One hundred and thirty seconds remain. Your health status light is black and cold. You can feel the blood draining from your wounds and the living plagues eating into your leg. You don’t care. You are not yet done. The Exalted Champions have made a fatal mistake.
They left you alive.
The Exalted Champions stalk past you, closing on Tayib. You push yourself to your knees in a pool of your own blood. Fire creeps onto the edges of your vision. You reach deep inside yourself, drawing up the least ebbs of your strength, and something more. You know of the machine-spirits that inhabit your weapons. You have felt the ghosts of those who have worn your power armor before you standing at your shoulder in the past. Now they add their strength, their wrath, and their righteous fury to yours.
“You forgot the first rule of fighting Ultramarines: make sure that your target is actually dead.”
Your plasma pistol is in your right hand. You know its ammunition flask is empty. You don’t care, it’s machine spirit doesn’t care, and in this place where reality has begun to break down, it doesn’t matter. Your will flows into the weapon, feeding its hungry machine spirit and stoking it’s fury. It bucks in your hand, two overcharged shots leaping from the barrel at the wounded Champion. It’s unholy force field pops like a rotten berry, the power pack on the back of its power armor blows apart, and the armored plates beneath shatters. Its necrotic flesh boils of its bones, which burn to black ashes before the empty suit of power armor crashes to the ground with the clatter of rusted metal.
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The two surviving Champions howl in agony as they turn to face you. “You DARE?”
“Courage. And. Honor.”
The Champions turn to attack you and recoil, shocked by either your appearance or by something behind you. You don’t bother looking, instead re-aiming and firing again. The second Champion’s head evaporates into dust on the wind, leaving his body to collapse and impale itself on his own sword. The last Champion rams his sword through your breastplate out out your back. You can feel it split both of your hearts in half, collapse two of your three lungs, shatter your rib cage, and sever your spine. Your armor’s built-in drug dispensers flood your system with pain suppressants, but you know it isn’t enough to keep you alive for more than a few seconds. As your armor loses power and begins to shut down around your body, you pull the trigger on you plasma pistol two last times. The last Champion falls dead on top of you, his legs shot away at the hip, flames eating him from the inside out.
One hundred and six seconds remain on your timer as it fades from view for the last time.
“Unleash hell Tayib.”
Your eyes close for the last time, your foes slain, your mission complete.
One hundred and six seconds later, you body is obliterated along with The Blighted Heart and the Captialis Congestus.