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The Voscani Iron Armored Regiment was tactically excellent.
Even in betrayal, their battle lines held with textbook precision.
Heavy weapons teams set up firing positions in rapid succession, advancing in layers, methodically cutting down the Cadian defenders who hadn't yet processed what was happening.
Then something hit their flank that made no tactical sense whatsoever.
No artillery barrage. No armored column.
Two people.
Horus and Kullen hit the rebel line with nothing but their bodies.
The machine gunners never got their fingers to the triggers. The shadows were already on them.
Horus reached out with his left hand, thick fingers closing around the skull of a helmeted soldier. Five fingers. The precision-crafted ballistic helmet collapsed inward, skull and flesh and bone folding together like crumpled foil.
He swung the body sideways without looking. It hit the adjacent infantry squad like a battering ram. Bones snapped in a rapid chain as seven or eight fully armed traitors were bowled off their feet, combat-ineffective before they hit the ground.
The Power Sword in his right hand carved lethal arcs through the air. The disruption field sheared through armor and flesh without the slightest resistance.
Slash. Horizontal cut. Upward rip.
Every movement stripped to its essential function. No flourish, no wasted motion. Pure killing efficiency, nothing else.
The Wolf King's craft had been forged across ten thousand battles of the Great Crusade. Turned on these fallen Guardsmen, it was annihilation from another dimension entirely.
The Voscani soldiers didn't break from the first hit. Frontline officers reacted fast, barking orders. Three squads pulled back to create distance, trying to establish a crossfire net.
Hellgun muzzles swung in unison toward the two giants wrapped in tattered canvas.
The sights couldn't lock.
The Primarch moved without any discernible pattern, yet somehow slipped through every lethal firing lane with mechanical precision.
Horus found the gaps in the fire, answered with his boltgun, and drove deeper into the formation.
Blood and meat scattered.
Kullen came right behind him.
The former Knight of the First Legion worked his master-crafted Power Sword through the rebel ranks in a storm of shearing metal. His movements were precise and lethal, dedicated to clearing the threats trying to close on Horus from blind angles.
He noticed quickly, though, that his own preternatural reaction speed wasn't enough to keep pace with the Primarch.
It left him with a feeling he wasn't accustomed to: inadequacy.
He was a battle-hardened Astartes, veteran of a hundred engagements. But the Primarch's combat rhythm operated on a different plane entirely.
One hundred and fifty meters back, in a shell crater behind the main fighting.
Kaelen lay prone on a rubble pile, breathing hard. Lasgun stock pressed tight to his shoulder, scope up against his eye.
The System interface pulsed at the edge of his vision.
[Points Consumed: 800]
[Skills Acquired: Advanced Enemy Dynamic Perception / Weak Point Assisted Targeting]
His field of view changed completely. Across the enemy positions, red silhouettes blazed to life. Data strings cascaded through his mind.
The Primarch was tearing through everything in front of him, but that didn't mean the situation was clean. The Voscani rebel commander wasn't an idiot. Several heavy plasma launchers were repositioning from concealed emplacements, adjusting elevation angles, working toward a crossfire solution on Horus.
The Primarch had no armor. A direct plasma hit would still put him down hard.
Kaelen held his breath. Finger on the trigger.
The reticle settled on a plasma gunner sheltering behind the wreck of a Chimera.
He fired.
The red beam punched through the smoke and drove straight through the gunner's unprotected eye socket. The heat burned out his cerebral cortex before he finished falling. His plasma gun, already cycling toward overload, discharged as it hit the ground. A blazing blue sphere detonated at the center of the rebel position.
The blue light swallowed an entire infantry platoon.
Kaelen watched the result and the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
He shifted to a new position and brought the gun back up.
Through the scope, the Voscani Iron Armored Regiment's celebrated tactical maneuvering and coordinated defensive positions looked like a bad joke against absolute violence.
Elite Imperial Guard or not, running into a Primarch wasn't much different from weeds meeting a harvester.
Horus finished the enemies in front of him and glanced back for a moment.
The sniper fire from the rear had cleared the heaviest threats a heartbeat before he needed them gone, every single time. Not just accurate — the timing was surgical.
The kid was good.
The Wolf King let out a low, rumbling chuckle.
He shifted his footwork, slipped through a burst of suppressing fire, dropped his stance, and drove straight into the outer perimeter of the rebel command post.
Two heavy riot-shield servitors rolled forward to anchor the line. Behind them, thirty-odd Hellgunners stacked into a wall of fire.
"Open fire! Tear these two Ogryns apart!"
The rebel officer's voice cracked with the effort.
Horus didn't bother to dodge.
He kicked a crumbling statue off its base. The solid stone block skidded across the floor and ate the first volley for him.
He grabbed the statue's edge with one hand and drove forward, man and stone together, straight into the servitor line.
The heavy riot shields buckled and shattered under his grip. Metal components sprayed in every direction.
The short sword went into the rebel officer's chest. A twist. A pull. The scream died in his throat.
Then something changed deeper in the position.
An officer-uniformed man tore his shirt open. His bare chest was carved with profane eight-pointed stars. A Chaos Sorcerer. Purple balefire gathered between his palms, and the temperature around him plummeted.
He had his eyes on Horus.
The sorcerer began chanting, guttural and venomous. Warp energy churned and built, preparing to unleash a psychic storm that could corrode flesh down to the bone.
The range was too great. Two wrecked Leman Russ tanks blocked the line of fire. Horus's boltgun was dry. Neither he nor Kullen could disengage in time.
Kaelen's retina flooded red.
[WARNING: High-risk Warp psychic readings detected]
He didn't hesitate. His thumb found the power regulator on the side of the lasgun and shoved it to the stop. Overload mode.
It would wreck the barrel. It might blow up in his hands.
He pressed the stock hard into his shoulder. In his vision, the sorcerer's purple shield showed a single weak point the size of a coin, rising and falling faintly with the man's breathing.
"Go die, traitor."
Kaelen exhaled.
Pulled the trigger.
A blinding crimson beam tore from the muzzle.
It crossed the battlefield, threaded the gap between the two wrecks, and drove into the energy weak point below the sorcerer's throat without a millimeter of deviation.
The high-energy burn severed the incantation mid-syllable.
The uncontrolled Warp energy detonated.
The sorcerer didn't scream. He exploded from the inside out in a mass of purple-black balefire. The dozen elite rebels standing guard around him were caught in the blast. Armor and flesh melted in an eyeblink, leaving nothing but bubbling toxic slag steaming on the ground.
Kaelen tossed the ruined lasgun aside, fished a dead man's rifle from the mud, and racked the bolt.
Across the battlefield, Horus felt the threat vanish.
The Wolf King turned his head, looking back through the smoke toward the crater where Kaelen was hidden. Beneath the goggles, something that looked like approval.
"G-General Cliff! Two Ogryns are hitting our flank!"
"They're fast, sir! Our flanking units can't hold them! Based on their heading, they're moving toward the command post!"
In a command camp on the Tarlock Plains, General Cliff, the officer who had brought nine Voscani combat regiments into open rebellion — heard the report and had one immediate thought.
Ridiculous.
Two Ogryns had broken through his flank line and were running a decapitation strike?
"Steady. Push the armor up. Kill those two Ogryns."
He kept his voice level as he issued the order.
Ogryns were brutes, nothing more. If these were two loyalist Astartes, he might have reason to worry. But Ogryns against armor?
They'd be ground to paste.
The words weren't even cold before another runner crashed into the camp, stumbling over his own feet.
"General! Our front is under attack! The corpse-emperor's dogs have woken up!"
"Which unit?"
"The Cadian 8th, sir — Ursarkar Creed in command! They're coming down off the ridge! Two of our front regiments got hit before they could react!"
➤ Next: The Wolf-Shepherd's Decapitation Strike
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