The Ten Rings came back.
They cut through the walker mass on their return arc and found their positions around the vibranium armor in tight rotating orbits, each band picking up speed as the formation tightened. By the time they had completed the first full cycle they had merged into something continuous: a spiral storm barrier spinning close around Nolan's frame, the velocity of each ring enough that anything reaching through the barrier met multiple impacts before it arrived.
Typhus's scythe hit the barrier and the collision rang out hard enough to feel through the armor plating.
The daemon weapon was formidable. The chaos energy worked into it was real. But the Ten Rings were older than most things in this world's history and made of materials that did not defer to the power embedded in a scythe on the basis of category alone. The barrier held, absorbing each strike and returning it as force into the next rotation.
Nolan had tested vibranium's limits across enough combat by now to know what this armor could and could not absorb from conventional power weapons. A daemon weapon at this tier pushed the boundary harder, but the verdict was the same. The plate held.
He took a breath and stepped forward.
The Heart of the Furnace went back to his side. Both hands went to the Warscythe, closing around the haft with the grip of someone who intended to use it seriously, and the Ten Rings pulled out of their barrier formation and reorganized above his power pack into a single broad halo of purple light, patient, rotating slowly, waiting for a direction.
Typhus came at him without preamble.
What followed was not an exchange that resolved quickly. Both of them were too large for the surrounding walker tide to interfere with in any meaningful way, and the open space the combat created kept widening as the shockwaves from each collision drove bodies outward. Any plague walker or Death Guard unlucky enough to drift into the radius of the fight encountered scythe blades without being the target of either one, and came apart accordingly.
Ceramite ground against vibranium. The Warscythe and the daemon scythe connected in sequences too fast to track individually, each impact redirecting the next attack's angle, each redirection creating an opening that the other closed before it could be exploited. Typhus was not slow and he was not careless. He was a thing that had been doing this for a very long time.
Nolan found the opening when Typhus committed weight to a downward stroke.
The Warscythe drove into the shoulder joint at the point where the plate had been stressed by accumulated impacts, going deep, the blade sinking into the corrupted flesh beneath. He pulled to recover the weapon and felt resistance: the flesh around the blade was moving, closing, the wound drawing the Warscythe in rather than releasing it.
Typhus's laughter was low and wet.
The regeneration that Nurgle granted his most favored was not simply fast. It was adaptive. The wound had wrapped around the blade and was holding it, and the daemon scythe was already moving in Typhus's other hand, the Destroyer Hive swarm trailing from it as it came back at Nolan's neck.
The Ten Rings dropped from their halo and accelerated.
They struck the daemon scythe in overlapping rapid impacts, each ring hitting the same stressed point in sequence, and the weapon that had survived contact with the Warscythe found a different kind of sustained pressure arriving from eight directions simultaneously. The blade fractured and then came apart, metal fragments spinning outward. The Destroyer swarm that had been riding the scythe's momentum reversed direction under the wind pressure of the rings' passage, driven back into Typhus's frame before it could reach Nolan.
Both weapons were now either embedded or destroyed.
Typhus grinned.
Nolan released the Warscythe haft and drove a vibranium fist into Typhus's helmet at full power. The eyepiece shattered outward in fragments and the massive rotten body rocked backward, feet scraping for purchase. Typhus found it and kicked back: one enormous magnetic boot into the gap between Nolan's chest and abdominal plate, the force of it genuine enough to push Nolan backward several steps and break his angle for a follow-up.
Shadow Step.
Nolan crossed the distance between them before Typhus had finished recovering his posture, arriving at his flank, and the fists began working. Not single strikes aimed at specific targets but a sustained combination against the corrupted ceramite, hitting the already stressed sections, finding where the Warscythe's entry point had weakened the structure around it. The plate was failing in sections.
Above, Tony broke off from the wider engagement and aimed the Ark reactor at Typhus's exposed lateral. The beam that discharged punched through ceramite and the corrupted matter beneath it and exited the other side, leaving a wound that Nurgle's regeneration could not close before the heat had finished its work. Typhus lurched.
Thunder arrived from multiple directions at once. Thor had the Terminator's six arms coordinated around Mjolnir, every limb channeling the current into the hammer before the strike, and what came down on Typhus from the gathering storm above was not a bolt but a sustained pour that drove him to one knee by sheer accumulated voltage.
The ground shook.
The Hulk was already airborne.
From the direction of the nearest building, moving at the speed that Savage Hulk achieved when he stopped treating motion as something that happened between obstacles rather than through them, the green fist came in wrapped in the scream of displaced air.
Nolan moved first.
Shadow Step put him in front of Typhus in the fraction of a second before the fist arrived. Both vibranium palms found the Warscythe haft still embedded in the shoulder, fingers closing around it, and he pulled. Not with the aim of recovering the weapon cleanly: with the aim of using the blade as a lever, using the Hulk's incoming force as the power source, using the moment of impact to do what neither of them could have done separately.
The Hulk's fist connected with Typhus at full momentum.
Typhus left the ground.
The Warscythe came with him for a moment longer than that, and then it separated, because the force along the blade's axis had reached the point where even Nurgle's regeneration could not hold the wound closed against that vector of force. The blade cleared. Typhus came apart at the line the blade had opened.
Two halves of an enormous rotten body hit the ground separately. Green fluid poured from both, thick and reeking, spreading across the cracked road surface in expanding pools.
From the lower half's direction, a sound emerged. Not silence, not immediately. Typhus was still in the process of being Typhus, the consciousness that persisted through damage that would have ended anything without Nurgle's investment still present, still furious. The Destroyer swarm poured from what remained of his throat in fitful clouds. His voice came out broken and slow and absolutely certain it had been wronged.
"Corpse-king's dog..."
Nolan walked forward.
The Warscythe went across the back of his shoulder armor. He brought the vibranium helmet down slightly, looking through the eyepiece at what remained of Typhus's face: the rot and the ruin and the expression underneath it that had, apparently, been expecting a different outcome.
"No matter how determined a maggot is," Nolan said, his voice low and without particular heat in it, "it does not become a butterfly by effort alone. You sold your soul and spent everything you had to become Nurgle's most favored, his Chosen. And for all of that, you will never outweigh a single one of my Primarch brothers in Nurgle's hand." He held the gaze through the eyepiece. "I pass on the Emperor's regards. To all traitors of the Death Guard."
Typhus's mouth opened.
"It's you, you're the one who-"
The magnetic boot came down.
The First Captain of the Death Guard. Nurgle's Chosen. Mortarion's favored son. The Lord of the Destroyer Hive, Typhus, fell.
For now.