“Scorch Pattern Armor — Codename: Crimson Sun.”

  The voice was machine-flat, stripped of reverence or doubt, echoing across the armory as lumen-strips brightened in response.

  “Neural link: stable. Operator vitals within acceptable combat parameters. No data-lattice integration possible. Switching to autonomous support and doctrinal compliance mode.”

  The cage seals hissed open.

  The preacher stood encased in the armor like a saint in reliquary iron—plates of scorched ceram-metal layered over flak-reactive mesh, heat baffles glowing faintly along the spine. The plasma sprayer mounted over both forearms thrummed with restrained violence, vents exhaling a breath that smelled of ionized air and sacred unguents. Purity seals fluttered uselessly against systems that neither knew nor cared for their presence.

  The preacher flexed his gauntleted fingers, feeling the weight, the promise.

  “What is happening?” he demanded, voice amplified and reverberant within the helm. “And when will this blessed engine allow me to spread the Emperor’s truth upon the vile spawn that defile His stars?”

  Before the Castaway could answer, the armory shook.

  Heavy pistons slammed into motion to his right.

  The cage marked V-05—the one the ratling had claimed with a grin too wide for his narrow face—began to move.

  Panels unfolded, slid, rotated. Compact armor segments collapsed inward, then reconfigured with unsettling speed, adapting mass and articulation in ways that defied Imperial manufacturing logic. Limb housings shortened, then re-extended at new angles. Counterweights shifted. Gyros recalibrated.

  Two optics flared to life.

  Cold. Focused. Predatory.

  “HORIZON-CLASS SNIPER PLATFORM,” the system announced, voice shrill and precise, layered with subharmonics that made several men flinch.

  “DESIGNATION: OPPORTUNITY HUNTER.

  HUMAN VARIANT ACCEPTED.

  COGNITION SPEED: EXCEEDING THRESHOLD.

  REACTION TIME: OPTIMAL.

  MORPHOLOGY ADJUSTED TO USER ADVANTAGE.”

  The final locking sequence completed with a resonant clang.

  What emerged was no longer merely armor.

  The platform stood hunched and lean, digitigrade limbs elongated into powerful reverse-jointed legs, the silhouette somewhere between a rat and a predatory marsupial. Balance tails unfolded in articulated segments behind it, stabilizers humming softly. The long rifle—far too large for a ratling by any sane standard—rested nested across its chest, mag-locked and already whispering ballistic solutions into the wearer’s mind.

  Inside the helm, the ratling swore.

  Not in fear.

  In joy.

  “Oh—oh Throne—look at this—Emperor’s teeth, it’s showing me everything—wind shear, target drift, flesh density—oh, I could kiss whoever built this—”

  Data flooded him. Shooting vectors bloomed across his vision in layered ghost-images. Ammo types indexed themselves instinctively. Weak points pulsed in predictive outlines that hadn’t yet existed. He laughed, sharp and breathless, the sound crackling over the internal channel.

  The Castaway watched in silence.

  Not in awe.

  In calculation.

  He turned from the ratling and faced the last of the retinue still unarmed.

  The Goliath ganger stood waiting, massive frame coiled with barely contained violence. Veins stood out like cables along his neck and arms, crude augmetics hissing softly as pistons compensated for raw muscle mass. He raised his hammer in challenge, the chain-grid along its head whining as it spun to life, teeth bared in a feral grin.

  The Castaway sighed.

  “I do this against my better judgment.”

  The Goliath laughed, deep and booming. “Is it time for gifts for me too?” he snarled. “Is it Sanguinius’ Day already? Come on then, you lost mutt—show me the enemy, arm me, point me at ’em. I’ll prove who of us is the better slayer.”

  Silence answered him.

  The Castaway did not rise to the provocation. He simply extended one arm and pointed.

  Cage V-11.

  The designation burned to life above it.

  TITAN SLAYER.

  The Goliath’s grin widened, something almost reverent flickering behind the bravado. “Heh,” he rumbled. “Name fits.”

  With a hiss of hydraulics and heavy, eager steps, he stomped toward the cage. The doors irised open, then snapped shut around him as the platform dropped away beneath the deck, hauling him down into the waiting mass of the combat chassis. Metal rang. Pistons screamed. Systems roared awake.

  The Castaway turned back to the others.

  “He will be your battering ram,” he said calmly.

  His gaze settled on the preacher.

  “Yours is the task of annihilation. By his will, scorch the earth of warp-spawn taint. Let no speck remain.”

  The Scorch Pattern armor responded instantly. Runes flared. The twin plasma spewers mounted along the preacher’s arms began to whine as their cores charged, heat shimmer rolling off them in visible waves. The preacher straightened, zeal surging through him, vox amplifiers crackling as litanies spilled unbidden from his lips.

  “By His light,” he intoned fervently. “By His fire.”

  The Castaway’s attention shifted again.

  “Ratling.”

  The sniper platform’s optics focused on him.

  “Take the high ground. Hull, superstructure, spires. Anything too large to burn, too cunning to pin—remove it.”

  A snicker crackled back over the channel. “Oh, I’ll have my fun.”

  Without further ceremony, blast doors along the armory’s outer wall thundered open.

  The ratling moved first.

  His mech-limbs bit into the ship’s exterior with predatory ease, tearing handholds into adamantium plating as he launched upward, rifle locking into firing position mid-motion. He vanished along the hull in a blur of motion and laughter.

  The preacher followed.

  With a wordless cry of devotion, he leapt from the threshold. Jets roared from his boots, plumes of superheated exhaust flaring as he arced out into open air. Both plasma spewers glowed white-hot now, their cores screaming as they drank power, promising immolation.

  The armory doors slammed shut behind them.

  Outside, the battlefield waited.

  And the Castaway, alone again with his machines and the distant thunder of war, allowed himself one thin, grim smile.

  The hunt had begun.

  Down below, the battle raged on.

  The Magos Dominus advanced through the empty avenues like a walking siege engine, each step cracking rockcrete and pulverizing debris beneath his mass. His vox-net blared with layered command-bursts—target reallocations, fire-priority shifts, predictive kill-zones—his words not spoken but executed, translated instantly into motion by the city’s awakened war-architecture.

  Above and beyond the walls, ammunition and energy converged into a ceaseless storm. Macro-turrets spat incandescent death. Missile racks howled as they emptied themselves into the horizon. The neverborn came apart under the onslaught—forms shredded, unmade, erased mid-charge as reality reasserted itself through overwhelming force.

  His swarm sang.

  High-frequency vibrations rippled outward as the drone-cloud surged ahead of the main line, intercepting warp-born artillery before it could fully manifest. Most were caught, sliced apart, detonated in mid-air. Some were not.

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  Those that slipped through burst against the defenses in viscous plumes of unreality—corrupted matter and psychic filth splashing across battlements and streets alike. Even weakened by the Pariah’s lingering suppression, the effects were horrific. Flesh blistered and twisted. Diseases bloomed in moments, rot blooming where skin had been whole a second before. Some armsmen screamed as their minds fractured, laughter turning to sobbing madness as whispers clawed into their thoughts.

  They did not break.

  Klaxons wailed the hymns of the Imperium, ancient and thunderous, drowning out fear with ritual and rhythm. Officers bellowed orders until their throats bled. Men fired until barrels glowed, until hands shook, until magazines ran dry and were slammed home again by muscle memory alone.

  Shot after shot.

  Step by step.

  Blood for blood, breath for breath.

  They held.

  Then something hit.

  A roaring mass tore into the street behind the Magos Dominus with the force of a meteor, the impact throwing up a shockwave that sent debris and corpses alike skidding across the avenue. The ground buckled. The Dominus staggered, stabilizers shrieking as his massive frame lurched sideways, compensators screaming to keep him upright.

  A sound rolled through the smoke.

  Not a war-horn.

  Not a machine call.

  Laughter.

  Deep. Maddened. Exultant.

  The Titan Slayer rose from the crater.

  The Goliath’s combat chassis was immense—nearly the size of a Warhound’s torso, squat and brutal, all pistons and armored bulk. Reinforced limbs dug into the street as it hauled itself upright, plating scorched black from entry, servos whining with pent-up violence. Weapon systems cycled audibly, locks disengaging with a sound like a predator flexing its claws.

  From within the machine, the Goliath howled.

  “HAHA—YES! THAT’S IT! THAT’S THE SMELL OF IT!”

  His chain-hammer spun to life, the teeth screaming as they bit into the air, energy fields crackling along its head. Targeting runes cascaded across his vision—big things, armored things, things worth killing.

  The neverborn noticed him.

  A surge of warp-flesh turned, massing toward the new threat, shrieking in a chorus of hate and hunger.

  The Goliath leaned forward.

  “COME ON THEN!” he bellowed, voice booming through external speakers. “LET ME SHOW YOU HOW REAL MONSTERS FIGHT!”

  He charged.

  The Magos Dominus straightened, stabilizers locking back into place. For a fraction of a second, his optics tracked the Titan Slayer’s advance, data streams recalibrating around the new variable.

  Then he voxed a single, approving burst.

  ++ASSAULT VECTOR ACCEPTED++

  The city shook as iron and madness met the tide head-on.

  The Goliath renewed his charge.

  The Titan Slayer answered his bloodlust as readily as it had his mass. The chassis brightened beneath the baleful eye of the system’s star, armor plates dilating and locking as the morpho-adaptive framework fed on incoming telemetry. His weapon—once merely immense—swelled, matter flowing and reconfiguring under controlled violence. The chain-hammer thickened, its head elongating, power-field teeth multiplying until the air around it screamed in protest.

  Energy crackled.

  Gravitic shear bent light.

  The weapon drank.

  Back thrusters ignited in a blaze of crimson, exhaust plumes tearing at the street as the Titan Slayer launched forward like an artillery shell given hatred and a name.

  He clipped the wall on his ascent.

  Ferrocrete exploded outward. The few armsmen still manning that section never had time to scream—sent spinning in a storm of debris and pulverized stone, bodies coming apart as casually as the barricade they’d trusted. Warning runes flashed across the Dominus’ peripheral feeds—friendly loss, unavoidable—and were dismissed just as quickly.

  The Goliath did not slow.

  He became a comet.

  Traps vanished beneath him, mines detonating uselessly in his wake as his mass and velocity carried him clean over the kill-zones the Castaway had once laid with such care. No man’s land ceased to exist in his path, reduced to a blur of shattered ground and incandescent wake.

  Then he hit the neverborn tide.

  Impact was apocalyptic.

  The hammer came down and reality buckled. Warp-flesh burst apart in a geyser of gore and unreality, bodies torn open, inside-out, or simply erased where the power field passed. Tentacles, wings, mockeries of limbs—everything within reach came apart in a volcanic spray, ichor raining down in burning arcs.

  The shockwave flattened the front ranks outright.

  Behind them, the horde reeled.

  The Goliath plowed on, laughing, swinging again and again, each blow a localized extinction event. The Titan Slayer’s systems sang with overload warnings and ecstatic confirmations in equal measure, feeding him target after target, urging him deeper, harder, faster.

  “YES!” he roared, voice booming across the battlefield. “THAT’S IT—BREAK! COME ON, YOU FILTH—COME ON!”

  Around him, the neverborn howled—not in triumph, but in something closer to confusion, even fear—as iron fury carved a wound straight through their advance.

  From the walls, battered armsmen stared in stunned silence as the pressure eased, the tide breaking where the comet of steel had struck.

  And somewhere above it all, unseen but keenly felt, the Pariah’s shadow pressed down—mute, absolute—ensuring that what was destroyed stayed destroyed.

  The battle had found its monster.

  And it was laughing.

  With swings and heaves worthy of a titan long dormant, the Goliath reaped.

  Each arc of the hammer split more than flesh—air combusted under its passage, pressure waves rippling outward as if the world itself flinched. Warp-things came apart in sprays of ichor and unreality, bodies torn open, crushed flat, or simply pulped into formless ruin. The ground trembled beneath his advance, shockwaves rolling through the streets and into the foundations of the city as he carved a widening corridor of annihilation.

  He laughed as he worked.

  Small things died first—scuttling horrors, plague-things that burst like overripe fruit, chittering masses that tried to swarm his legs and were ground to paste beneath piston-driven strides. He waded through them, hammer rising and falling, every impact a punctuation mark in a sentence written in gore.

  Then the mass closed in.

  They came in waves too thick to scatter—piled bodies, fused forms, living carpets of claws and mouths that crawled over one another in a desperate attempt to bury him. Tentacles wrapped around limbs. Barbed growths anchored into joints. Warp-flesh flowed like tar, dragging at the Titan Slayer’s legs, climbing his chassis in grasping, screaming heaps.

  Warning runes screamed across his vision.

  Structural load exceeded.

  Mobility compromised.

  External mass accumulation critical.

  The Goliath roared in fury and exhilaration, hammer chewing through bodies at point-blank range, but for the first time his advance slowed. The swarm pressed closer, weight and numbers threatening to drag him down, to smother iron with meat.

  Above them, something shifted.

  The preacher woke from his vigil.

  His helm turned, optics locking onto the writhing knot of warp-flesh below. For a heartbeat, he was still—then he extended both arms wide and braced himself against the air. Thrusters flared brighter, counteracting recoil as the plasma generators mounted along his forearms screamed in protest.

  Heat spiked.

  Machine components howled.

  The preacher intoned a final rite, voice carried across the battlefield through vox and faith alike.

  “By His will,” he thundered, “let the unclean be reduced to ash.”

  The generators peaked.

  An iridescent inferno erupted.

  Twin torrents of plasma—golden-white, blinding in their intensity—lashed downward, washing over the damned lands like the breath of a newborn star. Flesh did not burn so much as vanish, sloughing away in sheets as bodies liquefied and boiled into vapor. Warp-things shrieked as their forms collapsed, outlines sagging and dissolving under heat so absolute it denied them the dignity of death.

  The swarm around the Goliath came apart in moments.

  Masses fused together, then burst. Limbs ran like wax. Eyes boiled in their sockets before faces followed, flowing down into glowing slag that hissed and cracked against the shattered street. The air filled with the stench of scorched corruption, a choking reek that even the wind seemed eager to flee.

  The preacher held the streams steady, riding the recoil, thrusters screaming as he scoured the ground clean—layer by layer—until nothing remained but vitrified earth and drifting embers.

  Silence followed.

  The Goliath straightened amid the ruin, armor scorched, systems screaming, but standing. He threw his head back and bellowed triumph, hammer still spinning, ichor steaming from its teeth.

  From the walls, battered armsmen found their breath again.

  From the city’s depths, the neverborn recoiled.

  And beneath the screaming of engines and faith and fire, the battlefield learned a simple truth:

  Iron did not kneel.

  The earth split with a sound like a corpse tearing.

  Not an explosion outward, but an inversion—ground collapsing inward as something vast and rotten forced itself free. Rockcrete was dragged down and pulverized, then hurled skyward as a bloated, wormlike horror erupted from beneath the street in a spiraling corkscrew of filth and momentum. Its body was a procession of mouths and ringed teeth, each rimmed with decaying skin, each gnawing at nothing as it burst into the open air.

  Nurglings spilled from it like maggots from a ruptured wound, shrieking as they tumbled through the smoke, splattering wetly across the scorched ground.

  It surged straight for the preacher.

  The distance vanished in a heartbeat.

  And then the world popped.

  The creature detonated mid-lunge in a violent bloom of gore and sparks, its mass coming apart in a sudden, concussive flash. A fraction of a second later, the remains caught fire—not with warp-flame, but with clean, hungry combustion. The air ignited around it, a rolling halo of white-orange burn that devoured flesh, spores, and crawling parasites alike.

  Nothing remained but falling ash and a rain of blackened teeth.

  A calm, clipped transmission cut across the vox-net.

  “Oxygen ignition alchemical round hit,” the system intoned.

  “Target eliminated.”

  Kilometers away, a barrel-sized slug was ejected from the sniper platform’s rifle with a thunderous clang, spinning end over end before vanishing into the wreckage below. The weapon’s optics rotated smoothly, irises dilating and contracting as targeting solutions recalculated, new threat vectors blooming into existence.

  Smoke drifted across the ratling’s helm.

  Red light burned from the two blazing optics set into the angular, predatory silhouette of his platform, illuminating a face stretched into a feral grin. He leaned slightly into the rifle, already settling for the next shot.

  “Come on, old man,” the ratkin voxed, amusement thick in his voice. “How many times do I gotta save your hide today?”

  Below him, the battlefield burned cleaner.

  Above, the horizon still bled warp-light.

  And somewhere far beyond the reaches of the city, something far larger than a worm took notice.