Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Lin had wrested part of the automated defence network back from the machine-spirit daemons.

Banishing those machine-spirit daemons cost him nothing — his very nature saw to that. What he lacked was raw processing power; he simply could not compute fast enough to seize control of any more of the ship's systems.

Still, it was enough to buy the warriors on the front line the breathing room they desperately needed.

Automated turret fire hammered the Soul Drinkers' advance to a halt. They had expected the Imperial Fists to hold stubbornly, but the sudden surge in firepower caught them flat-footed all the same.

The lead Soul Drinker squad came apart under the bolt rounds, blood and shards of ceramite spraying across the deck.

The first casualty of a war between Space Marines had fallen, and the stench of blood in the corridors thickened by a degree.

The sons of Dorn holding the line poured out every round they had, but sheer weight of numbers carried the Soul Drinkers forward until the two forces closed to blade's reach.

The battle degenerated into a savage melee.

Zebyrean was first to reach Daenyathos at the enemy's head, driving his chainsword at the Chapter Master's flank. Daenyathos twisted aside and caught the whirring teeth on his Power Fist.

The clash became a contest of raw strength. Daenyathos pressed forward on the strength of his superior brute force, and Zebyrean gave ground step by step, looking ready to break at any moment.

But Daenyathos was in no hurry to finish him. He simply held the pressure on, grinding him back — until a Power Sword wreathed in blue arcs cut in and broke the deadlock.

"Daenyathos!" Thorne roared. "You have worn the Pain Glove! You swore the oath aboard the Shanzheng alongside every other Chapter Master! Why do you betray the Imperium now? Why betray Dorn?"

"I never cared for Dorn — but I have not betrayed the Imperium!" Daenyathos answered. Thorne's swordsmanship was formidable enough that he struggled to keep pace, yet he would not surrender the argument. "Look at what the Imperium has become. Driven to the brink by a rabble of beasts! Those mortals on Terra hold their rule together with lies and oppression. You believe you are defending the Imperium, when all you have become is the instrument of their corruption and their decay!"

Thorne said nothing. He only swung his blade.

Daenyathos' voice climbed higher. "We were meant to be humanity's saviours, to lead them into glory! Not to be shackled inside this rotting edifice!"

"Daenyathos, your words are seductive. Your deeds are treason." When Thorne finally answered, there was anger in his voice, but far more disappointment. "However many flaws the Imperium carries, it remains mankind's last hope."

"Mankind cannot be saved by a false hope! Tear it down and build anew — that is the only path! Join us, Thorne, or burn together with this rotting Imperium!"

"Ideals are never realised through betrayal and ruin. I learned that truth fifteen hundred years ago!"

"So you have chosen ruin." Daenyathos sounded almost regretful. "Then let me end your stubbornness with my own hands!"

Bold words — but Daenyathos was plainly no match for Thorne. The Power Sword found its opening and swept for his skull, the edge grazing his helm and leaving a deep gouge across the ceramite.

Daenyathos retreated, step after step. Thorne adjusted his footing and pressed the pursuit, and it seemed the duel of two Chapter Masters would end in his victory on the very next exchange.

At the critical moment, Daenyathos pulled a strange long spear from his ammunition pouch. He paid for it with a pauldron shattered by Thorne's blade, twisting his body to ram the weapon into Thorne's abdomen.

Trading wounds was nothing new to Thorne. Compared with the spearhead buried in his gut, the position of his own Power Sword promised a far more lethal outcome.

He turned the blade flat, ready to accept the injury and cut Daenyathos down where he stood — and then, to his shock, he felt the spear lodged in his belly drawing his strength out of him in a steady, unbroken stream.

Daenyathos wrenched the spear free with a snarl of a grin. Thorne staggered back several paces and collapsed, strengthless, to the deck.

The Exemplary Fists' organisation adhered strictly to the Codex, and that saved him. The litter-bearers of the Chapter Master's honour guard surged forward and put themselves between Thorne and the enemy.

Daenyathos did not pursue. He studied the blood staining the spearhead with satisfaction. He had already gotten what he came for from that single strike.

Having drunk deep of its enemy's blood, the Soulspear began to tremble faintly. The tip that housed the vortex generator glowed a dim violet beneath the film of blood, and its very shape began to change.

"At last! Not those degenerate, botched copies. This is a true son of Dorn's gene-sequence — one that can serve as a key!"

The Soulspear was commonly held to be a weapon Dorn had borne during the Great Crusade. Daenyathos knew the truth of it: Dorn had only carried it. The weapon's true origin was Abathur, Primarch of the Second Legion.

He was also the true father of the Soul Drinkers.

Daenyathos had learned that during an operation against daemons. He had refused to believe it at first — but this holy relic, usable only by one of the Second Legion's bloodline, had in the end become the core proof that convinced him.

For a century he had revealed almost nothing of that truth to his own warriors. He buried it all inside his careful preparations, waiting for the right moment.

A moment that could bring the Second Legion back from the dark.

He had tested the gene-sequence of the modern Imperial Fists long ago. The new breed, already stripped of two organs by degeneration, could never unlock the Predator's Eye.

Once he had considered that an impossible precondition — and then the summons to the Ultimate Wall handed him a chance more perfect than any he could have engineered.

These Imperial Fists, survivors of the old age, would now pave the stairway to his victory.

The weapon drained the strength of anything it pierced to feed its wielder, and once it had tasted a foe's gene-code it reshaped itself into a form specialised to kill that foe. With Thorne down beneath the Soulspear, the other warriors of the Seventh Legion could not last a single exchange against Daenyathos either.

The Chapter Master of the Soul Drinkers grew stronger with every kill, and he tore a gap in the first line of defence — only to run straight into Issaga and the Imperial Fists Dreadnought waiting behind it.

With Kurande absent, the Dreadnought had taken temporary command of the Imperial Fists, and its ferocious firepower pinned the Soul Drinkers, who had brought no heavy weapons aboard the Shanzheng. Battered by Dreadnought missiles and storm bolter fire, Daenyathos could not gain a metre.

He was not worried. He still had cards in hand. At a small gesture from him, the deepest-buried secret of the Soul Drinkers was committed to the fight.

A low, guttural roar rolled out from the Soul Drinker ranks. An instant later a squad of twisted, hideous warriors burst from the rear and charged straight at the line held by the Excoriators and the Imperial Fists.

They barely resembled human beings any longer. Abnormally elongated limbs and warped joints spoke of how deep the mutation had gone.

These things could no longer be called Astartes — xenos-like monsters whose power armour had been split and deformed by the bodies swelling inside it. Yet they moved with astonishing speed, an agility that had no business belonging to frames that size.

Loping on all fours like beasts, they braved the hail of fire and were inside the Imperial Fists' line within moments.

The Excoriators and Imperial Fists fought back with everything they had, and their weapons proved pitifully inadequate. Bolt rounds only blew open the outermost layers of flesh without touching anything vital, and chainsword strokes were batted aside by those contorted limbs.

One Imperial Fist tried to drive his chainsword through a mutant's chest. The thing's claw closed on his wrist first.

Bone snapped with a sound that set teeth on edge, the warrior's wrist crushed to pulp. Then the mutated Soul Drinker opened a maw like a red pit, engulfed the warrior's head, and blood sprayed across the deck.

Everyone was appalled by that savagery — including the Soul Drinkers who had known nothing of it.

Especially the Soul Drinkers. They understood now that the warriors who had once been their brothers were monsters, through and through.

"Daenyathos!" Issaga's voice cracked like a whip. "You have made common cause with Chaos!"

"Chaos? No. Those daemons were only a tool to reach my ends. What you see as mutation is the true potential buried in the depths of every Soul Drinker!"

Issaga was hardly going to take Daenyathos' word for it.

He reached out with his Psychic power to suppress these things that fought like possessed warriors — and reeled. There was genuinely no trace of Chaos corruption on them. If anything, they were unnaturally clean.

"What in the world are these things? How did they become this?"

Issaga had no answer, and in the heartbeat he spent stunned, Daenyathos slipped past him and came face to face with the old Imperial Fists Dreadnought.

He realised at once that this walker was a harder problem than Thorne had been.

He had meant to tear the Dreadnought's armour open with the Soulspear's vortex field and drag the veteran bodily out of his sarcophagi. But every approach he attempted was driven back by alternating bursts of bolt fire and sweeps of the Power Fist.

It hardly mattered. Daenyathos already held the advantage across the whole engagement; the Excoriators and Imperial Fists, thrown back by the mutants, could no longer hold the second line.

He ordered his Chapter's Librarians to drive the mutated Soul Drinkers with their Psychic power and tangle up the Dreadnought, then went around the walker and pushed his column onward.

"Have no fear, you will not wait long. Soon I will open the warp gate. The Shanzheng will receive its true master, and this fallen Imperium will be reborn!"

The Soul Drinkers around him, who had never been told the truth, hesitated at the sight of the grotesque mutations on their own brothers. Daenyathos did not care what his ignorant pawns thought.

The Soulspear, now shaped to kill Imperial Fists, made him unstoppable. He led the mutants from the front, and no son of Dorn who dared bar his path survived two exchanges.

As he and his honour guard drove into the inner ring, the pressure on the outer line — now facing only wavering Soul Drinkers — dropped away. The surviving defenders quickly reclaimed the breached positions, but the fact that Daenyathos was already inside left them at a loss.

The inner ring was held by Lin alone and the veterans from Cthonia at his side. Could they truly stop Daenyathos, who was carving through everything in his path?

"We cannot abandon the outer line, and we cannot leave Magos Lin to fight alone."

Wounded as he was, Thorne was the first to make the call. He was in no condition to fight, so whoever went in had to be chosen from among the others. Having learned that Issaga's Psychic power had no purchase on the mutants, Thorne turned his gaze to his own first-company captain.

"Zebyrean. I doubt whether you can bear this burden. But right now you are the only one who can carry out the task."

The words cut the captain deep. Zebyrean, who moments earlier had helped the honour guard drag Thorne clear and still wore his Chapter Master's blood on his armour, said nothing much at all. He only lowered his head and promised, "I will do everything I can."

No one saw the flicker of something hard and cold in his eyes.

After skewering the last two Imperial Fists who dared stand in his way, Daenyathos finally came within reach of his objective — the Predator's Eye, hidden in the depths of the Shanzheng.

The instant his gaze touched that unopened vortex, Daenyathos trembled from head to foot with excitement. Then a single warrior with a strange weapon stepped into his path: the last obstacle between him and the return of the Second Legion.

He wore Imperial Fists power armour and carried a long blade of unusual make. Daenyathos had never seen a weapon like it, but he could feel the singular presence radiating from the man.

It was familiar and alien at once, like a resonance rising out of the blood itself.

"Who are you?" he asked before he could stop himself. The Soulspear quivered faintly in his grip, as though answering the stranger's arrival.

"Admidel." The reply was short, the voice low and level.

Daenyathos frowned. The name meant nothing to him. He did not care who the man was — only how quickly he could remove the obstruction.

The mutated Soul Drinkers swarmed past him, tying down every warrior except Admidel and leaving the duelling ground to Daenyathos.

Daenyathos stowed the Soulspear and struck first.

Admidel's footwork was light and rooted at once; evasion seemed to have been written into his instincts. Not one of Daenyathos' movements touched him. Every time he slipped a blow, his return cut landed — and though none of them found a vital point, that alone was proof enough of who held the upper hand.

The longer the fight ran, the colder Daenyathos felt. He had never faced an opponent this difficult. He had thrown everything he possessed into it and was still being forced backwards, step by step.

But a battle is never decided by strength alone.

Certain that his opponent knew nothing of the Soulspear's specialised effect, Daenyathos ripped the weapon back out and swung it in a savage arc, meaning to smash through Admidel's guard by main force. Admidel simply flicked his wrist over, and the edge of the katana struck the spear's haft with perfect precision.

The impact tore the Soulspear from Daenyathos' hands and sent it spinning into the air.

But the vortex field had already engaged before the weapon was flung clear. It shredded Admidel's power armour, and the spear point pierced his skin before Daenyathos ever lost his grip.

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