Hymn and Roar

Before Angron's unstoppable fury, the Astra Militarum's solid defensive line, built from countless trenches, fortresses, and Leman Russ tanks, was as fragile as a castle piled from sand. Angron did not even use his two weapons. He merely ran. Each time his colossal body, brimming with explosive power, struck the Imperium's defenses, it smashed open a massive breach dozens of meters wide, filled with twisted steel and mangled flesh. Behind him came a crimson tide.

The defensive line was collapsing at a terrifying speed visible to the naked eye.

Just as Angron was about to charge into that ancient final fortress, he abruptly stopped. He threw back his head, and for the first time, a flicker of excitement that could be called "battle lust" flashed through eyes long consumed by endless rage, eyes that held nothing but the pure desire to kill.

He drove his massive axe and sword viciously into the ground, opened his mouth warped by the Butcher's Nails, and let out a blasphemous roar steeped in the ancient ritual of bloodshed.

"—In Khorne's name! For the Skull Throne! Blood for the Blood God!!!"

As his demonic roar, filled with divinity, rang out, the skies over Malakbel instantly turned an ominous blood-red. An incomparably immense crimson portal, formed from Warp energy of pure slaughter and rage, burst open above Angron's head!

Then, eight enormous figures slowly descended from the portal. More than ten meters tall, wreathed in hellfire, with broken wings growing from their backs, they wielded gigantic brass axes and flaming whips.

Bloodletters, Khorne's strongest and most bloodthirsty Greater Demons. Eight of them in total.

As these eight incarnations of Khorne's wrath descended, an endless demonic legion made up of lesser Bloodletters and Khorne Hounds poured from the crimson portal like a bloody downpour.

And at the very instant this demonic army, enough to drag any mortal planet into hell, was about to fully descend into realspace, the white spire that had stood silently at the end of the horizon—the Hymn Engine—finally struck back.

Bzzzzzzzzzz!!!

A visible golden halo composed of pure order and holy psychic power erupted from the summit of the Hymn Engine, spreading outward like ripples across water! Wherever it passed, the lesser Demons that had just entered realspace did not even have time to scream before dissolving and breaking apart like snow beneath the sun, banished back to their Chaotic homeland.

Even the eight powerful Bloodletters let out agonized roars beneath the impact of that pure divine order. The hellfire burning across their bodies instantly dimmed by more than half, while golden wounds, as though seared by branding irons, appeared across their huge and horrifying demonic forms.

Even Angron, the incarnation of rage, staggered back a step under the psychic onslaught. For the first time, his brain, completely twisted by the Butcher's Nails, felt a tearing agony like purification itself.

Yet it had only forced him back one step.

"...Noise!"

He forced out the word from his throat, saturated with endless fury and hatred. He tore his massive axe and sword from the earth, then hurled one of them forward like a javelin! The giant axe streaked through the air in a crimson arc before slamming into the enormous alloy gates of that ancient final fortress.

Then, using the giant axe as a foothold, Angron launched himself forward like a cannonball. He and his eight equally enraged, powerful Bloodletter servants charged without hesitation toward the final fortress shrouded in purifying light, toward the small yet equally madly burning Hearth within it.

Inside the fortress's central command room, lined with countless surveillance screens, Alexander silently watched the massive dark-red figure rapidly approaching with unstoppable momentum. He turned to the Imperial officer beside him, who had not uttered a word from beginning to end, though his face had long since gone pale as paper.

"Colonel," he said in a voice terrifyingly calm, "it seems our guest has arrived."

Colonel Karsten did not answer. He merely slowly drew the power sword that symbolized his authority.

"For the Emperor," he murmured.

Alexander smiled. He picked up the highest-priority communicator linked to the Fourth Fleet's flagship. He knew it was time for the final curtain call. He would deliver the final opening words for this grand fireworks display he had personally staged.

On the bridge of the flagship Glory of Terra, Admiral Abukansis looked down through the enormous viewport at the planet below, which was being mercilessly ravaged by war. His face seemed covered in ice that had not melted for ten thousand years, revealing no emotion at all. Yet his hands, clenched tightly around the edge of the command console until his knuckles turned white, exposed the raging turmoil within him.

The situation could no longer be described as merely "bad." Thousands of Space Marines, millions of Astra Militarum soldiers, thousands of tanks and artillery pieces—all of them melted away instantly before that unstoppable dark-red figure like ice and snow cast into a furnace, unable to even raise a proper ripple.

"Report! Sectors Seven, Eight, and Nine of the ground defenses have completely lost contact! Sectors Ten through Twelve are being overrun by the demonic legion! We have lost more than five hundred thousand soldiers!"

"Report! Angron has broken through all outer defensive lines and is assaulting the fortress beneath the Hymn Engine!"

"Report! The cruiser Unyielding Shield has been struck by the main guns of the enemy flagship Conqueror! Reactor detonation! We... we have lost General Marcus and his entire fleet!"

One desperate report after another, each filled with death, cut into the heart of this legendary old veteran who had fought for the Imperium for more than three centuries like the sharpest blades. Behind him, the naval commanders who had once been so haughty had long since shed all arrogance and prejudice. Their faces bore only one shared expression: fear.

They feared that incomprehensible incarnation of destruction, like divine punishment itself. They feared the Daemon Primarch whose mere existence was enough to utterly crush every shred of courage and hope in mortal hearts.

Just as the plague called "despair" was about to spread throughout the entire bridge, an unexpected highest-priority communication request suddenly connected to the main screen. It came from the final fortress on the ground, the one about to be destroyed. Its sender was the young commissar they had long since selectively forgotten—Alexander von Lawrence.