=== Anakin ===
Anakin moved through the battlefield like a storm along Obi-Wan. His lightsaber burned a molten path through the hordes of daemons that surged across the ruined plain, azure flashes reflecting from his eyes as he became a blur of motion, fury, and precision. Each movement was an act of slaughter and grace all at once, his strikes guided by instinct, rage, and that uncanny connection to the Force that made him more than mortal.
He tore through a creature twice his height, its body a writhing mass of blades and tendrils, severing it into ribbons of ichor and shadow. Before its corpse hit the ground, he was already upon the next, a horned abomination swinging a molten chain. Anakin caught it in midair with the Force, yanked it forward, and impaled it through its fanged maw, the smell of burnt warp-flesh filling the air.
"Get out of my way!" he snarled, shoving the carcass aside as his eyes darted toward the horizon.
Anakin raised his hand and unleashed the Force. A tidal wave of invisible might slammed outward, tearing a score of daemons apart in an instant. Their remains dissolved into glowing dust that scattered into the void. His saber followed through the haze, each strike perfectly timed.
Then, for the briefest of moments, he hesitated.
A piercing cry cut through the madness, not from the enemy, but from one of their own. His eyes snapped toward the far ridge, where Nira stood.
She was radiant, surrounded by light before she suddenly collapsed to the ground. The great angelic being who had been fighting moments before suddenly vanished from view, and Anakin saw no more.
"Nira!" Anakin shouted, though the word was swallowed by the chaos.
Her Terminator guard, massive armored giants of the Imperium, immediately surrounded her fallen form. One knelt and lifted her limp body with surprising gentleness, her head lolling against his chest plate. They began their retreat toward the rear lines, the light of their armor vanishing into the maelstrom of fire and smoke.
Anakin stood motionless for a moment, saber still humming. A feeling tightened in his chest, anger, fear, helplessness… It ignited into wrath. Even if she had betrayed him, she was still as close as a sister.
He turned back to the daemons with a snarl.
They came at him in a wave, gibbering horrors, things with too many mouths and not enough faces. He met them like a blade meets parchment. He spun, ducked, and cleaved through them by the dozen, each stroke of his saber precise and furious.
He ripped the spine from one creature with the Force and hurled it like a spear through three more.
Another lunged from behind, he turned, caught its claws, and crushed its skull with his mind.
Still they came, endless and vile.
And still he fought.
Then the sky turned white.
A deafening explosion lit the world in blue-white fire, a blinding pulse that turned the battlefield to day. Anakin turned sharply, shielding his eyes as a shape rose from the smoke.
Then a chill ran through the Force, a cold that went deeper than flesh, straight into the soul.
A woman descended onto the battlefield.
She drifted down through the burning skies like an angel of rot, her form both ethereal and monstrous, beauty and horror entwined in one.
The daemons around her fled in madness. Even they feared her.
Anakin could feel her presence like a knife through his mind. The Force itself recoiled, twisting under her weight.
And then he saw the Black Templar.
That… monster…
He stood before her, shield raised, Darksaber ignited, roaring challenges that echoed across the field. Even through the haze of war, Anakin could hear his words, hear the fury and devotion behind them.
The two clashed monster against monster, unshakable faith against madness. The Darksaber burned bright, cutting through the air in wide, furious arcs.
But the woman danced through it all.
She weaved around his strikes with unnatural grace, her own amethyst blade ignited. Every blow he landed seemed to go right through her, and Anakin could feel the anger, the frustration throughout the fight.
He found himself watching, transfixed. The fight was unlike anything he had ever seen.
Sebastian roared, pressing forward, his every strike a declaration of defiance. He moved faster, harder, until suddenly, he caught her off guard.
The Darksaber cleaved through her lightsaber, splitting it in half. The weapon fizzled and died, its amethyst glow snuffed out.
Anakin's heart leapt, but the moment was fleeting.
Abeloth's smile returned, softer now, almost… tender. She caught the Darksaber in her bare hand. The blade hissed, but she didn't even flinch.
"Enough." She said, her voice echoing across the battlefield. "You've been delightful my little Zealot, truly. But playtime is over."
The Black Templar charged, but her right arm twisted, lengthening and reshaping into a massive tendril. It speared forward, straight through his chest.
Anakin felt nothing. Nothing… save for rage. That was his kill… that was meant to be him killing that Monster… and she had taken it from him.
Sebastian was hoisted into the air, blood pouring from the hole in his armor. Even then, he tried to strike again, the Darksaber sputtering in his hand. Abeloth only smiled, a knowing, almost loving smile, before she hurled him aside like a broken toy.
He hit the ground hard and did not move.
Abeloth turned her gaze skyward, toward the pulsing rift of the Warp, and began to move towards it.
Anakin could only stand there, his saber trembling in his hand as he struggled to keep his anger in check.
Then his eyes changed.
The familiar blue flared molten, like cracks opening across the surface of a dying world. He sucked in a sharp breath, and the air itself trembled. The Force swelled around him, wild, untamed and furious, a storm no longer obeying the will of a Jedi, but answering instead to the raw fury of a man consumed by rage.
And then he moved.
Anakin launched himself forward, the ground exploding beneath his boots as he dove into the heart of the daemonic horde with a roar. The first creature, a massive quadrupedal beast with a skull of molten iron, swung a blade-arm the size of a landspeeder at him. Anakin ducked under it, and with his saber, cleaved the monster's torso clean in two. Its scream turned into vapor before the halves hit the ground.
The Force surged, and he unleashed it.
A shockwave erupted from his body, flattening everything around him for twenty meters. Dozens of lesser daemons were simply gone, turned to ash, scattered like dust in a storm. The ground blackened beneath his feet, warped by the heat of his fury.
Even Obi-Wan was thrown to his back from the blast.
Anakin reached out with one hand, fingers curling, and several daemons were yanked screaming into the air. With a flick, he crushed them mid-flight, their bodies imploding under the pressure. Blood misted into the air, glowing like molten embers.
Another wave charged him, a sea of warped insectoid horrors, winged abominations, humanoid nightmares. Anakin leapt into them without hesitation. His saber spun, carving through flesh and bone and void alike, each motion a blur. He didn't dodge. He didn't defend. He simply killed.
One daemon lunged at him from behind. Without even looking, he threw his left hand back, and the Force ripped it apart. Another came from above, he jumped, met it in the air, and sliced it in half from jaw to tail. The pieces burned before they touched the ground.
He landed amidst a cluster of lesser fiends and exploded outward again, the Force bursting from him like a supernova. Everything within a twenty-meter radius ceased to exist once more.
And still, he kept fighting.
Rage boiled through him, pure, molten wrath that burned brighter than any sun. The Force answered him like it never had before, every ounce of his will shaping it into destruction. He pulled daemons into the sky and slammed them down like meteors. He ripped up the very earth beneath him and hurled it like shrapnel. He drove his saber through three at once, then threw it like a spear, controlling it with the Force, spinning it through the crowd before calling it back to his hand.
Some daemons tried to flee... though none escaped.
He reached out, seized one by the throat, and dragged it screaming toward him through the air. It clawed at his hand, hissing words in a language older than stars. Anakin's expression didn't change. He tightened his grip. The daemon's body convulsed, and then it disintegrated, dust scattering from between his fingers.
Another lunged at him with barbed talons, he caught its arm, tore it clean off, and then impaled it with its own limb. The monster writhed, and he finished it with a vertical slash that split its skull.
He was drenched in blood and ash, surrounded by corpses and smoke, yet he looked utterly untouchable, an avatar of the Force unleashed.
Across the battlefield, Rex saw him, and for a moment, even through the chaos, the veteran clone stopped firing. His eyes widened behind his helmet.
"…by the stars…" he breathed, watching his general rip through the daemonic horde like a god of war reborn.
Beside him, Ahsoka paused mid-strike, turning to see Anakin in the distance, his movements blurring with unnatural speed, the ground itself trembling beneath each step. She felt it too, that familiar pull, that terrifying power radiating from him in waves.
"Anakin…" she whispered.
He was no longer fighting with restraint, with the calm control of a Jedi Knight. This was different, more primal. Every movement carried fury. Every strike was vengeance. His saber was a streak of blue molten light, his eyes like burning metal, his face twisted in pure wrath.
Rex turned back to her, voice tight. "We need to move. Now!"
She hesitated, one last glance at the man who had once been her master before nodding sharply. "Right."
They both turned back to the battle. But even as they fought, even as they carved through daemons and tried to survive, their eyes kept flicking toward him, the whirlwind at the center of the chaos.
He wasn't even breathing hard.
Suddenly, a second massive portal formed to his back left, and when he looked, he saw more of the accused Astartes coming from it.
Anakin turned just in time to see one of them appear beside him.
A rift of light split the air, and out of it stepped a towering warrior clad in argent ceramite. The air hummed with raw psychic power; purity seals burned bright crimson against his armor as sacred litanies crawled across the plating like living scripture. His eyes glowed behind his helm, twin lanterns of psychic wrath.
The daemon lunging toward Anakin never reached him. The Grey Knight's Nemesis halberd cut clean through its torso, the weapon humming with burning runes of banishment. The creature screamed as its body dissolved into a thousand writhing tendrils before collapsing into dust.
For a heartbeat, Anakin just stared.
The Knight turned his head toward him. "You kill daemons well, boy." His voice was distorted through layers of vox and psychic resonance, but there was a strange note of approval.
He didn't wait for a response. With a simple pivot, the Knight raised his halberd and charged into the swarm.
The new Astartes advanced like a wall of silver, each warrior a conduit for the Emperor's will. Their bolters roared holy fire; explosive rounds detonated inside daemon skulls, sending sprays of warp ichor onto the ground. Their blades sang, halberds, swords, staves, and hammers, all thrumming with psychic energy as they cleaved through the never-ending tide.
Anakin moved among them, his lightsaber blurred into a single bar of molten light, cutting through the corrupted and the damned. He pulled the air itself into a vortex of slicing wind that shredded flesh from bone. His eyes glowed molten gold as his anger deepened, having to fight among these… villains.
A pack of Bloodletters surged toward him, blades raised in unholy challenge. Anakin met them head-on. The first one's head left its shoulders before it even realized it was dead. The second was hurled skyward by a Force push so violent that its body burst apart mid-air. The third met his saber mid-swing, and Anakin twisted his wrist, parrying low before bisecting it from groin to crown.
He barely had time to breathe before something massive crashed through the front lines.
A Great Unclean One.
The monster was grotesque beyond imagination, a mountain of diseased flesh stitched together by rot and pus, its laughter a hideous gurgle that made his flesh crawl. Each step shook the battlefield, each breath spread decay. Flies the size of skulls swarmed around its bloated body as it dragged a rusted cleaver the size of a tank behind it.
Anakin's jaw tightened. He reached out, summoning the Force, ready to leap —
But the Grey Knights moved first.
A dozen of them broke formation, stepping forward as one. Their armor glowed white-hot, their psychic auras intertwining until it felt like a star had descended upon the field.
"In the Emperor's name!"
Their halberds raised as one, and together, they channeled their psychic might.
Warp energy bent and folded, compressed into a single pulse of sanctified power. Then, in an instant, it erupted.
The Great Unclean One howled as its flesh ignited. It tried to swing its blade, but its arm melted before the strike landed. Its eyes boiled from its skull. Its enormous body, an unholy temple to pestilence, burned with purifying flame until there was nothing left but ash and bubbling tar.
Anakin had to shield his eyes from the radiance.
When he looked back, the creature was gone. Only the Knights remained, their armor steaming, their purity seals fluttering in the hot wind.
One of them turned to face him, the same Knight who had first appeared by his side.
Anakin could see his gaze through the optics.
"I like the look in your eyes, boy," the Knight said, voice echoing with psychic depth. "You have seen the truth of the warp. You have felt its hatred." He stepped closer, his presence radiating divine pressure. "Do not let it consume you. Shape it. Focus it."
The Knight's halberd flared, its blade burning like a shard of a dying sun.
"Focus that hatred upon the daemons."
The Grey Knight turned from him, and with a simple thrust of his hand, turned a group of daemons to ash, much like Anakin had.
And then, without another word, he charged, a living weapon of light and faith, cutting through the next wave like a silver comet.
Anakin exhaled sharply, gripping his saber tighter. His pulse thundered in his ears. The Force roared in him like wildfire.
He dove into the fray once more, his saber a burning arc of vengeance beside the storm of silver.
And for the first time since the Warp tore open, hope flared across the battlefield like dawn.
===
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