The thief was running.

  It was the only sane response.

  Angron’s chainaxe tore through a wall like wet parchment, and he drove after the mortal, wreathed in fire and steam as water boiled away on contact. Ferrocrete cracked and slumped under his hooves, melting, giving up. The air tasted of hot limestone and scorched oil. Even his breath came out as a low, wet growl, drowned under the Nails’ constant pounding.

  Pipes burst into shredded metal. Conduits snapped free into sparking whips that spat and hissed. The hive tried to scream, but the sound was smothered by the Nails until it was nothing but pressure behind the eyes.

  Yet the little thief stayed just barely ahead.

  Angron understood why. This place was not built for him. The roof caught his armor. The corridors pinched his shoulders. His folded wings scraped the moving air and lost fractions of speed. Each impact made dust jump off the walls in pale sheets, hanging for a heartbeat before his wake shredded it.

  The thief knew that too.

  He chose turns that did nothing to hide him, only to shape Angron, to force wings and armor to pay their tithe to every corner. As if the thief needed exactly this many heartbeats. No more.

  Angron tasted it then, iron and smoke on his tongue. A second thread pulling at the chase.

  A marker. A destination. A game played off the board.

  Angron could have changed himself. Shed the wings. Shrunk the frame.

  Made the chase easy.

  But easy was not the point.

  What terror would be inspired by a man chasing another man? What fury? What hate? What would the hive remember when the screaming stopped?

  No. Let it see the titan that did not fit, and still came anyway. Let it learn that walls were only suggestions.

  Angron’s weapons hummed as he moved, the sound not just heard but felt. The air around them grew heavy, wrong, as if density itself thickened. Dust settled faster. Loose grit crept toward his hooves like it wanted to kneel. He felt the corridor buckle under that pressure and savored the world’s desperate attempt to keep its rules intact.

  He had chased joy and had it stolen once. Now he would take it back, piece by piece, from the one who dared to steal from him.

  Angron’s grin widened, all fang and promise.

  ...

  The white and scarlet of the White Scars flashed through the hive’s bruised light as Erden tore down a shattered boulevard, bike howling over broken ferrocrete. He rode like the storm itself had taught him, loose in the shoulders, weight shifting with the machine’s bucking reminders that the ground here was more crater than street. The city was a ruin made into a wind tunnel. Dust and ash streamed in ribbons between collapsed hab-stacks. Guttering fires painted everything in a fevered orange, and the storm above pressed down, turning sound into a constant, grinding roar.

  Weapons fire stitched the air around him. Chaos tracers hissed past his helm in hot, angry lines. Imperial las-bursts snapped in clean, disciplined cuts. Ork slugs came in loud, ugly arcs that chewed stone into sprays of grit. Threat runes bloomed and vanished faster than unaugmented eyes could follow. Erden ignored most of them. A Scar learned early that if you tried to fear every bullet, you’d never move at all.

  For the last few minutes his squad had ridden the ragged edge of a blasted canyon where the ground had split like a wound. They cut through skirmishes like needles through cloth, firing on the move when the angles offered, then slipping away before the fight could become a mire. Victories were brief. Detours were constant. Their real purpose was pursuit, and the hive tried to drag that purpose into its teeth with every tempting avenue that promised a quick kill and delivered only a sticky death.

  Erden kept his squad tight, not by barking orders, but by being a point the others could orbit. A hand signal. A shift of posture. A choice made cleanly. The storm made vox unreliable, so they rode on instinct and training and the old truth that speed was a form of mercy. Get there first, warn the others, and maybe fewer brothers died with their boots planted.

  The vox hammered his ears anyway. The same message, again and again, thrown wide on every band his systems could claw onto. Each broadcast pushed his armor to the edge. The storm chewed signals into static, bent words into ghosts, and still they kept shouting into it, trying to buy their brothers a heartbeat of warning.

  Erden’s voice came out level, almost bored, because panic was contagious and he refused to be the source.

  “Repeat,” his message began again. “Visual confirmed. Angron is in the city, headed east. Evacuate from projected paths.”

  He didn’t add the rest. He didn’t say there is no holding line for this. He didn’t say if you stay, you die. The brothers who needed those words would already understand them.

  Ahead, the skyline moved.

  Angron had ripped his way out of the ground only minutes ago in a shower of molten metal and superheated stone, erupting from the hive’s underbelly like an answered curse. Now he owned the air. Each wingbeat was a thunderclap that made windows shiver in their frames and sent loose debris hopping across rooftops. The sound wasn’t merely loud. It was heavy, the kind of noise that made you feel smaller inside your own armor.

  Even at a distance, Angron was not something you missed. He was a moving catastrophe, a burning, roaring meteor of rage that made the hive look fragile. Spires trembled as he passed. Iconography softened and ran like wax. The air around him shimmered with heat, steam bursting up wherever he passed wet ground. Anything that tried to close with him in the sky died for the arrogance. Small craft were torn apart in seconds, pulled from the air like birds snatched by a storm.

  Erden had seen monsters. He had watched demons die to bolter fire and stubbornness. He had watched Orks laugh while bleeding out. He had watched brothers burn and still advance.

  This was different.

  And yet, Angron’s movement made no sense.

  Not toward the largest concentration of enemies. Not toward a fortress or a gunline. He wasn’t acting like a weapon swung at the biggest nail.

  He was chasing.

  After something small.

  Erden’s helm optics tracked the blur ahead of the giant, a darting pale blue shape in the chaos, too quick, too precise, threading streets that should have been impassable. It was rooftop-high, moving along the spine-lines of the city: parapets, railings, the top edges of collapsed signage, anywhere a foot could touch without dropping into the street meat-grinder. It moved with a kind of impossible certainty, leaping gaps that should have killed it, vanishing and reappearing as if the hive itself had blinked.

  The distance between hunter and prey kept changing. Sometimes Angron almost had him. Sometimes the mortal widened the gap with a movement that made Erden’s gut twist, because no human body should have been able to do that.

  His mouth went dry.

  He tasted old fear and let it burn out in his lungs.

  He pinged the target on squad feed, then again, like the act of naming it would help reality accept it. His squad’s auspex rune-lights flickered in acknowledgement, tight and silent, their usual jokes left in the dust.

  We were born to chase the wind. And still this thing makes me feel small.

  Only the shared understanding remained: this was above them. And they were still going to ride toward it anyway, because that was what it meant to be a White Scar.

  ...

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Sasha said over the shrieking of metal and the roar of the demon.

  ‘Well, it mostly involves not dying!’ He shouted back down the link, slapping a palm against a roof guardrail and hurling himself over the edge into open space, aiming for the next sloped roof

  The roofline came at him like a thrown knife.

  Koron hit it anyway.

  Boots kissed cracked plasteel, grav-plates bit, and the impact that should have shattered even his augmented knees vanished into a clean, controlled sink of force. He never truly landed. He skimmed, redirected, and the rooftop became a brief suggestion beneath him.

  He was three stories above street level, running the sloped tin skin of a hab-block that had lost its outer wall. The next roof sat across a gap the width of a transit lane, lower by a meter, its ridge-line pointing straight toward the distant spike of the orbital tower.

  ‘Wind shear left-to-right, six meters per second,’ Sasha said in his head. Her voice was calm in that maddening way she had when everything was on fire. ‘We got military armored convoys three hundred meters ahead. Multiple civilian clusters, primarily on allied rear lines.’

  Koron saved his air for movement. Words could wait. Gravity couldn’t.

  A hab tower, a balcony was on his left. The gap yawned beneath him; the next tower’s roofline rose on his right like a knife-edge.

  His left hand snapped up. A grapple line fired with a sharp, metallic cough and punched into the underside of another balcony two stories above. The hook caught. The cable went taut. His grav-plates engaged hard, dragging his center of mass downward for a fraction of a second. It looked like he should have yanked his own shoulder out of the socket.

  Instead, he used the weight like a lever.

  The world tilted as the cable became a swing arm, and Koron became a pendulum. He swung through the void with the cable singing above him, released at the apex, and threw himself into the next building’s shadow.

  Arms forward, legs tucked, eyes flicking across a thousand little hazards that wanted his skin. Banners snapped between towers. Cable bundles sagged like thick ropes. Jagged rebar teeth stuck out of broken parapets. Glass dust glittered in the air and got everywhere.

  His grav-plates caught again, not to slow him, but to change his fall into a long, shallow glide. He slid through empty space between towers with a speed that felt inhuman in open air, like he’d brought his own rules with him.

  The air kicked. A shockwave rolled across the rooftops, and the tower to his right shuddered as if it wanted to kneel.

  Behind him, Angron struck the building and tore through it in a shower of sparks, glass and screams.

  Koron’s metal spine tried to turn into ice. He clamped down hard enough that it felt like a hand around his throat.

  Keep moving.

  His eyes flicked left. A forest of cranes and cargo containers half finished. Right. Power conduit bundle with live arcs. Ahead. A temple spire, too tall, too exposed. Below. A market canopy, cloth roofs and wailing people.

  No.

  ‘Crane yard,’ Sasha said. ‘Middling chance at sixty-three percent survivability odds, best option for low civilian count.’

  The choice snapped into place before Sasha had even finished speaking.

  His stomach complained. His feet obeyed.

  He caught a vertical wall at full speed and didn’t bounce, knees bending to absorb, then he pushed off.

  Grav-plates engaged laterally and he ran up the face of a habitation tower like gravity was optional. His boots found seams and shattered window frames. His hands touched nothing. He didn’t need to. The plates held him on the wall with a bias field that made the hair on his arms lift under the metal.

  Three steps up. Four. Five.

  Space folded with a gut-wrenching lurch, like the city had shifted sideways and he’d been left behind for an instant. Koron reappeared a hundred meters higher where the air was thinner and the wind had teeth. A saint-statue with its head missing leaned over the ledge beside him, and below, the crane yard spread out like a cage of moving ribs.

  He was already moving, boots striking a narrow ledge that was more debris than architecture. He used it anyway. One step, two, then he kicked off into open air.

  His grapple snapped out again. This time it didn’t aim for a balcony. It aimed for a hanging cable bundle. The hook bit into thick insulation and steel braid. The cable screamed under the sudden load.

  Noise, strain, protest. He accepted the whole choir and kept moving upward.

  Faster than a human could blink, using grav-plates to make himself lighter as the ratchet in the grapple reeled him up.

  He reached the cable bundle’s sagging midpoint and used it like a trampoline.

  Plates off. Weight on. Cable dips. Plates on. Weight off. Rebound.

  He launched.

  For a moment he was weightless, drifting through smog that smelled of incense and chemical runoff. The hive opened beneath him in vertical layers: rooftops, catwalks, alleyways, streets clogged with wrecks, tiny moving dots that were people trying to survive today.

  He saw the crane yard ahead. Skeletal arms, dangling cargo pods, chains swaying. The whole place looked like a hanging gallows built for machines.

  Behind him, Angron sheared through the same cable bundle.

  He kept his eyes forward. The city told him the rest: tremoring towers, thickening air, the absence of anything smart. The cable web behind him snapped like a giant instrument string. A coil of steel whipped loose and lashed across the air where Koron had been a second ago. The shockwave slapped his back and stole a slice of his breath.

  ‘Distance closing,’ Sasha said, still forcing calm. ‘Four seconds-correction, three-point-eight-until contact if current vector remains unchanged.’

  Koron’s lungs burned, but his body held all the same. His body could run for days at output that would kill a baseline human in minutes. He could sprint until the sun forgot his name.

  That wasn’t arrogance. It was engineering.

  However, Angron didn’t care how long Koron could run.

  He cared how long Koron could avoid being caught.

  Koron hit the crane yard like a stone skipping on water.

  He landed on a suspended cargo pod the size of a troop carrier, knees flexing, plates catching the swing instead of fighting it. The pod pitched under his weight. Chains groaned. Koron used the motion and took off again before it could swing him back.

  He didn’t jump so much as change vectors.

  Feet to crane arm. Wall-run along a narrow beam. Grapple into a chain thick as a man’s torso. Slide down the chain in a controlled fall, armor scraping sparks. Kick off mid-slide. Blink.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  He reappeared in the space between two crane arms, each the size of a hab block, already reaching for the next anchor.

  His body moved like it had been built for this, every gene enhanced muscle and tendon and augmented joint working as a single, rehearsed machine.

  The movements were too fast for a human eye to track cleanly. Even an Astartes would have had to commit to one line, one path, one brutal leap at a time. Koron wasn’t committing. He was editing.

  Left. Diagonal. Now.

  His grapple clamped onto a crane arm at an angle that would have torn a normal person in half. Koron’s grav-plates engaged, his mass spiked, and the crane arm bent instead of ripping free. Then he released the weight, rode the arm’s recoil, and used it to sling himself into open space above the yard.

  He could feel heat building in his plates, the faint sting of it through his armor. He could feel micro-vibrations in his cybernetic arms as the grapple motor whined. His system flagged a dozen tiny warnings that would have been screaming emergencies for anyone else.

  He ignored them and moved.

  Angron impacted the crane yard.

  The first impact collapsed a crane base into itself like it had been punched by a god. The second tore a dangling pod free and sent it spinning end over end through the air. The pod screamed as it went, metal bending, chains snapping.

  Koron saw the pod coming and adjusted in midair without thinking.

  Space folded a fraction of a second early.

  He reappeared beside a tower edge, boots skimming stone. The cargo pod passed through the place his skull had been, so close he felt the wind off it. It smashed into a neighboring crane and exploded into shrapnel and dust.

  Koron didn’t flinch. He couldn’t. Flinching took time.

  ‘Shit,’ Sasha said. ‘He is predicting your exits, turning your landing points into attack vectors.’

  Koron’s mouth twitched. It might have been a laugh if it hadn’t tasted like blood and smoke. ‘Bastards clever.’

  He ran up the side of the tower again, plates biting hard. He crossed a window frame, stepped on it like it was solid ground, and vaulted upward into a higher tier where the architecture changed. More ornaments. More broken statues. More places for Angron to turn a world into knives.

  A skybridge waited ahead, half intact and stubbornly upright—an arch of steel and cracked plasteel spanning the gap between towers. Beneath it, cloth banners hung like torn prayer-scrolls, snapping and twisting in the wind, slapping together with wet, frantic sounds. Beyond, rooftops stepped down toward a wide avenue where the skyline opened, and the orbital spire knifed up through the smog—close enough to taunt, still two kilometers away.

  If he reached that tower, he could broadcast.

  If he could broadcast, someone might live long enough to listen.

  ‘Civvies under the skybridge,’ Sasha warned. ‘High probability of casualties if it drops, but it's the best option.’

  Koron’s jaw locked. He didn’t change direction.

  He changed how he touched the world.

  He avoided the bridge’s spine and took the railing.

  Three inches of metal, slick with grit and ash. His grav-plates bit, turning that narrow strip into a roadway. He rode the top rail with his body tilted forward, hands spread for balance, feet landing with mechanical precision as gravitic curvature carried him across. The banners below blurred into color and motion, and he refused to look down.

  Behind him, Angron slammed into the bridge.

  The demon blade bit into a support beam. The metal didn’t shatter. It sagged, softened, surrendered. Scarlet energy crawled through the structure in branching veins. The whole arch dipped, then began to fold inward, its center lowering toward the street like a slow execution.

  Under the bridge, the street was clogged with bodies and wrecked carts, pinned by fallen masonry. They weren’t running. They couldn’t. They were a knot of living things with nowhere to go.

  Koron caught it at the edge of his vision.

  He couldn’t stop Angron.

  He couldn’t save the bridge.

  What he could steal, was its timing.

  Sasha’s voice snapped down the link, raw with sudden fear. ‘Don’t—!’

  He threw himself off the rail, diving beneath the collapsing span. His arms snapped forward and tiny discs spat into the air ahead of the fracture points. They struck with sharp, muted pops and blossomed into expanding blooms of hardened aerogel, ugly and fast, gluing themselves to beam and wall. The braces locked with a gritty snap he could feel in his bones.

  The bridge screamed as loads shifted. Bolts sheared. A beam tore free in a shower of sparks.

  It hung at a worse angle than before.

  But it didn’t come down on the bodies beneath it.

  Koron paid for that choice instantly.

  Angron dropped after him, wings flaring wide, weapons spread as if he meant to cut the air itself into pieces. The chainaxe teeth shrieked. The sword’s edge made Koron’s skin prickle under armor, his grav-plates buzzing with sudden interference.

  Oh no.

  Koron reached for the fold.

  Reality caught. Not fully. Just enough.

  The space he occupied twisted sideways as Angron’s swing passed too close. The fold field snagged on that distortion and the world lurched with it, a sick, sideways tug that tried to peel his stomach out through his spine.

  Koron came out misaligned.

  His boots hit a rooftop at an angle that turned traction into a lie. Loose grit slid under his left foot. His right found purchase a beat late. Momentum tried to turn him into a falling rag.

  For one brutal instant, he wasn’t a miracle of transhuman engineering.

  He was a man about to die from slipping on loose rocks.

  Grav-plates slammed on. Adhesion stole his balance like a hammer to the jaw. The sudden deceleration punched up his legs and into his back, bright-white sparks blooming at the edges of his vision. Something in his right knee made a tight, ugly complaint. His breath came out in a torn hiss that tasted like copper.

  Behind him, Angron roared, furious, already banking to follow.

  Not because Koron escaped.

  Because Koron stole the clean collapse. Again.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Sasha said, and her calm had a crack in it now, a thin edge of fear she was trying to keep out of her own voice. ‘His weapons are interfering with the blink field.’

  Koron dragged air in, fast and shallow, and forced his hands to stop shaking. The tremor didn’t vanish. It just obeyed.

  “Yeah,” he rasped aloud. “I noticed.”

  He pushed off the roof and went airborne again, choosing an uglier line on purpose. He cut through hanging tapestries that snapped against his face and shoulders and used their drag to change his fall. He hit a cable, ran it for three steps, then folded mid-stride.

  The skyline jumped.

  He reappeared upside down beneath another skybridge, fingers clamping a maintenance girder hard enough to make metal sing. His knee flared pain, hot and sharp, and he welcomed it because it meant the joint still listened.

  He swung once, kicked off, and twisted himself right-side up in open air with a motion that would have torn tendons out of any normal body.

  Below, street level flashed by in shards. Smoke. Fire. People. Bolter fire strobing. A gunship banking away from something red and huge.

  Koron didn’t have time to look.

  He could feel Angron coming in the way the towers trembled, in the way the air thickened, in the sudden absence of anything small enough to be smart.

  He chose his next line out of a thousand.

  Then he threw himself into it and trusted his body to keep up.

  ...

  Angron watched the little thief dart and weave through the hive in a way no human body had any right to manage.

  Eldar, yes. He had seen them do it. Lithe silhouettes skating on anti-gravity tides, turning the air itself into a dance floor. Once, long ago, the sight had sparked the smallest, most poisonous flicker of admiration, like a blade catching light.

  This mortal echoed that motion, a rougher shadow of it. Not as graceful, not as effortless, but still wrong in the same infuriating way. Near-instant folds through space. Three-dimensional pivots that ignored sane angles. A body that spent momentum like coin and never seemed to run out.

  But it wasn’t the speed that hooked Angron’s attention.

  It was the choices.

  The thief didn’t take the easiest lines. He didn’t cut through the thickest knots of souls even when it would have saved him seconds. He bled distance to avoid crushing the weak. He changed routes to spare those mewling wretches under the skybridge, and somehow still kept himself just beyond Angron’s reach.

  That was the irritation. Not that the mortal was fast.

  That he was fast and still being merciful.

  Angron’s blade bit air again. The chainaxe screamed through empty space. The impact that should have ended this chase became only another shattered wall, another roof torn open, another meaningless explosion of dust.

  The Nails answered each failure with a harder, more intimate pounding. They did not want pursuit. They wanted contact. They wanted the moment of breaking, and Angron was starving them with every missed strike.

  It scraped every nerve raw that he had been reduced to this. Chasing. Calculating. Having to earn a single mortal’s skull.

  His hooves slammed into a rooftop and the metal gave way beneath him. Plasteel crumpled like thin tin. Gilded icons and devotional plates shattered into powder. A saint’s painted face stared up at him from a broken tile, eyes wide and accusing, before his weight ground it into nothing. Angron hunched, growling, and the sound made loose grit skitter away from him as if it feared being noticed.

  Saliva strung from his maw in a thick rope and slathered onto the floor. It sizzled. The tile beneath it softened and ran.

  Then his back split.

  A hot line of pain tore across his shoulders, sharp enough to be satisfying, and blood poured down to pool around his hooves. The air above him began to burn, not with flame as mortals understood it, but with reality failing to keep its skin intact. The smell changed. Something electrical and sweet and rotten, like a storm over a slaughterhouse.

  His wings shuddered. Flesh tore. The membranes peeled back like wet cloth, and along the torn edges the Materium opened into thin screaming seams. Purple-pink fire erupted from those wounds, heat billowing out in violent pulses. Debris skittered and lifted. Dust spiraled away from him in frantic halos as the air itself shrieked under the pressure.

  For a moment, another figure flickered across his mind.

  Golden hair. White wings. Ash falling like snow in the ruins of a battlefield long ago. The last time Angron had tried to catch a true flyer and found himself swinging at an angel who was always just out of reach.

  Sanguinius had been a hawk, born to ride the wind. Angron’s wings had been a mockery, heavy, dragged through the sky by rage.

  He remembered the humiliation.

  He remembered the distance that would not close.

  This was his answer.

  If he could not defeat grace with grace, he would run it down and tear its throat out.

  His wings spread. The rifts roared wider, and the world behind him became a gash that exhaled.

  The air buckled.

  He shot forward faster than thought, faster than sane physics, propelled not by engines or discipline but by hate made directional. The skyline blurred. The hunt snapped from pursuit into intercept.

  And somewhere ahead, the thief was about to learn that the sky was not empty.

  It was Angron’s.

  ...

  Sasha screamed, the sound clawing down the link and then fracturing into nothing as the demon tore through the air like a thrown cathedral.

  Koron’s right toes kissed the top of a narrow chimney, the brickwork still warm from old exhaust and newer fire. He didn’t land so much as borrow it. The stack shuddered under him, soot and grit lifting in a little black halo around his boots as his grav-plates bit and held. For half a heartbeat, the storm thinned and he could smell the hive: burned promethium, wet stone, coppery dust, the faint sweet rot of something that had been alive yesterday.

  Then Angron’s approach arrived.

  A front of compressed air hammered into Koron’s chest like a mailed fist. His ribs, already bruised from a dozen near-misses, rang with the impact. His organs felt like they slid a fraction out of place and snapped back. The chimney whined, a thin structural complaint, and somewhere below it a window popped with a sharp, startled crack.

  His predictive models unspooled exits in clean, cold sequence. Three blinks here. Five there. A chain that would sling him from rooftop to broken spire to the distant towers still standing after nearly two weeks of warfare, towers that rose like stubborn teeth out of the city’s ruined mouth. The path was there. The numbers said it was there.

  Something deeper said no.

  It wasn’t civilians this time. It was a stone-cold instinct that tasted like iron. If he vanished, the demon’s blades would already be waiting at the place he chose.

  Koron let his knees soften by a fraction. Not in surrender, but a controlled loosening. He let his plates engage fully and held still on the chimney’s narrow crown, waiting out the half second he had left, an engineer waiting for a timing window on a collapsing load.

  Sasha tried to warn him again. Her words drowned under the thundering of his own heartbeat, blood roaring in his ears with the ugly insistence of mortality. He could feel the tremor in his hands and forced it down until it became useful, until it was only another input.

  Angron closed the distance.

  Up close, he was not just large. He was pressure. Heat shimmer crawled over Koron’s HUD and made the edges of reality ripple. The air around Angron tasted wrong, like lightning and ash mixed with something older, something that didn’t belong in lungs. The demon’s eyes burned with a furnace glare, and Koron saw it clearly in that gaze: Angron wasn’t looking at Koron.

  He was searching for Koron’s arrival.

  Koron moved at the last possible instant.

  His legs uncoiled, hurling him up and over the Primarch’s line of travel as Angron ripped past in a gale and crossed under him.

  There, for the briefest fraction, something caught.

  The warp jets behind Angron coughed, the roar clipped into a ragged sputter like a flame starved of air. The heat halo around his armor dulled a shade. Fire that should have licked and screamed along his plates guttered, muted, as if someone had pinched the sound out of it.

  Angron’s skin prickled beneath his armor. An itch, deep and fractured, static under the flesh. His ceramite drank the change and went strangely heavy, runes and brass fittings losing their hateful shine, dampened as though the world had suddenly remembered cold. The air thinned in a way that made his instincts snarl.

  He noticed.

  Not with thought, but with the same animal certainty that told him when a blade was coming.

  A dead patch in the warp.

  A place where his fury didn’t echo the way it should.

  His eyes sharpened, and in that furnace glare there was a flicker of confusion turned instantly into spite, as if reality itself had insulted him.

  Wind tore at Koron’s armor, clawed at his skin, yanked him sideways as if the air itself tried to hand him back. For a instant he was suspended above a moving apocalypse, and the city below stuttered in his peripheral vision: smashed rooftops, prayer banners snapped into ribbons, a plume of black smoke rising from a crater that had once been a street.

  As Koron cleared Angron’s head, his eyes caught on the metallic cords trailing from the demon’s scalp. They lashed and danced in the turbulence like serpents made of wire. Recognition flared, sharp and immediate, a memory of diagrams and anatomy and a name he had not recalled in years.

  Neurospinal Conductive Node, Type XII.

  His stomach lurched. Not because he didn’t understand, but because he did.

  Dozens of them, driven into Angron’s skull until the whole thing was nothing but cruelty with a serial number.

  His timing slipped by a fraction.

  Angron’s spiked tail whipped up, a striking chain made of bone and brass. It clipped Koron’s side in a grazing touch, barely contact, but the force behind it was obscene. The world snapped sideways. His body became a projectile.

  He careened into a tower wall hard enough to pulverize stone. His shield flared and flickered, a thin shimmering skin that took the worst of it, and still pain detonated down his ribs like a line of hot nails. He punched through exterior masonry into a room that didn’t belong in a warzone.

  Opulence.

  Silken sheets billowed in the shock of his entry, catching dust like snow. Gilded arches framed a ceiling painted with saints who had never seen the underside of a hive. A hanging lamp swung wildly, its crystal pieces chiming once, absurdly delicate, before shattering. Koron skidded across cold marble, leaving a scrape of torn grit and blood, then slammed shoulder-first into a reinforced door. The door cracked. The impact rang through his bones.

  His shield stuttered as it began to re-knit itself, light skittering back across fractured fields. Warning text tried to crawl into his awareness with the patient insistence of a machine that did not care about urgency:

  RIB FRACTURES: 3–5.

  TREATMENT BEGINNING-

  He killed the triage feed with a thought. Not now.

  Koron dragged himself upright, boots slipping on broken masonry and powdered plaster. The room was filling with dust, a pale haze that caught the firelight from outside and turned it into a dim amber fog. His breath rasped in his helm. Every inhale tugged on his side with a dulled reminder that bone had limits, even for him.

  Outside, Angron reoriented mid-air.

  Koron saw him through the ruptured wall, a massive silhouette framed by smoke and falling debris. The warp jets screamed, not as engines but rather reality being forced to make space. The lumbering titan did something that should have been impossible for so much mass: he snapped his angle, pivoting in the air with brutal decisiveness, already correcting, already coming about, a self-guiding missile of hate.

  Sasha’s voice came back, raw at the edges now.

  ‘He’s solving you.’

  Koron’s jaw tightened until it hurt. Copper flooded his mouth. He planted his feet on marble that had never expected to hold a running man and made his body obey anyway.

  ‘Think Rover has made enough distance?’ he sent, and launched himself out the shattered window before the demon could turn this suite into a tomb.

  Stained glass fell beside him in glittering sheets.

  A heartbeat later Angron punched through the building. Metal and stone softened in his wake like they were ashamed to be solid. Dust billowed out in a choking bloom, swallowing the room, swallowing the light.

  Koron used it.

  He fell through the dust curtain and, for the briefest slice of time, the world became simple: wind, gravity, and the thin little signal labeled ‘Rover’ sprinting across his overlay far below, a bright dot racing through the hive’s arteries toward the orbital spire, now only a kilometer distant.

  ‘No—’ Sasha started, then forced the word flat. ‘He tracked you across a continent and underground. A few thousand meters of hive isn’t cover. It’s a corridor.’

  His mind split without ceremony. One part counted angles and landing surfaces. Another watched the dot and measured hope in meters.

  ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  He hit the angled roof and shot down the centerline, boots biting, plates catching, body skimming rather than landing. ‘I can’t shake him. He doesn’t care what he breaks. So… we stop trying to keep him contained.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Sasha said, and he could hear her force the calm back into place. ‘What, you want to drag him straight into the Chaos lines and use him as the galaxy’s least subtle battering ram?’

  Koron bared his teeth in a tight, feral grin. ‘I’m not going to be able to keep this up forever. He’s closing the gap with every trick I pull. Eventually, he gets me.’

  He glanced once at the dot. Still running.

  ‘So let’s aim him. Away from the civvies, into the Chaos lines.'