The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Vitus Salicar rode at the head of the Blood Angels, his crimson Rhino’s engines roaring like a mesoscorpion in heat. He’d ordered the Techmarines to overcharge the engines. They’d burn out within minutes, metal grinding on metal and erupting in flames as oil feeds burst under pressure. It wouldn’t matter. These Rhinos would never need to move again once this task was done.

‘An end for all of us,’ he said.

They left burning trails behind them where fuel manifolds had already cracked. The flames spread quickly through the fields, and a wall of smoke and fire rose behind them.

There could be no retreat now, even if they desired one.

The traitor line was an unbroken wall of flesh and iron, tanks and marching soldiers as far as the eye could see. Smoke banks from booming artillery obscured the rear ranks. Gunfire snapped and explosions cratered the ground.

Shots punched the up-armoured glacis of his Rhino, but didn’t penetrate. A las-round clipped his shoulder guard, vitrifying the ash and dirt smeared over his Legion symbol. A glassy scab formed over the blood drop.

He looked left and right. Like him, Drazen Acorah and Apothecary Vastern rode in the cupola of their Rhinos, while Warden Serkan squatted atop his vehicle like the savage tribal chiefs of Baal Secundus atop their chariots in ages past.

‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ shouted Salicar as linked bolters on the roof of the Rhino opened fire. A few traitors in deliberately ripped Army fatigues and fetishised helms were punched from their feet.

He picked his target. Army Chimera with the Eye of Horus daubed in umber on the frontal glacis. A banner of ragged cloth streaming behind it with a bleeding eagle upon it. A vehicle for a commander or soldier of rank.

The engine behind Salicar blew out with a hard bang and a solid, concussive thud. He tasted burning promethium and lubricant. The vehicle gave one last spurt of power to the tracks before seizing with a dreadful clash of splintering metal and ripping gears.

The Rhino slammed head on into the painted Chimera. Metal buckled and deformed. The heavier Space Marine vehicle smashed the Chimera’s frontal section like foil paper. Salicar vaulted from the Rhino’s roof, using the collision to propel him deep into the enemy ranks.

His scaled cloak billowing behind him like golden pinions, the captain of the Bloodsworn sailed through the air and crashed down in the midst of the charging traitors. His sword swept out, its edges blazing with amber fire. Men died.

Behind him, the Rhino’s spiked bull bar had disembowelled the enemy vehicle like a carcass on a butcher’s slab. Black smoke billowed as the assault doors opened and the Blood Angels poured out. They slammed into the scattered traitors, bludgeoning them from their path with kite shields and short, stabbing thrusts of their swords.

Salicar moved and killed with grace and beauty, like a dancer whose every move was choreographed to match those of his foes. Mortals tried to cut him down, but his movements were too fast, too supple and too beautiful. His flame-lit edge opened their bodies, his gold-chased pistol spat headshots with every pull of the trigger.

Gun fire struck him on the chest and shoulders. Some of it even cut down the soldiers he was fighting. They knew they couldn’t fight Salicar on an equal footing and were looking to kill him any way they could. He kept moving, putting as many of the enemy around him as he could. If they planned to shoot him down, they would kill their own men to do it.

The Blood Angels formed arrowheads of red-armoured killers around their war-leaders. Warden Serkan smashed through a knot of bare-chested warriors with their flesh scarified by knife blades. His eagle-winged symbol of office carved them new wounds, but none that would ever heal.

Alix Vastern, the Apothecary who knew every inch of human physiology and who had spent a lifetime repairing it, now bent his every effort to destroying it. Drazen Acorah fought with a monstrous twin-bladed axe, hewing a red path through to a squad of augmented soldiers adorned in blood-lined flesh cloaks and whose weapons were those of the techno-barbarians that once warred over the ruined hellscapes of Old Earth.

Salicar pushed through the masses of packed soldiery to link with him. No blade touched him, but las-rounds and solid slugs gouged and bit his plate. In any other fight, the goal was to make space. To move, to find the gaps between the foe and drink deep of the killing thirst. Here, the aim was to fill that space with their flesh, to make them his shields.

All around, the charge of the enemy continued unabated. Chimeras roared past towards Tyana Kourion’s Grand Army of Molech. For all their trappings of savagery, the Warmaster’s army was disciplined.