Chapter 246: Eighteen Blows (Patreon)

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"I can’t contact that nailed bastard on vox!” Abaddon snarled over the channel, broadcast to Typhus.

“He’s probably been killed!" Typhus’ roar came back through the vox, distorted by static but dripping with venom. The Warmaster, locked in combat with Grey, disengaged for a moment, his mind racing.

The deck beneath them had shaken with detonations moments ago, and the hulking form of Kossolax had been hurled screaming down into the labyrinthine conduits below. Abaddon had intended for Kossolax to rejoin the fight swiftly, but now… the chances were nine out of ten that the fool was dead.

“Your lord has fallen!” Abaddon bellowed, raising the daemon blade Drach’nyen high as he parried the downward sweep of Grey’s roaring chain axe. “Avenge him!”

The Foresworn warband, unable to reach Kossolax themselves, howled with fury at the declaration. If the Warmaster had proclaimed their leader slain, then it was truth. They surrendered to hate and madness, their only solace found in slaughter.

With suicidal fury, they hurled themselves upon nearby foes, allowing enemy blades to bite deep into their armor and flesh, even as they brought chainaxes and butcher’s knives crashing into enemy skulls.

The Space Marines of the former World Eaters Legion, the Foresworn were consummate masters of close combat. Their legacy was slaughter, their creed bloodshed. Even in death, they dragged loyalist Astartes down into the bloody ruin.

Abaddon watched their frenzy with satisfaction. Kossolax’s demise was no tragedy. In fact, it suited him, the Foresworn’s berserk rage was a weapon sharper than their commander could ever have been. It left him free to focus all his malice on the iron-skeleton warrior before him.

“Look at yourself,” Abaddon sneered as he thrust Drach’nyen into Grey’s chest cavity, deliberately avoiding the glowing fusion reactor visible between the man’s exposed ribwork. “Are you even human any longer?”

Grey gave no reply. Silent, he counterattacked with his chainblade, but Abaddon had already read his intent. The Warmaster stepped back lightly, letting the weapon bite nothing but air, contempt twisting his features.

But then, Grey’s speed shifted, leaving after-images in the air as he closed the gap. Abaddon narrowed his eyes, prepared to use his skills to protect his vitals, but his gaze caught the sudden burst of light flaring from the cavity in Grey’s chest

In that instant, Grey had triggered his reactor’s self-destruct protocol.

At the same time, Grey had triggered his “bullet time” again, but this time his body was far beyond safe limits. His over-strained nervous system screamed and convulsed.

For an instant, he saw himself back in the underhive of Tyrone Hive, assassinating a Genestealer Patriarch alongside Qin Mo. In the next flicker, he was fighting on Talon II, driving a blade through the treacherous general, heralding the liberation of the world. He saw dozens of such visions, moments of war and fleeting triumphs. But among them, precious few were memories of peace. The worlds he had helped free were never a utopia, never perfect beneath Talon’s rule. But still, he believed that with time, they could create...

“Our liberation… is only a matter of time,” Grey murmured, blood leaking from his ears and eyes, raising his broken chainblade.

"BOOOM∼!"

Drach’nyen absorbed much of the explosion’s fury, its daemon-forged edge drinking in the raw kinetic force like a glutton savoring a feast. Even so, the blast hurled Abaddon back, his black armor scorched and cracked. Burns that would have killed a mortal were nothing to the Warmaster of Chaos.

Abaddon spat blood, eyes narrowing, rising to his feet. “Liberation...?”

He studied Grey’s ruined torso. The blast had cored a hole through his chest, melting metal ribs into slag. Yet even as steam hissed from vents hidden between his bones, a secondary reactor deep within his abdomen absorbed and vented the worst of the heat. Hissing clouds rolled from his frame like smoke from a forge.

And then the horror began. The missing bones re-formed. Dense, tiny black nanites scuttled across his frame, knitting rib after rib back together in seconds.

Abaddon realized the truth. This was no man, no Astartes, but a precision-forged engine of slaughter. Injuries that would fell any warrior only made it repair itself and shrug them off as nothing. Left unchecked, it would never truly weaken; it would always restore itself to peak condition.

By contrast, Abaddon himself had suffered. Though Drach’nyen had shielded him from the brunt of the blast, fragments of Grey’s skeletal plating had acted as shrapnel, embedding themselves across his body. His skin bubbled and flaked where the fragments burned him, peeling away like meat over a fire.

If this battle dragged on at this rate, he would inevitably be defeated.

Snarling, Abaddon resolved to end it with the next exchange. The head. Abaddon would take the head. Even if this iron skeleton refused to die without it, the gamble was worth the attempt.

He charged, Drach’nyen gripped one-handed, faster than he had ever moved in his long, cursed life.

Grey, still half-conscious, almost triggered “bullet time” once more. The command surged from his bio-processors toward his spine… then he cut it off. Instinct whispered of another opportunity.

He raised his cybernetic arm. With a magnetic pulse, a fallen power sword leapt from the ground, whirling through the air toward Abaddon.

But such tricks meant nothing to the Warmaster. He had a hundred ways to avoid it. With a contemptuous sidestep, he let the blade scream past, lips curling in mockery.

But before he could speak, agony lanced his back. A blade burst through his waist from behind, glowing with golden light.

Abaddon staggered, choking in disbelief. Turning, he saw her, wings aflame with divine radiance, armor shining gold.

Saint Celestine, the Emperor’s living blade.

True hate and unease rippled through Abaddon. To him, Celestine was no mere foe of flesh and steel. She was a symbol, a living reminder of the Emperor’s defiance. A shard of divinity that refused to die, no matter how many times the Warmaster sought to extinguish her light across centuries, she had risen again, as though the Emperor Himself mocked him through her existence. In his eyes, she was the embodiment of everything he had sworn to destroy.

Before he could react, Grey was upon him again, chainblade howling. There was no room to dodge. With grim resolve, Abaddon transmitted a command to the Vengeful Spirit. Then he braced his body for the coming storm.

Teeth shrieking, the chainblade tore through ceramite and flesh. Celestine’s power sword pierced and withdrew, only to plunge again into another wound.

Together, Grey and the Living Saint carved him apart. In less than two seconds, they struck him eighteen times, every blow a killing wound for a lesser being, even for most daemonic princes of Chaos.

The nineteenth never landed. Warp-light engulfed Abaddon as the Vengeful Spirit’s teleportarium seized him, ripping his broken form from the battlefield.

Grey stared down at his weapon. His chainblade, clogged with Abaddon’s blood, had been shattered in the clash, only half a weapon remaining. By rights, its teeth should no longer spin. And yet, they turned, snarling as though eager for more.

When he turned to question the angel beside him, to ask her name, he already knew. The knowledge came unbidden, as if he always knew: this was Saint Celestine, the Living Saint of the Emperor, a torch of faith burning across millennia.

Celestine spared him only a glance, eyes shifting to the greater war still raging around them. Abaddon and Kossolax were gone; only Typhus remained to command the traitors. She had no reason to linger.

With a beat of radiant wings, the Saint soared upward, piercing the station’s ceiling to rejoin the larger battle upon Cadia’s surface.

Grey found a brief moment of respite. He attempted to tear free the power claw still embedded in his chest, clutching his last reactor core. But to his horror, the claw had fused to his skeletal frame, welded there by the nanites that had repaired his wounds. Only Qin Mo might cut it free now without killing him.

He had no choice but to fight on. With the claw still in place, Grey hefted his half-ruined weapon and returned to the slaughter.

Above and below, the war raged still.

On Cadia itself, the conflict neared its dreadful climax. Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed stood in the command bunker, eyes locked on holo-maps of the station, his every decision shaping the last defense of the Imperium’s fortress world.