"May the Allfather grant me the thorniest of foes."
Byrne continued his relentless advance along the colossal avenues of the sorcerer city.
Flanking his rear were several Rune Priests; as the Librarians of the Space Wolves, they possessed the unique ability to command the raw elements of nature, even in a domain completely devoid of a natural world.
The sorcerers of the Thousand Sons Legion conducted fierce delaying actions across every major intersection of the metropolis, inflicting heavy casualties upon both the Space Wolves and their mortal auxiliary regiments.
The active manpower available to the Thousand Sons was far from vast, but the individual combat efficacy of each warrior was exceptionally high. Naturally, the Space Wolves deliberately excluded the Rubric Marines from their internal headcount when calculating the metrics of the enemy.
With a sweep of his power claw, Byrne ripped a Rubric Marine completely in two. Infinite streams of dust and sand spilled out from the ruptured ceramite, and the surrounding Space Wolves let out booming laughs as they scooped up the dust and hurled it mockingly back into the faces of the Thousand Sons sorcerers.
Stationed near a primary ritual altar, the psychic fluctuations radiating from a coven of Thousand Sons sorcerers spiked into a sudden, violent crescendo.
"Behold, brothers! The heretic sorcerers have completely broken their composure! Let us expedite this bastard's departure so he may join his kin who turned to ash alongside Prospero long ago!"
Even though Byrne was the solitary Space Wolf present on the field who had actively participated in that ancient campaign, that reality did nothing to deter the younger wolves from using the historical tragedy to mercilessly taunt their foes.
A substantial portion of the active Thousand Sons sorcerers were direct survivors of that ancient conflict. They had personally witnessed their Primarch's spine shattered across the knee of Leman Russ; they had watched Magnus barter away the fragments of his own soul to deliver his broken legion from complete annihilation.
The Burning of Prospero—this historical trauma had been carved indelibly into the psyche of every surviving Thousand Sons sorcerer. It remained a permanent, weeping scar embedded within the very code of their gene-seed.
This transcended individual temperament entirely. Even the most stoic, calculated sorcerer capable of calmly negotiating a bargain with Tzeentch could not tolerate an insult of this magnitude—especially when delivered directly by the Space Wolves, the very instruments responsible for the destruction of their homeworld.
Driven to an absolute frenzy by the taunts, a multitude of sorcerers unleashed an overwhelming torrent of lethal spells. The sheer weight of the psychic energy violently warped the minds of the mortal auxiliary soldiers, mutating them instantly into shrieking Chaos Spawns, while others focused their wrath squarely onto the Space Wolves, grinding them down into microscopic ash with raw telekinetic force.
Byrne perceived the sudden, soaring violence of the combat. This was a true engagement; the composure of the Thousand Sons was shattering into absolute madness.
"Their defensive lines have fractured!"
"These fools haven't changed an ounce since the old days! Always loudly proclaiming their superior intellect, only to execute something so profoundly humorous when pressed."
This development was precisely what Byrne had engineered. His functional understanding of the Thousand Sons' psychological profile far eclipsed that of his younger pack-brothers—and in truth, eclipsed that of some younger sorcerers themselves.
Consequently, after absorbing Byrne's recounting of the Prospero campaign, the Space Wolves had systematically provoked the sorcerers. Sure enough, superior intelligence and emotional stability proved to be entirely separate variables. The once airtight defensive perimeter unraveled the moment the sorcerers broke composure to launch retaliatory strikes, creating the exact tactical vulnerability the Space Wolf elite had been waiting for.
Dozens of Terminators teleported directly into the weakest coordinates of the fractured line. Accompanied by a swirling vortex of cerulean energy, the Scarab Occult Terminators of the Thousand Sons materialized on the grid to answer the breach.
On the primary front, Byrne personally tore his way through the outer perimeter. For a brief, fleeting instant, he felt precisely as though he had traveled ten millennia back in time—to an era before his Primarch had abandoned him to journey into the dark, to an era when the Imperium of Man was still ascending toward its golden age.
Boom!
A sound entirely distinct from the rhythmic bark of bolters and the crackle of sorcery echoed across the plaza—the piercing, evolutionary shriek of the Tyranids.
Two colossal Norn Emissaries unleashed a continuous wave of focused psychic energy, blowing a phalanx of Thousand Sons sorcerers off their feet. Byrne watched with a critical eye as these towering, exceptionally lethal organisms drove their massive frames directly into the heart of the sorcerer defenses.
Those masters of the arcane, entities who commanded an infinite repertoire of complex spells, were systematically run down and crushed under the raw, unadulterated mass of these biological juggernauts. Even when multiple sorcerers pooled their psychic reserves to channel a synchronized suppression spell, they could barely manage to slow the forward momentum of the monsters.
"The Tyranids are committing their heavy assets to the grid?"
The Tyranid vanguard surged forward like a biological tsunami, their infinite numbers swamping nearly half the active warzone within a single tactical window. Yet, for reasons the Space Wolves could not fathom, the xenos deliberately refrained from initiating an engagement with the Imperium, meticulously shifting their advance to maintain a strict operational distance from the Space Wolf lines.
"Press the advance! Are we truly going to sit back and allow these xenos to outpace us in harvesting the sons of Magnus?!"
"Monecious prattle."
An icy, detached voice echoed down from the high atmosphere.
Coinciding with the articulation of the words came a wave of absolute, crushing psychic suppression.
Hundreds of Space Wolves were instantly pinned to the earth under the staggering weight of the aura, including the Rune Priests who supposedly commanded exceptional mastery over the currents of the Warp.
Byrne sensed the immediate danger, his ancient instincts screaming an alarm: Has Magnus himself entered the theater?
He tilted his chassis upward. Floating high in the sky was an exceptionally ornate Thousand Sons sorcerer, his gauntlets adorned with an array of complex rings, the runic iconography forged into his helmet subtly warping reality as the localized background psychic currents automatically coalesced into his form.
Ahzek Ahriman.
Recognizing the arrival of an exceptionally problematic adversary, Byrne immediately swiveled his weapons array to lock onto the target. Before he could cycle the firing mechanism, a vast ocean of telekinetic energy unleashed by Ahriman violently repelled him and the surrounding Space Wolves, instantly undoing the hard-won tactical progress they had achieved over the last hour.
"My brothers, do not allow the ghosts of our historical tragedies to compromise our current objectives," Ahriman decreed calmly. "And as for you, Father... I do not believe the architecture of this current enterprise is correct."
As Ahriman spoke, a towering, magnificent silhouette materialized seamlessly directly behind him. The ornamental plumage gracing his armor gleamed with the exact same radiant splendor it possessed ten millennia ago.
His physical stature was immense, his skin a deep, vibrant crimson, and the solitary eye remaining within his countenance burned with the brilliant light of supreme intellect.
The Primarch of the Thousand Sons, Magnus the Red.
The two most powerful entities within the history of the Thousand Sons had officially consolidated their presence on the field, eliciting a sudden, primal surge of thrill within Byrne's ancient frame.
"Allfather, grant me glory this day."
The reaction speed of the Tyranid Swarm, however, comfortably eclipsed that of the Space Wolves. A unique, distinct silhouette erupted from the heart of the xenos vanguard, her trajectory singular and absolute in its intent—her target was Magnus!
Ahriman attempted to extend his hand to intercept the charging entity, but a jarring, highly anomalous psychic counter-current violently locked his arm in place.
Simultaneously, a massive concentration of specialized Tyranid psychic organisms materialized across the coordinates. The intensity of the Shadow in the Warp spiked exponentially, throwing the local Immaterium into an absolute frenzy, which effectively shattered the suppression clamping the Space Wolves, allowing them to plunge back into the meat-grinder.
"You lot, redirect and support the remaining pack-brothers! I intend to personally verify if Magnus's spine has healed correctly since our last meeting!"
War—a direct sub-consciousness node of the Great Devourer.
She had been granted a substantial portion of the overarching hive mind's vital essence. While a loss of this scale was something the Great Devourer could comfortably regenerate over a long chronological window, to War and the alternative lifeforms navigating this theater, it represented a concentration of raw power that could not possibly be ignored.
Within the tactical framework of the Swarm, War functioned precisely as a Primarch-level asset.
An entity of that caliber could only be answered by an asset operating on an identical tier of combat potential.
War drove her fist violently into Magnus's psychic aegis, the kinetic force shattering the barrier into a dense web of spider-web fractures. Yet, Magnus's boundless psychic reserves repaired the structure almost instantaneously, his counter-stroke manifesting as a devastating bolt of warp lightning.
War anchored her physical form to absorb the lightning head-on. Specialized biological organs distributed across her frame automatically converted the electrical energy into pure kinetic momentum; her acceleration spiked exponentially over a microsecond, and her follow-up strike shattered Magnus's reconstructed shield into absolute splinters.
However, Magnus simply utilized his telekinetic mastery to warp the local geometry of space, creating an infinite spatial distance that prevented War from closing to hand-to-hand range.
On the flanking front, the duel between the apex psykers commenced.
Ahriman locked his gaze onto the blind human female before him, his ancient instincts automatically priming him to exercise extreme caution.
There were exceptionally few mortal humans capable of projecting an aura that made him perceive a genuine threat to his existence. Within the psychic signature of Eleven, he detected the residual essence of more than one cosmic entity.
"Lend me your strength, thralls."
Ahriman chanted the true names of several high-tier daemons. Answering the terms of their ancient bindings, the entities materialized from the rift, lunging directly at Eleven.
"Out of my way, pests."