The clash of metal on metal rang out across the training ground in irregular bursts, punctuated by the hiss and scatter of sparks where ceramite met ceramite at speed.
A large group of Stormtroopers, each wearing the eye-catching yellow marking on the left shoulder of their auxiliary power armor that designated them as today's siege side, had been throwing themselves at five Lamenters battle-brothers for the past twenty minutes. The Astartes fought without weapons, the same as the Stormtroopers, but the comparison ended there.
Every Lamenters warrior moved with the fluid certainty of a mind that controlled its armor through the neural interface as naturally as breathing, their power fists and boots swinging with reaction speeds that the Stormtroopers could track only after the impact had already landed.
With almost every sequence of movement, another Stormtrooper went down. Helmets cracked under the force of blows they hadn't fully registered arriving. A man would be upright, focused, moving toward his target, and then he would be on the ground with his vision spinning and blood on his teeth, trying to remember where the ceiling was.
Nolan stood at the edge of the training ground with his arms folded across his chest, vibranium power armor off for the session, watching with the particular quality of attention that found its way to every detail at once.
"Formation." His voice cut across the noise without strain, aimed at the Stormtroopers still on their feet. "Watch how they move, even when they're attacking. They maintain spacing between themselves automatically. Have you noticed that?"
Several heads turned briefly toward him, which cost two of them, because the Astartes did not pause for pedagogical moments.
"On a real battlefield, the only thing you can count on is the person beside you. Your teammate is the one defending the angle you can't see. An enemy who has two Astartes to contend with instead of one is an enemy who has a problem. An enemy who has twenty Stormtroopers moving in coordinated pairs is twenty problems simultaneously. That's the difference between a mob and a fighting force."
The reminder landed. Stormtroopers who had been pressing forward individually shifted their approach, pulling tighter with the nearest teammate before committing to the next charge. The Astartes adapted, but the adjustments cost them something. One battle-brother found himself handling three attackers from interlocking angles for the first time in the session, and the fourth came in on his blind side a half-second later.
By the end of the exercise, one Astartes was on the ground. One Lamenters battle-brother taken down by Stormtroopers in auxiliary power armor with no special enhancements, against a target with nineteen full surgical enhancements and at least forty years of direct combat experience.
Nolan stepped forward onto the training ground.
The Lamenters present, whether standing on the sideline or in the middle of the field, raised the Aquila simultaneously, right fists crossing their chests in the salute of the Blood Angels succession. The Stormtroopers snapped their own salute: right fist against breastplate, the style specified in the Stormtrooper training manual that Doom had written and that had been producing consistent results ever since.
Nolan accepted both without requiring either.
"Technically," he said to the Stormtroopers, "exchanging dozens of mortal elites for a single Astartes in a direct engagement is not an unfavorable exchange, from a strategic standpoint. In practice, if you met these battle-brothers for the first time on an open battlefield without preparation, you would be in pieces before the formation instructions finished leaving your mouth." He paused. "That is what practice is for. You keep showing up. The gap closes. It does not close completely, but it closes enough to matter."
He looked around the training ground.
"My armor is in for modification at the moment. It was fitting a little tight." He let a slight smile cross his face. "I've apparently been growing. While I have the time, I'd like some sparring. Any of the battle-brothers want to oblige?"
This produced a particular quality of silence among the Lamenters. Several of them found things to look at that were not the Primarch. The instinct embedded in them by blood and by the stories that every Blood Angels successor Chapter received at the monastery on Baal was not easily overridden by an invitation to a training bout, even a sincere one. Challenging a Primarch in sparring was the kind of thing that was technically possible and practically very difficult to approach.
The First Company Commander was the exception.
He was a century-old veteran, and a century of combat had given him something that was rarer than enhancement surgeries: the ability to fully control his own strength in any situation. He was also the one person in the group who had spent enough time near death that he had stopped flinching from things that merely suggested discomfort.
He shook his bald head with an expression that communicated resignation rather than enthusiasm, and stepped forward.
"I'll do it, Lord Primarch."
Nolan rolled his shoulders. He had nothing on his body: no armor, no weapons, hands at his sides.
Then he raised one hand, palm outward.
The Ten Rings came from wherever he had set them before the session, crossing the open air in a smooth arc and settling onto his forearms one by one, each one clicking into position around thick wrists and sliding upward in their accustomed pattern.
"First Company Commander," Nolan said, watching the man's expression, "is this cheating?"
"Lord Primarch." The Commander squeezed a smile from the corner of his mouth that did not travel as far as his eyes. "If you picked up a chainsword, I would not object to that either."
He adjusted his feet on the training ground.
Then, without further preamble, he activated the jump pack.
The Commander in speed-type power armor launched forward with the sudden acceleration of a thing that has been very still for a fraction of a second and then very fast, magnetic boots hammering the metal floor in the first two steps before leaving it entirely. He came in low and wide, both arms sweeping forward in a clamp configured to take Nolan around the torso and remove the question of footwork from the equation entirely.
Nolan stepped sideways, and the step was not quite there when the Commander's arms arrived.
Shadow Step was not something that announced itself. One moment Nolan was at the correct position for the Commander's sweep to close on him, and the next moment he was not, and the displacement had not looked like movement exactly, more like the wrong part of a second had been skipped.
The Commander had a century of experience.
He felt the absence before his eyes processed the reason for it, and the arm that was already committed to the sweep changed its arc on pure combat intuition, pulling back and redirecting into the space beside him where the shadow step suggested Nolan had landed.
The arm passed through air.
Nolan had landed on the other side.
Both palms came forward. The Ten Rings burst outward in a pulse that was not quite a wave and not quite a series of individual impacts, but something in between: a force that wrapped around the ceramite abdominal section of the Commander's power armor and hit it from two angles simultaneously.
The Commander's magnetic boots gave way with a sound like bolts shearing. His entire body left the ground sideways, crossed two meters of training space, and landed hard enough to make the metal floor vibrate.
The Stormtroopers and the Lamenters on the sideline were very quiet.
Nolan lowered his hands. The Ten Rings settled back along his forearms in their resting positions.
He looked down at the First Company Commander, who was lying on the training ground with his armor largely intact and his dignity in a separate location.
"Good response on the sweep redirect," Nolan said. "You felt the step correctly. The timing on the redirect was the issue: you committed a fraction early, which gave me the window on the other side." He extended a hand. "Again, if you want."
The Commander stared at the offered hand for a moment.
Then he reached up and took it.