The instant the words fell, savage power tore through the deathly silence once more.
Lorgar and Saladin charged at each other again, like two arrows loosed from the suddenly taut strings of fate.
The air compressed beneath their speed and will, groaning under the strain.
Lorgar gripped the Greatsword with both hands. Though golden fissures spread beneath his skin like a burning map, every flex of his muscles brought tearing agony, and the Emperor's immense power placed a crushing burden upon his soul, his movements did not slow. Under that extreme pressure, they erupted with still more terrifying precision and strength.
The blade sliced through the air. Gone were the sacred, majestic strikes of before. In their place came heavy, short, utterly lethal arcs, like thunderbolts raging through a storm, dense, relentless, without a single gap!
Clang! Clang! Clang-clang-clang!
Metal crashed against metal at an astonishing rate, the impacts almost blending into the unbroken roar of a metallic storm.
Each of Lorgar's strikes carried immense physical force and an undying golden Purifying Flame. Simple, direct, brutal, yet guided by a combat instinct stripped to its purest form, they relentlessly hunted the gaps in Saladin's guard.
Saladin wielded both blades, forcing sand-colored psychic energy onto their edges, trying to overcome strength with finesse and find an opening through unpredictable, treacherous swordplay as cunning as a desert viper.
Yet before Lorgar's furious swordwork, driven by sheer strength and will and overwhelming as a landslide or tidal wave, his technique seemed painfully constrained.
He felt less as though he were fighting a warrior than resisting an encroaching natural disaster that would crush everything in its path.
Lorgar's strikes grew heavier and faster, numbing the arms Saladin used to block with his twin blades. The relentless, violent impacts also disrupted the flow of his