=== Obi-Wan ===
Obi-Wan stood atop a mound of daemon bodies as the smoke parted and revealed the last nightmare line of the enemy, the Chaos Astartes, marching through the ruin like walking cathedrals of hatred. Their armor burned with warpfire sigils, their pauldrons bristled with mutated spikes, their every footfall struck like a mallet against the world's failing heartbeat.
The clones opened fire in a storm.
Thousands of blasters screamed blue fury into the oncoming giants. Lances of energy hammered against ceramite corrupted by the warp, burning away paint and scoring deep gouges that smoked in the cold air. Some bolts found gaps, burrowing into joints, neck-seals and eye lenses, and a few of the twisted Space Marines fell dead, or staggered as sizzling wounds burst across their armor.
But most of the Chaos Marines barely reacted.
A red-plated brute raised his arm to shield his helm and kept walking.
Then the line of Chaos Astartes broke into a run.
"Hold the line!" Obi-Wan shouted.
But the enemy hit like an avalanche.
The first of them crashed into the clone front with a roar that split the sky. A serrated chain-axe whirred, and three troopers vanished beneath a hurricane of sparks and shredded armor. Another Chaos Marine seized a clone by the throat and hurled him into two more, slamming them all against a broken AT-TE hull so hard their helmets cracked like pottery.
The clones fought back desperately.
One squad flanked left, pouring fire at a Marine's exposed knee until the mutated armor bubbled and split. The giant stumbled before a second squad peppered his visor with concentrated shots. The bolted lenses shattered. He fell, roaring, only to be finished by a grenade that detonated inside the torn armor with a wet, concussive pop.
But for every one that fell, three more surged forward.
A Chaos marine towered above the melee, wielding a hooked glaive that hummed with warp energy. He cleaved through a dozen clones in a single sweeping arc. Their bodies flew like ragdolls, armor crushed, limbs twisted. He stepped over them, planted his armored boot on one clone's chest, and ground him into the dirt.
Obi-Wan leapt into the fray, intercepting a descending chainblade. The teeth screeched against his brass blade, sparks spraying like a fountain of molten stars.
The Marine roared, pressing down with a strength that felt tectonic.
Obi-Wan slid aside and cut upward, severing the weapon's motor and carving a glowing line across the Marine's helm with his lightsaber. But even wounded, the giant fought on, swinging a massive gauntlet that Obi-Wan dodged.
The battlefield around them dissolved into chaos.
A clone captain shoulder-charged a Marine, firing point-blank into his chest as he pushed with everything he had. The Marine backhanded him with a blow that folded his chestplate in half. Another trooper jumped onto a giant's back, jabbing a vibroknife repeatedly into a neck-joint until the blade broke. He was hurled off and stomped flat in the next second.
But the clones didn't budge.
They held their ground even as the enemy waded into them like titans in a sea of mortals. Blasters flared. Vibroblades met mutated chainblades. Grenades detonated in tight clusters. The air was choked with smoke, scorched plastoid, and the metallic tang of blood spilled in oceans.
A Chaos Marine bull-rushed forward, seizing two clones by the shoulders and smashing them together before tossing their broken bodies aside.
Another stomped through a line of troopers firing as fast as their rifles would allow. The blaster bolts melted into his warp-scarred armor as he smashed one clone's helmet inward with a single punch.
Still the clones fought. Still they resisted.
They knocked one Marine's leg out from under him and swarmed him, firing into the faceplate until the ceramite shattered. The corrupted warrior thrashed, roaring defiance even as they finished him.
Obi-Wan parried another strike and cut down his opponent in a bright, decisive stroke. But he could feel the tide turning, feel the pressure mounting. The Chaos Astartes were too few to win, yet too monstrous to break quickly. And in their dying throes, they meant to take half the army with them.
A blaster volley exploded against a Marine's back, and he spun, bolter barking. The shot caught a trooper mid-stride and tore the man in two, the scream swallowed by the blast.
Obi-Wan grimaced.
This line would not hold much longer.
And yet the clones did not falter.
They fired, vented their weapons, then fired again. Taking down giants with the grit of soldiers who understood that courage at the end of all things was the last gift they could give.
Obi-Wan slid under the Chaos Marine's crushing blow, boots skidding across blood churned mud. The giant's chainblade screamed past his head, teeth snapping at the air. Obi-Wan pivoted, drove forward, and plunged his brass blade into the crease of the Marine's left knee.
The corrupted Astartes bellowed, dropping to one side.
Obi-Wan didn't wait.
He kicked off the giant's thigh, soared upward in a blur, and stabbed his lightsaber straight through the Marine's right eye. The blade hissed as it punched through helm, skull, and brainstem, the burning glow erupting out the back of the headplate like a miniature sunrise.
The Marine toppled like a felled obelisk, shaking the ground when he hit.
Obi-Wan landed lightly atop the fallen corpse, breath ragged. He yanked the blade free with a sharp twist, and then felt the Force vibrate through him in a sudden tremor.
He looked up.
Not far, Anakin was a wildfire.
Three Chaos Astartes had encircled him, each larger than any foe the young Jedi had ever faced. But he tore through them like they were younglings.
Anakin ducked beneath a swing that would've taken his head clean off, vaulted up the Marine's arm, and severed the limb at the elbow with a single, furious stroke. Before the severed gauntlet even hit the ground, Anakin spun, cleaving another Marine across the chestplate so deeply sparks jetted out of the wound like arterial fire.
The last Astartes lunged, a hammer the size of a clone trooper slamming down. Anakin caught it with both hands through the Force, the air trembling around him, then shoved it aside with a raw, tidal surge that blasted the Marine backward ten meters.
Obi-Wan's heart skipped.
He knew power. He had seen mastery, brilliance, luminous potential. But this… this was different. The sacrifice of the Daughter, the shockwave of the Force unbound, it had changed Anakin. It had truly crowned him as it's chosen.
He was fighting at a level even Obi-Wan had never seen him reach.
Anakin charged the fallen Marine, leapt high, and landed on the corrupted giant's torso with an impact that cratered the mud. His lightsaber plunged again and again into the Marine's helm. After three brutal thrusts, the giant's armor split, and the Chaos warrior slumped still.
Before any of them could breathe, a distant thunder rose, armor smashing against armor, ceramite hammering ceramite.
Obi-Wan turned.
From the far flank of the battlefield, where the daemon hordes had been heaped into mountains of corpses, the Imperium came.
Maximus descended into the enemy line with his thunderhammer raised high. The first swing cracked a Marine's torso open in a boom that sent shockwaves crawling across the dirt. His second strike crushed another Astartes helmet like a bronze egg. The Ultramarine captain pushed forward, his armor drenched in daemon-ichor and firelight, each blow rewriting the landscape.
Beside him, Sebastian was a hurricane of black flame.
The Darksaber sang with a ferocity not meant for mortal ears, its edge wrapped in The Emperor's benediction. Sebastian's jump pack unleashed blasts of burning wind as he leapt into the corrupted legion. Every strike of the black blade sheared through chainaxes, helms, gauntlets, slicing ceramite and bone as easily as parchment.
Together they hit the Chaos line so hard the entire formation staggered.
A ripple passed through the corrupted warriors, a moment of genuine shock. They were trapped between Skywalker and Kenobi on one side, and two living legends of the Imperium on the other.
But Chaos Marines did not know the meaning of surrender.
They roared with voices that made the ground quake and launched themselves at every direction at once. One charged Maximus and was reduced to molten ruin as the thunderhammer caved in his chest. Another lunged at Sebastian, only to lose both arms in a single, blinding cut.
A third sprinted toward Obi-Wan, bolter blazing, until Anakin intercepted him, tackling the Marine with the Force, slamming him to the earth and driving his saber through the twisted breastplate.
Still they came.
Axeblades screaming. Bolters thundering. Warp-runes flaring crimson and violet.
The clones regrouped behind the Jedi, pouring fire into any openings they could find. Even wounded, even exhausted, they stood their ground as the final storm broke around them.
The Chaos Astartes fought like beasts who knew they were doomed, howling, charging, taking troopers with them even as they died.
Yet the tide had turned.
Maximus, Sebastian, and the Imperial troops carved deeper, their pincer tightening. Anakin fought like a being half-made of lightning. Obi-Wan cut down every twisted giant that dared to break away from the pack. And the clones filled the gaps with stubborn, defiant fire.
The corrupted legion began to collapse.
One warrior at a time. One roar at a time. One brutal, final stand at a time.
The last line of Chaos, cornered and raging, refused to fall quietly, but fall they would, crushed between the hammer of the Astartes and the unbreakable will of the Jedi.
The end of the battle had come, forged in fire, blood, and the last screams of the dying corruptions of the warp.
=== Raxor ===
Raxor watched the battlefield thunder and convulse beneath the closing of the final warp portal, its shrieking light folding in on itself like a dying star. For a heartbeat, the world held its breath. Then came the detonation. A tidal burst of raw, scouring force swept across the ruined plain, erasing thousands of daemons in a single incandescent blink. Their howls dissolved into the wind. What remained were only the stranded fiends and the Chaos Astartes who had not been quick, or fortunate enough to escape.
The Salamander wiped soot from his lenses. The rumble of Maximus' thunderhammer rolled like distant weather, and Sebastian's silhouette carved a ragged path through the last red ocean of warpspawn. Even from the rear lines, Raxor felt the heat of the Black Templar's fury, a bonfire against the night.
But the battle was no longer a blazing storm. It was a flickering flame now. And he knew his brothers would finish what they had started.
He patted the side of the AT-TE he'd appropriated, its great cannon still glowing faintly from the last overcharged barrage he had coaxed from it. The clone crew inside gave him a tired thumbs-up through the hatch, a little gesture that carried the weight of shared survival. Raxor returned it, then slung his heavy bolter over his shoulder with a soft clank that felt almost gentle after the chaos.
Time to help, not to kill.
He vaulted off the tank and landed with the soft, seismic thud only an Astartes could make, the ground dimpling under his boots.
Ahead, a trio of Mandalorians strained around a collapsed durasteel support beam. Their armor bore new cracks, and the one trapped beneath the beam gasped through clenched teeth as sparks rained down from somewhere above.
Raxor lumbered toward them, looming like a walking furnace.
One of the Mandalorians heard him and snapped towards him. "Lord Raxor!"
Raxor answered by planting a boot beside the beam. "You called that lifting?"
Before they could react, he reached down and curled his gauntleted fingers under the edge. The metal groaned as he hauled the beam upward. He tossed it aside into the dirt, where it punched a shallow crater and lay still.
The Mandalorians stared. Their trapped brother sat up, coughing dust, then stared too.
Raxor gave a small nod. "Get him to a medical tent."
One of them took their helmet off to blink at him. "Thank you Lord."
He moved on.
The battlefield felt strangely haunted in its dying moments, not by spirits, but by silence creeping in where screams had lived moments earlier. Raxor welcomed it. The soft whir of his armor's cooling vents was suddenly loud, almost intimate.
Near the remains of a shattered clone barricade, he found a pair of troopers carrying their fallen comrade. Their hands shook with the effort. Raxor approached, and the younger one instinctively raised a blaster towards him.
"Hold clone. Im here to help." The Salamander said.
He gently plucked the body from their grip, as if handling a fragile relic. "You've done enough for him. Let me carry him the rest of the way."
The clones exchanged a look of mingled grief and gratitude before falling in step beside him. They led him toward a small clearing the medics had turned into a silent garden of the honored dead. Raxor knelt, setting the fallen trooper among the others with a reverence that they didnt understand.
The clone that had pointed his blaster at Raxor swallowed hard. "Was it… was it worth it? All of this?"
Raxor looked out across the field, the troopers searching for survivors, the Mandalorians checking their wounded, the Astartes forming new defensive lines as the last daemons fell beneath their fury.
"Yes," he said. "You cannot fathom the horrors that would have consumed the galaxy if left unchecked. Your brothers gave their lives for a just cause."
The clone removed his helmet before dropping it into the dirt below him. "I hope so." He said before returning to his duty.
A soft wind passed over them, tugging at banners and smoke trails, as if the world itself exhaled in relief.
Raxor rose and turned his gaze back toward the front lines, where Maximus and Sebastian fought like twin storms carving the final path to victory.
"Stay safe behind the lines," he told the clones. "The battle is almost finished."
He followed the thinning echoes of battle until he found the circle of unconscious master.
They lay scattered, their robes fanned around them. The air shimmered faintly with the last wisps of spent power, the afterglow of an act so immense that the ground around them still hummed.
And in the center, beside a small, still shape, knelt Dooku.
The Count's shoulders were bowed. His usually immaculate composure was cracked like old stone. Raxor could see the tremor in his hand where it rested on the tiny, green form lying motionless against the scorched earth.
Behind him, the Terminator guard stood vigil over Nira's unconscious body, their hulking frames forming a ring of unbreakable steel around her.
Raxor turned toward them, voice low. "Take the Grand Regent to the battle barge. She needs to rest."
The Terminators obeyed immediately. They lifted Nira with the reverence reserved for relics and carried her away, their heavy footfalls fading into the murmur of distant medics.
When they had gone, the Salamander faced the heart of the circle.
Dooku looked up at him.
Tears clung to the deep lines of his face.
"He is no more." Dooku rasped, voice frayed thin. "He closed the rifts. And in doing so… he gave everything."
Raxor lowered himself down beside Dooku, his armor groaning faintly. He rested a gauntleted hand on the Jedi's shoulder.
"I am sorry for your loss," Raxor said, his tone softened, shorn of all battlefield thunder. "He fought with honor. And he died so others would live. There is no greater courage than that."
Dooku bowed his head, a shudder passing through him. His other hand tightened around Yoda's cold hand. "He was the heart of our Order," he whispered. "The finest of us. And I… I could do nothing but watch him go. I know I am no longer a part of the Jedi, but… he was my master. My friend."
Raxor did not move. He stayed there beside the grieving master.
Dooku closed his eyes, breathing once, feeling his grief. The tremble in his shoulders eased, though it did not vanish.
Behind them, the unconscious Masters lay. Beyond them, the battlefield quieted further, as the battle reached its final moments.
And there, in the sacred stillness, a former Jedi mourned.
And an Astartes kept vigil beside him.
===
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