"Hesitation!"
"That was exactly it. You were no different from how you had been ten thousand years ago. You were a tyrant, but not entirely one."
The Daemon Primarch suddenly laughed.
From the Emperor's perspective, the fallen Angron was laughing through pain, his expression as twisted as could be.
"You acted utterly inhuman, yet you were not as inhuman as you appeared. That was why you hesitated."
"Did you think I would just watch you take this piece of trash back? Impossible!"
The Daemon Primarch said nothing, yet it seemed to have said everything.
It closed its eyes and endured the pain, yet it also seemed to bare its fangs in a savage display of dominance.
Clone Angron, standing nearby, felt nothing. He did not even know whether the Emperor, now balanced out, would directly erase his fallen original or spare it because some humanity remained within it.
Neither happened.
The Daemon Primarch kneeling on the ground, in that instant when the Emperor hesitated...
In that instant when it seemed to be speaking, seemed to be flaunting its might, seemed to be enduring pain, it rose to its feet.
The hatred, thirst for vengeance, joy of victory, and desire to win contained within the past, present, and future stages of the war on Brumm all converged, together with the blood shed by both sides upon this planet...
Gripping its greatsword, the Daemon Primarch unleashed a blow so terrible that the weapon itself shattered under the force.
A canyon appeared in the blasted wasteland.
If Brumm had not already been outside any proper orbit, the blow that created the canyon would have been enough to knock it out of planetary orbit.
The Emperor was not harmed in the slightest. He merely felt that one second he had been on the surface,