Nolan had already registered the threat before the cultist carrying the melta charge had covered half the distance.
Primarch-level senses processed information on a different schedule than human cognition, and what those senses communicated was clear: the specific mass density of a melta charge at approximately ninety meters, the protective ring of cultist bodies around it, the speed and direction of approach. The threat model resolved in the space of a single heartbeat.
The skull helmet's Mind Stone lit.
The Psychic Ray fired as a narrow, concentrated beam, driving through the press of cultist bodies at a path that the formation itself had inadvertently created, finding the arm of the carrier at the end of it. The beam went through the arm and into the melta charge without pause.
The passage became light.
The detonation expanded outward from the mid-point of the cultist formation in a wave of thermal energy that the enclosed passage geometry immediately concentrated into a directed effect, the walls and floor reflecting rather than absorbing, channeling the blast toward the only dimensions it had available. The cultists between the charge and Nolan had no time and no protective equipment and several thousand of them solved that equation immediately, the thermal wave converting them from people with objectives into dispersed matter.
The shockwave arrived a fraction of a second after the light.
Nolan was already moving.
The vibranium wings behind his power armor deployed to maximum span and drove back and forth in rapid opposing strokes, creating an airflow pattern that caught the Ten Rings as they launched simultaneously from his forearm, all ten rings spinning into a tightly rotating funnel configuration directly ahead of him. The spiral the rings formed acted as a redirector, catching the thermal wave as it came in and bending its direction toward the walls rather than through the formation of Astartes standing behind him.
The magnetic boots locked to the floor surface with full strength.
The shockwave hit.
The vibranium armor's kinetic absorption capacity activated with an immediacy that Nolan felt as pressure across every plate simultaneously, the suit converting what should have been force into stored energy. The thermal component that the rings and wings had not fully redirected pressed directly against the front of his armor, turning the vibranium shell red at the chest and pauldrons, the heat signatures registering at the edge of material tolerance for several seconds before beginning to dissipate.
Behind him, the Astartes had their answer.
The gap in the thermal wave where Nolan's body stood was significant. Most of what had been coming for the twenty warriors at his back had been redirected or absorbed. They had taken heat and displacement. They had not taken the full force of a melta detonation in an enclosed corridor.
The smoke cleared slowly.
The passage ahead was a different environment than it had been sixty seconds ago: the floor surface nearest the blast point had liquefied and re-solidified in irregular patterns, and the wall surfaces showed the scoring and deformation of sustained thermal exposure. What had been a mass of cultists was no longer present in any form that required tactical consideration.
"Lord Primarch, careful!"
The shouting from the Astartes reached him as the last of the shockwave effect dissipated. Nolan turned the skull helmet, checking the armor's surface temperature through the suit's monitoring system. The shell was cooling, the red fading back toward the pale gold of the vibranium beneath.
"I'm intact, brothers. Form up."
He raised the warscythe and Forgebreaker back to carry position.
"Advance."
The twenty Astartes stepped over the re-solidified floor and followed him deeper into the passage.
In a vast prayer square somewhere in the Ark of Omen's mid-section, the Carcharodons 3rd company were in the kind of fight they were built for and had not been expecting to need an exit from.
The prayer square was large enough that the ceiling was not visible in the ambient light, and its floor was occupied by cultist bodies in numbers that suggested the Ark of Omen had been running a very active congregation. The Carcharodons had arrived in the middle of it. Their captain had assessed the situation and chosen the only viable response, which was to attack in the direction that appeared to offer the thinnest concentration of enemies and fight toward it until something changed.
Nothing had changed yet.
The chainweapons worked continuously. Each warrior's blade or axe was coated well past the teeth with material that had been people recently, and the motors running them had the specific overtaxed pitch of machinery that had been at full output for longer than its rated cycle. The Carcharodons moved through the cultist mass with the directional momentum of something that had decided on a course and would maintain it regardless of what the terrain contributed.
The cultists had weapons.
Demonic blades, power weapons of various corrupted configurations, firearms fused to flesh that fired when the nerve endings connected told them to. One of them found a seam in a Carcharodon's pauldron joint and drove in a handspan, and the Carcharodon turned and crushed the face of the cultist behind the weapon with his free hand, then kept moving. Another cultist drove something pointed into the knee joint of a different warrior, and that warrior swung his chainaxe horizontal at a height that cleared the nearest friendly armor and removed the cultist from the situation, then continued walking on the leg.
The Carcharodons did not call out when they were hit. They registered it, compensated for it, and continued.
Until the ones who could no longer continue didn't.
The engine compartment was large and dark and full of things that generated heat and noise independently of anything the combatants were doing.
A Raven Guard had been in it for three minutes and had not been detected for two of them, which was sufficient. He emerged from the shadow beneath a massive mechanical housing as a Chaos Astartes in purple-red ceramite crossed within range, drove both power claws directly through the back of the ceramite at the weak point between the left pauldron and the backpack housing, and pushed through until the resistance of two hearts and a significant portion of the lung architecture had been resolved.
The Chaos Astartes began to fall.
A demonic weapon from a second Chaos Astartes arrived as the first was going down, aimed at where a Raven Guard head would be if a Raven Guard remained stationary after a kill. He was already moving. The blade passed close enough that it would have drawn blood from bare skin.
The second Chaos Astartes stepped forward to press the attack.
A second Raven Guard emerged from a shadow on the other side of the machinery, moving fast and silent, and drove both vibranium-edged power swords into the back of the Chaos Astartes's armor below the shoulder blades, the blades angled to find the spine at the point where the backpack housing created a gap in the ceramite coverage. The cut continued outward through the torso without stopping.
The Chaos Astartes came apart at the middle in two directions.
From somewhere inside the purple helmet, a sound emerged that did not resolve cleanly into either pain or exultation before it stopped.
The two Raven Guard looked at each other through their visors for a moment. Then, by unspoken agreement, they each raised one magnetic boot and brought it down on the head of the surviving Chaos Astartes section in unison.
The sound confirmed finality.
The Armiger's missile battery fired in tight sequence, the salvoes crossing the dim corridor in flat trajectories that did not leave the enemy formation much time to process before impact. The cultists and Chaos Astartes on the receiving end had their immediate tactical situation resolved for them by each detonation, the ones who survived one salvo repositioning into ground that the next salvo was already committed to.
The return fire that came back at the Armiger was heavy and simultaneous.
Explosive bolt rounds from multiple boltguns converged on the chassis from three angles. Lascannon beams, thick and blisteringly hot, swept in from the passage's far end where a heavy weapon team had taken position. The combined volume of fire was significant even for an Armiger-class Knight.
From within the Armiger, Reditus activated the refractor field.
The azure energy barrier that materialized around the war machine's hull was not standard Armiger specification. It was considerably thicker than any factory-installed refractor system, and its surface area covered the Armiger completely with enough excess to suggest the emitter design had been modified to overlap at the weak points. The bolt rounds impacted the field and detonated against it. The lascannon beams spread across its surface and bled their energy into the barrier rather than through it.
The Armiger's missile battery kept firing.
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