Wolf Nolan was off the ground before the first of the Rubricae had fully emerged from behind the boulder field.
His cracked dark red power armor's servo-systems engaged with the snap of systems that had been running at minimum draw and were now being asked for everything simultaneously. His right hand swept across the gravel beside him and closed around the Frost Fang's haft, the chainaxe's teeth whirring to life at the contact, the axe blade catching the Eye of Terror's bruised light in a cold gleam.
He looked at the advancing line of blue and gold power armor with the evaluating calm of a warrior who has fought things like this before.
"Rubricae," he said quietly. "Magnus's own Blades." He paused for half a second. "Soulless puppets. Every one of them."
It was the most he had time to say.
The boulder field erupted.
From every concealed position across the rubble field, where the surviving Wulfen of the Thirteenth Company had pressed themselves into the rocks and kept silent for the last several hours, hundreds of shapes launched upward simultaneously. The wolf-howl that rose from them was a single sound made of many voices, desolate and long, carrying across the red barren ground without any apparent concern for whether it was heard. They did not wait for an order. They were already moving before the sound had finished, clearing the boulders in long, agile arcs that covered the distance to the enemy line faster than standard Astartes were built to cover it, frost claws spread.
Where the Wulfen hit the Tzaangors, the engagement became a matter of close quarters and momentum, and the Wulfen had more of both.
Wolf Nolan moved in the opposite direction.
His magnetic boots raised brief bursts of red dust from the Chaos-tainted ground with each impact, the cracked ceramite of his armor carrying the accumulated record of the previous engagement across its surface. He did not adjust his approach for the nearest Rubric Marine that turned toward him: he simply drove directly at it, the Frost Fang already swinging back and coming forward in an arc that had the weight of a Primarch's arm behind it.
The Rubric Marine raised a warpflamer.
Wolf Nolan stepped sideways on the last stride, letting the gout of psychic fire bloom past his right shoulder and searing the air where he had been a moment ago. Then he was inside the weapon's reach, and the Frost Fang completed its arc across the Rubric Marine's waist. The animated armor folded at the cut and fell in two sections, the dust that had been its contents dispersing in the Eye's ambient Chaos field.
He was already turning for the next one.
The sorcerers among the Rubricae had advanced behind the front line, and they began their work as the first contact was joined across the entire engagement zone. Force staves swept up in unison, and the air above the battlefield became a different kind of problem: psychic lightning arcing in forked chains across the space where the Wulfen were moving, blazing columns of Tzeentchian flame erupting from the ground at calculated intervals. The hexes followed immediately afterward, invisible and specific, targeting the Wulfen's momentum, their charging speed, the ferocity that was the primary advantage they carried against opponents who could not match them in close quarters.
The Wulfen were resistant. Not immune: Wolf Nolan could see the lightning strip Wulfen brothers off their feet, could see the hexes slow the charge lines in places. But the Wulfen's mutated physiology gave them a durability margin that standard Astartes would not have had in this environment, and they were using it. They went down and they got back up, or they did not go down at all, and either way they kept closing.
Wolf Nolan was doing something different.
As the combat intensity escalated and the Frost Fang continued its work through the sorcerers' front rank, something changed in the quality of the space immediately around him. The psychic fire that reached for him dissipated before it arrived. The hexes that the sorcerers cast toward his position unraveled at the edge of their effect radius like thread coming loose from badly tied ends. The lightning that might have staggered anyone else discharged around his Iron Halo and his armor with a secondary crack that set his gray-white hair smoldering without stopping him from what he was doing.
He did not know precisely how to describe the protection when he was in it. He only knew that the harder he fought, the more completely the Tzeentchian sorcery failed to find purchase on him.
Khorne, whatever his interest in Wolf Nolan's eventual fate, found nothing more offensive than a warrior of his domain being stopped by sorcery. The two things were incompatible at a fundamental level, and the incompatibility was currently manifesting as a problem for every psyker in the engagement zone.
Wolf Nolan drove into the sorcerers' formation from the flank.
The Frost Fang moved faster than a chainaxe had any right to in that terrain and at that tempo, and the sorcerers who had been directing fire at the Wulfen suddenly had a more immediate priority. The psychic barrage faltered as they redirected. Which was the point.
Scarlet blood from the Tzaangors the Wulfen were cutting through splattered across his armor in repeated bursts, working into the cracks in the ceramite, soaking his hair from gray-white to a matted crimson. One bolt of psychic lightning found a gap in the Iron Halo's protective arc and hit him in the chest directly. The impact drove the air from him and set what remained of his hair to smoking, and he answered it with a roar that came from somewhere below conscious thought and resumed his attack before the sound had finished.
The Rubricae that he hit directly in that state were either hammered to the ground or split by the axe. The battle's momentum was moving toward the Thirteenth Company.
Then the sneer arrived.
It was not a sound that came from any throat on the battlefield. It was a presence distributed through the ambient Chaos field of the Eye itself: cold amusement, at ease, the register of something that had been watching this engagement from a significant remove and found the results moderately interesting rather than alarming. It lasted perhaps two seconds, and in those two seconds the psychic signature across the battlefield shifted entirely.
The Rubricae that had been cut down rose.
Not climbed. Rose: the severed sections of their armor drew back together, the dust inside them resettling, the gold-and-blue plate smoothing back to intact surfaces as though the damage had been reversed through a process that had nothing to do with repair and everything to do with Magnus simply deciding that his instruments would continue to function. The warpflamers came back up. The force staves steadied. Every Rubric Marine that had been a casualty was standing again within the space of those two seconds, restored to operational state.
Wolf Nolan stopped.
He stood in the middle of the engagement zone, the Frost Fang still in his hand, and looked at what had just happened, and his blood-red eyes were very open and very still.
The sneer had been telling him something specific: that the Rubricae were not the battle. They were the arena. Magnus's personal will was sustaining and restoring them directly, using them as instruments for a different objective than simply killing the Thirteenth Company. The Daemon Prince was waiting for something, and he had the patience of a creature that had been a Daemon Prince for ten thousand years.
Wolf Nolan looked at the Wulfen around him, at the numbers they were down from where they had started, and made the calculation that a captain makes rather than the calculation that a warrior makes.
He had enough anger to fight until his armor failed. That was not in question. The question was whether there would be anyone alive to walk out of this with him if he spent all of it here.
"Fall back," he said, loud enough to carry over the engagement noise. "Break contact now. All company. Move."
The Wulfen responded to his voice with a directness that bypassed understanding and went straight to compliance: the front lines broke, the flanks pivoted, and in the space of seconds the Thirteenth Company's engagement dissolved from a battle into a controlled retreat that used the boulder terrain for cover and moved toward whatever exit the terrain offered.
Wolf Nolan became the rear guard.
He did not retreat from the engagement. He stepped back into it: hitting the most dangerous of the reforming Rubricae before they could fully redirect toward the withdrawing Wulfen, demolishing with two or three Frost Fang strikes what would take minutes to restore, buying his brothers the intervals they needed. Each exchange cost him something, and the cost was visible in the deepening damage to his already-cracked armor, and he absorbed it all and kept moving.
The Wulfen were thirty meters ahead. Then forty.
And something moved in the ground under his feet.
The blood of the Tzaangors that had fallen in the first minutes of the engagement had pooled in the depressions of the barren stone, Chaos-tainted and carrying the psychic signature of Tzeentch's own aligned creatures. In the Eye of Terror, where the boundary between the Warp and real space had been worn to nothing, that blood was a material component that something very powerful could work with.
The chains rose from the ground in multiple places simultaneously.
They were not material chains in the conventional sense. They were constructs of sorcery and organic matter, the two components fused by Magnus's will into something that wrapped around Wolf Nolan's limbs with the grip of deliberate, focused power. His left leg. His right arm. Across his chest. The frost-claws of his Wulfen nature reacted, and his arms drove against the restraints with the strength of a Primarch's body pushing at absolute limit.
The chains held.
Wolf Nolan ground his teeth and pulled, every fibre of strength in the body that had fought a hundred arenas and survived the eye of Khorne's attention directing itself at the constructs around him, and the chains bent but did not give, and the distance between him and his brothers kept growing.