Lorgar: 80! 80! 80!

"Kill it! Concentrate fire!"

Chapter Master Seras's roar was almost drowned out by the deafening din.

The passage had become an inferno. The enormous mechanical Construct loomed like a Titan from ancient myth, swinging two massive drill arms that spun at a furious pace. Every blow carried devastating force.

Walls and floor crumbled like brittle biscuits beneath the drills, sending debris flying. The entire space shook under its rampage.

Two Word Bearers tried to flank it, firing their Bolters at the joints along its torso.

But the Construct seemed to have eyes in the back of its head. One drill arm swept sideways with speed that belied its enormous size.

"Watch out!"

The warning had barely left his lips when the terrible impact came. The drill did not pierce them. Instead, it struck their chest plates like a sledgehammer, carrying unstoppable momentum.

Bang!

The dull crash drowned out even the roar of Bolter fire. The two Adeptus Astartes were hit head-on as if by a battering ram. Their heavy Power Armour twisted and buckled, then shattered completely.

They flew backward like puppets with severed strings and slammed into a distant wall, bursting into two clouds of thick blood and Metal Shard.

The impact nearly crushed their bodies flat. Bone and organs mingled with the wreckage of their armour, coating the cold floor.

Precise Bolter fire and searing plasma beams alike struck the construct's thick, filth-encrusted shell, only to throw up showers of sparks or leave shallow craters that flowing metal swiftly filled. Nothing could stop its steady advance.

It was an unstoppable harvester of death, slowly and relentlessly crushing everything in its path.

"Target its leg joints! Throw it off balance!" Captain Isas's cold voice cut through the battle with unquestionable precision.

Several Dark Angels Terminators under his command stepped forward with Heavy Missile Launchers, dropped to one knee, and braced themselves.

"Fire!"

At the command, more than a dozen Missiles streaked out, trailing brilliant white flames.

Their warheads carried heat and force like fragments of a star. They struck with precision, concentrating their blasts on the construct's relatively slender supporting legs and ankle joints!

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Explosions merged into one continuous blast. Fire and thick smoke swallowed the construct's lower half.

The tremendous impact finally took effect. With a shriek of twisting metal, the behemoth staggered and tilted to one side, its advance halted for the moment.

But Isas's gaze sharpened beneath his hood.

He saw it clearly: Metal Shard torn from the construct by the blasts did not scatter. It hung eerily in the air for an instant, then shot back as though pulled by invisible threads—or drawn like iron filings to a powerful magnet. It swiftly reattached to the holes blown in its legs.

The flowing metal writhed and fused like something alive. The damage began to heal before his eyes.

"Keep up the suppressing fire! There's something strange about its structure! Use Melta Weapons! Melt its armour and don't give it a chance to regenerate!"

Seras had spotted it too. Suppressing his shock, he issued new orders with measured calm.

Several Word Bearers heavy-weapons specialists switched to Melta Weapons. Incandescent beams sliced toward the construct's joints and torso like scalpels.

The Melta Weapons proved far more effective. Wherever they hit, metal glowed red, melted, and dripped away, temporarily checking its uncanny self-repair.

But the mechanical beast was still a threat. It seemed enraged. Its remaining intact drill arm swung even more wildly, and every strike shook the ground, forcing the Space Marines to keep dodging.

Several more warriors failed to get clear. The edge of the drill clipped them, and even through their Power Armour, the horrific impact shattered their bones and sent them flying. Whether they lived or died was anyone's guess.

As the stalemate dragged on and casualties mounted, Lorgar—who had stood in a relatively safe part of the battlefield, calmly observing the fight—finally moved.

It was no sudden burst. He moved like a leopard that had long been poised to strike, going from absolute stillness to full speed with almost no transition.

He gave no battle cry, not even a warning to the guards beside him.

His deep-set eyes worked like the finest Sensors. In a split second, he had identified the fleeting pattern in the Construct's attacks and pinpointed a core in the middle of its massive torso. Layers of heavy armour protected it, but its energy fluctuations were strongest there, less than three metres below the crimson Sensors.

The next instant, Lorgar's towering figure became a blurred afterimage.

He held his heavy Warhammer in one hand. It looked ancient and unassuming, but held terrifying power. Its head dragged behind him, scraping stray sparks from the blackstone floor.

He moved faster than ordinary eyes could follow. Each precise, savage push of his feet left spiderweb cracks in the hard floor as he shot like an arrow straight at the construct's front!

The Construct clearly had an advanced threat-detection system.

Its crimson Sensors blazed, locking onto the black figure approaching at terrifying speed.

"Primarch... die..."

A faint sequence of distorted syllables, like metal grinding against metal, sounded beneath the deafening friction and explosions, all but impossible to hear.

Then its drill—the one brimming with the most energy, spinning tens of thousands of times a second—came crashing down toward the charging Lorgar with the weight of a mountain.

The drill tore through the air with a shriek like wailing ghosts. Its reach was so vast that it sealed off nearly every path of escape.

Facing a blow that could grind an Imperium tank to scrap, Lorgar raced onward without the slightest change in his gaze.

He did not dodge. He made no move to block.

At the final instant before the drill struck, he stopped dead. His feet drove into the floor like iron stakes, anchoring his stance.

Then the strength of his entire body erupted from his core, surged up his spine and through his arms, and poured into that seemingly unremarkable Warhammer.

He raised the hammer and met the blow!

The motion was simple and direct, but it unleashed his savage strength to its fullest!

No technique. Only raw power.

CLANG!!!!!

An indescribable crash erupted, louder than human ears could bear.

The head of the Warhammer struck the precise centre of the spinning drill's tip!

Time seemed to freeze.

The Warhammer did not get chewed apart as expected.

Instead, at the moment of contact, an invisible and overwhelming force poured from its head.

Against that absolute power, the kinetic energy of tens of thousands of rotations per second seemed laughable.

Starting at the point of impact, the enormous drill shattered piece by piece, like a glass ornament fed into an invisible grinder.

Twisted metal blades flew apart. Sturdy drive shafts snapped. The massive drill arm burst open section by section from within.

Countless Metal Shard shot outward at tremendous speed, rattling against the surrounding walls.

And the entire destructive sequence took only a few nanoseconds.

The recoil from shattering the drill seemed to have no effect on Lorgar.

He did not slow in the slightest. Using the faint rebound from his hammer strike, he accelerated again.

Like a ghost, he passed through the rain of metal fragments before they had even hit the ground. He surged up the construct's vast torso as it leaned forward, still trying to regain its balance.

The next moment, he stood firmly on the violently shaking mechanical beast's chest.

He was level with its crimson Sensors, which still flashed frantically as they tried to reacquire their target.

Then Lorgar drove his fist down.

The Construct's frontal armour shattered, exposing something twisted and almost human beneath the metal.

Crack!

The next instant, Lorgar's fist smashed the thing inside. The Construct lost control and toppled straight over.

"This thing seems to be controlled much like a Dreadnought. There's something humanlike inside operating it."

"But something about it feels wrong."

As Lorgar pondered this, a distorted alarm suddenly sounded from the machine. Within seconds, flames from an explosion burst out of the Construct's interior.

"Watch out! It's going to self-destruct!" Lorgar shouted.

The Word Bearers and Dark Angels quickly found cover and watched the massive mechanical Construct explode.

What the fuck is that thing? It wasn't in the Blackstone Fortress adventure book.

Those damned Brits. What the hell did you do?

Lorgar ranted inwardly. As far as he remembered, there was no weapon or species in Warhammer that matched the thing before him.

A minute later, the explosions ceased. The entire Construct had been reduced to ash.

"Well, I'd wanted to take that thing away to study it, but it looks like..."

Lorgar shrugged, then motioned for the others to follow.

No one noticed the symbol of a twisted metal hand hidden beneath the building's rubble and the metallic ash.