Cypher did not waste time with the acknowledgment. He settled the White Tiger Sword across his back into carry position, drew the plasma pistol and the bolt pistol from his hips in the same motion, and moved toward the part of the battlefield where the last of the Rubricae were still operational and the Wulfen were still fighting them. His stride was not dramatic. It was the pace of someone who has a remaining task and intends to complete it.
The skull helmet's sensors tracked him until distance made tracking unnecessary, then Nolan turned back to the crater.
The center of the magma field was not settling. Thermal distortion and Chaos energy turbulence were interacting in ways that made visual assessment unreliable, but the ambient psychic pressure across the surrounding terrain was already recovering, climbing back toward the levels it had been at before the melta bomb detonation. The Eye of Terror's connection to the Warp was direct and permanent, and anything that had access to that connection had access to more raw regenerative material than physical damage could permanently exhaust.
Footsteps in the red gravel came from his left.
Wolf Nolan crossed the last meters between them with the Frost Fang back in his grip and his armor showing the full accumulated record of the engagement across every surface. The blood-mist he had sprayed when the psychic storm hit him was already drying on the ceramite. His eyes were still the wrong color.
He stopped beside Nolan and looked at the crater with the same focused attention.
"You nearly weren't here in time," he said. It was not an accusation. "If you hadn't come, I'd have capsized completely."
"Helping each other is the arrangement," Nolan said, still watching the thermal distortion. "And facing a traitor Primarch is exactly the kind of work that requires more than one of us."
Wolf Nolan's mouth opened slightly, showing white fangs, and he let out a short breath through his teeth that might have been a laugh and was definitely not.
Then both of them felt it simultaneously.
The ambient psychic pressure climbed. Not gradually: it climbed in the way that indicated a source was directing it, concentrating it toward a specific output. Somewhere in the magma field, something was drawing on the Eye's inexhaustible supply of Chaos energy with deliberate purpose.
"Russ." Nolan still did not turn. "Is the one-eyed Ogryn still alive in there?"
Wolf Nolan bared his fangs fully, directed at no particular target except the general concept of the situation.
"Of course he is," he said. His voice had the particular quality of someone who has just confirmed what they already knew and does not enjoy confirming it. "The Eye of Terror feeds directly into the Warp. There's no floor on what Magnus can draw on here. The melta bombs would have finished him anywhere else, sent him rolling straight back to the Crystal Labyrinth. Here, he just..." Wolf Nolan's jaw worked briefly. "He's coming back. The concentration is rising too fast. We don't have much time before he's functional enough to be a problem again."
"Then we need to give everyone else time to reach the portal." Nolan raised one arm and opened his palm.
From simulator storage, the heavy vehicle chassis materialized on the ground in front of them: a tracked platform designed to carry and stabilize a weapons system considerably larger than anything a standard vehicle was built to mount. The Volcano Cannon occupied most of its upper surface, the beam projector pointing toward the crater at the angle Nolan had left it set at. Beside the vehicle, a rack of Hellfire missile launchers appeared with enough munitions loaded for a sustained engagement.
Wolf Nolan stared at this for exactly the amount of time it took to fully register what he was seeing.
"By Russ's own leg hair." He said it with a flatness that indicated he had noticed the irony of the oath and had decided the situation warranted it anyway. "You and Cypher have pocket dimensions and stored heavy weapons, and I don't have so much as a spare pauldron." He moved toward the missile rack while still talking, scanning the launcher systems with the instinctive speed of someone who knows weapons and can learn a new one in the time it takes to look at it properly. "That is an unreasonable advantage and someone should have mentioned it earlier."
"You were busy in the arena," Nolan said, and jumped onto the vehicle chassis.
Wolf Nolan had the first Hellfire missile launcher figured out in under a minute. The weapon itself was straightforward once the targeting system was understood: a guided munition that followed the operator's aim, responsive to visual direction. He raised it, found the largest concentration of condensing psychic energy at the crater's center through the reticle, and fired.
The missile's propulsion trail crossed the barren ground toward the target. The impact that followed sent another blast wave across the terrain, large enough that both of them braced against the overpressure.
Wolf Nolan was already reloading for the second shot.
Nolan made the minor adjustment to the Volcano Cannon's elevation and pressed the launch activation. The beam that crossed the distance between the vehicle and the crater's center was white and coherent and wide enough to be visible as a solid column rather than a beam in any conventional sense. Its penetration was absolute: what was in the path of the beam was no longer there when the beam moved on, and Nolan walked it across the center of the magma field with the systematic focus of someone ensuring coverage.
In the crater's depths, the immense shape that had been reforming came apart again.
The combined output covered the center of the explosion zone in a saturation that the Eye of Terror's physical laws could not ignore regardless of the Chaos energy being fed to the target. Physical destruction at this scale still registered as destruction even here, and it bought time.
"Last missile," Wolf Nolan called, and fired the final shot into the most active section of the psychic condensation.
The Hellfire detonated, and the concentration dissipated.
Nolan pressed one hand to the chassis, stepped off, and returned the entire vehicle and its mounted weapon to simulator storage in the same motion. Behind them, across the barren terrain, Cypher's plasma pistol put the last Rubric Marine down: a single precise shot that separated the animated armor's structural integrity at the collar joint and ended the sorcerous animation sustaining it. The blue and gold plate went still.
Cypher holstered both weapons and turned toward the Webway portal.
The evacuation was already well advanced. The Terminator Guards had the Wulfen moving: dozens of surviving brothers of the Thirteenth Company, some supporting each other, all moving toward the portal at the best pace the terrain and their injuries permitted. The Blood Ravens Librarians at the portal maintained their psychic shield around it in a solid ring, the effort visible in their posture but their output steady. The Raven Guard held their position outside the shield perimeter, bolt guns up, covering the approach vectors with the patient thoroughness of warriors who have been told to prevent unexpected interruptions and intend to do so.
Cypher's shout carried across the engagement zone.
Wolf Nolan raised one fist in acknowledgment, already moving.
The last of the Wulfen were through the portal. Then the Terminator Guards. Then the Blood Ravens. Then the Raven Guard, falling back in pairs while the pair behind covered them, moving with the discipline of a withdrawal that has been conducted under fire often enough to have become a practiced form.
Cypher went through.
Nolan and Wolf Nolan were three strides from the portal when the sky changed.
It had been wrong in the way that everything in the Eye of Terror is wrong: the bruised non-colors, the ambient wrongness of a place where the Warp and physical reality had merged beyond recovery. What it became in the next second was different from that: it became actively hostile in a way that implied attention, direction, a mind of enormous scale choosing to focus. A Warp storm appeared above the nameless planet without any of the gradual build-up that Warp storms were supposed to require, fully formed and immediate, its edges sweeping down toward the surface in a spiral pattern that converged on the Webway portal.
They went through at a run.
The portal closed behind them.
And then it was torn apart.
The psychic disruption hit the Webway from outside with more force than the portal's construction could accommodate: the mirror-surface fractured, the transmission function inside it that had been maintaining a stable path to the Nicor inverted, and the three people inside the Webway at the moment of the disruption were no longer in the Webway at all.
The Warp received them without ceremony.
The cold of the ground came first.
Then the sound of it, which was the sound of armor moving through deep snow: the dense compressive sound of ceramite pressing through a surface that yielded without breaking. Then the sky, which was real sky of the kind that belonged to a world with a proper separation between physical space and the Warp: overcast, pale gray, the light of a sun that was not visible behind cloud cover.
Heavy snow. Cold ground. A real sky.
Wolf Nolan found the answer to an important question before either of the others: what it felt like to be expelled from the Warp through an involuntary aperture while wearing battle-damaged power armor. He propped himself up on both arms, turned his head sideways, and contributed to the snow's existing color scheme with a volume of scarlet that said something about the internal consequences of that particular mode of transit.
"Successfully confirmed," he said, into the snow, with extreme precision. "I now know what it feels like to be thrown inside a drum. Rotating. For an extended period."
He grabbed a handful of the cold snow and put it in his mouth and chewed on it.
Nolan had landed sitting upright, which was not how he had entered the Warp aperture but was apparently how the physics had resolved on the other end. He pulled the skull helmet off and breathed the actual cold air of wherever this was, letting the temperature work on his face while he processed the relevant facts. The air was clean. The planet's ambient psychic field was normal. The sky was real.
"Magnus or the Architect of Fate," he said, to no one in particular. "One of them rerouted us when we were inside the portal." He looked at Wolf Nolan, who had moved from the snow-eating to a sitting position and was looking at the surrounding terrain with an expression that had shifted from nausea to something more specific. "Cypher."
Cypher was upright already, because Cypher was apparently capable of landing correctly even after being ejected from a disrupted Webway portal by a Daemon Prince's psychic interference.
He looked at the surrounding landscape: the white plains, the particular quality of the clouds, the texture of the snowfall. He looked at Wolf Nolan.
"Wolf cub," he said, very carefully. "Does this place look familiar to you?"
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