No—!!
At the exact moment the body of the daemon-Primarch Angron turned to ash, the Glory of Conquest, flagship of the World Eaters Legion, began to shake violently.
The metal bulkheads groaned and twisted, as though some colossal beast were being gutted alive.
And then came the wailing.
Not the mechanical klaxons of a vessel in distress, but raw, soul-deep human screaming echoing through the corridors—anguished, desperate, mourning.
?
The retreating Black Guard froze mid-step.
These elite warriors had never heard a warship cry before. Instinctively, they raised their weapons, sights trained on the quivering conduits and pulsing cables around them.
Pipes that should have been cold steel now writhed like dying serpents.
"…"
Curze did not hesitate.
Beneath his mag-locked boots, the deck oozed a strange fluid—not blood, not coolant, but a saline, transparent liquid… tears, seeping from the cracks in the hull.
The Primarch's psychic perception pierced the steel, locking onto a collapsing consciousness—
Lorrata Sarin.
Their father had once spoken to him and Lorgar about her in stories of the World Eaters—of another universe where a brilliant fleetmaster's soul had been fused with her ship.
Here, she had been imprisoned eternally within corrupted iron, helpless as the Primarch she once served became a daemon… and now, slain by his own brother.
"…Pathetic."
Curze's whisper was lost in the ship's weeping.
BOOM. KRAAASH—!
Another violent tremor shook the vessel. Ahead, a blast door slammed shut, severing their exit route.
Blood-scented steam poured from ventilation shafts. Ceiling-mounted turrets descended, their barrels glowing with Chaotic energy. The deck angled sharply, attempting to hurl them into the abyss.
"She's trying to stop us."
The lead Black Guard's voice was taut over comms.
But Curze only raised his power claw.
BOOM—!
Five arcs of violet lightning exploded in a fan, carving through doors, turrets, and half-melted pipes with surgical precision.
Crystallized gold shimmered along the edges of the cuts—wounds inflicted on the soul itself, irreparable even to a sentient warship.
CLANG—CLANG CLANG!
Back at the bone-plated landing bay, Thunderhawk gunships rained down bolter fire. Anything that tried to approach—World Eater or daemon construct—was ripped apart in a storm of death.
Most impressive was the Primarch's personal gunship, its bay doors wide open, twin hardlight cannons spinning at maximum output, turning the corridor into a molten furnace.
"Board."
Curze's order was as brief as it was absolute.
The Black Guard sprinted for the extraction point like arrows loosed from warbows.
As the last set of mag-boots clamped to the boarding ramp, the Conqueror gave one final, keening wail.
Outside the viewport, the once-ordered lines of blood-red energy across the hull began to spiral out of control, gushing infected ichor like ruptured wounds.
"It's self-destructing," a Black Guard beside the Primarch muttered. "As if overwhelmed by grief—causing a core overload."
Curze stood at the open hatch, his visor reflecting the disintegrating behemoth.
For a moment, he saw something—faint, flickering.
A ghostly female silhouette.
She raised her hand toward him… and rendered a formal Imperial salute—before vanishing in a blinding cascade of psychic flame.
As the Thunderhawks burst through layers of collapsing hull, the Conqueror's core lit up with the brilliance of a newborn star.
The psychic shockwave shoved aside wreckage and ships, clearing a brief, perfect void in the void of space.
When the light faded, all that remained was a warped graveyard of shattered metal—
And a pristine captain's command sabre, floating alone in the vacuum. Lorrata Sarin's final gift, and the gravestone of this tragic saga.
With the Conqueror's death, the World Eaters' fleet command collapsed instantly.
What had once been a terrifyingly coordinated armada was now a headless beast, flailing wildly in the dark.
The first to break ranks was the left flank. Ships suddenly turned their guns on each other, bombarding their allies with macro cannons and plasma barrages.
There were no orders. No logic.
Only bloodlust.
BOOM—BOOM—!
One doomed ship's captain screamed over open comms:
"Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!"
Before his ship was engulfed by friendly fire.
The right flank, however, brought something worse.
Dozens of warships activated warp drives, tearing reality open at their prows.
They weren't retreating.
They were leaving—breaking away from the battle entirely, plunging into the Star Wars universe's other star systems… where they could give in fully to their nature.
Slaughter.
Of course, the Lords of Midnight and Word Bearers fleets would not let such an opportunity slip.
Blessed by priests, the Word Bearers' ships charged their light lance macro-batteries—some even briefly casting silhouettes of the Emperor himself across the void.
"Torpedo" and missile bays opened. Each payload glowed with the brilliance of purified psychic force.
The next second, the fleets unleashed their wrath.
Those Chaos vessels struck didn't explode conventionally—they melted, twisted like wax under invisible hands, crumpling into golden dust.
Meanwhile, Curze's fleet adopted a far more insidious approach.
Kingfisher-class and Paris-class ships infiltrated the enemy's shadow zones, ambushing warp-jumping targets. Mainline warships—like Valiant-class super-heavy cruisers—stood firm in direct engagements, unleashing suicide pods armed with nightmare viruses.
Their Emperor-class battleships used their primary and secondary batteries, along with beam arrays, to compress the enemy's maneuvering room, herding them into kill zones.
One highlight? The hunt of a World Eaters battleship.
Just as it tried to enter the Warp, three Lords of Midnight cruisers snared it with gravitational beams, dragging it back out of the rift.
As its armor cracked like an eggshell, cameras glimpsed its crew—clawing, biting, hacking each other to pieces.
Elsewhere, the corrupted Galactic Empire ships, though inferior in power, fared slightly better than the World Eaters. Still, they were doomed.
One Star Destroyer attempted to form a new defense line—only to be pierced through its engine bay by a Word Bearer psychic torpedo.
A fighter wing tried to cover a retreat with TIE-style formations—only to go mad mid-flight under the Lords of Midnight's electronic and psychic interference.
One particularly stubborn destroyer tried to ram the Midnight Lords' weakest flank—only to have its course overridden and shattered by the Grey Knights' flagship, the Inquisitor.
Now, the tide of battle was clear.
The void resembled a stirred pool of blood, patterns beginning to emerge.
Despite the Chaos armada maintaining a three-to-one numerical advantage, they were little more than a corpse without a head.
On the holomap, crimson enemy markers were spiraling into chaos, formations breaking into shards.
"What a pathetic display."
Curze chuckled lightly inside his cabin. Data cascaded down his shattered visor, highlighting every foolish enemy choice.
The terrifying World Eaters fleet now resembled a tantrum-throwing child deprived of their toys—rage without meaning.
Though the World Eaters had lost less than a tenth of their ships, Angron's death was a wound no hull breach could match.
In Lorgar's psychic vision, the blood-mist once clinging to the Chaos fleet faded rapidly, like low tide revealing a rotting seabed.
Without a Primarch, these beasts couldn't maintain even the pretense of discipline.
(Although… it wasn't like the World Eaters had much discipline to begin with.)
Early in the battle, they could've crushed their foes—had they leveraged their numbers and the surprise of their sudden arrival.
But Angron's personal duel had wasted that critical opportunity.
Fleetmistress Lorrata Sarin had tried to keep the lines intact… but even she could not defy a Primarch's command.
"A classic Khorne-style stupidity," Curze said.
On the bridge of the Flame of Faith, Lorgar echoed his brother's sentiment:
"Throwing away certain victory for so-called glory."
Still, both Primarchs knew they had "messed up" one crucial point—
A far greater threat was now taking shape.
Over a thousand World Eaters ships had broken through the blockade and vanished into the warp.
On the star map, red arcs—like metastasizing cancer—spread across the sector.
Commanders stared grimly at the map.
The crimson points were like pus seeping from an infected wound, spreading through the galaxy via the warp.
Each red line marked a vessel filled with bloodlust—twisted course lines forming a network of grotesque veins across the stars.
Unleashed slaughter. And for the greater war effort, this was a nightmare.
These fleeing ships had become unbound monsters—growing flesh over their hulls, turning weapons into altars of sacrifice.
Some ships had gone completely insane, randomly tearing through realspace, ripping open warp rifts without warning.
The most dangerous carried dormant Khorne blessings—enough to transform an entire planet into a daemonworld.
Worse yet, Imperial Fists, Iron Warriors, and Sons of Wounds would now need to divert troops for defense.
No one could predict where the madness would strike next.
But now wasn't the time for regrets. The original plan had to continue.
The Thunderhawk formation re-entered the Night Blade, passing through its plasma seal and settling into their berths with magnetic whirrs.
As the ramps opened, thirty fully armored Apothecaries stood ready, sprayers filled with Purity Bloom disinfectant.
The Black Guard disembarked. Daemon blood on their Terminator armor vaporized on contact with clean air, turning to foul black smoke.
Curze strode through the sterilization zone. The scanners flashed red across him—but Primarchs were incorruptible. That was Imperial truth.
The Black Guard, however, faced full purification.
The surviving two hundred honor guards underwent strict quarantine—armor scrubbed with blessed disinfectant, neural links checked via lie-detecting psychic devices. Any showing signs of irregularity were locked in stasis.
Then came seventy-two hours of isolation, until the Inquisition arrived for evaluation.
As for Curze—
When the Midnight Lord stepped onto the bridge, the command console activated instantly. From the data stream, Lorgar's image materialized.
"Over fourteen hundred enemy ships still resist," said the Word Bearer Primarch, his voice metallic. "But the real problem is the ones that got away."
He didn't ask about Angron. He knew.
Curze, tracing the star chart with a fingertip, locked the focus onto Coruscant.
"We finish this," he said coldly. "Then proceed as planned."
"Agreed," Lorgar replied without hesitation.
What followed was synchronized perfection.
The Midnight Lords deployed—thirty cruisers encircling and severing escape routes. Word Bearer priests sang as they blessed light lance arrays.
The Grey Knights and Hellenic Demigods cut in from the flanks, weaving a death net of sanctified runes.
On the holomap, enemy icons blinked out one by one.
One Chaos Star Destroyer tried to self-destruct—only to be caught by the Night Blade's gravitational anchor and torn apart.
As the last enemies in the Imbroco system fell, the moment had arrived—
Time to launch the Exterminatus upon Coruscant.
Recon drones had already returned hazy imagery:
Orbiting wreckage fused into heretical megastructures. Psychic signatures rivaling Primarchs radiated from its surface.
Daemonkind had taken root.
But Curze and Lorgar would not waste time in another ground war.
They would end this with absolute extinction.
And in the depths of hell, new guests were arriving…
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enjoying the story? Support the author and get early access to chapters by joining my Patre@n!Find me at: patre@n*com/Mutter
You can read each novel for $5 or get them all for just $15.
I Am Zeus, KING OF GODS (Chapter 79)
Fairy Tail: Igneel's Eldest Son (Chapter 391)
I Am Thalos, Odin's Older Brother (Chapter 471)
Reborn in America's Anti-Terror Unit (Chapter 677)
Solomon in Marvel (Chapter 1059)
Becoming the Wealthiest Tycoon on the Planet (Chapter 1418)
Surgical Fruit in the American Comics Universe (Chapter 1422)
American Detective: From TV Rookie to Seasoned Cop (Chapter 1452)
American TV Writer (Chapter 1504)
I Am Hades, The Supreme GOD of the Underworld!(Chapter 570)
Reborn as Humanity's Emperor Across the Multiverse (Chapter 703)
[+50 Power Stones = +1 Extra Chapter][+5 Reviews = +1 Extra Chapter]