Chapter 193 - The Lion Returns
~ 💎 WEEKLY POWER GOALS 💎🔥 60→1ch | 100→2ch | 200→5ch ⏰ Resets Monday! Thanks!
Angron was sent flying by the Emperor's Shield, his massive body like a boulder hurled from a trebuchet, crashing down into a factory long since reduced to ruin.
Rusted steel beams twisted and snapped under the impact. Rubble and shattered concrete scattered like rain. Dust billowed up and swallowed half the sky.
When he clawed his way back out of the wreckage and stood, those blood-red eyes found another brother waiting.
Lion El'Jonson. Grey-haired now, his face carved by ages of war, the old knight standing amid the scorched earth.
But those emerald-green eyes. Angron recognized them.
In that instant, the last thin thread of clarity still burning in his pupils was swallowed whole by rage, a candle flame snuffed by a gale.
The Red Angel's roar shook the air. He drove both fists into the factory floor, and the concrete cratered and split in web-like fractures that raced outward in every direction.
"You are nothing but two more skulls to leave before the Blood God's throne! Two corpses to bleed for Him! Come and fight me! So I can slaughter your sons! I will twist their heads off one by one and pile them beside your bodies!"
Sanguinius descended slowly beside the Lion, his white wings folding behind him. His war boots touched the ground without raising a single speck of dust.
The Great Angel's expression was almost casual. That familiar gentle curve still sat at the corner of his mouth.
But the Lion caught it. The cruelty and fury buried deep beneath his brother's eyes.
That was a side of Sanguinius rarely shown to anyone.
Angron had spoken of sons. Of slaughter. Those words had touched a switch that should never have been touched.
"We must banish him."
The Lion's voice was low and calm.
He despised this daemon brother before him, enslaved by rage. Despised that Angron had abandoned dignity, abandoned reason, abandoned everything a primarch should be. But he would never make the mistake of underestimating an opponent.
The Dark Gods stood behind Angron. Those blessings were no mere decoration.
"Yes. We must banish him, once again." Sanguinius said it simply, then glanced at the Lion.
One look. One instant.
In that fraction of a second, the two brothers already knew each other's minds. No tactical board. No comm channel. No words needed at all.
They were primarchs. War-lords forged by the Emperor of Mankind's own hand. Their understanding of one another was written into the deepest coil of their genes.
Both stepped forward at the same moment. Both accelerated at the same moment. Both charged the Red Angel at the same moment.
Angron charged back.
Three primarchs collided between the factory ruins and the scorched plain with a crash that shook the earth.
The Lion took ground containment.
His strength was not what it had been ten thousand years ago, he knew that. But he had skill. And the most instinctive cunning of a hunter.
Great axe met the Sword of Fealty. Sparks burst like a storm. Every impact sent numbing shock through the web of his hand.
Angron's strength was staggering, even more savage than the Lion remembered. Khorne's blessings had turned the Red Angel into a pure engine of destruction with nothing left inside but the need to kill.
Another cleaving strike came down. The Lion didn't meet it head-on.
He rolled sideways, fluid as the oldest predator in Caliban's forests, and the moment the axe blade missed him he drove the Emperor's Shield directly into Angron's face.
Blinding golden light erupted from the eagle shield. A pulse of pure psychic force detonated on impact. The Red Angel's eyes went blank.
Half a second.
To a mortal, barely the gap between one heartbeat and the next.
To a primarch, it was an eternity.
Sanguinius was already moving.
He swept around behind Angron, faster than his own shadow, and drove his spear through the daemon primarch's back with surgical precision. The point punched through Angron's heart and burst out the front of his chest in a spray of black, corrupted blood.
Then the blade swept down and took one of the Red Angel's massive wings clean off.
Sanguinius dropped his weapons. Both hands locked onto the thick cables of the Butcher's Nails crowning Angron's skull and seized.
This technique. This familiar, brutal technique.
Angron roared and thrashed, his one remaining wing beating frantically as he strained to take flight. But one wing wasn't enough. He couldn't get high enough. He couldn't shake loose.
He was a beast in a noose, hurling his body side to side, trying to throw the Great Angel off.
Sanguinius clamped his legs around Angron's waist like iron. His hands worked steadily, gathering those cables one bundle at a time, pulling them tight in his fists, the cables driven so deep they had grown into Angron's skull over millennia.
Then he leaned down close, his lips beside Angron's ear. When he spoke, his voice was almost gentle. The tone one brother uses with another.
"I free you from pain once more, brother."
His arms wrenched.
The Butcher's Nails tore free by the roots. Fragments of brain tissue. Black, corrupted blood. All of it sprayed across Sanguinius's breastplate.
The Red Angel's scream tore across the entire plain. It was sharp enough to shatter every last pane of glass still hanging in the factory's ruined frames.
Angron's knees buckled. The mountain of him crashed down.
The Lion did not hesitate.
No pause for pity. No pause at all.
He took a running start, launched himself into the air, and the Sword of Fealty swept upward in a cold arc of light.
The daemon primarch's head tumbled from his neck. It bounced twice on the scorched earth and came to rest in a pile of rubble.
The massive body toppled and hit the ground with a crash that sent dust rolling across the plain in waves.
Sanguinius dropped from his back and brushed the filth from his breastplate. He looked down at the pool of black blood already steaming and dissolving into the air. His expression was calm. The cruelty and fury had sunk back beneath the surface, where he kept it.
Under the gaze of both primarchs, Angron's physical form began to dissolve.
They both knew he was not truly dead. What was destroyed here in the materium was only the flesh-vessel. His soul had already plunged back before the Blood God's brass throne.
He would return. He always did.
"Do we evacuate now?" Sanguinius asked.
"No." The Lion drove the Sword of Fealty into the ground and looked out toward the gloom-shrouded horizon of Dragon's Rest.
"This planet is hiding two weapons. That daemon didn't sculpt an entire world in Caliban's image for nothing. He built this place to lure my sons here with the Tuchulcha Engine."
His gaze sharpened.
"Ouroboros. The Plagueheart. I made a promise to the Tuchulcha Engine that I would take them back."
--------
Azrael and the others received reinforcements.
A group that looked very much like Fallen Angels.
Several Dark Angels Chaplains, Asmodai among them, immediately moved to interrogate the suspicious warriors who had been fighting alongside them. Dante stopped them cold. He invoked the Lion's name and called in the Blood Angels' honor, asking the Dark Angels to hold their hand. Azrael suppressed his discomfort and accepted.
It cost him something to do it.
Before long, the enemy main force was broken and the landing zone was secured.
3 Knight Armigers still prowled the battlefield, their heavy weapons pinning down the loyalist fighters. At the critical moment, the Lion and Sanguinius arrived and dismantled two of them without ceremony. The third was torn apart under the Dark Angels' retaliatory fire.
When the black smoke finally cleared, and the two primarchs walked through the ruins toward their sons, Azrael and every Dark Angel on that field stopped breathing.
The Lion.
Hair grey, face weathered, armor layered with new scratches over old battle scars.
But those emerald-green eyes. The eyes painted onto every battle standard, carved into every mural, woven into every legend the Chapter had carried for ten thousand years.
They were looking at him now.
Close enough to reach out and touch.
Azrael's lips parted. His knees bent without his permission. As he went down, every Dark Angel behind him followed, one by one, until the field was silent and the sons of Caliban knelt in the dust.
Ten thousand years of hunting. Of silence. Of secrets kept in the dark and waiting that never ended.
All of it had led here.
The Lion had truly returned.
➤ Next: The Emperor: Damn, If Only I'd Had This Thing Back Then
————————————————————
🔥 Patreon members are 60+ chapters ahead.
⚡ Limited-time offer currently running...
👉 Join on -
patreon(.)com/DarkGolds