The refractor field held.
It did more than hold. The weapons directed at the Armiger were producing results that would have disabled a standard refractor system within the first thirty seconds, and Reditus's modified barrier had absorbed that volume of fire and then continued absorbing more without any visible indication of failure. Energy fragments shed from the field's surface with each impact, dispersing into the surrounding air as heat, but the field itself remained continuous. Whatever combination of local and salvaged alien technology had gone into its construction, the result was a barrier that appeared to regard the current volume of incoming fire as an engineering problem it had already solved.
From within the Armiger, Reditus produced melta bombs.
They came from the inner cavities of the war machine's chassis in a steady stream, each one activated to a delayed timer before being released, the mechanical arms distributing them with the specific imprecision of someone who understood that when the goal is detonation coverage, precise placement is less important than volume. The bombs scattered across the corridor in front of the Armiger, landing among the cultist positions and skittering to rest beneath the feet of the Chaos Astartes attempting to advance through the sustained fire. Each detonation resolved a localized tactical problem completely.
The passage ahead of Nolan had fewer things in it than it had sixty seconds ago.
The warscythe came out of a Chaos Astartes's torso trailing the fluid that Primarch-caliber weapons tend to displace, and the Astartes came apart in two sections at the line of the cut. Forgebreaker handled the next one at chest height, the thunder hammer's kinetic and energy output distributed through the target's upper body in a direction that left nothing requiring follow-up. The impact threw fragments of ceramite and other material against the passage walls.
Nolan stopped his magnetic boots.
He shook the skull helmet once, clearing the spatter from the eyepieces, and looked around the passage. The last Chaos Astartes in the immediate area was going down under the combined attention of two Raven Guard and a Carcharodon, the conclusion of which was not in question.
"Three minutes," Nolan said into the command channel. "Stop advancing. Check weapons. Check the injured."
Fifteen Astartes. That was what remained of the twenty he had come through the teleportation with, and the number confirmed what the last twenty minutes had cost. The Apothecary in the group moved through the fallen immediately, checking vital signs with the professional efficiency of someone who had done this in worse conditions and worse lighting, reporting back in brief terms: three were gone, two were still functional with injuries that would require addressed post-engagement.
Three brothers.
Nolan looked at them for a moment. The passage's ambient reddish light did not do anything to soften what he was looking at, and he did not look away from it.
He reached into the simulator's storage interface and extracted several remote-trigger melta bombs, placing them near the bodies. The enemy would not have the gene-seeds. He gave the order to move before the thought behind the action had time to settle into something heavier than it needed to be right now.
They fought forward.
The Ark of Omen's interior offered them a variety of terrain across the next thirty minutes: narrow maintenance passages barely wide enough for two Astartes abreast, wide freight corridors where daemon engines had been staged and were no longer staged after the group came through, a network of junctions where the cable bundles in the walls reached such density that the walls themselves were effectively organic at that point. They fought through raids from Chaos Astartes in groups of eight to fifteen at a time, the enemy learning nothing from each previous engagement's outcome.
At one point, an ancient bridge: the kind of internal structure that the Ark of Omen's assembly from multiple space hulk sections had produced, a span crossing a gap between hull sections that was several hundred meters across and evidently unlit below the bridge deck. The bridge's structural integrity was significantly compromised, which was something Nolan recognized and chose to use rather than avoid. The cultists who pursued them across it experienced the logical consequence.
They rested at the bridge's far end. Set melta bombs at the structural weak points they had identified. Drank recaf from armor supply lines and replaced ammunition from the group's shared reserve.
The communication channel opened.
The voice that came through was fragmented, cutting in and out across the Ark of Omen's interference field, but the quality of it was distinct even under distortion: a Raven Guard, straining to keep the words coherent.
"All battle brothers. Do not approach this location. Please. Ah."
Then nothing.
Nolan raised his head.
Through the skull helmet's filtration system, he drew air slowly and processed what came back. The Ark of Omen's ambient smell was layered: metal, biological matter in various states, the particular chemical signature that Chaos-touched environments accumulated over centuries of occupation. But under all of that, something else. Something he had smelled often enough in the last hour to recognize immediately.
He pointed. A direction. Through a wall that currently had no visible passage, toward a section of the vessel that the corridor network had not yet shown them.
Thirteen Astartes looked at the direction, then at each other, then back at Nolan.
He was already running.
The ancient palace had been someone's idea of grandeur, at some point in the Ark of Omen's history that was difficult to date.
The walls were metal that had been decaying long enough to develop texture, and across every surface of them, paintings had been applied in a medium that was not paint in any conventional sense. The subjects of the paintings were human faces, rendered in detail that suggested the artist had worked from direct observation. Close observation. The faces occupied every available section of wall from floor to ceiling, layer over layer where the space had run out, and they were not serene.
Nolan came through the entrance at full running speed and stopped.
The Chaos Astartes in the center of the chamber was a head taller than a standard battle-brother, which put his proportions in a category that Nolan did not encounter often even in the current company. The ancient power armor he wore was purple-red, and its surface was covered in protrusions that, on second examination, were not decorative: faces, worked into the ceramite in high relief, each one bearing an expression of extremity. From the power backpack rose three injector housings, medical-adjacent in shape but not in purpose, the substances they contained being something other than standard combat stimulants.
One of his hands held a Lash of Torment, the long braid of it wrapped around the wrist of a Raven Guard whose posture communicated that the limbs bearing him up were not intact. The Raven Guard was conscious. Barely.
The other hand held the Laeran Blade.
Nolan's eyes went to the Chaos Astartes's face last, because the face communicated something that required a moment to process. It was blood-red. Not painted, not a trick of the light. The skin was not present. What was visible instead was what lies under skin when nothing covers it, the complete facial musculature exposed and articulating without protection, and across every visible surface of it were cuts in various stages, layered over each other at different ages, in patterns that were not random.
Something settled in Nolan's chest that was not tactical.
"Put my battle brother down," he said.
His breathing had changed without his instruction. He heard it inside the skull helmet, heavier than it should be, and recognized it as the specific physiological state that anger produces when it has been offered a sufficiently worthy target. His grip on the warscythe and Forgebreaker tightened until the joints of the vibranium gauntlets produced a sound.
"I will give you a more painful death than you deserve."
The skinless face moved.
What the expression it formed represented was something in the vicinity of amusement, and the Chaos Astartes made a sound to accompany it that had the cadence of a laugh without any of the warmth that word is usually associated with. He looked at the Raven Guard suspended from his hand with the specific consideration of someone checking whether a prop is still needed.
He threw the Raven Guard upward.
The Laeran Blade came across in the same motion, and where the Raven Guard came down, the blade was already positioned.
The long thin tongue that emerged from the skinless mouth had no business being the length it was, and it moved with an independence that suggested the relationship between its owner and normal anatomy was one of historical rather than current relevance. The blade lifted slowly, the body on it raised for inspection, and the Chaos Astartes turned the blood-red face toward Nolan with the unhurried attention of someone who has all the time available to him that he could require.
"Tsk, tsk." The voice carried across the chamber easily, a resonant bass that the face it came from should not have been capable of producing. "Lord Primarch. First meeting, and already you offer me a painful death. I find that I appreciate directness."
He took one step.
"Allow me the courtesy of an introduction, since you have so generously come to find me. The greatest among the Chosen of Slaanesh. Champion and herald of Lord Fulgrim. Son of Chemos, who does not stay dead."
The blade lowered very slightly, angled toward Nolan.
"Lucius the Eternal extends his greetings to the twenty-second Primarch."