The figure's black magnetic boots came down on the arena floor with a weight that carried across the entire space.
Nolan looked through the eyepiece and saw the face.
Gray-white hair, long and loose. Eyes the pale cyan of pack ice, catching the black light of Commorragh's sun. And beneath the cold smile, white fangs pressed against the lower lip in the particular way that Space Wolves carried themselves even when standing still.
He was looking at himself.
"It seems I actually managed to run into myself," Nolan said quietly, to no one in particular.
The galleries were screaming. Under the noise, the figure with the bare arms reached behind the broken power pack and pulled out two weapons without ceremony: a Nemesis sword in one hand, a chainaxe slick with old blood in the other. The expression on that familiar face settled back into something flat and cold.
Then he charged.
No wind-up, no hesitation. His old wolf simulated version of himself simply moved, and Nolan moved to meet him, pushing the vibranium power armor into a run with both hands locked on the Warscythe.
The Warscythe's haft met the flat of the Nemesis blade at full momentum and the impact was a thing felt in the teeth. The shockwave spread outward invisibly, pressing the blood-soaked dirt down in a ring around them. Nolan found himself nose to nose through his own visor with a pair of cyan eyes that carried the specific expression of someone who had been in this arena for a very long time and had stopped being impressed by most things.
"Did you fall to Chaos?" Nolan said, low and direct.
A cold, contemptuous smile. The fangs showed more fully.
"Who are you calling fallen?" The voice was his own, rougher at the edges, worn by something extended. "If I'd gone to Chaos, would I still be stuck in some pointed-ear arena? Do you think these creatures could hold me otherwise?" The chainaxe pressed against the Warscythe's haft with steady force. "And you. The original. Why in the void did you come here with this few people? Are you trying to get yourself killed?"
The weapons disengaged.
Both of them let go at exactly the same moment.
A thick-knuckled bare hand and a vibranium-gauntleted hand found each other and gripped.
"Hello, wolf cub."
"Ha. Hello, Primarch."
The galleries went still in a way that had nothing to do with reverence. Thousands of Dark Eldar processed what they were seeing and arrived, one by one, at the same confused conclusion: that the killing they had been promised was not going to happen the way they had arranged it.
In the stand at the arena's edge, Archon Ilu Limnu rose from his seat. His expression had not changed. It simply recalibrated, the way a Dark Eldar of his experience recalibrates when a variable produces an unexpected result.
"A mistake on my part," he said, his amplified voice reaching every corner of the arena without effort. "But no matter." He spread his hand toward the arena floor in a single sweeping gesture. "Every spectator here. Their lives are yours now. Kill them all. Take their heads, and you become honored guests of the Pierced Rose."
For one heartbeat the galleries were still.
Then the Dark Eldar climbed over the fences.
They came over the bleachers and down the pillars and across every vertical surface with the quick, fluid movement of a species that had been doing this for ten thousand years. Melee weapons already in hand, they poured inward from every direction toward the arena floor.
"Come on," Nolan said. He turned to the wolf beside him. "We fight our way out."
The wolf's cold smile returned. He tightened his grip on both weapons without a word.
The bolt guns of the hunting team opened up from behind them, the sound rolling across the arena in overlapping waves. Kahurangi's psychic lightning arced outward in branching paths, each discharge finding the slender Dark Eldar frames with the accuracy of someone who had been reading the battlefield since before most of the crowd was born.
Nolan and his counterpart moved.
They drove into the incoming mass from opposite angles, then found each other's rhythm without coordinating it consciously. The chainaxe swept horizontally and cleared a corridor. The Warscythe followed the corridor's edge vertically and closed it. They moved together with the unsettling synchronicity of two people who shared every instinct, advancing through a crowd that had expected a performance and received something they had no category for.
The Ten Rings cut independent paths through the press, moving on their own geometries, returning to Nolan's orbit between passes.
There were a great many Dark Eldar. The arena had been built to hold them. Even the dead ones were obstacles, and the living ones kept coming across their own fallen with the specific enthusiasm of a species that feeds on sensation and had decided this qualified.
In the Archon's stand, Ilu Limnu rose from his seat, composure intact, and moved toward the arena edge. He had decided to participate directly. It was that kind of moment.
He did not hear the power pack behind him until it was already too late to matter.
A figure in a white-hooded cloak descended behind him from somewhere above the stand, a power sword already drawn, and a quiet, unhurried voice came from beneath the hood.
"Going somewhere?"
Lord Cypher did not wait for an answer.
The sword crossed through Ilu Limnu's neck and throat in a single clean motion. The Archon's eyes went wide and remained that way. One syllable formed on his lips, incomplete, and then the head left the shoulders and hit the floor of the stand with a sound that was swallowed entirely by the noise below.
Cypher looked down at it for a moment.
"Simple enough," he said to himself. "Though at least it brought all three of us together. That is not a common occurrence."
He drew a remote detonator from the armor at his waist, considered it briefly, and pressed it.
The arena shook.
The sound arrived half a second later: a deep, rolling series of detonations from beneath the structure's walls, melta bombs burning through load-bearing points at temperatures that no architecture was built to survive. Fire and shockwave pressure swept through the arena's lower sections and punched outward through the galleries in expanding rings. Stone cracked. The upper tiers began to shift.
Dark Eldar, even those deep in the grip of arena-frenzy, understood structural collapse. The movement in the galleries reversed almost instantly, the mass of bodies flowing back over fences and up stairways and out of exits as the ceiling groaned above them.
Then the webway opened above the arena floor. Not a device portal, a Chapter-deployed gate, wide and stable, and Tyberos dropped through it with his lightning claws active, the dual arcs already drawn across the air. Five Lamenters Terminators came through behind him, heavy weapons already leveled, and the ground shook again when they landed.
The Death Arena of Commorragh was no longer an arena.
It had become something else entirely.