Mortarion moved—his body blurred into a sickly green streak, faster than mortal eyes could track.
His great scythe carved a ghastly arc; space itself seemed to split with a rotting wound.
Titus raised his sword. Emperor's holy fire met plague miasma; the blast shredded a hundred meters of metal around them.
On this clash, Titus did not yield—his golden power blade flared brighter and began to force down Mortarion's scythe.
"Is that all you've got?" Titus taunted.
He had expected much of a fallen primarch. So far, not impressed. Mortarion's speed was high, but not dazzling to his eyes.
The primarch's strength, too, felt underwhelming. Titus didn't even need to grow to giant form to press him. Thanks to Rhodes's enhancements, Titus stood three-point-three meters tall; compared to Mortarion's near four meters, the gap wasn't so large.
Titus unleashed the Emperor's wrath—his sword's disintegration field thrummed, golden psychic power surging for Mortarion's chest.
The Death Lord slipped his torso aside and smashed Silence down on Titus's pauldron. The extradimensional armor rang—and held.
Silence failed to harm the suit. The armor had come from an Emperor avatar, forged by Salome and Yapool on Rhodes's orders. It could expand to giant form or contract—an artifact by any measure.
As with the sword, the armor held the Emperor-avatar's psychic charge.
"Your armor… why does it bear the Emperor's power? Are you his champion?" Mortarion withdrew Silence scythe and stared at the towering marine.
The blade's nimbus reminded him of his father's power; for a moment he wondered if this had been the Emperor's own sword.
Impossible—his father's sword was in Guilliman's keeping.
"No comment," Titus snorted, and pressed the attack.
Mortarion vented virulent warp-toxins—Nurgle's corroding force. Any normal Astartes in that cloud would see their armor rot away, then their flesh, dying in moments.
But Titus's armor sang—the Emperor's sigils flared, and holy might dispersed the corruption.
"The Gene-Father's power protects me," Titus said.
This time he did not call upon the Emperor by name. The source was the Emperor, yes—but it was his Gene-Father who bestowed it, via the giant Emperor-avatar.
"Impossible! No one but my father can wield such power—no one!" Mortarion howled, scythe weaving a blur as he attacked in fury.
Titus remained cool, eyes steady, blade meeting every blow.
"Powerless rage," Titus shook his head. The fallen primarch had lost a warrior's calm—his strikes grew sloppy, his guard full of holes.
"You wretch—I'll kill you!" Mortarion roared.
Titus seized the opening and brought his sword down.
"For the Emperor! For Lord Rhodes!"
The blade bit into Mortarion's chest; holy fire scorched corrupted flesh. Mortarion screamed.
"You think… this can kill a primarch? Behold Grandfather's new gift," Mortarion snarled.
His body swelled; rotten wings spread; a psychic storm swept the field. Titus stood unmoved amid the blast, a pillar unbowed, golden plates blazing like a war-god.
Mortarion hovered, rot surging like a tide; he stood fifty meters tall.
Nurgle had not sent him to Vashtorr for a full giant-form refit, but had upgraded him with a titanic corpse-beast frame to counter giant foes.
"Now, mortal, witness true despair. Behold a daemon primarch's power!" Mortarion raved.
His loss to his own gene-son, Typhus, still festered. He could not lose again. Grandfather had granted him gigantism—he would slay this Emperor's champion.
"You think only you can grow?" Titus scoffed. Ultra-Beast power ignited; he swelled to sixty meters.
"Damn you!" The daemon primarch spewed clouds of corrosive flies at Titus.
The stench of Nurgle broke on the Emperor's gold. When Titus underwent Ultra-Beast augmentation, he used flesh from an Emperor-avatar.
In theory, his strength matched the giant Custodes—and thanks to Rhodes's care, his effective power ranked just below a primarch within the Imperium.
The giants clashed again. With the corpse-beast frame, Mortarion had grown stronger—perhaps enough to fight Typhus to a draw.
But today he faced Rhodes's champion, his deputy commander—the most dangerous man in the legion.
Their collisions shook the entire warship. Even a Gloriana-class couldn't bear such blows.
Titus's iron fist burned with golden fire. His uppercut smashed Mortarion's jaw—maggots and rot flew.
As the daemon primarch reeled, Titus seized a decayed wing, hip-threw the fifty-meter giant, and pile-drove him into a mountain of scrap.
Boom! Boom!
The ship quaked; the Gloriana-class reached the verge of structural failure.
"Your strikes are as flimsy as Nurgle's snot. You're not worthy of my father's attention," Titus boomed through his helm amps, taunting the fallen primarch.
He raised a boot etched with golden sigils and stomped Mortarion's gut. The deck crumpled; the Death Lord vomited bile-green gore.
Silence stabbed from the poison fog—Titus caught the blade barehanded, sparks screaming where gauntlet met daemon-edge.
With a roar, he snapped the corrupted artifact in two.
"Impossible!" Mortarion's compound eyes flickered wildly.
Nurgle had blessed that weapon himself. A mortal had broken it.
Before he could recover, Titus's burning fists hammered his breastplate, each blow ringing with the Emperor's wrath. Nurgle-blessed armor peeled like dead bark.
Pus jetted from Mortarion's seven orifices. He tried to conjure a plague-cloud; Titus's knee strike shattered his chest.
As he doubled over, an iron elbow came down, caving half his face and filling his vision with sparks.
"This is for the Gene-Father!" Titus drove his powered fist into Mortarion's gut; the disintegration field turned rotten viscera to slurry.
"This is for the Emperor!" A left hook smashed his temple; a broken horn spun away to pin itself in a distant bulkhead.
Mortarion struggled to rise—his left leg was gone, torn away at the hip.
Titus grabbed his ruined wings and rag-dolled the primarch, slamming him into the deck again and again.
Each impact made the ship quake. Grandfather's blessings crumbled under brute divinity. The Gloriana finally came apart.
Before the final break, Rhodes's gene-sons blue-flashed away via teleport bracelets.
When Titus stopped, Mortarion was a quivering heap of rot. Titus's armor dripped stink. He lifted his right foot; Imperial holy fire boiled around the boot.
"One last blow," he said, voice icy. "For every Imperial world devoured by Nurgle's plagues."
His stomp crashed down. The shockwave flipped the corrupted Gloriana; a mushroom of rot and rust billowed up.
When the dust cleared, the Gloriana was gone. Most of Mortarion's remains had turned to ash.
Titus floated in hard vacuum, staring coldly at what was left—half a head. The fallen primarch clung to life only by a Daemon Prince's monstrous regeneration.