Andrallo stepped out of the drop pod, and for the first time, he felt something like genuine freedom and release.
“Psychic link’s holding steady.
Maen and Charlotte are safe.
So.
You can all die now.”
No prayer, no proclamation.
With just those words, Andrallo charged forward, violet psychic light wrapping around him like armor, draped over his frame as soft and light as gossamer.
He reached a World Eater and an Emperor’s Children marine still locked in their standoff and cut both of them in half with a single strike.
Their heads hadn’t even caught up to what was happening before their bodies were airborne.
Andrallo’s body, fully ascended by his own genetics and stacked with the effects of every mod he’d once installed, was simply on a different level from anything these Chaos Astartes could match.
Most of the Space Marines present couldn’t even track him with their eyes.
All they registered was a flash of violet light, and then they were in pieces.
The Slaanesh warband’s Astartes who were bonded to daemons could at least keep pace with him, drawing on Warp-fueled strength, but the Daemonettes bound inside them went on strike, refusing outright to come out and fight no matter what.
Some of the Daemonettes had been tormenting humans just a second earlier, only to catch sight of Andrallo and bolt back into the Warp in tears, like some coward who’d just had their toe stepped on.
With Andrallo now in the fight, the Slaanesh warband, which had held the upper hand until then, suddenly started taking serious casualties, and the World Eaters, already the weaker side, found themselves in even worse shape.
Worse still, Andrallo showed no sign of slowing down at all.
This wasn’t some drug-fueled fit of madness.
He genuinely intended to kill every single one of them.
The Slaanesh warband’s Chaos Lord and the World Eaters’ own lord locked eyes, and in that moment, each understood exactly what the other was thinking: if they didn’t kill the violet phantom tearing through the battlefield, it would be the two of them who ended up dead instead.
At the two lords’ shouted commands, the World Eaters and Emperor’s Children, moments ago locked in a fight to the death, broke apart from each other and turned whatever weapons they had left on Andrallo instead.
If anything, the sight only fired Andrallo up more.
“Teaming up on me, are we?
Mortal enemies a second ago, and now you’re all buddies?
Good, good!
Now this is getting interesting!”
The Slaanesh warband’s Noise Marines struck first, their high-energy sonic weapons unleashing directional shockwaves straight at Andrallo.
But to avoid catching their own allies in the blast, they had to narrow the field, and none of it landed.
Andrallo tore through the battlefield at full speed, reaping the lives of every Chaos Astartes in his path, forcing the enemy to burn through their precious ammunition just trying to lay down suppressing fire.
One World Eater found a gap between Andrallo’s sword strokes and fired off a plasma round.
The blazing burst of energy slammed into his pauldron, and the instant, searing heat punched straight through his psychic defenses, melting the surface of the ceramite plate underneath.
Andrallo bared his teeth against the pain.
Now he finally understood just how much a plasma weapon could hurt.
But for whatever reason, the World Eater fired only that one shot before switching to his chainaxe and closing the distance.
“Shame. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
One more shot like that and you might’ve actually put me down for real.”
Andrallo closed on him in an instant, one upward slash severing his axe and the arm holding it, one downward stroke taking off the arm that had held the plasma pistol.
Two cuts, and the World Eater was out of the fight entirely.
Andrallo scooped up the fallen plasma pistol and dove for cover.
An instant later, sonic blasts and bolter rounds tore through the spot he’d just vacated, wiping out the disarmed World Eater along with everything else there.
Andrallo looked down at the still-hot plasma pistol in his hand, and behind his helmet, he couldn’t help but grin.
He finally had a real weapon of his own.
Violet psychic energy blanketed the battlefield.
Andrallo moved through it, emerging every so often just long enough to take another enemy’s head.
Every strike he landed drew a wave of return fire from the warbands, but all their ranged attacks did was pour into the psychic mist itself, with next to no effect.
Andrallo waited for his moment, then fired a shot of his own.
The blazing bolt of plasma tore straight through the psychic mist, punching a huge gap open in front of him.
A ball of blue energy streaked across the air, leaving behind a scorching trail, the superheated, ionized air along its path giving off an unsettling stench.
The Chaos Astartes could see the plasma’s trajectory with their own eyes, but their bodies simply weren’t fast enough to dodge it.
The moment it hit, a Noise Marine’s chestplate burned open into a gaping hole, the ceramite and the organs beneath it vaporized together.
After firing that single shot, Andrallo retreated back into the psychic mist, leaving the Chaos Lord fuming behind him.
“What the hell are you daemons even good for?!
Why won’t you come out and help?
That violet mist around Andrallo is clearly manifested psychic power, isn’t that exactly the kind of thing you daemons know inside and out?!”
But no matter how the Chaos Lord berated them, the daemons, who’d once acted like they owned the place, now huddled in the shadows and didn’t move an inch.
As creatures of the Warp, they’d always been bold enough to lord it over the material universe, precisely because the most humans could ever do was banish them, never truly kill them.
But now something had shown up capable of destroying them permanently, and these daemons had finally started to feel real fear.
Who knew what Andrallo’s connection to the cursed even was?
But standing still didn’t mean staying safe.
Andrallo’s violet power kept spreading, engulfing corpses and setting them alight, burning them down to ash in blue-violet psychic flame before folding what remained back into the mist.
Seeing that, the Chaos Lord made his decision at once.
“Everyone, form up, get in a circle!
Psykers, throw up a barrier!
Stop fighting alone and stop wasting ammunition!”
With their lives on the line, the Chaos Astartes found rare agreement.
World Eaters and Emperor’s Children stood shoulder to shoulder, and however badly each side still wanted to tear the other apart, for now, they held themselves back.
Another plasma shot came firing out of the mist. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
This time, ready for it, one of the Emperor’s Children’s own psykers threw up a barrier at once, and Khorne’s own blessing further weakened the blast, so that the shot did nothing more than burst into sparks against the shield.
Faced with their turtled-up formation, Andrallo, refusing to believe it would hold, fired again.
And then something went wrong.
The plasma pistol in his hand had already overheated, and this shot melted its magnetic containment coils completely.
The hydrogen-fueled plasma detonated right there in his grip.
For an instant, heat rivaling a solar flare melted the armor on his right arm completely away.
Even with his psychic defenses, the skin beneath was seared raw.
From a distance, the Chaos Lord saw a familiar burst of blue fire flare up inside the violet mist, and as a battle-hardened veteran, he understood immediately what had just happened.
“Ha ha ha!
Andrallo, don’t tell me you forgot the basic rules for handling a plasma weapon?
You really have fried your brain, haven’t you?
Come on, wake up already and join our celebration!”
No answer came.
Silence hung over everything, broken only by the breeze drifting past and the acrid smell of burning still hanging in the air.
The Chaos Lord’s patience began to wear thin.
He was sure Andrallo was just putting on a show.
Without the plasma pistol, all he had left was his blade, and he hadn’t used a single offensive psychic power this entire fight.
The Chaos Lord genuinely couldn’t imagine they’d lose.
“Andrallo, you’ve already lost.
I can feel your power fading.
Once that mist clears, there’s nothing waiting for you but death.
Why don’t you just—”
But reality slapped the Chaos Lord across the face almost immediately.
A shrieking sound tore through the air, a massive explosion ripped through a district in the distance, and the shockwave blew half a street’s worth of psychic mist clean away.
“A-artillery?!”
Not one of the Chaos Astartes had expected it: the planetary defense force’s artillery had opened fire on them, and packed together the way they were, it would take nothing more than a single heavy shell to blow every last warband member sky-high.
“Oh no!
It’s the defense force!
Everyone, fall back, now!!”
But it was already too late.
A dense artillery barrage saturated the area still shrouded in Andrallo’s psychic mist, hundreds of shells, each easily capable of leveling a fortified position, raining straight down onto the warbands below.
The blasts tore everything on the ground apart, shattering it to nothing, and even the daemons who’d been cowering in hiding were swept up and banished straight back into the Warp along with the rest.