The Cursed King, Chapter 63

Dust rolled from the broken mountains like smoke from old fires. In the cleft of the valley two giants stood again, blood-soaked, breathing steam. Rock screeched beneath their boots. Angron thumped one fist against his breastplate and the sound boomed through the ridges as if a gunship had fired.

Russ raised his head.

The air between them warped, a shimmer of heat that had nothing to do with flame. It was pressure. It was the weight of something unseen pressing outward from the Red Angel’s flesh, splitting the dust in ripples. His wounds sealed as they watched. Rents in muscle drew tight. The torn hinge of his pauldron straightened and fused. Blood that had poured from him only heartbeats before crawled back across his skin and vanished beneath closing pores. The breath that left him came hot and strong, a furnace drag. 

Russ spat grit from his mouth. The Wolf King’s own wounds bled but did not close nearly as fast. The traitor was getting stronger, he noted. There were lines of red across his ribs, a jagged cut at his temple, one ear gone. He set his feet in the charred earth and the ground fractured in spider webs around his heels.

This, Russ mused, must’ve been Angron’s Cursed Technique: Eternal Berserker. 

They moved.

Angron struck first. His left hand blurred, a backfist that shattered the sound about it. Russ angled his skull under the blow and drove an elbow into Angron’s ribs. Bone clacked. The riposte earned nothing; Angron’s flesh mended before the elbow cleared. The Red Angel laughed, lips peeled from cracked teeth, and swung again. Each punch ripped the air in two. Russ blocked most, took some, landed a few. For each wound he gave the butcher, that wound vanished in the span of a breath and the next sweep came harder than the last.

Thunder cracked overhead.

Russ drew a long breath and let it out slow. A bright spark flashed behind his pupils. He cocked one fist back and slammed it knuckle‑first into the sky.

Nothing happened for a heartbeat. Then clouds tore open.

The wolf fell.

It came from the height of heaven, a beast made of lightning and stone‑blue flame. Jaws wide enough to swallow a titan. Hide of thunder and storm clouds. It shrieked, a sound like tearing metal and thunderclap joined, and speared toward the valley floor. Its paws hit first, sinking half a league into the rock. The whole valley jumped.

“Divine Beast: Sapphire.” 

Angron looked up, grinning like a thing released from its chains.

Russ lifted his hands, palms open. The wolf split down the spine with a crack of light and became two. Each half smaller than the whole but no less savage and, certainly, by comparison, each one still large enough to bite titans in half or swallow them entirely. Electric fur crackled. Russ flicked his fingers and the pair lunged, shaking the ground. But Angron was too small a target for such large entities. Russ divided them once more, splitting them again and again until there were a hundred of them, each one the size of a small tank and cackling with arcs of electricity 

The Wolf King’s eyes narrowed. The lightning wolves were essentially immortal as they were made entirely of storm and lightning. Fighting Angron head on would be a monumental foolishness as, by this time, the deranged Primarch of the World Eaters had likely grown too powerful to defeat. No, the only way to win was to take the fool’s head right off his shoulders. There’d be no regenerating from that.

“Destroy him,” The Wolf King pointed and all the lightning wolves charged, their movement akin to a sea of storm clouds.

Angron met them head‑on.

They came like weather.

The wolves poured across the blasted plain in a tide of blue fire. Their pelts snapped with lightning. Their paws struck sparks from the stone. Where they ran the ground ionized and glassed. Arching bolts leapt wolf‑to‑wolf and the air filled with a single vast hum as if every horn of every warship in orbit had begun to sound at once.

Angron braced.

He planted both feet wide and dropped his shoulders and the earth under him sank. Dust blew outward in rings. His lungs drew in air that steamed on his teeth. One fist met the first wolf and the beast burst in a wreath of light, shards of storm veering skyward. The fragments arced back, re‑knit behind him, and lunged again. He caught its skull—no more than a hunk of incandescent cloud—and tore it free. The corpse flashed, split to cinders, vanished.

Two more struck his flanks. Their jaws clamped and drove him three steps sideways, gouging trenches. He roared and seized each by the throat and smashed them together until the swirl of their bodies fused into a single howling vortex that peeled from his grasp and shot high into the sky before cooling to rain.

The pack swept round.

They circled him in a cyclone, bodies blurring to a ring of cobalt flame. Inside the whorl Angron stood, breathing smoke, skin slick with cicatrix light where wounds had closed. Each breath fed the glow around him. Eternal Berserker. The longer he fenced with death the more life bent to his will. He flexed one arm and the plates creaked. Then he leapt.

He tore through the circle like a shell through cloth. Wolves scattered. Some re‑formed and swooped back. He hammered one aside, drove a knee through another. Their bodies unspooled to filaments then knit again behind him. They were numberless so long as Russ bid them divide.

The Wolf King watched from the ridge.

His hair hung in ropes. Blood streaked the fur about his shoulders. He raised one trembling hand and the storm above answered. Lightning forked down, struck Angron square. The Red Angel staggered as fire wrapped him. The wolves saw the chance and surged. Ten at once clamped jaws along his spine. Their hides blazed white in contact with his Cursed Energy and in an instant they blew apart, yet fragments clung like napalm, static crackling over his frame.

Russ ran.

He crossed the plain in long strides, boots smashing glass to powder. A shard of lightning held in each fist. Angron saw him come and swung, but Russ slid under the hook and sprang. Both blades of lightning in a crossing cut at the neck.

The glow burst, blinding. When the flare settled Russ stood behind Angron, panting, blades guttered out. He turned slow. The Red Angel still stood. A shallow line marked his throat, already closing. He grinned. Russ answered with a snarl and drove a fist for the wound. Angron caught the wrist, bones popping in his grip, and flung him.

Russ arced hundreds of meters and struck a basalt column. The spire collapsed, burying him under tons. Sand and dust boiled up. Angron advanced, each footfall a hammer. He dragged breaths that shook the hills. His shadow fell across the ruin.

The rubble exploded. Russ burst free, half buried in stormfire. Lightning knitted round his arms and ribs like armor. He slammed both palms on the ground. The plain bucked. Cracks raced outwards and from them rose pillars of stone stabbed through with electric veins. Each pillar split at the crown and wolves leapt forth, newborn, snarling, building the pack anew. They rained on Angron.

The Red Angel did not flinch. He waded through them, fists like comets, each swing drawing fire from the sky to sheath his knuckles. Wolves popped in showers of sparks. The sparks reassembled mid‑air, dove again. The pack became a living storm, too many to kill, too weak to kill him. They could only harry. That was Russ’s plan. Worry him, steal moments.

Russ closed in.

He feinted left, pivoted, brought a heel across Angron’s jaw. Cartilage snapped. Angron spat teeth. He laughed, caught Russ by the ankle mid‑kick, and hurled him to the earth hard enough the stone liquefied. He stamped but Russ rolled clear, knives of lightning coalescing in his hands, drove them into Angron’s calf. The blades sheared off at the haft as the flesh sealed. Angron seized Russ by the hair, lifted him, headbutted once, twice. Russ’s nose splintered. Blood guttered.

The wolves answered—scores of them crashed over Angron’s back, jaws biting at elbows and throat. Their bodies bled electricity into his wounds faster than they could close and for the first time he grimaced. Russ tore free and hacked at the momentary weakness. His hand buried in the open wound at Angron’s side, fingers curled on something vital. He wrenched.

Angron howled. He lashed blindly and backhanded Russ a dozen strides away. In Russ’s hand lay a slick length of black chain—the Butcher’s Nails, some of the few that still remained on Angron’s head, torn loose in a coil. They writhed, metal cords dripping warp‑tainted ichor. Russ hurled them aside. The ground where they landed hissed and split into a fissure spewing green flame.

Angron staggered. His breathing faltered. Heat poured from the tear in his flank. Steam rolled off him in sheets. A wound dug out faster than his gift could mend. His eyes found Russ across the plain. The Wolf King wiping blood from his face, chest heaving. Wolves ringed him, tails lashing.

Russ spoke no word. He raised one palm. The air above them convulsed. The clouds spiraled about a single point and a lance of sapphire bolt burned downward, thick as a fortress tower, swallowing Angron in actinic light. The blast pinned the Red Angel to the earth. The plain caved. A crater yawned half a mile across.

Silence.

The wolves stilled. Their hides dimmed to dull embers. Russ swayed, empty. His Cursed Energy spent. He watched the crater, vision blurring. Wind drew the smoke aside.

Angron stood at the center.

His frame blackened, armor slagged, yet he stood. Flesh crawled as if alive with worms. The wound in his side closed before Russ’s eyes. Angron’s breath shook mountains. The glow around him climbed to a sunburst crimson, so bright Russ squinted.

Eternal Berserker had crossed some brink.

Angron no longer bled. No longer bruised. The thing beneath his skin had become something else. Not flesh. Not even fire. A forge given will. Every second stoked it hotter. Every breath he drew pulled more power into him. The ground beneath him warped, sagged, glassed. Each step cracked plates of stone and turned them to slag.

The wolves fell back, tails flickering, their stormlight dimming at the edges. One howled and the sound vanished into Angron’s aura like a breath in flame.

Across the furnace field, Russ stood with almost nothing left. Only the raw meat of himself. What he had been before the geneforges. What remained when all artifice was gone. Marrow. Iron. Fury.

He raised his fists.

They trembled. Knuckles split and bleeding. Hair scorched to brittle ends. The cloak he wore flamed at the edges and curled away in ash. He barked a laugh. The sound cracked with smoke. A Fenrisian curse tumbled from his tongue.

Then he ran.

Angron saw him come. He did not move to meet him. Let him come. Let him break.

They collided.

No sky above them now. Only the sphere of Angron’s aura, a dome of burning atmosphere that boiled the air and melted the earth. Stone flowed like wax beneath their feet. Russ dove into it, through the pressure, through the light, and drove both fists forward.

They struck Angron square in the chest.

The impacts rang like cathedral bells, deep and resonant, shaking the bones of the valley. Angron staggered a step. Then he laughed. A deep sound from the gut. He caught Russ by the ribs and squeezed.

Russ’s spine bowed.

Ribs groaned and gave. He hung there, blood at his lips, eyes burning with something older than pain. Then he grinned.

He brought his hands together.

"Domain Expansion," he rasped. "Sapphire Field."

The world broke.

The shell burst outward. It expanded in an instant, a sphere of howling blue, then collapsed back in on itself and took them both with it. The burning plain vanished. The sky vanished. The very sound of the world ceased.

They stood in a chamber of lightning.

Not a place but a state of being. There was no floor. No sky. No horizon. Just current. Raw electric force stretched in every direction, infinite and unknowable, shaped only by will. Each bolt forked and re‑forked a thousand times a second. Angron staggered.

The light struck him.

One bolt. Then ten. Then hundreds. They came from everywhere. From below. From within. They tore at his body, not as fire, not as heat, but as judgment. Every nerve in his body lit. His back arched. He screamed.

The scream echoed without end.

Bolts bored through his chest. Split his limbs. His bones flared in silhouette, outlined in molten light. His armor flaked and blackened and peeled from him in long curling sheets. Blood vaporized in its veins. One eye burst, then the other. His mouth opened in a howl that carried no words, only the raw sound of suffering made incarnate.

Russ walked forward.

Here, in the domain, he was not broken. Not tired. Not wounded. Here, he was truth. The lightning poured from his skin like water, bound to him, made of him. His steps cracked the realm and reshaped it. Angron staggered back, trailing smoke and ruin. His body mended even here, but slowly, slowly, slower than before. The regeneration faltered.

Russ raised a hand.

A bolt shot down and struck Angron in the spine. He dropped to one knee. The light began to twist him, bend him, flay the madness from his bones. The domain pulsed, each beat stripping him further. His muscles trembled. His breath hitched.

Another bolt came. Then another.

Angron roared and lunged.

He crossed the space in a blur, driven by nothing but hate and the stubborn strength of a butcher too mean to die. He struck Russ square, sent him flying through the field. The realm shuddered. Russ hit a seam of lightning and vanished within it.

The air stilled.