Helmurad had become a furnace.

  The sky bled. The ground boiled like molten brass. Crimson lightning shed between shattered spires, each strike echoing with Khorne’s savage exultation.

  “Lion!”

  Angron descended in a storm of red wings and iron fury. The bde Samni’arius fell with enough force to cleave continents.

  The Lion did not retreat.

  He raised the Emperor’s Shield.

  The collision detonated like a localized starfall. By every w of physics, the fractured tectonic ptes beneath them should have shattered. Both primarchs should have plunged into magma.

  Lion braced for colpse.

  It never came.

  The rock screamed.

  But it did not break.

  For a fraction of a second, something shimmered in the air — a deep-blue hexagonal ttice, fwless and indifferent. A structure that seized matter itself and forced it back into alignment.

  Angron’s rage could bend reality.

  Yet reality here refused to yield.

  “…This is not natural.”

  Lion understood.

  This was not fortune.

  It was an opportunity.

  He rooted himself in the impossibly rigid ground, redirected the daemon’s momentum into the bedrock, and struck.

  Loyalty carved a precise golden arc.

  The bde pierced Angron’s throat — the daemon’s anchor point in realspace.

  The roar ended in ash.

  Silence returned.

  Lion pressed his boot against the ground. The sound rang metallic.

  Not miracle.

  Engineering.

  He looked toward the unnaturally calm darkness beyond the system.

  If this were the Emperor’s hand, there would be light.

  Instead, there was geometry.

  “Who?”

  This battle had never been between two.

  There was a third mind upon the board.

  And Lion would find it.