[The Harlequins have joined the Imperial alliance. Fulgrim's clone raised no objection, though the Salamanders occasionally let their eyes drift sideways toward the masked figures with the specific wariness of warriors who have fought the Eldar long enough to maintain the habit regardless of context.]
[There is no option now except to keep moving. Stopping means the Necron flood catches up and encircles you. You move, you fight, you push toward the World Nexus, and you do not stop.]
[You and Fulgrim's clone are operating at the absolute ceiling of your capability. The Empathic Obliterator sweeps through Necron formation after formation, the shared-damage mechanic clearing ground in radius, and the Ten Rings handle the angles the scepter cannot reach. Fulgrim's clone drives the Blood Scythe in sustained green arcs through anything that presses the flanks.]
[But numbers answer to mathematics, not effort.]
[The Vostroyan Firstborn take the heaviest losses. They are mortals in a battlefield built for Astartes, and Gauss flayer beams do not discriminate. By the time the formation reaches the outer approach to the World Nexus, nearly half of them are gone. The Ultramarines have taken over a third casualties. The Deathwatch kill team, which began this advance as five, is now down to one: the Black Shield, fighting through injuries that would have finished anyone without his lineage, keeping pace with Fulgrim's clone through will that has no physical explanation.]
[The Salamanders' heavy power hammers and power swords anchor the mortal troops behind them, the Chapter's characteristic steadiness holding the rear elements together even as the pressure increases.]
[Fulgrim's clone: his purple and gold armor has taken damage across every plate, the terracotta shell cracking in long stress lines, the ornamentation that made it beautiful now half-missing. His white hair is dark from root to tip with blood that is not his own. He fights through the metal tide like something that refuses categorization, the Blood Scythe leaving trails of green light that persist in the air after the blade has moved on.]
[The Black Shield paces him. The last son of a traitor's lineage, following the father who knelt before him, leading the remnant of the finest Ultramarines Trazyn had ever collected.]
[Then the last Contemptor Dreadnought begins to slow.]
[The sustained Gauss Cannon fire that the ancient war machine has been absorbing across the full length of the advance has finally accumulated past the threshold that even Heresy-era construction can withstand. The massive frame staggers. Its movement becomes inconsistent, the stride pattern breaking down. Living metal of its armor disperses into rising green atoms with each new impact, the ceramite and adamantium underneath giving way to the disintegration beams in sections.]
[It does not retreat.]
[The Dreadnought's engines push to full output. The stride steadies. The frame that is coming apart at its edges accelerates directly into the densest concentration of Necron heavy units ahead, driving like a steel structure that has forgotten it is also a coffin.]
["Courage and glory."]
[The voice from inside the sarcophagus is low and entirely without fear. An Ultramarine who had been entombed in the Heresy era and spent uncounted millennia in Trazyn's collection delivers his last battle cry at the volume of a man finishing a thought he started long ago.]
[Then the thermal reactor at the Dreadnought's core overloads.]
[Boom!]
[The flash is total. Every surface in the museum sector whites out simultaneously, and the shockwave that follows it moves through you like a physical command to fall. You drive the Empathic Obliterator into the metal floor as an anchor and hold your position, the vibranium armor rolling against the force, your magnetic boots the only other thing keeping you vertical. Even so, you slide three meters before you stop.]
[When your eyes open, the Necrons within a radius of several corridors are down. Not destroyed, but disrupted, their systems cycling through recovery from a concussive force that even living metal needs time to process.]
[The window is narrow.]
[You activate your armor and turn to what remains of the alliance behind you, not looking back at where the Dreadnought was.]
["The World Nexus is within reach. Victory is ahead of us. Every Leman Russ still operational: advance now. All Astartes: with me. Clear the path for the mortals behind you."]
[You have barely finished.]
[The Ultramarines who can still stand are already moving toward you. Fulgrim's clone raises the Blood Scythe and gathers the surviving Vostroyans and his lone gene-son around him without a word.]
[Your eyes move across the force: Fulgrim's clone looking like something that walked out of a defeat and kept going regardless, the Astartes in armor that has been hit by everything this museum contains and is still functional by some margin that should not exist, the Vostroyans reduced but moving, and the remaining Harlequins, down to six or seven, their leader simply meeting your look and tilting its masked head very slightly.]
[No words needed from that direction.]
["For the Emperor."]
[You say it quietly first. Then you say it again at a volume that fills the corridor.]
["For the Emperor!"]
[The roar that answers you comes from every throat left in the alliance simultaneously.]
[You and Fulgrim's clone go first.]
[The advance to the World Nexus costs what remains. The Vostroyan Firstborn are almost entirely gone by the time the cubic structure comes into view: a handful still on their feet, that is all. The Ultramarines are at half their post-liberation number. The last Contemptor's sacrifice covered the rear and is not coming back. Of the Salamanders, one remains. The Black Shield fights with one arm, the other gone at the elbow from a strike he took interposing himself between a Gauss Cannon beam and Fulgrim's clone. He fights with one arm and keeps up. The Harlequin leader is alone, the others taken by the aerial units Trazyn sent in the final approach.]
[The World Nexus stands before you: a massive cube of Necron construction, its surface inlaid with circuitry that runs in patterns too complex to read quickly, the scale of it dwarfing every surrounding structure.]
[You look at Fulgrim's clone. He looks at you.]
[You gesture to the Harlequin leader and the surviving Salamander.]
["Inspect the interior. Report back."]
[They go in. The wait is brief.]
[When they come back out, neither of them is moving with the steadiness they went in with.]
[The Harlequin leader stops in front of you. The mask makes it impossible to read the face beneath it, but the quality of the stillness is wrong: too rigid, something held under significant pressure.]
["We were wrong." The voice has lost its cryptic precision entirely. "We were genuinely wrong. This should not be possible. The prophecy cannot have meant this."]
[The Salamander stands to the side, his dark face carrying an expression of a man who has encountered something his entire frame of reference cannot accommodate.]
["My Primarchs." He chooses his words carefully. "Nothing in my training prepared me for what is in there. It exceeds anything I can analyze or advise on. You need to see it directly."]
[You take a breath.]
[You and Fulgrim's clone walk into the World Nexus side by side.]
[The interior is dim. The circuitry runs across every surface in the same complex patterns as the exterior, illuminated from within by a light that has no obvious source. At the center of the chamber, suspended by fields you cannot immediately identify, is a device of enormous scale.]
[You look up at it.]
[The sound that leaves you is barely above a whisper.]
["That is... a fragment of the Star God."]