Dominic was shunted violently by the impact, slamming hard onto the frozen deck and sliding multiple meters before coming to a complete halt.
He snapped his head up and watched Sister Cassandra stagger backward half a step. Her power sword clattered loosely against the ice, and her upper torso was cleaved near-entirely into twin segments.
Her hood slipped back, exposing a pale, serene face.
There was nothing left within her capacity to execute; she merely cast a final look at Dominic, and then collapsed heavily to the deck, completely devoid of vital metrics.
The terminal momentum of the blade remained unexhausted, shearing past Dominic's elevated left cybernetic armature as he attempted to block.
Crack!
The precision cybernetic limb severed completely flush at the elbow joint. The cross-section was perfectly smooth, and fragments of wiring and hydraulic conduits sprayed outward along the trajectory of the blade's sweep.
A freezing sensation rippled up from the residual stump, followed by an agonizing wave of delayed pain that bored into his neural pathways, before the cybernetic suite's diagnostics severed the neural link entirely, leaving only the distinct phantom pain native to a lost limb.
Dominic sat upon the ice deck, staring at the cybernetic stump sparking and crackling with static ignition, then looked toward the unmoving corpse of the Sister not far away. His entire physical frame felt frozen to the coordinate.
In a state of cognitive dislocation, the scene fronting his optical sensors overlapped perfectly with a historical file embedded in his memory.
It was an identically freezing theater of war; it was an identically sudden, unpredictable ambush, and Raphael had met an identical end.
Transforming a broken physical frame into a raging inferno.
A cataclysmic detonation had consumed her body, while he had survived the engagement.
From that chronological node onward, his left hand had transitioned into a mechanical prosthesis, carrying a permanent physical and psychological weight he could never unequip for the remainder of his life cycle.
"Ah!!!"
A tempest of absolute rage burned through his limbs like wildfire, instantaneously incinerating all remaining layers of tactical caution and survival dread.
His optical sensors bloodshot, Dominic's right hand violently plunged into the interior holster of his military uniform, tearing free a dagger forged entirely with gold filigree.
The blade asset lacked significant length, scaling to roughly thirty centimeters, its chassis densely engraved with intricate golden circuit-runes, and a micro-core simulating a condensed star matrix was embedded inside the pommel, radiating a deep amber-red illumination.
The blade edge displayed zero evidence of conventional sharpening, yet it naturally projected a layer of searing thermal energy. Within this zone of sub-zero absolute cold, waves of intense heat continuously distorted the atmosphere surrounding the weapon.
Setting Sun.
This constituted one of the sovereign Relics passed down through successive generations of his noble house.
His uncle had half-jokingly relayed a historical chronicle during his youth: when the God-Emperor of Mankind was scouting for engine cores to power the capital warships of the Blood Angels Chapter, He had personally captured a living star, compressing its mass into a near-eternal power crystalline core.
When this specific dagger was forged, the smiths utilized the stellar ash and solar embers that had bled out during that compression process. The operational temperature of the blade edge scaled to such an extreme floor that it possessed the utility to instantly liquidate every known alloy across the cosmos.
Dominic had preliminarily cataloged this data as a fabricated legend engineered by his seniors to amuse a child.
He had analyzed unmapped numbers of designated "Holy Relics," a vast majority of which commanded background data sheets that scaled to absurd, hyperbolic proportions.
Yet the precise millisecond his fingers locked around the hilt of this dagger, he attained absolute realization: even provided the chronicle of Setting Sun lacked that exact legendary lineage, the authentic parameters would not fall far short.
Because the destructive efficacy of this instrument decoupled entirely from mortal paradigms.
Apostle Four had severed the cybernetic armature with a singular cleave and was positioning his frame to deliver a terminal execution strike, when his tracking sensors registered the target lunging forward while anchoring an oddly configured golden dagger.
His expression preserving absolute zero data, he swung his guandao laterally to execute a standard parry maneuver.
From his tactical assessment, how could a mere short dagger hope to halt the kinetic trajectory of his heavy polearm?
Hiss!
Succeeding a brief, metallic ring of impact, an agonizing screech of thermal dissolution vibrated through the chamber.
The exact millisecond the heavy chassis of the guandao contacted the edge of Setting Sun, it simulated crystallized snow meeting a white-hot iron rod, a massive structural notch instantly melting into the weapon.
Exploiting the kinetic momentum, Dominic executed a reverse-hand slicing sweep. The golden blade carved a blazing arc through space, shearing completely through the multi-inch-thick metal shaft with absolute zero structural resistance.
Apostle Four's pupils contracted violently, an expression of sheer cognitive shock surfacing within his azure-grey eyes for the primary time across the engagement.
He stared with absolute disbelief at the broken polearm remaining inside his grasp, his physical chassis executing a high-velocity backward slide to re-establish a safe tactical distance.
Yet Dominic granted him zero margin to harvest a breath.
His propulsion units detonated at maximum output parameters; dragging his bleeding stump, his entire physical frame traced a trajectory simulating a ballistic artillery shell launched in direct pursuit, his right hand driving the dagger straight toward the target's face.
Ting!
A layer of pale-blue psionic shielding deployed instantaneouslyフロントing Apostle Four's chassis, mimicking a crystalline mirror.
The tip of Setting Sun impacted the shield surface, inducing a sequence of distorted kinetic ripples across space. Extreme thermal energy collided violently with raw psionic mass, producing a sharp crackling noise, yet the strike failed to instantaneously pierce the barrier.
The exact millisecond Apostle Four's lower limbs touched the deck, as he initialized protocols to channel a superior tier of psionic energy, an absolute, bone-chilling cold erupted from his rear flank.
It failed to map to a standard drop in environmental temperature; controversies aside, it constituted the total rejection matrix native to an Untouchable, a dead zone that completely severed and nullified all ambient psionic mechanics.
Sister Elaine had navigated to his lateral rear coordinate at an unmapped node.
She emitted zero vocal communication, and she declined to establish even a momentary optical link with Dominic, yet her tactical calculations had precisely mapped his line of attack.
She slammed both palms flush against the ice deck, forcing the output wattage of her Untouchable field to absolute biological thresholds, a pale-silver aura surging outward like a tidal wave to engulf Apostle Four.
"Ugh!"
Apostle Four discharged a muffled grunt, the psionic oscillations anchoring his frame plunging into immediate, chaotic destabilization.
The localized psionic barrier that had barely managed to arrest the trajectory of the dagger popped and shattered like a punctured bubble.
The optimal vector.
The crimson light within Dominic's optical focus surged to maximum thresholds, utilizing the kinetic thrust of the propulsion modules to launch his frame into the upper atmosphere of the chamber.
He locked his remaining grip onto the hilt of Setting Sun, channeling every tier of physical strength within his biology to deliver a maximum-intensity downward cleaving blow aimed straight at the crown of Apostle Four's head.
The golden blade sliced through the atmosphere, pulling a searing thermal afterimage across space, converting the surrounding sub-zero vapors into an immediate cloud of white steam.
There existed zero structural impedance.
Setting Sun cut directly into the absolute center of Apostle Four's skull, passing smoothly through his nasal bridge, throat, and chest cavity, before finalizing its exit route down his lower abdominal line.
It simulated a white-hot blade cutting through animal fat, lacking even a fractional index of resistance.
Apostle Four's physical frame locked rigidly to the coordinate, his four armatures preserving their spread-eagle configuration, the light anchoring his azure-grey pupils undergoing rapid, systemic dissolution.
He modeled a behavioral pattern suggesting an intent to transmit a final vocal file; his lips twitched across a brief sequence, yet the terminal output comprised strictly a pale-purple line of blood manifesting down the vertical axis of his body.
At the subsequent second, his physical chassis slid apart along the precise trajectory mapped by the blade, the perfectly smooth cross-sections yielding near-zero biological fluid leakage.
The extreme thermal footprint had instantaneously carbonized and sealed every ruptured blood vessel.
The twin halves of the corpse collapsed heavily onto the permafrost deck, generating a dull, heavy echo.
For a compressed timeline, the vast ice hall entered a state of absolute silence.
The surrounding columns of adherents, having suffered the loss of their high-tier command unit, experienced a temporary delay across their kinetic programming.
Yet this systemic delay sustained for a duration of merely zero-point-something seconds, before they resumed their emotionless pincer advance to engulf the remaining twin intruders.
Dominic stumbled upon completing his landing sequence, a wave of physical imbalance induced by the lost limb converging with the profound exhaustion that follows a state of absolute rage.
He gritted his teeth to sustain his vertical posture, intending to command Sister Elaine to execute an immediate egress, when a minor, rippling psionic wave signature vibrated through the atmosphere, expanding like rings on water.
It constituted a automated distress beacon broadcasted by Apostle Four at his exact node of termination.
Centered on the grand ice hall, that specific wave signature traveled through the subterranean rock matrices of the caverns at extreme velocity, simulating an invisible ripple that comprehensively saturated the entirety of the Fang City within a single millisecond.
"Intruders... the temple... desecration of the Dragon Deity..."
Intermittent, fragmented conceptual thoughts flooded directly into the consciousness of every primitive nomad across the settlement, simultaneously triggering activation protocols for unmapped numbers of azure-robed adherents cached deep within the permafrost layers.
Initialize egress protocols. This coordinate is no longer tactically viable.
Sister Elaine recovered Cassandra's power sword, sheathing the weapon back onto her hip line with a reverse sweep, her optical focus preserving absolute zero emotional data.
It simulated a paradigm where the warrior who had just made the ultimate sacrifice constituted nothing superior to an irrelevant demographic metric.
She seized Dominic by his remaining armature, and the twin profiles launched into a high-velocity dash out of the grand ice hall.
Lunging out of the temple's glacial valley, the panorama awaiting Dominic caused his heart to plunge.
The preliminarily peaceful and serene Fang City had comprehensively transformed its baseline layout.
The blare of war horns resonated without cessation, and unmapped numbers of nomads clad in animal hides emerged from every lateral ice cave and elevated platform, anchoring ice spears, stone axes, and steel blades as they densely obstructed every available transit corridor.
Azure war paint was mapped across their facial planes, the fires of absolute rage burned within their eyes, and they vocalized regional dialects he possessed zero capacity to decode, charging the twin survivors with total disregard for personal survival.
These constituted ordinary human demographics under the governance of the Imperium.
They were not Genestealer strains, nor did they calibrate to Chaos cultists; they were merely primitive nomads who had inhabited the permafrost wastes across successive generations, navigating a grueling survival cycle.
Dominic reinforced his grip around Setting Sun, a momentary trace of cognitive dislocation surfacing within his eyes.
Barely a dozen minutes prior, he had been standing behind a massive ice pillar, monitoring these exact demographics quietly engaged in labor and routine survival, watching children pursuing one another in play across the caverns.
He had analyzed entirely too many homeworlds pulverized by the engines of war; because of that extensive data history, he possessed a razor-sharp realization of how hard-won this specific peace truly was—a state of tranquility that scaled as exceptionally fragile across the cruel theater of the galaxy.
Yet he, an Imperial General whose baseline protocols dictated the absolute protection of human citizens, was currently forced to personally fracture this tranquility, executing a slaughter of these near-unarmed civilians.
Focus your cognitive processing!
Sister Elaine delivered a swift tap against his shoulder architecture, rapidly executing a sequence of tactical hand signs.
At the subsequent millisecond, the power sword anchoring her grasp carved a wide horizontal arc through space. The leading echelon of nomads instantly suffered total bisection of their upper armatures, collapsing onto the ice deck while discharging agonized shrieks.
Her kinetic execution was exceptionally rapid and lethal, every strike optimized to deliver immediate termination. She cleaved through the targets as if they decoupled from common human biology, treating them merely as obstructive xenos beasts.
They have been manipulated by xenos culture, transitioning them into heretical populations. The Imperium commands zero requirement for a general who harbors sentimentality.
The Sister's hand signs simulated a bucket of freezing water dashed over his frame, causing Dominic to experience an involuntary shudder.
He snapped back to absolute alertness.
This chronological node excluded all bandwidth for soft-hearted operations.
Cassandra's corpse remained abandoned inside the grand ice hall; provided their profiles similarly terminated at this coordinate, the underlying truth would remain permanently buried beneath unmapped layers of ice.
"Carve an extraction lane."
Dominic spoke in a low register, his vocal cords severely rasped.
He elevated his laspistol, aligning the targeting reticle with the vanguard line of nomad warriors, yet he intentionally adjusted the vector away from vital anatomical zones. The high-energy thermal beams struck the targets' shoulder structures and upper armatures, attempting to incapacitate the personnel to force a retreat.
Yet the nomads displayed an identical behavioral model to the waking adherents, manifesting zero dread of physical termination.
The exact millisecond a forward unit collapsed, the subsequent asset instantly leaped directly over his companion's physical frame to sustain the momentum of the charge.
They discharged furious roars, launching ice spears and stone axes across ballistic trajectories; though the primitive projectiles possessed zero utility to pierce the light armor plating hidden beneath their concealment cloaks, they simulated a head-on downpour, severely impeding their forward velocity.
The closer they navigated toward the primary ingress threshold of the Fang City, the higher the density of the converging nomad forces scaled.
They leaped down from the lateral ice ladders, erupted from subterranean ice shafts, and even slid down the massive icicles suspended from the high ceiling matrix, leaving the entire perimeter saturated with human silhouettes across all quadrants.
The energy cell anchoring Dominic's laspistol rapidly reached absolute depletion thresholds, forcing him to rely strictly on Setting Sun to navigate close-quarters combat.
Every sweep of the golden blade edge invariably pulled a mist of blood interlaced with the pungent odor of carbonized tissue, yet the millisecond a specific wave was neutralized, an identical column surged forward to replace the deficit, scaling to an infinite index.
Their physical stamina was bleeding out at extreme velocity.
The gear configurations they wore mapped to stealth suits, completely decoupling from the heavy pattern Terminator Armour engineered explicitly to dominate macro-scale front-line engagements.
The protective metrics were capped, the ammunition supplies were finite, and even the internal energy cells driving the micro-thruster units were approaching terminal thresholds.
The cross-section of Dominic's left arm had long entered a state of absolute numbness under the sub-zero environmental exposure, the intense cold boring past the metal structural elements directly into his bone matrices; every independent sweep of the dagger carried a wave of excruciating pain that pierced his central nervous system.
Yet the superior psychological weight traced back to his cognitive processing.
Every independent instance where the blade edge punctured a human frame, and every chronological node where an agonized scream registered across his audio sensors, his cognitive models flashed with visual files of those children sitting beside the bonfires listening to historical tales, of those women stitching hide garments, and of those craftsmen polishing stone implements.
He was not uninitiated across the metrics of human termination.
Traitors, heretics—the enemies who had suffered termination under his sovereign command numbered in the thousands.
Yet executing these near-unarmed, ordinary human citizens whose baseline programming dictated nothing superior to the defense of their sovereign home matrix generated an exceptionally bitter psychological feedback loop.
Sister Elaine, conversely, preserved absolute zero emotional data across her facial plane.
Her power sword continuously maintained the single most efficient cleaving trajectory, every strike precisely severing a jugular lane or a primary arterial architecture, declining to waste a fractional index of physical energy.
When confronting light-armor or unarmored targets, she even desisted from initiating the weapon's active power field disruption matrix, refusing to deplete an additional tier of the suit's internal batteries.
From her cognitive architecture, these human assets who had suffered ideological infiltration by a xenos culture—venerating a xenos construct as a divine deity—shared an absolute status overlap with corrupted heretics.
The sovereign borders of the Imperium spanned unmapped sectors, governing a population demographic that scaled to trillions; low-tier, contaminated populace fragments of this zero-value classification existed in infinite supply.
Their termination generated zero statistical deficit.
The twin survivors operated across opposing paradigms—one freezing and mechanical, the other burning and heavily burdened—yet relying strictly on sheer internal resilience, they systematically carved a bloody transit route from the glacial temple valley all the way to the primary city gates of the Fang City.
The colossal ice-hewn gate valve materialized directly within line-of-sight, the space beyond the threshold framing the howling blizzards and the expansive arctic wastes.
Provided they forced egress through this singular gate, utilizing the optical concealment modules to blend into the white-out conditions of the blizzard would suffice to break the tracking vectors of the pursuers, enabling them to navigate to the pre-hidden atmospheric skiff to execute orbital return to the starport.
Strategic salvation was positioned less than a hair's breadth away.
Yet precisely at this critical node—Boom!
Succeeding a deafening, structure-shaking detonation, the dense ice gate valve slammed downward from its internal mechanical tracks, locking flush into the permafrost floor to comprehensively seal the exit.
A blast of frost and sub-zero vapors rushed across their faces, simulating a massive maw closing its fangs to finalize confinement.
Dominic charged directly to the threshold, using his remaining right armature to strike the ice bulkhead with maximum force, leaving nothing superior to twin shallow structural indentations.
This ice gate measured multiple meters in physical thickness; given their contemporary status parameters, executing a structural breach via raw physical force crossed into absolute impossibility.
To their rear, the rhythmic thudding of closing boots and raw vocalized roars converged across a tightening perimeter.
Hundreds of azure-robed adherents had already exited the glacial valley corridor, their silhouettes emerging in high-density formations across the mouth of the transit lane, their azure-grey pupils radiating a cold luster within the dim illumination.
Across the wider perimeter, unmapped numbers of nomads hoisted blazing torches, converting the entirety of the gate plaza into a completely sealed pocket, the shifting firelight illuminating rows of furious faces.
Sister Elaine executed a precise rotation, backing her chassis flush against the freezing ice gate, her power sword held horizontally across her torso to initialize a textbook defensive stance.
She cast a lateral glance at Dominic beside her.
This Imperial Major General, who historically operated with high spirits and absolute command clarity, currently maintained a subtly lowered cranium, his fiery-red hair completely obscuring his eyes and brow line.
The severed cybernetic stump dangled limply against his flank, the golden dagger continuously dripping biological fluid, his shoulders executing minor vertical oscillations as his respiration metrics registered as heavy and labored.
His optical tracking appeared somewhat unfocused, resting across the undulating columns of human silhouettes fronting his coordinate, yet simulating a behavioral state where he was monitoring absolute zero data.
Was his cognitive processing paralyzed by the structural termination of the escape vector?
Or had his mental faculties entered a state of dislocation due to the reality that his armatures were saturated with the blood of innocent demographics?
Sister Elaine declined to initiate an interrogation file.
She merely reinforced her grasp around the hilt of her power sword, systematically deploying her Untouchable field across a gradual expansion vector to envelope the zone securing their twin positions.
The sub-zero gale screamed through the micro-fissures of the city gate, whipping up the frozen blood dust from the deck to consolidate into fine, granular ice crystals within the freezing atmosphere.
The surrounding blockade of bodies closed the physical distance without cessation, the shifting torchlight stretching their twin shadows into elongated, distorted vectors against the ice wall.
It simulated a paradigm where a tactical containment loop had finalized into an absolute death trap.
Elaine cast a terminal glance at Dominic, appearing to finalize a specific internal protocol.
Yet the exact millisecond she initialized a forward stride, Dominic executed a kinetic movement ahead of her timeline.
As Elaine pivoted her optical focus back to his chassis, the internal disorientation within his eyes had completely dissolved into non-existence, replaced by the identical layer of absolute resolution that characterized his historical command profile.
Dominic delivered a singular, highly compressed tactical hand sign, commanding her to execute a backward deployment.
Elaine attained immediate realization: the familiar Major General had returned to operational parameters—at least, at this contemporary chronological node, he had returned.
She executed a crisp nod, activating her propulsion modules to snap backward across a high-velocity slide.
Dominic's right armature smoothly extracted a compact micro-drill assembly from his tactical web—a specialized breaching munition engineered explicitly to counter this precise structural impasse.
His cognitive re-awakening failed to stem from a scenario where he had comprehensively resolved the philosophical crisis; controversies aside, he merely harbored an absolute refusal to monitor the identical structural tragedy play out before his optical sensors for the third time across his life cycle.
The drill munition cut through the air, precisely bypassing every independent nomad attempting to intercept its trajectory, to score a direct impact flush against the center of the massive gate.
BOOM!!!