Impact.
The wail of metal tore through the thin atmosphere—not once, but in a succession of heavy crashes powerful enough to pound the planet's core.
Each thunderous impact carved another scar into the vast graveyard called a battlefield.
Desolation no longer sufficed to describe this place.
Stellar dust mingled with molten metal fragments, carpeting the ground in gray.
Yet that ground was neither soil nor rock.
It was wreckage piled into mountains, the crushed bones of civilization and war.
The black ceramite armour of the First Legion's Space Marines lay twisted among the streamlined carapaces of Rangdan warriors, their surfaces covered in inhuman ornamentation, forming endless hills of corpses.
Larger, more suffocating shadows towered above them.
These were the fallen bodies of Titans, like toppled mountains, their immense metal skeletons shattered. Their former grandeur now served only as the grim foundation of this duel.
Higher still, all the way to the limits of sight, warship wrecks hung like the corpses of slain gods. Their colossal silhouettes blotted out the dim starlight, their cold hulls forming the sole, eternal vault above this ultimate struggle.
At the center of this stage built from death, two storms of destruction collided.
Lion El'Jonson, lord of the First Legion and Primarch of the Dark Angels, swung his sword with the inevitability of stars tracing their orbits: simple, precise, and charged with the power to sever fate.
The shriek of the Lion Sword cutting through the air was the battlefield's most commanding decree.
His Power Armour was covered in gouges and scorch marks. Enormous claw marks across his pauldron cut deep enough to expose its inner structure, yet none of this diminished the perfection of his stance. His was pure technique, stripped of every distraction, existing only to kill.
His opponent was Hannibal, First Warmaster of