The Laeran Blade came in at the angle that ten thousand years of practice had identified as optimal against a helmeted opponent.
Nolan's skull helmet was already moving.
The blade passed close enough to feel: a whisper of displaced air against the side of the vibranium, the edge leaving a thin bright scar across the helmet's surface rather than driving through the eyepiece. The contact lasted a fraction of a second and then the moment was past, and the internals of the vibranium power armor were cycling to full output as Nolan completed the dodge and came back in.
His left boot lifted and drove forward.
The kick landed in the center of Lucius's power armor at chest height, and the force behind it was not the force of a Chaos Champion's endurance or even a standard Astartes's strength. It was Primarch force, applied in a single concentrated point, and it sent Lucius's tall body backward in the specific way that bodies go backward when they have not chosen to do so. The faces worked into the ceramite of his armor seemed to stretch as he went, the features of them distorting under the momentum, and from within the shell a collection of sounds emerged that were not mechanical.
The warscythe came with him.
The blade had been embedded in Lucius's back from the first exchange, and as Lucius's body traveled backward the psychic flame continued its work, burning not from the outside but from the contact point inward, the golden fire propagating through the corrupted tissue in the shoulder region in a way that normal fire does not propagate. By the time Lucius hit the floor's arc limit and his momentum converted into rotation, the warscythe had cut through most of the shoulder on its way clear, exposing a section of chaotic flesh and internal structure that had no business being visible.
The amount of dark blood that followed confirmed the wound's depth.
Nolan was already stepping forward.
Lucius's Chaos physiology was working on the wound even as it was occurring, the regenerative capacity that ten millennia of Slaanesh's favor had built into him pushing the shoulder tissue back toward closure. Nolan gave it approximately one second of that process before the warscythe came down again, this time targeting the arm that was rising with the Lash of Torment coiling to strike.
The blade separated the arm at the shoulder in one motion.
The psychic flames consumed what they touched. The arm, the Lash of Torment still wrapped around its forearm, became ash before the separated mass had completed its fall. Gold fire rose from the contact in a column that lit the hall differently than the ambient reddish light, and the smell of something burning that was not biological in any standard sense spread outward from the point of incineration.
Lucius produced a sound.
It was not a scream in the sense of something that communicates distress and seeks assistance. It was the pure acoustic output of pain applied to a nervous system that had long since modified its relationship with pain into something closer to intimacy, and the fact that the relationship existed did not make the input less intense.
Nolan stepped past the falling ash and used the Ten Rings.
All ten rings came down simultaneously on Lucius's body and blood-red face, hammering with the massed kinetic force of metal moving at speed under Primarch direction, driving the Champion of Slaanesh back and down before the remaining arm could bring the Laeran Blade to bear at a useful angle. Lucius swung it anyway. The reach was wrong. Nolan stepped inside it and the warscythe took the second arm at the same point it had taken the first.
The psychic flames removed it from the inventory of things that still existed.
Lucius hit the metal floor.
Without arms, his options for controlling his orientation were limited to what his torso and legs could manage, which was not much given that the legs were currently underneath him at an angle that suggested the impact had arranged them there rather than intention. He remained where he was, the skinless face against the metal floor, and for a moment the only sounds in the hall were the psychic fire diminishing on the warscythe blade and Lucius's breathing, which was working hard around the open wound at his shoulder and chest.
Then he pushed himself upright on the stumps.
"Kill me." The voice had lost none of its resonance, which was interesting given the circumstances. He raised the blood-red face toward Nolan. "Kill me yourself. If you have any courage in that golden armor, drive that blade through me and be done with it."
Nolan looked at him.
Then he swung the warscythe again, methodically, stripping what remained of the armor shell and the flesh beneath it from the shoulder region in sections. Then the chest. Not quickly. The blade's psychic fire did not hurry the process.
Lucius's ability to regenerate was real and it worked, but what it could not do was work faster than the damage being applied, and Nolan was not applying the damage at a rate designed to kill. He was applying it at a rate designed to maintain a specific state: combat-capable enough to remain conscious, non-functional enough to be unable to resist. By the time the warscythe had finished its latest circuit, the figure on the floor had been reduced to something that was technically still Lucius in a continuous biological sense, but was not in any other practical sense the imposing champion that had occupied this hall twenty minutes ago.
What remained twisted against the floor with the specific determination of something that has not yet been given permission to stop.
Nolan reached into the simulator's storage interface.
Melta bombs came out one by one. He set each timer by hand, short intervals, and placed them systematically around the wriggling torso, arranging them with the same methodical attention he had given to the warscythe work. When the last one was positioned, he straightened.
He looked at Lucius for a moment.
"If you get the opportunity," he said, "pass a message to Slaanesh for me." His voice was level and not particularly loud. "Tell her that her choice of champion, by the standards of combat ability, is poor. Weak, in fact. I have fought better Chaos Astartes in the last hour than her designated representative."
The effect was immediate.
The face that had been staring at him with the concentrated resentment of something that intends to remember this forever now changed register entirely. Lucius began cursing in a voice that had found new volume from somewhere, the invective directed at Nolan, at the Emperor, at the Golden Throne and its occupant, at the hall, at the melta bombs, at the specific properties of psychic fire as a combat tool, and at several other targets that emerged as the tirade progressed. The skinless face contorted through expressions that its exposure to air made more visible than they might otherwise have been.
The blood-red eyes, when the words ran out, locked onto Nolan with a focus that suggested the intent to memorize every detail and store it somewhere below conscious access.
Nolan had already turned.
He walked out of the hall without looking back, the magnetic boots finding the metal floor at a steady pace, and he did not feel the thing that Lucius's curse required.
The explosions came through the walls several minutes later, the shockwave of multiple melta detonations in a confined space transmitting through the Ark of Omen's metal hull as a sequence of compressed vibrations. The hall behind him was no longer the hall it had been.
Nolan stopped walking.
He stood in the middle of a passage and closed his eyes inside the skull helmet, and spent thirty seconds running a careful internal inventory: muscle function, sensory input, the quality of his own thoughts, the specific texture of his own identity. Checking, methodically, for anything that was not his.
He found nothing that was not his.
He opened his eyes and exhaled through the filtration system.
Then he continued forward.
The Ark of Omen's interior was complex in the way that only something assembled from multiple disparate vessels could be: the corridor geometry did not follow any consistent architectural logic, transitioning between the design conventions of whatever original ship each section had come from, connected at junctions that were sometimes engineered and sometimes simply cut through. Navigating it by map was not an option Nolan had. He navigated by instinct and by the particular quality of attention that Primarch-level situational awareness could sustain in unfamiliar environments.
But there was something else.
He became aware of it gradually, the way a person becomes aware of a sound that has been present for some time before it crosses the threshold of conscious attention. The passages around him were not changing in any way he could measure with the armor's sensors. The walls were the same. The air was the same. The geometry was the same.
But the direction he was moving was not random anymore.
Something was arranging itself in the space ahead in a way that made one direction feel more significant than the others, not as a physical force but as a quality of attention that he could not source to anything in the immediate environment. He was being guided. He could not identify the mechanism. He continued forward, because the direction it indicated felt like somewhere the boarding operation needed to reach.
When the passage opened into the wide central space, he stopped.
He took in the scale of what was before him and confirmed that his assessment of the previous passages had been accurate.
This was the Ark of Omen's core.