V2 Chapter 22: Thirty Seconds, I'll Only Play With You for Thirty Seconds
Joghaten Khan led nearly a hundred battle-brothers of the Fourth Brotherhood of the Scimitar through the final passage and into the space that had once served as the planetary governor's private warehouse.
Nothing of its original character remained.
Physical law had been torn apart here entirely. The tides of the Sea of Souls had engulfed this area completely and transformed it into a new Warp sub-plane: suffocating, vast, and without any of the properties the material universe was supposed to maintain.
Rolling seas of blood and mountains of bleached skulls covered every line of sight. The air carried the nauseating smell of sulphur and old blood, thick enough to taste.
Joghaten exhaled a long, controlled breath. Both his hearts were beating hard. Under Khornate corruption at this concentration, even he was finding it difficult to hold down the most primitive killing desire rising from somewhere beneath conscious thought.
But this Khan of the Brotherhood understood clearly what that meant. Now, perhaps only they, the sons of the Great Khan, could end this disaster.
If they could not, this planet would fall entirely into the endless Warp abyss.
This was a world that Saint Sabbat had once conquered. Every inch of its ground had once received the Emperor's light. Joghaten was going to force everything twisted here back onto the right path.
"For the Emperor! For the Great Khan!"
Joghaten Khan and the dozens of battle-brothers behind him let out a deafening war cry in unison.
They activated their jump packs without hesitation. Accompanied by the hot exhaust flames of their engines, dozens of White Scars Astartes launched into the air like meteors and drove directly into the daemon horde surging toward them like a tide.
They used the nearly irrepressible Warp-rage burning in their own hearts as the sharpest weapon available, pouring bolt rounds and blade-work into the daemon swarms without reservation.
Then, from behind a towering mountain of skulls to one side, a roar erupted that reached into the soul itself.
Accompanied by the thunderous sound of bone shattering, a terrifying, fully physical Greater Daemon forced the skull mountain down. Tens of thousands of skulls cascaded outward. The daemon appeared at the centre of the battlefield.
It stood more than ten metres tall. Its body carried the dark red, brass-textured quality of powerful musculature stripped of skin and exposed directly to the air.
A pair of broken, enormous bat-flesh wings spread behind it. In its hand it gripped an enormous bloodaxe longer than a Space Marine's full height, with boiling blood running the length of the blade.
This was the Bloodthirster. It lowered its head and unleashed a thunderous roar at the White Scars warriors below, the roar of something that has no patience for creatures that dare to challenge its authority.
Without any warning, the enormous bloodaxe swept horizontally with a screeching tear through the air.
The absolute force of the blow cleaved a brief vacuum trail through the space it passed through.
Three Astartes who had just used their jump packs to gain height, with no time to evade, were cut in half at the waist along with their solid ceramite power armour. Viscera and blood fell in a rain onto the sea of blood below.
Joghaten's eyes went wide with fury. He roared and immediately ordered through the communications channel for every warrior to scatter completely: they could not withstand the enemy's attacks head-on. Then he shouted a name across the formation:
"Batu! Pin it down!"
"As ordered!"
A figure in an elaborate helmet, both hands gripping a pair of Chogorian power scimitars in a reversed grip, burst from the formation like a gust of wind and charged toward the massive Greater Daemon.
Across his white power armour, inscribed in the extremely beautiful and intricate calligraphy of Chogoris, dense inscriptions recorded the full history of his battle honours.
This was Batu, Champion of the Brotherhood of the Scimitar and the absolute master of blade arts in the entire Brotherhood. He would be the primary force drawing the Bloodthirster's attention and fighting for attack windows for the battle-brothers around him.
On the far side of the battlefield, the Storm Seer accompanying the force raised his staff high. At the lethal risk of psychic backlash, he forced himself to summon a pale white bolt of living lightning, driving it precisely into the Greater Daemon's eyes.
The Greater Daemon took the hit and let out an enraged roar. Its vision went briefly and completely dark.
Batu seized the fleeting opening. In an explosive sliding drive across the floor, he narrowly evaded the bloodaxe swinging blind and drove both blades hard into the Bloodthirster's ankles.
But before the Champion could withdraw, the Greater Daemon's thick, reverse-jointed rear leg delivered a single back-kick that landed squarely in Batu's chest.
Accompanied by a bone-shattering crack, the master of blade arts was sent flying like a kite with its string cut and crashed into a distant wall. Ceramite shattered. He was instantly critically wounded and near death, his fate unclear.
"No!" The Storm Seer, having looked directly at the Greater Daemon's fury and forced himself to use psychic power in the same moment, suffered terrible backlash. Blood erupted from every orifice on his face. He fell flat to the ground and sank into deep unconsciousness.
Joghaten Khan drove himself forward with both eyes gone red, trying to use his crescent power tulwar to block the next axe strike descending toward the Storm Seer.
The pure brute force of it, like a mountain, instantly shattered the Khan's shoulder plate. The impact transmitted through the bone. Joghaten went down on one knee, spat blood, and nearly lost his grip on the blade.
The other White Scars warriors around him, in their attempts to swarm and surround the daemon, were struck and sent flying one after another by its brutal swings, like it was batting away nuisances.
In under a few minutes, the elite Astartes assault squad had nearly been wiped out, blood staining every suit of armour on the field. The Greater Daemon, by contrast, showed nothing beyond a shallow, smoking wound at its ankle. It was otherwise essentially untouched.
At that nearly desperate moment of crisis, countless streams of dense heavy fire came screaming in from behind: laser beams, plasma bolts, and bolt rounds and drove hard into the Bloodthirster that was an instant away from crushing Joghaten underfoot.
The Greater Daemon was pushed back half a step by the sudden fire net.
Reinforcements?
Joghaten breathed in great, wrenching pulls. The Space Marine's superhuman physiology rapidly secreted coagulants and combat stimulants, driving his body back to a state where he could barely function. He used the power tulwar as a prop, pushed himself upright, and looked behind him.
A rough, bellowing roar drew his attention. A powerfully built figure carrying a heavy power maul drove it with pure force into a Bloodletter attempting a flanking ambush and sent it flying.
Behind him was a dense mass of mortal warriors in black carapace armour.
They surged forward like a black tide, charging into the sea of blood without any hesitation.
They ran toward the critically wounded White Scars warriors on the ground, set up bolt guns and meltaguns, and used their own flesh and blood to block the daemon counterattack surge in front of the Space Marines.
At this moment, even the White Scars Khan, known for his fast neural responses and wide experience, was utterly frozen.
Reason told Joghaten clearly: in a space with Chaos corruption at this concentration, thousands of mortal warriors who had received no genetic modification whatsoever had not only failed to go mad, but had maintained formation in their charge. This was something that had almost never occurred anywhere in the entire history of Imperial warfare.
But the reality in front of him was proving all of it true. The resolve and combat power these mortal warriors were demonstrating was enough to give any being pause.
Including the Bloodthirster whose slaughter had been interrupted.
The daemon turned its head, looked at the mortal creatures swarming below it, and let out an extremely enraged roar.
The Warp impact carried in that single roar sent dozens of 112th warriors charging at the front flying.
They crashed to the ground, bones broken, and could only moan in pain in the blood-water, unable to rise.
Anderson, eyes flooding red, let out an enraged roar and threw himself at the Greater Daemon without hesitation.
He leapt high. The power maul drove downward at the Greater Daemon's pillar-thick lower leg with everything he had.
Reality was desperately uncompromising.
The Greater Daemon's bloodaxe swung to meet Anderson's power maul. At the instant of contact, Anderson's arms produced a cracking sound and the bones of both arms broke entirely. The power maul's head was shattered into pieces by the terrifying force.
Anderson's body flew backward like a cannonball and crashed through a group of 112th warriors when it landed. Against any ordinary person, a single blow like this would reduce them to blood and fragments.
But under [Flesh Engine's] action, his muscle fibres and blood vessels forcibly locked the organs on the verge of collapse and barely preserved his life. He lost combat capability entirely.
Joghaten, watching these mortal warriors fight this desperately to provide cover for their Astartes companions, felt an unprecedented shock and fury rise in that proud Chogorian hunter.
He struggled upright and let out a deafening roar at the Greater Daemon.
The remaining White Scars warriors who could still stand, who could still hold a weapon, did the same. They let out simultaneous ferocious war cries, trying to draw the Greater Daemon's attention back onto themselves.
The roaring successfully enraged the Bloodthirster. The daemon turned its massive frame, raised the bloodaxe, and walked back toward the remaining White Scars line carrying the weight of something that expects nothing to stop it.
At that critical instant, a power sword came flying from the distant passage entrance.
Its velocity reached the extreme. It broke the sound barrier on its approach, the crack of it arriving ahead of the blade itself.
On the sword's edge, an intensely dazzling, pure golden flame burned.
The sword traced a lethal golden arc through the air, like divine judgement finding its mark, and drove precisely into the Greater Daemon's chest.
Unlike the White Scars' previous strikes, which had failed to reach the daemon's essential nature, this time the terrifying Bloodthirster let out a heartrending, agonised roar.
It staggered backward, dropping the bloodaxe. It roared and reached up with both massive hands, trying to pull the burning power sword from its chest.
But the eternally burning golden flame carried some absolute suppressing quality against what the daemon was. The moment the Greater Daemon's palms touched the sword's hilt, they were scorched black with a sizzling sound, leaving it helpless. All it could do was let out howls of mixed fury and pain.
Joghaten looked in the direction from which the power sword had come.
In the midst of the churning mass of daemons, a mortal commissar in a black greatcoat was walking forward with entirely steady, expressionless steps.
He had no cover. Not a single weapon in his hands.
More than a dozen Bloodletters registered this apparently defenceless mortal and immediately screamed with excitement, swarming like sharks to blood, rushing to tear him apart with their claws.
At this moment, the commissar slowly raised his head.
Joghaten was stunned to see that this mortal's eyes were radiating a golden light too intense to look at directly.
The commissar simply extended his right hand.
A clear, ringing note cut through everything around it.
The power sword tore itself free from the Greater Daemon's chest, trailing a burst of burning daemon blood. It traced a beautiful arc in the air and flew steadily back into the commissar's hand.
The Greater Daemon, critically wounded in its chest, descended into complete madness. It roared furiously, fixing its gaze on the mortal radiating an aura that filled it with violent revulsion, and committed to tearing him apart.
Duvette closed his hand around the recovered power sword. The corner of his mouth curved slowly upward into something that had nothing gentle in it at all.
He swung the blade. The cold yet sacred golden flame erupted instantly, expanding into a ring of lethal fire that swept across the surrounding Bloodletters and burned their souls to ash where they stood.
Duvette fixed his gaze on the Bloodthirster across the ruined, blood-soaked space. The golden light in his eyes burned at its full intensity.
"Thirty seconds," he said quietly, his voice carrying no particular effort, but reaching every corner of the battlefield regardless.
"I'll only play with you for thirty seconds."
The words landed, and his black-coated figure went forward like an arrow released from a bow, across the blood-water and the bodies covering the ground, straight at the Greater Daemon that considered itself beyond the reach of anything here.
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