"Damn… even Guilliman's down?" Eden let out a long sigh, his anxiety rising.
After awakening his Warp nature, Guilliman could be called the toughest, most unyielding of the primarchs.
He was practically the galaxy's number-one meat shield. Ordinary "traps" barely even registered when he stepped on them.
And yet even he couldn't withstand Angron's punishment. That alone showed how dire the situation had become.
At this moment, Guilliman's Armor of Fate was wrecked into scrap. His body was covered in wounds, including multiple that should have been fatal.
Half his viscera was exposed to the void.
And that was after repeated injections of restorative agents and panaceas. Otherwise, his condition would have been even worse.
Worse still, the sheer quantity of drugs used in such a short window had produced resistance.
The healing effect was dropping sharply.
There was no helping it.
Guilliman had taken the bulk of Angron's damage by himself. Without him in front, shielding the others, the fight ahead would only become more brutal.
The Chaos Gods had poured too much power into Angron—enough that he now exceeded the very "tier" a primarch should occupy.
Even with five primarchs fighting together, they could barely hold the line.
In this moment, they weren't merely fighting Angron.
They were facing the Chaos Gods behind him.
Seeing Guilliman struggle to rise again to rejoin the battle, Eden raised a hand and pressed him back down.
"Catch your breath. We can hold a little longer."
In Eden's judgment, if Guilliman forced himself back into combat in this state, the risk of true death was extreme.
Guilliman didn't insist. He fell back onto the rubble, weak as a dying star.
"I'll recover. In at most one-eighth of a Terran hour, I can rejoin the fight."
This "limit-breaker" primarch knew his own body all too well.
"You can still fight?" Eden inhaled hard when he realized Guilliman hadn't fully collapsed.
Guilliman really was the hardest man in the galaxy.
Eden nodded firmly. "Good. I'm going to support the Lion and the others. Fix yourself up, then come find us."
Since they hadn't entirely lost Guilliman as a combat asset, that at least counted as good news.
Because with only four primarchs, they likely couldn't hold until the plan completed.
After confirming the situation, Eden didn't waste time. He turned and left.
Guilliman lay on the rubble, clenched his teeth, shoved his spilled organs back into place, then seared the wound shut with flame to stop the bleeding.
Flesh slowly began to knit.
Enduring the agony, Guilliman regulated his breathing. In truth, his injuries were worse than they looked.
But he still chose to continue fighting, even at the cost of his life.
The lord of Ultramar stared at Eden's departing back, his gaze unwavering.
"Eden, my brother… I'll come support you. I will."
He burned his own essence like fuel, over-drawing his body, forcing his wounds to close at speed.
…
Eden stumbled as he moved, injecting himself with several more restorative agents and panaceas.
He wasn't in good shape either.
If Guilliman's job was to soak damage, Eden's job was to deal it—and he'd taken plenty of hits in return.
He'd also spent an enormous amount of faith energy.
Now the armor over his chest was shattered. His breastbone was caved in, his organs ruptured, and countless other wounds covered him.
Fortunately, none were immediately fatal.
After stabilizing himself, Eden leapt into the void and rejoined the battle.
With the Lion and the others drawing Angron away, the battlefield had shifted again.
The divine authorities welded into Angron's daemon-body twisted and corrupted cruisers and debris fields alike, violently reshaping the environment.
Everywhere, colossal flesh-vines, magma, fog, and plague-filth formed a labyrinth.
Some zones even connected to the Warp itself—hazards everywhere.
Chaos daemons infested it all, pursuing and harrying them without pause.
Eden crashed down onto a slanted platform below and followed the ebb and surge of warp-taint toward the main engagement.
The scene ahead felt unreal.
Steel wreckage had been warped into impossible structures balanced on invisible rings. Aberrant flesh swelled and pulsed like breathing organs.
Perhaps this was how Angron could annihilate fleets.
Once the beast attacked, the Chaos Gods could use him as a node in a colossal ritual lattice, projecting warp-corruption into the surrounding region.
A walking apocalypse.
Eden's resolve hardened.
"If Angron reaches Holy Terra or the Dawnlight City webway, that will be the real catastrophe. Everything we've built will be ruined."
Destruction was always easier than construction. A city and territory he'd spent decades raising could be corrupted and destroyed by the Chaos Gods in a few hours.
They didn't even need to do much—just spread taint along the "nodes," and Eden would be stuck cleaning for ages.
Fortunately, Angron was still constrained by the sector-wide Chaos array. For now, he could only operate within the Vostroya Pan-Sector and the surrounding reaches.
Otherwise, even containing him would be nearly impossible.
Before long, Eden reached the newest battlefield.
It was the cruiser's engine core—steam thick in the air.
Tendons and corrupted flesh had sprouted from engines and valves, intertwining with sparking cables, grinding gears, and unknown fangs that chewed at metal.
Daemons grew inside the profaned machinery, occasionally bursting out to ambush.
Eden snapped an insectoid daemon—its head ringed with jagged teeth—out of a valve and crushed it underfoot.
"The corruption's getting worse. The longer we drag this out, the lower our odds of winning!"
Eden's brow tightened.
The daemonic ambushes weren't lethal, but they were relentless and infuriating.
Even for primarchs, they were still flesh-and-blood in this galaxy. No matter how tough, a hit still drew blood.
And it was obvious: this place was converting into a Chaos realm. Daemons were multiplying.
After executing a few more, Eden saw the massive daemon-body in the distance. Metal ruins disintegrated under its blows.
Angron radiated a terrifying presence. The gods' warp-power churned in his flesh, and their will could be faintly sensed behind it.
The gods of the Warp were watching this war—watching the Savior and his brothers.
Whum-whum-whum—
Jaghatai Khan weaved through the battlefield on the Pale Eagle, repeatedly accelerating into sudden strikes that carved fresh wounds into Angron.
Perturabo manipulated forbidden relics integrated into the Logos Armour, seeking angles to target the monster's head.
The Lion held the front line, repeatedly parrying the bone-axe and the barbed, fleshy whips.
Among the loyal primarchs, he was the strongest besides Eden himself.
Suddenly, a rotting maw in Angron's abdomen spewed vile filth—highly corrosive.
Nurgle's plague-slurry.
The Lion reacted instantly, using his nature to evade and plunge into the forests of Caliban.
The filth followed after him. Nurgle's imps shrieked with glee as the taint spread, twisting the trees where it touched.
Fortunately, the forest suppressed it before long.
A fog of corruption expanded.
Perturabo's automatons and weapons platforms sprouted stinking flesh and began to convulse wildly.
As if they were living creatures.
"Mechanical plague?"
Perturabo realized the fog was devouring his automatons and weaponry—and worse, it was crawling along cables toward the Logos Armour itself.
Bzzzzt—
He severed the cables in time, sacrificing a mechanical arm to block the infection.
That was when the Khan found an opening.
Taking advantage of the moment Angron finished vomiting the plague, he drove the Pale Eagle at full speed toward Angron's blind side.
But the moment the Khan drew close, the daemon-heads embedded across Angron's back snapped open, staring at him with eyes of agony.
Aaaaah!
From their mouths came a grotesque, genderless scream of noise, an audio-wave that blanketed the area in an instant.
Slaanesh's authority.
The Khan was hit by the sonic assault, and his prized vehicle immediately lost control.
In the next instant, Angron turned to face him directly. The bone-blood axe swept sideways and smashed through the Pale Eagle's auramite plating.
The force hurled him away.
The Khan and his vehicle crashed across the ruins—and then the truly dangerous moment came.
Boom!
Angron spewed magma onto the overturned Pale Eagle, then brought the axe down again and smashed it apart.
Sparks erupted in a storm.
The sacred machine the Khan oiled, polished, and maintained daily—his beloved relic—was destroyed.
"Damn it!"
The Khan watched, bitterness surging up with rage.
He unfurled his relic mechanical wings, surged forward, and carved deeper wounds into the culprit.
But not long after, he was seized by a monstrous claw and slammed into the wreckage.
"Brother!"
Eden arrived in time, catching the Khan and preventing him from taking further damage.
As they sprinted and dodged Angron's strikes, Eden spoke to steady him.
"Khan, I'll reimburse this loss. After this, I'll build you a stronger new model. I guarantee you'll be satisfied."
The Khan's mood visibly improved. "Is your weapon ready yet? How much longer do we have to hold?"
Eden's countermeasure—his tool for resisting Angron and the gods—had been kept secret. Even they hadn't seen it.
From start to finish it remained sealed within the forge-platform.
That was for safety.
Eden feared that if it were exposed, the Chaos Gods would do everything possible to destroy it—leaving him without a decisive answer.
Keeping it in the forge-platform, protected by holy energy and shielded from scrutiny, was the best option.
He also worried that the gods might sense the threat and pull Angron back. That would be disastrous.
So their strategy was to keep striking the gods' chosen, goading him—forcing him to stay.
Eden checked the latest transmission and answered.
"Half an hour at most. When the time comes, I'll activate it—and end this."
At that moment, the two of them crossed a small stretch of Caliban's forest.
Angron pursued closely, but the cramped spacing between the giant trees slowed his chase.
"Slaughter!"
In rage, the beast conjured warp-magma and set the forest ablaze. Heat waves erupted.
Eden seized the opening, regrouped with the Lion and Perturabo, and reorganized their offense.
They had to survive this final stretch.
"Where's Roboute?" the Lion demanded when he didn't see Guilliman's annoying face. He was genuinely worried. "How is he?"
If that annoying bastard died, wouldn't the world become unbearably dull?
"Guilliman's fine," Eden answered, estimating the time. "He should be able to rejoin us in about ten minutes."
Given the current situation, their odds of holding until activation were very good—especially if Guilliman returned.
The primarch brothers sprinted across new platforms, cutting down the swarming daemons as they ran.
The Chaos Gods shared the same logic: use daemons to drain the primarchs' stamina.
To ensure their chosen could kill them all.
If that happened, humanity would lose its power to resist across the galaxy.
"This is bad."
Suddenly, Eden and the others stopped short.
A twisted metal wall rose before them, stretching into the void. Daemonic limbs covered it, swaying like seaweed.
A dead end.
The Chaos Gods had reshaped the terrain, raising an impassable barrier here.
But when they turned back, Angron had already burst out of Caliban's forest and cut off their retreat.
Behind him surged a black tide of daemons.
"Brothers, looks like we keep fighting."
Eden inhaled and charged with the others straight into Angron and the daemon-host behind him.
The battle erupted again.
Angron roared, and the bone-blood axe crashed down—
—aimed at Eden.
But after the blade shattered the ground, Eden was gone.
The next instant came a burst of pain at the back of Angron's skull.
That was Rogo's authority.
Eden used a cunning, ferocious greenskin authority to slip behind Angron and smash the back of his head.
Unfortunately, with the Chaos Gods' blessings, the monster was nearly impossible to kill.
And Eden's Diablo the Destroyer authority and greenskin authority still weren't enough to oppose the gods' authorities head-on. All he could do was stall as much as possible.
In truth, if Eden hadn't been resisting the gods' corruption this whole time—slowing the conversion of the battlefield—the Lion and the others would already have fallen.
But time felt unbearably long.
For beings at this level, a single second held multiple exchanges. Life and death often decided themselves fast.
They were trying as hard as they could to endure.
Ten minutes later.
The Lion was covered in wounds, barely able to stand.
He stared at Eden and rasped, "Where is Roboute? You said he'd be here in ten minutes to support us."
"That was the plan," Eden panted.
Then he thought of something, scalp tingling.
"If that bastard didn't show up late, he should have made it. We're at most a cruiser's distance apart from him. He can't seriously be lost, can he?"
At that exact moment, in another nearby zone of the battlefield—
Guilliman was running like mad, dread in his heart.
His promised time was nearly up, and the primarch brothers had shifted the battle farther away.
Thinking of that, the lord of Ultramar forced himself faster, eyes hard as iron.
"Eden, brothers—hold on. I'm coming!"
Not long after, Guilliman's expression went blank.
He… couldn't find the way?!
He tried to use his warp nature to track the aura of Angron and his brothers, jumping between platforms and spatial zones.
"Found them!"
In the next instant, Guilliman surged forward in joy.
He passed through a twisted zone of the Chaos realm. After a dizzying spin and distortion, his boots hit solid ground again—under searing sunlight.
Sunlight?!
Guilliman realized something was wrong and looked up.
A death world.
The land was crimson, the sun a burning sphere scorching the earth. Within sight, red-skinned daemons lay sprawled across the ground.
They carpeted the planet.
The crimson daemons had been lounging, half-asleep, but the moment they saw an outsider, they grabbed their weapons and stood.
They surged to surround him, stretching all the way to the horizon.
…?
Guilliman's brain short-circuited.
Where the hell did he end up?!
…
Void. Ruins battlefield.
Eden rolled to avoid a strike, grief all over his face as he told the others, "Brothers… if nothing unexpected happened, Guilliman won't be coming anytime soon."
Just now, Eden had lost his psychic link to Guilliman. Guilliman had vanished from this Chaos domain entirely.
They were in the middle of a raid, and their tank had somehow wandered off to who-knows-where.
The fight grew even harder. Stamina bled away fast.
At last, Eden caught an opening and closed in on Angron's head.
The clanging of the Butcher's Nails was terrifyingly clear—madness made audible.
Eden could even see, through a wound in Angron's skull, the thing that kept him raging.
A rope-like "nail," driven deep into the primarch's brain. Under Chaos corruption, it had become an abominable machine.
It warped thought and manufactured madness.
If Eden could rip out the Butcher's Nails, perhaps Angron could regain his mind.
That might be one of Eden's paths to victory.
With Chaos sustaining him, the fallen primarch possessed unimaginable regeneration. Ripping out the Nails wouldn't necessarily kill him.
And if Angron recovered his senses, perhaps his monstrous will—honed by resisting the Nails for so long—could reject the gods' control?
Eden made the call instantly.
He reached out, seized the Butcher's Nails, and tore with all his strength.
In that instant, Angron unleashed a howl of agony!
(End of Chapter)
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