The pale gold boots hit Magnus's chest like a dropped siege hammer.
The two horns that curved from the Daemon Prince's breastplate shattered at the base, fragments spinning outward in the frozen air of the time field at a pace that made each one individually trackable. Nolan had come in fast, wings flipped to propulsion at the end of the dive, all of Starfire Glory's enhanced strength focused into the point of contact, and the impact registered across Magnus's enormous body as a stagger that someone nine meters tall was not supposed to produce.
Nolan did not land on the ground. He stayed in contact with Magnus's body, pivoting in mid-air with the propulsion jets correcting his angle, and brought the Warscythe and the Forgebreaker down simultaneously at the joint between Magnus's upper and lower body. The Warscythe's green luminescence traced an arc through ceramite and red flesh. The Forgebreaker's lightning discharged into the same target with everything it had.
Magnus's thighs, each one standing taller than a standard Astartes, separated from the rest of him.
The Daemon Prince's slowed roar of pain was still building when Cypher arrived.
He had come in from the side, moving at the pace the time field allowed him to move faster than anyone else in its radius, and he used Nolan's power backpack as the last step in his approach: one boot on the housing, then airborne, the White Tiger Sword going up with both hands and coming down with all the velocity the jump and the gravity and the strength in Cypher's Primarch-adjacent frame could produce. The sword struck the side of Magnus's skull with a sound that was not entirely material: somewhere between steel on bone and a tiger's roar compressed into a single blade impact, the sword drove deep.
Magnus went further down.
His one remaining eye was visible through the slowness: wide and luminous and registering injury in real time while the time field made everything around it cooperate at half the natural pace. The grimoire was still in his grip, one hand clenching it while everything else was occupied with the accumulated damage of three seconds.
Then the grimoire opened.
The energy that came from its pages was not bound by the Space-Time Crystal's temporal field. It operated on a different order than the physical, working through channels that Jaghatai Khan's time-stopping artifact did not have entries for, and what it produced moved at full speed in a world where nothing else did. The psychic blast it released was directional and short-range, centered on Cypher as the most immediate threat.
Cypher was thrown.
He went back through the slowed air in a long arc that carried him fifty meters before the time field's friction-adjusted air let him interact with the ground, and he hit with the controlled impact of someone who has been thrown at high speed a great many times and has developed something resembling a protocol for it.
In the space where Cypher had been, the glow around Wolf Nolan's broken dark red armor was not the ambient light of the Eye of Terror.
It was something else. The wisps of blood-colored light that ran along the ceramite's crack-lines had been building since the chains had held him, building since the Wulfen had died around him, building since the Daemon Prince had put his hand on his head and described the specific fate he intended for the survivors of the Thirteenth Company. The Frost Fang's chain-teeth cycled at a pitch that was not a normal mechanical sound. Wolf Nolan's eyes, which had been cyan before this engagement, carried no trace of that color anymore.
He went from standing to airborne in the single motion of someone who stopped parsing the distance and simply moved through it.
The jump cleared eight meters. The Frost Fang came down two-handed onto Magnus's chest with the combined weight of a Primarch's body and a full-commitment strike and the specific quality of a blow that does not hold anything in reserve. The blade found the gap the previous injuries had created and drove through it: ribs, plate armor, into the dense gold-bright substance of the Daemon Prince's spine.
The slowed roar that came from Magnus this time was not pain alone.
"Rewind!" Cypher's voice carried across the engagement zone from where he had landed, already pushing himself to his feet with one arm under him and his head coming up to check the state of his ceramite chest piece. "The field is collapsing!"
The warning was accurate and the timing of it was insufficient.
The Space-Time Crystal's maximum operational capacity had been exceeded from the moment Cypher had activated it at this scale. What it had produced was real and it had worked: several seconds of time field at a radius wide enough to cover a nine-meter Daemon Prince and everything within a kilometer of him. The cost had been written on Cypher's face since the moment of activation. The field had been failing at its edges for some time before the center went, and when the center went, it went completely.
The psychic storm that had been accumulating inside Magnus's body during the seconds he had been slowed released all at once.
Wolf Nolan was the closest target and took the majority of it. The shockwave hit him and what came with it was not clean kinetic force: it was Magnus's psychic output at full intensity discharged at point-blank range, carrying the specific contaminating quality of Tzeentchian energy that the Eye's ambient field had been feeding continuously. Wolf Nolan went backward at a velocity that covered a kilometer in a time that was not long, trailing blood-mist mixed with flickers of psychic flame from his mouth and nose. He hit the ground and the ground registered the impact.
Main Nolan was also moving backward, but not uncontrolled.
The propulsion device absorbed what it could and redirected the rest into corrective thrust, and he stabilized in the air at thirty meters altitude with the Eye's chaotic wind pressing against him from multiple directions and the skull helmet's eyepiece already computing the situation below.
Magnus had not fallen.
He was damaged in a way that should have prevented him from standing. His thighs were gone. The chest cavity bore the mark of the Frost Fang's deepest penetration. The skull carried a line where the White Tiger Sword had struck almost through. And all of it was being addressed: the Eye of Terror had no shortage of the Chaos energy that animated and sustained a Daemon Prince's body, and Magnus was drawing on it with the focused intent of something that was very angry and needed to be functional again as quickly as possible. The wounds were not closing at speed. But they were closing.
The grimoire was already open in his hand. His remaining eye had found Nolan in the air, and the expression behind it was not the patience it had carried when addressing Wolf Nolan.
Nolan lowered his left arm to his side and opened his hand.
He was holding a detonation device.
It was a small thing, a standard remote trigger for charges that had been deployed ahead of time. He had scattered them during the initial approach and the first moments of close contact with Magnus's body, working from the pocket storage space the Space-Time Crystal had maintained as a separate function from the time field itself: melta bombs, seeded across the ground beneath the Daemon Prince's position while Cypher and Wolf Nolan were providing the immediate threat that kept Magnus's attention directed upward.
Cypher, standing on the ground fifty meters away, looked at the device.
Magnus, in the process of reforming, looked down.
The ground under his position was packed with them.
His psychic shield assembled over his body in the fraction of a second before Nolan's thumb moved on the trigger.
The melta bombs fired simultaneously.
The ground within a kilometer in every direction was, within the space of three seconds, not ground anymore. The concentrated thermal and penetrating energy output of dozens of melta bombs in a concentrated pattern produced a lake of orange-red magma that expanded outward from the central point and consumed everything that had been surface material. The explosion shockwave that followed the thermal event added turbulence that the already-chaotic air of the Eye of Terror processed into something between a windstorm and a psychic pulse. The mushroom column of superheated gas and vaporized rock climbed at a rate that suggested it was not planning to stop at any altitude the visible sky offered.
Nolan had the propulsion at maximum thrust within the first half-second. He used the direction of the blast to add velocity, riding ahead of the shockwave front as it expanded outward and climbing with every fraction of thrust the wings could generate, clearing the explosion's radius at an angle that kept him ahead of the thermal edge by a margin he would have described later, if pressed, as sufficient.
He came through the mushroom column on the far side and circled once, letting the propulsion system recalibrate, then descended toward the ground that was not magma.
Cypher was already standing when Nolan landed. He was covered in the superficial layer of debris that followed any explosion of this scale, and he was brushing dust from his pauldrons with the manner of someone who has been in a great many explosions and has developed a reasonable post-event routine. He looked toward the crater.
"Brother," he said, "do you think we successfully drove the red Ogryn off?"
"I don't know," Nolan said.
He was watching the crater through the skull helmet's magnification. The center of the magma field was producing thermal distortion that made detailed observation unreliable. But the Eye of Terror did not have a shortage of Chaos energy, and a Daemon Prince who could draw on the ambient field had access to more raw material for regeneration than any amount of physical damage could permanently consume. Without a ritual of exile or a sealing mechanism prepared in advance, a confrontation like this one produced an outcome that was a category between defeat and inconvenience.
Across the field, Wolf Nolan was upright. He had covered a kilometer of ground from where he had landed and he was upright and moving, which Nolan filed as the relevant information.
"Cypher." He did not look away from the crater. "Get on every channel available. Tell everyone to break contact with the Rubricae now, all of them, and move immediately to the Webway portal." He let the magnification adjust for a moment. "We cannot still be here when Magnus decides he is functional enough to resume."
He turned.
"Move."