The Primarch of Liberty-Chapter 172: The Fall of the Overlord

Now, leading his men further into the thickening miasma and fog, Mortarion's resolve hardened. The fortress's defenders launched desperate counterattacks, but his warriors, bolstered by the advanced equipment and Mortarion's unyielding determination, put down the remaining resistance with brutal efficiency. The lasguns and disciplined formations of his troops tore through the last of the undead legions until they arrived before an ominous arch shrouded in swirling, almost tangible miasma.

The toxins grew thicker with each step upward, forcing even his hardy warriors to rely more heavily on their breathing apparatus. The miasma here had a different quality - more malevolent, more purposeful - as if it were not merely a natural defense but a conscious barrier crafted by malign intelligence.

Typhon, gestured to one of the soldiers. "Test the threshold," he ordered, his voice muffled by his rebreather. The chosen warrior, demonstrating the courage that had become synonymous with the Death Guard, approached the arch with measured steps.

The moment he crossed the threshold, horror unfolded with terrible swiftness. The specialized breathing apparatus, which had proven reliable throughout their long campaign, began to corrode visibly. The metal darkened and bubbled as if subjected to concentrated acid. Then came the screams - the warrior's exposed skin blistering and burning despite his protective gear.

He staggered backward, falling clear of the arch's influence. His fellow soldiers rushed to his aid, medical personnel already moving forward with treatments developed over long years of fighting in Barbarus's toxic environment. His agonized cries echoed off the black iron walls, his sounds evidence to the potency of Necare's final defense.

Mortarion watched impassively, his mind calculating. The soldier's suffering confirmed his suspicions: the miasma beyond the arch was unlike anything they had faced before. Its poison was so potent, so concentrated, that no ordinary man-or even the equipment they relied on -could withstand it. His fingers tightened on the hilt of his blade as he turned to Typhon.

"Clean up the remaining resistance," Mortarion ordered, his tone brooking no argument. "Hold this position and ensure no one disturbs the perimeter."

Typhon hesitated, his concern evident. "My lord, that miasma-it's unnatural. Are you -certain-"

"I am certain," Mortarion cut him off, his voice cold and resolute. "Only the Barbaran Plate can endure what lies beyond. This task is mine alone." He didn't mention the psyk-out bolter or the warnings about Necare's witch-powers. Some weapons were best kept secret until the moment of their use.

His men watched with a mixture of awe and trepidation as their leader approached the arch. The Barbaran Plate gleamed dully in the dim light, its surfaces already beginning to shed the lesser toxins that tried to cling to it. Mortarion paused at the threshold, feeling the weight of destiny pressing down like a physical force.

"Hold this position," he commanded. "Whatever you hear, whatever you see, maintain the blockade. Necare dies today."

Without waiting for acknowledgment, Mortarion stepped through the arch. The miasma enveloped him immediately, thick enough to obscure him from his men's view within two paces. The toxins here were unlike anything he'd encountered before - a witch's brew of poison and sorcery designed to kill anything that dared approach the highest spire of Barbarus.

But the Barbaran Plate held true, protecting its wearer just as its mysterious creators had promised. Each step carried Mortarion deeper into the poisoned heart of his adopted father's domain, while behind him, the sounds of his army grew faint and distorted.

The last thing his men saw was their lord's silhouette, growing indistinct in the supernatural fog, the outline of his armor a promise that even the worst of Barbarus's poisons could not stop the Death Lord's advance. Then he vanished completely, leaving them to wonder what final confrontation awaited in the toxic heights above.

In the distance, thunder rolled across Barbarus's eternal clouds, as if the very planet held its breath for the coming confrontation between the witch-king of the highest peak and the son he had failed to break.

As Mortarion pushed forward, the oppressive miasma thickened with every step, its noxious tendrils growing more potent and suffocating. The air seemed alive with movement, shadowy forms darting just beyond his sight. His senses, honed through countless battles, caught the faint shift of air and the whisper of movement. With a swift, decisive swing of his scythe, Mortarion bisected three hulking golems that attempted to ambush him. Their forms crumbled into foul, corrupted pieces.

The sounds of combat - the wet splitting of unnatural flesh, the scrape of metal against metal, echoed through the miasma, calling to the other guardians that haunted these heights. They came in a wave of rot and malice, shambling corpses and construct monstrosities whose very existence was an affront to natural law.

Mortarion faced them without fear, without hesitation. His scythe moved like an extension of his will, harvesting the unclean in great sweeping arcs. Limbs flew. Heads rolled. Torsos split. With each swing, with each kill, the pile of broken abominations grew higher around him, forming a grotesque pedestal that elevated him above the swirling miasma.

"Is this all you send against me, witch?" Mortarion called out, his enhanced voice carrying through the toxic fog like a blade. "Your puppets fall like wheat before the scythe!"

No answer came, but the attacks intensified. A construct of stitched-together plague victims lurched from the fog, its multiple mouths wailing in discordant agony. Mortarion silenced them with a precision strike that split its misshapen skull. A floating cloud of crystallized poison darts rushed toward him, only to be dispersed by a backhanded sweep of his gauntlet. Three more golems, these built from the bodies of fallen warriors who had once fought alongside Mortarion, attacked in perfect coordination - suggesting a guiding intelligence behind their movements.

He dispatched them with mercilessly though something like regret flickered behind his stern visage when he recognized what remained of their faces. These had been good men once, brave fighters who had followed him against the overlords. Now they were puppets of the very enemy they had sworn to destroy. Mortarion granted them the only mercy left to give - a clean death and an end to their defilement.

Finally, Mortarion emerged into a clearing within the mist, stepping before the Palace of Necare. The fortress loomed ominously, its grotesque architecture pulsing with an unnatural energy. At the heart of the desolate courtyard stood Necare himself, the Overlord of Barbarus, surrounded by hulking golems crafted from flesh and festering diseases. His presence radiated malice, and his voice cut through the fog like a blade.

My son," Necare's voice carried the honeyed tones of false concern, "you have returned to me at last."

Mortarion's response was immediate and venomous: "Spare me your false attempts at fatherhood, WITCH!"

Necare chuckled, the sound dripping with malice. "As you wish, my ungrateful child."

At his words, the hulking golems surged forward with terrifying speed. Mortarion dodged the first, its massive fists slamming into the ground where he had stood a moment before. But the second golem barreled into him, tackling him to the ground with bone-crushing force. Mortarion grunted, his Barbarian Plate absorbing much of the impact, and kicked the creature off him. Rolling to his feet, he narrowly avoided a pulverizing strike from another golem. With transhuman strength, he kicked the construct off him, the force of the blow sending it staggering backward. He rolled away just as the first golem brought its massive fists down, impacting the ground where Mortarion's head had been a fraction of a second earlier and creating a crater in the stone.

The second golem seized Mortarion's leg in a grip that would have pulverized ordinary bone. Without hesitation, Mortarion swung his scythe in a precise arc that severed the construct's hand at the wrist, freeing himself before it could drag him into range of its other weapons. In the same fluid motion, he continued his swing, bisecting the torso of another golem that had lunged for him, revealing the rotting organs and mechanical augmentations that powered its

unnatural existence.

Victory was short-lived, however, Pain lanced through Mortarion's chest - sharp, sudden, and intense even to his desensitized nervous system. A decayed spear, conjured from the miasma itself and propelled by Necare's foul sorcery, had pierced his armor just below his left collarbone. Blood, dark and thick, welled up around the wound and began to drip down the ornate curves of his Barbarian Plate.

Mortarion coughed, tasting copper and something else - something bitter and burning that spoke of the weapon's toxic enchantment. His enhanced physiology was already working to neutralize the poison, but it was a deadly brew even by the standards of Barbarus. Through a red haze of pain, he saw Necare making mystical gestures in the air, fingers weaving complex patterns that bent reality to his will.

The miasma around Mortarion began to solidify, forming into cruel spikes and barbed tendrils that reached for him with predatory intent. Recognizing the danger, Mortarion charged forward with explosive speed, leaving his previous position just as it transformed into a cage of razor-sharp miasmatic thorns that would have impaled him from every angle. His rush toward Necare was like the wrath of nature itself - implacable, unstoppable, a force of pure destruction aimed at the heart of corruption. But Necare was not without defenses. As Mortarion closed the distance, the very ground beneath his feet transformed, becoming a poisonous swamp that clung to his boots and slowed his advance. Each step became a battle of wills - Mortarion's transhuman strength against the witch-king's reality-warping powers. The poisonous mire had reached his knees now, and each movement required tremendous effort. Necare, seeing his advantage, began the gestures for his final spell - something terrible that would end even a Primarch's existence.

Necare's laughter echoed through the miasma as he began to weave his final spell. "That is all you are, my son," Necare taunted, his voice a cruel melody of disdain.

For all your strength, for all your defiance, you remain what I made you - a creature of

Barbarus, bound to its laws and its limitations."

Gritting his teeth, Mortarion drew his bolter and fired three shots in quick succession. The rounds, loaded with psyk-out ammunition, tore through the air.

Necare reacted instantly, tendrils of miasma rising to intercept the incoming fire. The first bolt was caught and contained, its detonation harmlessly absorbed by the poisonous fog. The second bolt dispersed its intercepting tendrils in a flash of anti-warp energy, clearing a path for the third. Necare managed to alter its trajectory with a desperate gesture, but not enough - the bolt struck him in the shoulder instead of the center mass Mortarion had aimed for.

The impact was catastrophic. The bolt blew Necare's shoulder apart in an explosion of tainted flesh and corrupted bone. The witch-king's shriek was inhuman in its pitch and intensity, a sound that couldn't have emerged from a purely human throat.

His concentration broken by pain and shock, Necare's control over the miasma faltered momentarily. The tendrils surrounding Mortarion began to thrash wildly, some of them wrapping around his armor in their death throes. The pressure was immense, Tyranimite plates creaking under the strain, joints groaning as they were tested to their structural limits.

Mortarion fired his bolter three more times, but Necare had already recovered enough to summon a forest of miasmatic tendrils to intercept the shots. The bolts detonated against this barrier, dispersing sections of it but failing to reach their target. When the toxic fog cleared, Necare was no longer in his previous position.

Realizing the immediate danger had shifted, Mortarion holstered his bolter and returned his attention to the immediate threat - the constricting tendrils that threatened to crush his armor and the poisonous swamp still holding him partially immobilized. His scythe flashed, cutting through the thickest of the tendrils with ease while he strained toward more solid

ground. With a final heave of transhuman strength, Mortarion pulled himself onto more solid ground, the remains of the miasmatic tendrils falling away from his armor like severed limbs. He watched as his Barbarian Plate began to repair itself, the Tyranimite material slowly knitting back together over the worst breaches. He reached up and pulled the spectral spear from his

chest with a grunt of pain, dark blood flowing freely before his enhanced healing began to close the wound.

The moment of recovery was short-lived. Pain exploded through Mortarion's back and out through his torso - a pain so intense, so all-encompassing, that even his iron discipline couldn't contain it. For perhaps the first time since his transhuman transformation, Mortarion shouted in agony.

Behind him stood Necare, his form horribly mangled from the bolter wound. His right arm

was entirely gone, along with a significant portion of his torso on that side. What remained of his body seemed to be held together by the same foul sorcery that animated his constructs, wisps of miasma stitching the ragged edges of his wounds together in a grotesque parody of

healing.

In his remaining hand, he held a blade of pure solidified miasma - a weapon that existed in both physical and metaphysical realms simultaneously. This blade now protruded from Mortarion's back, having pierced straight through his armor and transhuman flesh to emerge from his chest in a spray of blood and corrupted tissue.

"Did you think," Necare rasped, his voice barely human now, "that I would be so easily

defeated? I who raised you? I who taught you everything you know of war and survival?" Mortarion, despite being impaled by a blade forged from miasma, displayed a pain tolerance so immense that he managed to ignore the searing agony. With his scythe raised, he attempted a desperate swing at Necare. The Overlord, anticipating the attack, distanced himself further, summoning more tendrils to impale Mortarion, pinning him in place like a

trophy for display.

More Tendrils manifested from the swirling miasma, each one finding its mark with unerring accuracy. They pierced Mortarion's limbs, his torso, his neck-not seeking to kill immediately, but to maximize suffering. Necare was an artist of pain, and Mortarion had become his masterpiece.

"I could have given you everything," Necare's voice was almost wistful as he watched his

adopted son struggle against the inevitable. "You could have ruled at my side, a prince of poisons, master of this world and a dozen more."

Mortarion's response was a strangled laugh, blood bubbling between his teeth. "I would rather die as a man than live as your puppet."

The Primarch fell to one knee, his transhuman physiology finally beginning to surrender to the concentrated toxins flowing through his veins. His vision darkened at the edges, the world narrowing to a tunnel that contained only Necare's mocking smile and the whirling clouds of

death.

And then, he heard it.

The voice was unlike any Mortarion had heard before, not even in the blighted heights where

reality grew thin and things from beyond sometimes whispered to those desperate enough to listen. It bypassed his ears entirely, speaking directly to the core of his being.

"Embrace my blessing, my grandson", it crooned with paternal affection that poorly masked

the rot beneath. "I will grant you power beyond measure, strength enough to crush your adoptive father. Embrace it, my child. Embrace my blessings."

Time seemed to slow as Mortarion recognized what approached him. The beings that the overlords sometimes communed with-the powers that granted them their unnatural abilities and corrupted forms. One of them now offered Mortarion the same poisoned chalice.

With the last of his strength, he gathered the blood and bile filling his mouth and spat defiantly. "Never," he rasped. "Whoever you are, I'd rather die."

A chuckle filled his mind, amused rather than angered by his defiance. "As you wish, little

one."

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But the whispers continued, insidious and relentless, like a thousand serpents coiling around

his mind.

Your defiance was always admirable," Necare mused, circling his fallen son. "But ultimately futile. Like all who oppose the natural order of Barbarus."

Mortarion's vision swam, his enhanced senses beginning to fail him. But in the periphery of

his fading sight, something impossible manifested—a tinge of gold that had no place in the eternally gray world of Barbarus's peaks.

He turned his head, muscles screaming in protest at even this small movement. There, standing as if the deadly miasma was nothing more than a pleasant summer breeze, was the

regal stranger from the bonfire. His form seemed both solid and ethereal, power contained in human shape by nothing more than will.

Upon his armored shoulder perched an eagle, its feathers gleaming with metallic perfection,

its eyes containing wisdom that spoke of millennia. The bird's gaze fixed on Mortarion with an intensity that transcended species.

Mortarion blinked, and the figure vanished as if it had never been there. Yet, in its place, a faint golden thread shimmered in the air, leading from Mortarion's bolter to Necare. The Overlord, seemingly unaware, moved as though caught in a strange distortion of time, his

movements slow and deliberate.

Understanding crystallized in Mortarion's mind with perfect clarity. With strength he should not have possessed, he reached for the weapon. His fingers closed around the grip, the weight

familiar and somehow reassuring.

Time seemed to slow further as he raised the bolter. Necare moved as if through liquid, his

expression of triumph gradually shifting to confusion as he registered Mortarion's movement.

He aimed along the golden thread, knowing with inexplicable certainty that this shot would not miss. His finger tensed on the trigger.

The bolt pistol's report echoed across the mountaintop, momentarily drowning out even the

perpetual howl of toxic winds. The round crossed the distance between them in a heartbeat, following the golden path as if guided by fate itself.

It struck Necare precisely where cranium met spine, a perfect killshot that no mortal marksman could have made in such conditions. The overlord's head did not merely suffer damage-it exploded in a shower of tainted matter and released warp energies.

The witch-king's body remained standing for several heartbeats, as if unable to comprehend

its sudden decapitation. Then it collapsed, folding in on itself with the finality of a puppet whose strings had been cut.

The witch-king's body remained standing for several heartbeats, as if unable to comprehend

its sudden decapitation. Then it collapsed, folding in on itself with the finality of a puppet whose strings had been cut.

With their master's death, the miasma weapons lost coherence. The tentdrils impaling Mortarion dissolved, leaving ragged wounds that immediately began to knit themselves closed through his transhuman healing. The concentrated toxins in the air dissipated, returning to their natural, merely lethal state rather than the weaponized malice they had been moments before.

Mortarion collapsed to his knees, the bolter falling from nerveless fingers. Each breath came easier than the last as his enhanced physiology purged the poisons. Around him, the eternal clouds of Barbarus continued their slow churning, indifferent to the momentous change that had just occurred.

The tyrant was dead. The mountain peaks, for the first time in living memory, belonged to humanity rather than the witch-kings who had preyed upon them.

The miasma settled into its natural patterns, no longer directed by malevolent will. Mortarion remained kneeling, his transhuman physiology working furiously to expel the toxins that had nearly claimed him. Each breath came easier than the last, though pain still lanced through his chest where the concentrated poison had pierced him most deeply. The battle was won. Necare, the tyrant who had claimed to be his father, lay dead. The witch-

king's reign over Barbarus's highest peak had ended with the crack of a bolt pistol and the golden thread that had guided Mortarion's final shot.

Yet victory brought no elation, only a bone-deep weariness and questions that swirled like the toxic clouds surrounding him. Questions about the golden figure he had glimpsed in his moment of greatest need, about the voice that had offered corrupt salvation, about the strangers who had appeared at the bonfire with their archeotech and cryptic words.

A shadow fell across him, and Mortarion's hand instinctively moved toward his weapon. But

the movement froze as he recognized the silhouettes against the sickly light filtering through Barbarus's eternal shroud.

The two strangers from the bonfire stood before him, seemingly untouched by the poisonous atmosphere that would kill ordinary men in moments. The one with the perpetual hint of amusement-Franklin, though Mortarion still did not know this name-extended a hand. "Congratulations on overcoming the final hurdle," Franklin said, his voice cutting clearly

through the toxic winds. There was genuine respect in his tone, one warrior acknowledging

another's

triumph. Mortarion hesitated only briefly before accepting the offered hand. Despite his transhuman strength and stature, he felt Franklin pull him to his feet with surprising ease, as if the stranger possessed power comparable to his own.

"Here," Franklin continued, producing a small glass container that seemed to glow with an

inner light. "The soul of the tyrant."

Mortarion's eyes widened fractionally as he studied the jar. Within, a wisp of energy writhed and pulsed, recognizable even to his untrained perception as the essence that had once animated Necare. The witch-king's power, his consciousness, his very being-somehow

captured and contained.

"How...?" Mortarion began, then firmed his resolve and asked the question that had burned in

his mind since their first meeting. "Who are you?"

The two strangers exchanged a glance loaded with meaning. The regal one-whose brief appearance had coincided with Mortarion's impossible shot-stepped forward, his presence seeming to expand until it filled the poisoned peak with subtle authority.

"I am your father," he said simply.