The Lion Vs Daemon Angron (Warhammer 40K Arks of Omen Narration)

Transcript

The warpforged palace heaved with obscene life. Sinewy, gore, wet flesh surged from grates and valves. Strong through with sparking wires, glowing eye lenses, and gnashing metal fangs.

Roadways cracked down their middles, then yawned open like mile-long trapdoors. Tilling, battling warriors and vehicles down into furnace pits, with cogs gnashed in piston-driven crushers, pulverized metal, flesh, and souls. High overhead, the arachnoid spines creaked into motion, their tips curled down and inward like the mandibles of a vast insectal maw.

Gunships and flying demon engines were smashed from the air by the descending masses of metal and muscle. Shadows pooled around doomed combatants, who looked up in despair before they were crushed. Through it all battled Angron and the Lion.

El Johnson was disgusted by his former brother's hideous form, contemptuous of the monster Angron had made of himself. Yet he did not underestimate the supernatural might that dark apotheosis had granted the demon Primarch. The Lion fought with every iota of skill he possessed, channeling all the lessons he had ever learned about combating wild and wart-tainted beasts.

For his part, Angron felt little beyond the furious pounding, pounding, pounding of the butcher's nails. He dimly recognized the Lion, but El Johnson was just another foe to be slain. An eternity of unending rage and hate had blunted the Red Angel's capacity to revile one enemy more than any other.

Angron would take his once-brother's head for corn, just as he had taken those of so many of the Lion's genes' sons already this day. The two demigods fought their way across a mechanical plateau, where piston columns pounded maniacally and jets of white-hot flame erupted from below hidden apertures. Angron sought to lop El Johnson's head from his shoulders, but felt he was there to block the blow.

Somniaris rebounded again from the Emperor's shield, and as the shockwave drove Angron back, the Lion seized the chance to duck around a pummeling row of pistons and gain some space. Angron dropped his head and pulled through the slabs of machinery. He bellowed as he wretched aside sparking mechanisms and hacked apart steel-braided sinew, only to recoil as the Lion smashed the Emperor's shield into his face.

El Johnson retreated again, a strategy cohering in his mind as he clattered down a spiraling brass stairway. He was gaining a sense of his foe. Angron was a devastatingly powerful and unrelenting enemy, but the Lion thought he knew.

His train of thought was disrupted as the stairway gave a violent lurch. Looking up, El Johnson saw Angron had taken to the air, letting his weapons dangle from their chain manacles as he grasped the stairway's superstructure, then wrenched the entire edifice away from the side of the mechanical plateau. With an oath, the Lion leapt clear as the spiral stair buckled under its own weight and collapsed.

He dropped, cloak rippling behind him, and landed atop a room of gothic ruin. Despite the tumorous masses of biotechnology that grew from it, El Johnson felt a horrible sense of familiarity as he glanced around the crumbling rooftop and saw the hooded statues that dotted it. He did not know precisely what the structure had been, but he recognized the architectural style of Caliban before Imperial compliance.

The Lion had no time for bitter reflection. Angron fell upon him like a roaring thunderbolt spat from the skies of dancing flame. The Primarch's weapons clashed and clashed again as the Lion gave ground before his enemy's brutal onslaught.

Lost to rage, Angron might have been, but hardwired instinct, coupled with the dark gifts of his patron god, lent him tremendous martial skill. Unleashing a flurry of blows upon the Lion, he forced open a gap in his opponent's guard before landing a kick to El Johnson's chest that cracked his armor and threw him through a statue with punishing force. Sensing what was coming next, El Johnson kept rolling even as Angron's axe slammed into the rooftop where he had been a split second before.

Reaching the roof's edge, the Lion threw himself out into thin air and dropped onto a tilted metal platform some thirty feet below. He rolled with the impact and came up in a guard stance, shooting a quick look at his surroundings as he did so. The sight that greeted him was a surreal one.

This region of the Warped Forge Palace appeared to have contorted atop vast, unseen gimbals so that what might have been a flat plane of riveted metal plates had now become a treacherous landscape of steeply angled ramps. Crackling energy pylons thrust skyward from between the crooked plates. It looked as though loyalist and heretic war engines had been dueling here before the cataclysmic awakening of the planet began.

Dark angels and World Eater's battle tanks lay helpless where they had been hurled onto their roofs or blazed where they had smashed together or had slid into contact with the lightning-wreathed pylons. More tanks and a handful of staggering Chaos Knights were still mobile. Some crews looked to be falling back, trying to maneuver their vehicles onto more stable ground.

Others, prizing hatred or vengeance even over life, fought on as best they could, even as their war engines slid inexorably towards oblivion. Angron swooped from atop the gothic ruin and fell upon the lion again. This time, El Johnson was prepared.

Dropping to one knee, he raised the Emperor's shield and caught the full force of Angron's meteoric descent upon it. Golden energy erupted in a tremendous shockwave, and the red angel was hurled back to smash down amidst the precariously battling war machines. If the lion had expected a moment's respite from this gambit, he was disappointed.

Angron rose with an incensed howl and hurled a World Eater's predator toward the lion with an underhanded swing of his axe. Seeing the improbable projectile coming, El Johnson dove aside. However, he was not quick enough to avoid the next tank, the dark angel's impulsor.

With Angron's scent slamming and bouncing end over end in his direction, the vehicle hit the lion and smashed him back into the wall of the gothic ruin, hard enough to crater the stonework. Angron howled and charged, beating his wings to give himself more impetus. Bloodied and in pain, but knowing that he had moments to act, the lion heaved aside the crumpled wreck of the impulsor and leapt atop it.

He spared a moment's thought for his jean sons. Slain within the ruined vehicle, anger smoldered within him. Angron leapt to strike, and the lion dove aside, leaping away from the wreck and hammering the emperor's shield into the back of Angron's skull as he went.

Propelled forward by the blow, the red angel smashed headlong into the ruin and was buried in an avalanche of rubble as the wall came down upon him. El Johnson backed swiftly away, limping slightly, dimly aware of tanks still dueling around him, even as he kept his attention on the rubble heap. He knew Angron could not so easily be defeated, but he hoped to at least have wounded his former brother.

If nothing else, the ignominy of being buried alive would have stoked Angron's fury to new heights, something the lion was counting on. The rubble heap erupted. Flaming chunks of masonry rocketed through the air, several striking tanks with the force of wrecking balls.

Angron came at the lion in a red blur, eyes blazing hate, weapons swinging wildly. So sudden and ferocious was the assault that even El Johnson could not react in time. He managed to bring the emperor's shield up between himself and Angron, but the anger was poor and the titanic discharger of energy threw him backward as violently as his foe.

The ground fell away from the lion as he tumbled back then down into the few wreathed gulfs between the tilted platforms. Angron bellowed a war cry and plunged after him. The lion smiled mirthlessly, for here is the perfect environment for the culmination of his strategy.

He faded into the smog an instant ahead of Angron, who howled with fury to find his opponent vanished. The red angel was by now apoplectic. Though incapable of feeling fatigue, Angron was not accustomed to the mounting frustration of fighting one opponent for so long while they maintained a relentlessly defensive stance.

He had claimed no skulls and shed only the merest drops of blood for what felt like an eternity. The insistent pounding, pounding, pounding of the butcher's nail suffused his being with white-hot agony. His capacity for reason had been drowned in molten fury and pain.

To find his foe vanished then was near unbearable. Angron could scent the lion's potent biology in the lapping powders of his armor. He could hear the Primarch's heartbeats, his footfalls, the servo whine of his battle plates.

He glimpsed the furnace-light beacon of L. Johnson's soul burning in his warpsite, yet the phantasmic smog occluded even Angron's demonic senses. The lion, for his part, had less trouble keeping track of a foe that roiled and snarled oaths and appreciations with every heaving breath.

Angron hacked at half-imagined geists and bellowed with rage. In response, the lion surged suddenly from the flank and struck with the emperor's shield, sending Angron recoiling into the air with wings beating. The demon Primarch lunged, but L.

Johnson was gone away into the fumes. Angron thundered after his prey. Again, the lion evaded, struck, and faded back from his enemy's lightning-fast counterattack.

In his mind, he fought monsters again in the mist-wreathed Calibanite forests. The few times Angron landed a blow, the emperor's shield was always there to block it and send the demon Primarch reeling back. All the while, Angron's rage mounted until it danced across his body as a specter of flame.

His muscles and eyes bulged as though he might literally burst from the anger swelling within. Then came a piston, rushing up from the depths and discharging steam as it slammed to a halt at its apogee. For a moment, it blasted aside the veil of smog.

The lion was revealed in the act of slipping through the air.