Abaddon's flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, rested quietly in orbit over Vigilus.
This Gloriana-class Battleship had been built during the Great Crusade, on the Emperor's personal orders, with the full resources of the Adeptus Mechanicus on Mars.
It had also been the flagship of the Imperium's Warmaster Horus.
Hundreds of Chaos warships of all sizes now guarded the Vengeful Spirit, while still more were scattered around Vigilus, constantly providing the ground forces with various forms of orbital fire support.
Yet in a remote corner of the Chaos fleet, a light cruiser broke formation, turned, and headed away from Vigilus.
At the same time, a question echoed across the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit.
"What?!"
"He has something to attend to?"
A Chaos Star hung high in the center of the enormous bridge, surrounded by heaps of skulls and any other offerings that might please the gods.
Tech-Priests of the Dark Mechanicum operated various instruments, while large numbers of mutated crew worked with their heads down below.
As the chosen of all four gods undivided, Abaddon still had a terrifying bridge, with disemboweled mortals and even loyal Astartes hanging everywhere, but it was at least far more normal than those devoted to just one god.
Abaddon's voice echoed across the bridge, surrounded only by the overlapping electronic tones of the instruments.
The mutated crew kept their heads down as though they had heard nothing, not daring to make any movement beyond their duties on the bridge.
Only a company commander under Abaddon, standing before the bridge throne, answered again in a rasping voice:
"Those were Black Skull's exact words."
It was simple and direct, without the slightest honorific for Abaddon. The two seemed less like superior and subordinate than partners with a shared goal.
On the bridge throne, Abaddon was encased in heavy, master-crafted Terminator Armour, his left hand bearing the enormous Talon of Horus, once Horus's exclusive weapon.
In his right hand was the daemon sword Drach'nyen, formed from a daemon that had once fought the Emperor.
Combined with the towering stature bestowed on him by the blessings of all four gods, even Calgar looked somewhat short and frail before him.
Abaddon ignored his subordinate's attitude. He merely turned his gaze toward a ripple in space far out in the void beyond the bridge, where a Warp jump engine was starting up.
Seeing how efficiently Black Skull had departed in the time since the report arrived, Abaddon knew this was no matter of having something to attend to, even without the company commander saying so.
"My men..."
"Ran away?"
His eyes widening slightly, Abaddon instantly understood what Black Skull was doing.
Abaddon commanded a vast Chaos army, with hundreds of warships on this battlefield alone. Naturally, he would not care about one insignificant Black Skull.
Yet Abaddon's attention still shifted instantly from the front lines to this matter, because there was actually a force on the ground capable of making a Chaos Warband flee outright. That fact alone warranted his attention.
Withdrawing his gaze from the direction of Black Skull's jump, Abaddon paused, then looked straight at the Astartes adjutant beside him:
"Pull up all information related to Black Skull."
The adjutant turned and immediately carried out the order. Once all the relevant information on Black Skull had been gathered, Abaddon gave it a quick glance, and something resembling a "smile" actually tugged at his rigid, cold face.
"Black Skull..."
"Was driven off by a bunch of mortals..."
His lips stretched into a smile, but not only the mortals around him-even the less-than-respectful Chaos Astartes instantly felt a surge of tension.
The Chaos company commander glanced around, inwardly irritated by Black Skull's "incompetence." Yet faced with Abaddon's obvious mood, he braced himself and finally spoke in a more respectful tone:
"Should we send more men?"
Though he had become respectful, Abaddon still cared nothing for his subordinates' attitudes. He looked at the enormous projection of Vigilus below the bridge, watching the lone red dot outside Hyperia amid a sea of green dots. After studying it for a while, he withdrew his gaze and all his attention.
Turning back to the deadlocked front between himself and Calgar in Hyperia, Abaddon spoke without expression:
"That is not our objective."
"Exterminate him."
Abaddon paid no further attention to this minor battlefield incident. After all, even if Sith had driven off Black Skull, what did it matter?
Now that every faction had taken the stage, even if all 150,000 of these mortals were storm troopers, they could only turn to dust beneath the endless, repeated extermination wrought by friend and foe.
The Chaos company commander nodded and left, and Abaddon's orders for the siege of Hyperia began echoing across the bridge once more.
Only in a corner of the fleet did a Chaos light cruiser carrying a small Cyclonic Torpedo begin changing course toward Sith.
Meanwhile, on the ground.
Endless Genestealers crashed against the 101st Regiment's fierce firepower, one wave after another.
With the vast quantities of ammunition delivered in the earlier supply shipment, Sith had no need to worry about running short.
A bolt round pierced four low-level Genestealers without any protection, then exploded, taking out another seven or eight around them.
Watching the Genestealer army being forced back by gunfire, Sith raised his eyes to the sky once again.
As he watched lances and mushroom clouds constantly alternating across the nearby landscape, Sith grew a little tense and turned his gaze overhead.
In the sky not far away, a Chaos warship was slowly approaching.
Watching the warship, Sith raised his hand and fired another shot without turning his head.
After killing an Aberrant charging toward him, Sith finally lost patience.
Drawing his Power Sword, Sith turned, bearing wounds that had become even more pronounced after his bloody battle with the Chaos Astartes:
"Stop worrying about the line. Have everyone charge with everything they've got. We must, within..."
He instinctively wanted to set a time limit, but paused, then abruptly spoke:
"Tell everyone, if they don't want to die, fight their way out of the Hive City as fast as they can!"
With that, Sith ignored the stunned looks of Brunok and the others beside him and charged straight into the packed Genestealers ahead.
The sounds of Power Sword and bolter rang out again. Amid the orange-yellow glow cast by the flames below, Sith's Power Armour reflected a faint light, like a deity radiating gold.
Seeing Sith like this, the mortal soldiers behind him, including Brunok, seemed pumped full of stimulants, following fanatically in his wake.
The gunfire weakened, but a mass of soldiers carrying sabers and entrenching tools slammed into the Genestealers' soft "flesh" like a red-hot iron.
Before long, an exit passage in the Upper Hive suddenly burst open, and a towering elevated railway crashed to the ground with the groan of twisting metal.
First, large numbers of Genestealers were pushed out, shrieking and roaring back into the Hive City.
Yet the ugly mouths they had only just opened were blasted apart by bolt rounds or lasers in the blink of an eye.
The Genestealers tumbled to either side, followed by large numbers of mortal soldiers suddenly pouring out of the passage.
There was none of the sunshine and gentle breeze of the tower tops. The world beneath the Hive City held only gloom.
Overhead were clouds flickering constantly with eerie lightning under the influence of Warp power. Below lay an endless expanse of directly warped and deformed ground, with layers of rock and Orks piled over one another.
And as Sith led the soldiers out of the Hive City, something suddenly pierced the clouds overhead, and a tall building plummeted straight down.
A tall building?
Sith frowned, but as he focused more of his attention on it, he finally saw clearly. It was no building at all, but an extermination torpedo dropped from space!