Dark Apostle

A combi-bolter was placed into one the armature joints of the servo-arm, and bolts tore into the weak point, severing the limb. The combat servitor reeled backwards, the stump of its servo-arm spraying oil and milky liquid as it waved ineffectually, before another blast from the combi-bolter tore the servitor's head from its shoulders.

'One day the pleasure of killing you will be mine, and mine alone,' came a snarling voice. 'None will steal that prize from me.'

Marduk looked up at Kol Badar, standing over him. He could just imagine the smirk on the whoreson's face beneath his quad-tusked helmet, and he rose to his feet quickly, his face burning with shame and fury. His hand tightened around the grip of his chainsword, and he felt the daemon Borhg'ash willing him to lash out at the Coryphaus.

Kol Badar laughed as he turned away from the First Acolyte, his combi-bolter tearing another enemy to shreds. With a swat of his power claw he sent one of the tracked units toppling onto its side, where an Anointed cult member turned its head to molten metal and liquid, burning flesh with a searing blast from the meltagun slung beneath his bolter.

Simmering with anger, Marduk watched as Kol Badar grabbed the track unit of the battle tank in his massive power talons, ripping it clear in a shower of sparks and smoke. As the tank jerked to a halt, the warlord of the Word Bearers clenched his talons into a fist crackling with energy and, with a roar, smashed it into the armoured plating of the vehicle. The reinforced armour buckled under the power of the blow. The second blow punched straight through the armoured hull and Kol Badar wrenched his fist free, tangled metal screeching horribly. Placing the muzzle of his combi-bolter through the hole, he unloaded his clip inside the tank. The bolt-rounds ricocheted around the enclosed space deafeningly and there were screams from within.

As if feeling Marduk's gaze, Kol Badar turned towards him, and pointed at the First Acolyte with one of his crackling power talons. The message was clear: your time will come.

I welcome that time with open arms, thought Marduk, flushed with anger and bitterness.

The Imperial forces were being butchered. Despite their efforts to drive against the traitor Legion, they were making no ground. Worse, they were losing ground, being slowly pushed back by the fury of the Chaos Space Marines' resistance.

But that was soon to change.

The earth shuddered with each step of the Exemplis. It rose out of the gloom like a colossus of the ancients, a towering behemoth of awesome power. The mountains shook to their foundations as thousands of tonnes of metal slammed into the hard, salt packed earth of the flooding valley with each titanic step.

Those legs alone were mighty bastion fortresses, complete with battle cannon batteries and crenellated walls from which soldiers could pour fire into the foe. Within each leg was a demi-cohort consisting of Hypaspists and the elite biologically and mechanically enhanced Praetorians. But the leg bastions were the least of the weapons of the Exemplis.

Heaving some of the most powerful weapons ever conceived by the Adeptus Mechanicus, entire traitorous planets had surrendered at the mere appearance of the Exemplis. With weaponry the size of towering building blocks, each capable of demolishing cities and laying rain to armies, the Exemplis had been in operational use by the Fire Wasps of Legio Ignatum since the time of the Great Crusade.

The plasma reactor, burning with the contained energy of a sun, roared with terrifying power as a fraction of its energy was siphoned into the giant weaponry of the god-machine.

The Exemplis was one of the last remaining Imperator Titans of Legio Ignatum of Mars and was worshipped by the adepts of the Cult Mechanicus as an avatar of the Omnissiah. With thundering steps, it strode to war once more against the traitors that had turned their back on the Imperium of Man.

CHAPTER TWELVE

There was something distinctly wrong about the tower, something far more perverted and unearthly than Varnus could truly conceive. It was almost as if it was a sentient being, that it had thoughts and ambitions of its own, and that these thoughts and ambitions were seeping into the slaves that laboured over its living form.

It was large on an unfeasible, maddening scale, and continued to rise hundreds of metres into the sky with every passing change of shift. It was so high that were it not for the vile, living re-breather masks that had been attached to the slaves' faces, they would start to struggle for oxygen in the increasingly thin air, not to mention the noxious fumes that blanketed the shattered city. The smog fumes seemed inexorably drawn towards the tower, and they circled it lazily.