This is the bonus chapter for reaching 150 Powerstones.
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The Diasporex Gate.
The battlefield had devolved into an absolute meat grinder.
Fires raged. Blood slicked the decks. The deafening roar of mass-reactive bolter fire shook the air. A purple tide of Emperor's Children clashed head-on with the Diasporex Alliance's defenders, turning the narrow corridors into a chaotic, bloody slaughterhouse.
Volleys of plasma beams melted blackened craters into the bulkheads. Energy blades crashed against power swords, sending showers of blinding sparks flying in every direction.
Both sides were completely lost to the bloodlust.
Nobody took a step back.
Nobody surrendered.
It was a fight to the bitter, bloody end.
By now, the defensive fortifications were mostly reduced to slag. Those once-dense networks of automated turrets were nothing but a graveyard of smoking wreckage. The heavily fortified energy shields had long since overloaded and shattered like glass.
Still, the Diasporex Alliance fought on.
Genetically augmented xenos warriors threw their own bodies into the breaches, buying time against the Astartes advance with their lives. Armored mechanized troopers hunkered down behind whatever cover was left, laying down frantic waves of suppression fire. Airborne cybernetic drones swarmed overhead, raining down rockets and plasma blasts in a desperate last stand.
But right in the middle of all that chaos, a solitary purple figure was reaping through the defenders like the Grim Reaper himself.
Fulgrim.
Every single swing of the Blade of the Laer ended multiple lives. A sickly, pink-purple light twisted and writhed around his body, cloaking him in an unearthly, daemonic halo.
His flawlessly perfect face was contorted into a mask of frenzied bloodlust. Deep within his eyes—which were already starting to bleed into a toxic shade of magenta—there was nothing but a ravenous hunger for slaughter.
Behind him, the Emperor's Children were completely consumed by the madness of the fight.
Julius Kaesoron's bladework was a masterpiece of lethal elegance, every strike perfectly parrying and dismantling enemy attacks. Vespasian's flawless tactical barks kept the Legion's formation rock-solid, ordering overlapping fields of fire as they systematically pushed forward. Saul Tarvitz fought in grim silence, every swing of his power sword steady, measured, and instantly fatal.
"Roar!!!"
A heavily augmented xenos brute bellowed, lunging at the Primarch with energy blades buzzing on both of its cybernetic arms.
Fulgrim casually sidestepped the dual strike. With a lazy flick of his wrist, the Blade of the Laer cleaved through the air, completely severing both of the monster's front limbs at the shoulder joints.
But the freak just wouldn't drop. It desperately grabbed a fistful of Fulgrim's cape with its remaining two arms, unhinged a jaw packed with razor-sharp fangs, and lunged straight for the Primarch's throat.
Fulgrim didn't even flinch. He just raised a hand, locking his golden power gauntlet over the creature's face, and clamped his fingers shut...
Crunch.
The sickening sound of a skull collapsing was instantly swallowed up by the thundering explosions around them.
Still, more of the xenos monstrosities kept swarming in. They were literally using their own corpses to slow the demigod down.
Julius Kaesoron's voice chimed over the vox-net:
"Father!"
"Enemy reinforcements are still pouring in!"
"If this keeps up, our casualty rates will—"
"Irrelevant," Fulgrim's voice was ice-cold, carrying an eerily serene detachment. "To achieve perfection, all sacrifices are justified."
--
High above the meat grinder, atop the remnants of the primary defense battery.
Karu Atlee stood motionless, his eyeless, alien visage pointed directly at the slaughter below.
He could sense it...
Those purple murder machines were pushing deeper, step by bloody step.
The Alliance warriors were being butchered to the last man.
The battle was unraveling. They were losing.
He stood in deafening silence for a long time.
Then, he finally moved.
He strapped on his personal set of heavy cybernetic war-plate, studded entirely with pure Diasporexs. Under the flickering emergency lights, every interlocking scale of the armor threw off a cold, ghostly luminescence. He planted all four of his heavy mechanical legs onto the steel gantry, leaning his elongated torso forward.
Reaching to his side, he hoisted up a massive energy greataxe. Its heavy, broad blade crackled with a violent, deep-blue electrical aura.
In his other manipulator arm, he gripped a towering energy greatsword—long, sleek, and humming with a lethal, icy chill at the tip.
Behind him, a heavily augmented cyber-drone hovered over, projecting a frantic psionic transmission into his mind:
"Chieftain, you can't—"
"I can."
He turned to look at the scattered remnants of his people, still fighting tooth and nail in the muck below.
There were xenos. There were humans.
But right now, every single one of them wore the exact same expression...
Despair. Fury. Utter resolve.
It was the final, fanatical stand of a people defending their home.
In his mind's eye, Karu pictured Shukra Valentine's perpetually calm face. His oldest rival—a man he'd bumped heads with for decades—was hunkered down on the bridge, waiting for his status report.
"Make it back alive." That had been Shukra's final order.
Karu hadn't answered him.
Because he knew perfectly well this was a one-way trip.
Launching himself off the high-ground barricades, Karu's massive four-legged chassis kicked through the empty air, plummeting down into the dead center of the meat grinder like a falling meteor.
He held his crackling energy axe high above his head, leveling his greatsword across his heavily plated chest.
A deafening, guttural war cry exploded from his augmetic vocalizers, rattling the bulkheads so hard that even the defenders currently laying down fire flinched in shock:
"My children..."
Down in the blood-soaked muck, every battered xenos warrior snapped their head up.
They saw him. Their Chieftain.
The leader who had guided them through the dark void of this sector for centuries. The commander who had thrown himself onto the front lines of every single crisis they had ever faced.
And here he was, fully strapped into his most sacred relic armor, standing right beside them in the trenches.
Karu Atlee's voice rumbled over the vox again, steeped in a raw, tragic finality:
"Give them everything you have!"
He hoisted both his crackling energy axe and his greatsword toward the ceiling.
"Butcher every last one of these bastards!"
He hammered his mechanical legs into a dead sprint, charging straight at the lone purple demigod tearing through his lines.
"For our home!"
His furious bellow ripped through the corridor like a shockwave:
"KILL THEM ALL!"
He surged forward, charging headlong toward that purple silhouette.
"Protect our home..." His deafening roar exploded down the corridor: "KILL THEM ALL!!!"
Behind him, the xenos warriors let out an earth-shattering battle cry in unison. The augmented xenos fighters found their second wind. Mangled cybernetic units took to the air once more. The Diasporex armored mechs, on the verge of total collapse, gritted their teeth and kept laying down fire. Following their chieftain's lead, they launched one final, desperate charge at that purple figure.
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