Fulgrim stood in the center of the concourse with wings half-open and claws flexed, his head turned slightly as if he could smell the man he wanted. He had broken the fog apart with a single pulse that stripped the charge from the mist and flung it out into the hive's ribs. White dust settled over broken rails and smashed pillars. Bodies lay half-swallowed by new-grown wood. The grinders were silent and dark. The holes where captives had been bound were empty.
"Come out," Fulgrim said, voice carrying clean across the distance. "You asked for my attention. You have it."
Hashirama did not rise to the very obvious bait.
Hashirama breathed in and made a single seal, dampening the signature of his chakra until the very idea of it seemed to vanish into a haze. Both his spiritual and physical energies became one with the world around him–a simple trick that any Shinobi worth their salt would know how to perform, especially during stealth missions. Hashirama's aura, his presence, everything about, bled away from the world into nothing. Not even the greatest sensor would be able to detect his presence at this point.
He sent the first wave.
Wood clones stepped from behind ribs of iron and through holes cut in the concourse floor.
Fulgrim's head turned to catch them. The corner of his mouth lifted.
"Finally."
He moved lightly. His lower body coiled and uncoiled in a single stroke. He crossed the distance with one push of clawed hands and a sweep of tail. His first strike cut three clones in half. The clones burst on contact. Each broke into a bouquet of hard wooden stakes that flew outward at supersonic velocities. The nearest Emperor's Children raised their arms to block. Stakes sank into joint gaps and found the soft material under filigreed plating. Marines staggered, surprised by the weight of wood stuck through the rubberized suits under their plates.
Fulgrim flicked his claws to clear sap and wood fibers. Two more clones hit him from the left. He spun his wing and let the edge cut them to splinters. The second burst showered the ground with stakes. They clacked off his scales and wings with sharp sounds. Several ricocheted into the ankles of marines trying to get clear. One marine stepped on a stake and lost his footing. He fell onto his back and slid toward the hole where a grinder had been. A clone took him around the head and sealed him under the floor.
"Form on the Phoenician!" a champion shouted from the edge.
"Hold fire!" another voice snapped. "Close the ranks, don't shoot blind."
"I have clear sight," a Kakophoni said, voice tight. "Target is—"
"Do not fire at my back," Fulgrim said without turning. The threat sat under the words without emphasis. "If you do, I will cut your arms off at the shoulder."
The Kakophoni held his breath. He lowered the barrel a fraction.
Clones pressed the sides. They struck in pairs and threes, always from the edge of Fulgrim's next step. A clone leapt for Fulgrim's throat. Fulgrim caught it by the face and squeezed. The skull cracked under his hand. The clone burst. A ring of stakes snapped like trapped springs and punched into the breastplates of the marines behind him. One stake went through a vox grille and pinned a marine's lower jaw to his collar. He clawed at it and made a choking sound that ended when a root closed over his mouth.
Fulgrim laughed once without humor. He swept his right hand through two more clones and sent their bodies into the floor. He rolled his shoulder and found clean movement. He looked pleased with that. Then he slashed again. He cut so quickly that the air cracked. The cuts were clean. The clones died without reaction. The stakes did the reacting for them.
"Left!" a marine shouted. "Two o'clock!"
"Your left," another corrected.
A third voice, closer. "Shut up and move!"
They tried to make a lane for him. They raised shields where they had them. Many did not. Those who stepped in front of Fulgrim to screen him were touched with the same affection as a lamp post. He swatted one aside with the back of his hand and sent the man cartwheeling into a pile of toppled machinery. The marine did not get up. He drove his tail across the ground and sent three more into a wall that had only half survived the recent collapse. The wall fell on them. He stepped over another who had not moved quickly enough. The Primarch did not appear to notice.
Hashirama watched the rhythm and counted the cuts. He had needed to see Fulgrim's reach while the man's patience thinned. The wood clone deaths gave him that. He held his real body flat against a pillar and traced the edge with two fingers before he moved. He kept to broken shadows cast by burnt gantries and the edges of high racks of storage bins. He sent more clones from new angles to keep attention where he needed it.
Batu ghosted through the lower levels with a pace that left no scrape or echo. He remained near the two relief corridors that led to the outer skirts. When the freed civilians reached him in the mist earlier, he had taken them in silence and sent them forward. Now, with the fog gone, he used bent pipes and broken cable trunks for cover. The lightning seals along his greaves gave him short, precise bursts. He took two squads that were trying to reach the center. He left them laid out in intervals, no scream, no alarm. He kept his blade clean and dry.
Fulgrim cut another clone apart. Stakes bounced off his face and stuck in the decorative horn ridges at his brow. He ignored them. He looked toward the gallery where Hashirama had stood before and then toward the collapsed transit spine. He sniffed once. He tasted metal and stone dust and wood sap. He tasted blood. But not Hashirama's. That, more than the ambushes, pushed his mood to irritation.
"Coward," he said to the broken concrete. The word came flat, not angry. "You have a stage. Use it."
Two clones hit him at the same time from opposite sides. Their hands stuck to his arms with a grip that used the tiny scale edges for purchase. They drove knees toward his ribs and throat. He twisted his torso and broke their holds. They burst. Stakes punched into his scales and scraped along the underplates of his chest. Several stakes found the flesh at the wings' root. He flinched once from pure reflex and then bared his teeth. The stakes fell out and hit the ground with dry sounds before bursting into masses of tangled roots.
The Emperor's Children came harder now that they could see. A captain forced a group through the tangle of new-grown wood and tried to reach his Primarch's side. He kept shouting distances: "Twenty paces—fifteen—ten—" Fulgrim took a half step back to make space and then surged forward as a clone appeared in the man's path. He struck the clone and the man caught a wing edge under his pauldron. The edge drove straight through the pauldron plate and into his shoulder. Fulgrim moved to clear it and flung the man out of the way. The captain hit the floor and slid. He left a smear. He did not stand again.
Hashirama made his choice.
He ran a hand sign and pressed both palms to the floor.
"Earth Release: Swamp of the Underworld."
The concourse floor sagged with a soft, heavy sound. The edges of cracked plates spread like fresh clay as rigidity failed under the technique. The hard surface melted to a dark, viscous mud that stank of tar and wet stone and old machine oil. It started shallow and gained depth with each breath. The weight of armor turned every step into a slow sink. Boots disappeared. Knees went under. Marines tried to lift, and the pull of the vacuum made their legs feel twice as heavy. The mud stuck to greaves and slid over hips and waist plates.
"Back!" someone shouted. "Fall back to dry ground!"
"Great idea, genius!" another answered, voice higher than he intended.
"Link lines," a sergeant barked. "Belts together, pull as one."
They moved with discipline at first. They clipped belts to belts and reached back. The man furthest out only had his shoulders above the surface. He made no progress when he tried to swim it. He sank because he spread his weight wide and gave the mud more purchase. The men behind him leaned. Five bodies pulled. The man's armor creaked. He did not come free. The mud held him and drank their effort. The strain took his shoulder joint. He screamed. The belts pulled his arm up and away from the socket. He still did not move.
"Cut him out," the sergeant ordered, jaw tight.
No one had a tool that worked on mud.
Fulgrim's lower body slipped into the swamp without losing cohesion. He kept his chest high and used the length of his tail like an oar. His wings helped him find purchase; each hard beat moved a foamed patch of mud aside and gave him room to angle the next stroke. He did not panic. He shifted his center of mass forward and kept momentum. He made a path.
"On me!" he called. "I will bring you through."
A line of Emperor's Children tried to follow the wake of his movement. They sank. The wake closed behind him. The pressure gradient pulled the mud in on itself. The men's knees locked. A marine behind them tried to go around through a thinner section. He misread the surface. He stepped where the layer was a film over deeper slurry. He went down to his chest in one step and filled his helm with curses that ended with a wet sound.
Hashirama sank his hands into the mud and pressed his chakra through the field. He felt hundreds of points of pressure where armored bodies fought for lift. He felt Fulgrim's weight as a long bar of force that ran like a blade through the swamp. It was impossible to mistake it for anything else.
He closed his hands slowly.
The mud stiffened. The surface lost shine and went dull. The viscosity rose and then snapped into structure. In a breath, the swamp went to rock. Marines froze in place where they sank. The ones who had kept their shoulders above the surface got locked at the neck. Many had gone deeper. Those had no line of sight to anything except the inside of their visors and the number readouts that told them their suit pressure. The numbers lowered in steady ticks.
Fulgrim found his wings trapped at half extension. Rock pressed against him along the lower body and hips and pinned him without bruising the scales. He blinked once at the change. He did not thrash. He flexed his wrists and felt the pull of stone. He looked down at the rock around his waist and then up at the broken shells of buildings at the concourse's edge.
He laughed. The sound came low and honest.
Hashirama did not give him another breath. He stamped the heel of his hand down.
"Earth Release: Moving Earth Core."
The ground under Fulgrim and the nearest hundred marines dropped. A square section of rock fell clean and even, a dozen meters to a side. The cut edges sheared through new stone and severed the frozen block from the concourse. The drop began at a measured pace and then accelerated as gravity took over. Armor scraped rock in long lines. Helmets struck internal plating. Astartes shouted to one another and then lost the air to speak. The block fell through the space where machines and substructures had sat before the fight ruined them. It landed one floor down with a sound that made dust leap from beams a street away. The rock cracked into large solution slabs.
Hashirama closed both hands. The edges of the hole moved. They came together as if pulled by an unseen vice. The air over the hole shifted with the motion. The square became a slit and then a seam. The seam pressed shut. The rock met rock and fused. The repaired surface looked like a single piece that had never broken.
Silence took a long second to land.
Hashirama scanned for movement. Astartes on the edges were still above ground. Many had sunk only to waist or chest, and the rock had fixed them where they were. Several tried to cut themselves free by sawing their own greaves with chainswords. The teeth bit into the rock and threw sparks. The blades jammed almost instantly. A few men reached for belts of grenades out of reflex. Those who did went still when they pictured the blast with their legs locked in stone. They put their hands down again and looked around without moving their heads.
Fulgrim burst up through the newly sealed surface in a spray of broken rock. He came up laughing, shoulders shaking, wings shedding chunks of stone. Dust coated his hair and his wings and made his scales dull. It did not change the shape of him or the energy that poured off his body. His eyes were very bright.
"Good," he said. His smile cut higher. "Again."
His hands shredded the rock left on his arms as if it were rope. He spun twice to flick the rest of the dust off his wings and squared his shoulders. He looked pleased, as if he had found a sparring partner who knew more than one trick. He spread his arms and invited another.
Hashirama had already moved.
He had cut explosive tags into thin slips and pressed them into the foundations of several buildings around the concourse while the mist still held. Clones had carried them, slid them under stone lips and into fractures in load-bearing pillars, and pinned them with roots that withdrew when he gave the signal. He had placed them to fall toward a single point in the center. He had watched the lines and angles and kept the pattern in his mind.
He made a seal and closed his hands.
Detonations ran around the concourse in a broken-ring pattern. The sound came sharp and hard, one set after another. Foundations cracked. Load paths failed. The closest gallery snapped in three places and tipped. The residencies stacked above it had lost half their structural pillars in the bombardment earlier. Hashirama finished the job cleanly. They leaned toward Fulgrim and then fell. Another building across from it followed. Its corner hit the ground and broke into three large sections. One section slid into the concourse and pushed a wave of dust and debris ahead of it. A tower further back buckled in the middle, hesitated, then came down like a tree chopped through at the trunk.
Batu crouched behind a buttress and watched the first of the structures go. He bared his teeth inside his helm.
"Now that's a signal," he whispered.
"Stay clear of the drop," Hashirama said.
"I am."
Fulgrim did not try to run from the collapse. He stepped into the fall. He caught the first slab on his shoulders and chest. He bent his knees a fraction, then locked them. The slab broke against his body and shot dust out in a hard ring. The next piece hit his back and shoulders and forced him to a knee. He drove that knee into the ground and held. The third broke two meters overhead and showered him with stone chunks that hit like thrown anvils. He exhaled and pushed up through them. A column fell across his wings and pinned him for a heartbeat. He tore the column in half and threw the halves aside. He rose as the rest of the building came down.
The weight was too much even for him to clear all at once. In seconds he was buried under a moving heap of concrete, rebar, iron, steel, and broken wood. The pile covered him to a height of three men. Dust flooded the concourse and turned the air brown. The sound of settling material filled every space.
Hashirama moved to the edge of the pile and squinted through the dust. He pulled a breath in shallow through his teeth to keep debris out of his lungs. He felt heat on his face and arms from the friction in the fall. He felt the drag in his muscles that told him not to spend more than he had to. He forced that aside.
A coil of scaled tail pushed out from the debris field. It slapped the ground twice and vanished again. A wingtip cleared and dug into the ground for leverage. It tore a furrow as it pulled. Claws raked up and found stone they could purchase. Fulgrim's head came up. He was smiling. He looked happy in a way that chilled the air.
"That was better," he said. His voice carried without strain. "Again."
Hashirama did not give him the distance. He slammed his palms down and sent roots into the pile from two directions. They drilled through gaps and wrapped beams. They pinned the larger elements in place. He sent more roots through the cracks in the broken slabs and along the rebar to find Fulgrim's limbs. They did not touch skin yet. They waited with points set.
Fulgrim threw his shoulders under him and shoved. The pile shifted. Hashirama sent the roots forward.
They struck. Hundreds of roots lanced down and then angled. They found gaps in the scale overlap. They found the soft material where wings joined the back. They found the mouth and went past the teeth in a smooth movement. They went through the cheeks and into the jaw hinge. They drove through the pits under the arms and through the plates of the lower body. They pierced through the belly where the plates were hard but had seams. They did not stop at entry.
They branched.
Each root split into smaller roots inside the wounds. The smaller ones curved around bone and drove along muscle fibers. The next level of branching went finer and reached for vessels. They spread out like a tree under skin and made contact with every path they could find. The texture of the roots changed as they moved. They went from hard to fibrous and from fibrous to fine and flexible. They were not designed to tear; they were designed to hold and drink.
Fulgrim roared. The sound did not have words in it. It had surprise and then anger and then a heat that did not belong to anything human. He flung his arms and tore several roots out. Sap flew. The roots regrew inside him as quickly as he tore them. They used the water in his blood. They used the energy that ran through him like a furnace.
A hundred roots inside Fulgrim shifted their tips and widened. Small seals pricked into the wood with clean, simple strokes. Each was designed for a single task: convert what they touched to chakra for an instant and then route it. The conversion did not want to work. It fought. The roots insisted and gave it shape for long enough to pour along their channels. The energy turned to chakra for a heartbeat and the network took it. It went into the ground.
Fulgrim spit a mouthful of wood and blood. He laughed and moaned in pain and pleasure.
His eyes cut to the left and then back to the right. He hissed through his teeth and tried to rise. The roots along his spine flexed and tightened. The ones through his shoulders anchored to the rebar and held his arms down. The ones through his wings pressed the wings flat. The ones through his lower body pinned each segment to a slab underneath it.
He shifted again. He still moved. Nothing fixed him entirely. He was too strong, and there were too many joints. He tore three roots out, screamed once, and then tore another five. Hashirama forced his hands into the floor to his wrists and grew replacements inside the body faster than he could tear them out. He put more of the smaller roots into key lines that he felt under his palms. He did not stop until the roots that converged around Fulgrim had resembled a small forest
Fulgrim tried to rear up again. A root inside his throat expanded and made space its own way. He gagged and spat blood and splinters. He ripped that root out with two fingers and a hard pull. It regrew on the way out. He almost smiled at the audacity of it. Fulgrim's laughter changed. It went lower and carried a scratch in the throat where the roots kept growing. He blinked dust out of his eyelashes and set his mouth in a hard line.
"More," he said again, though it came quieter. "Is this all?"
Hashirama pressed his fingers deeper into the stone. The ground around Fulgrim trembled in a small radius as more roots sought seams in the broken slabs. They found the seams and opened them by less than the width of a coin. The shift gave the network more flex and kept the lines from snapping when Fulgrim heaved.
He felt the energy change. The flood eased by a fraction. The first layer of siphon began to take.
Each root began to siphon Fulgrim's spiritual energy.
AN: Chapter 39 is out on Patreon! Award ReplyReport248denheim23/11/2025NewAdd bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks Chapter 36: New View contentdenheim30/11/2025NewAdd bookmark#1,050They rose from the Palace in silence.
The Ten Thousand formed a spearhead around Him, auramite armor taking the light of Terra's day and returning it without glare. Malcador matched the Emperor's pace with a stride that did not waste movement. The void above them was a field of shattered orbit and widening fire where orbitals and docks had been, and beyond that, a horizon of black metal where the Necron fleet spread its lines.
Neoth—Emperor of Mankind—did not speak as his personal vessel crossed through the upper layers of the atmosphere. The planetary shield he had raised held steady below, layered and adaptive, deflecting fragments and turning their momentum elsewhere. His eyes moved once across the ruins that had been Mars. There was no planet there now–at least, not as he knew it. There were only continents of broken crust and rivers of red-black stone cooling to a dead shine. A price to pay. There was always a price to pay.
He lifted His right hand and placed His will into the space between Terra and void. And a golden stream of fiery psychic energies surged forth, illuminating the dark.
It rose without heat or flame, a pressure that pressed without weight and did not dispel air. It was not light. It caused light to change when it passed through. It was the ordering force of a mind that had had no peer in this galaxy for longer than empires remembered themselves. Custodians steadied their grips on Guardian Spears as the first crest of that wave moved out.
The psychic wave met the forward face of the Necron formation and rolled over it.
The Void Dragon answered.
From the heart of the phalanxes a countercurrent rose. It did not come from the Immaterium nor from the hyper-advanced Necron weapons. It came from the deep well of a being that drank stars and called their dregs its blood. It was not thought. It was refusal given shape. Material Energy. Where the Emperor's force smoothed, this broke with edges too fine to see, cutting vectors apart and binding them to rules from before the universe cooled.
The two waves struck.
The impact did not explode. It did not produce sound. It produced structure.
Neoth felt it before he saw it. Psychic pressure met material force, and between them something formed that was neither and both. The interface thickened as if it pulled substance down from the space between rules. Where the front of His power touched the Dragon's answering surge, it laid down a sheet of something that did not exist a heartbeat before.
It was Chakra.
He recognized the signature at once. The pattern was the same as the Webway gate rebuilt hours before. It was the same as the living wood arrays under His Palace. It was Hashirama's work written in a different hand.
"Malcador," He said.
"I feel it," Malcador answered. "A median plane."
The sheet spread out from the collision line and arced into a vault. It found the curve of Terra's gravity well and matched it by choice rather than compliance. It thickened until its surface gave back a faint reflection. Where it touched nothing, it continued to exist. Where it met bodies, it accepted their weight. It did not flex.
The Emperor teleported onto it from his vessel. Malcador followed without hesitation. The Ten Thousand landed behind them with controlled impacts, boots touching down onto something that took their weight as if it had always been there. Above, Necron warships slid forward with perfect angles and began to land upon the same substance. Their supports came down with a synchronized thud. The field did not mark.
"Hold at thirty ranks," the Aquilan command vox sounded behind the Emperor. The voice had the calm of a man who had fought all his life. "Shields open to sector green. Target priority: cutters and portals."
The first Monolith fell toward the field and arrested within an arm's length of contact, then settled the last span as if by choice. Its portal awakened. A phalanx stepped through— skeletal silhouettes in uniformly black metal, eyes burning with cold light, gauss muzzles already steady. Opposite them, a wide Custodian line made ready.
"Engage," the Emperor said.
Light as weapons crossed the space.
Sagittarum beams snapped open with a constant tone, cutting through the first ranks of Necron warriors and leaving lines of vapor where matter had been. Gauss return fire flensed the air in green bands that tore apart molecules and left armor plates pitted and biting at themselves. Guardian Spears answered with disciplined shots, each selected for a joint or a node of energy. The first Necron ranks disassembled in pieces, then began to crawl back together as if a crude memory of the body could call it back into shape.
Hetaeron Guard split the line and moved forward with shields up, one step at a time, spears low and ready. Their formation met a wedge of Triarch Praetorians landing from a high arc. The Custodians did not break step. The first engagement was clean: a shield block, a spear cut through a thorax, a boot into a knee. A second Praetorian landed with a staff strike aimed at a throat. A blade caught it and drove it off line. A bolt from a Guardian Spear put a hole through a head unit that did not bleed. A third made to bypass the shield wall and take the knees. A second rank thrust ended it.
"Left vector elements," Malcador said, voice low. He did not point. "They are testing the cohesion between plates."
"I see it," Neoth said.
At the field's edge the Necrons sent a swarm of scarabs over the lip and under the Custodian line, tiny bodies seeking purchase on greaves and couplings. The Emperor's gaze moved once and the insectoid machines froze as if their time had been placed between pages. Custodians stepped, then stepped again, boots crushing metal dust.
Another wave of Necrons came through from a portal at a different angle. Their leader carried a glaive that cut with a black edge that devoured light rather than reflecting it. He had a crown and the posture of a figure that had once been called lord. The Hetaeron rank leader met him with a shield that glowed faintly at the edge, took the glaive on that glow, and turned his spear point into the lord's chest with a movement that did not waste force. The Necron lord's body tried to become separate pieces around the wound. The Hetaeron twisted and broke something that did not have a name. The lord fell without weight and his body slid across the chakra surface with a hiss.
The Emperor did not continue to watch. A shadow passed across His peripheral vision. The Void Dragon moved.
He had seen this being in another age. It had been weak then. Its hunger had been simple. Its refusal had been broad and scattered. It had crossed interstellar space in a body that had been forced to carry itself without feeding. It had come to Terra with power gone and memory cracked. He had bound it. It had fought with shock and rage and confusion. It had lost.
It was not weak now.
The greatest and most potent shard of Mag'ladroth opened itself and then drew itself inward again. Where a moment before there had been a vast dragon-silhouette that blocked the light, now there was a humanoid figure that stood twice the height of a Dreadnought. Its skin was silver without blemish. The surface of that silver did not hold still. It tracked with a pattern of green cubes that slid across one another in and out of this reality and others beside it. Wings extended from its back in an even plane, each feather a blade of metal as thin as a hair and as long as a man. A serpentine tail coiled at its heels and set itself once around its own body. In its right hand it carried a staff that had no joints and no grain. It was not crystal. It was not metal. It was light made to behave as if it had weight.
The being looked across the field. Its eyes did not shine. They moved over the Emperor, over Malcador, and over the Custodians, and then back to the Emperor again. The mouth did not move. The voice appeared in the air before Neoth like a readout.
YOU.
The Emperor answered without turning His head. "Did you miss me?"
YOU BOUND ME. The voice did not echo. YOU USED MY POWER.
"You were going to eat my world," Neoth said. "Containment was an acceptable tool."
YOU WILL PAY.
The Emperor did not react to the claim. He looked once past Mag'ladroth to the lines of metal worlds moving into position beyond the near fleet, then back. "We will see."
The Dragon moved first. It drew its staff across its body and then extended the tip toward His chest. The movement left a line hanging in the air as if the staff had dragged a crease into space. Where that line hung, matter lost its arrangement and turned to dust. The line kept coming.
Neoth met it with His open hand.
Psychic force pressed into the line and gave it shape, took it from a cut to a plane and from a plane to a slab. The slab cooled to Chakra. The cut turned aside and slid down. The slab remained for a moment, then he relaxed and it became air again.
The Dragon's left wing moved. It did not flap. The edges of the metal feathers shifted in a ripple that moved at the speed of thought. Where those edges passed, the chakra surface below changed polarity and tried to eject the Custodians standing on it. Malcador was already crouched with one hand pressed flat to the field, feeding a stabilizing pattern into it that countered the change. Ten Thousand boots held.
"Frame is responsive," Malcador said. "We can keep it."
"For now."
The Emperor reached for His blade and advanced.
Mag'ladroth accepted the engagement. The staff fell in a straight strike from above. The Emperor stepped to the side, brought the blade up into the path of the strike, and stopped it as one might stop a spear with two fingers placed at the right point. The staff's light material shuddered once. The green cubes across the Dragon's skin flickered and shifted.
They traded two more exchanges without calling attention to them. Each time, the staff sought to draw lines that converted matter and energy to obedient nothings. Each time, His blade gave the lines a new rule, then returned them to the general weave. They moved across the field without stutter. Where they passed, Custodians and Necrons alike pulled aside and continued their work.
A Telemon dreadnought planted both feet and fired its twin weapons past the Emperor's shoulder, the auric machine's vox roaring a brief warning. The beams took a Monolith under its portal and through its core matrix. The construct folded and imploded to a flat object that then became a small object and then a point and then nothing. Gauss beams returned and cut across the Telemon's armor like planned filleting. The Telemon did not fall. It set its feet on the chakra, refused to give a millimeter, and replied until the return fire stopped.
On the far side of the field a Necron beam cut through a Custodian from hip to shoulder. The wound did not throw blood. It converted flesh on its edges to a fine grit. The Custodian fell to one knee, set his spear into the field, and pushed himself back up with a sound that might have been a curse. Malcador rolled one finger. The chakra surface rose up under the Custodian's boot to give him a step and keep him from sliding. Two more Custodians closed in to cover him. The wounded man lifted his spear and continued to fight.
"Observe the interface," the Emperor said. He parried another strike and moved to the Dragon's flank. The staff rotated and met Him with the precision of a mind that made decisions without delay.
"I am," Malcador said. "Each contact between your force and the Dragon's returns a quantity of the median substance–Chakra. It does not decay if we keep feeding it with collisions."
The Emperor caught the staff with the flat of His palm and pressed.
"Hashirama's energy," he said. "Chakra. It is born naturally here if the base energies meet properly."
"That appears so. The Old Ones built an empire on this logic." The Sigillite's voice did not rise. "We are standing on their proof."
Neoth stepped and drove His blade into the Dragon's shoulder. The blade did not cut in a conventional way. It wrote a sentence into the matter and the sentence overruled what the Dragon had asked its body to be. The staff swung up in a block and deflected the next stroke. Mag'ladroth's tail came around as a coil and struck at His legs. He took the impact at the shin and did not move.
"Why was it weak when we first fought?" Malcador asked from behind His left shoulder. He knew Neoth had already asked Himself the question.
"Transit," the Emperor said. He rotated His body and pulled the Dragon's staff-holding hand out of its preferred path. He struck at the ribs with the back of His blade. The Dragon's chest changed from one kind of metal to another in the movement of an instant. The strike cut a groove and did not go through. "It crossed the interstellar black without feeding. It arrived without reserves. It bled power to keep its mind from losing its shape. It could not use its reserves fast enough to matter."
"And now?" Malcador asked.
"Now, it's had time to rest and feed on the energies of Mars itself," the Emperor said. "It has almost all of itself back. Almost."
He pressed and the Dragon yielded half a step. Neoth saw the exact ratio of the step. It mattered.
"This is still a shard," He said. "A large one, but not the whole."
Mag'ladroth chose to answer. SUFFICIENT.
"Shut up."
A Necron barge swept across the field in a low arc instead of landing. Its underside opened and a blade slid out on a force sheath. It turned toward Malcador as if it had seen an opportunity. Ten Custodians interposed in a wall without being told. The barge struck their shields with a sound like a mountain groaning. The auramite held. Shots from twenty Guardian Spears punched lines into the barge's flank. It began to slide. The Ten pushed together as one single mass and turned the machine's momentum into a path that ended at the field's edge. The barge fell off and tried to correct in void. The chakra did not allow attachment once it left, and the barge spun into space with no purchase, still firing.
The Emperor and the Dragon moved again.
The staff came down in a vertical cut. He caught it and rotated it half a degree with his wrist. The Dragon tried to step into the opening and found a plane where empty space had been. It put a foot on the plane and for one blink its weight was not its own. The Emperor struck, then struck again, then used his blade to draw a line through the air that stayed for a heartbeat. Where the line hung, the Dragon's body slowed in that volume. It tore through it a half beat later and returned to speed.
They broke apart and came together again with no change in expressions. Each contact of staff to blade produced another line of Chakra beneath their feet. The field grew denser where they fought. It sent a backwash of order through the space around Terra that went out as concentric waves. Where the waves touched the closest Chaos fleets, their void-warded hulls shivered.
A Death Guard strike cruiser tried to hold course along the orbital plane and bring its gun decks to bear on a Loyalist formation. The chakra backwash intersected it and its daemonic shields dragged at themselves as if they had been made to run through sand. The ship's trajectory warped. Its prow turned a degree at a time without captains ordering it. Its engines fought the change and burned in colors they had not burned before. A second wave passed and the ship's bound spirits screamed through vox channels that had been set to silent. A third wave hit the formation and the strike cruiser's forward decks flaked and came off in sheets. Principles that Chaos had abused to keep the ship flying stopped taking orders for a moment. The cruiser drifted and then broke into three pieces. A battle-barge farther out tried to shift out of realspace and the chakra waves made the path unsteady. The jump drive tore itself apart with a sound that carried in no medium.
The traitor fleet began to move away without waiting for signals.
The Emperor did not turn His head to look. He felt the changes through the field under His feet. He put another line into Mag'ladroth's ribs and drew power from the contact. The energy rose through Him as if the Old Ones' doors had opened again. He accepted it and did not allow it to widen beyond what He ordered.
The Dragon changed tactics. It swung the staff in a flat cut that was not aimed at Him but at the field itself. The chakra under them flashed from set to unset in a pattern. Custodians across a span found their footing drop two centimeters in an instant and then rise three, then lock again. Men adjusted and did not stumble. The Ten Thousand altered weight distribution by training and continued to fire and cut.
Then Mag'ladroth tried something that was not expected. It opened its mouth and let a tone out.
The tone was not loud. It touched the field and it made the median substance want to shake. The surface under the Custodians warred with their boots. Auramite shivered. Gauss beams briefly found more purchase. The tone targeted Malcador with precision.
The Sigillite's lips thinned. He moved one finger and then another. He began to hum. It was not a melody. It was two notes that did not belong together made to fit with force. He painted that fit into the field around him. The Dragon's tone hit the hum and broke into pieces. Malcador nodded once.
"You will not shake me," he said.
Mag'ladroth's head turned by a fraction. Its cubes shifted. It calculated a change faster than a human eye could record it. The staff drew a tight circle and then stabbed out with that circle wrapped around the tip. The circle behaved like a cutting nozzle. It moved toward Neoth's heart.
He moved his blade half a thumb-width.
The staff should have hit. It did not. It arrived at a place he had just removed. The light at the staff's end bulged and then returned to shape with perfect elasticity. The Emperor gave the staff back to the Dragon with the same speed it had come and drove His free hand into the being's sternum. He did not punch. He placed a field there and closed His fist until the field had to get smaller. The Dragon's chest compressed. The cubes fought the shape change with a rage that had nothing of mind in it. The staff came down toward His wrist. He withdrew without leaving time.
They separated again. This time the Dragon did not move immediately. It stood with wings set, tail placed, staff vertical. The green cubes ran and came to heel. It made a small correction to the geometry of its joints. It learned.
It moved and the next set of exchanges were faster. The staff stopped trying to cut in simple vectors. It bent around His blocks and pulled instead of pushed. It aimed not at His body but at His intention. He answered by letting the blade's edge be a different instruction in each inch. The staff shifted again and became a lattice that folded around Him like a cage and moved to lock. His blade moved once and passed through eight of the lattice lines at eight points. They failed. The cage collapsed.
From the periphery of his awareness he felt the Ten Thousand go to work with a rhythm that matched the Palace's bells. A Custodian Captain set a mobile line with sixty men and pushed through a Monolith's portal before the machine could close it. Inside the portal, gravity did not behave as expected. They adjusted footing without comment and put shots into the portal's heart from the machine's own back. The Monolith died with a flat sound.
A chorus of Custodian voices announced kills across the ranks.
"Three portals cold."
"Two Praetorian wedges broken."
"Sagittarum on my right, increase rate and cut by two degrees down."
Neoth's attention returned to the fight. He noted that each time staff and blade met, the chakra rose. It ran under them and made new plates, and from those plates new waves went out. He took His own measure against the Dragon's and found that it had moved the ratio. In the last two exchanges Mag'ladroth had not only adapted; it had pushed His guard half an angle twice.
He let that add to the line of conclusions he needed to reach.
He could win by attrition here. He could fight for hours. The field would thicken. The Custodians would hold and kill. The Necron fleet were a headache, but there wasn't enough of them to be a true threat. The traitor fleets would be pushed farther away. And Guilliman was on the way.
But the Siege's clock ticked in another place. Horus waited. Horus was dying while he waited. The Chaos Gods were not certain for the first time in their long history and uncertainty did not make them harmless. It made them desperate.
He did not have hours.
The Dragon seemed to gather that conclusion at the same time. It drew the staff back and then pushed it forward in a movement that carried a density it had not used before. The tip peeled the edges of His blade for a blink and found purchase. It pressed inward. His blade held, but the pressure rose. The green cubes across Mag'ladroth's surface brightened by a fraction. The wings bent their feathers at angles He had not seen yet.
"Now," Malcador said.
Neoth stopped holding back.
He drew from the chakra plates under His feet, from the wave still spreading, and from the part of Himself that had once built a prison for a god and later built a throne for a species. He pulled from the space that had no time and from the time that had no space. He did not take from Terra. He did not take from the Palace. He did not take from the Webway. He drew from the meeting of minds and matter, from the median His foe and He had made. He closed His hand on that and opened it again.
The light that rose did not have color. The sun's disc in Terra's sky paled like a lamp turned low. Shadows on the Palace's walls changed angle and then returned. The glare swept across the field and registered as numbers in Custodian optics that the men would never speak of. The Necron phalanxes stuttered and their orderly lines faltered. Daemon engines in the far distance began to scream again, the sound not carried by air or vacuum but by a rule change in the space their screams occupied.
The Emperor took that light and compressed it. He set it into a shape He could hold and then He put it into the Dragon's body with one clean push.
Mag'ladroth did not move out of the way. It could not. The light went into it and filled the shape of its ribs, the hollows of its wings, the long tail, the staff hand, the staff itself. It tried to refuse. It tried to make the light behave like a line it could cut. The light did not know how to be cut. It was not matter. It was not mind. It was both.
The Dragon screamed.
AN: Chapter 40 is out on Patreon! Award ReplyReport247denheim30/11/2025NewAdd bookmarkView discussionThreadmarks Chapter 37: New View contentdenheimYesterday at 6:22 AMNewAdd bookmark#1,074The roots inside Fulgrim tightened for one last pull and then seized. The daemon primarch opened his mouth and let out a single sound. It struck the field of battle as an instruction carried on raw psychic force. Pain sat in it. Pleasure sat in it. There was rage, and there was a rough edge of something that wanted to drag every nerve into obedience. The sound hit the web of wood like a blade put through wire.
The roots buckled. The seals etched into their tips melted out of shape as if pressed by hands too fast to see. The inner branches tore with a wet snap and then disintegrated. Splinters flew from the punctures along Fulgrim's ribs and wings. Sap boiled where the sound passed. The roots through his lower body warped to corkscrews and ripped free. The anchoring beams that had pinned the debris stack in place gave up the angle they held and sprang out with sharp, flat bangs. Slabs shifted. A crack ran through the pile. Dust leapt in a sheet and then fell.
Hashirama let go before the backlash reached his hands. He pushed back with both feet and left the edge of the pile as it slid. He landed on the concourse and skidded, boots scraping. He threw shuriken and kunai as he moved, both hands precise.
Fulgrim swatted them aside without looking. A wing flicked. The edge of the feathers caught the air and turned it into a hard wall. The gust hit like a shove. Steel bit concrete and spun away. A handful of shuriken slammed into the chests of Emperor's Children too slow to duck; a few pinged off Fulgrim's scales and vanished into the dust with a hiss. The wing beat drove a second wave of grit across the floor and made the fallen slabs rattle.
"Enough hiding," Fulgrim said. His voice was steady again. The scratch in his throat sat there, new and thin.
He came on. He used no showy spin to announce it. He simply crossed the space. The first strike came from the sword in his right hand, a straight line that made the air whiten. Hashirama slid left. The sword wrote a narrow corridor of nothing where his chest had been and carved through a ridge of collapsed floor at waist height. The ridge fell in a clean two-piece line and hit the ground with a dull sound.
Fulgrim's tail swept to cut the retreat. Hashirama hopped it and let it pass a finger's width beneath his boot. He put a kunai into the tail as it went, not to hurt but to feel movement. The metal found no purchase and spun free. The wing followed. The edges of the feathers were too thin to be called blades and too stiff to be called cloth. The sweep ran at thigh height to take the legs and ensure a fall.
Hashirama let his right foot drop to the ground long enough for purchase and then took the sweep at the shin with a block of live wood that grew from the floor in the blink before the wing arrived. The wing cut the block in half. He kicked the front half into the wing and used the recoil to slide back. The wing had traveled a hair slow compared to the sword; Fulgrim corrected for that in the next pass. Hashirama saw it in the angle of his shoulder and the slight tightening of muscle under metal.
Keep moving!
Fulgrim's free hand lifted. The fingers arced and left a line in the air that pulsed once and began to spread. It wasn't hot or cold. It reminded Hashirama of a nerve struck the wrong way from a powerful Genjutsu. The line tried to go through his head. He tasted copper and slate and something sour. Some form of purely spiritual attack tried to ride his own senses into him.
Hashirama grounded it. He put two fingers to his palm and ran a short loop of chakra through the outer meridians and back into the heel of his hand. He lit his inner ear with a brief pulse and flattened the ossicles so they would not vibrate to outside instruction. He blinked. The pulse blurred. He moved right as a second sword line took the space his head had occupied and wrote emptiness there. He took air into his lungs with a steady count and let his feet choose the next three angles without letting his eyes lie to him.
The sword moved again. The tip wrote a shape the width of a man's thigh, curved in a way that tried to steal the knee. Hashirama dropped his weight into a crouch, slid, and let the shape pass overhead. He tossed three shuriken low and tight. Fulgrim did not step on them. He took them with the flat of his foot and kicked them up as if they were pebbles. Two turned and snapped into a wall with a sound like a hand slap. The third skipped off a scale at his hip and vanished beneath a slab.
"Where are you?" Fulgrim asked the air. He wasn't angry now. He sounded disappointed and excited at the same breath.
"Here," Hashirama said, for no other reason than to put the word in the man's ear at the right time.
The sword swung for the sound. Hashirama was already three steps to the left, sliding past a broken pillar and keeping it between them. The sword grazed the pillar and turned half of it to powder. The rest tumbled and scattered, a loose pile of fist-sized pieces. Hashirama let himself breathe through his nose and taste the dust. Concrete grit. Iron. Sap from the roots pulled free from Fulgrim's chest. Blood—metallic, sweet-sick—and the clean mineral of water still caught under the floors from before. There was too much to filter. He tightened his control and kept the smell from touching memory.
Fulgrim pressed. He moved with a pace that Hashirama had only seen a handful of times. Madara had moved like this, not always fast but always in the right place by the next breath. Fulgrim did not have Madara's patience. He simply cut everything in front of him until the thing he wanted was exposed. The speed in the muscles was not the problem; it was the speed of choice layered over it.
A crack appeared in the air to Hashirama's right. It was narrow, barely wider than a spine. It tried to rotate and pulled at the edges of the space around it. His arm hair stood up. He put his hand out to stop himself from stepping into it. A finger went numb to the first knuckle. The crack passed through the rail he had touched earlier. Half of the rail turned to grit. The rest fell.
Kakophoni nearby took the hint and resumed their work. Two stood far enough back to bring instruments to their shoulders and begin a new sweep. The first tone came low. The second took a higher band. The third tried to sit between the first two and set teeth into an ache. The sounds fought for a clean return. Fulgrim did not tell them to stop. He did not turn.
Hashirama snapped a pair of tags from a pouch with two fingers and slapped one on a pillar, the second on the floor three paces from the first. He pulled up a plate of wood, angled it to catch a bolt that went wide, and let the wood take the hit. He moved the plate with a twist of his wrist and pushed it into the path of the sound for half a heartbeat to break the line. The Kakophoni shifted tone to compensate. The plate splintered. He dropped it and breathed out through his teeth. He felt a little bit of chakra come back, a thin thread from a clone that had just done its last work and given up its body. That was the plan. He kept moving long enough to let the threads reach him.
"Do you not bleed, gardener?" Fulgrim asked. He put the word on an edge that wanted to turn into a caress. It did not land. Hashirama let it slip and fall away.
"Sometimes," Hashirama said. His voice stayed level. "Not today."
Fulgrim's smile sharpened. The sword carved a circle in the air and then sent the circle forward like a wheel thrown at chest height. Hashirama slid left and then left again when the circle corrected. He let it hit a low wall. The wall peeled open along the line the wheel wanted to cut and folded away. The circle slowed when it had to do work. He let it, then stepped out of the way when it found him again a breath later.
He threw a kunai with a wire attached. Fulgrim cut the wire with a lazy wrist turn and then the second wire he had not seen. Hashirama used the pull to change direction without wasting force. He passed a gap where a maintenance shaft had sheared open. A hand reached up from under a lip of rock and grabbed his ankle. The hand shook. It was in a gauntlet, fingers scuffed raw to the metal from trying to climb. He shifted his foot and the hand lost it. The marine under the rock screamed once, then made a sound that might have been a laugh. He went still. A second hand reached up and then fell back. The crack of a breaking servo came from the hole. The silence that followed had weight.
The air changed. Fulgrim's left hand traced a short arc and left a smear that bled color wrong. The smear stretched like gum and then snapped. Where it snapped, a line of nothing went out. The spiritual ability put a pressure behind the eyes that did not care if the man seeing it was Astartes, human, or shinobi. Hashirama pulled a single breath into the bottom of his lungs and held it. He put chakra through his eyes long enough to set the rods and cones into a more useful level. The smear tried to alter his sense of distance. It failed by a hair. He crossed the smear, felt the world try to slip sideways, and made it stay where it was by an act of decision.
He cut across open ground. He did not like doing it. He knew it made him clear. He did it because the broken angles around the pile gave Fulgrim too many spots to make a cut that would land even if it missed him. He would rather give a clean target and make the man take the shot at the wrong time than give a hundred dirty ones and let the man take the right shot once.
Fulgrim followed with no wasted steps. His feet made a steady sound against stone, each placed for power. He covered ten paces as if they were two. The sword came in at a short range this time. Hashirama let the point come and then cut his body around it. The sword passed along the inside of his arm and through the cloth of his sleeve. He felt hairs on his forearm go numb in a narrow pass. He moved past the sword, put a palm on the back of it as if to stop it, and then did not. He let the sword go and the weight behind it dragged Fulgrim forward by half a step. He struck the thumb joint with a heel palm. Fulgrim opened his hand at the right time and the strike landed on air.
Fulgrim's wing followed, hard for the head. Hashirama ducked. A feather edge clipped his topknot and took the hair like a knife. He felt his scalp itch above one ear and then sting. Blood slipped down into the hairline. He left it. There was no time to wipe it away.
Batu's voice came briefly on a whisper band in his ear. "Three squads moving to your north. I will handle them."
"Keep low," Hashirama said. He moved without looking toward Batu's vector. He trusted Batu to do the right thing. He would not draw his friend into the center of this if he did not have to.
A Kakophoni found a clear angle and sent a focused cone to lock his feet. Hashirama took the first note in his knee joint and let it move the joint a fraction in the wrong way. He accepted the error before it did damage. The second note tried to follow his heart rate and then force it to a new beat. He cut the note with a pulse of chakra sent along the sack around the heart. The sack tightened and refused to let the heart be a drum. The third note went for the bones in his ear. He had already flattened them. The sound passed like weather he watched through a window and did not feel.
"Move and breathe," he told himself. He began to move slower by degrees.
Fulgrim saw him slow. His smile widened. "You are winding down."
"Your mom's winding down," Hashirama said.
Fulgrim chuckled.
Hashirama let another clone disperse three blocks out. Chakra returned in a light surge. It wasn't much, but it was enough to keep his hands fast. Fulgrim closed in and sent the sword toward his head again. Hashirama leaned back and felt the wake brush the tip of his nose. He set his palm against Fulgrim's wrist and shoved. The move did nothing to the wrist. It gave him the angle he needed to slip left and let the wing pass right. The tail came in to catch him and he took it with a foot and rode it for a half-step to avoid the sword's return cut.
Fulgrim laughed once. "You dance well."
"I prefer to not get hit at all," Hashirama said.
"Then dance," Fulgrim said. He made a sharp cut toward the floor where Hashirama would land.
Hashirama did not land there. He took the next two steps on a path that felt wrong and hated it. He kept breathing. He let the bent path give him another two seconds. He felt the energy in his body settle. The steady breaths he had been counting began to yield more back than they cost. He had a little bit now. He needed more.
The Emperor's Children on the edges tried again to reach their primarch's side. Batu cut them off. They fell in pairs without sound, laid along a pipe run or inside a collapsed stairwell where they would not be found immediately. Batu did not enter the open. He held the shadow line as if it were a command. He tightened the circle by inches and waited.
Fulgrim began to put pressure into the feints. He had stopped wasting effort on cuts that looked good. He pressed real attacks on the beat after a feint, used straight lines and tight arcs, and let his enemy provide the mirror. Hashirama took the beat off his rhythm so he would not be predictable. He let his hands meet the sword just enough to know what it intended, then left the contact. He turned the wing edges with simple blocks that did not try to stop them, merely address the angle and make it less dangerous. He moved just enough to avoid the tail, then went still for a half beat to upset Fulgrim's expectation.
"You are almost at the wall," Fulgrim said. His eyes were bright, not with madness, but with a focused excitement that did not allow for anything else. "Got more tricks?"
Hashirama did not answer. He let his breath slow again, a fraction each time. He felt his body telling him the same thing it always told him when he was near his limits: stop or you will not be able to start again. He overruled it with the same decision he had made a hundred times in a hundred other places. He set a hand on a section of floor that had not collapsed and ran a short pulse through it. The ground under the nearest trapped marines set hard in a way that would keep them from slipping out by accident and becoming victims of the fight. He hated adding to their fear. He could not give them priority over this target. He hoped Batu would find the ones he could.
"Hashirama," Batu whispered. "I am ready to draw him for you if you need a breath."
"Not yet," Hashirama answered. "Stay as you are."
Fulgrim shifted his stance. His sword lifted an inch. The wings flexed and let the metal feathers shift along their edges. The tail drew a tight circle. The body read like a coil under a hand about to let go.
The next minute was a series of near-misses that stacked on each other like stones. The sword passed within a hair of Hashirama's neck. The wing cut the hem of his cloak and took a ribbon from it. The tail nearly hit his thigh with a tap that would have vaporized the leg of another man.
"Almost," Fulgrim said softly.
"Almost," Hashirama agreed. His breath had settled. His core felt like a room where the air had been changing with each draw and was now clean again. He did not have a surplus. He had just enough to take the next step.
Fulgrim struck for the face. Hashirama bent backward from the waist and put his shoulders almost to the ground. The sword's tip passed over him. He let the blade of his own hand push the sword up a fraction, just enough for a small correction to make the follow-up miss. He stood in a smooth motion and then stopped moving.
It was a stillness that did not belong in a fight like this. He placed his feet. He let his shoulders settle. He opened his hands and let them hang at his sides. He allowed the breath to fill and fall once. He allowed the next breath to do the same thing. He put his attention on the ground under his feet, on the air at the end of his nose, on the noise of his own blood. He let go of the small attention he had been paying to Fulgrim's hands and to the sword and to the wings. He had all the information he needed.
Fulgrim laughed. It was not cruel. It sounded like someone seeing an ending they had expected and enjoying being right.
"At last," he said. "Brave and stupid."
He lunged. The wings tucked to cut drag and then spread in the last instant to help with a final change of line. The tail readied to sweepset a knee if the main strike missed. The movement used everything he had in the right order. He came in so fast the air felt solid.
Hashirama's eyes snapped open.
The pupils sharpened. The skin at his temples took on a trace of color where natural energy gathered. Sage Mode took hold.
He lifted both hands in a smooth motion and set them together in front of his chest.
"Sage Art: Wood Release—True Hand."
The sky answered.
The air above the concourse gained weight. Shadows changed direction as if there were now another mass overhead for them to obey. A shape lowered through that weight. It was made of living wood that had not been there a breath before and was there now as if it had grown the entire time and had finally pushed past the canopy. The hand was the size of an entire titan. Fingers thicker than towers folded at the joints and set themselves on a path that had no hurry in it and no doubt.
Fulgrim's smile showed teeth. He did not stop his lunge. He bared his claws and raised the sword. It was only when he saw the shadow and glanced above did his small fall.
The wooden hand fell.