"One star fortress. One Abyssal-class battleship. Three Gloriana-class battleships. Emperor-class... two thousand capital ships. Ten Titan Legions..."
"Given the First Legion's particular nature, Father also had us bring ten Iron Circle maniples and ten Castellan Robot cohorts each, along with thirty Volcano Cannons..."
"My lord, these are the assets Father is transferring to the Dark Angels. If you have no objections, please sign here — just place your finger and press."
An Iron Warrior in Tyrant Terminator armour was aboard the Invincible Reason, delivering a briefing on the purpose of their visit to Lion El'Jonson and his assembled officers.
But the Lion had gone quiet, looking out through the viewport at the star fortress and fleet that blotted out every other sight.
"This is an insult! The honour and responsibility of Warmaster should fall to the First Legion! We are the First Legion — the Emperor's wrath made manifest! Do you think you can come here and mock us with a few ships?!"
Luther and the other Calibanites had been about to say exactly that — but then they noticed the Lion's hand, trembling slightly, already pressing his finger to the verification panel. And then they looked out at that magnificent fleet through the viewport...
"The Warmaster is too generous!"
Luther and Zabriel stepped forward, warmly welcoming the several Iron Warriors who stood three heads taller than them.
"Please forgive Father — he's a little shy, doesn't like to make a fuss. You've come all this way and we weren't even there to meet you — you really shouldn't have gone to this trouble. We could have come to collect it ourselves."
"Indeed, indeed..."
Watching these two men single-handedly destroying the First Legion's reputation, Corswain and the others instinctively couldn't help but look down on them.
Moments ago those two were the loudest voices demanding they "keep their dignity" and make sure everyone understood the First Legion were no one's subordinates.
And now look at them. Shameless beyond all measure. The First Legion has no need—
Several Iron Circle maniples and Castellan Robots filed in, carrying exquisitely lethal precision-crafted power weapons and Tyrant Terminator suits.
"These weapons and Terminator plate were personally crafted by the artisans and Magi of Olympia. Father thought your Legion might appreciate them."
The tall Iron Warrior continued.
"Brother, make sure you come again — the First Legion will be the sharpest blade in the service of the Emperor and the Warmaster!"
Corswain looked down at the precision power sword in his hands — one that Olympia's master artificers had laboured over for months. The balance was extraordinary. The length and width of the blade, the weight, the exquisite engravings, the understated yet opulent dark-gold ornamentation — this was a power sword designed as if it had been built specifically for his aesthetic sensibility.
"My lord, this one was crafted by Father personally. He says it's a gift for you — it was meant to be sent before the Rangda campaign, but various matters kept getting in the way. He's only now been able to send it."
A tall Iron Warrior set down a large case from behind him, then lifted it and opened it carefully.
The Lion needed only a single glance to see the long black blade resting inside.
There was nothing ostentatious about it. Even the handle looked entirely ordinary — plain wood wrapped with leather cord for grip.
But for reasons Lion El'Jonson couldn't articulate, his eyes were drawn to it the moment he saw it.
The blade was a deep, matte black from tip to tang, its light absorbed rather than reflected. Yet the Lion could sense it plainly — this sword was extraordinarily sharp.
"This blade was forged by Father's own hand. It is the peak of his craft. Even he could not forge it again today. As for how well it performs — words are empty. Father says you'll have to test it yourself."
The Lion made a casual flourish. The sound that followed was like a sonic crack. And in that instant, the Lion understood exactly what made this sword different.
This was the singular blade Perturabo had forged years ago — now gifted to Lion El'Jonson. It reflected something close to the Emperor's own intention for the First Legion: edges sharp enough to cut through anything, yet always kept deliberately sheathed, because they were humanity's last hope in its most desperate hour.
A faint smile passed across the Lion's expression — which, under the shadow of the Invincible Reason, was usually something of a grim thing.
"When you return, give the Warmaster my regards. Tell him — I like his gift very much."
"Yes, my lord."
"Father, I think the Warmaster is someone you should cultivate a close relationship with."
Radulon, wearing Tyrant Terminator armour in yellow-and-black stripes that clashed magnificently with everything the Blood Angels stood for, looked out at the enormous star fortress and fleet and spoke with conviction.
"Yes, yes — Father, I think the Captain is right."
Amit, also in Tyrant Terminator armour, pressed a control stud and felt the twin chainblades mounted beneath his power fist roar to life. A somewhat bloodthirsty smile spread across his handsome face.
It wasn't just the sons, either — the Great Angel himself was genuinely astonished by his brother's generosity and the sheer depth of resources being revealed. How much had this brother been concealing all along?
The Great Angel had originally intended to use the Warmaster position to help erase the ill reputation his sons had previously earned. But now, somehow, that goal felt considerably less urgent.
"Commander Frax, your presence honours us enormously — please, please, come in, sit down, sit down!"
Typhon was practically fawning over Frax, the Iron Warriors officer who had come to deliver their allocation of equipment — the closest among them to the Death Guard.
"The Death Guard will forever adore the Warmaster!"
Even Frax thought this was genuinely embarrassing for the Legion. Never mind Mortarion and the Death Guard themselves.
A Legion that had thrown away all dignity and honour — what hope was there of them accomplishing anything meaningful?
Just as Mortarion's complexion, already purpling under his respirator, reached a critical shade, and as the Death Guard around him were already reaching for their great scythes, on the verge of cutting Typhon down where he stood—
"You see, Commander, the Death Guard are truly impoverished! Barbarus, well, we needn't even discuss that place — remote and desolate, and being so far out in the Tempestus sector, Imperium supply shipments rarely even reach us."
"If not for the Warmaster's kind heart, we Death Guard would be surviving on corpse starch right now. And our mortal auxiliary forces — the poor souls! Even ration tins of ant-cattle are—"
"Perhaps, Commander, you might mention to the Warmaster — another eight or ten Gloriana-class vessels, just to help out a brother Legion? And you can see for yourself — we are genuinely destitute out here, desperately poor..."
Frax looked at the fleet and equipment he had brought. Then he looked at the Death Guard — who, after years of being quietly subsidised by the Iron Warriors, now counted no fewer than three thousand capital ships in their main battle fleet alone.
"I will inform Father of your circumstances. What Father decides is not for me to say. What I can authorise is one additional Gloriana-class as supplementary allocation."
"Much obliged, much obliged — come now, Commander, have some of Barbarus's local specialty..."
Watching Typhon and Frax completely ignoring Mortarion and the others, Garro and his companions had been about to voice their outrage — but somehow the words stuck in their throats. The great scythes and boltguns were quietly put away.
With a certain unspoken mutual understanding, they began retrieving their "legendary" Mark II power armour from the equipment stores, adding a few more "legendary accomplishments" to the record, and then marched with expressions of iron resolve toward the bridge command room.
Just as Perturabo was opening his vaults to share what he had with his brothers, something entirely unexpected happened.
Across the inner territories of the Imperium, driven by years of crushing taxation and the unchecked cruelty of the upper hive nobility, massive rebellions erupted simultaneously on an unprecedented scale.
The moment Perturabo learned of it, he realised immediately — he had been set up.
Those two old scoundrels were absolutely without conscience. And he refused to believe Chaos had no hand in stirring this.
He had just taken office as Warmaster and they served him this?
"Those two animals!"
He swept the table in front of him clean with one hand. The boundless psychic energy around Perturabo began haemorrhaging outward uncontrollably.
In the Warp, the colossal Daemonic Forge began belching black smoke in great churning clouds. The mechanical arms resumed their frenzied grasping and snatching at everything in reach.
"And to think I couldn't figure out why they were being so generous — they had this waiting for me all along!"
"A mess they made themselves, and they want me to hold the bag! They want me to clean up their ruins! These two animals — why didn't those Perpetuals finish them off when they had the chance?!"
"All these years I've been sustaining the Imperium — could the Great Crusade have run this smoothly without me? Would Terra have any right to call itself a place fit for humans without me?"
"And this is how they repay me! I'll curse their ancestors to the last generation!"
"One day I will bring my fleet to Terra and lash them to the top of the Hive spires and let them learn exactly what a cyclone torpedo sounds like at close range!"
"Animals! Absolute animals!"
The Iron Warriors and the assembled Legion representatives who had come to pay their respects all bowed their heads. The mortal scribes beside them trembled as they wiped the sweat from their foreheads, carefully making certain "minor adjustments" to the Warmaster's on-the-record statements.
"You — go back and tell your Legion commanders. Halt the Crusade. Pacify the rebellions first. Olympia and the Mechanicum will give you full support."
Having addressed the various Legion representatives who had arrived with gifts they hadn't even had the chance to present, Perturabo looked toward Dantioch.
"Remember — the extremist factions get exterminated. The moderate ones get to live. I'll be drawing administrative personnel and resources from Olympia and the other worlds to stabilise things. That comes first. Everything else can wait."
"I'll handle Terra myself. You go now. Nothing else needs doing."
"Yes, Warmaster."
"Father — what are you going to say to the Emperor?"
Dantioch asked.
"What am I going to say?"
A flicker of red light passed through Perturabo's eyes.
"You don't need to concern yourself with that. Go and organise the pacification. Reputation is secondary — don't worry about efficiency. Once the pacification is complete, bring me a list of anyone who's been quietly slandering me, and put them into the penitence engine suits I've prepared for them. The mine-slave numbers have been a bit low lately — the Galactic Core operations are short-handed."
"Understood. I'll go now, Father."
"Good."
In truth, Dantioch had always tried his best to imagine the worst of the Imperium, to see it with maximum cynicism. But he now realised he had still been somewhat naive and charitable.
Had they all been serving an Imperium like this all along?
To save humanity, to spread the Imperial Truth — was this the kind of salvation, the kind of truth-spreading, they meant?
And to abolish all religious faith and bring humanity a hopeful future — this?
Dantioch thought the civilians were not wrong to resist. The xenos were villainous enough. But those who ground down their own people were not much better.
The Imperium was rotten from the root. There was no saving it. Dantioch swore to himself — once the Great Crusade was over, he would tear this entire Imperium down and rebuild it under a new system.
Otherwise, what hope did humanity have? What golden age were they dreaming of returning to? Even in his most optimistic dreams, nothing like that was happening.
The roar of bolters and chainswords pulled Dantioch back from his thoughts.
He had participated in suppressing rebellions before, and he'd seen scenes like this. Back then, they hadn't moved him at all. Expansion always brought growing pains — it was an unavoidable reality.
But this time was different.
"Cassius. How many is this now?"
"The eighth."
"And the other Chapters? The other lords?"
"Over a hundred sectors now."
Dantioch found it bitterly ironic. When they had fought on Rangda, had they exterminated and slaughtered this many human beings?
In less than a year of pacification work, they had already killed humans across at least a hundred sectors, and there was still no end in sight.
Dantioch couldn't understand it. Had the Imperium truly rotted this far?
"The Eastern Fringe and Pacificus sectors are mostly stable now. The Tempestus sector has no major issues either. Only the Sol System and the Obscurus remain."
"The rebel forces in those two regions are tenacious. Even after we've exterminated entire planetary populations — no matter what we do — they refuse to surrender."
"The elderly, women, children — they have no capacity to resist, and we had no intention of killing them. But they would rather die by their own hand than live as civilians under our authority again. Father gave us his orders, but that's exactly why our efficiency has been impossible to raise."
Even Cassius thought the Imperium had gone too far this time. How could an Imperium be like this?
They commit every atrocity imaginable, then refuse to bear any consequence, and call on Father to resolve it for them.
These civilians hadn't simply lost hope. They were beyond that.
Cassius thought of a world they had reclaimed a year earlier — Catachan. Conditions there would test even a Space Marine. Yet even in that environment, humans had survived with fierce tenacity.
The mutants living in the underhive would step out of their misery when they saw even a glimmer of opportunity, joining the Imperium's auxiliary forces, hoping to earn military credits, enough to claim citizenship status, a few blocks of corpse starch to eat.
Cassius genuinely couldn't comprehend what policies and methods the Imperium had employed to produce this result — where humans would choose to kill themselves, would take their children with them into death rather than return to the Imperium's embrace.
"Commander — are we really going to abandon these people?"
Cassius never imagined a day would come when he'd be asking this question, let alone asking it of Dantioch.
"The cost of governance has grown beyond what Father can absorb. You've seen it yourself — the state of the worlds we've recovered, the condition people live in under our administration. We've already reached the absolute limit of what Father can tolerate."
"This means that even we can no longer pull resources to govern these places. All we can do is clear them and resettle."
In the past, Cassius wouldn't have considered this a problem. But this time the scale was simply too vast. Far too many people.
"Is there really no other way?"
Cassius looked at his old friend. Dantioch had always been tactically brilliant, and possessed an empathy that was rare in the Legion.
But Dantioch only shook his head. He had grown somewhat numb, and he had no answer to give.
"So you're going to bombard the entire hive city?"
Guilliman looked at Toramino beside him with barely-contained fury.
"There are forty billion human beings in that hive. Forty billion!"
"The cost of rebuilding a hive city is greater than the value of every human inside it, my lord. The rebel forces inside are not weak. Sending our brothers in would certainly cost significant casualties."
"Given that, it is more efficient to destroy it entirely and rebuild from scratch. There is no reason to advance under enemy fire. Even if Abominable Intelligence units are deployed, the entire hive will need reconstruction regardless — better to simply drop a Volcano Cannon directly in and level it."
Toramino presented it to Guilliman as a straightforward question of value. Several tens of billions of people — he wasn't short of lives at this point.
"I do not approve this plan. Rescind it."
Guilliman kept his anger tightly suppressed.
"My Legion will begin the assault. You are free to proceed to the next world — approach from the other direction and begin clearing rebel forces there. We'll manage this side ourselves."
"My lord, your rate of progress is already the slowest of any Legion. And your losses are the heaviest across all the pacification forces. Father has already sent you several requests to accelerate."
Toramino had no desire to argue with a Primarch.
"Then have the Emperor and the Warmaster come and tell me that themselves!"
"For now — this sector is under our command. You are dismissed."
Guilliman had reached the end of his tolerance for the cold ruthlessness of his brother Legions.
"You always have been an idealist, my lord. Father has cautioned you many times. This is a minor matter — there are better options available."
"You are asking me to massacre unarmed civilians. I am telling you — I cannot do it. Even if the Warmaster himself came here, my answer would not change. An Astartes's weapons are not pointed at our own civilians!"
"They are rebels now, my lord. And their forces are not weak. The fact that they have resisted to this point speaks for itself, doesn't it?"
"Those who have been swept up among them share that fate. They shelter under the rebels, my lord. There is nothing pitiable about that. They are the enemy."
Toramino tried to reason with one of the sharpest political minds among any of the Primarchs, but Guilliman's stubbornness exceeded anything he had expected.
"Take your fleet. Leave. We will resolve this within seven days. You need not concern yourself with it. I will send people to govern this sector afterward."
Guilliman turned away. He had no more interest in listening to this man. Their outlooks were fundamentally incompatible — further words were useless.
Toramino could only lead his Chapter away. He was hardly going to pick a fight with his father's brother.
But Guilliman's brow remained deeply furrowed. He knew that Perturabo, cold as he was, still chose to maintain a reasonable order for the civilians under his rule. Yet even he had been pushed to this extreme. What did that say about how brutal things had become elsewhere?
Even thinking about it made Guilliman feel a chill. What had the Imperium allowed itself to become?
No wonder the Emperor had rushed to appoint a Warmaster so quickly. Perhaps no one but Perturabo could fill this particular gap.
The most alarming thing, Guilliman reflected, was that knowing both the Emperor and Malcador as he did — these were precisely the kind of men who would wait until the rebellion was suppressed, then redirect all the blame onto the Warmaster, strip him of the title, and walk away clean.
That way the resources came to them. The blame went elsewhere. And the Imperium's enormous hidden crisis was resolved as a bonus.
Guilliman wasn't the only one who had thought of this. A few other Primarchs had already roughly guessed the Emperor's intentions, but none of them dared say it aloud. They wanted to believe — to gamble that the Emperor wouldn't be that heartless.
Even Horus, in that moment, hoped his father would not do it. He had wanted the Warmaster position badly enough to accept the Emperor's quiet assistance without protest. But to advance by standing on his brother's face — even he, ruthless as he had always been, could not do that.
The Imperium's rebellions were now nearly pacified. In the Obscurus and the Sol System, only scattered remnant forces remained in isolated pockets.
The Great Crusade had quietly resumed while many were still submerged in the aftermath of the suppression.
No damaging words circulated within the Imperium. The Iron Warriors' suppression of loose speech was one reason — but the more fundamental reason was that nobody had the nerve to speak ill of a Primarch, especially not the Warmaster at the height of his power.
The rebellions had erupted right after he took office, true. But that was no reflection on his competence, and who would dare imply otherwise? He could have you planted in the ground and labelled as a local heritage mountain ginseng and nobody would say a word.
A Primarch's conduct was a family matter. He was the Emperor's own son. Who would dare utter a single word of criticism? Senior Administratum officials had been executed for less. These people — common onions and garlic among giants — what could they possibly say?
Did they want to mysteriously go astray in the Warp? Or be found having shot themselves in the back eight times?
As it turned out — to the surprise of many — the Imperium not only generated no ill wind around Perturabo's Warmaster position as a result of the rebellion, but after the purge, with Perturabo's own people installed throughout the administrative structure, the Imperium's governance efficiency actually improved substantially.
The Pacificus sector in particular — it had to be said, Lorgar's talent for spreading the Imperial Truth was genuine. The worlds the Word Bearers had brought into the fold were generally loyal, and the pacification of those rebellions had been swift.
The Pacificus had always been the most tranquil region of the galaxy to begin with — xenos sightings were relatively rare, and with just the one Legion of Word Bearers and their Expedition fleets, their crusade efficiency was somehow still the highest of anyone.
The most unexpected development for Malcador and others was the severity of the rebellion within the Sol System itself. Nobody had anticipated it reaching that scale.
With the exception of the worlds Perturabo had previously fortified, and the territories where the Imperial Fists were garrisoned, almost every world in the Sol System had seen some degree of rebellion.
Because of its position, the Sol System had actually suffered under more concentrated oppression than almost any other sector. And the sight of the nobility's paradise worlds and garden worlds had cut more deeply into the people who had been ground down beneath them.
The ferocity of the resistance exceeded all expectations. Even Lion El'Jonson and Ferrus Manus, among the hardest and most ruthless of the Primarchs, found themselves unable to continue by the end.
And it wasn't just them. Eventually every Legion found itself unable to act. Nobody, after slaughtering this many of their own kind, could keep going.
Even someone as unhinged as Curze briefly returned to a kind of lucidity at the end, and spoke words that drained the colour from everyone present.
"If salvation means the slaughter of humanity, then we have now liberated everyone. The Great Crusade is complete."
In the end, only Perturabo, deploying his Abominable Intelligence cohorts, was able to finish it.
This pacification had left almost everyone questioning whether anything they had done over these years had truly been righteous.
Reducing these civilians to this state for the sake of their own honour — was this the true nature of the Great Crusade?
Perturabo gave no one more time for reflection. The Great Crusade restarted. They were pushed back onto the battlefield.
War was a mundane affair for Space Marines. But once conviction wavered, war only drove them deeper into confusion.
In the end Perturabo used the Iron Warriors' own creed to force some clarity back into his brothers — and the Great Crusade, however reluctantly, resumed.
Being Warmaster like this — Perturabo felt the shame of it. He had never hated the Emperor and Malcador the way he hated them now. If those two animals had spent even one day in all their lives doing something decent, the Imperium would never have come to this.
"Brother, you've become like you were before again lately. Very volatile. Your sister is worried — but she's been seeing you so rarely that she asked me to come and check on you."
Vulkan, who had been working continuously inside the Webway and had not participated in the pacification, had no clear sense of how severe the rebellion had truly been.
But seeing the Warmaster — his brother — in this much pain, the scale of what had happened was not difficult to infer.
"Things have been heavy lately. Not just for me — the rebellions shook every one of the brothers. The Great Crusade had been riddled with contradictions already, and the Imperium hasn't reclaimed nearly enough territory. And in this one pacification — every one of us killed across more than two hundred sectors' worth of human beings."
"Two hundred sectors. Humanity probably hasn't lost that many lives to xenos in the entire Great Crusade combined. In a single pacification, we killed more of our own people than all our enemies put together."
"What does that make us? What has any of this Great Crusade amounted to? We said we were saving humanity — what exactly did we save?"
Even just hearing the number was enough to stun Vulkan. What had his brothers lived through in these eighteen months?
"Do you know, Vulkan — the fleets and equipment I gave to my brothers, the first time they were ever used in anger was against human beings inside our own Imperium. When those power weapons tore through those civilians, every single one of them didn't know what they were doing or why."
"Now I can only drive them back onto the Great Crusade with high-minded justifications I barely believe myself. I can't even find a single honest reason — a single worthwhile goal — to give them for why the Great Crusade should continue."
Perturabo couldn't go on. Nobody could speak calmly after slaughtering their own people.
"Brother..."
Vulkan had nothing to say either. Perturabo's territories had always insulated him from a clear understanding of conditions elsewhere.
"Go back, Vulkan. I have things to attend to. Finish the Webway research as soon as you can. If you're starting to feel the walls close in, take your sons out for a while — just don't go too far."
"All right."
"Malcador — I've been having this nagging feeling of dread lately. Why is that?"
The Emperor had been feeling a persistent chill at his back recently. He couldn't identify the source no matter how he searched, and even scanning the Warp had turned up nothing obviously wrong.
"You think it might be that great Blue Bird again? I keep feeling like it's brewing something. Maybe I should find another opportunity to get everyone together and hit it again."
The Emperor decided it was probably that damned Blue Bird scheming again. In his experience, whenever something felt off, giving it a solid beating was never the wrong call.
But while the Emperor didn't know the reason, Malcador did. Not only did he know — he understood that this time the situation was severe enough that one wrong step could tip the Imperium into ruin.
Only someone with the Emperor's particular brand of obliviousness could be simultaneously callous, heartless, emotionally vacant, and inclined to treat everyone around him as tools — and still be surprised when things went catastrophically wrong. Whether he'd be able to smooth his way through this one, Malcador genuinely didn't know.
He was still turning over how to buy time with the Primarchs when the Emperor's mouth started moving again.
"By the way — are we still going to revoke Perturabo's Warmaster position? He's caused quite a significant incident here. I think the Warmaster title—"
The Emperor had been about to say more, but suddenly both he and Malcador turned to look forward.
A colossal machine — no, a giant clad in an enormous white suit of armour — had appeared outside the Imperial Palace without making a single sound.
The Custodians had raised their weapons. Valdor stepped forward, positioning himself before Perturabo.
"Warmaster."
Valdor signalled the surrounding Custodians to stand down, then offered a respectful bow. Whatever one's feelings on the matter, Perturabo's standing demanded acknowledgement.
"Come out."
Perturabo ignored the Custodians entirely, calling out to the open air ahead of him. Those crimson optical lenses brought the tension of the scene to an almost unbearable pitch.
"Warmaster—"
"Come out. I will not say it a third time. Otherwise I will go inside and reduce your Webway project to rubble."
The barely-suppressed fury in Perturabo's voice was something anyone could hear plainly.
The figures of the Emperor and Malcador appeared before the Eternity Gate.
The Emperor had barely opened his mouth before his expression shifted. Psychic shields activated in an instant. A hypersonic electromagnetic nova cannon round, hundreds of metres in diameter, discharged from the barrel array behind Perturabo.
In the same moment, everyone inside the Imperial Palace was teleported away by Perturabo — leaving only Malcador and the Emperor.
Plasma blastguns and Volcano Cannons followed immediately. The gates of the Imperial Palace were reduced to molten slag in seconds.
"What are you doing?! Have you lost your mind?!"
"You two animals!"
"You consume oxygen while living and waste perfectly good soil by dying, and your existence torments the Warp even in your half-dead state — your presence in this world serves no purpose whatsoever except to drag humanity's moral floor to new lows!"
"I am going to send you both to your deaths right now!"
"And I will shackle your souls inside my Daemonic Forge for all eternity!"
Perturabo swept a hand outward. Overwhelming psychic force blanketed all of Terra in an instant. Endless artillery emplacements materialised in the skies above, every barrel trained on the Imperial Palace.
That day, the people of Terra witnessed something that blotted out the sky — a cataclysm of mechanical annihilation beyond anything they had imagined. Was this what the Abominable Intelligence revolt had been like?
Underground, Magnus and the others had no idea what was happening above — only that the ceiling seemed to be on the verge of collapse, and the chaos cascaded into the Webway around them. The workers inside scrambled, utterly disoriented.
A powerful wave of psychic force sealed off any attempt to go up and investigate. The Webway itself was undamaged, but nobody was in any state to continue working. Everyone wanted to know what was happening above.
"Wretch! Perturabo — I am your Father! Are you trying to commit patricide?!"
The Emperor and Malcador, barely managing to weather the barrage, were scanning desperately for any opening to subdue Perturabo.
But three hundred and sixty degrees of overlapping fire suppression, combined with the penetrating reach of Perturabo's psychic output, left no exploitable angle.
"What are you two animals still doing alive?!"
"I should have ended you both when I was putting Terra in order!"
"At least then you wouldn't have spent all these years still being a plague on humanity!"
"Die!"
Perturabo had truly crossed into a state of incandescent fury. Nothing either of them could say now would ever reach him.
"Stop! Perturabo — this has nothing to do with me! I'm your Uncle Malcador! If you want to hit your old man, leave me out of it!"
Malcador tried to use this as an opening — and was immediately struck by a lance of light hundreds of metres across, which impacted his psychic shields and sent him coughing up blood.
Innumerable gun barrels swivelled to track the silver-haired old man.
"Take it up with my Volcano Cannons!"
"You unfilial wretch — perhaps I haven't made it sufficiently clear that Saint George and his dragon-slaying is not a legend!"
A great blade wreathed in golden fire split the void, then drove downward through the wall of artillery fire directly at Perturabo.
Deep in the Warp, the Chaos Gods watching the spectacle were in a state of extraordinary excitement — Khorne especially, unabashedly channelling blessings onto his "brother."
Nurgle and Slaanesh piled on blessings from the sidelines. Even Tzeentch quietly slipped some power into the mix.
Come on, Lord of Iron! Put that damned golden-skinned man down!