Chapter 76 - The Sons of the Emperor Are Very Happy Today
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Seeing that familiar bald head, Valerian's fingers spasmed. He reached instinctively for the Custodian halberd lying nearby, every last shred of him wanting to drive the blade into this eternal traitor's throat.
His body wouldn't move.
Not just the wounds. Something else. A perception so strange it stopped him cold.
Horus had pulled him back from the edge, then simply moved on. He and Guilliman hit the crimson tide of Khorne daemons together, and that was that.
Every Custodian who saw Horus froze.
Then, almost as one, they understood.
If the Arch-Traitor, who should have been annihilated body and soul ten thousand years ago, was standing here swinging a power axe through greater daemons, only one explanation held.
The Eternal Sovereign had absolved him.
However much it defied reason. However completely it shattered everything they thought they knew. The will from the Throne was the only truth that mattered.
Valerian coughed up blood, forced himself upright on his good arm, grabbed his halberd, and staggered after them.
"Then let's kill," he muttered through his teeth.
The battle had stopped resembling a defensive line entirely.
It was two uncontrolled human meat grinders.
Guilliman's cobalt-blue armor blazed across the blood-soaked field. The Lord of Ultramar swept his broad greatsword in great burning arcs, golden flames trailing each stroke, and a dozen daemons evaporated with every pass, brass weapons and all.
Horus was worse.
He didn't bother dodging the lesser creatures at all. His massive frame simply crashed through three Flesh Hounds trying to flank him. His left hand clamped around a Bloodletter's throat, squeezed once, and the crack of snapping vertebrae rang out clean and sharp. The daemon's head rolled to the edge of the battlement.
"Roboute!"
Horus's voice detonated across the primarchs' encrypted channel, thunderously loud, shot through with wild abandon.
"How long has it been since the two of us fought back-to-back like this?!"
Guilliman split a Bloodletter lunging straight at his face. Golden fire trailed the blade and flung a crescent wall of flame that drove back the next wave.
His breathing was perfectly steady. His voice was not.
"The Battle of Ullanor, brother! The first time we ever fought side by side, teaching those greenskin orks what war looks like!"
Horus laughed, and the channel crackled with it.
No shadow of ten thousand years in that laugh. No weight of betrayal.
Just pure, uncut exhilaration. The joy of a man who had set down every burden he had ever carried.
Nothing in the universe could have felt better than this moment.
Their Father's absolution. Their Father's way of speaking to them. His manner was unhinged, yes, but to Guilliman and Horus, it was something they had never once been given. No distance between sovereign and subject. No careful formality. Something closer to family. Something closer to friends. It reached the part of them that had always been, underneath everything else, a child wanting to be seen.
They had their Father's recognition.
And more than that: they were the first sons to ever speak with him like this. Could any of their brothers say the same?!
"That time was different, Roboute!" Horus launched himself skyward. His power axe came down from the apex of the arc and split a brass-armored daemon, shield and all, clean in half as it crested the wall.
He landed. His boot crushed the daemon's chest into the stone. He raised the axe.
"At Ullanor, we fought as Legion Masters! But today, we fight as blood brothers!"
That shout hit Guilliman somewhere deep and set it alight.
The ruler of the Five Hundred Worlds, the man every strategist in the Imperium had spent ten thousand years trying to imitate, threw out every tactical doctrine he had ever written.
"I am honored, brother!"
"As am I! My brother, let us find out which of us kills the most!"
Both primarchs erupted into laughter that felt like it could tear the sky open.
Across the line, the Khorne daemons stared at these two sons of a god and found them more terrifying than anything they had brought to Terra.
They had come to spread fear. Instead they had become experience fodder for a kill-count competition.
The Bloodletters in the front rank took two steps back without meaning to. The hands gripping their hellblades were shaking.
Don't come any closer.
"Kill for the living! Kill for the dead!"
Horus threw his head back and loosed the wildest battle cry he had in him, into the blood-soaked wind.
"Kill for the Master of Mankind! Kill for our Father!"
"Courage and Honor!" Guilliman came right behind him. The Emperor's Sword erupted into a pillar of fire. "For our Father!"
Two demigods carved forward, and the pressure on the wall dropped like a stone.
But Khorne's armies did not rout from fear.
On the right flank, where the defensive line had collapsed entirely, a Bloodthirster hauled itself over the breach on a mountain of its own dead. Its bulk matched the greater daemon from before, every inch of it. Brazen hellfire burned across its body. One lash of the bone whip shattered two Ultramarine veterans and sent them spinning off the hundred-meter wall.
As the monster turned toward the inner courtyard, a dark figure stepped into its path.
Cullen.
The Dark Angels veteran stood in the Bloodthirster's way with his masterwork power greatsword held in a reverse grip, both hands, the ancient runes along the blade catching the firelight. He planted himself and did not move.
A few hours ago, he would have run the numbers. Assessed the gap. Chosen to skirmish and stall, buying time for Grey Knight or Custodian support to arrive.
Not now.
He had received absolution.
The Old Sword.
The Absolver Angels.
The Lion, soon to wake.
The three concepts crashed through him like a current, and his adrenaline hit a height he had never touched in ten thousand years of war.
The Bloodthirster exhaled a gust of sulfurous, scalding breath. Its legs drove into the stone and the brazen greataxe came screaming down at Cullen's skull.
"Repent! This day marks thy death!"
Cullen stepped into the swing.
The power sword's disruption field blazed to its absolute limit, the hum rising to a near-shattering shriek. He read the gap in the daemon's arc, dropped into a slide, and drove himself straight under the giant's legs.
The blade came up through the gap in the armor, punched into flesh, and tore upward. Half a meter of ruin opened in the daemon's thigh.
Scalding blood poured over him. He didn't notice. Both legs kicked off the stone and he launched himself up along the daemon's back, into the air.
The Bloodthirster screamed and wheeled, bone whip cracking.
Cullen was already faster. The killing craft of the First Legion's ancient knights, preserved across ten millennia, executed itself without hesitation.
He caught the whip under his boot, used the momentum, and flipped. He came out of the somersault at exactly the height of the daemon's head.
"For the Emperor!"
The roar tore out of him raw.
"For the Lion!"
The power greatsword drove into the Bloodthirster's left eye with everything he had. The blade punched through the brain and burst out the back of the skull.
Cullen locked both hands on the hilt and rode the fall. The daemon's head split in two.
BOOM!
The colossal body hit the ground and the dust rose in a wave.
Cullen knelt on one knee atop the corpse. He pulled his sword free. His chest heaved. Every inch of him radiated something cold and absolute, the killing intent of a man who had been waiting ten thousand years for this exact moment.
Nearby, a cluster of Primaris Space Marines had stopped fighting entirely. They stood with weapons lowered, staring at the black-armored veteran who had just soloed a greater daemon.
On the wall, the tide turned.
Two primarchs killing without limit. The Custodians and Grey Knights holding the reformed line. Khorne's daemon army, which had never once broken from fear, was being ground back. The front was moving. Their line was retreating.
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(Next chapter brings the Great Angel. Quick question for everyone: should we bring Loken along too? Drop a 1 for yes, 2 for no.)
➤ Next: Double Yolk! — Tears Unshed
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