Riding through the bloodhaze and aftermath, the Scourge didn’t see the chainaxe coming for him. The weapon shredded up his shoulder just beneath his pauldron, and blood began to leak down the side of his plate and the bike. As he tore away from the threat, his hand momentarily uncertain on the handlebars, he heard the deep roar of boltguns, fired in spectral unison, blasting apart the axe-wielding renegade and the death cult assassins in amongst whom he was standing.
As Kersh’s bike tore out of the chapels and dormitories of the city and into the smouldering devastation of Saint Bartolomé-East, the heavens truly fell. With a trail of soot streaming behind the bike from the cremated district – the result of the Impunitas’s earlier bombing raids – Kersh bled and watched material that was clearly not ship wreckage rocket from the sky. Unnatural blocks of blood-black ice were raining down on the district and necroplex beyond like artillery fire. Easing the speeding bike around craters created by tumbling rock and exotic metal fragments, Kersh suddenly became aware of a monstrous hound bounding up behind the bike and attempting to tear at the back wheel with its knife-point teeth. Swiping unsuccessfully with his gladius, the Scourge attempted to barge the reptilian beast into the walls of gutted derelicts.
The beast either bounded over the obstacles or crashed its bony head straight through them. When the thing almost took his arm off with a jaw-rearing snap, Kersh turned away from the daemon hound. Standing in the road were a trio of damned legionnaires, their bolters aimed straight at the advancing Kersh. As the ghastly Angels blazed coldly away, Kersh brought up his arm instinctively. Unmolested by the immaterial rounds, the Excoriator brought down his arm, only for it to jump back up as he rode straight through the line of revenants. Holding on to the screeching bike, the Scourge cast a glance behind him to see the accursed crusaders melt into nothing, revealing the bolt-blasted carcass of the daemon dead on the cobbles.
Gunning down clots of cultists with his bolters as he rode on, Kersh was almost knocked from the bike by a meteorite strike that demolished what was left of a burning hospice. Out across the ravaged district, the corpus-captain’s attention was arrested by the spectacle of a creature that had been less fortunate. Out in the wastes, the hulking greater daemon that had terrorised the Excoriator earlier stood impaled on a shard of ice which had fallen and speared the bloodthirster into the ground. Kersh sickeningly recalled the death of Squad Whip Joachim and thanked the Emperor for the daemon’s spectacular misfortune.
With the bike’s engine gunned excruciatingly to maximum speed, Kersh finally spotted the Lych Gate marking the limit of the city. A World Eater ran towards the road from a smashed chapel, his brass bolt pistols blazing – until a damned legionnaire stepped out from behind a blackened altar and gunned the Chaos Space Marine down from behind, ethereal bolts searing into his pack, through his warped body and out of his chestplate. The World Eater fell down by the roadside, one of his ornately crafted sidearms still aimed across the cobbles. As Kersh passed he felt a pair of bolt-rounds bore into his side. With the bike wobbling and the mauled Scourge fading fast, the sky lit up behind him.
A colossal stream of energy struck the city. For a moment, time seemed to stop. The ground seemed to shift below the wheels of Kersh’s bike. As darkness returned, buildings were blasted apart by a ring of concentric destruction spreading throughout the cemetery world city. As Kersh shot through the open Lych Gate, destruction cascaded after him, an avalanche of masonry, flaming bodies, blood and dust.
With little left to destroy in the blitzed Saint Bartolomé-East district, Kersh avoided the worst of the debris-storm. A rolling dust cloud rapidly swallowed the bike and Excoriator, however, blinding the grievously wounded Scourge to the danger ahead. The bike’s wheels left the ground without warning. Since Kersh hadn’t hit anything, he reasoned that there simply wasn’t any ground beneath him. The lychway had been pounded by a falling piece of the Keeler Comet minutes before, turning the width of the road into a crater. The bike began to fall, the front wheel not making the other side of the pit. As the front of the bike struck the crater wall, Kersh was flung like a piece of wreckage across the lychway. Bouncing and breaking along the track at all but lethal speed, the Excoriator tumbled to a plate-crushing stop by an ornate gravestone.
The half-dead Scourge blinked gore from his remaining eye. A gash across his face kept flooding the socket with blood. He might have lost consciousness, but if he had, he didn’t remember. As he moved his neck, pain streaked through the back of his head. Something was cracked or broken there. It was a living torment to move, but Kersh felt he had little choice. He was out on the necroplex. He sensed danger all about him.
Obsequa City lay behind him, a devastated mess of flaming wreckage and settling dust. The magnificent dome of the Umberto II Memorial Mausoleum was now a mountain of masonry. Many of the city centre cathedrals and temples had been wiped from the face of the cemetery world, but a good part of the city remained, albeit as a firestorm wracked ruin. Torched and shattered disciples of the Blood God who refused to give up the fight wandered the night with their murderous instincts still intact, even if their bodies were roasted and smashed. Damned legionnaires, incorporeal and impassive, hunted down such degenerate specimens without mercy, finishing what the lance strike had begun. The revenants had been unaffected by the city-levelling, star-hot beam of energy, with even those Angels directly below the orbital strike going about their vengeance oblivious to the destruction wrought around them.
Kersh limped agonisingly along the darkness of the lychway, daemon-haunted burial grounds on either side. He no longer had the company standard and had lost his Scourge’s blade in the crash. Drawing his remaining gladius – his back-up blade – the Excoriator hobbled on. With blood leaking from both sides of his mangled plate and the gleaming sword held limply in a shattered hand, the Scourge didn’t think to last long.
Destruction rained from the sky. Shattered pieces of ice had tumbled and rolled a path of annihilation through the Cholercaust fleet, cleaving vessels in half, destroying others outright and scattering smaller wolfpacks of raiders and pirates. Rock and immense warp-frozen shards of blood pounded the burial grounds – devastating the rabid hordes, blasting daemon entities back to the depths of the warp and laying waste to Khorne’s most frenzied warriors, decimate champions and able butchers. World Eaters raged at the heavens with their axes roaring and swords held high, shot through with white-hot metal nuggets that thunderbolted from the sky.
Kersh stomped on, blood-shod. A daemon herald leapt out over a crypt at the Scourge. He remembered raising his gladius but little else. Fading in and out of consciousness, the Excoriator found the daemon dead at his feet. Traitor Angels charged at him with oversized weapons and war cries, only to end up dead and bolt-punctured before him. An infernal predator swooped overhead, dive-bombing the corpus-captain, but that too found its way to a swift death on the ground. Kersh’s failing sight revealed only movements in the murk. He heard deviant hordes fighting with each other. Warbands at war. Infernal rivalries settled in blood. All he recognised were the flame-swathed Angels of his salvation. A Legion of the Damned, moving about the graves like an army of ghosts, taking the fight to the Ruinous, executing the tainted and delivering doom to the Emperor’s enemies.