Blood ran through the wrinkles of his face from the Butcher's Nails. This vicious creation was reveling; it did not care whose blood was spilled, so long as blood nourished it.
"Khârn!" Angrath called to his close friend, pointing his Custodes spear at the center of the melee.
At the very heart of the battlefield, a towering Ultramarine in a cloak was cutting his way toward them. A guard even taller than those adamantine-armored warriors followed close beside him. Their armor seemed to be a variant of Cataphractii Terminator plate, yet it radiated an even more invincible presence.
The cloaked Astartes had no need for his subordinates to clear a path for him. He held a long power sword in one hand and wielded a shorter combat blade in the other.
Khârn watched him cleave a World Eater to death with the power sword. Then, like thunder on a midsummer night, the blade appeared at another World Eater's neck in an instant. The traitor seemed to have run into the disintegration field himself and sheared off his own head.
The shorter combat blade intertwined with the power sword, and together they tore open another World Eater's throat.
The two swords whirled between the warrior's hands, perfectly coordinated as they blocked weapons striking from the surrounding World Eaters. An axe was knocked aside, and its wielder was forced back several steps by overwhelming force.
Just as he tried to continue fighting, the cloaked warrior drove the short blade into his abdomen. As pain forced him to stagger backward and pull free, the instant the dagger slipped from his body, the long power sword pierced his breastplate. Its disintegration field tore through black carapace, flesh, and bone before emerging from his back.
Even though they stood on opposing sides, Khârn's mind, steeped