‘In your ignorance, do you see what you have wrought?’ Vulkan said, swinging his hammer again. ‘Your kind should have stayed dead where we buried you.’
They exchanged more blows. Vulkan struggled to keep his footing against the hammering impact of every strike, but slowly circled to his left, manoeuvring the ork into position.
‘You moved too soon,’ Vulkan continued. ‘Had you but the patience of true intelligence you would have seen that another decade, perhaps two, and the Imperium would have crumbled easily. And to strike at the Throneworld… You have roused a different beast, one that will see you crushed.’
The Great Beast surprised him. It did not draw back its fist, but reached out and snatched him by the throat. War-plate groaned under the pressure of the ork’s fierce grip, tightening around Vulkan’s windpipe. He rained blows against its arm as the warlord pulled back its other fist for a blow that would take off the primarch’s head. As the claw powered towards his face, Vulkan switched the focus of his attack, slamming Doomtremor into the oncoming fist.
The explosion of competing powers parted the two combatants, flinging Vulkan into the wall and sending the Great Beast staggering across the floor, spiked boots gouging furrows in the stone.
The ork shook its arm and hand, numbed by the impact. Vulkan blinked hard to clear his spinning vision.
‘But you are not the real threat,’ the primarch snarled, pushing to his feet. He spun Doomtremor in his palms, sizing up his opponent. ‘You are the distraction that will allow the true enemy to surge forth again.’
The two giants hurled themselves at each other. The Great Beast crushed the bodies of fallen Chapter Masters underfoot. Vulkan threw Doomtremor at the last moment, casting the burning hammer into the Great Beast’s face. Armour buckled and split and the hammer whirled away across the chamber.
Vulkan wheeled past the stunned ork, but not so swiftly that he avoided its next punch, which caught him square in the gut and launched him a dozen metres through the air. Turning his crash into a roll, Vulkan regained his feet.
Its helm was a mess, but the ork now stood between the primarch and his weapon.
The flames around one of the Great Beast’s gauntlets flickered away. It reached up and tore free the remnants of its helmet, tossing the mangled armour aside. Its head was enormous, with tusks and fangs like swords. The Great Beast regarded Vulkan with deep red eyes, a permanent scowl furrowing its brow.
‘You are right, son of the Emperor,’ it said. The voice was deep, guttural, but unmistakably speaking Imperial Gothic.
Vulkan was so taken aback by this utterance that he barely dodged the blast of power that erupted from the Great Beast’s out-thrust fist.
‘Your empire is on its knees. We shall be its death.’ The Great Beast glanced over its shoulder and turned back to the primarch with what Vulkan believed was a smile. ‘And just like your Emperor, you have thrown away your most powerful weapon.’
The Great Beast lowered its head and charged with a roar, green flames bursting from its fists. Vulkan leapt aside and threw a hand out towards Doomtremor, activating the miniature teleport link he had fitted into its head and his gauntlet. With a crack of splitting air, the hammer appeared in his fist. He swung hard, aiming for the side of the Great Beast’s head.
The blow bounced from thick skull, Doomtremor’s power field ripping skin and flesh down to the bone, searing a streak across the Great Beast’s scalp.
The ork lumbered away. A pulse of power flooded from it in a shockwave, staggering Vulkan as he readied for his next strike.
The Great Beast straightened, thick blood pouring down its face, a visible crack in the side of its skull.
‘Are you feeling tired yet, son of the Emperor?’ it asked. Green coils of energy snaked up to its face, flowing over the wound, healing the gash in a few seconds. The Great Beast laughed. ‘Is that the hardest you can hit me?’
‘I don’t have to hit harder,’ Vulkan replied. ‘I just have to think quicker.’
Their last exchange had brought the Great Beast back in front of the massive throne alcove in the heart of the reactor. The primarch hurled himself full force, tackling the warlord in the midriff to take them both into the pulsating green aura of the energy field.
At the moment of entry, Vulkan felt the overwhelming nature of Ullanor pouring into him. He witnessed and participated in the unimaginable orkishness of Ullanor, feeling himself drawn out into a web of waaagh power stretching across many star systems, the pulsing tendrils feeding back into his being even as his presence radiated energy into those around him.
That power echoed back through time, past the Horus Heresy to the primordial origins of the orks themselves. He was one with the nature of the orks, and saw for the briefest moment two green-skinned behemoths battering each other with bare fists at the dawn of time before even mankind was born.
The sensation of something around his throat dragged Vulkan back to the present, staring into the rage-filled eyes of the Great Beast. Both claws were on his throat, squeezing the life from the primarch.
Having seen the nature of the waaagh-force that bound the orks together, guessing at its nature from his own dark experience of Chaos, Vulkan was struck by a revelation. All things were interconnected. The orks seemed random but they were not. They were emergent. Trial and error always began with wildness and accidental circumstance, but it honed and refined. It evolved.
As the orks had evolved of late — hyper-evolved in the accelerating presence of the Great Beast — so their strategy had evolved. From gargants to hulks, to attack moons, to Ullanor itself — a progression that, once revealed, could be followed back to its base in the most simple of ork constructions.
And the same was true of all their acts.
Learn through action. Trial and error.
The attack moons were not battle stations, or at least not merely battle stations. They were test shots, dry runs sent out into the void as the orks tinkered and improved their gravitic engines.
And once the technology had been proven they needed to find a target. The Great Beast had not struck early, it had struck a bargain. It would avenge the abused spirit of the orks, it would crush the Emperor that had humbled orkdom. On the crescendo of such a victory its power would be unlimited and it would ascend to rule of the galaxy.
And now, Vulkan realised in that instant of feverish thought, they had found Earth. They had located the Throneworld and humanity had proven itself incapable of fighting back.
The attack moon over Earth was a beacon as much as a vanguard. Ullanor, the whole world, was the same thinking writ on a planetary scale — a base of billions of orks. It had been armed and protected like an attack moon. Could it also be moved across star systems like one? If Terra was the target…
There really was no way to stop the Great Beast by any conventional means.
Such power could not be destroyed, only diverted. Feeling the last gasps of breath escaping his body, Vulkan let his thoughts flow again. He reached out into the undulating waaagh, tapping into that warp-born part of himself that had been for every primarch a blessing and a curse. He allowed his primal essence to mix with that of the orks, his Emperor-created body absorbing the surge of energy like a sponge.
He allowed the pure orkishness that had killed so many Librarians to infuse his body. Vulkan felt the Great Beast tense, its thoughts moving to him with tectonic slowness as it realised something was amiss. It tried to pull back the waaagh, to wrest the raw orkish power from the mind of the primarch.
Vulkan only had a moment before he lost the battle, before the power of the orks and the last dregs of his life were both spent.