Doom Slayer
The first thing he heard was prayer.
Thousands of voices filled the ruined sanctum. Some rose loudly enough to challenge the bombardment beyond its walls. Others slipped through bloodied lips as little more than breath.
They pleaded with an Emperor the Slayer did not know to protect their families, forgive their sins, and deliver their world from the creatures outside.
The portal closed behind him.
Crimson light vanished from the cracked statues surrounding the altar. The smell of brimstone lingered, mixing with incense, blood, scorched stone, and promethium smoke.
The Slayer stood motionless within the shadows of the apse.
His Praetor suit bore the scars of the battle from which he had been torn. Demon blood coated his gauntlets and filled the seams of his green armour. Fresh burns crossed his breastplate, though the flesh beneath remained in pristine condition.
No firearm rested in his hands.
The Doomblade was built into the left wrist of his Praetor suit, retracted within a reinforced housing along the gauntlet. It was his sidearm blade. It was short, fast, and made for killing at arm's reach without occupying either hand.
The last thing he remembered was Hell.
He had entered a temple beneath a dead sky. Legions of demons had surrounded the portal ahead of him, and something vast had waited beyond it.
Then the gateway had changed.
It had dragged him through places without light, distance, or shape. For an instant, he had felt countless minds reaching toward him.
Now he was here.
Even though he didn't know where he was. It didn't matter in the end.
After all hell had torn him from one world and cast him onto another before. Names, stars, and dimensions changed. The work of killing demons did not.
He had fought for longer than mortal calendars could measure. Eons had passed around him in Hell, where time bent beneath the will of ancient things. He had broken armies, slain Titans, and cast down the dark power from which Hell itself had been born.
He was no longer merely the marine who had first stepped into that endless war in hell.
The Slayer surveyed the sanctum.
It was vast enough to contain a fortress. Statues of armoured warriors stood between pillars that disappeared into smoke. Human skulls had been worked into the walls, altars, and iron railings. Thousands of candles burned beneath the image of a golden figure seated upon a throne.
The place resembled a temple of Hell.
The people inside did not. They were civilians.
The wounded covered the floor between broken pews. Soldiers rested against the pillars, clutching empty lasguns or pressing filthy bandages against their injuries.
Parents held their children beneath torn regimental banners while robed priests moved among them, speaking words of comfort they could no longer make themselves believe.
Fear filled every face.
It was not the fevered devotion of cultists waiting to spill blood. It was the fear of people with nowhere left to run.
A wounded Cadian was the first to notice him. The soldier's violet eyes widened. He forced his lasgun up with one hand while the other hung uselessly at his side.
"Contact!" he shouted.
"Behind the altar!" The warning spread through the sanctum faster than any prayer.
Voices died one after another. Thousands of faces turned toward the apse, and the congregation recoiled from the green-armoured giant standing in its shadows.
Those nearest the altar scrambled backward. An old man fell between the pews and was nearly trampled before two strangers dragged him clear.
Parents pulled children against their chests. Several of the wounded tried to crawl despite injuries that had left them unable to stand.
A woman screamed.
"Another traitor," someone whispered.
"Emperor preserve us," answered another.
Fewer than a dozen Cadian soldiers were still capable of fighting. Their lasguns swung toward the Slayer in an uneven line, barrels trembling from exhaustion, fear, or both. Some of the weapons were empty. None of the soldiers lowered them.
A priest stepped between the armoured stranger and a cluster of children. His face had gone pale, but he planted his staff against the floor and held his ground.
The Slayer did not move toward them. His hands remained empty at his sides.
That did little to calm the congregation. They saw armour of no Imperial pattern, a visor that revealed nothing, and enough daemonic blood upon his wargear to paint an altar. He had appeared through a portal in the heart of their sanctuary. On Cadia, such arrivals brought only corruption and death.
The wounded Cadian kept his lasgun trained upon the Slayer's chest. Yet beneath the fear, uncertainty entered his expression. The stranger had been given every opportunity to attack. He had not taken one.
The Slayer's helmet turned slowly across the sanctum.
He saw the wounded. He saw the children. He saw the narrow aisles, the weakened pillars, and the thousands of bodies packed so closely together that a single careless attack could turn the sanctum into their tomb.
As he thought of this, something struck the sanctum doors from outside.
The sound rolled through the nave like the tolling of an enormous bell.
The towering adamantium doors shook upon their hinges. Dust streamed from the arch above them, and iron votive lamps swayed on their chains. The congregation fell silent.
For a moment, nothing followed.
Then came a second impact.
The doors bowed inward. Their locking bar groaned within its brackets, and a crack raced across the stone above the frame. Candles toppled from their stands. Somewhere among the pews, a child began to cry.
Something scraped across the other side of the doors.
Not one set of claws, but hundreds.
The sound crawled across the metal while muffled shrieks and laughter seeped through the seams.
A third blow struck.
The entire sanctum trembled. Fragments of coloured glass rained from the high windows, and waves of candlelight vanished beneath falling dust.
The crowd surged away from the entrance, crushing itself deeper into the nave. Priests shouted for calm, but their voices disappeared beneath the panic.
The Cadian soldiers turned their lasguns from the Slayer toward the doors.
The wounded soldier hesitated. His gaze moved between the stranger in the apse and the entrance beginning to fail.
Another impact tore one of the upper hinges from the wall.
The doors lurched inward before the locking bar forced them back. A narrow seam opened between them. Red light spilled through it, followed by the points of hooked blades and clawed fingers straining to widen the gap.
"Weapons ready!" a Cadian sergeant shouted.
Fewer than a dozen soldiers were still capable of standing. They formed a ragged line between the doors and the civilians anyway.
The pounding stopped. Silence settled over the sanctum, sudden and complete.
The defenders tightened their grips. Parents covered their children with their own bodies. The priest before the altar whispered the final words of a prayer.
Then every creature outside struck at once.
The doors exploded. Twisted metal tore through the nave.
The Slayer moved.
One instant he stood beside the altar. The next, he was between the flying debris and the first row of civilians. Shards of adamantium struck his Praetor suit hard enough to crack the stone beneath his boots.
No mortal eye saw him cross the distance. He had used only the smallest fraction of his true speed.
None passed him.
The civilians nearest the entrance had thrown up their arms and waited for the metal to tear through them. When they looked again, they found the stranger standing before them. Jagged shards protruded from the floor around his boots. Others lay flattened or broken against his armour.
He had placed himself in their path.
Confusion passed through the fear behind him.
The Cadians opened fire through the smoke.
Crimson daemons rushed into the sanctum.
Bloodletters vaulted over the shattered doors, their burning swords raised above horned skulls. Cultists followed beneath banners marked with symbols that seemed to crawl whenever mortal eyes settled upon them.
The first daemon landed among the wounded.
It raised its blade above a woman shielding two children beneath her body.
With a metallic snap, the Doomblade deployed from the housing on his left wrist.
Within the crowded sanctum, it offered him the control he needed.
The woman saw him standing between the congregation and the doors.
Then he was between her and the daemon.
The Doomblade passed through the Bloodletter's wrist before its weapon could descend. The burning sword struck the floor.
His free fist struck the daemon in the chest. Ribs and spine broke together. The blow hurled the daemon away from the woman.
A final thrust through the skull ended it. The daemon dissolved into ash before it struck the ground.
The woman remained curled around her children. She stared at the ash drifting past the Slayer's legs, then up at the warrior who had crossed the sanctum to save them.
He had not even looked back to see whether they were watching.
The Slayer was already moving.
A cultist raised an autogun toward the wounded.
The Slayer crossed the distance before the man could pull the trigger. His free hand closed around the weapon and folded its metal frame in half.
His boot struck the cultist's chest and drove the man into the floor hard enough to break the flagstones.
Three Bloodletters attacked together.
Their blades descended from different directions, each stroke strong enough to split a mortal soldier through his armour.
The Slayer stepped inside the first swing.
His fist struck the first Bloodletter beneath the jaw. The blow tore its horned head from its shoulders and sent it spinning into the smoke.
The second attacked from his left.
The Slayer turned upon one foot and drove his armoured heel through its knee. The leg folded backward. He caught the falling daemon by the horn and drove its skull into the edge of a stone pew.
The pew broke first.
The third came from behind.
He caught its sword arm without looking. Bone broke inside his fist. The Slayer turned, pulled the daemon across his body, and drove one knee into its abdomen. The impact lifted the creature from the floor.
The Doomblade met it on the way down, entering beneath its jaw and emerging through the crown of its skull.
He tore the weapon free. Black blood struck his armour.
The Cadians watched in stunned silence.
The wounded soldier's lasgun was still pointed toward the Slayer. Slowly, almost without realizing it, he lowered the muzzle.
The stranger had crossed their line more times than the soldier could follow. Not once had he moved against them. Every daemon that reached for a wounded man, a parent, or a child died before its weapon could fall.
"He's protecting us," someone breathed. The words moved through those close enough to hear them.
More daemons poured through the doors.
The Slayer advanced to meet them.
He did not fight as a berserker lost to rage. Every movement was chosen. Every step kept his armoured body between the invaders and the civilians. Every cut ended at the exact depth required to kill without carrying the blade into someone behind his target. Every punch, kick, and throw drove the enemy away from the people he protected.
A Bloodletter tried to slip around his right side.
The Slayer seized it by one horn and pulled its head down into a rising knee. The daemon's face collapsed against his armour.
He threw the body into two more creatures rushing through the entrance, knocking all three back into the smoke.
Another climbed along a pillar to pass above him.
The Slayer took one step, planted a boot against the wall, and launched himself upward. He caught the daemon by the throat twenty feet above the floor and tore it from the stone with one hand.
They struck the ground together.
The Slayer landed on top of it. His armoured boot came down once. Only the Slayer rose.
A burst of autogun fire crossed the nave.
He moved into its path.
Rounds flattened against the Praetor suit and fell harmlessly at his feet. Before the cultist could change aim, the Slayer crossed the sanctuary.
He did not use the Doomblade. One backhand crushed the cultist's skull and hurled the body through the shattered doors.
Another cultist pulled a grenade from beneath his robes.
The Slayer caught the man's wrist, crushed every bone within it, and drove a knee into his chest. The cultist folded around the impact.
He took the grenade before the fuse completed its first second and threw it through the ruined doors.
The explosion tore apart the next rank of invaders outside.
No flame touched the congregation.
People began to lift their heads from behind the pews.
The soldiers no longer tracked the Slayer with their lasguns. They fired past him whenever the angle was safe, trusting that the green-armoured warrior would fill every breach they could not. The priest who had stood against him at the altar stared across the nave, his staff forgotten in one hand.
The stranger had strength enough to destroy the sanctum.
Instead, he measured every blow to preserve it.
The cultists began to falter. Their daemonic allies had entered the sanctum expecting wounded soldiers and helpless victims.
Instead, they had found him.
The creatures were not the demons of his Hell. Their forms were different, and the power animating them carried the taste of another abyss.
Their cruelty was the same. So was their fear.
One Bloodletter stopped at the threshold.
The daemon stared at the Slayer through the smoke. Something older than thought moved behind its burning eyes. It did not know his name, yet every fragment of its unnatural soul understood what stood before it.
The Slayer took one step forward.
The Bloodletter stepped back.
One of the children saw it.
"It's afraid of him." The child's voice was small, but the silence around the threshold carried it through the nave.
The civilians looked again, not at the Slayer, but at the daemon retreating from him. For weeks, the creatures of the Warp had hunted them through streets, shelters, and burning homes. They had never seen one hesitate. They had never imagined that such a thing could feel fear.
Something loosened within the congregation.
People rose from behind the pews. Wounded soldiers straightened against the pillars. Hands that had been clenched in terror formed the sign of the aquila.
A cultist screamed at the daemon to attack.
The Doomblade passed through both of them.
The remaining Bloodletters rushed him together, driven forward by rage and by the greater horde massing behind them.
Destroying them required no effort worth naming. He had slain creatures large enough to crush cities beneath their feet and survived battles that had ended realms.
These daemons were not a threat to him.
The only danger was what his strength could do to the people behind him. One careless strike or one collapsing pillar could end them.
The Slayer needed nothing more than the blade in his wrist and the strength of his own hands.
Burning blades filled the entrance as the daemons threw themselves upon him.
The Doomblade moved once.
Then again.
A Bloodletter survived the second cut and lunged.
The Slayer caught it by the throat and drove it into the wall. His fingers closed, crushing the daemon's neck and the stone behind it.
Another daemon swept low at his legs.
He stepped over the blade, stamped down upon the weapon, and kicked the creature hard enough to send it through three of its own kind.
More daemons crowded into the doorway behind it.
They came without order and seemingly without end. Bloodletters climbed over the bodies of those that had fallen. Cultists forced themselves through gaps between burning swords. Other shapes writhed in the smoke outside, clawing forward for the chance to reach the helpless souls within.
The Slayer met them at the threshold.
His Doomblade flashed once, and three daemons fell.
He caught a descending sword between his palms, tore it from its wielder, and drove the pommel through the creature's face. His elbow shattered the throat of another. A backward kick caved in a cultist's breastplate and hurled him into the horde outside.
Every body fell away from the congregation. Every drop of violence was directed toward the doors.
At first, the civilians tried to count the creatures he killed.
Twenty.
Forty.
Then the deaths came too quickly.
The Slayer seemed to stand everywhere the daemons attempted to pass. A fist crushed one skull. The Doomblade opened another from throat to sternum. An armoured knee broke a third across the spine. Whenever a burning blade reached beyond him, his hand closed around the wrist that carried it and dragged its owner back to die.
The horde kept coming. He kept killing.
The Cadians joined him. Las-bolts passed over his shoulders and beneath his arms whenever he opened a path for them. Their ragged volleys grew steadier with every daemon that fell.
Behind the firing line, the prayers returned. They no longer desperate whispers begging for rescue, but thousands of voices rising together in defiance.
The daemons heard them.
They heard the mortals they had come to slaughter finding their courage.
And they saw the reason standing in the doorway.
The final Bloodletter climbed over a mound of its own dead. The Slayer caught it by the throat before its feet touched the floor. He lifted it with one hand, drove the Doomblade through its skull, and cast its dissolving remains back into the smoke.
Then silence returned.
The Slayer stood among the remains of the invaders.
None had passed him.
Behind him, thousands of civilians remained alive.
The Doomblade retracted into the housing on his left wrist.
He had defended the sanctum with the wrist-mounted blade and his own body. Nothing more had been required.
For several heartbeats, no one spoke.
The wounded Cadian who had first seen the Slayer let his lasgun fall against its sling. Shame flickered across his face as he remembered where he had first aimed it. He straightened as much as his injuries allowed and raised his good hand in salute.
The priest stepped away from the children he had tried to shield. He no longer placed himself between them and the armoured stranger. Instead, he bowed his head.
The woman the Slayer had saved rose with both children clinging to her. She looked at him with tears cutting clean paths through the dust on her face. Around her, fear gave way first to disbelief, then to wonder, and finally to something Cadia had nearly forgotten.
Hope.
Some called him an angel beneath their breath. Others whispered that the Emperor had answered them. The Slayer understood none of their titles, but he understood the way parents no longer pulled their children away from him.
He understood the soldiers standing taller as he passed and the wounded reaching for weapons they had thought they would never lift again.
They did not know what he was.
They knew that he had chosen to protect them.
A little girl emerged from beneath a broken pew. Dust covered her face, and blood stained one sleeve of her dress. She looked at the Slayer, then at the dead daemons surrounding him.
Something lay near his boot.
A small rag doll, dressed in the red robes and white wings of an Imperial saint.
The Slayer bent and picked it up.
Hands that had broken Titans held the toy with care. He crossed the blood-covered floor and offered it to the girl.
She took it slowly.
"Are you one of the Emperor's angels?" she asked.
The Slayer looked down at her. He gave no answer. He did not know her Emperor. He knew why she would believe him to be an angel though.
The Slayer inclined his helmet once.
Her mother pulled the child close, tears running through the dust on her face.
The Slayer turned toward the ruined entrance.
The crowd parted before him. This time, they did not recoil in fear.
Civilians bowed their heads as he passed. Soldiers saluted. Children watched him with open admiration, their fear forgotten now that they had seen the daemons flee before him.
The priest stepped aside and made the sign of the aquila.
No one tried to stop him.
The wounded Cadian looked at the dead daemons, then at the green-armoured figure walking toward the war beyond the doors.
"Cadia stands," he whispered.
Another soldier repeated it.
Then one of the civilians.
The words spread through the sanctum, passing from the wounded to the frightened and from parents to their children.
"Cadia stands." The prayers did not cease.
The Slayer stepped out of the Sanctum Imperialis and onto its shattered stairs.
The western front of Kasr Kraf filled the horizon.
The city below was a single enormous battlefield. Entire districts burned while artillery shells crossed the sky in both directions. Cadian soldiers fought from trenches, rooftops, ruined hab-blocks, and the wreckage of their own tanks.
Black Legionaries advanced through the streets beneath banners marked with the Eye of Horus. Chaos cultists flooded around them in their thousands. Daemons moved through the smoke, slaughtering soldiers and civilians wherever the defensive lines had broken.
Aircraft fought above the towers. Imperial Thunderbolts twisted between corrupted fighters while burning wreckage fell around them.
Drop pods descended through the clouds like meteors.
One struck the avenue below the sanctum. Its doors exploded outward, and warriors in massive power armour emerged firing bolters into the daemonic horde.
Beyond the city walls, armies covered the plains of Cadia.
Above them, the sky had been torn open. The Eye of Terror stared down upon the world, filled with impossible colours and the screaming shapes of things too vast to enter reality.
Something else hung beyond the clouds.
A fortress blacker than the void drifted in Cadia's orbit. Its structure was broken and burning, but vast engines still glowed within its depths. Warships moved around it like insects circling a dying beast.
The Slayer did not know its name. He did not know Cadia. He did not know the Imperium, the Black Legion, or the ancient war that had brought them to this moment.
He knew the enemy.
He knew the innocent.
And he knew what had to be done.
The sanctum and its refugees were behind him now. The avenue offered clear lines of fire, with no civilians standing beyond his targets.
The Slayer raised his empty right hand.
Space folded around it, opening onto a pocket dimension hidden beyond the boundaries of the material world. He reached into the distortion.
The Super Shotgun emerged in his grasp, already loaded.
On the avenue below, a Bloodletter dragged a wounded Cadian from behind a barricade. The soldier reached for a lasgun lying just beyond his fingertips while the daemon raised its sword.
The Slayer stepped from the sanctum stairs.
The meathook fired.
Its chain buried itself in the daemon's chest.
The creature looked up.
For the first time since the invasion began, something born within the Warp felt a terror that did not belong to its victims.
The chain drew tight. The Slayer pulled himself into the war.
He struck the Bloodletter with enough force to carry it across the avenue. The daemon crashed through the remains of the barricade, and the Super Shotgun fired against its chest.
The creature ceased to exist.
The wounded Cadian stared up at him.
Along the avenue, exhausted soldiers turned toward the blast. They saw the green-armoured warrior standing over the daemon's remains. They saw other creatures hesitate at the sight of him.
For weeks, the servants of Chaos had fed upon their fear.
Now the daemons were afraid.
A Cadian sergeant climbed onto the barricade and raised his chainsword.
"Push those foul daemons back!" he shouted. "Cadia stands!"
The cry swept along the western line.
Soldiers who had been retreating stopped. Lasguns rose. Heavy weapons turned back toward the enemy. Men and women who had believed themselves already dead advanced behind the silent warrior.
The Slayer opened the Super Shotgun.
The spent shells fell.
Fresh ammunition passed from the pocket dimension into his hand, and he loaded both barrels.
The weapon snapped shut.
Above them, the broken Blackstone Fortress still waited in the heavens. Abaddon's final blow had not yet fallen, and the armies of Chaos still covered the plains beyond Kasr Kraf.
Cadia's future had once appeared certain.
Then something from beyond its universe stepped onto its soil.
The Super Shotgun roared.
The Cadians charged.
Beneath a sky already marked for death, hope returned to Cadia.
Doom Guy: First-Hour Kill Count: 248
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Author Note: Alright if you made it this far, please drop some power stone so I know this story is being enjoyed. This is optional btw.