Ursarkar E. Creed
Ursarkar E. Creed measured victory in metres, and by that measure, Cadia was winning.
The western front of Kasr Kraf stretched from the shattered manufactorum districts in the north to the black foundations of the pylon fields in the south.
Forty thousand Imperial defenders fought across that expanse. Most were Cadian, drawn from regiments whose numbers had been reduced so severely that survivors no longer bothered asking which company a soldier had once belonged to.
They fought beside Space Marines, the Adepta Sororitas, the Sisters of Silence, Titan crews, and anyone else still capable of carrying a weapon.
Against them stood an army without a visible end. Chaos cultists covered the western approaches in their hundreds of thousands. Black Legionaries advanced among them, supported by the Hounds of Abaddon and warriors from other Traitor Legions.
Daemons stalked between burning tanks. Corrupted engines dragged themselves across the ruins on tracks, claws, and limbs made from fused flesh and metal.
The Traitor Astartes alone outnumbered every loyalist Space Marine detachment combined. Chaos held the same advantage in god-engines. Behind the legions of flesh walked countless Titans.
Creed stood upon the command platform of Bastion Primus, one of the last fortified observation towers overlooking the western pylon fields. The upper walls had been opened by artillery fire, leaving half the chamber exposed to Cadia's poisoned sky. Wind carried smoke, ash, and the distant screams of the dying across the strategium.
He preferred it that way.
A sealed bunker encouraged commanders to mistake glowing symbols for soldiers. From the broken tower, Creed could see what every order cost.
At fifty, he was Cadia's Lord Castellan, its Governor Primus, and the supreme commander of every Imperial force fighting upon the fortress world.
None of those titles mattered as much as knowing when to send soldiers forward, and understanding precisely what he condemned them to when he did.
The hololithic table before him displayed the western front in layers of flickering light. Cadian formations glowed violet. Allied forces appeared in white and gold. Enemy concentrations stained the display red.
There was far too much red.
No other battlefield on Cadia held so many soldiers, war engines, or god-machines. The western front was the largest battle upon a world built almost entirely for war.
For the first time in eighteen hours, however, it was moving west.
"The Ninth and Seventeenth have reclaimed the second trench line," an adjutant reported. "Black Templar elements are advancing beyond them."
"Tell the Templars to stop at Marker Aurelius," Creed said.
The adjutant hesitated. "They have momentum, my lord."
"They also have a traitor armour column moving behind the refinery to their north." The man looked down at the hololith. No enemy armour appeared there.
"Auspex has not detected…"
"The refinery smoke changed direction three minutes ago." Creed pointed toward the distant ruins. Through the open wall, a black column rose above the manufactorums. It leaned east despite the wind driving everything else toward the north.
Something large was moving beneath it.
"If the Templars continue another five hundred metres, the armour will strike their flank. Tell them to halt. Redirect Battery Sixteen to grid seven-four. Three ranging rounds, then saturation fire." The adjutant relayed the order.
Creed raised his magnoculars. The western front filled his vision.
Thousands of Cadians climbed from the trenches and advanced behind their tanks. Purple eyes shone beneath battered helmets. Regimental banners moved above them, many so burned and torn that only fragments of their original markings remained.
Leman Russ battle tanks rolled through the ruins in staggered formations, firing into the retreating horde. Chimeras followed in their wake. Basilisks hidden behind the pylon ridges sent shells screaming overhead while Manticores painted burning paths across the sky.
The infantry moved beneath the guns of gods.
An Imperial Warlord Titan strode between the pylon fields, its void shields flashing beneath incoming fire. Each discharge of its volcano cannon turned a distant section of the Chaos army into white fire. Two loyalist Reavers guarded its flanks while packs of Warhound Titans hunted through the broken city, moving between towers like armoured wolves.
Across from them, the engines of Chaos answered.
Traitor Titans advanced through the smoke beneath banners made from chained bodies. Their armour had grown around them like diseased bone.
Faces pressed beneath iron plating opened their mouths whenever the war engines fired. A corrupted Warlord unleashed a beam of crimson light that passed through three hab-blocks and struck the shields of its loyalist counterpart.
The impact brought false daylight to the western front.
The loyalist Titan remained standing. The Cadians cheered and continued forward.
Aircraft fought between the god-engines' upper bodies. Imperial Thunderbolts twisted through formations of corrupted fighters while Marauder bombers crossed the pylon fields beneath curtains of flak. Drop pods fell through the burning clouds from both sides, striking the ruins hard enough to throw tanks from their tracks.
Higher still hung the crippled Blackstone Fortress.
It was a broken darkness against the Eye of Terror, burning in Cadia's orbit while the warships surrounding it tore one another apart. Even crippled, the ancient fortress cast a shadow across the world.
Creed lowered the magnoculars. His plan had begun six hours earlier with a retreat.
He had surrendered two kilometres of broken ground, abandoned three trench systems, and allowed Urkanthos's commanders to believe the western line had finally begun to collapse.
Chaos had surged into the gap exactly as Creed had intended. Cultists and daemons crowded together between the pylon ridges, driving so deeply into the Imperial position that their own reserves blocked their withdrawal.
Then Creed had closed the trap.
Imperial Fists emerged from fortifications buried beneath the southern ridge and sealed the approach to the pylons. Dark Angels struck from concealed positions among the northern manufactorums. Blood Angels descended upon the enemy rear in a storm of jump packs and crimson armour.
The Space Wolves needed no invitation to attack.
They came through the ruins aboard armoured transports, then dismounted within metres of the enemy line. Bolters thundered. Chainswords tore through daemons and traitors alike. Their howls travelled farther than the guns.
At the centre, the Black Templars led the Cadian countercharge.
The Adepta Sororitas advanced beside them, black and red armour shining beneath the fires. Flamers washed across the trenches. Bolters roared beneath hymns sung by thousands of voices.
Above the Sisters flew the two Geminae Superia.
Their wings shone against Cadia's darkened sky as they swept through formations of winged daemons. One carried a burning blade. The other fired into the creatures diving toward the Cadian lines. Wherever they appeared, the defenders looked upward and remembered that miracles still walked among them.
Near the pylons, the Sisters of Silence fought without hymns, declarations, or battle cries.
They needed none.
Their presence pressed against the Warp like a blade laid against diseased flesh. Daemons weakened as they approached the silent warriors. Some stumbled. Others flickered between forms. Cadian squads waiting behind the null-maidens cut them down with disciplined volleys.
The pylons strengthened that effect.
Great structures of black stone rose above the battlefield, untouched by age and older than any human settlement on Cadia. Their surfaces drank the light. Whenever the Eye of Terror pulsed overhead, lines of pale energy moved through the pylons in answer.
There were pylon fields elsewhere upon Cadia. Nowhere though held as many as the western front of Kasr Kraf.
That was why Chaos had concentrated its greatest army here. The Despoiler could burn cities, shatter regiments, and drown Cadia in blood, but as long as the pylons endured, the world still possessed a weapon against the Warp itself.
Creed would not surrender them. Not while a single Cadian remained alive.
"Report from the central salient," another vox-officer called. "Commissar Cain has rallied the Forty-Third and elements of the Cadian Eighth. They have reached the third trench."
Creed found the formation upon the hololith.
The Eighth Cadian, his own regiment, the Lord Castellan's Own, had formed the core of the assault. At their front moved a tall commissar in a greatcoat, chainsword raised as las-fire cut through the smoke around him.
Ciaphas Cain had an unusual talent for finding the point where a battle was most likely to become impossible. He possessed an even more unusual talent for surviving it.
"Tell Cain to hold the trench and prepare for a counterattack," Creed said.
"The enemy is withdrawing from his sector."
"They are withdrawing from every sector."
Creed studied the field. Chaos had lost ground. It had not lost cohesion.
Cultists fled in disorder, but the Black Legion was retreating by formation. Their heavy weapons covered one another. Their surviving armour reversed through the ruins rather than turning its weaker rear plating toward the Imperials. Even the daemons seemed to be withdrawing toward selected positions.
Someone was still commanding them.
Creed had spent most of his fifty years studying war. He had learned to recognize the difference between an enemy breaking and an enemy making room.
The western front was making room for something.
"Halt the central advance," Creed ordered.
Several officers turned toward him.
"My lord?" his senior adjutant asked.
"All formations halt at their assigned markers. Titans hold fire unless fired upon. Artillery is to prepare counter-battery patterns."
"The enemy is in retreat."
"No," Creed said. "The enemy is clearing the field."
The first reports arrived before the order reached every unit.
"Warp disturbance beyond the third trench!"
"Massive energy spike!"
"Pylon response increasing!"
The black structures began to hum.
Creed felt the sound through his boots before he heard it. The hololithic display rippled. Vox channels filled with static and voices speaking backward.
Above the western approaches, the sky opened.
The wound was smaller than the Eye of Terror and darker than the smoke surrounding it. Blood-red lightning spread from its edges. The clouds twisted inward, drawn toward a point hanging above the retreating Chaos host.
The Sisters of Silence turned toward it as one.
The pylons answered with a pulse of pale light.
For an instant, the forming rift narrowed. Something inside forced it open again.
A shape descended through the wound. It fell with its wings closed around its body, trailing fire as it passed into Cadia's atmosphere. The thing struck the centre of the western killing zone.
The impact swallowed the third trench.
Earth and broken stone rose in a wall. Cadian tanks disappeared beneath it. The shock wave crossed two kilometres, flattened what remained of the manufactorum towers, and struck Bastion Primus hard enough to tear officers from their feet.
Creed remained upright by holding the hololithic table.
The display vanished.
Beyond the broken wall, a red glow spread through the smoke.
Creed raised his magnoculars. The crater covered half the ground his army had reclaimed.
Something stood at its centre.
The creature had once worn the shape of an Astartes. Traces of black power armour remained fused to its body, but it had grown far beyond any mortal frame. Wings opened behind it, vast and ragged. Brass chains hung from its limbs. A crown of horns surrounded a face formed from scarred flesh and exposed bone.
In one hand it carried an axe large enough to split a battle tank.
The symbol of Khorne burned upon its chest.
Black Legionaries stopped retreating. The Hounds of Abaddon dropped to one knee. The daemon prince raised its axe. Every servant of Chaos upon the western front roared.
The sound came from hundreds of thousands of throats. It rolled across the trenches, shook dust from the pylons, and swallowed the Imperial battle cries beneath it.
"Identification," Creed said.
His senior adjutant stared through another pair of magnoculars.
"Urkanthos," he said. "Also recorded as Urkrathos. Former Chaos Lord. Master of the Hounds of Abaddon. Lord Ravager of the Chosen."
The vox-officer beside him looked up from his console.
"Admiral of the Black Fleet."
Creed kept watching the daemon prince.
"Abaddon's second-in-command."
No one answered. They did not need to.
Urkanthos lowered his axe toward the Imperial line. Chaos advanced.
The counterattack began with the Titans.
Four traitor engines emerged from the smoke behind the daemon prince. Then another three. More shapes moved beyond them, their upper bodies hidden beneath the clouds.
The loyalist Warlord fired first.
Its volcano cannon struck a corrupted Reaver in the chest. Void shields burst. Armour became liquid. The traitor engine staggered but did not fall.
Three Chaos Titans returned fire.
The Imperial Warlord's shields failed one after another. Red lightning crawled across its armour. A plasma blast struck its left knee, and the joint disappeared.
The god-engine fell. Its death took nearly a minute.
The crew sounded its war horn as it descended, a final note deep enough to shake the battlefield. Cadian soldiers ran beneath its shadow. Some escaped. Most did not.
The Warlord struck the earth beside the southern pylon ridge.
The explosion erased six Imperial companies.
Urkanthos charged through the fire.
He moved faster than anything of his size should have been capable of moving. His axe passed through a Leman Russ and divided the tank from turret to tracks. He seized another vehicle with one claw, lifted it above his head, and threw it into the advancing Cadians.
The Hounds of Abaddon followed him.
Black-armoured warriors crashed into the third trench. Chainaxes rose and fell. Bolt rounds turned Cadian bodies into red mist. Behind them came Bloodletters, Juggernauts, and screaming masses of cultists driven forward by the sight of the daemon prince.
The western line stopped advancing. Then it began moving backward.
"Imperial Fists report a breach at the southern ridge!"
"Blood Angels have lost contact with their second assault group!"
"Enemy armour moving through the refinery!"
The hidden column Creed had predicted emerged too early for the artillery to destroy it. Chaos Land Raiders and corrupted battle tanks rolled from the smoke, firing into the Black Templars' flank.
Battery Sixteen opened fire. Its first shells struck the armour column. Its second volley never came.
A winged daemon landed among the Basilisks and tore through their ammunition stores. The battery disappeared in a succession of explosions.
Creed rebuilt the battle inside his mind.
The hololith flickered back to life, but half its information was already wrong. Vox channels collapsed. Unit markers vanished. Red spread across the western display.
"Dark Angels pivot south," Creed ordered. "Imperial Fists hold the pylon ridge. All remaining armour to the central salient."
"The centre is collapsing."
"Then reinforce it."
"With what?"
Creed looked at the officer. The man lowered his eyes. There were no reserves.
Creed had committed the last of them to the counteroffensive. It had been the correct decision. That did not make the consequences lighter.
"Strip the northern bastions," Creed said. "Every squad not under direct assault moves west."
"That will leave the inner district exposed."
"If the pylons fall, the inner district will not matter."
Orders went out.
The Adepta Sororitas formed a wall before the retreating Cadians. Their flamers burned until fuel lines ran dry. When the flames failed, they drew blades and met the daemons in close combat.
The Geminae Superia descended among them.
White wings vanished beneath black shapes. Golden light flashed through the mass as the two warriors fought back-to-back. They killed everything that reached them, but even they were forced toward the pylon ridge.
The Sisters of Silence withdrew in perfect order. Their null presence tore gaps through the daemonic horde, yet those gaps closed faster than the Cadians could exploit them.
Space Marines died by the squad.
Space Wolves met the Hounds of Abaddon in the ruins and turned the streets into slaughterhouses. Blood Angels descended into the breach around the centre. Dark Angels fired until the barrels of their bolters glowed. The Black Templars ignored the order to withdraw long enough to recover the gene-seed of their fallen.
The Imperial Fists did not withdraw at all. They stood before the first pylon in a line of yellow armour and fired into the approaching dark.
Urkanthos reached them. His axe fell once. The line disappeared.
Creed heard their final transmission over the vox.
No plea.
No scream.
Only the words every soul upon Cadia understood.
"Cadia stands." The channel went silent.
Creed removed his cap and wiped ash from its brim before placing it back upon his head.
Around him, the strategium had grown quiet. Officers still worked. Vox-operators still called for reports. Servitors moved through smoke carrying fresh power cells.
Yet Creed could feel despair entering the room.
It came through the vox first. Orders had to be repeated. Unit commanders asked for reinforcements that did not exist. Soldiers who had advanced beneath regimental banners now whispered that the line was gone.
Then the despair reached the hololith.
Violet formations broke into smaller clusters. White markers disappeared. Red pressed toward the pylons from every direction.
Forty thousand defenders had begun the battle.
Creed no longer knew how many remained.
The Chaos host still appeared endless. Above it all, Urkanthos spread his wings and laughed.
The sound reached Bastion Primus despite the artillery.
Creed stared at the daemon prince through his magnoculars.
Cadia had faced monsters before. Cadia had buried them.
But Creed was a soldier before he was a symbol, and a soldier counted what remained.
One loyalist Reaver. Three Warhounds. Less than half the western armour. Artillery reduced to scattered batteries. The pylon ridge breached in two places. No reserves. No retreat route broad enough to save the survivors. No time.
His mind searched for a formation, a weakness, a sacrifice that might purchase one more hour.
For the first time that day, Creed found nothing. Then something green crossed the Imperial line.
At first, Creed mistook it for a damaged aircraft falling from the smoke.
The shape rose rather than fell.
It leapt from the stairs of a ruined sanctum behind the western trenches, passed over two shattered hab-blocks, an armoured column, and the final Cadian barricade, then descended into the killing ground between the armies.
It landed alone.
The impact cracked the earth and threw daemons from their feet.
Creed focused the magnoculars. A warrior stood within the crater.
He wore green armour of no pattern Creed recognized. It lacked the heraldry of an Astartes Chapter, the seals of the Inquisition, or the devotional markings of the Mechanicus. The figure was shorter than a Space Marine but broader than any unaugmented man had the right to be.
He held a double-barrelled weapon in one hand.
"Unknown contact in the centre!" a vox-officer called.
"I can see him," Creed said.
"Identification?"
"None."
"Hostile?"
Creed watched the warrior turn toward the Chaos army.
"Not to us."
A pack of Bloodletters rushed the crater.
The weapon in the stranger's hand fired. The first daemon came apart.
A hook beneath the barrels launched into the chest of the second. A burning chain pulled the warrior forward. He crossed the distance in an instant, struck the daemon with enough force to fold its body around his shoulder, and fired again before either touched the ground.
The remaining Bloodletters surrounded him.
Their swords fell. Blades that passed through Cadian armour and mortal bone struck the green plates of his suit.
They did nothing. One sword shattered against his shoulder. Another struck his helmet and broke at the middle. A third drove its point into the gap beneath his arm. The blade stopped against the flesh beneath as though it had struck adamantium.
The warrior turned.
He caught the Bloodletter by the throat and lifted it from the ground.
Something extended from his left wrist. The short blade entered beneath the daemon's jaw. The warrior held it there for one deliberate heartbeat before tearing the creature's head free.
The other daemons tried to retreat.
The warrior did not permit it.
Space folded beside his hand. The double-barrelled weapon vanished. Another took its place. The new gun fired explosive shells into the fleeing daemons. Each round buried itself inside a body before detonating. Horned limbs scattered across the killing zone.
"How is he doing that?" Creed's adjutant whispered.
Creed ignored the question. The answer did not matter.
The result did.
Chaos had noticed the stranger. Cultists diverted toward him by the thousands. Black Legionaries turned their bolters upon the crater. Daemons abandoned the retreating Imperial formations and rushed toward the green-armoured warrior.
Every enemy drawn to him was an enemy no longer attacking the pylons.
Creed returned to the hololith.
"Mark the unknown as Spearpoint," he ordered.
His adjutant stared at him. "My lord?"
"Every unit on the western front is to treat his position as the centre of our counterattack. Armour advances along both sides of his path. Infantry follows at two hundred metres. Do not cross his line of fire."
"We do not know who he is." Creed looked toward the crater as another weapon appeared in the stranger's hands.
"We know which direction he is moving." The order went out. The warrior moved west.
He did not advance like an infantryman. He tore a road through the army before him.
A heavy cannon appeared in his hands. Its first shot entered the eye lens of a Black Legionnaire and exited through the rear of the traitor's helmet. The weapon changed configuration before the body fell. A stream of miniature missiles crossed the battlefield and detonated among the Hounds of Abaddon.
Bolter fire struck the stranger from every direction. Explosions swallowed him. He emerged without slowing. His armour remained unbroken. The body inside remained untouched.
He exchanged the cannon for a weapon that spat blue plasma. Energy washed across a rank of daemons. Their flesh ignited. The stranger continued firing, not allowing them the release of a swift death. The creatures screamed as the plasma consumed them from the outside inward.
Creed had heard daemons laugh while killing children.
He had never heard them beg. The sound travelled across the western front. Cadian soldiers heard it. So did the Space Marines.
The servants of Chaos could suffer. The knowledge moved through the defenders like ammunition passed along a firing line.
The stranger's weapon vanished again. A rocket launcher entered his hands.
Three missiles left its tubes in rapid succession. They curved through the smoke and struck a corrupted Land Raider from three directions. Its armour opened. Fire filled the interior. Black Legionaries forced themselves through the hatches only to find the green warrior waiting for them.
He killed the first with a blast from the double-barrelled weapon.
The second swung a power axe into his chest. The weapon struck hard enough to send a shock wave through the rubble.
The stranger did not move. He looked down at the axe. Then he looked at the traitor holding it. His fist broke through the Black Legionnaire's breastplate.
He seized something inside and pulled. The traitor fell in two directions.
"Central formations advancing," a vox-officer reported. "Cain has left the third trench."
Creed found the commissar's position.
Ciaphas Cain stood atop the parapet, chainsword raised toward the green warrior's path. Cadians climbed after him. Their battle cry spread across the line.
"Cadia stands!" The words reached the Blood Angels.
"Cadia stands!" The Black Templars answered with their own roar.
"Cadia stands!" The entire western front surged forward.
Creed issued orders faster than the adjutants could repeat them.
"Space Wolves take the northern ruins. Dark Angels cover their flank. Blood Angels strike the enemy artillery. Move the Sisters through the centre. Titans redirect all weapons toward the traitor engines."
The surviving loyalist Reaver stepped over the fallen Warlord. Its guns fired.
A Chaos Warhound vanished from the waist upward.
The Imperial Warhounds ran beside the advancing Cadians, their shields burning as they hunted the larger traitor engines through the smoke. One fell to a plasma blast. The other two continued forward.
The stranger reached the first Chaos Titan before they did.
It was a Warhound corrupted so completely that its cockpit had become a horned skull. The Titan lowered its weapons toward him.
Space folded. A long weapon of metal and burning energy appeared across the warrior's arms.
It fired.
The bolt struck the Warhound's forward shields and shattered them in a single flash. A second shot passed through the cockpit. The Titan staggered.
The warrior was already beneath it. A chainsaw appeared in his hands. He drove the screaming teeth into the Titan's ankle.
Metal, cables, and corrupted flesh sprayed across the ground. The Warhound tried to step away. The stranger followed the movement, cutting deeper until the leg separated.
The Titan fell into the Chaos ranks.
Before it struck the ground, the chainsaw was gone. A hilt appeared in the warrior's hand. Red energy erupted from it in the shape of a sword. Hellish runes burned within the blade.
The stranger leapt.
He landed upon the fallen Titan's head and drove the red blade through its armour. The god-engine convulsed. Its war horn became a scream.
The warrior forced the blade deeper.
He did not withdraw it until the daemon bound within the machine had felt every second of its death.
The Titan exploded beneath him. The blast consumed the surrounding horde.
The stranger walked from the fire. His armour remained unmarked.
"Emperor's blood," someone whispered within the strategium.
Creed said nothing. He no longer believed the warrior was a normal Astartes. He no longer believed the distinction mattered.
The Geminae Superia swept above the stranger's advance, cutting down winged creatures attempting to descend upon him. The Adepta Sororitas followed through the corridor he had opened, their hymns rising with the gunfire. Sisters of Silence reached the edge of the killing ground, and daemons caught between their null presence and the green warrior began to collapse.
Chaos sent more. The stranger welcomed them.
A chaingun formed in his hands and unfolded into three rotating assemblies. It fired until the sound became a single continuous roar. Cultists disappeared by ranks. Traitor Astartes staggered beneath thousands of rounds. When a daemon prince attempted to reach him, a shield of blue energy formed before the barrels. The creature's axe struck the shield and rebounded.
The stranger stepped forward.
The chaingun fired through the daemon prince at contact range. What remained struck the ground in pieces.
Grenades launched from his shoulder. One froze a mass of Bloodletters where they stood. The next burst into flame. A jet of fire swept across the trapped creatures, thawing them only so they could burn.
He crossed through them with the blade in his wrist. He made certain none died quickly.
A massive hammer appeared in both hands. The stranger brought it down.
The impact released a wave of argent force that lifted daemons, cultists, and Traitor Astartes from the ground. Bodies broke in the air. Those that survived the first blast struck the ruins hard enough to bury themselves in stone.
The hammer vanished before the shock wave faded.
In its place appeared a weapon of pale metal and opening blades. It unleashed a storm of argent bolts so dense that the air became white. The warrior swept the barrage across the Chaos line, stripping flesh from daemons and burning through the joints of power armour.
Creed watched enemy markers disappear from the hololith.
The red mass surrounding Spearpoint thinned. Imperial formations poured into the gap. Cadian armour divided the Chaos host. Space Marines struck the exposed flanks. The Sisters reclaimed the lower pylon ridge.
The battle had changed again. Not because Cadia had found more soldiers. Not because reinforcements had arrived. It was because one being had entered the killing zone and taught an endless army to fear death.
Urkanthos saw it. The daemon prince abandoned the pylon ridge and turned toward the centre.
He roared an order in a language that caused blood to run from the ears of every mortal who heard it. The Chaos army converged upon the stranger.
Creed watched the green marker disappear beneath red.
For three seconds, nothing emerged. Then the centre of the western front became green fire.
The weapon in the stranger's hands was larger than any he had used before. Its core glowed with energy so bright that the magnoculars darkened to protect Creed's eyes.
The warrior fired.
A sphere of green plasma crossed the Chaos army.
Every tendril of energy that touched a daemon found another, then another beyond it. The shot moved through the horde like judgment given form. Cultists became shadows. Black Legionaries vanished inside their armour. Daemons were ripped from reality screaming.
The blast continued west until it struck a traitor Reaver.
The Titan's void shields failed. Its armour opened. The god-engine disappeared within the light.
Silence followed.
Not true silence. Artillery still fired. Titans still walked. Thousands still fought and died.
Yet for one impossible moment, the western battle field seemed quiet.
A corridor nearly a kilometre long had been burned through the Chaos host. The green warrior stood at its beginning.
Urkanthos waited at its end. The daemon prince spread his wings.
Blood and fire coiled around his body. The surviving Hounds of Abaddon gathered behind him. Chaos Space Marines formed ranks along the ruins. Daemons crowded the ground but did not advance.
For the first time since his arrival, Urkanthos was no longer looking toward the pylons.
He was looking at one man.
The stranger dismissed the great weapon. Space folded around it, and it vanished.
He walked down the corridor he had made.
No Cadian followed. Creed did not order them to. This was no longer a place for regular soldiers.
Urkanthos stepped forward.
Each footfall cracked the ground. His axe dragged beside him, carving a burning line through Cadia's soil.
The green warrior stopped.
The armies of the western front watched from either side.
Forty thousand Imperial defenders had begun the battle believing they faced an enemy without end. Now the endless enemy drew back from a single silent figure.
Urkanthos raised his axe.
The stranger opened his right hand.
Space folded above his palm. The hilt of the Crucible entered his grasp. Raw Hell energy surged through it. A red blade erupted into being, its burning runes reflected across the daemon prince's armour.
Creed looked from the servant of Khorne to the warrior who had crossed an army to reach him.
Then the heavens answered in gold.
A column of radiance pierced the smoke above the western front. It did not flicker beneath the flak or dim beneath the ash. The radiance poured through Cadia's poisoned sky until vast white wings opened within it.
Saint Celestine descended above the killing zone.
Her golden armour shone unmarred by the ruin below. The Ardent Blade burned in her hand, and a halo of living fire crowned her head. Daemons recoiled from her radiance. Across the Imperial lines, exhausted soldiers looked up and remembered that the Emperor had not abandoned them.
The two Geminae Superia rose from the battlefield to meet her. They took their places at her flanks, one on either side, their wings spread against the burning sky.
Yet Celestine did not turn toward the defenders. She did not look to the pylons or to Creed's broken tower.
Her gaze settled upon the silent green warrior standing before Urkanthos. Whatever had drawn the Living Saint across the burning kasr, Creed understood that she had found it.
Urkanthos threw back his horned head and roared.
The Doom Slayer took one step forward.
A Lord Castellan watched from the ruins. A Living Saint watched from the sky. Two armies watched from either side. And Cadia held its breath.
…
Eastern front Casualties
Cadians: 64,957 (Civilians included)
Forces of Chaos: 207,642