Chapter 376: The Knight Duel
"Ha ha ha! Brother, I've been waiting for this day for so long!"
The Preceptor Knight strode forward toward Luca, its bulk, far larger than any ordinary Knight, radiating a crushing sense of presence.
"I've been waiting for the chance to duel you again. Brother, I'll prove I was never weaker than you. My loss back then was nothing but luck!"
Frales's fury blared through the vox at Luca.
Back on that dueling ground, fighting for the throne, Luca had beaten him and simply walked away, and that had left a humiliation in him that never faded.
It felt, to Frales, like Luca was saying: I never wanted this throne. Beating you was nothing. I'm handing you the crown as a favor.
That feeling had tormented him, day and night, ever since.
He'd trained relentlessly after that, duel after duel, purely to grow stronger, purely for the day he could stand before his brother Luca again and demand a fair fight, once and for all.
Earlier, while Luca fought his three corrupted Knights, Frales had been watching the whole time.
He'd stood hidden in the treeline, observing everything, refusing to act.
Only once Luca had wiped out every last one of his men did he finally step forward, because what he wanted was a fair, one-on-one duel.
Frales said, "Come, my dear brother. Let's have our duel again. I'll show the world with your own severed head that your victory back then was nothing but luck."
As he spoke, the weapons mounted on the Preceptor's arms began to glow.
Under normal circumstances, a Preceptor-class Knight would carry a heavy loadout of ranged weaponry. But with Khorne's influence blanketing this world, every powered weapon had failed, and so the Preceptor had been fitted with two melee weapons instead.
Its left arm carried a massive powered flail, the chain alone stretching close to thirty meters long.
Once activated, a blue disruption field wrapped around the chain, crackling with blue lightning.
Sustaining a field that long, that thick, took an enormous amount of power. Only the Preceptor's absurdly overbuilt engine could maintain a thirty-meter disruption field for any real length of time.
Its right arm carried a powered lance, tip sharpened to a fine point, wrapped in its own disruption field, capable of punching through almost anything.
Which made clear, immediately, that this so-called "fair duel" was nothing of the sort. On a world with no functioning ranged weapons, whoever's melee reach was longer held the advantage.
The Preceptor wielded a thirty-meter flail and a ten-plus-meter lance. Luca had a powered gauntlet and a Hellstrike chainsword, both purely close-range weapons. How was that supposed to be a fair fight?
But Luca's fury had already reached its peak. He hadn't imagined his own brother could fall this far, pledged to Chaos, and drenched in this much bloodshed, with total disregard for every bit of honor their ancestors had ever stood for.
"FRALES!!"
Luca roared and drove his Cerastus forward, straight at the Preceptor.
The Cerastus was built lean, built for speed, easily the fastest of the large Knight classes.
The Preceptor was tall, wide, built at roughly twice the Cerastus's mass.
The sheer scale of it was intimidating, but Luca felt no fear at all. All he wanted now was to kill his own brother and put an end to all of this.
A twisted laugh came through the Preceptor's vox, and the massive powered flail in its left hand began charging, blue lightning crackling and arcing along the disruption field wrapped around the chain.
The arm drew back slightly, then whipped forward with brutal force.
WHOOSH! The nearly thirty-meter chain lashed out toward Luca.
A direct hit would have carved a deep, brutal gash straight through the Cerastus's plating.
But the Cerastus was fast, and Luca was a seasoned pilot. Tracking the incoming flail through his optics, he threw his whole body into a sharp lateral dive.
CRASH! The flail slammed into the ground where he'd just been, throwing up a huge cloud of dust and debris.
Now!
Recovering that flail for a second swing would take time, more than enough for the Cerastus to close thirty meters and land a decisive blow up close.
Luca seized the opening left by the disarmed weapon and pressed forward, Hellstrike chainsword already roaring to life.
As he closed the distance, the Preceptor's powered lance began charging in turn.
The blue field wrapped around the lance's tip, and it thrust forward hard, straight at Luca.
Luca's plan was to catch the lance with his powered gauntlet, neutralizing both of the Preceptor's long weapons at once. Then he could drive the Hellstrike chainsword straight into the cockpit and end this.
Just as the lance was about to skewer him, Luca threw up his gauntlet, disruption field meeting disruption field, and caught the lance in a crushing grip.
It worked. The gauntlet held the lance fast, pinning the Preceptor in place, its center wide open.
"Die, my fallen brother!"
The chainsword roared and thrust forward, ready to end the source of all this corruption once and for all.
But the instant the chainblade, spinning tens of thousands of times per second, made contact with the Preceptor's chest plating, it screeched against warped metal and threw off a violent shower of sparks, without penetrating at all.
"What? That's impossible!"
Luca reeled in shock. By every bit of experience he had, even the thickest Preceptor armour should have given way under a chainblade spinning that fast. So why hadn't it?
"Heh heh. Dear brother. Feeling your own weakness now? Feeling the gap between us?"
Mocking laughter rolled out of the Preceptor's vox, and the next instant, the lance still trapped in Luca's gauntlet surged with force.
The Preceptor's monstrous power output flooded through its massive frame, generating overwhelming torque.
With one violent wrench of the lance, Luca's own Cerastus was flung clean off its feet, hurled more than forty meters through the air.
The Cerastus, a full-grown chunk of adamantium in its own right, crashed down in the fields, gouging a massive furrow into the ground.
Luca sat there stunned for a moment. He'd just been thrown, like that? A Knight suit, pure adamantium construction, thrown bodily by another Knight suit?
He didn't have time to dwell on it, because he could already hear the Preceptor's heavy footsteps closing in, the crackle of the powered flail charging again.
Luca scrambled and rolled hard to the side, and the instant he cleared the spot, the flail slammed down where he'd been lying, throwing up a fresh eruption of earth and stone.
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