Warhammer 40K: System Error, I Summoned the Arch-Traitor! Chapter 75 - The Battle of the Lion's Gate

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The wheel of fate spun wildly once more.

Terra. The Imperial Palace. The Lion's Gate front lines.

The roar of slaughter had swallowed every trace of quiet this planet once possessed. Through the reek of blood and the howl of blades, a crimson tide crashed against the Eternity Wall's defenses in endless, maddening waves.

A tide made of Khorne's daemon legions.

The Great Rift's aftershocks had torn the veil of realspace apart, and in doing so had handed the Emperor's golden hounds, the Adeptus Custodes, their first large-scale engagent since the Horus Heresy ended ten thousand years ago.

Custodian Warden Valerian twisted sideways, letting the acid-dripping claws of a Bloodletter rake empty air.

He gripped his Guardian Spear in both hands and drove it upward in a clean backhand arc. The high-frequency disruption field split the daemon from groin to chin.

Blood drenched his ornate golden power armor. He didn't spare it a glance. He was already turning, already locking onto the next target.

Along the endless stretch of the Lion's Gate battlents, the Custodians were not alone.

Grey Knights, Sisters of Silence, Imperial Fists, and the Ultramarines and Primaris Space Marines newly fed into this at grinder of a defense line were holding every breach by sheer, grinding force.

Valerian thrust and thrust again, harvesting lives.

A few ters to his right, a Sister of Silence moved in tight formation with him. The Pariah's innate null-field pressed down on the daemons clawing their way over the wall, slowing their movents, making their outlines flicker and stutter like dying flas.

Ten thousand years of doctrine, unchanged. The Sisters stripped the Warp-spawned filth of their supernatural protections. The Custodians delivered the purest, most lethal physical destruction.

"Purge the daemons! For the Emperor!"

The battle cry ca from Inquisitor Arkun, leading a Grey Knight brotherhood squad sowhere down the line. Valerian caught a glimpse of them working through the daemon mass with lightning and fla, their kill rate matching the Custodians' own.

But the Grey Knights were not fighting alongside the Custodians. The new reinforcents, the Ultramarines and Primaris Space Marines, held the ground between them.

The Sisters' null-field suppressed allies just as readily as enemies. Grey Knights stripped of their psychic gifts were still formidable warriors, but formidable warriors fighting blind was a waste. That was the whole point of keeping them separated.

"Courage and Honor! For Lord Guilliman!"

Captain Cato Sicarius of the Ultramarines Second Company swept his Tempest Blade in a wide arc, his azure armor a vivid slash of color against the carnage. His swordsmanship was both magnificent and savage. Every strike sent daemon limbs spinning through the air.

Watching them fight, Valerian felt the familiar, private misgiving settle in his chest.

It didn't matter how valiantly these superhuman warriors perford. The prejudice in a Custodian's bones didn't erode that easily. The Horus Heresy was ten thousand years gone and still vivid as an open wound. Gene-sires had led half the Astartes to shatter the Emperor's grand design. In the eyes of the Custodians, these emotionally susceptible warriors were inherently unstable — bombs waiting for the right mont to go off.

Roboute Guilliman.

The thought that this ambitious, politician-minded Primarch had already led his retinue deep into the Imperial Palace, perhaps standing before the Master of Mankind at this very mont, cast a shadow across Valerian's thoughts.

Word was that another gene-sire had co with him.

"As long as it isn't that damned bastard Horus Lupercal." Valerian turned the thought over while his spear kept moving. "Compared to the Arch-Traitor, Guilliman is practically a saint."

He didn't get the chance to finish the thought.

The Eternity Wall shuddered beneath his feet.

"Left flank breach! They're over the wall! Extrely large target!"

The warning tore through the comms channel like a scream.

Valerian spun.

BOOM!

A colossal creature with enormous bat-like flesh wings ca down like a burning red teor, clearing the outer wall and slamming into the junction between the Ultramarines and the Grey Knights.

A Bloodthirster of Khorne.

The instant the ten-ter-tall behemoth hit the ground, its iron hooves crushed two Grey Knights who couldn't clear the impact zone into bleeding ruin.

"ROAR—!"

The Greater Daemon threw its head back and bellowed, a sound that hit like a physical blow. It swung its blood-dripping brass double-bladed axe in both hands and tore through the battle line like a machine built for nothing but slaughter.

The shockwave of its passage sent seven or eight Primaris Space Marines flying off the wall and into the abyss below.

The defense line split open. The lower-ranking Bloodletters that had been held back saw the gap and ca swarming through it like mad dogs.

If this thing wasn't dead in the next few minutes, this section of the wall was gone.

Valerian didn't hesitate.

He broke from his Sister partner. His golden power armor surged to maximum output. He ran, alone, straight at the Greater Daemon, boots hamring over corpses and rubble.

"Die! You Warp-spawned freak!"

The Greater Daemon caught the golden bolt of lightning charging toward it. It grinned, dropped the Astartes it had been mauling, and brought the great axe down at Valerian's head with both hands.

The wind hit him like a wall. The pressure was suffocating.

Valerian had no intention of taking a blow that could split a heavy tank.

At the instant the axe blade kissed his helt, his body executed a sideways force-deflecting slide at full sprint, a movent that had no business working at that speed, and scraped past the edge of the axe face by a hair's breadth.

BOOM. The ground bricks exploded into powder.

In the gap left by the missed strike, Valerian drove off the ground with both legs and launched himself into the air. His Guardian Spear scread through the arc and drove into the Greater Daemon's left flank.

The stench of high-frequency energy cutting through muscle rolled over him.

The Greater Daemon howled. Valerian endured the scalding daemon blood splashing across his visor, wrenched the spear free, and twisted his body mid-air.

The spear traced a clean half-moon arc.

CRACK!

The thick tendon of the Greater Daemon's left leg was severed at the root.

The giant beast lost its balance and crashed to one knee, caving in half a battlent crenel under the impact.

It was a beautiful kill stroke. No one cheered.

Because the breach was filling faster now. The instant Valerian landed, seven or eight Bloodletters ca at him from his blind spots.

One latched onto his thigh. Another bit down on his left arm armor.

He shook them off and swept his spear through them, shredding the minor daemons in a single pass. Half a second. That was all it cost him.

It was enough.

The Bloodthirster didn't care about its severed tendon. The injury had only made it angrier.

It propped itself up on one leg, and the brass great axe ca around in a horizontal sweep with a shrieking sonic boom.

BANG!

Like being hit by an armored train at full speed.

Valerian's golden breastplate caved and shattered across a wide area. He was airborne, spewing blood and fragnts of internal organs, and then he hit the defensive bunker on the inner wall like a broken ragdoll.

His Guardian Spear spun out of his grip and disappeared into the daemon mass.

Across the line, Grey Knight Arkun was fighting toward him, but a pack of frenzied Flesh Hounds had him pinned. Every other ally was cut off and surrounded.

Valerian coughed blood and tried to drive his servo-muscle bundles into motion.

Over a dozen bones were broken. The speed he had always relied on now made lifting his arm feel like moving through stone.

The light above him went out.

The Greater Daemon dragged its axe to stand over him, raised both arms, and let out a low, savage laugh from deep in its throat.

He tried to rise. His legs buckled. He knew, with the cold clarity of ten thousand hours of training, that he was not going to dodge what ca next.

"My soul returns to the Golden Throne."

The thought surfaced from sowhere he couldn't na.

"I am sorry, my Lord. I have failed you."

Two deafening sonic booms split the air.

No searing pain. No axe splitting bone.

What Valerian heard instead was a single, dull, wet sound of parting flesh.

A massive cobalt-blue figure, wreathed in golden fla hot enough to make the air ripple, ca down between him and the Greater Daemon like a falling star.

Roboute Guilliman.

The Master of Ultramar gripped the Emperor's Sword in both hands and drove it upward from below. The thick daemonic arm holding the brass great axe was severed at the shoulder. The golden fla left nothing clean behind.

The severed arm spun skyward. The Greater Daemon staggered back with a howl of shock and pain.

It didn't get ti to recover.

A second figure cut into the inner circle of the battlefield, taller even than Guilliman, clad in pearl-white armor, the oppressive weight of his presence arriving before he did. He ca in at a dead sprint and left the ground entirely, a master-crafted power axe crackling with blue arcs gripped in both hands.

Pure, violent montum.

CRUNCH!

The high-frequency blade chopped through the brass gorget at the Bloodthirster's neck and kept going, severing the cervical vertebrae in a single stroke.

The enormous daemonic head shot upward. A column of dark red blood erupted beneath it like a fountain.

Two demigods. One perfect, instantaneous exchange.

The Bloodthirster of Khorne, so utterly domineering a heartbeat ago, didn't even manage a final word. Its massive headless carcass toppled with a thunderous crash and raised a cloud of dust that swallowed the surrounding rubble.

Valerian sat slumped in the debris, his vision filled entirely by the two figures standing over him.

The one on the left, azure armor, golden-fla sword. That was Guilliman. He was certain of that.

But when Valerian slowly turned his gaze to the giant on the right, the one holding the blood-dripping battle axe...

This veteran of a hundred campaigns felt his heart miss a beat.

The giant wasn't wearing a helt.

By the light of the fires burning along the wall, Valerian saw his face clearly.

A broad jaw. A resolute, hard-cut profile. And that head: completely bare, not a single hair, unmistakable to anyone who had ever studied the archives.

The pearl-white armor bore none of the blasphemous Chaos bone spikes. There was no Warp-madness burning in those eyes.

But that face.

Even burned to ash, no Custodian alive could ever mistake it.

It was the face from the Horus Heresy records. The face that every Custodian had driven their spear through a thousand tis in the privacy of their own hearts.

Valerian's hands and feet went cold. The ground had opened beneath him and dropped him into sothing dark and freezing. His thoughts dissolved. His training dissolved. Everything dissolved.

"Ho... Horus..."

➤ Next: The Sons of the Emperor Are Very Happy Today

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