Chapter 377: The Knight Duel, Part 2
Luca scrambled back up off the ground, staring at the Preceptor slowly retracting its flail in the distance.
"Frales! Is this what you get for kneeling before a Chaos God? Is this the charity he's handed you?"
That point-blank chainsword thrust should have punched clean through the Preceptor's chest plating.
But it hadn't gone through, leaving only a modest gash across the armour instead.
Nothing about that made sense. The enemy had to be using something.
"Heh heh! This is the reward that Power granted me, after eight hundred and eighty-eight duels, eight hundred and eighty-eight severed heads."
Frales sounded thoroughly pleased with himself, laying out exactly why his Knight hadn't been pierced.
In the years since Luca had left, Frales had kept dueling, kept winning, without pause.
Every victory in the arena had taken another head, and once the count hit eight hundred and eighty-eight, that Power had finally taken notice, and granted him a blessing.
He'd been in this very Preceptor at the time, dueling a noble who'd opposed him. His powered lance had punched clean through the man's cockpit, vaporizing pilot and command throne together, completing the eight-hundred-eighty-eighth trial.
The blessing had descended in that instant, and it had transformed both him and this Preceptor completely.
Frales hadn't stepped out of the Preceptor in over a year now. His flesh had fused entirely with the machine's command throne, grown into it like a single tumorous mass.
He was the Preceptor now. The Preceptor was his body.
And that body, blessed as it was, carried a churning corruption woven through its armour plating, hardening what was already dense adamantium into something ordinary weapons could barely scratch.
"Heh heh. I'm not who I was back then. I've grown far stronger. And you, brother, after all your years of wandering? Did you grow at all? Let's find out."
He fully retracted the flail this time, and lashed it out at Luca again.
This time, Luca timed it right, catching the incoming flail on his gauntlet the moment it struck.
The disruption fields of gauntlet and flail collided, sparking and crackling violently.
But a flail was flexible by nature. Even with part of the chain caught, the head of the weapon still whipped around and struck home.
It slammed into Luca's massive shoulder plating with a resounding crack.
A flail wasn't like a chainsword. A chainblade would have simply cut clean through with the disruption field doing the work.
But a flail, a hammer, a gauntlet, those delivered blunt-force damage that radiated outward through the whole structure.
One good hit, and everything nearby fractured, spider-webbing with cracks.
Right where the flail had struck, Luca's Cerastus plating was already covered in a spreading web of stress fractures.
A few more hits like that, and the whole section of armour would shatter outright.
With the flail caught in his gauntlet, Luca's mechanical claw began to crush down, applying force.
The chain groaned and crackled under the pressure, and after a moment, a loud snap rang out as the energy conduit running through the section he held gave way entirely.
From that break point on, the severed length of chain no longer carried the disruption field, reduced to an ordinary chain.
The Preceptor yanked its arm back hard, and without the field to hold it together, that dead section of chain tore free in Luca's grip.
The thirty-plus-meter flail was now barely over twenty-five meters long.
Still usable, but with reduced reach, and that made Frales noticeably more cautious.
"Interesting. But that's all you've got."
Frales let out a mocking laugh and drove the Preceptor forward, charging.
The thing wasn't fast, exactly, but its sheer mass made the ground shake with every stride.
Luca charged to meet him, staying in constant motion, cutting down the chances of getting hit clean.
The Preceptor's flail lashed out again, this time in a wide horizontal sweep.
There was no dodging it. Luca had no choice but to block with his gauntlet.
The gauntlet caught part of the chain, but the head of the flail still connected, slamming into the Cerastus's main body.
The impact left a massive network of cracks running across nearly the entire chassis.
Up in the command throne, Luca screamed in pain. His nervous system was wired directly into the Knight, and right now, the Cerastus's body was his own.
The blow felt like it had landed on his own flesh, agony sharp enough to nearly black him out, but he gritted his teeth and kept pushing forward.
He discarded the length of chain still in his gauntlet, freed the hand into a grappling stance, and pressed the charge.
The Preceptor's powered lance thrust out at him, and Luca caught the tip in his gauntlet's grip once again.
His chainsword swung out with his right hand, this time not at the Preceptor's body, but at the long shaft of the lance itself.
He meant to sever the weapon entirely, take away its greatest threat.
But when the chainblade bit into the lance, it screeched against something far harder than expected, and didn't cut through cleanly.
Clearly, Khorne's blessing had spread to the lance itself too, hardening it to an absurd degree.
But even hardened metal had its limits. A chainsword was a sustained-contact weapon, the blade grinding continuously, and visible damage started appearing on the lance's shaft under the relentless assault.
Frales, unwilling to lose his weapon, began spinning in place.
The torque generated by a machine that size spinning was enormous, and with his gauntlet still locked onto the lance, Luca was lifted clean off his feet, dangling off the Preceptor's frame like some kind of ornament.
Then, like a thrown shot put, he was flung away again.
A thunderous crash followed as Luca slammed into the ground, gouging out a massive crater.
An impact with that much force did real damage to the whole frame. Wired directly into the machine's nervous system, Luca felt like every bone in his body had just been shattered.
He tried to scramble back up, but between the searing nerve pain and the damage to the frame itself, he moved slower this time.
Just as he straightened up, the Preceptor's flail lashed out again, faster than he could possibly react.
It struck him square across the waist, wrapping around him several times over.
The armour plating where it hit shattered instantly, chunks of adamantium falling away like broken ice.
Luca felt like his own skin was being torn off, and let out an agonized scream that tore from somewhere deep.
By now, his whole body was completely restrained, the flail wound tight around him, leaving him no way to dodge or move.
"Die, brother!!"
Frales let out a triumphant laugh, tightened the chain, leveled the powered lance, and charged forward.
Luca fought desperately to break free of the chain binding him, to regain any kind of mobility, but there was nothing he could do.
All he could do was watch, helpless, as the Preceptor closed the distance, that disruption-wreathed lance drawing closer and closer.
SQUELCH!!
With a violent shriek of tearing metal, the powered lance drove straight through Luca's Knight, punching clean out the other side.
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