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Magnus's gaze locked onto the pool of gore on the ground.
The blinding golden light faded. What remained was a bloodstained tal card.
Engraved on its face: [The Wheel of Fortune].
The Daemon Primarch's mind hadn't caught up yet. Then the impossible happened.
No gravity. No inertia. No splashing.
The shredded flesh, the pale cerebrospinal fluid, even the crushed bone fragnts, all of it simply broke free from the physical laws of Luna's surface. Everything hung suspended in midair, perfectly still.
Then a green glow rippled across the crimson mass.
Not sorcery. Not a single spark of psychic power. It was a data stream, countless glowing green characters, garbled and cascading, like sothing had ripped the color and shape clean out of a painting. Kaelen's headless corpse dissolved in 2 seconds into a sky full of dancing glyphs and vanished without a trace.
Magnus instinctively tried to step back.
He couldn't move.
The entire space-ti of the Luna battlefield had been forcibly paused.
In the distance, Guilliman stood frozen mid-charge, the blazing Sword of the Emperor raised high, one foot lifted off the ground, locked rigid in the vacuum.
Horus's desperate roar was still trapped in his throat. His mouth hung open. The muscles of his face were twisted in grief and fury. No sound ca out.
Kullen hung suspended in midair where he'd been sent flying, shattered fragnts of black ceramite drifting silently around him.
Even the Warp had stopped. The burning violet flas, the muzzle smoke from loyalist bolters, the footsteps of the Thousand Sons, all of it sealed inside an absolutely still fra.
Only Magnus could still move his single crimson eye.
This is not psychic power.
The Daemon Primarch scread inside his own skull. Even if the Changer of Ways descended in person, he could never sever the laws of realspace and the Warp simultaneously, not with this totality. Not like this.
In the sky above, the small card began to expand.
And expand.
A sky-blotting phantom of [The Wheel of Fortune] inverted itself across Luna's firmant. Gears turned. The flow of destiny flipped over entirely.
A figure descended from the vortex at the card's center, stepping down through the void one stride at a ti. The sheer scale of it pressed the air flat.
It was Kaelen.
But his current form was ten tis larger than the daemon-ascended Magnus.
He wore nothing. He was flawlessly perfect. Not a single trace of psychic fluctuation ca off him.
No joy. No sorrow.
Just a pressure that sat completely outside the rules of this universe.
[Kaelen] checked the panel only he could see:
[Tarot Card: The Wheel of Fortune, Activated]
[Ti Remaining: 3 seconds]
3 seconds was enough.
[Kaelen] looked down at the ant-sized Magnus beneath his feet.
The Daemon Primarch's entire body shuddered.
Because it wasn't just [Kaelen] he was looking at. In the void behind that colossal figure, countless indescribable eyes had opened, packed dense, wall to wall, staring without restraint.
Mocking.
Contemptuous.
Impatient.
Traitor to the Imperium. Red-skinned Ogryn. Arrogant parrot. Pitiful pawn.
The silent judgnts drove into Magnus's soul like blades. Crueler than any Warp torture he'd ever endured. His proud daemonic body, under all those gazes, felt like nothing more than a clown on a stage.
One eye, no one could tell which, transmitted the first thought:
[Kill him!]
The rest joined in unison.
Their hunger to crush that red skull flooded the space in an instant.
Kaelen didn't move. He spoke, his voice flat: "Is this your will?"
Magnus blinked.
Asking ?
"Yes." The Crimson King answered honestly, every word carrying the bone-deep pride he couldn't shed even now.
Kaelen simply repeated: "Is this your will?"
Who is he talking to?
Magnus snapped his eye sideways and felt his blood run cold. Behind him, at so point he hadn't noticed, a twisted blue figure had appeared.
Wily. Ever-shifting.
The Changer of Ways. Tzeentch.
"My lord, save —" Magnus couldn't even get the words out.
The twisted blue form solidified. It took on the shape [Kaelen]'s eyes perceived: hunched, wearing a crooked grin, exactly as the Changer of Ways ought to look.
[Welco, spectator from beyond the stage. Your presence honors us~]
[Offending you was never my intention~ You know Magnus's temperant as well as I do~]
[As compensation, you are welco to vent your displeasure. A lesson will suffice, no need to kill him outright. I will present a request you cannot refuse~]
For Magnus, the world went silent.
He couldn't hear the transaction.
But he could see it. The Changer of Ways — his lord, the one who calculated everything, who played the world like a board ga — was holding out a soul fragnt with sothing close to a groveling posture. The fragnt blazed with a supre golden light.
That sacred aura. Magnus recognized it.
Kaelen glanced at the fragnt, nodded once, and drew it into his palm without ceremony.
Deal done.
The Changer of Ways's phantom scattered instantly and fled faster than it ever had before.
Countdown: 2 seconds.
Kaelen stepped forward. His enormous hand reached out like a mountain falling and clamped down on the Daemon Primarch's skull.
The instant of contact, Magnus's soul let out the most harrowing shriek of his existence.
He realized with horror that what held him wasn't gripping bone.
It was gripping concept.
The proud Lord of Prospero from the Great Crusade. The one-eyed crimson fiend after his fall. The Crimson King. The na "Magnus" itself. His past, his present, his future, all of it crushed inside five fingers that carried no supernatural power whatsoever.
"Now it's my turn."
[Kaelen]'s voice was perfectly calm.
Five fingers closed.
CRACK!
No force-field. No psychic enchantnt.
One muffled, visceral burst of flesh.
The insufferably arrogant Crimson King, the most powerful Daemon Prince under Tzeentch, that massive twin-horned head, was crushed on the spot by a force that had no na.
No blood. No bone. Nothing flew.
Magnus's daemonic body was erased from the laws of the material universe at the mont of detonation. All that remained was a piercing soul-scream, kicked by that sa force straight back into the deepest pit of the Warp.
Countdown: 1 second.
The eyes behind [Kaelen] spoke together:
Eliminate them.
[Kaelen] turned and looked out across the basin, mountains and valleys of Thousand Sons warriors and Tzeentchian daemons packed wall to wall.
He raised his right hand.
Snapped his fingers.
SNAP!
A ring of invisible force expanded outward from him as its center, sweeping across Luna's surface in an instant.
The Rubric Marines. The Screars. The Pink Horrors. Even the violet-blue Warp storms still churning overhead. The mont that wave touched them, they vanished, like pencil drawings wiped clean by a giant eraser.
Not a speck of ash. Not a trace. Clean as if they had never set foot on this planet.
Ti's up.
Kaelen's godlike form shrank rapidly.
THUD!
Back to a one-point-eight-ter mortal captain, Kaelen dropped straight onto his backside in the rubble of the crater.
The frozen space-ti shattered. Everything roared back to life.
"KAELEN!"
Horus's roar, suppressed past the breaking point, finally exploded. Eyes bloodshot, moving like a maddened beast, the Warmaster swung his master-crafted power axe in a desperate lunge toward the spot where Kaelen had just been standing.
Guilliman ca in two strides behind him, jaw clenched, the Sword of the Emperor carving a furious arc of golden fla through the air as he crossed dozens of ters in a single breath.
Kullen hit the ground hard, tumbled, and clawed his way back to his feet.
All three of them converged on the center of the battlefield, weapons up, ready to take Magnus apart or die trying.
Then they stopped.
Magnus was gone.
The Thousand Sons army that had packed the entire basin, not a single power armor component remained. No Warp-stench in the air. The crater floor was so clean it could have served as a parade ground.
Only Kaelen sat alone in a rock pile not far away, hastily snapping his helt visor back into place, chest heaving, gulping down air in great ragged breaths.
➤ Next: Are the Custodes Really Just Vases?
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