Vashtorr's roar of primordial fury tore through the Warp, vibrating within the very consciousness of every soul present. His voice echoed across the entirety of the battlefield like the grinding of tectonic plates.
"Lion! Guilliman! Do not think for a single moment that you have won!"
A sudden, violent eruption of empyric energy surged; the rift upon the planetary surface bloomed into full, horrific flower. A baleful, crimson radiance saturated the vision of all. Rage and a primal urge to slaughter welled up in every heart, loyalist and traitor alike.
The remnants of the World Eaters let out a heaven-shaking cry of exultation. From within the shifting shadows of the Warp portal, a towering silhouette emerged, flanked by a tide of Bloodletters and a host of frenzied Bloodcrushers.
The Lion and Guilliman felt the crushing weight of a god's gaze instantly.
BOOM!
A red blur hurtled forward. With a speed that defied his massive bulk, the attacker kicked an unprepared Guilliman with enough force to send the Avenging Son airborne. Simultaneously, a Gore-slicked chainaxe, wreathed in the malevolent glow of the Brass Throne, swung in a murderous arc toward the Lord of the First.
Behind him, the daemonic legions shrieked, surging into the fray.
The Lion watched as his brother was thrown like a spent shell casing, crashing into the mangled chassis of a dead Daemon Engine. He had no time to check on Roboute's condition; the Emperor's Shield, emblazoned with the golden Aquila, slammed into the desecrated axe with a thunderous impact.
The sheer, tectonic force of the blow forced the Lion to brace the shield with both hands to keep from being overborne. The face of the assailant was a nightmare etched in familiar scars; it was a visage well known to both El'Jonson and Guilliman.
The Lion's gaze remained ice-cold as he locked strength with the shadow of his brother, his voice a lash of righteous condemnation.
"Angron! Once we stood as one for the Emperor's glory. Now you wallow in the abyss of Chaos, a breaker of oaths and a traitor to your blood!"
Angron's features were contorted into a mask of pure agony and hate, his eyes burning with a lunatic fire.
"Oaths? Chains, Lion! Nothing but shackles to bind me! I have drowned in pain while the Emperor stood by and did nothing to save me!"
The Lion shifted his weight, using the curvature of the Emperor's Shield to deflect the axe's momentum. In the same fluid motion, he drove the hilt of the Lion Sword into the crown of Angron's head, a scalp bristling with the metallic cables of the Butcher's Nails.
Staggered, Angron recoiled slightly, but his massive axe swept out in a retaliatory horizontal lash. The Lion leaped back, finding his footing and resetting his guard in a heartbeat.
"Fury has blinded you, Angron. Chaos brings only ruin. You are no longer the brother I knew."
Angron threw back his head and laughed, a sound of pure, unadulterated madness, as he swung the massive weapon in a wide, careless arc.
"Then come, Lion! Let us see if your long slumber has turned your marrow to water!"
The movements of the Primarchs occurred at a temporal scale far beyond the reaction speeds of the surrounding Adeptus Astartes. It was only after the initial exchange of words that the surrounding Honour Guard realized what had happened. Two of the Emperor's Children scrambled toward the wreckage of the Daemon Engine to recover their gene-father.
Angron was wreathed in a pulsing, dark-red aura, the raw power of Khorne coursing through his veins. His axe left crimson afterimages in the air as he rained blow after blow upon the Lion.
In this moment, the Lion's tactical genius was absolute. Drawing upon ten thousand years of instinct and unmatched combat experience, he moved with the grace of a forest predator—dodging, parrying, and delivering lightning-fast counter-thrusts.
Yet, the weight of the Red Angel's blows was immense. Every collision forced the Lion to use the Emperor's Shield to precisely angle the kinetic force away from his posture.
"You've grown old, Lion! The great forest cat hides behind a slab of gold! Look at your hands, I can feel them trembling!"
Angron's expression grew increasingly feral. The Lion remained silent. He could feel it: since his fall, Angron's power had grown exponentially, but his technique had devolved into the frantic, predictable lashing of a rabid beast. Though his strikes were easy to read, the sheer volume of his strength and his tireless aggression required the Lion's total, unflinching concentration.
Driven by the frantic ticking of the Butcher's Nails and frustrated by the lack of a kill, Angron finally surrendered the last vestige of his reason. He roared, leaping high into the air to bring his axe down in a world-splitting overhead strike.
Suddenly, a strange sense of displacement radiated from the flank.
Mid-air and unable to adjust his trajectory, Angron could only snap his head toward the threat. A massive shell, its armor-piercing tip shrieking as it tore through the atmosphere, hurtled directly toward his torso. For a fleeting second, a flicker of lucidity returned to Angron's eyes, a moment of pure disbelief as the projectile punched through his warp-forged plate and tore a path straight through his midsection.
The shell continued its flight, plunging into the daemonic horde behind him and detonating in a localized firestorm that cleared a wide radius of filth.
Combat that was a blur to an Astartes was child's play for an Iron Man.
The Executor Heavy Tank had tracked the Red Angel's arc. At the apex of his leap, it had fired. The heavy armor-piercing round, though unable to detonate inside a body of Angron's density, nonetheless left a gaping, translucent hole in his torso. The kinetic shock alone nearly sheared the Primarch in half. The desecrated axe flew from his nerveless grip.
Below, the Lion, who had been braced to take the impact for a counter-strike, stood frozen in momentary shock. Guilliman, just being hauled from the wreckage by his Honour Guard, witnessed the scene in stunned silence.
"AAAGH!!!!"
With a final, agonizing shriek, Angron's physical form disintegrated. A geyser of pure Khornate energy, thick with madness and bloodlust, erupted from the collapsing meat of his avatar.
Bolstered by this discharge of power, the daemons became even more frenzied. The metaphysical nature of Khorne granted these entities a natural resilience to ranged weaponry; only the visceral clash of blade on flesh and the brutal reality of melee could truly banish these crimson horrors.
Axion identified this tactical shift instantly.
The concentrated las-fire was proving inefficient against these high-energy entities, and while solid shot could claim a few at a time, the kill-rate was insufficient. Facing an enemy that demanded physical contact, Axion engaged the Executor's high-speed drive.
What followed left every witness on the battlefield speechless.
The massive war machine, terrifying in both length and breadth, kicked up a wall of dust. To the onlookers, it looked like a colossal blackboard eraser being shoved across a crowded slate; the Executor plowed into the daemonic ranks, dragging hundreds of Bloodletters beneath its massive tracks and grinding them into empyric sludge.
The attending Tech-Priests watched this two-hundred-kilometer-per-hour juggernaut with a religious awe that bordered on the indecorous, metaphorical oil-tears of joy pricking their ocular sensors.
Bloodletters and Bloodcrushers hacked at the rampaging behemoth with their Hellblades, but weapons designed to cleave Astartes plate were useless against the slab-sided hull of an Executor. The maddening, soul-withering aura of the Blood God saturated the field, but the soulless machine-spirit of the tank remained utterly indifferent.
The armored titan began to run a "box-pattern" over the battlefield, repeatedly crushing everything in its path.
All the while, its secondary weapons and missile pods never ceased their fire. Whether it was cultist, World Eater, Black Legionnaire, or Iron Warrior, the result was the same: they were picked off by laser arrays or main-gun fire, then pulverized into the dirt by the tank's relentless, oversized treads.
For the first time in their long lives, the Knights of the Imperium felt a new, singular emotion.
"I want to drive that," one muttered. "I want to drive that and kill everything."