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Horus threw a punch.
No wind-up. No warning.
Pure mass and pure fury, his enormous fra driving forward like a battering ram.
The air compressed and detonated, a piercing sonic boom that split the passage in two.
Abaddon never got his daemon sword up in ti.
The Despoiler saw the golden-white halo fill his vision and then there was nothing but impact.
"Warmaster, watch out!"
Devram heaved his chainaxe at the last second, throwing himself in front of Abaddon to eat the blow.
The fist connected with the axe face.
The chain teeth shattered on contact, fragnts screaming in every direction. The force punched straight through the tal and drove into both Chaos Space Marines' chestplates like a battering ram.
Bone cracked. The sound made your teeth ache.
Abaddon and Devram left the ground together, bodies wrenched backward. They punched through 3 load-bearing walls of the underground bunker in rapid succession and finally slamd into a thick blackstone pillar at the center of the passage.
BOOM!
The obelisk base — wide enough that several n couldn't wrap their arms around it — burst with a web of fractures and snapped clean in two. Rock and rubble cascaded down from above, burying both of the Black Legion's senior commanders under a mountain of debris.
"Now that's what I'm talking about!" Kaelen bellowed from behind cover, slapping a fresh power cell into his lasgun.
That's more like it. All that flashy Warp illusion garbage, you just put a primarch's fist through it and call it a day.
Black-purple Warp lightning exploded from the rubble pile.
Abaddon shoved the boulders off himself and lurched upright. Half his Terminator faceplate had been torn away and deford beyond recognition, exposing a face streaming blood from his mouth and nose. He coughed hard, hacking up chunks of blood-soaked viscera.
The Four Gods' regeneration was already working frantically to seal the damage.
The pain cleared his head completely. Against that utterly unreasonable gene-father, one-on-one was suicide.
Abaddon ripped the skull-shaped teleportation beacon from his belt and crushed it to powder in his fist.
"Kill them all!" His voice ca out hoarse and shredded.
Blinding psyker lightning tore the confined passage open. A Warp rift was forced wide, and a thick stench of sulfur poured backward into realspace.
Bloodletters sward through in their hundreds. Behind them ca Bloodcrushers, each one several ters tall, roaring as they squeezed into the underground facility and rged into a vast red tide. On their heels, 2 full squads of Black Legion Terminator veterans advanced in lockstep, twin-linked bolters leveled, long tongues of fla spitting from every barrel.
The hail of fire blanketed the entire position in an instant.
"Contract the line! Don't let them break through!"
Lord Castellan Creed's voice cut through the chaos as he directed the surviving Cadians. The veterans gritted their teeth and kept firing, but las-bolts striking the Bloodcrushers' brass armor didn't even leave a scratch.
"Fall back!"
Kullen held the front.
The Dark Angels veteran drove his power armor into overload, both arms fractured, moving on sheer will. His high-frequency cutting field swept across the leading Bloodletters and bisected them at the waist. Then 3 Black Legion Terminators opened up on him simultaneously, bolter rounds hamring his pauldrons, sparks cascading, forcing his head down.
Celestine fought through the air above, bleeding from a dozen wounds, scattering sacred fla in wide arcs. The golden fire stalled the daemon horde's charge. But against the endless tide pouring from the Warp, that sliver of light was nothing.
Horus dropped his bolter, took his blazing sword in both hands, and waded into the enemy. Every swing of the Wolf-King's blade took heads, two, three, four at a ti. He killed fast. It wasn't fast enough. The daemons just kept coming.
The air in the facility had been completely displaced, replaced by scorching Warp miasma and the Blood God's psychic pressure bearing down on every mind without pause.
Kaelen crouched behind a shattered wall, his lasgun barrel glowing cherry-red from sustained fire. Spending all his points on that one shot had felt incredible in the mont. Now, with no system backup and a full daemon tide in his face, he was starting to think it might have been a mistake.
A Bloodcrusher smashed through the cover directly ahead of him.
Rubble exploded outward. Kaelen was knocked flat.
The colossal beast reared up, brass-armored forehooves raised high, and brought them down toward his chest.
Then, from the deepest part of the underground bunker, sothing happened.
A sound. Deep, muffled, chanical, a physical vibration that had nothing to do with the Warp. It carried weight in it, the kind of weight that cos from millions of years of dormancy finally ending.
Eerie green light erupted from the very bottom of the ruins like a geyser.
It climbed the blackstone spires along their carved patterns, racing upward, and in the space of a breath it flooded every retina in the facility.
The Cadian blackstone obelisk matrix ca fully online.
Deep below, Archmagos Cawl pressed the activation key he had spent so long deciphering.
The erald light waves expanded outward in rings, passing through rock and tal and flesh without resistance, sweeping the entire planet in seconds.
Physics reasserted itself. The irresistible pulse severed every connection between the material universe and the Sea of Souls, brutally, completely, all at once.
The Bloodcrusher froze in midair, forehooves still raised.
No scream. No struggle. The Warp energy holding its body together simply disconnected. The colossal beast disintegrated in under a second into a heap of inert rust that rained down across Kaelen's helt.
Every daemon in the facility, Bloodletters, Horrors, every creature that had forced its way into realspace, vanished the instant the green light touched them. No residue. No trace. Gone.
The passage went silent.
All the noise, stripped away at once. Only the hiss of ventilation ducts and the scrape of armor remained.
Everything had changed.
On the Imperial battle line above, soldiers on both sides could see it clearly: the Eye of Terror in Cadia's sky was collapsing at an impossible rate, the Warp rift that had spanned star systems squeezed down to a hairline crack.
Below, the change was just as violent.
The wings behind Celestine snapped shut. The sacred golden light wrapping her body went out with a soft hiss. She dropped from the air and hit the ground hard, reduced in an instant to an exhausted, wounded, entirely ordinary Battle Sister.
The sword in Horus's hand stopped burning. Sacred fire gone, it was just a greatsword.
The Warp had gone dark.
The worst of it, though, was not on the Imperial side.
It was Abaddon.
The Four Gods' blessings were ripped away by the blackstone pulse. His grotesquely swollen muscles began deflating, and the Terminator armor that had been filled out by dark power suddenly hung loose on his fra. The daemon sword Drach'nyen went cold in his grip, unable to produce even a wisp of black fla.
The Black Legion veterans who had been so ferociously aggressive monts ago stood frozen, staring.
The Warp's augntation was gone. The blessings that had made them immune to pain were gone. What remained was 10,000 years of accumulated wounds, and every single one of them was screaming.
"This is impossible." Abaddon's voice cracked on the words. He could feel the hollow where his power used to be.
All of it. Gone. What stood in this passage now was just an Astartes veteran running on gene-forging and ceramite.
Horus rolled his neck. It cracked several tis.
Losing psyker support barely registered for a genetic primarch.
"You have no chance left, Ezekyle."
He tossed the dead greatsword aside, cracked his knuckles, and walked toward Abaddon.
No Warp sorcery? Fine.
A primarch's baseline physique against an ordinary Astartes. Did he even need technique?
Abaddon watched his father close the distance and felt cold sweat soak through his armor.
Panic.
The raw, primal kind that belongs to mortals.
For the first ti in 10,000 years, he felt the scythe of death pressed against his throat. Not as an abstraction. As a fact.
He couldn't take half a punch from his father. Not now.
The Despoiler clenched his jaw and gave the most humiliating order of his life.
"Initiate orbital forced teleportation."
He kept his eyes locked on Horus, blood-flecked foam at the corners of his mouth.
"Don't get comfortable, Father. This isn't over."
"Drown in your false victory. All personnel — withdraw to the fleet."
Teleportation light flared. Abaddon and the surviving Black Legion veterans dissolved into white light and vanished, leaving nothing behind but wreckage and silence.
Kaelen shoved the rust off his head and sucked in a long, ragged breath.
He looked up at the blackstone obelisk base pulsing with erald light and exhaled slowly.
"Calling Archmagos." He pressed his comms earpiece. "Your blackout couldn't have co at a better ti. Abaddon tucked tail and ran. Daemons are cleared."
Cawl's chanical voice ca back through a faint wash of static. "Captain, tactical victory does not equal strategic relief. My detection arrays are showing a large number of Chaos fleet vessels accelerating away from Cadian low orbit."
Breaking orbit.
The smile on Kaelen's face went still. A scenario detonated in his mind, one he recognized, one he had hoped would never co.
Celestine noticed the shift.
"Mr. Kaelen, Abaddon has fled. Why do you look like that?"
Kaelen didn't answer her. He roared into his headset, voice cracking raw:
"Archmagos! Get word to every unit — prepare for full evacuation from Cadia! Now!"
"That madman is going to use the Blackstone Fortress wreckage to smash straight through the planet!"
➤ Next: Next Stop, Macragge
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