Want more chapters right now? 🔥
Get access to 220 advance chapters across all my stories.
👉 patreon/Mr UmU
spatreon/Mr_UmU
_______________
The dying light of Nuceria's sun cast crimson shadows across the burning husk of Daishia. What should have been the gentle embrace of dusk was instead a hellish tableau painted in fla and blood.
The city that had once stood as a testant to the Tarka dynasty's cruelty now served as a monunt to their destruction.
The screams of the dying echoed through smoke-choked streets where justice wore the face of vengeance.
Angron moved through the carnage like a force of nature given terrible purpose. His fury burned pure and righteous, unencumbered by the torturous devices that had claid so many of his brothers and sisters. Every blow struck down an oppressor.
Every life taken balanced the scales of suffering that had weighed upon his people for too long.
Behind him ca the gladiators, his brothers and sisters in bondage, now free to write their nas in the blood of their torntors.
They wielded stolen weapons with skills honed in the killing pits, turning the very arts forced upon them against their forr masters.
"Blood for blood," snarled Yochuka, his blade still dripping from a guard's opened throat. At sixteen, he should have known the innocence of youth.
Instead, the Tarka had fed him to their arena, transforming a child into an instrunt of death for their amusent.
Khyster, the huntress whose face bore the scars of seven years in the fighting pits, lifted a speared guard high above her head.
Blood cascaded down the weapon's haft, baptizing her ruined features. She had been robbed of beauty, of softness, of everything that might have defined her womanhood—all sacrificed to satisfy the bloodlust of decadent nobles.
Among the vengeful gladiators moved Oenomaus, the old trainer who had been father to them all. His weathered hands, which had once guided young fighters in forms and stances, now guided them in the art of retribution.
This day had lived in his dreams for decades, the day when chains would break and accounts would be settled.
Even death held no terror for him now. They would die as free n, or live as free n. Either fate was victory.
The slaves fought with fury refined in the crucible of the arena, their skills turned against the high-born who had cheered their suffering. Knights and nobles died like rabid dogs in the streets they had once ruled.
"Angron, please—I was mistaken, I know that now—"
A young knight, perhaps Yochuka's age, fell to his knees before the advancing Primarch. Silver-white tendrils of his augtic implants writhed desperately, forming barriers of living tal.
These "Silver Vine" enhancents marked him as nobility, granting him strength and protection that had made him untouchable among lesser mortals.
Angron had felt the bite of such technology before, when he fought alone and weaponless. But those days were ended. The power-axe gifted by the Custodians humd with barely-contained energy, its disruption field eager to taste noble blood.
"You do not know you were wrong," Angron growled, his massive fist connecting with the youth's skull. He seized the knight's head and drove it into the rockcrete with bone-crushing force. "You rely know you are about to die."
The Silver Vine barriers collapsed under the Primarch's assault like paper before fla.
"Is this not what you desired? Slaughter, cruel and absolute, was this not the spectacle that pleased you?" Angron's voice carried the weight of a thousand deaths witnessed, a thousand humiliations endured. "Now the entertainnt is ours, and you find it lacking? How terribly selfish."
The knight's pleas dissolved into gurgling as Angron's fingers closed around his throat. With a sound like breaking timber, the Primarch twisted, ending the noble's protests forever.
"I will kill every last one of you," Angron whispered to the corpse. "Your children. Your bloodline. All of it."
The Tarka stronghold, for all its defensive asures, could not stand against the fury of the enslaved. When the gates fell, no quarter was given. The pain inflicted upon the gladiators over long years demanded paynt in kind.
A child's cry pierced the din of battle.
"Father!" The boy could not have seen more than four sumrs.
The Tarka patriarch, fleeing with his personal guard, turned to see a slave hoist his youngest son high before dashing the child against the stones. Small limbs twitched once, then stilled.
"You damned butchers!" The lord's voice cracked with grief and outrage. "He was innocent! Four years old!"
The slaves showed no rcy. If anything, the lord's anguish seed to fuel their cruelty. They impaled the small corpse upon a spear and paraded it through the burning halls, their laughter echoing off smoke-stained walls.
Even the mighty could bleed. Even the noble could weep. The revelation intoxicated the forr slaves with its justice.
Angron did not intervene. Blood for blood—it was humanity's oldest covenant, inscribed in the very marrow of the species. The Tarka had authored this tragedy with every lash, every forced battle, every life spent for their entertainnt.
None of the high-born survived. Acid baths. Impalent. The beasts they had kept for sport—all beca instrunts of execution.
The patriarch himself was dismbered while still drawing breath, his screams joining the symphony of justice that echoed through Daishia's ruins.
The war raged from dusk to dusk, twenty-four hours of reckoning that painted the broken city crimson.
Black smoke shrouded the sky like a funeral shroud, and in its shadows, history itself was being rewritten.
Ra, commander of the Custodian Guard squad, observed the carnage with tactical detachnt. The Emperor's will was clear; no word of the Twelfth Primarch's enslavent could reach the wider Imperium.
Such knowledge would tarnish the Emperor's divine image, undermine the myth of the Primarchs as perfect gene-forged demigods.
The nobles of Nuceria would die. Their civilization would be cleansed in blood and fla. Only ash and carefully crafted lies would remain.
When the killing finally ended, the surviving aristocrats knelt in chains before their conquerors. Pride had been stripped away along with their finery, leaving only terror and the sharp scent of voided bowels.
"Their fate rests in your hands, Twelfth," Ra intoned, approaching Angron with the asured steps of a predator. "As the Emperor's son, judgnt is your prerogative."
The kneeling nobles looked up with desperate hope, praying that rcy might yet save them from their slaves' fury.
Angron's smile was a terrible thing to behold.
"Send them to the arena," he commanded. "Let Nuceria witness one final ga—the last gladiatorial contest this world will ever know. One may survive to bear witness to the end of the slave epoch."
Despair replaced hope on noble faces as the gladiators surged forward, dragging their forr masters toward the killing pits. Every cruelty, every humiliation, every death would be repaid with interest.
"It is finished here, Twelfth," Ra declared. "The ti has co to depart."
"To where?" Angron gazed across the burning city, reluctance flickering in his dark eyes.
"To the stars. To et your gene-sire and your brothers." Ra's voice carried the weight of imperial decree.
"Go with them, my son." Oenomaus stepped forward, his scarred hands coming to rest on Angron's massive shoulders. "From the mont I first saw you, I knew your destiny lay beyond Nuceria's blood-soaked sands."
"But—" The Primarch's reluctance was plain. These gladiators were his family, forged in shared suffering and tempered in the fires of the arena.
"Nuceria will be rebuilt," Ra interjected smoothly. "The Imperium will ensure your people know freedom. You need not concern yourself with their welfare."
The promise, hollow though it was, swayed Angron's decision. He embraced Oenomaus, bid farewell to his gladiator brothers and sisters, and departed with the golden-armored Custodians.
An auxiliary force remained behin, not to liberate, but to ensure compliance with Imperial doctrine.
As his transport climbed toward the stars, Angron's mind churned with questions and fears. "What manner of n are my father and brothers?"
The Emperor's flagship, Bucephalus, thrumd with the barely-contained energies of the Great Crusade. In its training decks, warriors honed themselves into instrunts of Imperial will, their augnted forms pushing the boundaries of human capability.
Cheers erupted as Horus, bare-chested and gleaming with sweat, threw an Astartes warrior whose gene-seed had not yet fully matured.
The Sixteenth Legion's chosen son had made these training sessions his daily ritual, and his prowess grew with each passing day.
"Your skills improve beyond asure," called one of the warriors, stepping forward with genuine admiration. "We eagerly await the day we fight at your side."
Warriors from other Legions watched with poorly-concealed envy. Their own Primarchs remained lost among the stars, their return dates unknown. The Sixteenth Legion's fortune seed almost cruel in its abundance.
Horus basked in their praise, hoping word of his achievents would reach the Emperor's ears. Recognition from his gene-sire mattered above all else.
"I long for the day you take command of the Legion, Horus." A new recruit pushed through the crowd, his eyes bright with hero-worship.
The words pleased Horus greatly. "What is your na, brother?"
"Ezekyle Abaddon, my lord. Like yourself, I hail from Cthonia."
Horus would have continued the conversation, but the arrival of Custodian Guards cut short all discourse. They bore an imperial summons—the Emperor commanded his presence imdiately.
Reluctantly abandoning his conversation with Abaddon, Horus followed the golden-armored figures through the ship's baroque corridors.
They led him to a magnificent audience hall, its vaulted ceiling lost in shadows that seed to pulse with barely-contained power.
A figure stood at the chamber's center—broad-shouldered, scarred, radiating the barely-leashed violence of the arena.
The mont Horus laid eyes upon him, recognition flared. This was kin. This was brother. Another son of the Emperor.
The knowledge should have brought joy. Instead, it kindled sothing darker—a territorial instinct that made Horus's jaw clench and his eyes narrow.
"Your hostility is plain to see," the gladiator observed, his voice carrying the rough edges of Nuceria's fighting pits. "Do you seek to challenge to combat?"
The question hung in the air between them like a blade, waiting to fall. Two sons of the Emperor, eting for the first ti, already sizing each other for weakness.
In the shadows above, the very air seed to hold its breath, waiting to see what manner of brotherhood would erge from this first, fateful encounter
_____________
Want bonus chapters? Let's reach the goal together!
Goal: 150 – Remaining: 38 = 2 Bonus Chapter
📌 1 Power Stone on the Book Page = 100 on Chapter Pages!
!! VISIT the BOOK PAGE to donate your Power Stone.
Leave a REVIEW and drop a COMNT!!
Let's do this, everyone !!
Reviews
All reviews (0)