As the warp’s song grew and grew, threatening an exalting crescendo, the daemon of the first murder felt the defenders’ desperation gaining a stained, queasy brittleness. It cast its senses wide to see why, and immediately let forth a roar that was half canted across the noosphere and partially bellowed into the webway’s relative reality. The Anathema itself was within reach, stilled and crippled and bound to its Throne. These last, exhausted defenders were all that stood in the daemon’s path.
Two of the dead Golden approached in their metal shells, weapons crashing, ripping yet more shards of armour-flesh free. The daemon lashed back with its tendrils, hammering one of them away, sending it tumbling into the ranks of the creature’s own kindred to be pried open and the meat within devoured.
It lifted the second in its coiling grip, smelling a familiar soul. It knew this one.
‘End of Empires!’ it voxed, screamed and canted. ‘End of Empires!’
Land made a sound in the back of his throat, one he wasn’t proud of. He had to swallow before he could speak. Even the Custodians were falling back from what the Archimandrite had become. It had downed Sevik within mere heartbeats. It killed one of the Ten Thousand’s Dreadnoughts as quick as Land could blink. It lifted another in its tentacles, and…
‘What in the Omnissiah’s name will your chainsword do against that?’
‘Very little,’ Zephon replied. Yet still he gunned it. ‘Bring us in closer.’
Arkhan did so, his eyes locked to the visions feeds.
‘Baroness D’Arcus,’ Zephon voxed. ‘I require your aid.’
Zephon climbed out onto the tank’s roof. A second later, Land heard the thruster bark of the Blood Angel’s jump pack igniting.
Sagittarus was drowning. Or suffocating. He didn’t know which. He was struggling to breathe in the womb-fluid of his coffin, each inhalation coming with the coppery taste of blood and a sour tang of oil. Whatever was left of his physical form – even Sagittarus had never been sure how much of himself remained inside the coffin – banged and thumped inside the life support sarcophagus, sloshing in the amniotic fluid but no longer submerged within it.
Leaking. That thought held primacy in the darkening light of his perceptions. Crippled. Hurt. Leaking.
He faced ahead, trying to raise arms that wouldn’t obey. He had to pull himself out of the monster’s tendrils. His weapons clunked, devoid of ammunition for hours. His chassis, alive with warning readings for so long already, was held together only by dumb luck.
Yet he’d charged the Archimandrite. Limping and bleeding and ammo-starved, he’d charged it as it stepped over the dead Knight. There had been no choice. Its cannons were devastating the faltering Imperial lines.
Only in death does duty end.
One blow was all he’d been able to land, a shattering strike from his fist that ripped the plating from the Archimandrite’s chest, revealing a subdermal layer of secondary ablative plate. And then, he was in the creature’s clutches, hauled from the ground.
To his shame, he cried out when his right arm tore free. He had no nerves in his Dreadnought shell but the synaptic backlash of being mutilated was all too real. The Archimandrite brandished the ripped limb, still spitting with sparks, before hurling it away into the seething tides below.
Sagittarus’ world lurched as he was lifted even higher, the whine of protesting metal resounding in his ears through the murky, muffled coffin. He felt the pressure in his thigh as the daemon took a firmer grip, then the wrenching jolt of dislocation that followed. Another crack of synaptic feedback coursed through his revenant flesh. Malfunctioning systems railed at him. Empty weapons cried out for him to fire.
Turbines screamed as a figure in bloody red thudded onto the Archimandrite’s shoulder. The Blood Angel, Zephon, cleaved down with a two-handed blow of his chainblade, the sword ripping into a tendril’s joint where flesh met machine in unholy fusion. The sword rose and fell, tearing away chunks of bloody metal, spitting its own teeth as its revving track was fouled by gore and dense armour.
The Archimandrite pivoted but the Blood Angel’s jump pack spurted stabilising gas jets, long enough for a fifth blow to bite deep into the carved wound. The tendril deformed with the damage, gushing oil and slime as it fell limp, dropping Sagittarus into the melee below.
His last sight before plunging into the battling bodies was the Archimandrite’s left hand closing around the Blood Angel’s torso, dragging him from his unstable perch.
Sagittarus rolled with all of the grace of an overturned sand turtle, clawing his remaining fist into the ground, and dragged himself back.
‘Five,’ he heard Zephon vox, the Blood Angel’s voice marred by strain for the first time.
Four.
Zephon thrashed in the beast’s grip, laying into the machine’s forearm with his damaged chainsword.
Three.
A lucky nick at the wrist tore a fluid-wet spillage of cabling from its housing, weakening the grip before it fully closed. The Blood Angel fired his jump pack, red ceramite scraping against the Archimandrite’s clutching fingers as he boosted free, straight up.
Two.
With a grace any winged being would envy, the Blood Angel twisted in the air, angling his propulsion to veer him back to the Imperial line.
One.
The bandolier of grenades mag-locked to the back of the Archimandrite’s head detonated in incendiary harmony, sending shrapnel rainstorming across the embattled lines. Daemons near to the detonation howled at the punishment delivered to their predator-monarch. The Archimandrite, missing a significant portion of its hunchback and both shoulders, staggered forwards, emitting a shriek that the true war machine was incapable of producing.
‘Engaging,’ came Jaya’s voice in Zephon’s helm.
She had expended her ammunition hours before, even depleting Torolec’s reserves. Her swordlimb was a cracked ruin; it had shattered against a Warhound after cutting through the bare metal and severing the leg at the thigh. Lacking any other recourse, she was down to clubbing with the broken hilt and her ammo-starved gunlimb, doing her best to guard the front ranks from harm by warding them from the Archimandrite’s onslaught with her ion shield.
Zephon sent the signal. Jaya forced her Knight into a sprinting run, charging as Sevik had charged, heaving her Castigator’s weight against the staggering Archimandrite. Hunched as she was, she found herself face to face with the Mechanicum’s creation, looking down into the broken cranial armour left in the wake of the grenades’ detonation. Fluids ran and bubbled in scorched cables. Fleshy matter was burned against the insides of the dome – what had once been Hieronyma’s brain and spinal column. The incinerated remnants still quivered with impossible life.
End of Empires, she heard in her mind. In the same second, warning chimes began singing their familiar song. The creatures were swarming around her knees and she had no means of shoving them away. The Custodians and Sisters were too far back to reach her.