Chapter 107 - Kabanda: Holy Shit, Primarchs! Two of Them!!
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Yor opened her mouth. Her parched throat couldn't make a sound.
The five surviving Blood Knights stood frozen, clutching their battered chainswords.
The red sand filling the sky was torn apart by a pure white radiance. That face, the one they had only ever seen on monastery frescoes and reliquary icons, hung suspended in midair, real and undeniable.
Golden hair billowed.
White wings unfurled.
No retinal image needed to confirm it. The Astartes' two hearts hammered frantic alarms inside their chests. The source-blood deep in their genes was boiling.
It was the absolute bond etched into the deepest layer of every double helix.
The Creator.
The Gene-Sire.
The Great Angel Sanguinius.
Returned. Alive.
Several hundred meters away, in the ruins of a defensive line, reddish-brown earth exploded upward.
Ka'Bandha's massive, malformed body heaved aside several tons of rubble, its hideous face caked in dust and grime. The arrogant Bloodthirster had just eaten a brutal kick. Its great axe was buried in a dirt slope twenty meters away.
By any reasonable logic, a Bloodthirster humiliated should erupt in thunderous rage and start killing everything in reach.
Ka'Bandha froze instead.
It stared up at the white-winged figure in the sky. Its wide nostrils blasted two jets of scorching sulfur smoke in rapid succession.
Two seconds passed.
A howl of utterly maniacal laughter rolled across the entire battlefield of Baal Primus. The sand and stones on the ground rattled with the frequency of it.
"Your return delights me! Angel!"
Ka'Bandha threw its blood-soaked maw wide open, completely indifferent to the face it had just lost. It spread its tattered, fleshy wings and thrust both arms forward in a grotesque, exaggerated embrace.
"Magnificent! This is simply magnificent!" The excitement in Ka'Bandha's voice was raw and obvious. The Warp storms churning around it intensified in response.
By the Bloodthirster's reckoning, slaughtering those tireless Tyranid crawlers was nothing but eating day-old swill. Beating the sons of the Blood Angels was, at most, a cold appetizer. A snack.
But this man in the air.
This man who had once beaten it to a pulp, flawless, perfect, the master of the Ninth Legion.
This was the supreme prey Ka'Bandha's heart had craved to break with its own hands across ten thousand years.
"Oh, beautiful Sanguinius!"
Ka'Bandha's colossal body surged forward, striding across a carpet of corpses with the energy of a deranged stalker who had finally laid eyes on the object of a ten-millennium obsession.
"Mighty Sanguinius!"
"Perfect Sanguinius!"
The Greater Daemon lashed the ground before it with its barbed whip. The earth split open in a trench several meters deep.
"You have finally appeared before me once more! What method should I use to properly catch up on these ten thousand years between us? Every day in the Warp, I dream of savoring the sound of your fists cracking against my bones!"
In midair.
Sanguinius kept his chin slightly lowered.
He couldn't even be bothered to frown.
The moment this Khornate mad dog opened its mouth, the air around it went rotten.
"Reminiscing is hardly necessary, Ka'Bandha."
The Great Angel turned his wrist and slowly drew the Blade Encarmine. The broad blade's edge blazed with a blinding corona of energy.
"I will repeat what I did on the primary world of Signus." His tone was calm, almost conversational, as if recounting a mundane errand. "Stomp your spine to pieces. Then tear your wings off while you're still breathing."
Sanguinius swept his arm up, sword tip leveled at Ka'Bandha's face.
"Or I could reenact the scene before the Eternity Gate ten thousand years ago. Lift you high, break your back, and kick what's left of you back into the cesspit of the Warp."
Two direct strikes at the Bloodthirster's darkest defeats — the Great Crusade, the Heresy. Ka'Bandha didn't leap up in fury. Its twisted, flesh-stacked face only grew more exhilarated.
"Yes! That's it! That is the most precious gift the Blood God has granted me for returning to the materium after ten thousand years!" The Greater Daemon hammered its thick chestplate, took a massive stride, and coiled to launch itself into a duel ten millennia in the making.
Its feet hadn't left the ground.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
A sharp electronic chirp cut through the battlefield from somewhere between the two sides.
A cylindrical metal device, barely the size of two palms, its casing scratched and battered, dropped from above the cloud layer without warning. It punched straight into the hard soil with a wet thud.
A psychic teleportation beacon.
The next instant.
Blazing white light detonated above it.
The light collapsed inward and sealed shut.
A suit of armor appeared at the center of the battlefield. Pearl white. Enormously framed, a full size larger than standard Terminator plate. It hit the ground with a sound that pressed against the chest. The shockwave pushed the red sand outward in a perfect ring around its boots.
That completely bare, unadorned bald head.
That suit of Serpent's Scales power armor, redesigned and rebuilt by Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, shoulders and arms bristling with miniature firepower modules.
The newcomer exhaled a slow breath of hot air. He rolled his thick neck left, then right. Several crisp pops of bone.
Everyone on the battlefield went still.
Everyone except Sanguinius.
Yor's fingers spasmed on her chainsword grip. The hilt nearly slipped from her gauntlet entirely. Her brain stopped working.
Behind her, the five surviving Blood Knights looked ready to lose their eyeballs through their helmet lenses.
Horus.
Horus, alive, standing right in front of them.
The Blood Knights surged forward on instinct to protect Sanguinius. A single look from the Great Angel stopped them cold. Gentle. Absolute.
"Just watch, my sons." Sanguinius said softly.
Across the field, Ka'Bandha stared at the enormous bald head before it. Its blood-red eyes were wide with something it almost never felt.
Shock.
"Horus Lupercal?!"
Ka'Bandha roared. "I thought that Abaddon whelp was only spreading rumors! I never imagined you, you bald bastard, actually came back to life!"
Sanguinius descended slowly and came to stand at Horus's side.
Gold and white, shoulder to shoulder. The two most legendary Primarchs in the history of the human Imperium. The battle-intent that erupted from them was enough to crack the sky.
"No more words, daemon." Horus's voice rang out like a thunderclap, majestic and enormous. "My brother and I are going to beat you back to nothing today!"
The Warmaster took one heavy step forward. The wind howled against his armor.
"You once said you would exterminate my sons and destroy everything I cherish." Sanguinius raised the Blade Encarmine. His eyes were cold as a blade's edge. "But I have returned. Ka'Bandha, shoulder to shoulder with my brother, I will banish you once more."
The last word landed.
BOOM. BOOM.
Both Primarchs moved at the same instant. No warning. No hesitation. They exploded forward at a speed Yor and the Blood Knights couldn't even track, carrying force enough to unmake the world, and drove straight at the Bloodthirster's grinning face.
"THEN COME AND FIGHT! SONS OF THE ACCURSED ONE!"
Ka'Bandha screamed with pure joy. Defeat or death — it didn't matter. To fight these two again, after ten thousand years?
Worth every drop of blood it was about to spend.
➤ Next: The Battle for Baal (4)
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