"Traitor," Guilliman said, his voice like a thunderclap across the battlefield. "Your thoughts are as rotten as your soul. What gives you the audacity to stand before me?"
He fixed his steely gaze on Gurlo, the bloated leader of the rebellion, clad in rusted Centurion armor twisted by the warp.
"You could have scurried back to your disgusting subspace before I arrived. But no—you stayed. For that, I must admire your courage… though I suspect your long years in filth have shattered whatever mind you had left."
The Primarch's words were sharp, cutting through the din of battle. Around him, Imperial warriors cheered, morale rekindled by the presence of their living legend.
"You are arrogant, Primarch," Gurlo snarled, his face flushing a darker shade of green with fury.
He had expected many things from a son of the Emperor—but not this brazen contempt.
"When one faces trash, it's difficult not to be arrogant," Guilliman replied coldly. "If your so-called forces cannot change their pitiful fate, then why shouldn't I be confident?"
Mockery laced his voice. His words were broadcast across the vox-net, heard by loyalist and traitor alike.
"You will pay for that insolence," Gurlo growled, bile seeping from his cracked lips. Even a Chaos-infested warlord could feel the sting of humiliation.
"I would welcome the attempt," Guilliman said, eyes unblinking. "But we both know you lack the strength to make me pay."
Gurlo fell silent. He had never encountered such a brazen Primarch—one whose sharp tongue was as deadly as his sword.
Guilliman, for his part, remained unmoved by the traitor's anger. He was no longer just the thirteenth son of the Emperor. After his resurrection, he had become something more—his essence merged with another soul, one steeped in knowledge and perspective from another existence. The new Guilliman was colder, sharper, more cunning—and his wit was as keen as his blade.
Even the Chaos Gods would find his tongue hard to match.
"I hope your blade is as sharp as your words, Primarch," Gurlo growled, signaling to his second-in-command. The bloated warrior nodded solemnly.
"Then witness the power of the warp," Gurlo bellowed. "Tremble before it!"
Suddenly, the earth shuddered beneath their feet.
A sound like shattering glass echoed through the sky, as if the fabric of reality itself had cracked. Jagged fractures tore through the air, and from them spilled a foul, unholy light—sickly hues that no natural sun could produce. That light radiated pure malevolence, hatred of the material world given form.
The veil between realspace and the warp had been torn open.
From the rift spilled warp energy—an infectious tide of madness and corruption. Nearby Imperial psykers immediately felt their powers surge. The broken veil granted them easier access to the immaterium—but such gifts always carried a price. A moment of weakness, a slip in focus, and they would be consumed from within—transformed into gibbering spawn or possessed by things far worse.
From the ruptured portal, a shape began to emerge—massive, bloated, and reeking of pestilence.
Ten meters tall, the creature oozed with filth. Its belly bulged and sagged, covered in weeping sores and leaking pus. A massive rusted blade rested in its meaty hands. Its mouth, lined with rotting teeth and crawling with maggots, opened to let out a roar that echoed across the battlefield. Plague flies buzzed around it, and Nurglings—small, malformed spawn of Nurgle—spilled from its wounds, laughing madly.
A Great Unclean One, a greater daemon of Nurgle, had entered the battlefield.
"Disgusting," Guilliman muttered, gazing at the creature with cold contempt.
Daemons. The eternal enemies of mankind. Born from the warp, forged by emotion and fed by belief. They were not truly alive, not truly real—mere projections of the greater entities that dwelled beyond reality. Destroying their physical forms would only send them screaming back to the immaterium, where they would bide their time until summoned again.
Only a few weapons or incredibly potent psykers could annihilate them completely.
The Emperor's Sword was such a weapon.
When Guilliman had first returned to life, he had used this blade to kill a traitor-turned-daemon prince blessed by Khorne. The weapon, a relic of unmatched power, burned with the Emperor's wrath—its touch could sever even a daemon's connection to the warp.
The Warp's denizens were diverse, shaped not just by the Chaos Gods, but also by mortal belief, extreme emotions, or race-specific obsessions. Some daemons, like the infamous Curse of Man, were created entirely from despair and hatred. That entity once wounded the Emperor himself during the Webway Wars, almost tipping the balance in humanity's eternal struggle.
In that grim conflict, the End of the Empire left the Emperor gravely wounded, allowing Horus—empowered by the Dark Gods—to strike the fatal blow during the Siege of Terra. It was only through the sacrifice of Sanguinius and the intervention of Warmaster Orr that the Emperor ultimately slew Horus, though at great cost.
There were others—unaffiliated warp entities like Samus, who nearly killed the loyalist Loken during the betrayal at Itari III. That battle saw Loken, once Horus' trusted captain, resist the Warmaster's corruption. He and a handful of loyalists held the line against the World Eaters and their primarch Angron for months.
Though orbital bombardment eradicated nearly all Imperial loyalists on the planet, Loken survived. Samus, acting under Horus' command, hunted him down as an example of what defiance would cost. In a final act of heroism, the remembrancer Mecetti sacrificed herself to banish Samus, saving Loken's life.
There were other unaffiliated daemons like Be'lakor, who served their own agendas or formed shifting allegiances with the Chaos pantheon—forever locked in battle in the eternal nightmare of the warp.
The daemon now before Guilliman belonged to the camp of Nurgle. A Plague Demon, bloated with the "blessings" of disease, despair, and decay.
"A Primarch?" the Great Unclean One bellowed, his fetid eyes narrowing as he spotted Guilliman.
"And you… a repugnant beast," Guilliman replied. He cleaved through the last Plague Marine in his way with a single stroke of the Emperor's Sword. The traitor's body exploded into golden flame, his soul incinerated by the Emperor's judgment.
The daemon smirked with yellowed, cracked teeth. "Perhaps poor Mortarion needs a family reunion. I could take you back, make him happy again."
"That idiot traitor needs a pyre, not a family," Guilliman said coldly. "And you, daemon, would do well to return now—before I burn you to cinders."
The two titans stared at one another across the ruined ground—Primarch and daemon, champions of opposing realms.
Behind Guilliman, the air shimmered. Titans marched forward. The earth trembled beneath their adamantium feet. From the skies above, the Imperial fleet began to adjust firing patterns, preparing to obliterate the rift and its defenders with orbital fire.
But Guilliman did not wait.
Raising the Emperor's Sword high, its flame casting back the corrupting shadows, he advanced on the daemon, voice like iron:
"Face judgment."
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