Chapter 375: Brothers Meet
One by one, the cultists stepped forward to duel Kian.
He didn't bother killing any of them outright. He just cut off their hands and feet and staked them into the ground.
By now, over twenty impaled cultists lay behind him, screaming in agony.
These daemon-blessed warriors truly had absurd durability, still screaming their lungs out even after wounds like these.
While Kian carved through the enemy, the last few green defenders who'd made it this far with him had all died. Called out one by one to duel other cultists, they'd been killed to the last man. Kian was well and truly alone now.
He cut down another opponent, staked the man to the ground, and roared out.
"NEXT! Hurry it up! Send me your heads to cut, you mongrels!"
While Kian ran his one-man gauntlet, Luca's battle had reached its own climax.
By this point, every squire-suit on both sides had been reduced to wreckage. Only a handful of Knight suits remained standing.
The traitor army was down to a single Knight now. Luca's side, Luca included, had only one remaining Cerastus as well.
Luca's ally, that green-painted Cerastus, had already taken serious damage, its right arm sheared clean off at the shoulder by an enemy chainsword.
The left arm was still attached, chainsword still spinning, but the fight had taken its toll, some critical component jammed, the weapon no longer able to move.
The three remaining Knights repositioned, circling for an angle.
Through his Knight's optics, Luca stared hard at the enemy pilot. Whoever was driving that machine handled it with serious skill, possibly one of the court's veteran Knights.
If the enemy hadn't repainted his suit with skin and bone trophies, Luca might have recognized him from the paint scheme alone.
He held back, cautious. With only one intact Knight and one nearly wrecked one against an opponent this experienced, one wrong move could cost them everything.
Luca wanted to keep circling, look for an opening. But his ally, the nearly wrecked Cerastus, had other ideas.
"My liege. It seems this is where this old servant's story ends."
Luca froze. Something in that told him exactly what was coming.
"Wait, what are you—"
"My liege, our opponent is clearly a veteran, likely one of the court's old master Knights returned to the field. One misstep, and both of us die here. And you haven't forgotten, my liege, your brother, the fallen one, hasn't shown himself yet, nor has his Knight. If he arrives and joins this fight, we're both dead for certain. We cannot afford to drag this out any longer. It ends now. Go, my liege. I'll buy you your opening."
The moment the words left him, the crippled Knight suit surged forward with everything it had left, charging straight at the enemy.
"WAIT!"
Luca tried to stop him, but it was too late. His last remaining companion was already committed.
Nothing left to do but follow.
What kind of opening could a machine that size actually create for someone? Nothing but the obvious, throwing his own body into the enemy's blade, hoping for one sliver of opportunity in the gap after the strike landed.
The green Knight roared forward, closing the distance to the red one in moments.
"Die, traitor!!"
The green pilot's final battle-cry blasted over the vox, and the red Knight raised its chainsword high and brought it down, hard.
The massive adamantium chainblade, spinning at tens of thousands of revolutions per second, tore straight into the green Knight's body.
Adamantium plating and frame alike were shredded instantly by the high-speed teeth.
The cockpit was pulverized outright, the pilot's flesh and blood reduced to nothing alongside the command throne.
Having dispatched the enemy in a single stroke, the red Knight moved quickly to pull the chainsword free and reset into a defensive stance.
But before he could fully recover, Luca's Knight was already on him.
Luca's massive powered gauntlet shot out with his left hand and seized one of the enemy's chainswords in a crushing grip.
With the enemy's arm locked down, Luca drove his own chainsword deep into the enemy's abdomen with his right.
A grinding shriek of tearing metal followed, and Luca's blade punched clean through the enemy's chest cavity, pulping the pilot inside just as thoroughly as before.
CRASH! CRASH!
Two heavy impacts followed as one green and one red Knight suit hit the ground, joining the hundreds of thousands of corpses already scattered across the battlefield, meeting the same death as everyone else.
Only Luca's white suit remained standing, alone, gazing out over the corpse-strewn field, an unspoken confusion in his eyes.
He looked for an enemy, but found none within a kilometer in any direction.
A Knight's battle wasn't something mortals could take part in. Every last cultist had given him a wide berth.
Luca turned to look toward the Golden Bridge.
Dusk was settling in now, and the evacuation there was moving faster than anyone had expected. No infighting among the civilians, no scrambling over crossing priority. They simply queued in order, and when their turn came, sprinted the five hundred meters across at full speed.
Everything running smoothly, in perfect order. It looked like the evacuation might finish ahead of schedule after all.
Something in Luca eased at the sight. Their deaths hadn't been wasted.
With that thought, he turned his Knight toward the surrounding cultist forces, intending to press the attack.
But the moment he took a step, a voice blared out from a loudspeaker behind him.
"My dear brother. Where do you think you're going?"
Luca froze mid-stride and turned back toward the base of Throne Mountain.
At the foot of the mountain, past the rolling wheat fields, stood a forest of alien trees forty to fifty meters tall.
From within that treeline, a Knight suit emerged, slow and deliberate, adorned in flesh and bone, radiating pure malice.
It was a Cerastus... no. A Preceptor-pattern Knight — the largest Knight class of all, standing fifteen meters tall, a full three meters taller than Luca's own suit.
And it wasn't just taller. It was massively wider too.
The Preceptor was famous for the sheer thickness of its armour. Its skeletal frame ran twice the width of a Cerastus, wrapped in slabs of heavy adamantium plating, a walking mountain of metal.
A machine that size on the field carried a crushing sense of presence all on its own.
Luca heard the voice come through the Preceptor's vox, and his fury ignited to its absolute peak.
"FRALES!! You dare show your face to me!!"
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