The smoke and dust slowly settled.
The scene at the bottom of the colossal crater in the center of the industrial zone finally became clear to all the survivors.
And every single survivor drew a sharp, collective breath.
At the bottom of the crater, the two daemons were still standing.
The Lord of Bizarre Mysteries had lost six of its arms. Of the remaining three, the two holding the scepter and the dagger had been snapped in half.
Of its three heads, one was completely gone, one only had half a jaw left, and while the third was relatively intact, its left eye had been blown out, leaving a gaping hole oozing blue pus.
"Know... ledge..." It spoke using its remaining head, every syllable sounding like grinding gears. "Will not... perish..."
The Slaughterer of Fury was in even worse shape.
Its sixteen-meter-tall body was covered in cracks, like a terracotta warrior on the verge of shattering.
Its left arm was completely gone from the elbow down. While its right arm was still intact, three of the fingers gripping its great-axe had been severed.
The blood-flames surrounding its body had shrunk to a paper-thin layer, barely enough to cover its skin.
But its three eyes still burned with pure, unadulterated lust for slaughter.
"Blood..." It growled, its voice hoarse. "Not enough..."
Kans Atens stood at the edge of the crater. Beneath his faceplate, his face was completely drained of color.
"How... how is this possible..." He muttered. His voice broadcasted through his external vox-speakers, carrying a distinct tremble. "The psionic detonation of three hundred Psykers... over three hundred purification shells..."
"Data confirmed." Scoria Kane's mechanical voice chimed in. "Although the energy levels of the two Warp entities have dropped by eighty-seven point three percent, their core existence... remains unbroken."
"What does that mean?" Busir Hysman hissed, his purple robes soaked in sweat and clinging to his body.
"It means," Landon Atens's voice echoed from the cockpit of Iron Guard, carrying a calmness laced with despair, "they are immortal… at least on Aurelian IV, with our current means... we cannot kill them."
Those words sounded like a final death knell.
The surviving soldiers on the battlefield heard it.
The PDF conscripts still fighting lesser daemons, the battered local guard troops, the Knight pilots with damaged mechs and depleted ammunition...
In that moment, morale completely collapsed.
"We can't kill them..." A PDF soldier threw down his lasgun and burst into tears, clutching his head. "We can't kill them... we're all going to die... we're all going to die here..."
His sobbing spread like an infectious disease.
The first soldier turned and ran.
Then a second, then a third...
"No retreating! Commissars! Open fire!"
Kans roared over the channel, but even the commissars themselves were backing away.
They saw it.
At the bottom of the crater, the surviving head of the Lord of Bizarre Mysteries was slowly turning.
Its one good eye swept across the battlefield—across the broken soldiers, the surviving Knight Mechs, the Mechanicus positions.
"Fear..." It spoke, its voice carrying a morbid sense of delight. "...Is also... a form of knowledge… Collect... must collect..."
It raised its one remaining intact arm—the one holding the quill.
The tip of the quill traced a stroke through the empty air.
With every stroke, a fleeing soldier would suddenly freeze. Blue liquid mixed with brain matter would pour from their orifices before they collapsed, dead.
The eyes of the dead were locked wide open, their pupils reflecting rapidly flashing digits.
In the fraction of a second before they died, they were forcibly injected with an amount of knowledge that exceeded the processing limit of the human brain.
"It is... collecting data on the fear of death..." Scoria's mechanical eye flashed frantically. "All units! Do not listen to its voice!"
But it was too late.
Across the battlefield, dozens more soldiers dropped dead in the exact same manner.
The Slaughterer of Fury began to move.
It took a step, dragging its broken body as it slowly climbed up the edge of the crater.
With every step, the cracks on its body widened, but its speed was actually increasing.
"Blood..." It repeated the word, raising its chipped great-axe with its right arm. "Need... more..."
A damaged Warglaive Knight attempted to intercept it.
The pilot was a young man, only twenty-five years old, a scion of a branch family of House Atens.
The servo-motors in his mech's left leg had failed, forcing it to limp forward, but he still raised his chain-cleaver.
"For the House! For—"
The great-axe swung down.
There was no technique, no flair. Just the simplest, most brutal chopping motion.
But this strike carried the fury of a Khornate daemon, and the purest thirst for slaughter.
The Warglaive's ion shield popped like a soap bubble. The chain-cleaver was snapped in half. And the mech itself, from head to toe, was neatly cleaved in two.
The promethium fuel tank detonated. The fireball swallowed the cockpit, and swallowed the young man's unfinished oath.
"Retreat..." Kans heard himself speak, his voice so dry it didn't even sound like his own. "All units... commence orderly retreat..."
He knew what those words meant.
It meant that in this war that had lasted for dozens of days, they had lost.
It meant that the hundreds of thousands of troops and hundreds of precious machines the four major factions had invested were all wasted.
It meant that Aru City... would likely fall.
But what else could they do?
They couldn't kill them.
They really couldn't kill them.
Busir Hysman had collapsed beside the command vehicle, his purple robes covered in dirt, his eyes hollow.
Scoria Kane's mechanical arms hung limply at his sides. The cyborg seemed to be calculating the retreat route that offered the highest probability of survival for their units.
Landon Atens sat in the cockpit of Iron Guard, watching the red daemon drawing closer step by step on his screen. His hand hovered over the emergency ejection button, but he couldn't bring himself to press it.
A Knight of House Atens could die in battle, but could never...
"What is that?"
Suddenly, a voice crackled over the channel.
It was a squad leader still on the frontline.
Kans looked up at the sky.
The grey, overcast sky of Aurelian IV was currently... being torn open.
It was as if a pair of invisible, gargantuan hands were ripping the firmament apart down the middle.
Behind the rift was the presence of something heavy and freezing cold—the energy turbulence generated by the friction between a warship's Void Shields and the material universe.
Then, the prow emerged.
It was a warship so massive it defied imagination.
The hull was over twenty kilometers long, colored in dark grey, and covered in overlapping layers of armor plating. Every single plate was etched with intricate mechanical patterns and holy runes.
The prow was shaped like a massive fist—the classic design of Imperial warships.
But this ship's fist was even larger, its edges sharp and defined, as if ready to smash a world to pieces at any moment.
Along both sides of the hull, an incredibly dense array of turrets deployed. Macro-cannons, lance batteries, torpedo tubes... the charging glow of those muzzles formed a cold, sweeping sea of stars.
"A Gloriana-class..."
For the first time, Scoria Kane's mechanical voice displayed a distinct emotional fluctuation—a tremor of awe mixed with sheer terror. "The Battleship... Fist of Iron..."
He recognized this ship.
Eighty years ago, this was the exact ship that led the fleet to Aurelian IV, using orbital bombardment to wipe the Blaec House off the map.
And now, it has returned.
As the Fist of Iron fully translated from the Warp, more silhouettes appeared behind the torn sky.
Battle Barges, Strike Cruisers, Frigates, Destroyers... a total of thirty-seven warships forming an Expeditionary Fleet formation.
They didn't open fire immediately. They simply hovered there.
The battlefield suddenly went dead silent.
Even the Horrors and Bloodletters chasing down soldiers stopped in their tracks. They looked up at the sky, letting out low, uneasy growls.
The remaining head of the Lord of Bizarre Mysteries spun wildly, calculating. It was desperately trying to calculate these newly introduced variables.
The Slaughterer of Fury simply roared at the heavens, raising its great-axe and issuing a bellow of challenge.
Suddenly drop pods descended.
Thousands of flaming meteors tore through the atmosphere, dragging long contrails behind them as they smashed toward the battlefield at a near-vertical angle.
"Drop pods!" Kans shrieked hoarsely. "All units! Take cover!"
But the target of those drop pods wasn't them.
The vast majority of the drop pods smashed precisely into the center of the industrial zone, forming a perimeter around the two daemon lords and landing in the most densely populated clusters of lesser daemons.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!!!
The impacts sounded like war drums.
The instant the drop pods cratered into the ground, their doors blew open. These were the pinnacle of assault drop pod design, capable of deploying their payload in 0.3 seconds.
A legion of giants stepped out.
Silver-grey Power Armor, their left pauldrons etched with the emblem of a clenched fist—the Iron Hands.
Standing at an average height of 2.3 meters and weighing over half a ton, every step they took made the ground tremble slightly.
Bolters, Chainswords, Meltaguns, Plasma Cannons... their weapons glinted with a cold metallic luster under the dim sky of Aurelian IV.
Their numbers exceeded five thousand.
Five thousand Adeptus Astartes. Soldiers of the Iron Hands Legion. The Emperor's Angels of Death.
The moment they stepped out of the drop pods, they formed combat formations.
In the front rank, three hundred warriors raised their Bolters simultaneously.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The roar of .75 caliber mass-reactive bolts firing in perfect unison sounded like a chorus of death.
In front of them, hundreds of lesser daemons were instantly torn to shreds.
The geometric shields of the Horrors?
They couldn't last 0.5 seconds against saturation Bolter fire.
The berserk charges of the Bloodletters?
Compared to the neural reaction speeds of the Astartes, they looked like they were moving in slow motion.
The snapping jaws of the Flesh Hounds?
They couldn't even scratch the ceramite coating of the Power Armor.
Slaughter.
This was true slaughter.
Five thousand Astartes operated like a single, precise, hyper-efficient killing machine, beginning to purge the battlefield.
They divided into dozens of squads, each with clearly defined objective zones.
Heavy weapon squads provided suppression, assault squads handled the purges, and tactical squads flanked and divided the enemy...
Did the daemons fight back?
Yes.
But it was useless.
A Bloodletter had finally managed to charge right in front of an Iron Hands warrior and swung its great-axe down.
The Iron Hands warrior didn't even bother to dodge; he simply raised his left arm.
CLANG!
The great-axe struck the vambrace of the Power Armor, kicking up a shower of sparks and leaving a white scratch on the ceramite. That was it.
Then, the Iron Hands warrior threw a right cross.
It wasn't an ordinary punch. The servo-motors in the Power Armor fired at maximum output, driving the fist at speeds exceeding two hundred kilometers per hour. The knuckles were wreathed in a pale blue disruption field—a Power Fist.
The Bloodletter's chest was punched clean through.
The Iron Hands warrior pulled his fist back, flicked the daemon blood and gore off his gauntlet, and kept walking, firing a short burst from his Bolter to kill another Horror thirty meters away.
The entire sequence took less than two seconds.
Cold, ruthless mechanization.
This was the Iron Hands.
–
High up in the warehouse district, the players were utterly dumbfounded.
[Have You Been Loyal Today?]: "HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT! DROP PODS! ASTARTES!, THOSE ARE ACTUAL SPACE MARINES!"
[Tax Bro]: "Five thousand! Five thousand Space Marines! The scale! The sheer flex!"
[Did White Scars Speed Today?]: "That Power Armor... those are the Iron Hands, right? That clenched fist on the left shoulder, it absolutely has to be!"
[God-Tier Mechanic]: "A Gloriana-class Battleship... the Fist of Iron... That's the flagship of Ferrus Manus, Primarch of the Iron Hands! The Primarch is here! The Primarch came personally!"
[Execute War Criminal Weasels]: "So we're getting a live, front-row seat to Space Marines fighting daemons before the Horus Heresy?! This ticket paid for itself!"
[Slaanesh's Chosen Failed the Selection Again]: "Not gonna lie, these Iron Hands look completely devoid of emotion, but their fighting style is cool as hell..."
[Iced Old Man Yellow's Golden Radish]: "If only I could screen record this! If I posted this on the forums, I'd become famous instantly!"
Paul stood in front of the players, not participating in the chaotic celebration in the channel.
He quietly observed the battlefield, watching the hyper-efficient slaughter of the Iron Hands warriors, and staring at the Gloriana-class Battleship hovering in the sky.
From that warship, he felt an immense, freezing cold willpower—a presence harboring the explosive force of a volcano—casting its gaze down and sweeping across the entire battlefield.
That was... the willpower of the Iron Hands Primarch.
--
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