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Chapter 280: Abaddon: These Primarchs, They Only Think of Themselves
🕑 Added 2025-11-04 10:21:02 +0000 UTCChapter 280: Abaddon: These Primarchs, They Only Think of Themselves
The sandstorm raged. Fort Vigilus, in an instant, had gone from a smoldering ruin to a raging inferno. From Luvon's betrayal to being besieged by all sides, and now to this chaotic free-for-all, the entire process had taken less than five minutes.
The central control room had long since become a bloody slaughterhouse. Elite Inner Circle knights and Librarians were locked in a tangled melee. From time to time, a figure would be instantly annihilated in a psychic storm, not even leaving a limb behind.
Luvon stood before the control console, his dark armour streaked with winding trails of blood. He glanced down at the twisted corpse at his feet. The Inner Circle knight had died in a lunging posture, his five fingers dug deep into the metal control panel. A psychic backlash had caused his internal organs to erupt from his mouth and nose, blooming into aη°η flower of blood on his chest. The thick smell of blood was nauseating. The killing machines stood motionless amidst the corpses and gore.
Just then, Luvon felt the approach of other beings in the distance. 'It never ends.'
He lowered his head, his fingertips, caked with dried blood, flicked open the skull-vox that had been buzzing since the battle began. "It is I."
"It seems you have won," the cold voice of the Chaos Warmaster replied.
"A minor complication. I still need to control the Void Claw," Luvon said quickly, his fingers flying across the console. This ancient technology was difficult for even the Dark Angels to understand. After centuries of research, they had given up and had to rely on the Librarian's prophecies to grope their way forward.
Suddenly, a blinding light erupted from an external monitor. He instinctively looked up and saw a burgeoning fireball rising.
"A reminder: the Primarch has arrived."
"I see him," Luvon lowered his head again, a vein in his forehead throbbing. "When will your support arrive?"
"After the device is activated. Have you found the switch?"
"Not yet."
A dead silence fell on the comms channel, only the crackle of static mixed with a heavy breathing, as if the Warmaster were trying to suppress a soon-to-erupt rage. After a long moment, the cold voice came again, each word seeming to be ground from between his teeth: "Hurry."
The communication was cut.
A thousand light-years away, within the Eye of Terror, the roar of a battleship's main guns was incessant. Abaddon pressed his right hand on the head of a warband leader and, with a gentle squeeze, the Chaos lord's head split into eight pieces.
The sound of various orders was constant. He looked up and saw the Gloriana-class battleship Vengeful Spirit beneath him, constantly spitting fire. In the distant dust, dozens of smaller fleets were evading.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The duel between the iron behemoths was magnificent. Abaddon sneered and threw down the warband leader's corpse. "Let them surrender," he said, his voice tinged with the pleasure of a cat toying with a mouse. "To have held out this long, they are worthy of serving the great cause."
"Our forces have not yet fully assembled. It would be better to wait until the situation is more stable," Falkus Kibre, the leader of the Black Legion's Justaerin Terminators, said in a muffled voice. He was referring to the matter on Vigilus. Abaddon's whim to try and send the Primarchs to the heavens had greatly excited the Black Legion.
"Why should I bother with a group of fools who are torn between hatred and honor?" Abaddon's fingers unconsciously tapped on the shattered battle-plate of the corpse in his hand. The sound of metal on metal was particularly harsh on the silent battlefield. "If they were really going to make a move, they would have gone all-in long ago. Luvon's current state... it's hard to say. To send our elite main force there would be suicide."
"Then they will die."
The Warmaster glanced sideways at his second-in-command and shook his head almost imperceptibly. "It doesn't matter."
These past few years, he had been quite proud of his achievements. After all, he had won the victory he wanted in every Black Crusade. But after he had angrily gone to question Perturabo about why he was no longer providing him with the necessary military support, and had been sent to the ICU for two years, he had suddenly sobered up.
A Primarch was not so easy to deal with. Every step in the material universe now could only be a minor move. He had to be fully prepared in the warp.
Kibre said nothing. He just felt that Abaddon had sobered up a lot since he had climbed out of the ICU. At least his actions lacked that mysterious confidence. And the Chaos Warmaster was not one to explain himself. He simply waved his hand and ordered, "You take my personal guard and go first. Don't let those stupid pigs of the Emperor's Children get the better of you."
"Yes, Warmaster," Kibre saluted and left, boarding an assault craft. He opened the hatch and saw that it was packed with Justaerin Terminators.
CLANG!
The iron door closed. The craft took off. As the assault craft's engines spewed a blue-purple plasma trail, Abaddon also rose and came to the planet's mountain peak. He looked at the forges that would soon belong to him, and glanced at the sorceress beside him. "Has the future changed?"
"I cannot see it," the sorceress replied in a hoarse voice.
The two of them tacitly skipped over the almost-nil success rate of the Void Claw. The Warmaster casually tossed the Chaos lord's mangled body off the cliff and sat down heavily, the rock beneath him groaning under his weight.
"Four. There are four damned Primarchs in the Ultima Segmentum. Now they will be heading for the Eye of Terror. Can the plan still work?" the sorceress asked, her cloudy eyes turning, her tone ancient.
"Ever since the battle on Terra, the entire galaxy has been the dying echo of the Imperium. We have been through the Great Heresy, and now there are fires everywhere. He will surely awaken."
"I'm not talking about that corpse on the throne!" the Warmaster suddenly erupted. He smashed his fist on the rock beside him. The flying debris shot past the sorceress, but did not make her move a single inch. "He is not worthy of me going to this extent!"
Faced with the enraged Warmaster, the sorceress still maintained her hunched posture, her withered fingers steadily holding a crystal ball, as if his threat was of no consequence to her. "It can be done," she said, raising her head slightly and looking at the Warmaster's glowing golden pupils. "But before that, we will need more support."
"Perturabo?" Abaddon let out a short, cold laugh. "They will never obey my command."
The Warmaster's voice was filled with a ten-thousand-year-old resentment. He clearly had a deep grudge against the Lord of Iron. "And they will never be patient. Just like in the past. These Primarchs will never submit to anyone."
Hadn't Abaddon tried to persuade Perturabo to wait? To wait another two hundred years, for the foretold moment to arrive, for them to contact a few more Primarchs, and then to march on Terra together. He had even sent Khayon, but had never heard back.
These Primarchs were more arrogant than the last, each one only thinking of himself.
"They will obey. They just need a failure," the sorceress replied, looking at the great rift that straddled the boundary between the warp and the material universe. "An unprecedented failure, to make them realize that the situation has gone beyond their control."
