The Primarch of Liberty

The valley trembled as three demigods clashed, each impact sending ripples through reality itself. Franklin's wings of steel caught the light as he ascended skyward, his avian skull wreathed in divine flames that left trailing embers in his wake. Close behind, Fulgrim's serpentine form twisted through the air with unnatural grace as his bat-like wings took him through the air, while Angron's brass-clad bulk followed with surprising agility, steam still venting from his helm.

The air itself seemed to scream as their weapons met. Anaris sang its deadly song as it parried strikes from multiple angles, Franklin's movements precise and calculated despite the fury of his opponents. Each clash left vibrations and lightning through the air.

Franklin's tactical genius showed itself not in direct combat, but in manipulation. As Fulgrim lunged forward, all four arms wielding death in different forms, Franklin executed a perfect pivot in mid-air. The movement placed the charging Angron directly between himself and Fulgrim's attack.

Fulgrim's blades, meant for Franklin, instead carved into Angron's brass armor. The weapons, touched by Slaanesh's corruption, left wounds that hissed and bubbled with unnatural energies. The Red Angel's roar of pain and fury echoed across the valley, shaking loose stones from distant cliffs.

"BETRAYER!" Angron's voice was volcanic fury given form. His single remaining arm swung his chainaxe in a devastating arc aimed at Fulgrim's perfect face. "NOW YOU TOO TURN ON ME!"

Fulgrim twisted away from the blow, his beautiful features contorted with disgust. "You absolute simpleton!" The Daemon Primarch of Slaanesh's voice carried even over the thunder of their combat. "This is exactly what he wanted! Your mindless rage makes you nothing but a weapon for others to point!"

"Fulgrim," Franklin's voice cut through the din, calm and mocking, "how does it feel to fight alongside a rabid dog like Angron? I'd imagine it cramps your... impeccable style."

Angron's chainaxe swung wide, nearly catching Fulgrim's tail. The Red Angel bellowed, steam bursting from his helm. "Watch where you're flailing, snake!"

Fulgrim hissed, his perfect face twisting into a sneer. "Perhaps if you had the intellect to match your brawn, we wouldn't have this problem, butcher!"

"Ah, the sibling love," Franklin interjected, his smirk audible in his tone. "Almost brings a tear to my eye. But really, Angron, you're just going to take that from him? The mighty Red Angel, reduced to a simple insult sponge for Fulgrim's wit? Sad."

Angron roared, his fury turning briefly toward Fulgrim. "You dare mock me, peacock?!"

Fulgrim's expression soured further as he twisted away from Angron's advance, his movements a blend of grace and disdain. "Mock? You mock yourself, Angron, with every thoughtless swing of that clumsy axe!"

"Careful, Fulgrim," Franklin called out, his voice carrying that perpetual note of amusement. "You might hurt his feelings. Though I suppose being Khorne's attack dog doesn't leave much room for feelings, does it, Angron?"

The taunt hit its mark. Angron's response was an incoherent roar of rage as he turned his attention back to Franklin, but the seed of discord had been planted.

"Speaking of hurt feelings," Franklin continued, effortlessly weaving between their attacks, "hey Fulgrim, remember that time with Rylanor? Must have been quite the explosive meeting. Did the virus bomb leave a bad taste in your mouth?"

The effect was immediate and devastating. Fulgrim's beautiful face contorted into something horrific, his composure shattered by the memory of that humiliation. "I'll flay the skin from your bones!" the Daemon Primarch shrieked, his attacks becoming wild and faster.

Franklin's laughter echoed across the valley as he suddenly dropped from between them, his wings folding close to his body. Both Daemon Primarchs, carried forward by their momentum and fury, crashed into each other. Fulgrim's blades scraped against Angron's armor while the Red Angel's chainaxe caught one of Fulgrim's secondary arms.

"Oh, this is precious," Franklin called from below, circling them like a bird of prey. "The serpent and the gladiator, dancing together. Though I must say, Angron, you're still following someone else's lead. First the High Riders, then the Emperor, now Khorne – at least you're consistent in your slavery."

This new barb drove Angron into an even deeper frenzy. He turned on Fulgrim, his single remaining arm wielding his chainaxe with terrible strength. "YOU!" he roared, "INTERFERING WITH MY KILL!"

Fulgrim was forced to defend against Angron's berserk assault, his face a mask of frustration and rage. "You brain-dead mongrel!" he spat, parrying the savage blows. "Can't you see he's manipulating us? This is exactly what he wants!"

"What I want?" Franklin's voice carried clearly as he continued his aerial circle around them, Anaris gleaming in the light. "I just want my brothers to get along. Is that too much to ask? Though I suppose asking Angron to think is like asking Fulgrim to be humble – simply beyond their capabilities."

The two Daemon Primarchs continued their conflict, their original target temporarily forgotten in their mutual antagonism. Fulgrim's serpentine form twisted and coiled as he tried to bring his superior number of arms to bear, while Angron's singular focus and overwhelming strength meant each blow that did land carried devastating force.

"You're playing right into his hands, you dolt!" Fulgrim snarled, even as he lashed out at Angron in retaliation for the damage done.

"Playing into my hands?" Franklin quipped, darting in to deliver a precise strike to Angron's shoulder before retreating once more. "Don't flatter yourselves. I'm just enjoying the show. A snake and a gladiator, tearing each other apart—how poetic."

Angron's chainaxe clashed against Fulgrim's blades in a blinding storm of sparks, their anger at Franklin turning inward as old rivalries flared. Fulgrim's serpentine form coiled around Angron, his blades carving into brass, while Angron's raw strength smashed aside Fulgrim's guard.

Franklin's laughter rang out once more, his voice carrying a mocking joy. "Come now, brothers. This is supposed to be a family reunion. Though I must admit, watching you two squabble like children is far more entertaining."

The valley bore the scars of their conflict—great gouges torn into the earth, the air thick with the tang of ozone and blood. Franklin's words were the true weapons here, stoking the flames of discord between his brothers with precision rivaling his swordsmanship.

And as the battle raged on, the Liberator remained ever above, circling like a hawk, his taunts and jibes driving the Daemon Primarchs further into their own chaos.

-------------------------

Abaddon the Despoiler stood amidst the chaos of battle, his terminator armor's void shields flickering as they deflected debris from the endless barrage. Above him, three demigods continued their aerial ballet of destruction, but his tactical mind was focused on the immediate battlefield before him. Ten thousand years of warfare had taught him to read battlefields like scholars read books, and what he read here gave him pause.

The Liberty Eagles had transformed the valley into a killing ground that would have made the Iron Warriors proud. A great wall stretched from horizon to horizon, its gunmetal surface broken by weapon emplacements and defense turrets. Before it lay a complex network of trenches and fortifications that spoke of careful preparation. This was no hasty defense – this was a carefully orchestrated trap.

The sky above darkened, but not from natural clouds. Squadrons of aircraft moved in perfect formation, their designs unlike anything in the Imperial arsenal. Abaddon watched as his own air support - Heldrakes and Hell Talons - were systematically destroyed crashing onto the ranks of the Lost and the Damned. A particularly aggressive Liberty Eagles pilot streaked past Abaddon's position, their aircraft's rotary cannon spewing death at a rate that turned the packed ranks of cultists into red mist.

"Like locusts," Abaddon muttered, watching his air support dwindle. "They blot out the sun with their wings of steel."

"Return fire!" Abaddon commanded, his voice carrying over the din of battle. The Black Legion's anti-aircraft batteries opened up, filling the sky with tracer fire and flak bursts.

The Bringers of Despair, his reformed Justaerin, formed a protective circle around their master. Their black Terminator armor bore the marks of ten millennia of warfare, each battle honor a testament to their dedication to the Long War. Yet even these veteran warriors seemed small against the scale of destruction being unleashed.

The artillery fire was unlike anything Abaddon had witnessed in his long existence. Shells fell not in the coordinated barrages Abaddon had witnessed countless times before, but in an endless stream that defied conventional logistics. Every second, new explosions churned the earth, creating a constant wall of detonations that made advance nearly impossible.

"Impossible," one of his Bringers of Despair growled, his voice distorted by his helm's vox. "No force can maintain such a rate of fire."

But Abaddon knew better. It's almost as if their ammunition production bordered on the infinite, their logistics chains never broke, their supply lines never faltered.

The sky darkened as Liberty Eagle bombers made another pass, their bomb bays opening to release streams of burning promethium. The sacred unguents and oils that powered his army's war machines burned just as readily as the flesh of his mortal soldiers. The screams of the burning mixed with the continuous thunder of artillery to create a cacophony of destruction.

A missile barrage interrupted his thoughts, forcing even his Terminator-armored form to seek cover. The voidshields of his armor flared as shrapnel peppered his position. Around him, more of the Lost and Damned died, their bodies torn apart by submunitions that seemed to seek out targets with malicious intelligence.

Yet Abaddon's enhanced vision caught something – a detail that lesser beings might have missed in the chaos of battle. On the rightmost section of the wall, there was an irregularity. The construction there seemed hasty, the materials different from the rest. To most, it would appear as merely a slight variation in the wall's perfect symmetry. But to Abaddon's experienced eye, it was like a beacon in the darkness.

"A weakness," he murmured, his tactical mind already calculating possibilities. "Or perhaps..."

He let the thought hang unfinished. Ten millennia of warfare had taught him caution. The Liberty Eagles fought with a precision that bordered on prescience. Could such an obvious flaw be accidental? Or was it a trap within a trap?

The ground trembled with new footfalls – the arrival of his Titan Legions. Great war machines of the Dark Mechanicum towered over the battlefield, their weapon systems already tracking targets. Behind them came their Knight escorts, smaller but no less deadly. Their arrival should have filled him with confidence, yet something nagged at the edges of his tactical assessment.

"Where are their Titans?" he wondered aloud. Every Legion maintained a complement of Titan support, yet the Liberty Eagles showed none. Their wall, while formidable, would not stand against concentrated Titan fire. Unless...

But time was not a luxury he could afford. The longer they remained in the killing ground, the more of his forces would be whittled away by the relentless bombardment. Sometimes, Abaddon knew, the only way to spring a trap was to trigger it deliberately.

He made his decision. Raising Drach'nyen high, its daemon-filled blade drinking in the light of explosions, he gave the order that would echo across the battlefield: "FORWARD FOR THE GODS!"

The Titans moved first, their massive forms advancing with terrifying majesty. Knight houses formed up on their flanks, protection against infantry assaults. Behind them came the mass of the Black Legion – Chaos Space Marines in their corrupted power armor, supported by columns of tanks and endless waves of cultists and traitor guard.

Abaddon advanced with them, his Terminator-armored guards keeping pace. Each step took them closer to the hastily-constructed section of wall, and with each step, his veteran's instincts screamed louder. The Liberty Eagles' fire seemed to slightly lessen against the advancing Titans, almost as if they were conserving ammunition. But for what?

The Despoiler's mind raced through possibilities even as he advanced. He had faced the Imperium's armies for ten millennia, learned their doctrines, their tactics, their tendencies. But the Liberty Eagles were different. They combined the precision of the Tau with the crushing firepower of the Imperial Guard, all enhanced by technology that seemed to border on the miraculous.

"Be ready," he voxed to his commanders. "They'll have something waiting for us. They always do."

The wall grew larger in his vision as they advanced, its hastily-constructed section becoming more prominent. The artillery fire continued its relentless pace, but now it seemed to be concentrating on their flanks, herding them toward that apparent weakness. It was obvious – too obvious – yet they had no choice but to advance into whatever trap awaited them.

Abaddon the Despoiler, veteran of ten thousand years of warfare, advanced with his forces toward what he strongly suspected was a carefully prepared killing ground. But sometimes, he knew, the only way to defeat a trap was to spring it with full knowledge of its existence. Time was his enemy now, and even a costly victory would be better than a slow death under the Liberty Eagles' guns.

-----------------------

The valley thundered with the death screams of Titans. The massive war machines of the Dark Mechanicum, for all their terrible majesty, proved vulnerable to the precision-guided missile fire from the wall's defense turrets. Each salvo was carefully calculated, striking repeatedly at the across different points in their void shields to overload their warping capabilities and when the shields were down the Railgun fire followed, killing blows that turned the ancient war machines into towering pyres.

Even in death, the Titans served their corrupted purpose. Their catastrophic barrages targeted a single section of the wall, exploiting the calculated vulnerabilities of a structure hastily erected in the theater of war. Behind them, the Lost and the Damned surged like a human tide, an army of deranged cultists, mutated monstrosities and traitor guardsmen throwing themselves forward in their millions. They filled trenches with their corpses and clogged defenses with their dead, a grotesque, crawling advance powered by desperation and madness.

The Liberty Guard countered with precision unmatched. Their tactical retreat was a masterclass in discipline and strategy—every step back was deliberate, every trench abandoned only after exacting the maximum toll on the enemy. Behind them, autonomous gun platforms and fire-control systems ensured no inch of ground was surrendered without a river of Chaos blood spilled.

When the breach finally came, it was cataclysmic. A final, coordinated salvo from the last standing Titans obliterated the weakened wall section in an eruption of fire and debris. Dust and smoke billowed like storm clouds, and from that inferno strode Abaddon the Despoiler, the Warmaster of Chaos, Drach'nyen held aloft. The blackened Terminator armor encasing his form glimmered like an avatar of annihilation, a demonic relic of humanity's greatest betrayal. His voice roared above the cacophony, rallying his forces to pour through the breach.

But the Liberty Eagles had anticipated this moment...no they planned this moment.

Standing at the forefront of the defense was First Captain Denzel Washington, his Exo-armor a gleaming testament to the artistry of the Dark Age of Technology. Its design evoked the image of ancient Terran samurai, every curve and plate bearing intricate, shifting patterns that seemed to move with an intelligence of their own. Twin blades, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi and Totsuka-no-Tsurugi, rested in his hands, their edges shimmering with hyper-phase energy capable of cutting through reality itself.

Their eyes met across the battlefield – two warriors who had both served as First Captains of their respective Legions. In that moment of recognition, both understood that this would be a duel worthy of legend.

With a guttural roar, he struck first. Drach'nyen hissed through the air, its daemon-infused blade cutting toward Washington with a speed and ferocity that would have sundered lesser warriors. But Denzel's response was poetry in motion. The twin hyper-phase swords, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi and Totsuka-no-Tsurugi, moved in perfect harmony, catching Drach'nyen's blade and redirecting its momentum. The counterstrike was so swift that Abaddon barely turned aside the strike aimed at his throat.

"Arrogant whelp," Abaddon thought as he recovered. This was no mere mortal to be crushed beneath his boot. 

"Sigismund..." Abaddon thought adjusting his stance. The comparison to Sigismund was immediate and unavoidable. But where the Emperor's Champion had been direct in his mastery, an unstoppable force of righteous fury, Denzel's style was more subtle. Each movement flowed into the next, no energy wasted, no opening given.

Around them, the battle raged with increasing intensity. The First Company's disintegration weapons continued their deadly work, while Black Legion veterans pushed forward, trying to expand the breach. But for the two warriors locked in combat, the wider battle faded to background noise.

Abaddon adjusted his strategy, remembering bitter lessons learned from his duel with Sigismund. That victory had come at a terrible cost, and even then, he had faced an aged warrior past his prime. The First Captain before him was in his absolute prime, every movement sharp and precise.

"You fight well, Traitor" Denzel's voice carried clearly despite the din of battle. "But you're still telegraphing your strikes. Old Luna Wolves habits die hard, don't they?"

The taunt was delivered with the same casual confidence that seemed to be a hallmark of the Liberty Eagles. Abaddon responded with a combination of strikes that would have overwhelmed most opponents, Drach'nyen's blade leaving trails of warp energy in its wake. But Denzel moved like water, each attack met and turned aside with elegant efficiency.

"The old ways had their merits," Abaddon growled, pressing his attack while being careful not to overextend. "Ten thousand years of warfare teaches one much about combat."

"Ten thousand years of the same mistakes," Denzel replied, his twin blades weaving an intricate pattern of defense and counter-attack. "You still try to overwhelm with brute force when precision would serve better."

Their weapons clashed again, sending sparks of both physical and metaphysical energy cascading around them. Each strike was a study in contrasts – Abaddon's raw power against Denzel's flowing precision, Chaos-corrupted weaponry against Dark Age masterworks, fury against technique.

The duel continued, neither warrior able to gain a decisive advantage. Abaddon's experience and daemonic weaponry were matched by Denzel's superior technology and perfect technique. Where Abaddon would strike with overwhelming force, Denzel would redirect and counter. When Denzel launched his lightning-fast combinations, Abaddon's blessings would allow him to weather the storm.

One is a Primeborn the other an Artificially made equivalent through blessings.

"Your Primarch fights above," Abaddon said between exchanges, "yet you don't seem concerned."

Denzel's response was accompanied by a combination so swift it appeared as a single motion. "Why should I be? He's enjoying himself. And unlike some sons, we know our father always wins."

The confidence in that statement was absolute, backed by the sort of certainty that came from witnessed truth rather than blind faith. It struck at something deep in Abaddon's psyche – a reminder of his own father's failures, of Horus's ultimate defeat.

The battle around them had transformed the breach into a meat grinder. Liberty Eagle Overwhelming Firepower met Black Legion fury in a swirling maelstrom of violence. Yet in the eye of this storm, The Two, Warmaster against First Captain continued their duel, each seeking the single opening that would end it decisively.

Their weapons clashed again, Daemon blade and phase technology creating distortions in reality where the blades met. Both warriors had fought countless duels across the centuries, but few had ever pushed them to these limits. It was the sort of combat that legends were made from – when skill and experience met their match, when neither warrior could afford a single mistake.

The fate of the battle might well hang on the outcome of their duel, but neither warrior allowed that pressure to affect their concentration. They fought on, their combat a deadly demonstration of everything that made Space Marines the Emperor's finest warriors, whether loyal or traitor.

And above them, the sky continued to echo with the sounds of demigods at war.