The screams of the Blood Angels after the death of their Primarch overwhelms your senses.
Deathraven clutches his head and collapses to the floor, unconscious.
The psyphic scream invades Draex mind causing all nails to dig in deep. So immense is the pain he cant even scream. During mid stride Draex's mind shut off like a light switch and he collapses to the floor face a bloody mess
Telemachon grits his teeth with blood dripping from his nose and Khayon falls to a knee staring up at Abaddon.
"Why... Did... You... Bring... That!"
Behind him came the hulking forms of Falkus and the Justaerin, shadows coalescing into reality as they passed through the conduit.
Abaddon lifted the great Talon, closing and opening the scythe blades with murderous theatre.
"The poetry of the moment. With my father’s own weapon, I will destroy all hope of his rebirth. Now... Where’s that mongrel dog who calls himself “Primogenitor”?"
They wait for the rest of you to regain your composure before continuing. Along with the others Lheor and the rest of the World Eaters and two hundred Rubric Marines travel through the conduit.
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Deathraven, upon awakening, removes his helmet to wipe the congealed blood from his face.
"This was a poor time to surprise us, brother. As your allies, we should have been forewarned of the sheer psychic backlash of that artifact."
"Apologies brothers I did not think it would affect you all as such. Your all quite attuned to the warp." Abaddon replied tapping his fingers to his heart.
"Not as attuned as you, it would seem."
He gazed at the talon for a moment before replacing his helmet.
"It sounded like the entire galaxy screamed."
Deathraven took up his place once more, his bolter up and tracking side-to-side once more, as they moved to find the corpse of the other dead god.
"I jest with you Brother nothing more. I appreciate your axes far more than you appreciate my power. Lest you forget, the power of Ulasht and Khayon have already claimed a million souls for your blood god this day".
Willpower
Ulasht hears the death throes of Sanguinas and hears not horror but the fate of one who chose poorly. Ulasht laughs as the sound echoes through his mind, his joy is short lived as he realizes he us lying on the deck of the ship with the chastisement of the Emperor rippling through his thoughts.
Ulasht shakes off the effects and stands, "Yes High Chieftain I agree it is a fitting weapon to utilize against the Emperor's Children this day".
Squads of Emperor’s Children took position at critical junctures to defend their master’s vessel, pouring bolter fire down the corridors at the Justaerin vanguard. Bolts strike Terminator plate with the echoing clang of a hammer at the forge; hundreds of bolts striking makes the very noise of Hell itself. Into this withering blizzard of explosive bolts, Falkus and his warriors advanced. Tusks and horns broke away, leaving bloody wounds in their wake. Armour shards were blasted clear, revealing the mutated flesh beneath. Still they walked, implacable, over the bodies of their fallen brethren. Those who stood against them died beneath claws and hammers, each falling blow ending a life precious to the Youngest God. Those who fled bought their lives at the cost of pride. Forever would we remember the crew of the Fleshmarket who broke and ran before the Justaerin’s grinding charge.
Abaddon led them, killing with his sword and the double-barrelled bolter mounted on the Talon’s bulk. But the claw’s blades, still stained with Sanguinius and the Emperor’s lives, remained unsullied.
Abaddon's laughter echoed down the hallways. He did not mean it in petty mockery. Battle-joy and fraternity flowed through him, enriching his aura. How long had it been since he marched to war with his brothers? Too long, too long.
This was Abaddon in his element, a battle-king, leading from the front. You stood at his side, killing as he killed, moving amidst the Justaerin as if you belonged among them. They encouraged you. They welcomed you. You were all one this night, wading through hordes of alchemically altered wretches lining up for the butcher’s blade.
The battle-joy was contagious. Here was an enemy worthy of death. Here were battle-brothers and leaders worth fighting and dying for.
Deathraven moved like a bird of prey, killing space marines in preference to killing slaves. He danced through the fire, the staccato sounds of gunfire like music to his ears. His power fist lashed out to kill an officer of the Emperor's Children, crushing his visor before pulping his skull.
He fought alongside the Justaerin as if he had done so for years, setting targets up for the killing blows of the terminators, or finishing off more hardy foes as they pressed his newfound allies. He willfully used the terminators for cover, while covering their flanks and dealing with anyone who managed to get into an advantageous position. These were not honor duels. This was mortal combat. This was War. This was why he lived.
Aldegund's nose bleeds and his brain is rattled making it hard to focus, but only fueling his anger.
Willpower
"I do believe now the rumors of him being made of Horus own geneseed are not so unfounded..."
Aldegund stops to pick up Draex like some other weapon piece of his repertoire "A weapon not used should be discarded, but for now you are an authentic World Eater about to die in battle even if I must carry you as a shield while I bash our enemies with my hammer"
Aldegund hurries to join the slaughter wielding his thunder hammer and Draex on his shoulder, been carried like a heavy sack of flesh and ceramite.
Akkad shakes the blood away. "It slew an angel. It crippled a false god. And now? Let's see." He takes his place in the assault, chanting prayers as he kills.
Draex muscle memory disembarks him to his feet off aldegund's shoulders and forward for more action, but staring into his eyes it appears his conscience is still on the floor. As he engages in battle his mind catches up with him then leaves him once more. In a near frenzied state, slaughtering emperor's children trying to catch up to ulasht murder count. Several times he had to be reminded by the other battle brethren not to attck them because they came to close to him while the nails were speaking.
"Ulasht I will catch your million and raise you 1 Haha!"
Draex slashes and cleaves foes in half, detaching skulls from bodies dual wielding axes with a mastery of precision and new found speed.
"Thus my Lassatra oath continues, as I unleash another weapon unto my foes." as he sees Draex rejoining the battle.
Only when you reached the apothecarion did your march finally break stride. All of you were long since inured to horror, so it was not the abundance of flesh heresy taking place inside those chambers that brought you to a halt. The walls were beribboned with racks of preserved human meat, organ containment jars, surgical tools – it was a laboratory set up within an abattoir, and its gory, soiled majesty surprised none of you. You expected nothing less from the wayward visionaries and genetic mages of the III Legion.
What brought you to a halt was that the overseer of this place had succeeded. This was not the laboratory of those who were struggling and failing to manipulate one of the most arcane and flawed sciences. This was the sanctum of madmen who had already succeeded.
From your first step into the chamber you realized it; it was in your very first breath of blood-fouled air. you had been wrong all this time. The Emperor’s Children were not unknowable years away from a cloning genesis. They had already mastered that darkest lore. you were not here as saviors, ready to purge this place before an abomination could be done. You were far too late for that.
Even Abaddon, so possessed by battle lust moments before, came to a dead halt. He stared at the blood-strewn surgical tables and the great sustaining tanks that contained half-formed perversions of life. Servitors and mind-dead thralls drifted between the machinery, tending to it all with a tenderness that had no place in this feculent nursery.
Here was the Emperor’s sacred genetic project rebuilt through daemonic lore and gutter genius. Row upon row of life pods contained mutated children and deformed adolescents, each with a feature or two that we just barely recognized. One of the palest child-creatures was melded to a smear of biological matter coating one wall of its tank. It reached out from where it was trapped in this fusion of mutated flesh, beckoning your group closer. The intelligence in its stare made your skin prickle under the touch of ice. Worse was the familiarity of its features, and the affection in its gaze.
"Lorgar." Khayon aimed his axe at the half-melted infant in the dirty life pod. "That is Lorgar."
Akkad saw the thing instantly, and was paralyzed, broken free by the words of Khayon. He embeds the head of his mace into the deck, and falls to his knees. "Father? Is that all we can have of you? You abandoned us, and everything fell apart. Our First Acolyte and our Keeper of the Faith scheme against each other for power, and neglect their flock. Were we not worthy?" He leaps up, mace crackling with lighting in one hand and bolter pointed directly at the disgusting aberration, and screams, "Father, why have you forsaken me!"
"Back away Akkad that is not your father." Abaddon said.
In another of the filthy tanks, full to the brim with oxygenated muck in place of amniotic fluid, a floating human infant – white of hair and dark of gaze – watched our every movement with wide, knowing eyes. It was one of the few unruined experiments, appearing outwardly perfect. That did nothing to ease your disgust.
"God of War," Lheor cursed at the sight.
Telemachon dropped slowly to his knees before the child. "Fulgrim," he whispered. "My father."
"Get up," Khayon said to him. "Get back."
The child-primarch slammed itself against the glass, expelling venom in a spreading black cloud from the roof of its mouth. A forked tongue lashed in futility, licking slime from the inner surface of its life-support prison. Telemachon stumbled back.
The chamber had room for hundreds of tanks. Many sockets were empty, the majority housed thrumming life pods with barely visible limbs moving through the carrion water. This chamber alone represented heresy beyond measure. Was there more? Was this all the Primogenitor had been able to evacuate from Harmony?
"Well, we certainly can't say that the bastard wasn't ambitious. Shall we finish this, brothers?"
You all turned at the sound of power-armoured boot steps. The Apothecary approached you unarmed, wearing the white and purple of the Emperor’s Children nearly lost beneath what looked like years of encrusted blood and blossoming mold. The over robe was likewise stained with unnamable filth. Thinning white hair hung to his shoulders, now all that was left of a once regal mane. He was no older than many other legionaries, yet he looked utterly ravaged by time. Even so, you all recognized him.
Abaddon spoke first "The years have been unkind to you, Chief Apothecary Fabius."
Fabius exhaled a sigh. Even his breath was foul – a warm wind of infected gums and tumour-spotted lungs. Plainly he experimented upon himself as frequently as he did his prisoners, and not all of his experiments were successful.
"Ezekyle." He made a lament of Abaddons name. "Ezekyle, you cannot even begin to imagine the horror you have wrought upon me this day."
"The damage to my work... I lack the words to frame it in terms you would ever understand. With wanton, useless violence you have done indescribable damage to my work. Centuries of study, Ezekyle. Lore that could never be copied, now lost forevermore. And for what, son of Horus? I ask you, for what?"
Even Abaddon, who had seen all Hell had to offer, was rocked to his core by what he saw all around you. It took him a moment to summon the words necessary for a reply.
"We don’t answer to you, fleshcrafter. If any soul standing here should seek to justify his actions, it’s the one covered in human excrement and exhaling cancerous breath, proud of his role in breeding these abominations."
"Abominations," Fabius repeated, looking away to the nearest tanks. Aborted and malformed godlings stared back at him with the unquestioning love of children for their father. "You were always so narrow of vision, Ezekyle." He shook his head, the stringy white hair sticking to his grimy face. "Kill me then, Cthonian barbarian."
Abaddon spoke softly, as though we stood in a sacred cathedral rather than this pit of alchemical sin. His words were a challenge, but they were devoid of all bravado and all humour.
"Not only do I not answer to you, Fabius, but you’ll find I’m quite intractable when it comes to obeying the orders of lunatics." He gestured to two of the Justaerin. "Vylo, Kureval. Take him."
The Terminators walked forwards. Their method of restraining the Primogenitor was brutally simple – they each gripped one of his arms in a massive power fist. The slightest pull would tear the Apothecary’s body apart.
Abaddon turned to your group, the ones that truly made this all possible. "End it. Leave nothing alive."
"With pleasure."
Deathraven set about destroying equipment and tanks with his power fist.
Draex gets to work wrecking the lab, slaying the bio freaks .. they dont bleed like he likes but doesn't matter as long as these thing break horribly
Unto you I deliver this sacrifice, the twisted image of one forsaken by his father who forsake his sons.
Akkad stares at the degenerate clone of his gene father, and a strange grinding sound of bone and ceramite comes from him, but his is unmoved and unchanged.
His left arm, armour as well, grows significantly longer and more slender, especially at his hands, where each digit becomes a lethal blade. His helmet reshapes to resemble an idealized face, and splits open in a too broad grin with too many blunt teeth.
He charges at the tank he's been staring at, smashes it open with one swing from his crozius, and impales the creature inside with his fingers on his left hand. He raises it to his face, and the clone seems to vanish piece by piece as he holds it to his helmet.
He devours it alive.
Draex gives pause to Akkads action the transformation didnt bother him one bit but to eat his own father.
Draex gets back to his destruction and mayhem
Draex punches through the tank snatching up the baby fulgrim clone grabing around its neck and body with on hand and grasping the top of his head holding it back so he cant bite him with the venom draex offers the child to Aldegund as a token for carrying him off the the field to fight another day
"Would you like the head of a Primarch as a servo skull?"
Ulasht releases the power of Chaos, Doombolts strike into tank after tank of the horrors born out of the madness of Fulgrim's children.
Soon after your group starts destroying the creatures and instruments a hundred bolters opened, raining a tide of explosive fire across the laboratory. A second later the Justaerin and every other warrior present joined in. Glass shattered. Flesh burst. Metal detonated. Things that should never have been born wailed as they died. When the servitors were killed and the machinery was shattered by gunfire, the Rubricae and the others turned their bolters, cannons and flamers to the deck, hammering and charring the dying mutants with executioners’ fire.
After an eternity, the guns fell quiet. Fluids dripped, steam rose and broken machinery sparked in the sudden stillness. The whole world smelt of the putrescent blood from false gods’ veins.
Fabius was the one to break the silence. "You still solve every obstacle in your path with the mindless application of violence. Nothing has changed, has it, Ezekyle?"
"Everything has changed, madman." He smiled at the prisoner, caressing Fabius’s cheek with a single scythe-claw. "Everything has changed."
More boot steps echoed from the same annex chamber from which Fabius had emerged. A heavier tread. Measured, confident.
The Apothecary’s watery stare focused on the weapon. "I see you carry the Talon. He will enjoy the irony of that."
Abaddon narrowed his eyes. "He?"
"He," Fabius confirmed.
Worldbreaker smashed through the first rank of the Rubricae, sending three of them crashing against the shell-pocked walls. They did not just crash aside in boneless tumbles; they came apart at the joints, their entire suits of armour falling to pieces and clattering against the walls. Whatever sliver of their souls had remained bound by their armour was gone.
It is Horus Lupercal! Not a child cloned from scraps of tissue and drops of blood. Not an abomination half lost to mutation’s touch and trapped inside a containment tank. It was Horus Lupercal, the First Primarch, Lord of the Space Marine Legions. Perhaps a touch younger looking than when any of you had last seen him, and clearly devoid of the Pantheon’s touch. But still Horus Lupercal, cloned from cold flesh harvested directly from his stasis-preserved corpse, wearing the armour stripped from his dead body. Horus Lupercal, clad in his breathtaking black war-plate, replete with the long fall of his white-wolf fur cloak and the pale shimmer of a kinetic force field protecting him like a halo.
Lheor and the warriors of the Fifteen Fangs reacted faster than any of you. Their heavy bolters gave a leonine roar of throaty chatter, kicking and booming as they fired on the Warmaster of the Imperium, with every bolt hitting home. But even as their bolts tore at Horus’s armour and flesh, their initiative did little but doom them before the rest of you. Worldbreaker swung again, hurling four of them aside in a single blow. They struck the deck in ragged disarray.
Initiative
Ulasht steels himself for perhaps the deadliest fight of his existence as an Adeptus Astartes. If Abaddon's Legion is to rise, their old Primarch, twisted as he may be by the Emperor's Children bizarre science, must fall...
Aldegund takes the head offered to him by Draex "Indeed a worthy reminder and a slave to the cause this will make" analyzing the skull in his hands for a moment, before attempting to analyze any data there is to clone Astartes or a Primarch.
Initiative
Everyone broke and fell back, scattering to the edges of the room to escape the war maul of this enraged revenant. The Rubricae, much slower than living warriors, marched back in their stately tread, barely pausing as they emptied magazine after magazine of warp-altered shells at the cloned primarch. And still they died with every swing. Gunfire shattered the primarch’s black ceramite and blew fist-sized chunks of flesh from his bones. Pain threaded his aura, yet Horus fought on.
Khayon threw energy at him. He threw lightning. He threw panic and hatred and anger in a seething bolt of mutagenic warpfire. It burst what remained of his force field in a whiplash of air pressure, and boiled the skin and hair from his head. Nothing more.
He went for Khayon. Khayon raised his axe only to have it smashed out of his hands, sent skidding across the filthy floor. His boot caved in Khayons breastplate, hurling him to the deck. His foot hammered down, pinning Khayon beneath him.
Nefertari took to the air, cutting past him and swinging with her klaive. She was a silken blur fast enough to weave between the bolt shells streaming around her, fast enough to slice through the primarch’s cheek, severing half of the muscles in his charred face. But he had weaved aside. She’d missed the killing blow. Horus was too fast, even for her.
The primarch’s hand closed around Nefertari’s ankle as she twisted in the air for another cut, and he dashed her against the deck. You heard the soft bones of her wings snapping like twigs on a forest floor.
He broke Gyre next. The daemon wolf launched for his throat, her claws rending his breastplate as her jaws clamped where the muscles of his neck and shoulder met. She was in the line of fire, helplessly so. Bolt shells from a dozen sources exploded into her and around her, bursting her fur and flesh open. Yet she endured it. She endured it to distract Horus, ripping tissue and tendons with every snap of her jaws, every shake of her head.
Worldbreaker broke Gyre’s grip and crushed her skull, dropping her to the deck like a slab of butcher’s meat. Half of her head was simply gone, replaced by a cavernous hole and the spill of grey-red brain matter. Her mortal form began to dissolve.
Telemachon’s twin swords burst through the front of Horus’s ruined breastplate in a spray of almost toxically rich blood. Without a pause, and faster than even Telemachon could withdraw them, Horus grabbed the blades in a single gauntleted fist, snapped them, then spun around and backhanded the swordsman across the chamber. Telemachon hammered into the far wall with the telltale resonant crash of ceramite.
Deathraven - 14
Draex - 14
Menstras - 13
Ulasht - 12
Aldegund - 12
Akkad - 5
Deathraven cursed their failure before firing his plasma pistol at the Primarch reborn.
Half Action Aim, Standard Attack TN:70 plus size modifiers
Pen 8
The plama shot burns into Horus. He does not show any form of pain as he has not already. A lot of his skin and armour is tore away already from the damage taken from all the attacks against him. The plasma shot tears his attention from Khayon who is beneath him and he steps toward Deathraven swinging Worldbreaker wide reaching the fallen son of the Lion.
Dodge vs 60
Worldbreaker smashes into Deathraven sending him flying across the room and crashes into a few Rubric Marines. Cermaite shattered his body lay still.
Draex engages combat with the reproduced primarch. Malice in his heart, yet enjoyment on the brain. Draex takes his most trusted companions Crim and Blood and unleases a furious assault on the farm grown demi god
"I shall harvest your skull son of the Emperor"
swift attack Crimon Mist
vs 52
bloodmist
vs 47
Must be blood in his eyes
Both of Draex weapons blades get stuck in the primarchs armour unable to pull them free. Horus turns and backhands Draex.
Draex is flung back by the blow his helmet snapping free from his head slamming into the wall teeth coming loose from his mouth.
V 54
Menstras hurls his last krak grenade at the Primarch.
X Pen 8
V 48
Menstras ducks amongst the pods and slips from view.
Ulasht allows his preternatural awareness to lapse, seeing that no other foe will be worth paying attention to until Lupercal is defeated. A Son of the true Lupercal raises his hand and summons forth Chaos to burn away at the false God before him.
Doombolt
Damage Energy Penetration 8