=== Maximus ===
"Something doesn't feel right," Maximus muttered, his voice deep and metallic, resonating with a cold mechanical edge. He stood at the edge of the hangar bay, his towering Centurion form silhouetted against the starlit void beyond. The stars shimmered with distant light, but there was no sign of the Imperium fleet. Only silence.
Bo-Katan stepped forward, her boots echoing softly on the durasteel floor. "How do you know this is where they'll arrive? What if they emerge elsewhere in the galaxy?" she asked, her tone respectful but tinged with concern.
Maximus didn't turn to face her. His glowing optics remained fixed on the black expanse of space. "No," he said, the word final and absolute. "It's here. I've seen it... in my visions. In my dreams. The Imperium comes to this place."
Bo-Katan studied him for a moment, then gave a subtle nod. "Very well, my Lord. Do you want me to deploy the Azure Talons to the surface?"
"Yes," he replied. A low hum pulsed through his frame as internal systems shifted. "I would join you... but something tells me I will be needed elsewhere." Slowly, he turned his armored head, looking down at her.
"Of course, Lord. I understand," she said quietly, giving a crisp nod before turning away. Her cape fluttered behind her as she exited the hangar, her mind already on the coming battle.
Left alone, Maximus remained motionless, his thoughts stirring like a storm beneath the surface. The stars offered no answers, only a deep and growing unease.
Something was wrong. He could feel it in his very being.
And the Imperium was late.
=== Anrakyr the Traveller ===
The void screamed.
It was not a sound, but a disturbance—an echo of disrupted harmony, of clashing energies and clumsy mortal engines. Anrakyr the Traveller stood motionless at the heart of his command dais aboard the ship, his consciousness tethered to the will of the tombship like a conductor guiding a symphony of annihilation.
Outside, the battle raged. Beams of emerald death lanced through the dark, scything into Ultramarines hulls with mathematical precision. The lead Battle Barge and her sister ships returned fire with brute force, unleashing plasma and macro-shells in a storm of fury.
"Primitive." Anrakyr mused.
He turned his gaze to the tactical hololith, alive with shifting data. The Necron fleet had suffered damage, more than expected. These warriors of Guilliman, these Adeptus Astartes, fought with grim resolve and a tactical cohesion that even the long-dead commanders of the old wars might have respected.
Still, it would not be enough.
"Master," came the voice of a subordinate Cryptek. "One of the enemy barges attempts to flank our formation. Shall we divert to intercept?"
Anrakyr paused. Not because he doubted the answer—but because he felt something.
An itch in the quantum strata. A ripple in the algorithm of battle.
"No," he replied. "Let them come. I wish to see this captain with my own eyes."
His will pulsed outward, an unseen command flowing to a cluster of Lychguard preparing to teleport.
"Mark the vessel. Prepare for boarding."
He turned his gaze to the rift, still pulsing like a wound in reality. That was the true objective. The humans believed they were here to defend it, enter it.
They did not yet understand that they were already too late.
This breach in reality… it was his now.
===
The moment of arrival was immaculate.
A pulse of gauss-fed energy displaced local reality, allowing Anrakyr and his cohort to materialize within the bowels of the enemy vessel. The Vengeance Eternal—an ironic name. But there would be no Vengeance here. Only death.
Anrakyr stepped through the shimmering veil, the quantum echo of teleportation still rippling behind him. His optics adjusted instantly, parsing the crude layout of the corridor. Dim red lighting flickered against battered ceramite walls. The stink of desperation clung to the air.
Lychguard advanced around him in a perfect wedge, their every motion calculated, rehearsed, perfect. Their war scythes glinted in the flashing lights like mirrored shards of a forgotten age.
Crude defenders were waiting. Astartes—Ultramarines. Predictable. Loyal. Brave.
Limited.
Their weapons roared, primitive kinetic slugs and explosive casings tearing toward him. Some struck his honor-plate, sparking harmlessly. Others passed through the air like slow, lumbering thoughts. Anrakyr didn't flinch. He merely observed.
He marked a Sergeant first—bold, defiant, firing from cover with rigid formality. A veteran, no doubt. Perhaps even decorated. Anrakyr honored him in the old way: a swift death.
He lunged forward, scythe arcing in a clean motion. The power field hissed as it met the Marine's torso, parting armor and bone as easily as sand under tide. The body collapsed mid-shout, bisected cleanly.
A hulking Dreadnought thundered down the corridor, weapons spinning, voice bellowing vengeance in distorted vox. A relic of war, fueled by dying flesh and fading purpose.
Anrakyr raised his arm. A single pulse of Gauss-fed energy—elegant and precise—lanced through the Dreadnought's chest. He staggered, flared, and fell.
"I remember when machines were built to last." Anrakyr said with a flicker of ancient disdain.
But the Ultramarines did not retreat.
They stood, and fought.
How quaint.
Anrakyr admired their futile courage in the same way one might admire a storm-tossed tree moments before the lightning struck. Noble, but doomed.
His Lychguard surged forward, a living wall of ancient fury. Cloaks of shimmering armorweave flowed like smoke behind them, war scythes humming with phase-energy. They fell upon the Astartes like a reaping tide.
One Space Marine raised a chainsword in defiance—only for a Lychguard to drive a scythe through his chestplate and twist, tearing the transhuman apart in a blossom of blood and shattered ceramite.
Another fired point-blank into a Necron's faceplate. The rounds buried itself inside the Necron, but it didn't stop the Lychguard from severing his legs at the knees, then beheading him as he screamed from the floor.
Anrakyr advanced through the carnage with measured grace, stepping over the dead like they were rubble in the sand.
One Marine charged him—an Assault Veteran with twin power blades and hatred in his optics. Fast. Focused. Dangerous.
But not fast enough.
Anrakyr sidestepped effortlessly, his scythe cleaving through the warrior's left arm and slicing upward through his chest. The blades clattered to the floor as the Marine collapsed, eyes wide with confusion in his final moments.
"What a waste," Anrakyr intoned as the corpse hit the deck.
Lychguard moved in harmony, executing brutal, synchronized maneuvers—two scythes crossed to disembowel a shield-bearing Terminator. Another impaled a wounded Marine against the wall and left him hanging like a banner of meat and steel.
A vox-station sputtered nearby, calling for reinforcements.
Anrakyr silenced it with a burst of Gauss energy that turned the console—and its operator—into molten slag.
He reached the central corridor junction and paused.
A survivor was crawling—his legs shattered, helm half-melted, bolter dragging behind him like a child's toy.
Anrakyr stood beside him, the scythe resting idly at his side.
"I had expected more." he said, his voice a mechanical whisper crawling across the ship.
Then he drove his blade through the Marine's spine with a single, casual thrust.
The light in the Vigilance Eternal flickered once more.
Then silence.
Only the slow, metallic footfalls of the undying echoed in the aftermath.
=== Captain Agemman ===
Green lightning flickered across the Leviathan's inner decks as the Necron boarding phalanx forced entry, teleporting into the spinal corridor of the mighty Battle Barge. Reality warped, cracked, and spat them forth in cold silence.
They expected the same as the other boarding parties. Resistance. Fire. Death.
But they did not expect discipline.
The first Necron warrior stepped forward, and was instantly obliterated by a volley of kraken penetrators from a massive Dreadnought stationed at the end of the hall. The corridor became a killing ground. Bolter fire poured into the breach, followed by flamer wash that lit the air itself ablaze.
From a raised platform at the far end, Captain Severus Agemman watched, impassive beneath his helm.
"Let them come."
The veterans of the First Company had prepared for this moment. They were not scattered, caught by surprise, or scrambling in retreat. They had built a trap.
From hidden alcoves, Terminators teleported into formation, storm shields locking into place, lightning claws primed. Assault Marines dropped from mag-locked walkways, activating jump packs mid-fall, slamming into Necron ranks with punishing force.
One Lychguard raised its scythe—only to be caught in a crushing grip of the Dreadnought. The Dreadnought roared as it drove the Necron into the floor with bone-breaking weight, pulverizing the warrior into shards.
Agemman finally drew his sword—a relic from Guilliman's own armory, burning with psychic flame. He stepped forward, walking calmly through the crossfire as his warriors fought with machine-like precision.
"Push them back," he ordered.
He waded into the fight like a god of war, carving through Necron Immortals with every blow. Their necrodermis split beneath his blade as if it were parchment. He parried a scythe, caught it with a gauntlet, and drove his sword through the wielder's chest in a single, fluid motion.
Lychguard began to falter.
But Anrakyr was not among them.
Instead, the Necron boarding party had sent a command Cryptek to lead the push—but even it began to realize the miscalculation.
These warriors were not defending a ship.
They were defending a legacy.
And every inch of it had been measured in blood and built for war.
One by one, the Necron phalanx was broken. Some phased away, retreating through quantum slipstreams. Others fell, their bodies claimed by gravity and fire. The Canoptek constructs fared no better—reduced to molten piles under melta fire.
As the last Lychguard was impaled on a power lance, Agemman stood in the silence that followed. His armor was scorched, but unbowed. His warriors formed up around him—silent, breathing heavily, bloodied but alive.
The lights dimmed for a moment.
The fabric of space trembled as another wave of energy pulsed through the Leviathan's central corridor. But this time, it was different. Tuned. Perfected. Not the sloppy tear of mass teleportation, but the seamless insertion of something ancient. Something deliberate.
Reality bent—and Anrakyr arrived.
He appeared like a thunderclap wrapped in silence, surrounded by a cadre of elite Necron warriors: Immortals clad in blackened alloy, their weapons pulsing with entropic resonance; Lychguard adorned in gold-trimmed necrodermis, their phase scythes burning with energy drawn from the edges of time.
Anrakyr stepped forward, his cloak fluttering weightlessly in the passageway, his optics burning with raw calculation.
He surveyed the aftermath of the first incursion—the shattered remains of his warriors, the butchered constructs, the scorched deck.
"Impressive," he murmured, his voice cold as the void.
Veteran Astartes in relic Terminator plate stepped up around Agemman, while Brother Aegis stalked just behind him. Power fields humming across a phalanx of storm shields as Terminators surrounded their Captain protectively.
"Who are you?," Agemman Demanded, voice low and full of fire.
"Death." Anrakyr said simply.
At that, the Lychguard surged forward, blades spinning in tight arcs of controlled violence. The Ultramarines met them head-on, shields locking, swords and axes crashing against phase weapons with thunderous force.
Agemman roared, activating his relic blade in a corona of psychic flame, and met the first Honor Guard with a two-handed swing that carved the Necron warrior in half from shoulder to hip.
A plasma blast incinerated a charging Immortal.
A Deathmark sniper, phasing in above, took aim—only to be shredded before the trigger could be pulled.
The corridor became a slaughterhouse—a blur of ceramite and necrodermis, blood and green lightning. Warriors on both sides fell in ruin, their deaths echoing across the bulkheads like war drums.
Then Anrakyr and Agemman met at the center.
Their first blows shook the corridor.
Agemman swung wide, blade blazing with psychic fury. Anrakyr parried with the haft of his scythe, then spun, striking low with impossible speed. Sparks flew as their weapons collided—two legends, locked in a dance as old as war itself.
"You fight well," Anrakyr said, voice calm even in the heart of battle. "But the flesh is weak."
A surge of gauss energy crackled across Anrakyr's blade, nearly taking the captain's arm. Agemman countered with a pommel strike to the Necron's skull.
All around them, the battle waged on—no quarter asked, none given.
The Leviathan groaned as its decks ran with blood and oil, its corridors now the battleground of two titans.
And neither would yield.
Agemman's blade swung in a wide arc, blazing with psychic fury—but it struck only air.
Too slow.
Anrakyr was already inside his guard. With a fluid twist of his scythe, he hooked the Captain's sword arm, twisted, and snapped the elbow joint with a sickening crack. Agemman grunted, staggering back, his sword falling from numbed fingers.
"Predictable," Anrakyr said coldly.
He advanced with machine precision, each step measured, each movement part of a greater calculus. A backhanded sweep with the haft of the warscythe sent Agemman crashing to the ground, his power armor cracking under the force.
A Terminator squad came to their Captain's rescue, but they died as they lived.
Inconsequential.
Agemman struggled to rise, his breathing ragged, blood streaming from his mouth. His warriors were locked in combat behind him, dying around him, fighting to the last. He looked up, just in time to see Anrakyr metal foot come down to smash into his chest.
"You fought valiantly, rest now, in your corpse God's embrace." Anrakyr said as he raised his scythe.
And then, the void screamed.
The walls of the Leviathan rippled. Lights exploded. Gravity failed. A low, resonating hum echoed through every vessel in space—the Ultramarines' battle barges, the remnants of the Necron fleet, the torn carcass of the Vengeance Eternal—everything.
Time shuddered.
Reality twisted.
Then it pulled.
An unseen force, immense and incomprehensible, gripped every ship like a child grasping toys. The tear in space—the wound they had fought over. No longer a passive anomaly, it opened hungrily, like the gaping maw of something ancient and alive.
Green lightning arced from Necron pylons as auto-reactive protocols kicked in. Void shields flared across Ultramarine hulls. Crews screamed over vox channels, issuing last-minute course corrections, power reroutes, prayers.
But it was too late.
Agemman and Anrakyr both looked up—not at each other, but at the very walls of the universe collapsing.
In one deafening, blinding instant, everything was pulled into the breach.
The Leviathan, the surviving battle barges, Anrakyr's command ship, even fragments of ruined vessels—all vanished into the maw.
Silence returned to the void.
The tear pulsed once… then shrank… and was gone.
===
If you enjoyed this chapter, maybe consider leaving me with a couple of your power stones? I promise I'll take good care of them:)