Beyond the viewports lay a sea of fire. Daemonic flames boiled within the Warp as violet beams of light flashed rapidly, picking off living starships one by one.
Inside the Rangdan flagship, a transparent barrier collapsed inward at high speed. Stripped of its external protection, the daemonic fire of Tzeentch breached the atomic gaps, warping the very fabric of material existence.
The Rangdan Overlord withdrew its psychic barrier, focusing its entire mind on dealing with the human Primarch, leaving it with no leftover strength to maintain its outer defenses.
The flagship was gradually becoming bio-organic. Straight corridors began to twist and wind, only to snap back to normal a moment later.
Blazkowicz strode forward. Wherever he passed, the profane forces of the Warp receded, and distorted monstrosities dissolved in sheer terror.
He paid little heed to the mutations, marching swiftly toward the bridge. Along his path, ghosts and gods scattered in retreat, and the daemonic fires were subdued.
By the time they reached the end of the corridor, the team had encountered surprisingly little resistance.
Whether they were slave levies or Rangdan elites, they had all been abandoned by the Rangdan Overlord. Burned by the daemonic flames into soulless zombies, they were naturally in no condition to stand in his way.
The adamantium doors, carved with the Path of Conquest, swung open as if welcoming the visitors.
Leading his Legion Astartes, the Slayer stepped inside. The bridge was still protected by a psychic shroud. Eldar slaves and elite Praetorian guards lined both sides of the room, while a dark green head hovered in the empty air.
The haughty Overlord lowered its crimson, slit-pupiled eyes, watching the human warriors enter the bridge and fan out into an assault formation. An Eldar warrior spoke on its behalf: "Blazkowicz Nowick."
"The twenty-first son of the human Emperor, Primarch, and Lord of the Denurian Stars."
This greeting, spoken as if by a peer, delivered itself from the mouth of an Eldar slave.
She held her chin high, giving a slight nod, her ancient manners steeped in patronizing arrogance.
The Slayer latched his super shotgun back onto his hip and drew his dimensional lightsaber with a reverse grip. "Are these your last words?"
Knowing that the Rangdan Overlord held immense value to the Imperium, his primary objective for this mission was capture. Therefore, he chose not to draw the Sword of Judgment, fearing its peerless, razor-sharp edge would instantly obliterate this foul xenos.
"Are you that confident?" The Overlord's massive brain pulsed, its blood-red eyes narrowing as a ripple of amusement leaked into its psychic waves. "You truly think you can capture me?"
Blazkowicz didn't say a word. The dimensional light-blade hissed to life from the hilt, his actions speaking for him.
The Eldar slave spoke once more: "I have fought Moribas Solas, and I held the upper hand the entire time."
As she spoke, the tentacles beneath the Rangdan Overlord's brain writhed. The dark green cerebrum descended from the air, seating itself upon a throne constructed of wraithbone.
"King of Warriors," the Eldar slave said, her voice sharp as she drew a mirror-bladed dagger, a hint of smugness lacing her words. "What do you think your chances of victory are?"
"Perhaps by coming here to capture me, you have simply delivered yourself to my doorstep, giving me the opportunity to capture a Primarch instead."
Blazkowicz remained silent. He took a step toward the Rangdan Overlord, storing his buzzsaw shield back into his dimensional pocket.
"I could take on ten of him."
As the words fell, the air on the bridge detonated! A figure, barely visible to the naked eye, practically teleported, materializing instantly right in front of the Rangdan Overlord.
The Overlord's crimson pupils snapped shut in sheer horror. Paralyzed by a sudden surge of panic, it desperately threw up a psychic barrier to block the lightsaber while thrusting its levitating throne into a frantic backward retreat.
In the span of a single thought, the Primarch had closed the distance. Had its mental reflexes not deployed its psychic shield in time, that azure longsword would have pierced straight between its eyes.
Only now did it recall what Solas had once said: The Primarchs are roughly on par with me—with the sole exception of Blazkowicz Nowick.
His personal martial prowess might stand head and shoulders above all other Primarchs!
"Do not harm—"
Its thoughts were cut short by a shriek. The Eldar slave screamed, her slender form blurring into afterimages as she lunged at Blazkowicz with her blade raised.
But what met her was a palm the size of a winnowing fan.
The massive hand slammed down, the compressed air between his fingers erupting in a piercing, screeching wail. The Howling Banshee's eyes widened to their limits; she couldn't track the trajectory at all, and her body was utterly incapable of reacting.
Smack!
Hand met bone-white psychic armor. In a moment where time seemed to grind to a halt, a titanic shockwave rippled out from the point of contact, cascading through her entire body like a wave.
The force of the blow tore completely through her. The back of the psychic armor violently ruptured, spraying a jet of shattered bone, pulverized flesh, and shredded organs backward!
Her skeletal frame smashed into the bridge viewport, clattering as it broke into countless bone fragments. The room instantly fell dead silent.
Beneath the iron palm, the psychic armor crumbled into powder and drifted to the floor. The Eldar's flesh slumped in a heap, shock still frozen across her twisted face.
Hiss...
The Overlord sucked in a sharp breath, its crimson eyes entirely filled with disbelief. What it had just witnessed defied all expectation.
The sheer visual violence of the spectacle shook its confidence. Its psychic barrier flickered slightly, a wave of terror surging through its mind.
An attack that didn't even qualify as a proper strike had demonstrated a peerless, crushing might. No one could witness it and remain unmoved.
"Destroy them!" Having seen Blazkowicz's terrifying strength, the Overlord lost all its composure and ordered its Praetorian guards to swarm him.
Over a hundred Praetorians received the command. Their weapons ignited as they charged the Slayer, while guards in the rear lined up their sights with ray guns.
As the Overlord's guards closed in, Blazkowicz casually threw a left hook. A chitinous suit of armor remained standing where it was, but the ground behind it was painted with a graffiti of sprayed organs, its torso thoroughly pulverized by his arm.
"Protect the Primarch!" Asterlan's roar echoed through the deck. The Legion Astartes followed closely in their Primarch's wake, throwing themselves into combat against the xenos guards.
Within milliseconds, the two sides clashed in brutal close-quarters combat.
With their Primarch fighting by their side, the Space Marines' zeal burned without limit. Every strike was delivered with absolute conviction, their sheer momentum vastly overwhelming their foes.
The Rangdan guards were driven back step by step. With every clash, powerful bio-engineered organisms—each boasting combat capabilities comparable to the Legio Custodes—were cleanly decapitated.
The Praetorians grew terrified. Their physical faculties were being entirely outmatched; after a few clashes, their weapons snapped, and the engagement turned into an absolute slaughter.
Most lethal of all was the uncanny coordination of the human warriors. They moved as a single entity; to them, the battlefield had no blind spots, and coordinated strikes flew in from every conceivable angle to assist.
The moment they crossed blades, the xenos lost whatever advantage they thought they had, and the corpses of their brethren piled up continuously.
Meanwhile, at the center of the battlefield, two transcendent entities locked in combat. Mind clashed against might, and the resulting shockwaves shattered the surrounding steel!
The Overlord unleashed its consciousness, its psychic power ripping sections of adamantium steel from the structure and forging them into a cluster of razor-sharp spikes. Concentrating its will, it hurled the spikes straight at Blazkowicz .
The Slayer's movements were fast to the point of absurdity. His fists and longsword blurred, striking thousands of times in a single second to deflect the adamantium spikes.
The air boomed and crackled. A storm of fist winds and sword shadows hammered into the psychic vortex, rattling the Rangdan Overlord's mind.
Once Blazkowicz battered back the psychic assault, the movements of the Rangdan guards appeared completely stationary in his eyes. The light-blade traced a luminous arc—a thousand strikes, ten thousand strikes in an instant—and the alien bodies surrounding him abruptly collapsed into a carpet of diced debris.
He burst free from the encirclement, his footsteps shaking the deck like a meteor strike, kicking up a localized tempest of death.
Along his path, xenos limbs flew in all directions. His Praetor Armor was drenched in iridescent fluids, making it impossible to distinguish between blood and insectoid secretions.
This was a total massacre!
In the brief instant it took the Overlord to gather its psychic energy, the Praetorian guards had already been harvested like wheat, falling in massive swaths.
Fists, palms, and blade—that immortal frame charged headlong through their ranks. Wherever he went, the Void Dragon inside his armor shrieked with ecstatic excitement, leaving a literal rain of corpses in his wake.
The guards in the rear threw down their firearms and drew their war-blades to form a desperate blockade. Their proud, nanosecond reaction times and 360-degree vision simply could not keep pace with the human Primarch's speed, nor could they lock their sights onto him.
To halt this overflowing avatar of ruin, their only option was to build a dam out of their own corpses.
Yet, how many bodies would it take to fill such an abyss?
Barely two seconds had passed since the commencement of the brawl. Some of their comrades' bodies had not even touched the ground before over a hundred lives were quietly extinguished.
The human Primarch's advance remained completely unstoppable, trampling everyone in his path as he carved out a bloody highway.
Blazkowicz swung his sword and threw his fists without pause, slicing through alien torsos and crushing alien skulls.
A single horizontal sweep bifurcated several xenos at once. From amidst the showering gore, a powerful wave erupted as the Overlord launched another psychic assault.
Invisible chains manifested and bound his sword-wielding right hand, noticeably slowing his momentum.
Seeing an opening, the Rangdan guards threw away all regard for their lives and lunged madly. Descending from the air and swarming from the ground, they practically buried Blazkowicz inside a sphere of bodies.
"Hmph!"
He let out a cold snort. With a violent jerk of his right arm, a sound like shattering glass echoed through the Immaterium as the psychic chains snapped instantly.
The blade whipped up a storm once more. A thousand strikes? A ten-thousand strikes? Or perhaps an infinite cascade of blades!
The encirclement violently blew apart. The remains of the Praetorians rained down in a pattering heap; not a single piece of flesh left intact was larger than five cubic centimeters.
By the bridge viewport, a heavy, dripping sound echoed. The Overlord had pushed its psychic reserves to their absolute breaking point, causing dark green cerebral fluid to bleed out like a waterfall, pooling into a puddle on the floor.
Crack!
A piece of the wraithbone throne splintered. When Blazkowicz had violently broken the psychic chains moments ago, the massive backlash inflicted severe damage on the Overlord's amplifying throne.
But it had no time to grieve or be astonished. It refocused its mind, plunging its consciousness down into the microscopic realm, intending to systematically unravel the atomic bonds of the human Primarch's material structure and kill him where he stood!
He was far too dangerous. He completely exceeded the home world's threat assessment. He had to be erased right here, right now!