Time: 001.M42 | POV: Zabriel (Risen)

  The forests of Avalus were burning. It was not a common fire, but a warp miasma leaking from the cracks of reality.

  Zabriel, a veteran of the First Legion and now one of the Risen, moved through the shadows of the trees behind his gene-father. It was a march through dimensions that mortals could not comprehend—one moment they were in a rotting swamp, the next their boots struck the steel ptes of a "Ten-Eyes" warband’s forge-factory.

  "Stay focused," Lion El'Jonson’s voice was a low thunder. He gripped the golden bde Fealty and the legendary Emperor’s Shield. Cd in armor of absolute defense, he descended like a knight-king out of ancient myth.

  Ahead, a group of Chaos-corrupted Heretic Astartes spotted the intruders. They howled, raising heavy weapons fused with their own flesh. These were bsphemous hybrids of psma cannons and multi-meltas, their barrels pulsing with purple veins—deeply modified by the Dark Mechanicum.

  "For the Chaos Gods!" the heretic champion pulled the trigger.

  Zabriel instinctively raised his bolter to suppress them, bracing for a brutal fight. Experience told him that weapons of this caliber could sg through ceramite armor or even threaten a Primarch’s kine-shields.

  However, destruction did not come.

  Zzzzt—

  A sharp, grating sound of electrical failure rang out, followed by a dead silence. The purple veins on the heretic’s weapon instantly turned grey and withered, as if the warp energy fueling it had been fttened by an "invisible bacteria" in a thousandth of a second. The psma cooling core clicked as it overloaded, then went dark—it had become nothing more than a block of cold scrap metal.

  The heretic champion froze. He hammered frantically at the dead machine, his eyes filled with an impossible madness. It was the hysteria of a shattered faith—why had the gifts of the gods been suddenly erased by the ws of physics?

  The Lion did not give him time to think. A fsh of golden light followed. He cut through the power armor—now stripped of its energy field—as easily as if it were parchment.

  In the subsequent sweep, Zabriel found more anomalies: enemy comm-arrays paralyzed by "natural aging" of the circuits, and automated turret motors jammed by some form of nano-dust. The battle was smoother than logic allowed.

  "They fell too deep. Even the iron in their hands refused to serve them," Lion El'Jonson judged coldly, looking at the piles of corpses. The Primarch attributed it to the Emperor’s Wrath or the retribution of traitors.

  Zabriel nodded in agreement, but as a veteran who had lived ten thousand years, a chill rose in his heart. He inspected the weapon of a fallen heretic. The internal circuit board wasn't burned—it had been "erased." It was as clean as a factory-fresh board.

  This was not retribution. This was a form of extremely precise industrial erasure.

  The forest mist swallowed the battlefield once more. The hunters pressed on, but Zabriel couldn't help but look back. He felt, obscurely, that beyond this fog, there was an invisible eye silently plucking the thorns from the Lion's path.