Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > The Death of Antagonis > Status Update

The missiles flashed inside. The explosions were funnelled out of the entrance and washed over the Thunderhawk as it angled toward the temple’s peak. ‘Message delivered,’ Keryon said. The Nightfire followed to make sure the message was understood.
Volos clapped Keryon on the shoulder guard and left the cockpit. He wasn’t even on the field yet, and he could already taste the blood of traitors in his mouth.

Volos was surrounded by killing. Hungry for vengeance, raging at the harm that was befalling his company, he gave himself up to the rhythm of violence. He let his body be fire and bone. He became what he was designed to be. He was monster and he was death, and there was no stopping him. Every movement took a life. Finger pulled trigger and blew up a head. Arm thrust to impale, pulled out and swept to sever.

Nithigg pointed. ‘The blessed, too.’
He used the word with both irony and reverence. Squad Solemnis was being led by Sergeant Lucertus to a drop pod. The abominations had been released from their holding cages. Chained and sedated, they would be unleashed on the planet’s surface to revel in the full extent of their madness, becoming furies of ceramite, teeth, and slashing bone.

‘I am not tainted,’ he whispered. ‘I am not tainted,’ he repeated, praying now. ‘The Emperor is my light, and my arm is eternally and solely at his service, until death releases me.’ For a flashing moment, he found himself wishing Setheno were here. But her words came to him: You are the Emperor’s monsters. And you are necessary. They were a dark comfort.

The painkillers flooding his system blocked the worst of his own injuries from his consciousness, but they couldn’t block his sense of the ship’s pain. Every hull breach, every tortured system, every blown bulkhead was as real to him as his own nerve clusters. As the ship revived, it screamed. Maro whispered to it. He repeated litanies of healing, doing everything he could to soothe the wounded spirit.

Volos drew level with Toharan. He was a colossus risen from the most fevered depths of humanity’s collective unconscious. His black ceramite dripping with gore and flesh, his face contorted into that of a saurian predator, he had become something that Toharan had never wished to contemplate, but now regarded with horrified understanding. He looked at his brother, and saw a daemon.

As blood and brain matter ran down the monster’s gauntlet, he gutted Feher with a bone-blade then threw the mangled corpse at the crowd. The Dragon roared, and with a voice that was deep and hissing and loud enough to be heard without speakers, he shouted, ‘People of Aighe Mortis! We are the Adeptus Astartes! We are the Black Dragons! We have come to purge your heresy with fire and with bone!’

Toharan was on the summit when the explosions happened. Without pausing his extermination of heretics, he glanced down the east slope and saw the billow of dust rise towards the invisible heavens, glowing from the flashes of fireballs. The enemy reinforcements were blocked. The troops on the hill were outnumbered now, with no way up or down. It was time to crush them, and place the Concordat in Imperial hands.

That decision was what mattered, and so, when all was said and done, he could put up with a little wounded pride. He held the fate of a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes in his hands. That was true authority and power. He knew there would be no songs written about Werner Lettinger in the centuries to come, but his name might certainly be spoken in hushed whispers, and that would suit him very well.

Volos and his brothers welcomed them to damnation with open arms. They burned and shot and sliced and smashed: dark gods of black ceramite and white, murderous bone. They were giants, monsters of war breaking little human dolls into bloody, smoking shreds.
It almost wasn’t sporting, Volos thought, snarling as he tore into another clump of cultists.