As his legs bent, he maglocked the Arbitrator to his side. He jumped, and reached up with his now free right hand. He grabbed the end of a leg as it rushed inwards, and used its momentum to launch himself at the daemon’s chest. With all the force of his flight, he drove the Hand of Dominion into the monster’s thorax. The power gauntlet annihilated daemonic matter. The huge body collapsed below the neck. The monster’s roar was cut off. It slashed out one more time, then disintegrated. The body tried to heave back, but the Wolf Blade’s growl rose in a rattling crescendo, and the sword ripped all the way through and came out the throat.

The daemon slumped down. Its fall crushed a score of lesser abominations that had rushed forwards, shrieking, as their leader was destroyed.

Guilliman and the Lion jumped down from the body. Foul smoke lifted from it, hacking at the throat with razored claws. The metal and the flesh began to lose substance. The primarchs waded into a streaming rush of daemons. The portal disgorged them without cease.

‘There are too many to stop,’ Gorod voxed.

The abominations were a tide flowing past the blocks of Legiones Astartes and out of the hall.

Guilliman blasted the head off a four-legged fiend with a scorpion’s tail. ‘Are you in contact with our forces outside the temple?’ he asked.

‘Not since the portal opened.’

So be it. He trusted the Chapter Masters of all the Legions to do what had to be done. And stopping the incursion was a distraction, not the goal. The three Legions were not here to reclaim Davin.

‘We fight to hold our position,’ he said, answering Gorod but voxing on an open battle channel. ‘We stay in this hall. There is no retreat.’ Two crimson daemons, wielding swords, attacked him with simultaneous swings. They were far too slow. The Hand of Dominion crushed the skull of one abomination, the Arbitrator cut the other in half.

A monstrous wave of force blasted from the portal, disintegrating the daemons on the threshold. The floor of the temple heaved upwards, splitting into uneven plates of stone. The dome cracked open and rained masonry. The walls swayed, buckled and leaned in towards each other.

The tremors rolled on. The Delphos groaned. From inside the gateway, Sanguinius roared.

To a man, the Sanguinary Guard turned at his voice, plunging into the abominations with renewed fury.

‘Now the battle is truly joined!’ the Lion called.

Side by side, Guilliman and the Lion fought their way through the tide of daemons towards the portal, marching steadily over the pitching and rising floor. The portal flashed and raged. The temple rocked back and forth, buffeted by the clashing, unseen waves of a struggle beyond Guilliman’s reach.