For a heartbeat, there was only war.
Cinerion's sabres crossed in a storm of blue fire, severing a Herald's spine in a crackling burst of warp ichor.
Thanatos waded beside him like a black reaper, his chainblade carving a screaming arc that split a horned brute from collar to hip.
The Heralds shrieked and died around them—but still they came, fearless, tireless, countless.
To their right, Morphael advanced in lockstep with the Magos convoy, shielding it step for step, while Vorgane held the second node, guns thundering to keep the path clear.
Servitors dragged towering Gellar pylons across the ash, hydraulics howling under the strain of forbidden weight.
The third node crawled toward activation, inch by inch.
At the rear line, Kaelthorn's bastion stood unbroken—its stormshield blazing against tides of warp flame. Inside, the Navigators still chanted the binding rites, third eyes glowing beneath veils slick with sweat and blood.
The battle was brutal—but it was still a battle of steel and will.
Then a sonic boom split the world.
A shockwave tore across the battlefield, flattening ash into glass and hammering against Knight plating hard enough to shake teeth in their skulls. Vox channels screamed with static. Servitors crashed to their knees beneath the invisible weight.
Even the warp-spawn halted mid-charge, heads snapping upward as if summoned by something vast and unseen.
Then—the sky went dark.
Not clouds. Not smoke.
Something else.
—
Darkness.
As though something vast and unseen had slid between the world and the light, the horizon was simply swallowed. The ash-winds died. Engines fell silent.
The warp-born grinned, pausing mid-charge as though awaiting a command only they could hear.
The battlefield froze.
It began at the edge of hearing—a low, thrumming pressure that came not from engines or guns, but from the air itself.
The ground vibrated.
Not with motion—but with weight. Reality pressed downward.
—
Then came the first scream.
A servitor in the Magos convoy jerked violently, limbs spasming as its vox-grille spat a shriek of broken binharic. Another convulsed beside it. Then three more.
Their cybernetics sparked and burned as feedback cascaded through their systems.
+++ ERR—R—R—R—OR ++++++ GRAV—I—TY F—FAULT ++++++ MASS DENS—S—S—ITY BRE—A—CH +++
They collapsed one by one, metal limbs clawing at nothing as an invisible force pinned them to the ground.
The towering harmonizer pylons they carried slammed into the ash like falling towers.
Across the battlefield, every servitor fell—crushed by something none of them could see.
—
The air grew heavy.
So heavy even Knights felt it. Pistons strained. Leg actuators groaned. Warning runes flared as god-machines sank into the ash under invisible weight.Then the real screams came—from the bastion.
Obol turned.
Kaelthorn's stormshield blazed in the distance, golden arcs rippling as something hammered against it from within the air itself. The bastion shuddered—not from impact, but from pressure.
—
Inside, the male Navigator still stood—but only barely.
Blood leaked from beneath his silver eye-veil, dripping down his cheek in thin, steady lines. His hands were locked around the railing, knuckles bone-white, jaw clenched in silent defiance.
The female Navigator was already on her knees beside him—violently retching ink-black bile onto the stone. Her breaths came in broken gasps, hands shaking as she fought not to collapse.
A psychic force was crushing them.
Obol opened his vox.
"Kaelthorn. Status."
—
"Navigator backlash—severe," Vaerin voxed. Kaelthorn's tone stayed flat—but strain bled through the channel.
"Pressure inside the veil is rising."
A human scream tore across the link.
The female Navigator convulsed, collapsing as blood spilled from beneath her silver eye-veil. The male caught her before she struck the stone—but the instant their hands touched, both jerked as if yanked by an unseen current.
Pressure.
Not physical—dimensional.
Across the battlefield, every Knight felt it now—a weight behind the eyes, pushing inward, hunting for fractures of the mind.
Then—
the ash ground trembled.
Magos Thale Serekin reached the third node.
His tracked chassis carved a path through the scorched earth, mechadendrites dragging sealed harmonizer coils behind him like chained idols. Servitors staggered around him under invisible force, hydraulics spasming—but the Magos did not slow.
Vorgane pivoted to cover him.Morphael advanced a step, Thunderstrike gauntlet clenched. The path was held.
The Magos did not look at them.
He looked at the Gate.
"Harmonic inversion detected."
"Cause—field pressure exceeding tolerances."
"Conduit bleed retransmitting through upper lattice nerve."
He angled a single lens toward the distant bastion.
"Effect—Navigators are absorbing harmonic recoil."
"Neural lattice is weakest conductive point. Collapse—projected."
A beat.
"If they fail, the cage fails."
No one spoke.
"Stabilization required," the Magos concluded.
"Beginning countermeasures."
—
He was already at work.
Mechadendrites slammed the final coils into place as ritual sparks leapt from his servo-tools. Hexagrammatic runes ignited along the harmonizer spine.
The node lit—
—and the air screamed as reality pushed back.
A pressure wave blasted outward like an invisible hammer, crushing the land under its weight. Heralds were driven to their knees.
Even Knights braced, heels carving trenches through the ash.
⟨ THIRD NODE — INITIALIZING ⟩
"Primary stabilization online," the Magos voxed, perfectly calm amid the distortion.
"Harmonic integrity at forty-one percent. Warp resistance rising."
Obol gave a grim nod inside Thanatos' throne.
His gaze fell to the glowing conduit-cables snaking across the battlefield—each one linking a Knight to Kaelthorn, feeding power into the forming Gellar field.
—
"Magos," Obol voxed,
"would distributing strain from the lattice reduce Navigator overload?"
—
The reply came instantly—flat, absolute.
"Affirmative."
Thale Serekin did not pause. His mechadendrites carved fresh stabilizer runes along the harmonizer spine as reality hammered against the node.
"Current anchor load is unsustainable."
"Kaelthorn is absorbing ninety-two percent of harmonic recoil."
"Navigator neural stress is now a cascading failure condition."
"Projected outcome: anchor collapse."
—
"Anchor collapse is always a risk," Obol replied, voice iron-steady.
"But the Navigators fail first."
—
A beat of static.
The Magos adjusted without hesitation.
"Correct."
"Primary threat has changed—Navigator failure now exceeds anchor risk."
"Recalibrating."
His mechadendrites snapped open like steel fangs, driving braided conduits into the third node. Sparks cascaded as warding sigils ignited across the harmonizer's plated spine.
"Initiating strain redistribution," he voxed.
"Cycling anchor load. Prepare for transfer."
Across the link, warning runes flared blood-red:
⟨ HARMONIC RESONANCE—REDIRECTING ⟩⟨ ANCHOR LOAD: 92% → 64% ⟩⟨ KNIGHT LOAD DISTRIBUTION: RISING ⟩
The conduit cables linking the Knights thrummed with new force.
The Gellar lattice shifted.
—
Reality fought back.
So did the enemy.
"High-Scion!" Maeric's voice cut across the link like a thrown blade.
Obol turned.
Cinerion's sabres were locked against a red—horned warp-brute's twin axes, both giants straining in brutal deadlock. Sparks of warp fire and atomized steel howled between them as the creature drove forward, forcing Cinerion back across the ridge.
Obol moved to assist—but his steps were too heavy.
Every stride dragged downward by unseen force—gravitic pressure escalation.
The warp was turning the air against them.
Thanatos' thermal lance rose, tracking the daemon—too slowly.
"Maeric! Boosters—now!"
—
Cinerion didn't hesitate.
Twin back-mounted thrusters ignited in a violent blast, hurling the Paladin forward with explosive momentum.
The red brute reeled as Cinerion broke the bind and slammed into it, sabres crossing in a punishing X-strike.
Metal shrieked. Warp flesh tore.
Locked together, the two titans crashed sideways across the ridge, boots carving trenches through the ash as their struggle dragged furrows of molten earth behind them.
They hit Phorxys' firing lane.
"Now! Vaeleen!"
—
"With pleasure."
Twin lightning lances roared. The sky split as two chained spears of white plasma blasted across the ridge—slowed by crushing gravity but not denied.
They carved burning scars into the world.
Cinerion held the monster down, sabres crossed at its throat, pinning it for execution.
The creature thrashed, wings beating, molten spittle hissing across his helm—but it could not break free.
The lightning struck—and the world went white.
Cinerion rose through the steam venting from his armor.
Both sabres burned white-hot, overcharged by residual lightning. His left arm joint sparked, hydraulics bleeding pressure from a torn servo line—but still he raised his blades into guard.
Thanatos advanced beside him, reactor flaring, stepping between Cinerion and the Gate.
—
"They have returned," Obol said—not a question, not surprise.
A simple acknowledgment of war.
The breach answered him.
Three shapes emerged.
A swollen mountain of rot crashed down first, the ground trembling beneath its diseased weight—the stench of death spilling outward in waves.
A lithe, towering violet war-fiend followed, claws flexing, every motion a promise of cruelty.
Above them both, a blue-winged horror shrieked, witch-light spiraling from a staff of warped runes as it climbed into the sky.
The war had names for them—somewhere, someday.
But not here.
Not yet.
Wave Eight advanced—but Obol did not give them his eyes.
"Kaelthorn," he voxed, voice cutting across the war,
"Relay to the Navigators: tune the lattice threads—link First and Second nodes."
"Then isolate. Cut your noospheric line and hold."
—
"Acknowledged," Vaerin replied. No protest. No delay.
Inside the bastion, Kaelthorn turned, stormshield blazing with golden arcs as Vaerin relayed the order inward.
The Navigators answered through pain.
Blood still streaked their veils, breaths sharp and ragged—but they raised trembling hands to the focusing rods and forced their minds into the lattice.
—
Reality shivered as their will took hold and bent its shape.
"Orders delivered," Vaerin voxed. "Initiating isolation now."
Kaelthorn cut itself from the noosphere.
Link-lights died. Command channels collapsed.
—
Kaelthorn's mind withdrew from the network—alone now in the storm.Obol immediately rerouted command distribution.
"Morvhar. Phorxys," he voxed.
"Kaelthorn is blind to us now. You are relay—line-of-sight and close vox only."
"Nothing touches the anchor unless it goes through you."
—
"Confirmed."
"Understood."
Thrykos and Vaeleen shifted positions without hesitation, locking a defensive circuit around Kaelthorn's bastion to maintain visual relay.
They were now Obol's voice to the anchor—and his last line of control.
—
Then—the first tuning field ignited as the navigators started their work.
"Cinerion," Obol voxed,
"break contact."
"Get to the final node. Repair and fortify your armor—you will lead activation."
—
Cinerion disengaged instantly.
Thrusters flared and he vaulted back from the ridge, landing in a spray of molten ash.
"Understood," Maeric replied, voice light despite reactor strain. A beat.
"Would you like me to carry you, Magos Dominus?"
—
In the trenches below, Magos Thale Serekin paused only long enough for a servo-skull to turn toward Cinerion.
"Negative."
"I still possess functional locomotion."
He resumed his advance without another word, beginning the march to the final node.
Servitors limped after him like damaged beasts, hauling the last harmonizer components across broken earth.
—
"Vorgane. Morphael," Obol voxed. His voice cut through the war like a commandment.
"Hold the Second Node and draw the violet one away from the lattice."
—
"Acknowledged," Isera replied, Morphael's thunderstrike gauntlet fist rising into guard.
—
"We'll have its attention," Caldrin added from Vorgane as Battle Cannon rotated toward the lithe war-form stalking their flank.
Thanatos advanced, reactor flaring like a furnace behind black iron. Obol turned toward the Third Node.
"I will hold the Third."
—
Ahead, a colossal mass of rot thundered across the battlefield—an obscene behemoth of swollen flesh and decay, dragging a trail of filth as it came.
Above it, a witch-winged horror circled—its feathers shifting through impossible colors, its presence wrong enough to bend the air around it. Warp-fire coiled around the staff clutched in one clawed hand.
Two greater nightmares.
And they were coming.
—
Obol advanced three paces from the Third Node—then stopped.
He did not rush the monster.
Thanatos grounded itself into the earth, one foot braced, reactor heat rising behind black iron like a furnace awakening.
The wind shifted—wrong, heavy—and a rising hiss cut through the air.
The sky had begun to scream.
Shrieking shapes poured from the darkness—winged warp-things with fanged maws and taloned limbs, a descending tide of predators diving straight for him.
—
Thanatos did not look up.
Obol reached down, drove the reaper chainsword into the ground, and ripped free a massive slab of earth and ferrocrete. He tore it from the world in a single brutal motion—a shield born of battlefield ruin.
Above him, twin lightning beams ignited—Phorxys opening fire, stormfire punching through the swarm in blinding arcs.
Obol had not given that order.
He only nodded once.
Then the first wave hit.
—
The swarm crashed against him like a living storm—talons and warp-flesh screeching over the slab of stone he held as a shield.
Every movement dragged like lead through water. Even turning his torso required will.
Warp-pressure pressed down on his hull—a crushing ocean of invisible force.
But he did not fall.
Thanatos advanced with a grin—slow, but certain.
Deliberate. Unbreakable.
Each step carved deep into the ash. Servos screamed. Pistons shook. Gravity itself fought him—and lost.
Then the warp-fire came.
It struck the stone shield full on, turning night into blinding blue.
The air detonated—
a deafening BOOOOOOOM that rolled like a buried star collapsing on itself.
Warp flame cascaded over the shield, molten light spilling down in rivers, reflecting off Thanatos' gold trim in ghostfire brilliance.
Obol didn't flinch.
He shifted his stance, braced, and drew back the thermal lance.
Overpressure vents howled.
He fired.
The beam swept in a wide arc—a blade of molten sunfire—shearing through the green tide ahead. Plague-masses and rotting war-beasts were cut open in droves, flesh boiling and bursting under the sustained thermal burn.
—
Carrion-things still filled the sky—but Thanatos did not look up.
He left that war to Phorxys.
He didn't need to check if she held the sky.
He already knew she did.
Trust in his blood outweighed doubt.
Trust made formation.
Trust made war.
And war did not pause for the dying.
—
Thanatos advanced.
Another blast of warp-fire slammed into the stone shield.
Cracks spiderwebbed across its surface as blue flame chewed through rock and fused metal. The impact shook Thanatos' entire frame. Runes flared. Servos groaned. But Obol did not retreat.
He hurled the dying slab forward.
A savage sweep of the reaper chainsword sent the fractured mass hurtling into the plague tide. It exploded on impact, a violent burst of dust and shattered earth that buried a wave of rot-beasts beneath it.
Thanatos did not slow.
He ripped another slab of ground free with a brutal twist of his gauntlet and braced it overhead as the next barrage screamed from the sky.
At the same time, he fired—the thermal lance roaring—molten energy cutting a burning line through the advancing green horde, a wall of rot closing around him step by step.
—
Beyond the flicker of Gellar light and the glare of warp-fire, two armored giants moved in perfect unity.
Vorgane and Morphael had begun their hunt.
The violet horror descended on them like a blade of living malice—four arms a blur of hooked claws and talons, every strike a scream of hatred fast enough to cut the air.
—
It moved first.
A blur of lethal grace, it crossed the ground like a lightning strike given flesh.
Behind it, mounted warp-spawn thundered down from the ridge—sleek, horned nightmares galloping on too-long limbs, lances of bone lowered in a silent charge.
Vorgane met the impact head-on.
The violet horror didn't open with a killing blow—it went for control. Its talons lashed out in a spiral of perfect violence, hammering into Vorgane's left arm assembly with surgical precision—right at the elbow joint of the siege claw.
The strike connected.
The blow tore Vorgane sideways, armor screaming as sparks and fractured plating sheared away. The impact dragged the Knight back meters through the ash—
—until Morphael moved.
Isera drove her Knight forward, slamming shoulder-first into Vorgane and bracing the larger frame with her own. Metal ground against metal as the pair locked formation again.
Caldrin grunted—not in pain, but annoyance.
The violet horror shrieked—a sound like razors drawn across glass—and the mounted cavalry struck next. Waves of pale, lithe riders swept past in flowing arcs—not dueling, but cutting and withdrawing, slashing joint lines, testing armor, driving them back.
Hit.Run.Hit.Run.
Each pass struck with elegant violence, forcing the two Knights back step by grinding step—trying to pry them away from the Second Node and the forming harmonic barrier behind it.
But the two Knights locked together and held.
Plech. Plech. Plech.
Some of the mounted warp-spawn slammed full-force into ceramite armor—and lost.
Bodies and mounts alike pulped against armored plating, faces bursting wetly before sliding off in smears of black rot and pale flesh.
Their deaths didn't slow the rest—the charge only grew wilder.
"Battle cannon—ground! Now!" Isera voxed.
—
Vorgane reacted instantly—the battle cannon dropped its aim and fired into the earth.
BOOM.
The shell hit just ahead of them and detonated with seismic force. It wasn't meant to kill.
It was meant to break momentum.
CRACK.
A brutal shockwave ripped outward, shattering already fractured stone and hurling dust and debris in a violent ring.
Mounted warp-riders were thrown from their saddles, their once-perfect charge collapsing as mounts crashed and skidded across broken terrain.
The ground split apart in jagged lines—uneven, lethal ground.
No charge could build speed here now. No clean advance.
The cavalry lost the one thing they relied on—flow.
—
Isera drove Morphael forward through the dust storm as the violet war-fiend returned to the attack—reappearing in a blur of murderous motion. It burst from the haze, hooved feet crushing its own fallen cavalry without hesitation.
The weak were obstacles.
Speed was survival.
—
Morphael's thermal spear rose to meet it—but even that was too slow against the violet fiend.
It lunged, four blades arcing in a perfect spiral of death, a cruel grin carved across its monstrous face as it closed in for the kill—
SZZZRAK—CRACK!
A blinding surge of power erupted point-blank.
Morphael's right arm had been low the entire time—Thunderstrike Gauntlet clenched and pulsing, quietly building charge while the enemy cavalry bled themselves uselessly against them.
Now that coiled energy detonated outward in a violent shock blast that stopped the creature mid-strike.
Its elegant killing lunge died in an instant.
Its body convulsed, every tendon seizing under the gauntlet's brutal discharge. Warp-flesh spasmed.
Claws locked—
Frozen.
Its blades hung inches from Morphael's armor.
—
Then Vorgane moved—silent as execution.
The siege claw rose behind the stunned fiend like a closing eclipse, metal shadow swallowing it whole. Motors growled. Pistons locked.
Then it struck.
CLACK.
The claw crushed over the monster's face, adamantine talons punching through silk-flesh and horned bone with mechanical inevitability.
The creature thrashed, all elegance gone—reduced to pure animal panic. It shrieked and writhed, claws flailing, hooves carving trenches in the broken earth as it struggled to tear free.
Caldrin lifted it—one-handed—from the ground, holding it aloft like a broken sacrifice. Warp-spit poured from its mouth as its limbs snapped and twisted in desperation.
Then—
PLOP.
A wet, sickening pop as the siege claw squeezed—half its face imploded like rotten fruit.
Locked helpless in Vorgane's grip, the fiend could only convulse as Morphael brought her weapon to bear.
The thermal spear lowered, core whining as molten energy built.
She didn't rush the shot. She aimed—slow, deliberate—sighting the exposed torso as the creature writhed and screamed.
Her voice crackled through the vox—not anger.
Exhilaration.
A savage, manic laugh.
And then—
FWOOM.
The melta round punched through the fiend's chest—not fast, but unstoppable. Slowed by the crushing air, the shot became worse than a kill—an execution in slow motion. The beam cored through violet flesh and warped bone, burning a tunnel of liquefied organs as the creature convulsed in agony.
It tried to scream.
Its throat melted instead.
Vorgane didn't let it fall. He tightened his grip—the siege claw locking and grinding until the shattered head and upper spine collapsed with a wet crunch.
Then he kept crushing—closing the claw into a fist around what remained.
The body tore apart in limp, twitching pieces—then began to unravel. Warp-flesh peeled away into greasy violet vapor as its form collapsed into nothing.
It never hit the ground—its corpse dissolved before gravity could claim it.
The Second Node held.
—
Warp-spawn—if the twisted heaps of meat could still be called corpses—smoldered across the fractured ridge where Vorgane and Morphael stood guard. The violet fiend was gone, erased by melta fire and iron will.
But war did not slow.
Above the battlefield, the shadows changed direction.
The winged horrors that had been diving against Thanatos no longer pressed the attack. They turned mid-flight—drawn toward a new command. Something older. Colder. Smarter.
The storm of lightning above Obol flickered—and ceased.
Phorxys was no longer firing.
—
Obol felt the shift before the vox even spoke.
The sky was no longer hunting him.
It had found a greater target.
The Bastion.Kaelthorn.The Navigators.
Thanatos carved deeper into the rotting mass of the plague-titan, molten filth hissing against armor, but Obol's helm turned—just slightly.
Not because he saw.Not because he heard.
But because he knew.
Inside the throne-casket of Thanatos, surrounded by relic sigils and the hum of the throne-mechanicum, Obol did something he had not done in decades.
He prayed.
For the Emperor.For the Omnissiah.For the young Scion inside Kaelthorn's helm—
He prayed that Vaerin would endure the storm to come.
—
"What should we do to help?" Caldrin muttered, Vorgane's vox low and grim as the two Knights stood amidst the mangled ruin of the fallen cavalry.
—
Isera didn't look at him. Her sensors were already locked on the sky—tracking the swarm that had broken away from Obol.
Her voice came back like forged iron.
"We hold this position. We keep the Second Node alive."
"That's how we help."
A pause. Static. Heat.
"Trust them, husband."
—
Caldrin exhaled once through the vox.
Not fear.
Acceptance.
"Then we watch their backs."
Both Knights turned—and leveled their guns toward the Bastion.
—
"Magos… that thing is going to be a problem. You have a solution?"
Maeric didn't slow as he spoke, Cinerion striding at full power beside the Magos convoy.
His sabre was raised toward the shifting storm of warp-light overhead—where the winged sorcerer-beast moved, dragging its locust host behind it like a living stormfront of wings and teeth.
Thale Serekin did not turn. No acknowledgment. No wasted movement.
Only the soft whine of auspex arrays as data flickered across his optics in scrolling green script—warp fluctuation, Gellar strain, Knight reactor bleed, field instability vectors—
Then his helm tilted.
Something had registered.
The Magos' optics narrowed, focusing past Maeric—past the battle—toward the broken horizon. Through drifting ash and shattered ferrocrete, a colossal shape lay half-buried in the dirt beyond the final node.
A weapon the size of a Krieg hab-block, its armored frame still faintly smoking in the ruin.
The Quake Cannon.
Thale stared at it for a long, silent moment.
Machine-thought turning.
Maeric followed his gaze.
"Magos?"
—
Kaelthorn raised her gaze to the horizon.
The winged warp-entity floated there—vast, skeletal wings spread as if it defied gravity by will alone. Its silhouette bent the sky around it. Warp-light crawled over its feathers like oil across glass—every color wrong.
Below it, its minions merged.
What had been scattered flocks of shrieking warp-things now stitched themselves together mid-air—flesh to flesh, wing to wing—an unholy convergence driven by a single will. Spines cracked and fused. Tendons wove together. Jaws bit into neighbors not to kill—but to bind.
The sky dimmed—not from storm or smoke, but from a living mass of wings and teeth. A cloud of locusts. Every wingbeat a blasphemy. Every shriek a promise of death.
—
"Lord Lysan… what do you make of this?" Vaerin muttered, teeth clenched inside her helm as Kaelthorn's grip tightened on the stormshield.
—
Behind her, within the bastion shrine of coiling conduits and hum of Gellar energy, the young Navigator did not answer at first.
Sweat ran down his jaw beneath lattices of psalm-inked sigils. He stared upward—pupils blown wide, blood tracking from his third eye.
He stared so hard it hurt.
A pulse of pressure built behind his eyes. Red veins flared at his temples. Still, he did not look away.
First he studied the winged thing—an entity of impossible geometry and cold intelligence. Then—slowly—his gaze moved to the sky-swallowed swarm beneath it.
When he spoke, his voice was tight.
"It isn't commanding them."
He shook his head. Breathing sharp.
"They're being flung around."
He pointed toward the swollen cloud.
"They're caught in its wake—like debris caught in a gravity well."
—
Lady Seraphine, his cousin—eyes widened.
"A… a warp current?"
—
Lysan nodded once, still staring skyward.
"Yes. It isn't just moving—it's carving a path through the immaterium and tearing reality behind it."
"Those things are caught in its passage now. They're part of its motion—whether they will it or not."
—
Vaerin leaned forward inside Kaelthorn's throne, voice calm but sharp.
"Meaning?"
—
Lysan finally looked at her—eyes bloodshot, breath held by discipline alone.
"Meaning it can't change direction freely. Everything bound to it fixes its path."
He exhaled once.
"Meaning its movement can be disrupted—"
Before he could finish, the sky answered.
A shriek rolled across the battlefield—not sound, but wrongness forced into a voice.
The locust-mass folded inward—then dived as one. A living storm of wings and gnashing warp-flesh fell toward the bastion.
—
Phoryxs moved first.
Twin spears of storm-light roared up from the defensive line—Vaeleen's lightning lances igniting into a blazing curtain that slashed across the oncoming swarm.
The arcs didn't scatter—they held, crackling against the crushing air in a solid wall of lightning as the winged horrors struck it like a tidal wave of flesh.
The impact lit the sky.
Creatures burst like overripe fruit against the barrier.
Others were pinned mid-flight, twitching violently as voltage ripped through their bodies.
The curtain bought seconds—only seconds—but seconds meant survival.
—
Kaelthorn raised her stormshield and planted herself before the Navigators as the bastion shuddered around them.
Lysan wiped blood from his nose, teeth clenched.
"That was only the vanguard. It will follow next."
And above the carnage—descending slow, deliberate, inevitable—the winged entity finally began to move.
"Gahhh—why do I always get the clever one!" Vaerin snarled as she slammed Kaelthorn into a forward brace.
The stormshield locked with a thunderous clang—and the world crashed against it.
Warp-fire hit first, splashing across the barrier like molten mercury, hissing as it chewed at layered wards.
Then the locusts struck—thousands of fused bodies slamming into the shield in a storm of wings and gnashing maws. The impact shook the bastion to its foundations. Stone cracked. Warning runes flared scarlet across Vaerin's display.
Kaelthorn did not yield.
Vaerin drove more power into the shield projectors, teeth bared against the mounting strain.
Her voice snapped across internal command:
"Firing solution—elevate! Mortars, suppress sky lane! Siege batteries—alternate feed—fire for effect!"
—
Kaelthorn's hull erupted—Four heavy mortars barked in brutal rhythm—
WHUMP—WHUMP—WHUMP—WHUMP—
Each blast ripped craters through the descending swarm.
Fliers burst midair in sprays of black ichor and crackling warp discharge.
A heartbeat later, the siege artillery fired, a thunderbolt of concussive wrath that cored through the locust mass and carved open sky.
But still it came. Still it closed.
Something new struck—fast.
A spear of fused flesh and wings, a living harpoon, tore downward toward the bastion. It would have hit—
THOOM.
It twisted mid-flight—ripped aside violently as if crushed by an unseen fist. It slammed into the ground far wide of target, skidding and screaming—before a follow-up blast vaporized it.
—
Vaerin's helm snapped back.
Inside the bastion, Lady Seraphine stood trembling, one hand raised, warp-light bleeding off her fingers in raw threads.
Black bile dripped from her lips. Blood from her nose. She was shaking—
—but smiling.
"If it has ten paths," she rasped, voice wet but fierce,
"I will close nine."
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and gave a broken laugh.
"Let it take the last one—because we'll be waiting there."
—
"Alright then—Navigators!" Vaerin growled, reactor heat rumbling beneath her voice.
"Let's show these warp-fiends who holds this ground."
Kaelthorn's cannons roared back to life—mortars cycling, siege batteries thundering in relentless rhythm. Every shot tore another wound into the living sky above.
Behind her, the Navigators moved like duelists at the edge of collapse.
Seraphine struck first—eyes blazing beneath a veil slick with blood. She seized a warp-line and snapped it sideways with a ragged shriek.
A whole cluster of locust horrors veered violently off-course—slamming into a jagged ridge with bone-shattering force.
Lysan followed—jaw locked, breath shaking. He didn't attack.
He redirected inevitability.
He lifted a trembling hand and twisted open a false path—an invisible corridor of fate—and a spiral of shrieking flesh-things crashed headlong into each other, tearing themselves apart midair.
They didn't shield the bastion.
They didn't slow the swarm.
They turned the swarm against itself.
—
Wave after wave of hostile flight slammed into rock spires, shattered against the terrain, collided and detonated in bursts of wings and ichor—all diverted away from Kaelthorn by the brutal precision of Navigator sight.
Vaerin braced behind the stormshield, watching the sky twist and break under their influence. She was not given to laughter.
But this—this—almost earned one.
Then the sky split.
No more probing assaults. No more testing boundaries.
The will behind the swarm finally struck.
A torrent of warp-fire screamed down from above—ripping straight through its own swarm as if they were nothing.
Fliers ignited midair, burned to vapor by sheets of colorless flame as the blast carved a perfect path toward its true target.
The Navigators.
Vaerin hurled Kaelthorn forward, stormshield locking into a full brace.
VOOOOM.
The warp-fire hit like the wrath of a false star. Reality bent. Wards howled. The impact smashed into the shield—melting, devouring, roaring.
Kaelthorn shuddered beneath the onslaught. Stabilizers screamed. Armor blistered under the psychic inferno.
For a heartbeat—the shield held.
Then the sky screamed again.
Another beam. Then another. Then another.
Each strike punched through the dying swarm and hammered the bastion with increasing fury, hurling black rain to the ground.
The air convulsed. Kaelthorn slid backward half a meter—heels carving trenches in the stone.
Then—
sizz.
sizz.
SIZZ.
Thin forks of lightning lashed across the sky.
Phorxys had re-entered the war.
Vaeleen's twin lances punched up from the right flank—two spears of white-blue fury streaking toward the heavens with surgical precision.
But as they neared the towering winged shape beyond the firestorm—
—they slowed—and bent—and stopped
Suspended midair—caught by an invisible field around the entity.
"Oh no you don't!" Vaeleen snarled.
Phorxys' reactor flared hotter. The lightning did not cease.
She forced more power through.
The sky burned with electric scream as the lances fought the unseen barrier—
—but the winged abomination did not react.
Did not acknowledge.
It was ignoring her.
It drifted through the sky with cold, surgical indifference—its vast wings barely moving.
The suspended lightning burned across its ward in sheets of white fire, the barrier sparking under the surge—but still, it ignored Phorxys completely.
As if she weren't even worth killing.
More lances hammered in—
sizz—SIZZ—SIIIIZZZ—
Chains of lightning crawled over the warped air like cracks in broken glass.
Portions of the barrier flared white-hot as Vaeleen overloaded it—but still the creature didn't return fire.
It didn't even slow.
It kept coming.
Straight for the bastion.
It wanted the Navigators.
"Emperor's mercy," Vaerin growled.
"It doesn't care about her."
—
"It doesn't," Lysan rasped.
"It wants—control."
—
Lysan pressed a blood-slick hand to his temple and raised the other—reaching into the warp currents swirling around Kaelthorn like invisible rivers.
Seraphine followed, teeth clenched, breath ragged.
"Together," she whispered.
"Push its path."
—
Warp-lines bent. Reality threads tightened. The sky shifted—and the winged entity lurched in mid-flight, forced to correct its course as if struck by a crosswind no one else could feel.
"Do it again," Vaerin ordered.
They did.
Lysan closed one path.Seraphine opened another—a false corridor of fate.
A siege shell roared from Kaelthorn's cannon.
Normally the creature would have slipped aside in effortless contempt—but now—
Now it had only one path left.
The shell hit.
It didn't pierce—it scorched, rippling energy across the entity's barrier.
Not damage—annoyance.
A message.
A reminder that it could be hurt.
—
For the first time, it turned its head—acknowledging that something on the ground could reach it.
The temperature spiked. Colors warped. The sky began to boil around it.
While the winged horror twisted away from Kaelthorn's artillery and the Navigators bent reality behind her, the storm did not abate.
The locust swarm crashed against the stormshield in endless waves, thousands of bodies shattering against adamantine like black hail.
Each impact shook the bastion walls and cracked the earth beneath Kaelthorn's feet—but still she held the line, shield high, guns roaring.
And while that living avalanche tried to bury them, a second war unfolded across the ridge—not of charge and steel, but of calculus, timing, and ruthless precision.
—
Thrykos stood within Morvhar's throne, gauntleted fingers moving over firing relays as tungsten-link ammo feeds clattered and cycled behind him.
Across the field, Phorxys shifted position, her lightning coils spitting violent sparks as Vaeleen forced them toward overload.
Thrykos voxed, voice steady amid chaos.
"Vaeleen—your lances are choking in this air. Heavy pressure's killing your speed."
—
Phorxys tilted slightly, Vaeleen's reply sharp.
"Everything is choking in this air. You have a cure for bad atmosphere now?"
—
"Not a cure," Thrykos said. "An adaptation."
He sent a firing schematic across the link—ragged pulse patterns, capacitor rotations, emergency coil bleeds flashing hazard-orange.
RAIL STRIKE PROTOCOL – PULSE FIRE? [Y/N]
/ CAUTION: COIL OVERLOAD LIKELY /
/ WARNING: UNTESTED IN COMBAT /
—
Vaeleen didn't hesitate.
"Locked. Tell me what you need, Lord Thrykos."
—
"Short bursts. Spike-strike pattern—hit and retract before the barrier learns the frequency."
—
"And you?"
—
Morvhar's avenger cannons spun up, not in the usual scream but in a slow, deliberate cadence.
"I'm going to load the sky with tungstens," he replied.
Thrykos locked into Morvhar's gunnery spine and began to override safeties one by one.
FEED REGULATORS—OFFLINE.BARREL SPIN GOVERNORS—MANUAL.CHARGE COMPRESSION—REDUCED.
His hands moved with the blunt efficiency of a man who had loaded guns in hell.
Morvhar's Avengers came alive in a measured churn—
THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.
Thrykos feathered the triggers, feeling the rhythm through the throne, making each shot an act of intent rather than machine routine.
Each tungsten slug punched into the thick air and hung there, pinned by drag and warp-pull—glittering dimly as they slowed, as if the sky itself were catching bullets.
He did not stop.
THOOM. THOOM.
Each round placed—not merely fired.
THOOM!
Each slug a stepping-stone.
THOOM!
Each shot part of a pattern the enemy could not yet see.
A grid rose in the air—a metal lattice suspended between rounds.
A cage. A killing field assembled one tungsten at a time.
—
Phorxys fired.
Lightning didn't crawl this time—it cut.
Twin lances snapped into pulse-fire, each discharge a brutal, surgical strike instead of a dragging beam. The shots hammered through the heavy air—short bursts, high amplitude—exactly as Thrykos had calculated.
Energy traveled cleaner in the compressed atmosphere—tighter, more violent—riding the dense air like rails. Every pulse slammed forward at near-light speed—
—too fast to be caught by drag.
The adjustment worked.
The pulses hit—hard enough to make the air shiver—but even at that velocity, they still caught.
One by one, the lightning rounds froze against the barrier, suspended midair by that impossible field.
Caught again.
The creature's ward still ruled physics.
But something had changed.
The strikes had arrived too fast for the barrier to fully absorb.
Instead of vanishing, they stacked—energy snarling, piling up in fixed points like fists slamming into glass.
That shouldn't have been possible.
Not unless someone had twisted the paths of force behind the strike.
Not unless someone had reshaped the battlefield.
The winged entity turned toward them.
The Navigators.
—
Warp-born intellect unfurled across the sky—vast, cold, ancient.
It understood.
This resistance was not random. Not instinct.
This was orchestrated.
And the thought of mortal minds trespassing in its art—
Interfering with its control—
Was not simply offensive.
It was unforgivable.
A lethal gamble had been made.
—
Then it happened.
Reality thinned—just for a heartbeat.
Not broken. Not shattered.
Peeled.
A thin layer of the creature's warp-shield phased away—stripped aside by an unseen hand.
By Lysan—dragging a thread of warp-space just far enough out of alignment to open a wound in the barrier.
—
Phorxys' next pulse did not stop.
It speared through.
The bolt tore past the suspended stormfront and slammed into exposed flesh—grazing the creature's left wing and shearing feathers into molten vapor, carving a burning line across its warped anatomy.
—
The sky lit with the strike—white and violent.
And the creature shrieked.
A sound followed—sharp, deliberate, wrong—a clicking that echoed across the battlefield from a beak that hadn't moved.
The shrieking stopped.
The swarm paused.
Even the warp-fire guttered low, as if the world itself waited.
The winged being turned—slowly, precisely—and fixed its burning, alien gaze on Lysan.
A terrible, knowing silence.
—
It moved toward Lysan.
The entire locust mass turned in a single motion—collapsing into a screaming arrowhead of fused wings and gnashing maws. Warp-light flared along their bodies as the winged entity poured power into them—not guiding, but hurling them like a spear of living flesh straight at the bastion.
Straight at the Navigator who had wounded its pride.
—
Lysan didn't flinch.
He only grinned through blood.
The swarm hit.
PIZH—SZZZZ—CRACK—KRAKOOM!
The front ranks of the locust horde struck the layer of tungsten rounds Morvhar had seeded into the sky—not air, but a web of conductive death.
Electric arcs erupted in chain reaction—bolt to slug, slug to slug, slug to sky—until the air itself became a glowing lattice of lightning.
The swarm convulsed as thousands of bodies burned into silhouette—outlines seared white against boiling air before bursting apart in crackling eruptions of gore and warp-energy.
—
What had been a lethal charge became a detonating wall of meat and madness—ripping itself apart against the storm they had built.
The winged entity released them.
Whatever command had bound the swarm in formation vanished—cut clean in an instant.
The locusts didn't break—they erupted.
They scattered in all directions—no longer a weapon, but a feral cyclone of teeth and wings gone rabid.
—
They shrieked in every direction at once—mindless, wild, hungry.
And they died for it.
Without cohesion, they plunged back into the tungsten kill-layer Morvhar had built.
PIZH—SZZT—CRACK—BOOM—BOOM—BOOM—
Lightning detonated across the sky in a sprawling chain reaction. Warp-things burned mid-turn, bursting like overripe fruit as arcs snapped between suspended tungsten slugs and flailing wings.
Those that survived the electric storm dove lower—only to be annihilated by Kaelthorn's artillery. Heavy shells ripped through the broken swarm, blasting wings and shattered limbs across the mountainside.
Those that dodged fell into Phorxys' firing lane—
—and were erased by pulse-lances that carved clean lines through flesh and scream.
For the first time since its arrival, the sky around the winged entity began to clear.
The living storm that shielded it was shrinking—consumed by its own collapse.
But it had not lost control of the swarm by mistake.
It had abandoned them.
Not from weakness—but because it no longer needed them.
What came next would not be a storm.
It would be a execution.
—
Lysan dropped to one knee—eyes gone white, his third eye bleeding freely as warp-bleed tore through him. Black bile spilled from his lips as he convulsed, veins bulging beneath his skin.
Seraphine threw her will into him and the lattice at once, holding both together by raw force—but he was bleeding out of time and thought, his mind being clawed apart by something vast and unseen.
—
The creature turned all its focus inward.
Its ward folded tight around its body as it rose—hovering like a crown of shadow above the bastion.
Where that shimmering shell brushed the suspended tungsten grid, one of its heads tilted.
A gout of warp-fire spat from its beak—white, silent, absolute.
The slow tungsten rounds in its path didn't burn.
They ceased—disintegrating into molten ghosts that rained down in glowing droplets.
It advanced—barrier tightening—power building around it like a hanging blade.
A killing strike was coming for the bastion—
————
CLICK.
————
A single tone cut across the vox.
Lady Seraphine's voice followed—weak, shaking—but triumphant.
"—First node… linked to second. Gellar wall… rising."
Then the world changed.
—
Reality slammed outward from the bastion like a shockwave—
FWUMMP
—an invisible wall of crushing force that tore across the ash plains.
Air warped.
Warp-things screamed.
Warp-light flared—and died, snuffed out like collapsing stars.
The locusts closest to the bastion exploded mid-flight, bodies shredded into ash by raw, weaponized reality.
Others didn't even burst—they ceased, folding inward and vanishing in silent implosions.
Kaelthorn's frame trembled as the Gellar surge roared to full strength—linking node to node in a burning wall across the battlefield. Dust blasted outward in rings. Stone split with seismic cracks.
The sky trembled.
The winged entity reeled back, wings flaring wide—its haunting composure finally broken.
—
The barrier cracked.
Hairline fractures raced across it—first one, then dozens—spreading like broken glass across invisible skin.
The entity froze mid-hover as reality pressed in from the rising Gellar Wall, its warp-shell flickering as if flayed by truth.
Morvhar's tungsten field closed around it like a noose.
—
One shard of barrier collapsed.
Then another.
Then all of it.
The ward shattered—not with sound, but with cataclysmic absence, as if a star had died.
Unshielded flesh met a sky full of suspended metal.
SHOCK!
Lightning didn't strike it once.
It claimed it.
—
Phorxys' pulse-lances locked to the tungsten grid—arcs chaining slug to slug until a cage of white fire snapped shut around the winged abomination.
Feathers burned. Flesh split. Its form erupted in screaming ribbons of warp-light as it thrashed inside its own execution.
Then—
BOOOOM.
A thunderclap rolled across the battlefield—from the direction of the last node.
—
Cinerion.
He stood on the far ridge—arm now refitted with the Quake Cannon left behind by Thanatos, braced into place with screaming servitors and raw defiance.
The recoil tore into him like a god's fist. The shot launched—and the force drove Cinerion meters into the earth. His legs buried to the knees. Armor fractured. Stabilizers blew red. Warning glyphs screamed murder across Maeric's display.
But the shot was already gone.
The Quake round tore across the sky—slowed but unstoppable—a mass-driver shell wrapped in crushing seismic force.
It struck the prison of ionized, compressed air formed by the tungsten lattice and chained lightning.
For a heartbeat, it hung there—
—then the world collapsed.
WOOOOOOOOSH.
Everything was pulled inward.
Air. Fire. Sound. Light. Even the lesser warp-spawn were dragged screaming into the collapsing point above the bastion.
The sky twisted around it—folded, crushed—like iron drawn into a singularity.
For a moment—there was only hunger.
A perfect implosion.
A devouring sphere of annihilation that shrank tighter and tighter until it erased everything within its grasp.
And then—
—it detonated.
THOOM.
The world erupted outward.
A shockwave of raw force tore free like a star being born in violence.
Ash lifted from the plains in a burning ring.
Mountainsides cracked.
Armor groaned.
Every Knight was driven back a step as reality itself shook.
At the heart of it—
—the winged horror was gone.
—
"Your plan, Magos," Maeric rasped through a crackle of static, coughing smoke from his lungs as sparks rained across Cinerion's cockpit,
"was… absolutely unorthodox—for a priest of Mars."
Warning runes flared across every system readout—half the Knight screaming red in protest. Maeric forced a laugh anyway—raw, ragged, triumphant.
—
Thale Serekin did not look at him.
The Magos stood buried in the storm of cables and rune-lit machinery at the final node, mechadendrites plunged deep into its exposed spine as he forced power through reluctant veins. One by one, the final coils locked into place.
Lightning crowned the pylon. Reality thrummed like a drawn blade.
—
Only then did the Magos speak—flat, calm, absolute.
"Gellar lattice complete."
Another relay slammed into place.
The ground trembled. The sky began to close.
"All that remains," he said, voice like an engine turning over,
"is tuning."