Fights six guards

‘Leave now and you live,’ said the warrior before him.

‘Yes, you said that, but here’s the thing,’ said Lucius. ‘I want in there, and you aren’t going to stop me. Trust me, it will give me great pleasure to take the six of you on at once, but I think that might be a rather one-sided experience by the end.’

Lucius saw the attack coming in the Phoenix Guard’s eyes.

Energised carbon steel clove the air, but Lucius was already moving.

Lucius ducked below the sweep of a halberd and the Terran blade leapt to his hand. Its tip plunged into the groin of the flesh-masked warrior. Lucius gave a savage twist and the blade cut up through his opponent’s femur and hip to remove his leg. Blood gouted from the wound, and the warrior fell with a cry of mingled pain and surprise. Lucius darted to the side, his Laeran blade cutting into the flank of the warrior to his right. Armour parted before its alien metal and the warrior’s guts looped out as though eager to be free of his flesh.

Altered organs heightened every sensation, and Lucius laughed with the vividness of his surroundings. The darkness became multi-faceted, the smell of blood a heady cocktail of unnatural chemicals and biological agents, the gleam of dim light from flashing weapons like the explosive fanfare that marked the end of the Great Triumph. His breath sounded impossibly loud, his blood like thundering rapids, and his opponents came at him with what seemed like deliberate slowness. A halberd stroked his shoulder, and Lucius rolled with the arc of the blow. He sprang to his feet, blocked the return cut, and rolled his wrists around the weapon’s haft, stabbing the blade through the Phoenix Guard’s helmet. The warrior dropped without a sound and Lucius swayed aside from a scything halberd blow intended to cleave him from skull to pelvis.

Lucius counterattacked with blistering speed, his first cut removing the warrior’s blade, the second opening his throat. A third blow all but severed the head, and he threw himself flat as another spiked halberd stabbed for the space between his shoulder blades. He came to his knees, swords crossed before him to catch the blade as it descended. The strength behind the blow was awesome, far in excess of his own, but Lucius twisted his blades to drive the blade down into the deck. Steel shrieked as the crackling blade tore up the decking. Lucius thundered his fist into the Phoenix Guard’s helmet, cracking the visor and drawing a grunt of pain from within. The warrior lost his grip on the halberd and blocked a dazzling cut to the neck with his forearm.

Lucius’s blade severed the arm at the elbow, and he spun inside to ram the Laeran blade through the warrior’s chest. His victim fell with a gurgling cry, grabbing Lucius’s wrist and dragging him down with him. Lucius was pulled to the deck, but kept the momentum of his tumble going as the last Phoenix Guard’s halberd swung for him. He twisted in the air and landed lightly on the balls of his
feet, leaving the blade trapped within the Phoenix Guard’s chest.

Armed only with his Terran blade, Lucius dropped into a theatrical en garde position, keeping his sword high and moving the tip in tiny circles. An old trick, but the Phoenix Guard was not a subtle warrior, and Lucius saw his foe’s eyes follow the motion of the blade. Lucius leapt forwards, feinting right as the warrior realised his mistake. A clumsy block swept around, but Lucius had already altered the angle of his thrust. The Terrawatt clans of the Urals had forged the blade in the days before Unity, and its edge had never failed him.

Until now.

The tip of the blade caught the broken nub of an eagle’s wing on the warrior’s plastron, and the impact sent a jolt of force along the sword. It snapped, and the tip sprang back at Lucius in a spinning arc of razor steel. Even Lucius’s preternaturally swift reactions could not save him, and the shard sliced a deep furrow from his left temple to his lower jaw.

The pain was so sudden, so blissful and so wonderfully unexpected that it almost killed him as he took a moment to savour it.

Given a reprieve from death, the Phoenix Guard thrust his halberd towards Lucius. The tip kissed the metal of Lucius’s war plate, but that was as close as it came to the swordsman’s skin. Lucius hacked the weapon’s haft in two with his broken sword and waved an admonishing finger.‘That was careless of me,’ he said with a faintly embarrassed sigh. ‘Imagine being killed by a sluggard like you. I’d never live it down.’

Before the warrior could reply or lament the loss of his weapon, Lucius spun inside his guard and executed an exquisitely aimed decapitating strike that sent the Phoenix Guard’s head spinning across the chamber.

***

The Primarchs: The Reflection Crack'd, Chapter 7