=== Nira ===
The drop ship slammed into the shattered plain with a thunderous crash. The rear ramp blew open, steam and fire billowing outward, and Nira strode into hell itself.
The battlefield was chaos incarnate. Daemons clawed their foes, screeching horrors spilling across the ruins. Separatist cyborgs, half-mechanical, half-enslaved flesh, marched in waves with blaster fire raking the smoke. Cultists screamed praise to their dark gods as they hurled themselves into the slaughter.
Behind her came the thunder of boots, the Terminators of the Ultramarines, each one encased in indomitable tactical dreadnought armor. Storm bolters barked in steady rhythm, reaper autocannons tearing through daemonflesh, and power fists or power swords crushed and cut anything bold enough to draw close.
And then there was Sanguinius.
No one could see him, save for Nira, who felt his presence and watched as he stalked into the battle like the God he was. He drifted across the battlefield, a shadow with wings of fire, and wherever he passed, the enemy simply died. A wave of cultists surged from the rubble to crash upon the Terminators' flank, only to fall apart, their throats severed, their skulls caved, their spines severed by unseen hands. Daemons charged, roaring, only to stagger and collapse as their hearts were pierced by blades no mortal eye could see.
Nira lifted her hand as a screeching horror lunged at her, its maw gaping wide enough to swallow her head whole. She extended her fingers, and arcs of viridian lightning erupted from her fingers. The daemon convulsed midair, screaming as black ichor boiling from its rupturing veins, before it burst apart in a storm of ash.
"Forward!" she cried, her voice carrying even over the din of war. The Terminators surged beside her, relentless juggernauts, their formation unbreakable. They carved their way through the tide, bolters roaring, storm shields flashing against the impacts of daemon claws and blaster fire alike.
A shriek cut through the chaos as a pack of bloodletters broke through the smoke, charging straight for her. They ran like wolves, blades raised, their eyes burning with hatred. Nira narrowed her gaze. Green lightning arced again, snapping from her palm to the lead daemon. It disintegrated in a flash of emerald fire, its weapon clattering to the ground as its body was reduced to cinders. Another lunged, and she thrust out her hand, and the daemon simply turned to mist.
But before the third could strike, it was simply gone. Not slain by her, nor by bolter fire. The daemon's body hit the ground in three neat pieces, as if an angel's blade had scythed through it. Sanguinius' pressed close then, and she allowed herself the faintest, fleeting smile.
Around her, death followed him like a tide.
One of the Terminators to her right slammed his fist into the ground, sending a shockwave through the charging cultists, scattering them like leaves before the wind. His brother beside him fired a sustained burst, reaper autocannon shells shredding a knot of Separatist cyborgs into molten wreckage. Still, the enemy poured forward, endless in number, driven by madness or machinery.
Nira raised both hands this time, gathering the crackling storm that danced along her fingertips. A knot of daemons burst through the front line, shrieking with fury. With a cry, she unleashed the green lightning across the battlefield in a wide arc, striking them all. The creatures writhed, their flesh blackening, bones showing through their cracking hides before they collapsed into heaps of smoking ruin.
Nira's eyes blazed with a malevolent green light as she let out a piercing scream, the sound raw with fury. She slammed her hands together, and the battlefield answered.
Hundreds of enemies, daemons, cultists, and cyborgs alike, were wrenched into the air as if seized by an unseen giant's grasp. Their shrieks filled the sky as they were dragged toward one another, bodies twisting and colliding midair. Then, with a deafening CRACK, the mass of flesh and metal slammed together in a catastrophic explosion. Blood, fire, and shards of broken bodies rained down like a storm, painting the ground with their carnage.
The Terminators bellowed their praise to the Emperor, their voices booming through vox-grilles, and pressed forward again.
But the battlefield was not without cost. She saw Ultramarine brothers fall, torn apart by daemon claws, Mandalorian corpses littered the ground, glowing green holes in the chestplates. She smelled burning flesh, loyalist and heretic alike.
Yet through it all, the line held. Through it all, Sanguinius walked.
Nira caught glimpses of him, a blur of white wings, a flash of golden hair, the faint ripple of his blade and spear descending. Each time, enemies fell like wheat before a scythe. Entire knots of daemons collapsed, torn apart by nothingness, cultist champions fell screaming, even the Separatist droid commanders were not spared, their heads crushed by invisible force.
Nira lifted her gaze to the sky where the portal loomed as Maximus flew towards it. A moment after his thunderous impact the portal collapsed.
She clenched her fists, lightning sparking again, her jaw set with iron resolve.
"Kill them all!" She commanded.
The Terminators pressed tighter around her, forming a wedge that plowed through the enemy. Green fire and storm bolter shells lit the battlefield. All the while, death walked unseen at her side, his angel's wings brushing against her soul.
=== Anakin ===
Blaster fire lit the ruins of Mortis like a storm of red and blue lightning, but it barely slowed the tide. The 501st held their line as best they could, shoulder to shoulder, white armor scorched black and yellow from fire and acid, their rifles screaming. But the things they faced… these were no Separatist clankers.
Anakin's blade whirled, azure light a shield around him. A Bloodletter of Khorne lunged, its skin the color of old blood, its brass sword catching fire with a hellish glow. He met it head-on, his saber cleaving through its weapon before shearing into its chest. The creature didn't scream, it laughed, a guttural sound full of hate before falling at his feet.
"Ahsoka, watch your flank!" Anakin shouted.
The Togruta spun, her green blades intercepting a pair of shimmering bolts of eldritch fire. The Horrors of Tzeentch laughed, their warped bodies splitting and reforming as they chanted in guttural, alien tongues. Arcane fire twisted into jagged bolts of lightning, slamming into clone ranks. The air smelled of burning flesh and ozone as men screamed, falling in heaps of smoking plastoid.
"General, they're ripping us apart!" Captain Rex bellowed over the din, firing his DC-17 into a Horror's head only for it to split into two smaller daemons, both shrieking in triumph as they unleashed twin waves of warp-flame.
"Hold the line!" Anakin roared, his voice carrying even above the thunder of battle. His lightsaber became a blur, batting aside fire that should have incinerated them all. He hurled out a wave of the Force, smashing a dozen Bloodletters back into the ruins, their bodies exploding into ash.
Still, it wasn't enough. The daemons just kept coming.
The line buckled as a pack of Bloodletters crashed into the front. One clone was split in half from shoulder to hip, another gutted and tossed aside like refuse. The clones fought with desperate courage, but their blasters seemed to do little against the warp-spawned flesh, and for every daemon that fell, five more surged forward to take its place, blades dripping with hate.
And then Obi-Wan ran to the front line.
He descended into the line like a storm. His lightsaber flared brilliant blue, cleaving through daemon after daemon with perfect, surgical precision. His every movement was flawless, but there was something different this time, something harsher.
A Bloodletter raised its brass blade high to strike Rex, and Obi-Wan's hand snapped out. The daemon froze in mid-motion, shrieking as its own bones snapped inward, its spine exploding from its back before it collapsed in a heap of gore. Without hesitation, Obi-Wan seized the blade with the Force, wrenching it free from the creature's lifeless hand.
Anakin's eyes widened as his friend caught the weapon, and then ignited his saber once more. One hand held the blue blade, the other the brass sword of Khorne. The two weapons moved together in a dance of violence that was both unnatural and utterly mesmerizing.
"Master Kenobi…?" Ahsoka's voice faltered.
Obi-Wan didn't answer. His face was set like stone, his eyes blazing with a focus Anakin had never seen before. He lunged forward, the brass sword crashing down with a strength that shattered a Bloodletter's weapon, while his lightsaber stabbed upward into the daemon's throat. In a single motion, he tore the blade free and slashed across, decapitating another.
He was a whirlwind.
The Force surged with him, and horrors died by the dozen. One shrieked as Obi-Wan clenched his fingers around the brass blade, its body imploding into a spray of gore. Another tried to weave a spell, only for Obi-Wan to hurl the brass sword into its chest with the Force, pinning it to a wall. His saber carved through two more, and then he wrenched the blade back into his hand as if it were made for him.
Blaster bolts from the 501st stitched across the field, cutting down daemons weakened by Obi-Wan's relentless assault. Still, the battlefield had become chaos incarnate. Warp fire rained from the Horrors, brass blades clashed with white plastoid, and everywhere men screamed and died.
Anakin barely parried a Bloodletter's savage strike, sparks flying as his saber met daemon-forged brass. He shoved the creature back with a blast of the Force, then looked over to Obi-Wan again.
The Jedi Master was fighting like something out of legend. His lightsaber flowed in tight, controlled arcs, deflecting, slicing, weaving through every weakness. But the brass blade… the way he used it was different. Brutal. Savage. It cleaved through daemon flesh with terrifying efficiency as if he were familiar with the blade.
"General Kenobi!" Rex called out, ducking behind cover as another volley of warp fire screamed overhead. "Sir! What in blazes are you doing?!"
Obi-Wan didn't answer. He slammed the pommel of the brass blade into a Horror's warped skull, splitting it open before following with a sweeping cut that bisected another from hip to shoulder.
With the Force, he crushed a Bloodletter into a heap of shattered bones, then impaled another on the brass blade, ripping upward in a fountain of ichor.
The clones rallied behind him, their spirits surging as they saw their general wading into the heart of the storm, cutting through monsters that had seemed unstoppable. Blaster fire renewed with furious intensity, the line holding once more.
Still, Anakin's heart hammered as he fought his way closer to Obi-Wan, blades whirling, cutting down daemons with reckless aggression.
"Obi-Wan!" he shouted again, forcing his way past a Horror that nearly dissolved Rex with a bolt of warp flame.
Obi-Wan glanced at him only once, his expression grim, his eyes hard as durasteel. And then he turned away, both weapons carving another bloody path through the daemonic horde.
Anakin exchanged a brief, unsettled glance with Ahsoka. She looked shaken, her sabers dripping with daemon ichor.
"I've never seen him fight like this," she muttered.
Neither had Anakin. And deep down, he wasn't sure whether it was courage, or something far darker that had taken hold of Obi-Wan Kenobi in that moment.
=== Yoda ===
The battlefield burned with madness. The ground was a tapestry of fire, broken steel, and the ichor of daemons spilling into the dirt. Legions of Jedi, invigorated beyond anything Yoda had ever felt in his nine centuries, carved their way through the nightmare tide. Their blades burned like miniature suns, the Force itself thrumming through every strike. He could feel it radiating from them all, every Jedi stronger, swifter, their connection magnified by the deaths of the Father and the Son. The Force itself was surging unbound, wild and absolute.
For Yoda, the energy was different. His body, though weary and scarred from his battle with the Sorcerer, felt charged, alive in ways he had not experienced since his youth. His wounds still ached, but power coursed beneath the pain, lifting him, steadying him.
He stood before his dropship, both hands resting on his cane, surveying the war. All around him, Jedi Masters, Knights, and Padawans cut down daemons by the score. Their Force pushes flattened entire ranks of cultists. Their blades severed limbs and heads in flashes of white-hot light. The air trembled with their combined will, a great chorus of resistance against the encroaching darkness.
And then, across the chaos, Yoda felt it. That presence. A shadow woven of spite and corruption. The Chaos Sorcerer.
Their eyes locked across the expanse of fire and slaughter. The Sorcerer, his warped armor gleaming with sickly runes, his staff dripping with unnatural light, had not forgotten their last clash. His sorcery had nearly ended Yoda then, rending his flesh and leaving him gasping in weakness. But Yoda had endured, and now, with the Force itself crashing like an ocean within him, he would finish it.
Yoda's clawed feet began to carry him forward slowly. Around him, the Jedi noticed and called out.
"Master Yoda, wait!"
"Stay with us, the lines aren't secure!"
"Let us protect you!"
He did not falter. His small frame, hunched and scarred, seemed suddenly massive, as though the very battlefield parted for him. He raised his clawed hand and shook his head once.
"Leave me be, you will," he rasped, voice quiet but thunderous in their minds. "This reckoning… long in coming, it has been."
The Jedi froze, as though the Force itself told them to stand aside. And so, reluctantly, they let him go.
The Chaos Sorcerer had seen him. The towering figure snarled, dark flames wreathing his form. His rasping laughter was carried even over the thunder of battle, echoing with both mockery and recognition. He began to stride forward, each footfall heavy enough to crack the broken stone beneath him. Daemons parted before him like a tide, unwilling to stand in the path of his rage.
And so, across the battlefield, two ancient beings walked toward one another, one a vessel of corruption and Chaos, the other a vessel of light and willpower.
Yoda's steps were short but unstoppable, his eyes burning with fierce light.
The Sorcerer's staff crackled with warp-energy, its runes screaming with promises of damnation and power. His stride was longer, heavier, each movement a display of raw arrogance.
Across the flaming no-man's-land, they closed the distance.
The war around them raged on, but to Yoda, it fell away. There was no battlefield, no armies, no portal, no galaxy at war. There was only the enemy before him, the one who had scarred him, who had mocked him, who had stained the Force with every step.
At last, they stopped, only a few dozen meters apart, staring into one another's souls.
"Finished with you, I am not." Yoda growled, voice a low rumble of ancient thunder. He let go of his cane and called his saber to his hand, igniting it with a snap-hiss, the green blade illuminating his weathered features.
The Sorcerer raised his staff, and reality itself warped around its head, warpfire beginning to coil like a storm.
"Your death will be a horror for the ages!" The Sorcerer snarled, the cracks in his armor flaring multi-colored smoke.
===
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