The air around Vek was thick with the stench of burning oil and blood, suffocating in its weight. The battlefield was a shifting nightmare of smoke, fire, and shadows—each movement a possible death. Engines rumbled like distant thunder, the screams of the dying woven into the mechanical cacophony.
The sergeant's barked orders barely registered. Vek's legs moved on instinct, his lasgun gripped like a lifeline as he stumbled toward the bunker. Yet his mind clung to a single, terrifying thought.
The Slayer.
The name echoed in his skull, ancient and absolute. A force beyond comprehension. He had seen Astartes before—once, when he was a child—but this was something else. Something more.
He should have kept moving. Should have followed the others inside. But curiosity, stronger than fear, anchored his feet to the blood-slicked ground.
Through the haze of smoke and drifting embers, he saw him.
The Slayer moved with eerie purpose, his green armor marred with filth and gore yet untouched by hesitation. Twin lasguns flared in his grasp, beams of red lancing through the swirling fog, cutting down anything that dared to move.
Then came the sound. A grinding, mechanical roar.
A shadow loomed from the smog—a war engine, massive and crude, its hulking form belching black smoke as it thundered forward. Its armor was a patchwork of scavenged steel and rusted plates, defaced with blasphemous sigils, its cannon swiveling with an ugly mechanical whine.
And riding atop the behemoth, clad in blood-red armor, was something worse.
It was too large to be a man, too monstrous to be an Astartes. Its form was a grotesque mockery of the Emperor's chosen—hulking and brutal, its crimson plates twisted with baroque corruption. In one gauntleted hand, it gripped a rusted chainaxe, its engine sputtering to life with a hungry snarl.
Vek felt his breath hitch. His fingers clenched the grip of his lasgun.
The Slayer turned to face them.
His lasguns sang in response, burning crimson streaks across the war machine's hull. Sparks erupted, metal buckled, but the monstrous tank did not stop.
With a screech of tortured servos, the war engine surged forward.
The Slayer held his ground. His weapons flared in defiance, a relentless barrage of fire, but it was not enough.
With a thunderous roar, the war machine slammed into him.
The impact was brutal, metal crashing against armor, the force sending the Slayer hurtling through the air like a broken doll. The smog swallowed him whole, his green-clad form vanishing into the chaos.
Then, the war machine followed.
A sickening crunch echoed through the battlefield as the tank's massive treads ground forward, disappearing into the swirling ash.
Vek's stomach twisted.
"No!" The word ripped from his throat, raw with disbelief.
The sergeant was on him in an instant, grabbing his shoulder, his grip bruising. "Get inside! That's an order!"
Vek stumbled back, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps. His mind screamed for him to resist, to do something, but his body obeyed the order.
The bunker doors slammed shut behind them.
And the battlefield beyond was swallowed by the storm.
The war machine's massive treads churned through the rubble, its corrupted bulk shaking the ground with every grinding movement. But something was wrong.
Its engine howled, struggling, as if caught on something.
Then the battlefield shook.
With a bone-rattling crack, the war engine lurched—not forward, but upward. The ground beneath it heaved, as if reality itself had turned against its advance.
Then, like a thing of mockery, the war machine rose.
From the smoke and ruin, the Slayer stood.
His boots dug deep into the shattered earth, muscles corded beneath armor, gauntleted fingers dug into the hull. The treads fought for purchase, servos screamed in protest—but it was too late.
With a guttural roar of defiance, the Slayer lifted.
The corrupted tank flipped. Hulking steel and desecrated plating twisted through the air like a broken beast, before slamming onto its back in a catastrophic impact. Fuel ignited. Metal split. Smoke and flame vomited from ruptured exhaust vents.
And atop the wreckage, the blood-red giant moved.
The Chaos Astarte dislodged himself with unnatural speed. His chainaxe revved to life, teeth spinning hungrily as he let out a guttural war cry.
The Slayer did not wait.
The first strike came in a brutal arc, meant to cleave his head from his shoulders. The Slayer sidestepped, movement deceptively fast for his size. The traitor pressed forward, axe carving through the air in savage sweeps.
Then, as the heretic overextended on a downward swing, the Slayer moved.
His hand shot forward, snatching the Astarte's own bolt pistol from its holster in one fluid motion. The Chaos Marine roared in fury, swinging again—too slow.
The Slayer ducked.
The bolt pistol slammed beneath the traitor's chin. The trigger pulled.
A deafening boom erupted. The bolt round detonated inside the heretic's skull. His body spasmed, armor cracking, before crumpling to the ground, chainaxe sputtering in a lifeless grip.
Silence fell.
Then came the war horns.
From the smog, the Berserkers came.
The battlefield trembled beneath their charge. Red ceramite, fresh with gore. Chainaxes, glaives, daemonic weapons screaming without sound. The earth itself seemed to recoil from their presence.
And at their head, atop a Juggernaut of molten iron and war-forged muscle, rode their warlord.
His laughter was a guttural, metallic rasp.
"You are too small for an Astarte," he mused. "Yet too strong for a mere Guardsman. And your rage—your rage sings."
The daemon in the chainaxe quivered, slithering into the Slayer's mind.
"Yesss… you are one of us. You are already His."
The warlord raised his weapon and started chanting.
"NO THRONE COMMANDS US! NO WALLS CONTAIN US!
NO LAW RESTRAINS US! NO PACT BINDS US!
WE ARE NOT ARMIES, NOR MEN, NOR KINGS—
WE ARE THE STORM THAT UNMAKES ALL THINGS!
EMPIRES RISE, EMPIRES FALL—
BUT WAR DOES NOT BEGIN, NOR END.
THE WORLD MOVES, BUT WE REMAIN,
FOR WE ARE WAR ITSELF!"
"YOU WHO SEEK CAUSE—FOOLS!
YOU WHO SEEK JUSTICE—LIARS!
YOU WHO SEEK CONQUEST—BLINDED!
THERE IS NO PURPOSE OF WAR BUT WAR ITSELF!
NO LORD ABOVE, NO LAND TO CLAIM,
NO PRIZE BEYOND THE ENDLESS BLADE!
WE DO NOT MARCH—WE ERUPT!
WE DO NOT CONQUER—WE DEVOUR!"
"BEFORE THE FIRST EMPIRE FELL, WE WERE.
AFTER THE LAST CITY BURNS, WE WILL BE.
WE ARE THE PURE MOTION OF THE BLADE,
THE TIDE THAT KNOWS NO SHORE.
CALL US SLAUGHTER, CALL US MADNESS,
CALL US WRATH, CALL US RUIN—
NAMES MEAN NOTHING, FOR WE ARE BEYOND THEM!
THE WAR THAT DOES NOT SERVE—ONLY SLAYS!"
"MARCH WITH US! OR BE CRUSHED BENEATH US!
JOIN THE TIDE, OR DROWN IN THE FLOOD!
WE DO NOT SEEK, WE DO NOT STRIVE—
WE ARE THE WAR, THE ENDLESS DRIVE!
NO KING! NO STATE! NO CHAIN!
ONLY BLOOD, ONLY STEEL, ONLY WAR!
NOT MEN—NOT SOLDIERS—
BUT THE WAR MACHINE ETERNAL!
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! WAR WITHOUT END!"
His war mad warriors answered and for them these words weren't poetry but absolute fact of the primordial truth of chaos. It was their reality.
"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!"
They beat upon their armor, a ritualistic cacophony of war. The daemon shrieked in delight—until it did not.
Something was wrong.
The Slayer's rage did not feed the daemon. It consumed.
Where it had once gorged itself, the entity recoiled. It tried to retreat within its weapon—but there was no escape.
The Slayer's fury was absolute.
It was not devotion. It was not madness. It was not Khorne.
It was something else.
The daemon screamed.
And then, it was gone.
The Berserkers staggered. Their chants faltered, their warlord's Juggernaut shifting uneasily beneath him.
The Slayer exhaled. The chainaxe—now lifeless—dropped from his grip.
Then, he reached into the void left behind.
His fingers pressed into the exposed chamber—and something new took hold.
A surge of argent fire flooded the weapon. The broken tool of slaughter was no longer Khorne's.
It was his.
And the Berserkers of Khorne, for the first time, felt fear.
The battlefield was then quickly overturned to a cauldron of chaos, a relentless storm of steel, flesh, and fire. The war cries of the Berserkers mixed with the deafening roar of war engines, the ground shaking beneath the weight of their charge. They charged charged at Slayer's defiance from all directions—blood-mad warriors wielding daemon-bound glaives, howling chainaxes, and crackling power fists, their armor bathed in centuries of slaughter.
The Doom Slayer stood in the eye of the storm. His argent-infused chainaxe roared in his grip, its energy hungry for destruction. His bolt pistol hung at his side—but he needed no gun. His eyes swept the battlefield, analyzing, calculating, hunting.
The Berserkers rushed him in a crimson tide. He launched forward, low and fast, his first strike carving upward in a brutal arc that split the nearest warrior from groin to sternum. The argent energy vaporized the Berserker's blood before it could even spray, but the others were already upon him.
A glaive screeched toward his throat. He ducked under it, stepping into the Berserker's guard, side kicking him through the armor and ripping the weapon from his grasp. With a fluid spin, he reversed the grip and slammed the glaive's pommel into the warrior's helmet, shattering the skull inside. He then threw it like a spear at charging berserker with velocity that ripped a hole through him. But then another glaive came at Slayer from behind—he twisted, caught it mid-swing, and forced it into another Berserker's chest, impaling him. Before closing in, spinning around, and grabbing the Berserker who attacked him and suplexed into stone with force that destroyed his brain by embeddeding his neural implants deeper.
A war engine screeched toward him, a crude spiked ram mounted at its front, its treads tearing up the corpses of the fallen. The Slayer leapt onto it just before impact, his boots slamming into the metal with a thunderous clang. He drove his axe into the cockpit, tearing the panel apart, exposing the frenzied cultists piloting it. One reached for a sidearm—too slow. The Slayer grabbed him by the collar and yanked him through the ruined cockpit, hurling the screaming heretic into the grinding treads below.
The second pilot pulled a lever—the machine surged forward, straight toward a cluster of Berserkers. Perfect.
The Slayer slammed his fist into the machine's internal fuel lines, tearing them apart. Fire burst forth, swallowing the cultist whole, but the Slayer was already gone, flipping backward off the doomed vehicle as it plowed into the ranks of its own allies, detonating in a storm of flame and shrapnel.
But there was no time to breathe.
A Berserker with a power fist lunged at him, the weapon crackling with unholy energy. The Slayer sidestepped, but the warrior anticipated it, swinging a chainaxe with his other hand. Sparks erupted as the Slayer barely parried with his own axe, the impact jarring the Berserker's bones. He kicked the warrior's knee sideways with brutal precision, shattering the joint. As the Berserker stumbled, the Slayer grabbed him by the wrist, ripped the power fist clean off his arm, and shoved it onto his own.
A bolt pistol barked—a Berserker at range. The Slayer charged, then slammed his stolen power fist like a missile, the armored gauntlet slamming into the gunner's face and pulping his skull.
Another war engine barreled toward him from behind, this one covered in thick plating, spikes, and a massive rotary cannon that spun to life. The Slayer sprinted toward a broken wreck, using it as a springboard to leap high.
[ QUAD DAMAGE ]
The surge of power filled his body as he flipped through the air. Mid-flight, he reached down, yanked the heavy bolter from a dead World Eater's Havoc Marine's hands, aptly named Khorne's Teeth, these were known for carrying heavy firearms, and with that he landed atop moving war engine.
Then he unleashed hell.
The heavy bolter, now fueled by Quad Damage, tore through the horde like a god's wrath. Berserkers exploded into mist as the rounds hit them, their armor shattering under the amplified explosive armor penetrating impact of the self-propelled gyrojet rounds. The war engine's own armor proved useless—the Slayer turned the bolter downward and fired into the machine beneath his feet. The rounds ripped through its reinforced plating like parchment, detonating the fuel supply inside.
The explosion hurled him through the air. He twisted mid-flight, landing in the midst of another wave of Berserkers. No bolter. No pistol. Just his axe.
[ ONSLAUGHT ]
The Slayer vanished.
To the Berserkers, it was as if Khorne himself had struck them down. One moment, their weapons swung at open air— the next, their comrades were falling in pieces. The Slayer moved faster than thought, an emerald phantom in the bloodstorm. His axe cut through armor like it wasn't there, severing limbs, torsos, heads in a whirlwind of carnage.
One Berserker brought his glaive down—only to be disarmed, spinning sidekicked in the head, his weapon wrenched from his hands before being driven through his own gut. Another swung a chainsword, but before it even connected, the Slayer was behind him, ripping the weapon from his grip and using it to carve through three more.
War engines screamed, their gunners turning their turrets toward him. He seized a dying Berserker by the belt and hurled him into the lead vehicle's treads. The machine stalled as blood and armor jammed its gears, and the Slayer sprinted up its stalled hull, using it as a ramp to launch himself toward the next. He landed atop it, grabbed a rocket launcher from another fallen Khorne's Teeth Marine, and fired point-blank into the war engine's cockpit.
Fire erupted, consuming another squad of charging Berserkers.
And still, the Chaos Lord watched.
The Juggernaut beneath him shifted, flames licking at its metal form. His hymn was complete.
The battlefield trembled.
The Slayer turned, his armor soaked in the blood of the fallen, his eyes locking onto the towering figure.
The Chaos Lord smiled beneath his helmet.
"Now, at last," he rumbled, raising his massive axe, "a worthy sacrifice upon this altar for Khorne."