Chapter 172 - The Phoenician's Sacrifice
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"I can feel it — his combat strength is fading."
Cullen's voice was low and taut. Kaelen followed his gaze.
Two figures tangled together at speeds that defeated even afterimages. All Kaelen could see were cold flashes of steel blinking in and out of the poison mist like lightning churning inside a thunderhead.
Each clash of metal reached his ears half a second late. The earth kept trembling in the lingering wake of the shockwaves.
"I can't see anything! Cullen! Whose strength is fading?" Kaelen shouted.
His naked eyes couldn't track a primarch-level fight. All he had was a blurred smear of purple burning across the scorched earth at impossible speed.
"Lord Clone Fulgrim!"
Kaelen's pupils shrank. "We have to help him."
"Sending the battle-automata now!"
Four battle-automata broke from Kaelen's escort at the order. Their massive metal frames ground across the scorched earth. Each raised a weapon from the Dark Age of Technology, trained on that eerie purple shape in the distance, and opened fire.
Beams and solid rounds wove into a wall of firepower, closing on the fallen serpent with enough force to shred Space Marine plate.
The Phoenician read his allies' intent instantly. He blurred backward several hundred meters, purple cloak cutting a clean arc through the poison mist, threading the fire coverage zone without a scratch.
The battle-automata were already at the mechanical limit of their reaction speed. The fallen primarch was faster.
His long serpentine tail played across the scorched earth in smooth, unhurried glides, sidestepping every round with a handful of sharp angles that looked almost contemptuous.
Then, between one evasion and the next, those purple eyes found Kaelen.
They cut through the smoke and the mist and the layered ranks of escorts and landed on one mortal standing far back in the line.
When Mortarion had first touched down on Iax, he had given specific instructions: watch for a certain mortal in the rear of Guilliman's column. A mortal with an unusually close relationship to the loyalist primarchs.
The Lord of Death had been clear. This mortal was the one who had brought back Horus and Sanguinius. This mortal was the unpredictable variable that had upended the gods' game entirely.
"Found you, little one."
The fallen serpent's lips curved slowly. The longsword in his hand gave a lazy flick, and what followed was a wave of purple flame the size of a landslide.
It carried the pleasure-force of Slaanesh, roaring forward in a wall of fire that warped the very air into obscene shapes as it came.
The four battle-automata never got the chance to recalibrate. The flames swallowed them whole.
Dark Age of Technology plate crumpled like paper before the power of the Warp. All four automata were sheared cleanly in half.
Guilliman's Librarians were forced to split their numbers, joining the Prophet Natas in throwing up a new psychic barrier at maximum speed.
Wraithbone runes wove a translucent wall of light across the air. Purple fire crashed into it and erupted in a blinding flash.
The barrier caught the worst of it, barely. Under the crushing weight of the impact it let out a grinding, splintering groan.
It held. But the shockwave that rolled off the collision hit Kaelen like a fist to the face, and for a moment he couldn't open his eyes.
He was not going to just stand here and die.
Kaelen clenched his jaw against the howling wind and drove his consciousness inward.
[System — exchange for a powerful offensive consumable!]
The System shop interface bloomed open in his mind.
No time to browse. He grabbed the first thing available and exchanged for an Emperor's Tarot card.
He was going to run the same play he had used against Magnus. But when he flipped the card over, he stopped.
Not [The Wheel of Fortune] — the card of reversed destiny.
[Sacrifice]. The card of selfless giving.
Kaelen stared at it. Why this one?
He never got to think it through.
A purple shape materialized in front of him like a ghost.
The fallen serpent had moved faster than even Cullen could track. The old knight's hand had barely touched his sword hilt when the daemon primarch's blade was already sweeping for Kaelen's throat.
That perfect, corrupted face filled his vision in an instant, the purple eyes bright with pleasure.
There was no dodging this.
The icy edge was a hair from Kaelen's skin when the mind-scarab on his shoulder blazed to life. Both mechanical eyes detonated in a burst of brilliant green light.
A powerful energy barrier snapped into existence, a transparent hemisphere that sealed Kaelen and Cullen inside it.
The blade came down on the barrier and exploded into a shower of blinding sparks.
Trazyn's gift. It held.
But a barrier has an overload threshold.
The fallen serpent's smile didn't waver. If anything, it sharpened with excitement.
He laid his blade flat against the barrier and pushed. All four arms drove force into the edge simultaneously. Purple daemonic power flooded the steel like a tide.
Cracks split outward from the contact point, spreading inch by inch across the surface with a sound like grinding teeth.
Kaelen's first instinct was to run, grab Cullen and get clear before the barrier broke. Then he realized the shield was a hemisphere. Solid ground beneath, nowhere to go. They were trapped.
The barrier couldn't hold. It blew apart.
The fallen serpent laughed and swung his blade at Kaelen in one savage, accelerating arc.
A purple figure arrived at the last possible second.
The Phoenician.
He had come, but he was one moment too late.
One more second and he could have used his sword to intercept the blow. But there was no more time for that. The only way to save Kaelen and Cullen now was to spend his own life doing it. Put his body between that blade and the mortal.
Would a gene-primarch do that for a single mortal?
The answer was,
Warm liquid touched Kaelen's face.
He opened his eyes.
A purple back stood between him and the blade. Broad shoulders, still as a wall, holding the line with nothing but flesh and blood.
The fallen serpent's sword had passed clean through the Phoenician's chest. Purple blood ran slow and steady down the flat of the blade, each drop hitting the scorched earth and blooming there like a strange flower.
Sacrifice.
The selfless kind.
The fallen serpent stared at it for a moment, arm frozen in the air.
Something unreadable flickered through those purple eyes.
Then he smiled.
"I never expected to kill you like this, clone. Not in battle." His voice was almost quiet, the tone of a man noting a minor inconvenience. "Was it worth it?"
Blood poured from the Phoenician's mouth. It ran down his jaw in a thin, steady stream.
With tremendous effort, he turned his head and looked at Kaelen.
He smiled.
Not the smile of a daemon primarch. Not the smile that made worlds flinch and kneel. This was a wide, open, tooth-baring grin, full of confidence and resolve and something unbroken.
It was the smile of a man who, in the last moments of his life, had finally become entirely himself.
He turned back to face the original.
"I have a clear conscience," he said.
Every trace of expression left the fallen serpent's face.
He went still. That handsome face, identical to the clone's feature for feature, turned to cold marble.
Then, without any expression at all, he drove a second blade through the clone's body.
"What a nauseating answer."
"NO!"
The howl came from across the battlefield. Konrad Curze, collapsed in Sevatar's arms, screamed like something had been torn out of him.
The Night Haunter's cry cut through every sound on the field.
He thrashed, trying to get up. His pitch-black eyes were wet for the first time, grief and rage boiling together in equal measure.
He wanted to close that distance. Wanted to put his lightning claws through the serpent that had taken his clone-brother.
But the toxin in his chest wound was accelerating. The curse-power clawed deeper into his primarch body with every second, working its way along that bone-deep gash.
He managed one step. Then the Night Haunter went down hard.
The situation collapsed all at once.
Kaelen's automata guard surged forward. Cullen drew his sword in the same breath. They threw themselves at the fallen primarch together, chasing whatever slim chance remained.
The fallen serpent barely looked at them. He flicked his tail, and it swept out like a cracking whip, and everyone went airborne.
"Quite a theatrical performance, isn't it?"
His tail coiled around Kaelen and lifted him slowly up to eye level.
That face, layered with corruption's markings, was inches from Kaelen's own. The purple eyes glittered with something dangerous and curious at the same time.
"Mortarion tells me you banished Magnus. That even the Changer of Ways has dealt with you personally." He tilted his head. "What exactly are you, little one?"
"Give me a satisfying answer and perhaps I'll make your death quick." A low, amused sound. "Though I'll admit — what I'd really love is to see the look on my dear brother Horus's face when he finds your body. Heh."
Kaelen suppressed the revulsion with everything he had. The serpent's tongue moved across his face in slow, deliberate strokes, and he endured it without flinching.
He did not struggle. He held those purple eyes and stared straight back.
"Witnessing miracles. Changing the shape of the story. That is what I am."
"My name is Kaelen."
"Very good." The fallen serpent nodded, the way someone might acknowledge the name of a dish they were about to eat.
His right arm came up. The blade was still wet with the Phoenician's blood.
"Then die."
The words hadn't finished leaving his mouth when he stopped.
His eyes dropped to Kaelen's pupils and found a reflection there. Not power rising from within Kaelen. Something else entirely. A blazing fire closing from behind him at meteor speed.
A warhammer, fully wreathed in roaring flame, introduced itself to the daemon primarch's face.
BOOM!
The flames detonated outward on impact into a blinding sphere of light.
The fallen serpent's tail released Kaelen on pure reflex. His whole body launched backward like a purple cannonball and crashed into the filth-soaked mire of Nurgle.
Putrid mud erupted several meters into the air and swallowed him whole in that reeking swamp.
When the fallen Fulgrim clawed his way back upright, he found the mire around him considerably more crowded than it had been.
A ring of Astartes warriors now surrounded Kaelen and Cullen and the others, every one of them burning.
And at the center of that ring stood a giant, flame-wreathed figure with two metal arms.
He gripped his still-burning warhammer in both hands. His eyes were filled with fire. He stared at the mire-soaked daemon primarch in front of him, and the heat rolling off his body burned Nurgle's poison mist to nothing.
The fallen serpent's voice came out barely above a whisper, stripped of all its theater.
"Ferrus?"
➤ Next: The Chemosian Phoenix Reborn Through Nirvana
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