands.
The System interface was going insane across his retina.
"System — empty every point I have. All of it. All in." He scread it inside his skull.
[WARNING: Host's current target is 'Chaos Warmaster · Ezekyle Abaddon,' possessing extrely high universal causal protection and the power field shelter of the Chaos Four Gods.]
[To generate an effective damage check against this target, all current digital points must be consud. Confirm exchange for 'One Absolute Hit that Ignores Warp Force Fields'?]
"Less talking. Do it."
No hesitation.
111,500 points. Gone in an instant.
Inside the lasgun's scope, the crosshairs locked, System-forced, immovable, onto the completely unguarded hollow of Abaddon's neck.
Kael pulled the trigger.
ZZZZT!
A red laser beam left the barrel. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't leave so much as a scorch mark on ceramite.
But under the System's augntation, this beam ignored the Four Gods' blessings churning around Abaddon's body. It ignored the purple-black shields so dense they were nearly solid. It punched straight through the resentnt field radiating off the daemon sword.
Dead center. Right into the Great Despoiler's neck.
The instant it entered flesh, it vaporized blood, tissue, and part of the artificial nerve bundle buried there.
SPLURT!
A massive gout of thick black blood burst from Abaddon's neck and painted half the wall.
The blow defied every law of reason. The Chaos Warmaster's body locked up with a fatal, total freeze.
"AHHHHH!"
The sound that ca out of Abaddon was not human.
He clapped a hand to his neck. Black blood sprayed between his fingers. His colossal fra staggered backward, step after lurching step, his face contorted into sothing barely recognizable as a face.
He could not understand it. A piece-of-trash Astra Militarum lasgun. How had it punched through Terminator Armour blessed by the gods themselves?
The shriek tore the psychic illusion apart.
The phantom of the Vengeful Spirit shattered. Horus's eyes snapped open.
In front of him: Cullen on one knee, blood streaming from both arms. Kael behind cover, gasping, still holding the gun. Abaddon clutching his neck, his face slack with shock.
The guilt and heartbreak the illusion had forced on him didn't disappear. They were simply buried under sothing hotter and cleaner.
Rage.
Horus closed his grip on the blazing longsword.
The air in the bunker changed. The black-purple warp mist that the Four Gods' power had stirred up, all of it recoiled. It was pushed back, dispersed, driven away by the Wolf Shepherd's fury, which he was no longer bothering to contain.
The sorrow and guilt that had lived in those eyes were gone.
What remained was a golden fla that could burn the galaxy down.
"Ezekyle."
The Wolf Shepherd's voice was low. Each syllable landed with physical weight.
"You have thoroughly enraged ."
No wasted motion. The massive Terminator-armoured fra crushed the air as it moved. The iron fist that had once shattered a daemon prince carried pure, annihilating force straight toward Abaddon's face.
---
(Big Bro Abaddon had a massive advantage, Big Bro Abaddon pressed the attack, and Big Bro Abaddon lost!)
(Honestly, I think the original Abaddon is kind of dumb. When Guilliman got stabbed by Fulgrim, he at least had the sense to get put in a stasis field. Why didn't you Luna Wolves think of that back then? I feel like the Abaddon I write is still a bit too clever, actually knowing how to use sches and all.)
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