On the decks of the Star Fortress Vellado, the fighting began on the command level beneath Biberus's feet and soon spread throughout its interior.
In every corridor, every chamber, and every stretch of lift shaft, mutated Raven Guard warriors kept emerging from the shadows.
They were no longer the hunters famed for speed and precision that Biberus remembered. Those warriors, who had once moved like ghosts among the stars during the Great Crusade, had now been utterly transformed by Chaos.
Their bodies, formed from flesh fused with power armour, were studded with eyes, teeth, and twisted growths.
Biberus fought these fallen warriors of the Raven Guard Legion with his power scimitar.
His every movement still carried the ferocity and efficiency honed through years of battle, his power scimitar tracing deadly arcs in his hand.
He slashed at the neck of a charging Chaos Space Marine. Steel flashed, and the head, still wearing its Raven Guard helmet, flew from its shoulders, rolled across the metal floor, and came to rest against a corner.
Yet a moment later, two dark red points of light still shone within the severed head's visor.
The headless torso did not even break stride. Its body, long since fused with its power armour, could still move normally.
It lunged at Biberus, swinging its claw-like arms. Only when a Space Marine following behind him fired a meltagun into its chest at point-blank range did a fatal cavity burst through the flesh that had mutated into a carapace, as though vaporized by a blazing sun. Only then was that evil power truly erased from realspace.
Even slicing through these bodies of fused metal and flesh could not truly kill them.
Biberus found that no matter how precisely he wielded his blade and its disruption field, the severed limbs and