By now, Angron had utterly surrendered the faculty of speech, devolving into a mindless, slaughter-driven beast. He bore the lashing tail of a daemon, reverse-jointed hocks, and the iconic, monstrous visage of a Warp-entity. His scarlet blade was perpetually wreathed in roiling currents of gore-slicked energy. The Blood God's fury at their previous failure had been immense, manifesting in several additional Butcher's Nails driven into the Primarch's skull.
The unstable physical laws within the Webway caused Axion's mechanical forces to suffer their first significant setback. Angron charged through the labyrinthine dimensions at the head of hundreds of thousands of daemons and over a thousand Khorne Berzerkers, a crimson tide of destruction.
That momentum held until they slammed into a fortified line anchored by several Destroyer-class Heavy Automata. Even though Angron was bolstered by the direct favor of Khorne, granting him peerless ferocity and strength, the fallen Primarch, now a feral creature of pure rage, could not escape the cold logic of the machines. He was seized by massive power claws and torn asunder on the spot. Though Angron's blade inflicted grievous wounds upon the Destroyers, it was a hollow victory; given but a moment, the nanites would stitch the damaged war engines back together.
Yet, Angron's failure only served to stoke the furnace of Khorne's wrath. The Primarch was reduced to a recurring "super-soldier," an avatar of endless resurrection. Each time he was shredded by the power claws of a Destroyer or incinerated by a Vengeance-class weapon within the Webway, he would promptly manifest at another breach, continuing his systematic devastation of the Automated Sentry-Troopers and Armored Wardens.
This severe disruption to the exploration progress immediately drew the attention of Axion's primary consciousness. Faced with the repeated manifestation of a supernatural entity, Axion quickly formulated a clinical countermeasure.
As Angron's physical form coalesced once more through the power of Khorne, Axion took direct command, concentrating the Destroyers from several fronts. The nanites shifted the configuration of their power claws, transforming them into massive restraint-clamps. When the frenzied beast charged the mechanical line again, brandishing his scarlet sword, the Destroyers surged forward in unison. They pinned the ten-meter-tall Daemon Primarch to the deck.
Inhibitor devices designed for psychic extraction were forcibly grafted onto Angron's daemonic flesh by swarms of nanites. As a faint luminescence flickered to life, the scarlet malefic energy of the Warp was slowly siphoned from his frame. Axion, wary of such volatile energies, had no intention of utilizing them; instead, he shunted the power into a temporary cage forged from neutron-star matter.
The complex, interlaced energy circuits were gorged with the raw essence of violent emotion, creating a singular containment field that bound Angron within. To preclude any risk of Warp-taint, Axion eschewed all sapient systems for the prison, relying solely on a simple, direct structural design of gravity generators.
The more Khorne flooded Angron with power, the faster that energy was drained. The cage utilized this chaotic essence to generate a gravitational well. In this cycle, the crushing weight intensified until Angron was pinned, immobile and helpless.
Stripped of his chaotic divinity, Angron's violent thrashing soon faded into weakness. Once the energy reached an equilibrium, the Destroyers released their massive clamps. However, as a final precaution before reverting their limbs to power claws, Axion commanded the machines to sever Angron's limbs and his Great Tail. The prison and the extraction devices, overseen by a cohort of automata, maintained a dynamic energy balance with the Primarch. No matter the effort, Angron could not leverage his own power to escape.
Khorne watched as Angron flopped upon the metallic floor of the cage like a landed catfish. The Blood God mentally struck his own brow in frustration. Then, with a roar of absolute fury, he descended.
A deluge of Warp power instantly vaporized the extraction devices. The delicate nanites were corrupted into piles of scarlet dross by the sheer pressure of the Empyrean. The super-gravity cage of neutron-star matter began to buckle and warp. The horrific, peerless might of the Blood God himself swept forward like a localized storm, effortlessly rewriting the laws of physics within this stretch of the Webway.
The surging, inexhaustible energy struck the supposedly indestructible cage. With a world-shaking thunderclap, the massive bars were pulverized, reduced to fine dust in an instant.
The nearby Destroyers reacted with cold efficiency, raising their mechanical limbs to unleash torrents of incandescent flame. The white-hot fire roared with such intensity that the surrounding Webway walls flickered and distorted under the heat. Simultaneously, the Destroyers lunged, their power claws snapping toward the breach with blinding speed.
BOOM! CRUNCH!
A blinding flash of blood-red light strobed through the tunnel. Amidst the sound of metal tearing and grinding, the massive frames of several Destroyers were split vertically in two, as if cleaved by an invisible, celestial axe. The Quantum Energy Cores and Quantum Thinking Modules within them, glowing with a soft blue light, proved brittle before this malefic radiance, shattering instantly.
"Do these cold iron trinkets truly think to halt my wrath? Crush them! Grind them into scrap beneath my axe!" Angron, now a vessel for Khorne's direct essence, had regrown his limbs. He shouldered a massive greataxe, his roar of contempt and bloodlust echoing through the Webway.
Driven to a frenzy by that thunderous command, the daemonic horde and the World Eaters Berzerkers behind him raised a deafening cry, lunging at the remaining mechanical forces like starving wolves. Daemonic roars, the scream of rending metal, and energy discharges filled the corridor. Bolstered by Khornate power, the daemons hacked apart the Sentry-Troopers and Armored Wardens with renewed ferocity.
Khorne, inhabiting the Primarch's frame, gave full vent to his primal rage. He threw back Angron's head and bellowed with dark exhilaration.
"Hahahaha! Soulless husks of steel! You dare stand before me? I shall pave the road to glory with your wreckage!"
The deity's voice dripped with loathing for that which offered no blood to spill, and a manic fury to destroy every obstacle by force. The great blood-axe swung again, snuffing out the white flames and whipping up a cyclone of heat.
However, within the shattered husks of the Destroyer-class Heavy Automata, the fractured Quantum Energy Cores suddenly pulsed with a blinding, unstable light.
KABOOM!
A muffled, world-rending explosion followed. A massive breach tore open in the Webway's fabric. Legions of daemons were sucked out of the tunnel and into the Warp, only to be instantly vaporized by the cold, golden radiance shining there. Even the Angron-vessel inhabited by Khorne lost its physical cohesion in the blast.
Khorne, clutching Angron's soul, vanished back into the Immaterium just before the blinding golden light could reach him. From within the Warp, there came a frustrated, muffled grunt, and a single, cold, merciless laugh.
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