The bridge was unrecognizable.
Where once mortar-stamped ferrocrete and steel buttresses held the line, now hell had risen in tangible form. Geysers of molten brass erupted through shattered deck plating. The sky was a torn parchment of screaming warp-storms and bleeding clouds. The shadows of Imperial banners fluttered in the inferno light, scorched and sodden with the blood of their bearers.
Daemons poured from the rifts like vermin through a broken floodgate. Bloodletters in a thousand howling ranks surged forward, blades glowing with warpfire. Juggernauts, engines of snarling brass and black muscle, crushed the fallen beneath iron hooves. Fresh Daemon Engines, malformed and half-born from bleeding birthing pods, lurched out of ruptured reality still dripping with warp-amniotic fluid, already screaming for murder.
The Imperials were falling back—tanks reversing at full speed, heavy weapons crews abandoning tripods mid-fire. The retreat was ordered, but it smelled of desperation.
Steel Legion Vanquishers and Chimeras bucked and fired in staggered volleys as they pulled back, shells hammering into the front lines of the Daemon tide—but it was not enough.
Nothing was enough.
A wall of flesh and brass sprinted toward them. Faster than any mortal formation should have been able to follow. The ground shook with the approach of daemon-borne hatred, and the screams of the damned echoed louder than any vox-call.
Among the chaos, a colossal silhouette rose above the carnage.
Valkor the Clysm.
The size of a giant monster made metal, his Contemptor sarcophagus burned with renewed unholy vigor. Warpfire flowed from the glowing fissures of his crimson armor like blood from a ruptured artery. His right arm held aloft the Axe of Blind Fury, now howling with the stolen souls of both enemy and ally. His left—Chain Fist and twin-linked bolter thundering blind hate—sent shells through the backs of fleeing guardsmen and Space Marines without hesitation.
Behind him, the Talisman of Burning Blood now dislodged from his armor, hovered, orbiting the Lord of Skulls' shattered skull, pulsing like a still-beating heart. Each pulse sent a wave of rage through the horde, whipping Daemons into even greater frenzy.
From the rear line, atop a fortified platform, the Shadowsword locked its massive Volcano Cannon onto Valkor's silhouette.
"Target confirmed," came the gunner's rasped vox, barely audible over the machine's reactor whine. "Firing."
A lance of light brighter than a star screamed across the battlefield. The bridge cracked beneath the pressure of the firing solution. Air ignited as the Volcano Cannon loosed its fury—a solar flare of absolute destruction.
The beam hit Valkor dead center.
And did not kill him.
The Axe of Blind Fury roared—not in steel, but in sound and soul. Valkor braced, sinking one massive dreadnought foot into the corpse of a slain Baneblade, and raised the Axe two-handed against the incoming strike.
The Volcano beam struck the blade—and shattered into a fan of diverted energy, melting tanks, flesh, and Daemons alike in a radius around him. Valkor did not move.
But he screamed.
Not with pain. With challenge.
The Axe drank it—drank the heat, the force, the blinding godlight—and in turn, burned its price.
Inside the weapon, something ancient twisted.
The Daemon bound within howled—a sound only Valkor could hear—not in triumph, but fury. The weapon had taken too much. Valkor had forced it to endure what should have broken any mortal frame.
And it did not forgive him.
The runes along the Axe's haft bled molten brass. Flesh wrapped around the steel screamed and sloughed off in coils of nerve and rot.
Valkor's eyes flared white-hot inside his helm. He ground the weapon into the deck, steadying it with both arms as the Daemon inside fought him—teeth bared, soul-forged hate clashing with the will of the butcher-prince that wielded it.
He won.
Barely.
But the Axe had changed.
The next time it was raised, it would thirst not just for enemy blood—but for the hand that held.
All this could be from the War tent where Slayer was. This tent was no longer a tent. It was a crumpled carcass of plasteel rods and burned banners, half-drowned in mud and the blood of vox-techs who had died screaming at their consoles. The walls shuddered with each impact from the outer defenses, and the cries of retreating Guardsmen were getting closer.
In the center of it all stood the Doom Slayer, motionless.
His armor hissed softly as heat bled from cracked ceramite. His fists clenched and unclenched in rhythm. The maelstrom of Khorne was closing in, and yet this so called warrior of endless wars did not move.
"Coward," the young Space Wolf spat.
Rurik, Blood Claw of Fenris, paced behind the Slayer like a caged wulfen. His scarred cheeks were flush with blood and fury, and his fangs bared with every breath. He was young, but not green—not anymore. His chainsword was nicked and his bolter low on rounds.
"Why are you standing here?! The Horde is already at the gates! They're flooding the damn bridge! My brothers are out there. Dying. And they send me to watch you?"
He slammed a fist against the wall. It caved inward with a dull thud, dislodging ashes.
"Say something! Do anything! Are you some relic waiting to rust in silence?!"
The Doom Slayer did not answer.
Outside, a Baneblade screamed its last breath as a daemon engine speared through its hull. The explosion rocked the tent, sent support rods tumbling. Still, Slayer didn't move.
Then—a voice cut through the vox-bead in Rurik's ear. Calm. Soft. Icy.
"Rurik."
The young Blood Claw paused. His snarl faded into confusion.
"Your duty is done. Get to the east span. Rejoin your kin. Prepare for bridge detonation protocol. The Slayer walks alone."
"What?" Rurik blinked, pulse rising. "What the hel are you talking about? The fight is here! He hasn't even—"
A low growl of metal and fury interrupted him.
The Doom Slayer moved.
Like a switch had been flipped in the fabric of reality.
He turned in a blur of motion, scattering debris and vox-equipment in a wave of brute force, and charged the edge of the bridge without a word. Rurik barely had time to process the sudden wind sheer before the Slayer launched himself off the edge—
Down.
"Wait! Where are you going?!" Rurik shouted, running after him.
He reached the ledge just in time to see the green-armored juggernaut slam into the vertical support wall of the bridge, tearing into the understructure with his bare hands. Sparks and gore sprayed as he ripped through iron plating and dropped from girder to girder, heading for the chaos below.
Rurik leaned out, eyes wide.
The Underbridge was a nightmare.
Guardsmen of the Steel Legion were breaking. Hundreds dead. Thousand more pulled apart by packs of Bloodletters that poured from hissing portals, swarming walls, rails, and ducts like ants with blades.
One heavy weapon team was holding a central junction. Barely. Until a Bloodletter leapt and took a trooper's head off with a single arc of its sword.
And now—above them all—a green fury descended.
The Doom Slayer, one hand gripping a vertical pipe, the other already spooling up his superheated chainblade. He dropped like a meteor into the melee, slamming into the deck with explosive force, scattering daemons and men alike.
Even from here, Rurik felt the quake.
"By Russ…" he whispered.
The vox clicked again.
"Go, Rurik," Sefirot said. "Find your pack. You're not meant to watch this."
Underbridge. There was no plan. No orders. No battle. Just running. Runninh from being slaughtered.
Trooper Vek's lungs were screaming. His legs burned. The air was thick with smoke, oil, and blood—the kind of blood that gets in your nose and stays there, thick and iron-sweet and warm.
Somewhere behind him, a man was screaming and screaming and screaming, until the sound ended with a noise like meat getting torn apart.
They'd said "contact in the sublevels." They said "possible cultists."
They had no idea.
Nobody knew what these things were.
Red shadows. Blades longer than arms. Shapes that flickered into view just long enough to cut someone in half before vanishing again.
They didn't shoot. They didn't roar. They didn't charge.
They just appeared—and killed.
Vek had seen three squads go down in seconds. Whole teams just shredded, like paper in a turbine.
He ran past the remains of a sergeant—just legs.
A helmet clattered by his boots, still full of head.
Someone tried firing lasgun, but the moment it charged, a red blur came from the ceiling and carved him into two smoking heaps, both still twitching.
Vek didn't scream. He couldn't. His throat was closed tight with fear.
They were in the walls now. The pipes. The shadows.
Every flicker of movement made him flinch. Every sound might be death.
He rounded a corner, boots skidding in blood, nearly falling into a corpse heap—six guardsmen, opened like books, steaming in the flickering lights.
"LADDERS! GO! GO—"
Someone screamed up ahead, pointing at an escape shaft bolted to the wall.
Hope. For half a second, Vek believed in it. He sprinted, heart hammering, lungs burning, until—
THUD!
A fellow guardsman slammed into him, wild-eyed, arms flailing, shoving him aside.
"OUTTA MY WAY! MOVE! MOVE!"
Vek crashed into the wall. Pain flared through his shoulder. He staggered up—
A flash of red filled his vision.
And something hit his lasgun with surgical brutality—the barrel snapped off, clean-cut, still glowing, still melting.
The red thing was right there. Eight feet of blade-thin muscle, eyes like furnaces, horns curling back from a skull wreathed in heat haze. Its blade hissed like it was drinking the air.
It moved again.
Vek couldn't think.
Couldn't breathe.
Just fell backward—
BOOM.
The demon's head vanished. The body staggered, smoking—and then combusted, leaving nothing but a stink like cooked metal and sulfur.
Behind it—
A figure.
The Slayer. A being in green steel and smoke, glowing like a forge inside, staring at nothing but targets.
Vek crawled backward on his hands, boots slipping in gore.
Then more red shapes appeared. Five. Ten. Fifteen.
They sprinted like animals. Screeching across walls and ceilings, blades held high, eyes screaming without sound.
One leapt.
CRACK. It exploded mid-air.
Another came from the pipework—
CRACK.
The Doom Slayer advanced, bolt pistol bucking in his hand, his other arm raising the red glowing chainaxe.
GRRRRRRNNNNNCH—he drove it through one of the monsters mid-sprint, the chain weapon's teeth chewing through the torso, sparks and ichor flying.
It was massacre.
But the things kept coming.
Vek didn't wait.
He turned and ran, sprinting for the next ladder, not daring to look back.
The sounds behind him were like a forge devouring flesh.
Crackling gunfire. Sizzling bodies. That never-ending whine of the chainblade, drowning out screams.
But the red didn't stop.
And Vek didn't know what was even happening anymore.
He just knew that he had to keep running, because slowing down meant joining the red. And there was nothing left of the people who joined the red. Only parts.
More daemons were here.
Not just skittering horrors—they flooded the substructure like meat-tide. Hundreds, thousands, of snarling crimson shapes racing along the steel veins of the megastructure beneath the bridge. Corridors meant for maintenance crews now ran with the corpses of the Armageddon Steel Legion. Bloodletters—flesh-forged murder, red-hot and knife-limbed—shrieked and tore through fleeing men and women like wheat under a rusted scythe.
Steel groaned beneath the Slayer's boots. A thousand kilometers of blood-drenched iron and corrupted metal stretched ahead—a hellish labyrinth of maintenance corridors and service tunnels once built for mortal hands, now overtaken by the warp. This was no longer infrastructure. It was a vein-pulsing artery of Khorne, pumping blood, screams, and daemonic fury directly into the heart of the Imperial defense.
And Doom Slayer entered it like a bullet through the skull.
The corridor walls twitched with residual daemonic flesh, tendrils slithering from cracks like veins bursting through skin. Bloodletters emerged like knives from shadow—red-hot, blade-limbed things that didn't run so much as slice through reality. They didn't roar. They hissed like searing metal. Twenty in the first wave.
The Slayer drew his bolt pistol and detonated the nearest bloodletter's face—skull and fire splitting in opposite directions. He rolled forward, seized the next daemon's neck and crushed it against the wall with such force that the spine cracked out the back of its molten skin like a snapped whip. Another charged—he met it mid-air with a shotgun blast to the groin, then grabbed its flailing body and used it like a bludgeon against the next wave.
He didn't stop moving. Wall-run, shoulder bash, vault—his motion was a brutal symphony of momentum. Every kill fed into the next. A hallway collapsed—Slayer ran across the falling wall, leapt off a daemonic pipe, and tackled a skull-faced abomination off a ledge. He landed in a puddle of boiling blood as a portal snapped open behind him—more red blurs tore into reality.
He punched the portal.
It exploded inwards, rupturing with a meaty scream, like a torn throat. The daemons on the other side had just begun to emerge—he shot their heads through the closing rift with pinpoint bolt fire, filling it with flying limbs and shrieking warp-gore.
Then came the warp-beasts. Engine-limbed spawn of Khorne, bleeding iron and chains, trying to trample him in corridors so tight he had to scrape through sideways. One lunged. He dropkicked it into a reactor coil and followed up with a point-blank execution to the temple. One of its limbs flailed at him—he caught it, snapped it, and used it as a spear through the next daemon's mouth.
He sprinted now. Not away. Toward.
Three bloodletter packs. A dozen each. Portals all around him screaming open.
He threw a frag grenade mid-leap, detonated it midair, dropped through the blast cloud and split three daemons down the middle with his energy-charged Chainaxe in a single downward arc. It screamed like a beast as it cut, searing energy turning warp-flesh into explosive fire. Bones jutted from bloodletters' mouths as he hacked through them like rot.
A daemon engine, like a centipede made of gun barrels, crawled along the ceiling. He ran along the wall, leapt onto its back, planted three Krak grenades along its spine, and jumped off as the thing exploded mid-scream. The explosion lit the hall for several seconds as burning bloodrunes scrawled across the walls in response.
Another corridor—reinforced blast doors. Sealed shut.
He didn't open them.
He ran through them, axe-first, and the daemon inside screamed in surprise before its head hit the floor two seconds later.
One kilometer down. Another. More screams. More fire. The underbridge raged like a living throat choking on meat and metal. Steel melted, sirens shrieked, guardsmen corpses dangled like butchered cattle from the ceilings.
More daemons came. Always more.
He kept going.
He reloaded mid-sprint, ducked a warp-whip, and shot the daemon in the foot. As it dropped, he gripped its tongue and yanked its face off. Another leapt. He shoulder-bashed it into an electrical box, grabbed its horn and snapped its skull backwards with such force the body flipped three times before crashing into a wall.
He jumped a pit, shot mid-air, landed on a daemon's head, broke its neck with his knees, grabbed another and curb-stomped it on the metal floor.
He kicked another portal—punched it into shards of fire—then grabbed one of the shards and shoved it into a bloodletter's eye.
He revved his chainaxe in defiance at the never-ending tide.
He holstered the pistol, drew the heavy bolter mounted to his back, and fired on full-auto.
The corridor was thunder.
THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD.
Bloodletters exploded in every direction. Chunks of daemon meat pelted the walls like red hail. Legs went flying. Arms tumbled through the smoke. Entire packs were erased in storms of mass-reactive death. He turned, spun, fired down branching tunnels, killing as he moved, cutting through them like a furnace-bladed wind.
They closed in again.
The flamer came next.
From his back, he pulled out a promethium flamer, primed it with a hiss, and bathed the tunnel in roaring fire. Daemons screamed like boiling animals, their flesh popping and melting off in great chunks as they thrashed in the inferno.
And still they came.
He ran. Not away. Toward. Toward the next pack, toward the next kill. Grappling onto rebar and jumping across broken chasms in the bridge's underside, he parkoured between twisted girders and flame-scorched ladders, punching through collapsing walls, ripping out pipes to smash through daemons, always moving forward. When a bloodletter swung from behind, Slayer kicked backwards with crushing force, snapping its leg at the knee, spun, grabbed its own sword arm, and forced it to decapitate itself.
Slayer kept moving. Each step he took crushed skulls that hadn't been there a second before—as if the bridge birthed them for Khorne to count.
A wave of bloodletters slammed into him. Clawed feet slammed walls and ceilings, scythe-blades flashing like red lightning. But Slayer moved like physics had lost control of him.
Wall-running across broken sections—vaulting—air-dashing—flipping—cleaving.
The Agent Charged Chainaxe ignited, teeth glowing with orange warp-hate, and he cut a bloodletter in half from groin to crown midair, then embedded the axe in the face of another mid-spin.
Three more came.
He ducked, rolled, came up beneath them and fired his bolt pistol point-blank, rounds tearing torsos apart in sprays of molten flesh and screaming bone.
A fourth leapt—he caught it, slammed it spine-first into a power console, then crushed its skull with a headbutt that echoed like a drumbeat from Hell.
He never slowed.
He never breathed.
He was war in forward motion.
A section where maintenance tunnels had collapsed. Dozens of Guardsmen had tried to flee. They never made it.
Slayer dropped through the smoke and found himself face-to-face with a corridor lined in flayed skin—whole walls pulsating with the warpflesh of fallen men.
Bloodletters stalked the bones of a cargo rail system, laughing like files dragged across glass.
Slayer didn't blink.
He charged.
One leapt—he ducked under, severed its spine mid-slide, reversed, kicked another into a cogitator engine. Its body ignited. A third came—he didn't use his axe.
He punched through its face.
Near the end of the under structures of the bridge, a portal opened overhead. He jumped, climbed a broken support cable in three motions, and reached the rift.
His hand crackled with warp-burning rage. He drove his fist into the portal's eye, tore it open wider—then ripped it shut from the inside, splitting the glyph matrix and causing it to implode in a thunderclap of null-energy.
And it came.
The Herald of Khorne.
A red-armored hulking bloodletter, larger than any bloodletter Slayer faced before, even twice his own height, wielding a warp-flaming Hellblade of the size of a tank's cannon. Its breath scorched the walls. Chains hung from its horns. Its voice was chainsaw steel and burning meat.
It roared. Slayer didn't wait.
He charged.
The Hellblade came down in an arc. Slayer slide-ducked, stuck multi-melta to its gut—red hot shots after shots point-blank. The Herald reeled. Slayer flipped up, cracked its chin with his axe hilt, slashed across the chest—sparks and black blood. The Herald's fist came like a missile—Slayer caught it, broke a finger, and ripped it off.
The Herald screamed. Slayer kicked the broken fist into its mouth, then slammed his Chainaxe into its leg. The daemon collapsed. It tried to rise.
He stomped on its knee.
Bone snapped. Slayer vaulted its body, stabbed into its back with the axe, and pulled downward—splitting flesh, armor, and spine.
The daemon turned, trying to incant.
He didn't let it.
He tore its tongue out and crushed its skull against the wall, over and over until the concrete cracked and blood turned the walls black.
It died. The underbridge was silent.
No more daemons. No more screams. Only blood, smoke, and the echo of his boots.
Slayer turned. Punched the last portal closed. Reloaded.
It was time for the battle on the bridge surface.