**Chapter 8: The Echo of Slaughter**
The Path of Sorrows was not built for war. It was a pilgrimage route, a narrow, winding cloister carved into the mountain's rock, designed to humble the faithful. Its walls were lined with alcoves, each containing a life-sized statue of a martyr in a state of beatific agony. The vaulted ceiling, a hundred feet high, was supported by slender, fluted columns that gave the entire passage the feel of a cathedral's nave. The path was designed for slow, contemplative walking. For the invading forces of the Tyrant of Chains, it was a deathtrap.
Sister-Sergeant Elara and Canoness Isolde had executed their fighting withdrawal with brutal, textbook precision. They had ceded the lower gates, but not before turning them into mine-filled, promethium-soaked kill-zones. They gave ground slowly, forcing the Chaos legionaries to push through corridors littered with the bodies of their own, their advance constricted, their numerical advantage nullified. Now, the head of the Chaos spearhead was pouring into the Path of Sorrows, lured by the promise of a direct route to the upper sanctums.
They found only death waiting for them.
From fortified positions at the far end of the Path and from murder-holes drilled into the walls above, the Sisters of Battle unleashed hell. Heavy bolters thundered, their explosive shells turning the front ranks of the traitor guardsmen into clouds of red mist and metal shards. Multi-meltas hissed, their thermal blasts slagging armor and boiling flesh. The grand cloister became a gallery of slaughter, the air thick with the stench of ozone, cooked meat, and righteous fury. The polished marble floors, once trod upon by pious pilgrims, were now slick with the blood and viscera of heretics.
But the forces of Chaos were relentless. They were a tide of fanatics, driven by profane faith and the iron will of their masters. For every traitor guardsman that fell, two more clambered over his corpse, their las-guns firing wildly. They used their own dead as shields, a moving barricade of flesh and bone, and they pushed forward, meter by bloody meter.
And then, the true horrors came.
The rhythmic *thump-thump-thump* of heavy footfalls echoed from the entrance, a sound that made the very rock tremble. Three figures, each the size of a small vehicle, lumbered into the corridor. They were Obliterators. Their armor was a grotesque, ever-shifting fusion of corrupted ceramite, pulsing daemonic flesh, and integrated weaponry. One moment, an arm was a multi-barreled assault cannon spitting a hail of shells; the next, it had morphed into a roaring plasma gun or a screaming melta-cannon. They were walking avatars of destruction, the ultimate expression of the Iron Warriors' profane love for war and daemonic machinery.
They immediately targeted the Sisters' heavy weapon emplacements. A torrent of plasma fire, bright as a sun, slammed into a bolter nest, vaporizing the gun, the Sisters manning it, and a ten-foot section of the wall behind them. A hail of autocannon shells shredded another position, the explosive rounds turning the defenders into bloody confetti.
The Sisters' defensive line buckled. Their faith was strong, but faith was a poor shield against plasma. Panic began to creep into their disciplined ranks.
That was the moment Likas chose to strike.
He didn't come from the front or the back. He came from above. Smashing down through the vaulted ceiling in a shower of stone and blessed dust, he landed in the very center of the Chaos advance. His landing was not a clumsy crash, but a controlled, explosive impact. He landed in a crouch, his luminous wings flaring out, and the ground around him buckled, sending a shockwave through the heretic ranks that tossed dozens of traitor guardsmen into the air like broken dolls.
He rose to his full, terrifying height, a demigod of silver-gold light standing amidst a sea of corruption. He held no weapon in his hands. He *was* the weapon.
The nearest Chaos legionaries, their minds shattered by the sheer, unexpected violence of his arrival, turned their las-guns on him. A storm of red energy bolts converged on his position.
Likas simply stood there, unmoving. A shimmering, translucent aura, woven from the dual frequencies of his power, flared to life around him. The las-bolts struck it and dissolved into harmless motes of light. He was utterly untouchable.
Then, he attacked. He moved with a speed that was a physical violation of reality. One moment he was standing still; the next he was a blur of motion, a whirlwind of destruction tearing through the enemy ranks. His fighting style was a brutal, hyper-efficient synthesis of a thousand martial arts, guided by the flawless combat-calculus of the ANITO Protocol.
A traitor sergeant charged him, a crackling power sword raised high. Likas didn't even look at him. He shot a hand out, catching the man's wrist. He didn't stop him; he used the man's own momentum, twisting and pulling him off-balance. With a single, fluid motion, Likas snapped the man's arm, ripped the power sword from his grasp, and drove the crackling blade through the chest of another heretic who was trying to flank him.
He was a force of nature. He punched through the chest plates of Chaos Marines, his fists glowing with kinetic force. He kicked with the force of a battering ram, shattering limbs and sending armored bodies flying. He moved through the enemy horde like a shark through a school of fish, a being of sublime violence, his every action a perfect equation of force and leverage. The ANITO Protocol was not just guiding him; it was experiencing a form of computational ecstasy, its every theoretical combat model being executed with flawless, beautiful perfection.
The Obliterators, seeing this new, immense threat, turned their attention from the Sisters to him. Their fleshy armor rippled as their limbs morphed into a terrifying arsenal.
"Now," Likas sent a single, psychic command.
The trap was sprung.
From the deep shadows of the martyr's alcoves, from the darkness of the high ceiling, from the very air itself, the Echo of Bone struck. It did not manifest as a single entity. It became a storm of silver vengeance. A dozen spectral hands, formed from pure Aethel, materialized in the air around the Obliterators. Each hand held a shimmering, ethereal blade.
The Obliterators, for all their daemonic power, were caught completely by surprise. Before they could even bring their weapons to bear on their new, ghostly assailants, the silver blades struck. They did not target the heavy armor. They bypassed it. The spectral blades, guided by a ten-thousand-year-old hatred, phased through the corrupted ceramite and struck the daemonic flesh and machinery beneath. They severed power conduits, sliced through mutated muscle, and, most importantly, severed the connection between the Chaos Marine soul and the daemon bound within its metal shell.
One of the Obliterators screamed, a sound of tearing metal and a dying star, as its internal reactor went critical. It swelled, its armor cracking, before detonating in a massive plasma explosion that incinerated every heretic within a fifteen-meter radius. The other two simply collapsed, their limbs frozen in mid-transformation, the daemonic light in their optics fading to black. They were now just inert, grotesque statues of iron and dead flesh.
The precision was breathtaking. The Echo had spent a fraction of its power to achieve a result that would have taken Likas minutes of brutal, close-quarters fighting. It was the perfect synergy of the hammer and the scalpel.
With their ultimate weapon neutralized, the Chaos advance broke. What was once a disciplined push became a panicked rout. The traitor legionaries, trapped between the relentless fire of the Sisters at their front and the terrifying demigod at their back, were slaughtered wholesale.
Likas did not relent. He was a pitiless, efficient engine of destruction. The soul of Reyes, the gentle man who had once felt pity for a Pox-Drudge, was buried deep, shielded by the cold, hard necessity of the moment. This was not a battle for survival; it was an act of extermination. These were not misguided soldiers; they were willing slaves to a power that sought to consume everything. There was no room for mercy.
He found the Chaos Champion leading the assault, a hulking brute of an Iron Warrior with a massive thunder hammer. The Champion, a veteran of a hundred campaigns, roared a challenge and swung his hammer in an arc that should have pulverized Likas. Likas simply dropped to one knee, letting the hammer pass over his head, and drove his glowing fist upwards into the Champion's unarmored jaw. The impact shattered the marine's helmet and snapped his neck, his roar cut short in a wet, gurgling crunch.
Likas stood over the corpse, the silver-gold light of his aura pulsing gently. The Path of Sorrows was now a charnel house, the battle over in minutes. The surviving heretics were being systematically hunted down and purged by the advancing Sisters of Battle.
A shimmering silver form coalesced beside him. The Echo of Bone stood there, its skeletal frame radiating a cold satisfaction.
*…it is done… the filth has been cleansed from this hall…*
"This was one hallway," Likas replied, his breathing steady, his body showing no sign of fatigue. The faith and fury of the battle had been a feast for him, his energy reserves now higher than when he had started. "They have breached the Convent in a dozen other places. This was just the first wave."
As if to punctuate his words, a new series of thunderous explosions rocked the mountain from deeper within. The Chaos forces were nothing if not persistent. They had lost their spearhead, but the rest of the spear was still driving forward.
"Canoness," Likas said, his voice now linked to Elara and Isolde via a direct psychic channel created by his new powers. "What's the status of the lower scriptorium?"
Isolde's voice came back, strained and panting. "Under heavy assault, Stigmator! They've deployed… daemon engines! Maulerfiends!"
Likas's mind, aided by the ANITO Protocol's vast database, conjured an image of the beast: a hulking, six-limbed monstrosity of metal and daemonflesh, a hunched beast with magma-cutters for fists, designed to tear through fortress walls.
"We're on our way," Likas said. He turned to the Echo. *They're using brute force. Tearing down the walls. A direct assault. Your turn to be the hammer.*
The Echo's fiery eyes seemed to burn brighter. *…I will relish breaking their profane machines…*
Before they could move, Elara's voice cut in, sharp and urgent. "Likas, wait! I'm reading something else. A high-level psychic signature, moving fast through the sublevels. It's not a daemon. It's… subtle. Elusive. It's avoiding the main fighting."
Likas went still. The ANITO Protocol instantly shifted its focus, sifting through the psychic background noise of the battle, searching for the anomaly Elara had detected. It found it: a thin, hard-to-track thread of psychic energy, slick and cunning, like a serpent slithering through the foundations of the mountain. It was heading downwards, towards the geothermal core. Towards the source of the Convent's instability.
It was a saboteur.
The voice of the Chaos Lord, the commander in orbit, returned to his mind, dripping with smug satisfaction. *…did you truly think this was a simple brute-force invasion, little godling? The Iron Warriors are merely a distraction. A glorious, noisy one, but a distraction nonetheless. The true prize is not this mountain. It is what lies beneath.*
A new wave of understanding washed over Likas. This wasn't just an invasion. It was a multi-pronged, strategic operation. The main army was there to draw out the defenders, to fix their attention, while a specialist moved unseen to achieve the real objective.
"The geothermal core isn't just failing," Likas said, his voice grim. "It's being pushed. The saboteur is accelerating the meltdown."
"To what end?" Elara demanded. "They would destroy their own army in the blast!"
"No," Likas realized with dawning horror. "It's not a bomb. It's a ritual. They're not trying to destroy the mountain; they're trying to turn it into a Daemon World. A massive volcanic eruption, fueled by a million martyred souls and the psychic energy of this holy place… it would tear a permanent hole in reality. A new Eye of Terror, right here, in the heart of the Segmentum."
This was the true scale of the Tyrant of Chains' ambition. Not just to conquer a world, but to create a new bastion of hell.
The choice was stark. Two critical threats, happening simultaneously. The Maulerfiends were tearing through the heart of the Convent, threatening to overrun the defenders in minutes. But the psychic saboteur was threatening to destroy the entire world in a matter of hours.
"We have to split up," Likas said, the decision instantaneous. He turned to the Echo. "The Maulerfiends. The Sisters cannot stop them. Go. Be the wrath of the Saint they have prayed for. Defend your home."
The Echo hesitated, its gaze shifting between Likas and the direction of the deeper battle. Its rage was a fire that wanted to burn everything, but it was beginning to understand the cold logic of strategy. *…and you?*
"I'm going hunting," Likas said, his eyes glowing with a cold, hard light. He looked at Elara through their psychic link. "Keep them alive, Elara. Buy me time."
"Always, Likas," she replied, her voice filled with a grim resolve he had never heard before. It was the voice of a woman who had finally found a battle worthy of her life.
The Echo of Bone gave a single, sharp nod, then dissolved into a silver streak, phasing through the floor to descend upon the daemon engines below.
Likas closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, focusing his will. The silver-gold aura around him retracted, sinking into his skin. His wings of light folded away into nothingness. To a casual observer, he was now just an unarmed, impossibly large man in a simple black jumpsuit. He was silencing his psychic presence, dampening his own power signature to a bare minimum. If he was going to hunt a serpent, he couldn't stomp through the jungle like a behemoth. He had to become a shadow.
He began to run. His feet barely seemed to touch the bloody floor. He flowed through the ruined cloister, a silent, dark shape moving with a speed and grace that was utterly at odds with his size. The ANITO Protocol was now a hunter's tool, filtering the air, tasting the psychic residue left by the saboteur, building a scent-trail through the chaos of the battle.
He was no longer a demigod of light and fury. He was what Project LIKAS had originally been designed to be: the perfect, solitary hyper-combatant. The ultimate slayer. And he was hunting in the dark, beneath a holy mountain that was screaming as it died. The fate of the world now rested not on a grand battle, but on a silent, unseen duel in the deep places of the earth.