The Cursed King, Chapter 62

The earth split under their feet.

A crack like the end of all things rang out across the blasted plain and a shockwave followed close behind, rolling outward in a ring of pulverized stone and fire. Their fists had met in the center, two titanic forms locked in a single strike, and from that strike the land was made new. Crags erupted where flatlands had lain. Black spires of earth rose and then broke apart into shrapnel that tore through clouds and armor and flesh without discrimination.

Vulkan grunted as the Khan immediately retreated in a swirl of wind and blade.

Above them, the sky filled with fire. Aircraft burned trails across the heavens, streaking between dogfights that left corpses tumbling through the clouds. Contrails intersected in chaotic weavings as loyalist and traitor craft slammed into one another, shorting shields and splitting hulls with fusion torpedoes and cursed detonations. Some burst into flame. Others fell like stones, trailing smoke. Pilots screamed their deaths into dead channels.

Below, on the broken crust of Isstvan III, the Legiones Astartes made war upon their own. The black-armored sons of Ferrus Manus clashed with former comrades from the Luna Wolves, Iron Warriors, and Word Bearers. Meltaguns hissed and spat streams of superheated gas that burned ceramite to liquid. Power blades found soft points in joint plating. Sorcery lit the air like lightning, bolts of cursed energy flashing from the hands of warrior-psykers who moved with terrible calm across the field, faces as still as statues.

And in the midst of this chaos came something else. Something new.

They moved like men but were not men. Their bodies were housed in machines. Bipedal torsos atop quadrupedal supports, centaur-shaped warforms clad in plates of alloy unknown even to the forges of Mars. Their weapons were long-barreled, white-hot, and each bolt they loosed cut through tank armor and power fields as though slicing through water. A Baneblade reeled under a single shot, its turret blown apart and the crew inside turned to ash in an instant. One of these walkers, marked with the sign of a silver helix, leveled its rifle at a squad of Raven Guard and fired once. The air bent. The men were gone.

There were others. Astartes in armor patterns that had no designation in the records of Terra. Armor that bore no aquila, no marks of chapter or origin. Their plating shimmered, reactive to light, and some carried blades that buzzed in frequencies tuned to psychic nerves. They killed in silence. In efficiency. They fought beside the traitors without hesitation, without word.

In the heart of the conflict stood Vulkan, son of Nocturne, black-skinned and burning with inner fire. His frame was a monolith, a moving fortress of flesh and will and pain forged into endurance. He raised a hand and the air shimmered, a beam of white-hot particles roaring from his palm. It crossed the field like a lash from heaven and turned a trio of enemy warforms to slag. Their limbs went first, then their torsos, then all of it was gone, the ground turned glassy beneath the point of impact.

He turned, eyes scanning. In the chaos, a wind rose.

The sound came not like any machine. It came in rushes. Cuts in the air. Slices of motion too fast to track. He heard it, a fluttering like wings, but no wings there. Just a blur.

“Brother!” Vulkan roared. “Why are you doing this?!” 

Then came the pain.

His arm left him before he even saw the blade. A spray of blood rose from his shoulder and splashed against his own chestplate in great arcs. His body staggered sideways, and the severed arm spun in the dust before landing with a wet thud. The blade had cut through his armor, his bones, his tendons, and the flame within him struggled to contain the shock.

The Khan stood beside him.

White armor. Trimmed with pale gold. A long blade in one hand. Wind curling about his shoulders, lifting his cloak. Blood on the sword, bright and red. His eyes calm. No hate. No joy.

“Forgive me,” said the Khan. “But I will do what I must.”

Vulkan’s teeth clenched. Regeneration already knitting muscle and sinew together beneath the meat of his shoulder. Flames crawled from his neck stump and licked the air. His eyes locked on his brother.

The Khan vanished.

A pulse of wind. The sound of it echoing in the broken buildings behind him. Vulkan turned. The Khan was already gone again. There one moment, and in the next, smoke.

Elsewhere, battles raged. A Space Wolves dreadnought lumbered forward, smoke pouring from its side vents, its fists dripping with black blood. It crushed a traitor terminator beneath one iron foot and leveled its heavy flamer at a group of advancing Word Bearers. Fire roared from its arm. The enemy screamed as they burned.

A scream was cut short as something blurred through the air, slicing the dreadnought’s torso in half. The top slid sideways. Sparks burst from broken cabling and then the wreck fell.

In the north quarter of the hive city, Ferrus Manus threw down a building. He had torn out its foundation with his own hands and toppled it upon a landing zone, crushing a dozen traitor transports and the troops disembarking from them. His armor was coated in the ichor of his enemies. His hammer swung wide and tore a line through a Sons of Horus assault squad, their bodies flying in pieces across the rubble.

Behind him, Iron Hands followed. They said nothing. Fired without emotion. Their movements mechanical. Precise. A machine war conducted by machine men. But even they began to falter under the pressure. The traitors had momentum and numbers. Each push brought fresh heresies.

Above the spire line, the Raven Guard emerged from the shadows, striking at the backs of enemy lines. Black forms dropping from broken balconies, wings made of smoke. They stabbed and vanished, reappeared and stabbed again. But even they began to thin. The traitors had countermeasures now. Sensor grids that mapped motion in higher spectrums. Some of Corax’s men fell before they ever reached the ground, their jump packs failing midair, sliced by precision beams.

And still the new armies came. Men not born of the gene-forges of Terra, but built in secret, nurtured in dark laboratories beneath alien suns. They carried no heraldry but bore strange marks etched into their armor—glyphs that flickered when seen directly. Their weapons sang. Each discharge came not with the roar of chemical fire but with a hollow chime, as if the universe itself recoiled.

They cut down loyalists by the dozens.

Vulkan roared and raised his hand and willed forth a miniature sun, which he then cast down upon the traitor lines and engulfed the battlefield in fire and death.

—

Sukuna saw all of this from the shattered tower where he stood.

Dust curled around his boots. His armor bore the marks of earlier combat. Streaks of black. Claw gouges. The gold on his pauldrons was dulled, stained with the blood of traitors and loyalists both.

He turned, eyes scanning the battlefield.

He saw a Blood Angel sergeant torn in half by an orbital strike. He saw a squad of his own Devourers collapse a bridge beneath advancing World Eaters, then bury the survivors with a shell barrage. He saw Sorcerers walking through the air, riding currents of the warp like waves, loosing bolts of screaming energy into the ranks of the Raven Guard below.

He saw Sanguinius. A golden shape at the heart of the slaughter. Wings stained. Sword lifted. And he saw something else closing in on him. A figure in rust-colored armor, massive, horned, dragging a blade too heavy for most men to lift. They moved toward each other like tides. The inevitable crash yet to come.

Sukuna narrowed his eyes.

His time was nearly up.

He stepped down from the tower and the dust rose to meet him. His boots struck the earth. Four arms moved as one. He began to walk, sword in one hand, his staff in the other. The remaining hands opened, closed, tested the tension in the fingers. Blood from the earlier fight still clung to the joints. He would not wipe it away.

He moved across the field.

And the ground around him broke open. A traitor dreadnought rose from a pit of rubble. It swung an arm the size of a rhino tank. Sukuna ducked beneath it, surged forward, and drove his blade into the undercarriage. Sparks flew. A shriek like a dying man made of iron rang out. The dreadnought fell.

He stepped over it without pause.

Far ahead, the Khan fought again. Against two Salamanders now. Moving so fast they barely saw him. Their attacks landed seconds late. His counterstrikes landed first. Flesh parted. Blood sprayed. The Salamanders fell.

Vulkan had vanished from sight. Somewhere behind the smoke.

Sukuna lifted his head and opened his senses. The world went still for a breath. The roar of battle faded. He listened.

There.

A ripple of cursed energy. Far to the east.

Something was coming.

He turned and began to move.

Above him, the sky cracked. A new fleet had entered orbit. Sukuna didn’t need to ask whose. He could see the outlines of their vessels. Could feel the way the air shivered in anticipation. 

And the war was just beginning.

—

The ground was shaking.

It came low at first. A sound beneath sound. A thing that traveled through the bones before the ears. The tremor of gods in motion. Men looked up from their fighting. They saw no flash nor fire but they felt it. Felt the world rending itself in the distance. Dust rose on the far horizon. A haze of red earth and black ash and pulverized stone.

In the valley below the broken spires of Isstvan, two figures collided.

They met with such force that the hills around them split. That the crust itself heaved like a wounded animal. Stone crumpled beneath their feet and flew upward in jagged shards. And still they moved. Faster than the sound of their own strikes. Faster than reason.

One of them bore a great pelt of gray fur, matted now with blood and ash. The other wore iron red, rusted and crusted with old gore. They were not men. Not anymore. They were monsters. Beasts made in the image of man, given names and purpose. Sons of the Emperor. Leman Russ of Fenris. Angron of Nuceria.

Their weapons had long since shattered.

The chainaxes Angron carried had screamed their last as they met the fangs of the Wolf King’s blade. Broken hafts lay scattered, their teeth torn from the links. The great frost blade of Fenris cracked across Angron’s chest, then shattered outright as the Red Angel drove a fist into Leman’s gut. The blow shook the mountains.

"Sukuna should've just killed you when he ripped the nails from your skull!"

"I shall send him your skull, dog!"

After that they fought bare.

Fists. Elbows. Feet. Teeth.

Angron moved like a butcher gone mad, hammering blow after blow with both hands. He caught Russ by the shoulder and threw him against a mountainside. The stone cracked. Leman rose and came back at him, fangs bared, striking low and fast. His knee caught Angron beneath the ribs and lifted him off the ground. The Red Angel spun and smashed his head into Russ’s, their helms already gone, blood smearing their faces.

They slammed into one another again.

The mountain broke.

A shelf of rock the size of a city block buckled and gave way. Dust poured down in a choking wave. Men died in that dust. Astartes from both sides. Loyal and traitor alike. Caught in the tremor and buried where they stood. No orders reached them. No clarion call or warcry. Just silence and the weight of falling earth.

In the heart of it, the two Primarchs rose from the ruin.

Their bodies glowed. Not with light. With pressure. With weight. Cursed Energy spilled from every inch of them. The air around them crackled and turned dense. They moved through it like creatures in water, bending it as they passed. Angron struck first, a low sweep of the leg that tore through a fallen ridge and sent boulders flying. Russ vaulted over it and brought both fists down on Angron’s shoulders.

Angron staggered.

Russ stepped forward, hands already blurring. He threw three punches in the space of a breath. Angron blocked the first, took the second on his jaw, ducked under the third and rammed his shoulder into the Wolf King’s ribs. Leman reeled. Angron roared and drove him back, fists flying like hammers, blows that cratered the ground and sent geysers of rock into the sky.

They vanished.

Reappeared two hundred meters to the west. Angron was mid-swing, his fist arcing toward Russ’s skull. The Wolf King caught it in one hand, braced with his foot, and threw him. Angron cartwheeled through the air, struck the cliffside, and vanished in a roar of dust and stone.

Leman followed.

He crossed the space in a blur, feet pounding the rock until the impact lifted him clear and he dove into the wreckage. They collided again within the cloud, and the shockwave blew out in a ring that flattened trees and turned men to paste.

The wind screamed.