"Brother, we're in trouble. Imperial Majesty might not be able to handle that many abomination engines."
Lion suddenly spoke up in warning. "We have to pull back inside the Titan engine cluster's defensive line before those abomination engines finish closing the encirclement."
It wasn't just the Lion. Guilliman and the others all wore grave expressions.
Out beyond the observation deck, five or six massive daemon engines, plus a swarm of more rotting, corrupted machines, were already closing in.
It was obvious that once the Daemon Princes had noticed this fortress-type Titan, they'd hurriedly peeled those engines off to converge on it.
The vicious whirling blade arrays, the pus-dripping auger-drills, and those yawning cannon muzzles were all clearly visible.
You could practically smell the bloody, rancid stink venting from their engines.
"I see new trajectories.
Faster. Close in further, get inside its shield envelope, destroy every mechanical structure!"
The Lords of Change had sensed how terrifying this colossal war-engine truly was—especially its astounding defensive power.
Three layers of stacked fortress-grade void shields and a mesh of subsidiary shield generators were enough to blunt almost all incoming artillery fire.
So they chose to go for a melee kill, swarming and tearing down this Savior's war-engine at close quarters.
Several sly, man-shaped warp-ravens hid behind the advancing daemon engines, wrapped in sorcerous ward-fields.
They mocked freely, their voices like snapping dead branches.
Hoarse. Grating.
"That one has made a fatal mistake, grown so careless that he dares to mock the might of Chaos.
He's about to be surrounded…"
"Faster, faster—spin the web of doom tighter."
"Cursed little creature, your end is at hand."
"Stupid pretender-Emperor, you can't escape. Endless Chaos will bury you!"
The man-shaped warp-ravens deliberately heaped insults upon the Savior, upon this so-called Emperor of Mankind, trying to goad his fury.
They could never help themselves.
The more they could prove the enemy's "stupidity" and stoke his rage, the more excited they became.
On top of that, Khorne's own greater daemons were drawing close, bellowing as well.
Eyes gleaming with predatory hunger.
The moment the Savior's war-engine's defenses cracked, they would surge in as one to butcher the Primarchs inside the hull.
"Damnable Chaos abominations!"
Hearing the chorus of howls and abuse, Eden couldn't help but curse back.
But even as he swore, he couldn't quite stop the corners of his mouth from twitching upward, or keep himself from straightening his back a little.
In the past, those terms—"false Emperor," "cursed one," and the rest—had all been reserved for Big E himself.
What had he ever done to deserve getting cursed out like that too?!
In its own way, that was an honor.
Everyone knew this much.
The harder your enemy rages at you, the more it proves they fear you—and odds are good they're already mentally breaking down.
Just look at the way the Chaos Gods spat curses whenever they mentioned Big E, as if the old man owed them all a mountain of unpaid debts.
The sheer loathing.
Now he was about to enjoy that treatment as well. He was no longer that little nobody skulking in the shadows.
Just look at the field. There were four Primarchs standing here, and those Daemon Princes had latched onto him alone as their target of abuse.
They'd practically forgotten everyone else existed.
That was prestige.
Lion and Guilliman both felt a little sour at how it played out. As Primarchs, they didn't often have the experience of being collectively ignored.
If it were just one of them getting cursed out alone, they'd be furious.
But with so many of them gathered, how was it that those Chaos abominations could only see the Savior and still had the gall to pretend the rest of them weren't even there?
Were they saying the rest of them posed no threat at all?
The humiliation!
"Hm?"
Suddenly, Guilliman caught his own name in the croak of a Lord of Change, and the curse it used was fairly filthy.
That Daemon had nearly died at the Ultramarine Primarch's blade once before, and now he ranted and raved about vengeance.
Hearing it, Guilliman's lips curved in the faintest of smiles.
That felt good.
At least he'd left a few marks on the war against Chaos.
His achievements weren't completely eclipsed by the Savior's rising legend. He was still ahead of that old lion in this particular metric, at least.
Right now, Lion and Khan were also pricking up their ears, listening hard for their own names in the curses.
No such luck.
Those damned Chaos abominations deserved hell.
They were even angrier than the two Primarchs actually being cursed.
Still, all this was a mere minor interlude for the Primarchs, hardly worth any real attention.
They finished their assessment of the battlefield at blistering speed.
"At current pace, the abomination engines will hit melee range inside two minutes and start posing a real threat.
Especially that plague-flesh mountain right there. Those acidic secretions will almost certainly corrode mechanical structures."
Khan used naked sight alone to judge both sides' speeds, time-to-contact, and probable threats.
That kind of mental calculus was a survival skill for any high-speed assault commander.
And as a Primarch, his instincts were even keener.
A moment later, the sensor arrays confirmed every detail of the White Scar Primarch's assessment.
His brain really did work faster than the machine spirits—exactly the sort of talent that let him thread like lightning through enemy lines.
"At that speed, there's no time left to pull out.
Imperial Majesty is simply too big. If we start to turn now, we'll just expose weak spots."
"That would be even more dangerous."
Eden nodded, speaking even as he issued a new set of orders.
"Our best option is to dig in right here, hold position, and wait for the Titan cluster to catch up to us.
Once they're in range, we punch out together and resume the breakthrough."
Boom—
At the Savior's command,
Imperial Majesty ground to a halt, sinking down slightly as if bracing itself. Its colossal machine-legs extended additional struts that drove deep into the earth.
It locked itself down into a massive gun-carriage frame, built for stability.
Clang, clang, clang.
A thousand interlocking gears shrieked and hammered.
Bulkhead after bulkhead of armor peeled open, revealing dense nests of apertures within. Every one of them was a launch tube for missiles and shells.
At the same time, six enormous cannons telescoped and rotated out from either flank of Imperial Majesty's torso, looking very much like new mechanical limbs growing out of nowhere.
"Hss~ Is… that what you call defense?"
Lion and the other Primarchs stared, slack-jawed, at the holo-projection of Imperial Majesty, bristling now with missile ports and auxiliary gun-limbs.
They had seriously underestimated just how heavily armed this Redemption Bastion-class Titan truly was.
It had eight mechanical arms in total, and each one was thicker than a macro-cannon barrel.
In truth, their estimates were still far too conservative.
Back in the design phase, Eden had never been fond of the old Imperial aesthetic of bolting cathedrals and reliquaries all over a Titan's hull.
Nor did he find the near-humanoid silhouette particularly rational.
Pure wasted space.
So Imperial Majesty, under his directives, had been stripped of virtually all decorative structures and space-hogging buildings.
Everything was replaced with purely functional structures, squeezing every last cubic meter for use.
Even the legs were built as heavy, reinforced assemblies rather than those skinny, human-like stilts. They could fold and extend, and were fitted with auxiliary treads.
Anything to minimize the chance of a Titan tripping on the battlefield. That sort of slapstick disaster had, regrettably, happened more than once in Imperial history.
If the machine spirits and the tech-priests hadn't fought tooth and nail, he'd have happily gone full-track chassis and been done with it.
But that wasn't all. Eden had always thought the standard Titan armament scheme was far too conservative.
With something this big, how could you justify just two weapon-arms and a pair of shoulder-mounted main guns?
Four primary guns on a chassis this size was an insult.
He had the Forge Directorate lean all the way in, deploying their full creativity to cram as many macro-weapons as possible into every volume they could reach.
Now, in addition to the twin siege-hammer arms and their integrated guns, Imperial Majesty mounted six torso-side main batteries and four more on its shoulders.
And in the dead center of its belly, one even larger core gun.
Thirteen main guns in total, plus a forest of secondary weapons of every caliber and class.
Inside, beyond the power cores, shield nodes, and internal defense and troop-bay systems, almost everything else was munitions storage and gun assemblies.
It was, in every sense, a walking, super-heavy mobile munitions depot.
"Brother Eden, is that… a Warlord Cannon?"
Lion stared at the core gun slung under Imperial Majesty's central torso in the holo, throat working.
On Imperial ground warfronts, Warlord Cannons were some of the nastiest artillery pieces that existed, purpose-built to crack city walls and fortress bastions or erase entire districts in a single shot.
Each one was nearly a hundred meters tall in its own right, a nightmare to deploy, chained to an entire century of engine crews, movers, and guardians.
Any time a Warlord Cannon rolled onto a front, the enemy threw everything they had at it, desperate to stop it firing even once.
But Brother Eden had simply built one into Imperial Majesty's torso, wrapped it in layers of shields, and given it the mobility of a Titan.
How was that even remotely fair?
"No, that's not a Warlord. Those are still too weak."
Eden shook his head.
The original plan had, in fact, been to mount a Warlord Cannon there.
But eventually, the Forge Directorate had decided that, as the Savior's personal engine, Imperial Majesty's centerpiece weapon simply had to be more outrageous—something that broke completely free of conventional thinking.
In the end, they swapped in something considerably nastier.
They even scrapped previous blueprints and blew the budget again to install a much larger, next-generation reactor just to feed it.
"More precisely, it's a relic-grade shipboard lance. It's a bit energy-hungry."
Eden answered under the Primarchs' collective stare.
That lance was xenos tech, Eldar work. It drew less power than an Imperial lance of similar output and took up less room, which was the only reason it could be mounted on a ground engine at all.
But on land, the thing was utterly monstrous.
Silence.
As the Savior finished speaking, Lion and the other Primarchs fell utterly quiet. He could even hear someone swallow.
Any Imperial commander worth the name knew that ship weapons and ground weapons lived in entirely different leagues.
Even a single shipboard lance gun left Warlord Cannons in the dust. Warlords at best imitated a diluted sliver of naval-grade firepower.
And here Imperial Majesty was mounting a relic-grade lance array.
No engine, Chaos or Imperial, would shrug that off.
Lion and his brothers actually felt a stab of pity for the Chaos abominations out there.
They had no idea what kind of oncoming storm they were walking into.
"At this level of 'defensive fire,' we should be able to keep those daemon engines off us, don't you think?"
Eden smiled faintly as he looked at the still-howling Chaos beasts in the distance.
Vmm—
Out beyond the observation deck, a dozen energy spikes flared to life, brilliant and savage.
The big one was coming. That was the lance cycling up to firing threshold.
At the same time, all twelve of Imperial Majesty's conventional main guns roared to life, as did the myriad lesser launch ports.
A storm of shells and missiles screamed out toward the onrushing daemon engines.
On the Chaos side, confusion reigned.
They saw the Savior's behemoth suddenly hunker down and then bristle with cannon muzzles all over its frame.
The central core gun in particular was blazing with a terrifying light.
Every daemon on that front felt the threat in their marrow, and a strange, brief hush fell over the battle-line.
All the howling, the taunts, the roar of challenge—snuffed out in an instant.
???
"Gaaah!
Oh, Changer of Ways…"
The Lords of Change, watching from above, saw the Savior's smile and felt an inexplicable chill.
The blazing radiance blooming from that central barrel a heartbeat later made their beaks snap shut with an audible click.
The moment they recognized what they were looking at, their whole frames shuddered.
"No. Impossible. That's an Imperial shipboard weapon. How is that on the surface?!"
The Chaos vortex enshrouding this world all but blanketed the whole planet, thick enough to choke off every orbital-level strike.
Under normal circumstances, the strongest weapons the Imperium could bring to bear here were Titans and Warlord Cannons.
And even Warlords were a limited threat to an attacking Chaos host—hard to deploy, slow to reload, and instantly targeted.
But now, the Savior's colossal war-engine could fire a lance.
That was existential.
Anything within its arcs of fire was in danger of outright obliteration.
Before they could act, the first salvo of conventional artillery came crashing down.
Mushroom-shaped blossoms of fire rose in a chain, hammering the advancing daemon engines. Shields flickered. Armor ruptured. Some were already smoking wrecks.
And under that storm of explosions, none of them were in any position to interfere with the lance firing.
Craa—
The Lords of Change were the first to bolt, beating their wings desperately as they tried to claw their way out of the lance's envelope.
The daemon engines and lesser daemons realized what was happening a heartbeat later and also began to break, surging sideways and backward.
Run.
They had to get out of the kill zone or there would be no survivors.
Too late.
VMMMM!!!
Several lances speared out along the surface, racing away from Imperial Majesty toward the Chaos ranks. The ground beneath them vaporized into churned, glassy scars ten meters wide.
"Blood for the blo—"
An eighty-meter-tall Khorne Blood Slaughterer daemon-engine tank, still barreling straight ahead, never even finished its roar.
It hit the lance head-on.
Its sorcerous shield held for less than a second before it was punched through. The crimson ram-spike and skull prow dissolved into cinders. The entire engine detonated in a spray of molten slag.
The beams did not stop.
The converging high-energy lances scythed across the ground in sweeping S-curves, burning everything in their path to ash.
Caaawk!
One Lord of Change, who'd tried to jump early, was still too slow. A lance scraped across him, shearing off an entire wing. He tumbled down in a spiral of flame and shrieking feathers.
Moments later, the individual beams converged into a single titanic ray, nearly a hundred meters thick.
This was the essence of a lance: several lower-output emitters combining into one focused discharge to achieve vastly higher energy density.
That single spear of light plowed onward, gouging a blackened highway across the earth before finally detonating in a remote corner of the Chaos line in a sun-white blast.
An even larger shockwave rippled out, flattening and shattering wave after wave of Chaos filth.
The lance strike erased everything in its line of fire, and even in the secondary zone of destruction—several square kilometers out from the point of detonation—few things were left standing.
KABOOM—
"Hss~ shipboard weapons really do hit differently…"
As the lance finally flared out, Eden casually slipped on a pair of sunglasses. The obsidian lenses reflected the distant, pale white bloom of the explosion.
A moment later the thunder rolled in, the softened shockwave washing across him and teasing his annoyingly perfect black hair.
The other Primarchs, by contrast, had all been caught full-on by the glare. Their eyes stung, and they squinted against the after-images, looking distinctly un-dignified.
"My apologies. Things were urgent and I didn't have time to arrange sunglasses for everyone."
Eeden offered an appropriately polite apology.
He had warned them right before firing. Even in atmosphere, the lance's range might be curtailed, but the brilliance of the discharge still exceeded expectations.
"Damn it all, how does Brother Eden manage to look that stylish under any circumstances?!"
Lion rubbed at his eyes, grumbling inwardly.
No matter the battlefield, his brother always somehow managed to strike a perfectly composed, impeccably flashy pose—drawing every eye.
So much so that he had now outshone even the Great Crusade's former top idol, the so-called Imperial Phoenix, Fulgrim himself.
Once the afterglow faded, they all looked down at the battlefield again.
What met their gaze was a flat, blackened highway, nearly a hundred meters wide.
It looked like some giant architect had carved out a road just for them, stretching all the way beyond the horizon.
Everything within that path of advance had been scoured clean of Chaos filth. The surviving daemons outside the core zone were stumbling and scattering in panic.
Their screams were nothing but raw agony.
From their eyes, the Primarchs could see something new now.
Fear.
They were afraid of the Savior's power.
Imperial Majesty had fired one single volley—and blown apart the oncoming Chaos vanguard, opening a corridor through the warp-tide.
"This fortress-Titan is more than worthy. It can definitely pull its weight in the real fight against Chaos."
Looking at the devastation Imperial Majesty had wrought and the daemons' wails, Eden felt more and more satisfied.
It was a pity he still couldn't pinpoint Fulgrim's position. If he had, he'd have happily dropped that shot straight into the Phoenix's command bastion.
Even if it didn't kill the traitor Primarch outright, it would at least ruin his whole command net.
And there was still no sign of the other fallen Primarchs either—which was worrying.
Eden let out a quiet sigh, admitting to himself that he'd been too conservative earlier.
He really should have let the Forge Directorate build an even bigger war-engine.
You could never have too much firepower.
Only when Humanity's Empire had stacked enough overwhelming firepower would it ever know peace and prosperity again.
A thought struck him.
He'd only just turned his head when his adjutant, Tarko, stepped forward into the perfect listening position.
The right hand of the Emperor knew every nuance of the Savior's smallest gestures, knew exactly when to step up and be ready to receive new orders.
(End of Chapter)
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