The smoke slowly dispersed.
Her war-skirt swayed, but she was no delicate woman.
Her body stood nearly four meters tall, without the slightest trace of bulkiness.
It was the body of a demigod, combining ultimate elegance with overwhelming majesty.
She wore crimson armor edged in gilded trim.
Every line was smooth and sharp, and the breastplate was engraved with the double-headed eagle and the Emperor’s holy sigils.
Every inch radiated sanctity and authority.
Golden light flowed across her, unstained by dust, utterly out of place amid the ruined arena around her.
Her long crimson hair, passionate as flame, fell over her shoulders like a waterfall.
Her hair stirred lightly in the wind.
Her skin was whiter than snow, and her features were as exquisite as a deity’s, but her red-gold eyes fully displayed the majesty of one of the Emperor’s children.
Where her gaze swept, even the air seemed to freeze.
The divinity belonging to a Primarch was displayed in full, an uncrossable gulf that mortal Astartes could never surpass.
Astartes were the Emperor’s warriors, elite weapons.
But she was a transcendent child personally forged by the Emperor, a demigod walking among mortals.
Every breath she took carried the momentum to suppress the stars.
Between the two, there was a difference as vast as heaven and earth.
Lancelot felt there was no need to keep gripping the power sword in his hand, because he could see that the Mistress of the XII Legion, named Angrona, was tightly holding a flaming longsword.
The Emperor’s Sword.
Even without its power fully awakened, it radiated a stern pressure that suppressed all Chaotic evil.
This sword contained the Emperor’s own pure power.
Daemons killed by it would no longer be banished back to the Warp as usual, but would instead be erased completely on every level of existence.
In the original world, the one who held this longsword was the Avenging Son, Lord of the XIII Legion: Roboute Guilliman.
But in this mirror world, it was actually the weapon of Angron…
no, of Angrona, Mistress of the XII Legion?!
It was said that Guilliman himself was actually a berserker at heart, only one whose upbringing had suppressed that nature.
Angron should originally have been a healer of minds, yet he had been forcibly remade into a killing machine by the environment of his homeworld and the Butcher’s Nails.
Thinking this, Lancelot could not help looking at the head of Angrona, the Primarch before him.
The Butcher’s Nails were also an ancient atrocity from the Dark Age of Technology.
In easy-to-understand terms, they were something like a lobotomy combined with a neural stimulation device.
The surgical process was also extremely brutal.
A large number of cable-linked “nails” had to pierce the skull and be implanted into the brain, replacing the functions of certain brain regions.
And after such an extreme modification, the only purpose of this device was to amplify rage, suppress reason and emotion, and inflict terrifying pain that almost surpassed the limits of what the body could endure.
Even a demigod-level existence like a Primarch could not withstand it.
Wearing that thing meant that pleasure could only be found in slaughter, and only battle could temporarily ease the pain.
In the main world, when the Emperor found the Primarch Angron, he had already worn the Butcher’s Nails for many years.
Even the Emperor could not safely remove them.
It seemed that because of this, Big E himself had almost no patience for Angron.
He had treated him entirely as a tool.
One could only say he was scum among scum.
And if one only looked at Angron himself, his life was a tragedy among tragedies.
As a child, he had been found by slave masters and forced to fight as a gladiator.
Before he had fully mastered his own power, the Butcher’s Nails were implanted into him.
Under such circumstances, while enduring pain and a bloodthirsty desire to kill, he still led a slave uprising in an attempt to overthrow the slave masters.
But in the end, the Emperor descended directly, took him away, and left Angron somehow branded as a so-called “deserter.”
Thus, for Angron of the original world, his entire life had been slavery.
The Emperor was his slave master.
Chaos was his slave master.
The root of every tragedy was the Butcher’s Nails.
At that time, he desperately wanted to give up and rot away, forcing Khorne to ascend the Butcher’s Nails along with him.
Thus, the Mistress of the XII Legion was completely turned into a monster driven by rage and slaughter.
And now, did the loyal version of the Mistress of the XII Legion in this world still have the Butcher’s Nails on her head?
It did not seem so.
No wonder.
Lancelot muttered inwardly.
At that moment, the Primarch Angrona, who had descended here, swept her gaze across the battlefield.
Her golden eyes instantly locked onto Lancelot in the arena, and then her brows could not help furrowing slightly.
Before arriving at this place, Angrona had already received intelligence from her Legion.
One of the traps she had set had been triggered.
An existence with the appearance of a Dark Angel had silently broken into her private residence and activated a trap she had arranged with her own hands.
At first, she had naturally assumed that her traitorous brother had fallen into her trap.
The other party had fallen to Chaos, was suspicious of everything, and was endlessly obsessed with any secret related to himself.
That was precisely why she had arranged this trap.
Now that the trap had been triggered, Angrona had immediately set aside all the work at hand and even used certain special methods to rush back to her homeworld at the fastest possible speed.
But there was something strange.
Along the way, various pieces of intelligence had been relayed to her.
The being who had fallen into her trap had not tried to kill her children.
If he really were that traitor Lion, why would he go this far?
Unless he had already seen through everything here, yet still chosen to step into the trap for the purpose of drawing her out and confronting her.
There could be many conspiracies hidden within this.
It might even be a trap that that man had set for her in return.
But for Angrona, wielding the Emperor’s Sword, no matter what, she had to step onto this arena.
When she landed, she had already prepared herself for a battle to the death.
But after truly seeing the existence before her, Angrona frowned slightly.
“You are not the Lion.”
She spoke a sentence that set the tone.
After Lancelot heard those words, he finally breathed a sigh of relief.
But in the next moment, the words of the Lady of the Red Sands turned back again.
“But you do indeed carry the feel of the Lion’s gene.”
As she spoke, Angrona strode toward Lancelot, and that pressure naturally rolled over him.
“So…
what exactly are you?”
“Could you be a tool the Lion created to explore this place?
To arrive here without sound or trace, what did the Lion invest in you?”
The Primarch gradually approached.
The intimidation transmitted through the gene itself was enough to make an ordinary Space Marine’s legs go weak.
But Lancelot was unaffected.
He simply looked at the Primarch’s face before him.
After losing focus for a brief moment, he finally reacted.
His survival instinct surged up, and he quickly said, “Honored Mistress of the XII Legion!
I have nothing to do with that traitor Lion!
As for why I appeared here…
I cannot explain that clearly to you, but what I can tell you is this: I carry a mission.
Something directly connected to the Emperor!”
“Something connected to the Emperor?”
When Angrona heard this, she only found it laughable.
The Emperor’s Sword in her hand also began to burn fiercely at that moment.
To survive, he was even willing to spout nonsense like this?
Still, Angrona did want to know why the person before her was so confident.
Because she knew very clearly what kind of deterrence the Emperor’s Sword in her hand held for daemons. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
Even her traitorous brothers would feel fear before this sword, yet the existence before her showed no reaction at all.
The reason was actually quite simple.
First, Lancelot could leave this world at any time.
Second, he had not expected to directly meet a loyal child of the Emperor here.
In that case, the authenticity of that object could be judged.
But watching the Primarch before him approach like a tiger eyeing its prey, completely disbelieving his words, Lancelot still felt a little nervous deep down.
“Wait, Lady Primarch!
That thing is rather special.
I think we should have the people around us leave first.
Give us some private space, and then I will show it to you!”
“Have us leave?!
Damn heretic!
Do you think mere words are enough to deceive us?!”
The surrounding Crimson Angels growled.
Angrona, Primarch of the XII Legion Crimson Angels, looked coldly at Lancelot before her.
The Emperor’s Sword in her hand had already been raised slightly.
No choice…
Lancelot’s sense of danger screamed madly.
How fast could a Primarch move?
To an Astartes, she could kill him before he even saw her clearly.
And the reason Angrona was still standing there before him was only because she was still observing and confirming whether there were any traps hidden on Lancelot.
At that moment, Angrona’s thoughts surged like a tide as she looked at Lancelot.
Strangely, the Warp around this person was unusually calm, and realspace was exceptionally stable…
Could Chaos have placed some special curse upon him?
Countless thoughts were processed in the Primarch’s mind like lightning, and all kinds of guesses emerged.
But in the end, all those guesses shared one premise.
First, strike him once and see.
If any Warp daemon was dwelling within him, then once he was struck by the Emperor’s Sword, it would reveal its true form.
The urge to attack climbed to its peak in an instant, and Lancelot instantly bristled as if every hair on his body had stood on end.
No choice!
In this situation, the Primarch and these Astartes warriors would absolutely not believe him or allow him to be alone with the Primarch!
Then…
he could only risk being discovered by Chaos!
Lancelot made his decision in an instant.
And in the very next moment, Angrona moved.
Her figure vanished from where she stood as if the scene had skipped a frame.
Almost at the same time, white light lit up in Lancelot’s hand.
“Damn it, is this Chaos filth finally revealing his methods?!”
That was what Khârn, watching from the outer ring, thought.
But at that moment, he suddenly felt his body, this fearless body of his, experience a certain instinctive tremble.
Angrona also froze.
The Emperor’s Sword had already slashed down before Lancelot, yet she stopped it.
There was no trace of Warp fluctuation in the white light radiating from Lancelot’s hand.
And within that white light, something suddenly emerged and appeared in Lancelot’s grasp.
It was a vial of red blood enclosed within a quartz tube.
Everything seemed no different from before, but for some reason, the air seemed to grow viscous.
Within the dueling ground, the thirteen golden pillars of light that had originally lit up began to burn fiercely.
At that moment, even the Primarch, looking at the object in Lancelot’s hand, wore an expression filled with disbelief.