Lucia slowly straightened her body, pulling the chainsword in her hand from the chest of the Chaos Space Marine lying dead upon the deck.
Even such a simple motion was executed with excruciating difficulty.
She bore two penetrating wounds to her waist, a fractured left arm, six gunshot wounds across her torso, a multitude of shattered ribs, severely ruptured internal organs, a severed right leg, catastrophic blood loss, a mild concussion, and blindness in her right eye.
These injuries would be absolutely fatal even for a Space Marine with two hearts and three lungs, let alone a re mortal.
Even if this mortal was a Canoness of the Order of Our Martyred Lady, there should be no exception to this grim reality.
"God-Emperor, my duty remains unfulfilled."
Her lips twitched as she gripped her shattered relic storm shield and chainsword, slowly surveying her surroundings.
Surrounding her were no fewer than twenty-two Chaos Space Marines from the Angels of Ecstasy, a warband devoted to Slaanesh, trapping her perfectly in the center.
The corpses of Lucia's personal retinue, the Seraphim Sisters, lay haphazardly strewn across the deck, their blood having already bled dry to form a modest lake of gore.
Lucia stood at the center of the blood pool, facing a despair-inducing disparity in strength.
A towering Chaos Space Marine Captain clad in Terminator armor stepped forth from the encirclent, arriving before her and drawing the power sword from his waist.
"Let us duel."
From beneath his helt erged a voice reminiscent of a hissing serpentine creature.
"Defeat , and you may live; fail, and you shall offer your loyalty to the Prince of Pleasure!"
"That rotting corpse upon the Golden Throne is not worthy of your allegiance, for what has he ever given you besides lies and silence?"
"The Prince of Pleasure in the Empyrean welcos all who throw themselves into His embrace."
"Only when you join us will you understand just how utterly laughable everything you cling to appears in our eyes!"
Had it been earlier, Lucia would have fiercely rebuked this traitor's blasphemous words, utilizing the bolter in her hands to show him the true aning of the God-Emperor's wrath.
However, she now had absolutely no excess strength left to waste.
Lucia simply and calmly arranged her sword and shield into a combat stance, the killing intent in her remaining eye burning fiercely.
The Chaos Captain similarly assud a dueling stance, though his mind was not entirely focused on the battle.
After all, the disparity between them was visible to the naked eye; his opponent was tottering and likely to collapse at any mont.
The relic storm shield in her grasp was so riddled with gashes and missing chunks that a few more strikes would surely shatter it, and the chainsword in her other hand had ceased to rev, making it perhaps less lethal than a simple monomolecular blade.
anwhile, having commanded the battle from the rear, he remained in peak physical condition, fully ard with Terminator armor, a power sword, and an Iron Halo.
Drawing upon his over two centuries of combat experience, he reckoned that even if he just stood there and let this lapdog of the Corpse-Emperor strike him, the sheer recoil might kill her; there was not the slightest possibility of defeat!
Right now, the Chaos Captain needed to consider how to handle the aftermath.
The losses incurred during this boarding action had been catastrophically high.
The force under his command consisted of three hundred Chaos Space Marines, including elite units like Warp Talons, Chaos Sorcerers, Chaos Captains, and Helbrutes.
This was a force possessing overwhelming power more than enough to effortlessly conquer an entire planet.
Even if the enemy consisted of the Sisters of Battle, an elite military force within the Imperium of Man second only to the Adeptus Astartes, this should have been an incredibly easy, effortless mission.
Yet he never could have imagined that this Order Militant would be so utterly ferocious.
Under the command of this Canoness, they had engaged the boarding Chaos Space Marines in a brutal at grinder within the cruiser, eventually launching counter-charges and fighting to the absolute last warrior, ultimately inflicting staggering casualties upon the warband.
As the dust settled on this battle, he realized that the number of fully intact Space Marines remaining was dangerously low.
Having suffered such an absurd casualty ratio, regardless of the reasons, the rules of the warband dictated that upon his return to the fleet, he would face a fate far more agonizing than re death.
"Fortunately, there is still one final solution."
The Chaos Space Marine Captain cast his gaze upon the Canoness standing before him.
As is widely known, much like the vile creatures in certain fictional works, the forces of Chaos had always taken profound delight in corrupting Sisters of unwavering faith, an act that imnsely pleased the Ruinous Powers behind them.
"Capture her, imprison her, corrupt her... If I sacrifice her soul to the Prince of Pleasure, He will undoubtedly bestow a mighty blessing upon !"
Such thoughts blossod within the Captain's mind.
Once his power had swelled significantly, he would return to the fleet, challenge the warband's Chaos Lord, achieve victory, and usurp everything the warlord possessed.
When that ti ca, he might very well ascend to the rank of Chaos Lord himself!
Just as he was reveling in his beautiful delusions of the future, Lucia moved.
With her right leg severed, she relied entirely upon a violent thrust of her left foot, launching her body forward like a cannonball toward the Chaos Captain as the chainsword in her grasp cleaved heavily toward his skull!
"Hmph, utterly riddled with openings!"
A flash of disdain flickered in the Chaos Captain's eyes as he swung his power sword, executing a lightning-fast upward slash.
Seeing the oncoming strike, Lucia felt absolutely no fear, instead silently praying within her heart:
"God-Emperor, witness !"
She violently twisted her footing, making absolutely no attempt to parry, simply tilting her body slightly to the side.
The power sword, wreathed in a pale blue disruption field, sliced through her right arm as easily as cutting through air, sending a geyser of blood erupting outward.
"What in the warp is happening, what is she trying to do?"
The Chaos Captain froze in montary confusion.
Carried by sheer montum, the chainsword gripped in Lucia's severed arm flew outward, sweeping directly toward his face.
"What use is this?"
Exactly as the Chaos Captain thought, the incoming chainsword crashed heavily against the deflection shield generated by his Iron Halo.
A blinding flash of pale white energy erupted, and although it lasted for only a fraction of a second, it successfully blinded his field of vision.
"Damn it, I was careless!"
His heart clenched, but it was already too late to react.
In that fleeting spark of ti, Lucia cast aside the relic storm shield in her remaining hand, revealing the lethal weapon concealed beneath her forearm.
It was an Exitus pistol, a weapon belonging to a Vindicare Assassin of the Officio Assassinorum!
Canoness Lucia had acquired this pistol from the corpse of a Vindicare Assassin during a mission to suppress a rebellion.
Afterwards, she had commissioned a Tech-Priest of the Adeptus chanicus to modify it into a miniaturized launcher concealed beneath her forearm.
It was a trump card she had never once revealed, even in the most brutal death struggles leading up to this mont!
Muzzle flash blossod as an Exitus round erupted from the chamber, carving a brilliant, unmistakable line through the air.
The armor-piercing round shattered the Iron Halo's field and drilled with absolute precision directly through the tactical ocular lens of the Terminator helt, churning the Chaos Captain's brain into bloody pulp.
Instantly, the massive fra of the Chaos Space Marine Captain swayed unsteadily before collapsing to the deck with a thunderous crash.
The battlefield fell into a realm of dead silence.
Even the Astartes, possessing transhuman cognitive processing speeds, were so profoundly shocked by this inconceivable reversal that their minds montarily blanked.
However, they recovered their senses with brutal swiftness.
"Click-clack, click-clack—"
The unified sound of bolters being racked echoed through the hall as Lucia stood perfectly still, silently praying in her heart:
"God-Emperor, my duty is fulfilled."
"Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!"
The deafening roar of gunfire erupted as an apocalyptic storm of mass-reactive bolts tore toward Lucia, on the verge of utterly consuming her fragile form.
Lucia, who had closed her eyes to await her soul's return to the Golden Throne, opened them in a state of sheer bewildernt.
"What is happening?"
"Why do I feel absolutely no pain?"
Weakly opening her eyes, she was astonished to discover that the bolts were violently deflected the very instant they made contact with her flesh, as if an invisible force field was protecting her entire body.
She noticed a sudden shift in the traitors' posture, as every single Chaos Space Marine seed to turn their gaze toward the entryway on the far side of the grand hall.
Lucia slowly turned her head to follow their gaze, her remaining eye reflecting the silhouette of a young man stepping into the blood-soaked hall.
The youth appeared completely unard and incredibly young, lacking even the slightest hint of extraordinary power.
Yet within Lucia's death-fringed perception, an inexplicable hallucination began to take root.
The young man's body seed to be wreathed in a blinding, radiant golden light, identical to the divine luminescence exuded by the holy statue of the Emperor she had laid eyes upon when she first joined the Ecclesiarchy at the age of twelve.
"Is he... an envoy of the God-Emperor?"
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