"This moment, I have waited far, far too long.
Hypocrite… your opponent can only be me, not any other existence."
Fulgrim's forked tongue flicked across his purple-red lips, a trace of excitement in his eyes.
"Only I, the perfect Phoenix, am worthy to take your life and your soul.
That will be the most eye-catching performance in the entire galaxy."
The Fallen Phoenix spoke, eyes showing open disdain.
"You are so cowardly, hiding your true self behind cloned bodies, like a rat skulking in the gutter."
The Savior almost never showed his true body. The one descending upon Kalisde was only a cloned shell.
"I fear that hypocrite's face is nothing but a carefully adjusted mask. His real appearance is likely too hideous to show in public."
Thinking of this, Fulgrim gently stroked his own pale, powder-caked cheeks.
To the Fallen Phoenix, anyone less beautiful than himself was a hideous creature, unworthy of being compared to him.
All this time, his beauty had stood at the very peak of the galaxy.
Until the Savior appeared and ruined everything.
Fulgrim was convinced that the Savior's handsome, seductive face was artificially sculpted, not his original appearance.
He did not believe anyone in the galaxy could be more beautiful than the perfect Phoenix.
That clone-born fraud should be despised.
Yet no matter how he mocked it, the Savior's habit of hiding behind clones was a severe problem for Chaos.
Fulgrim even suspected that man had never once appeared in his true body.
The Savior's real flesh might still be hidden deep beneath Urth.
Which meant the man was extremely difficult to kill… and even harder to strip of his soul.
"Unfortunately for you, you cannot resist the Prince of Pleasure's carefully brewed venom."
The warped "cape" of tendrils on Fulgrim's back stretched into the void, contracting and loosening as if drinking in some sort of dark substance.
Gradually, his body began to tremble, a flush rising on his face.
"Hiss…"
The Fallen Phoenix let out a serpentine hiss and suddenly spat a cloud of venom onto the sword's tip, mingling it with the deadly toxins already smeared there.
Several different poisons fused together, forming a vicious, iridescent sheen.
It was a gift from the Prince of Pleasure, a horrifying warp-venom several times deadlier than the toxin that had felled Guilliman before.
Slaanesh, the Prince of Pleasure, had grown ever more wary of the Savior who had begun to steal the power of pleasure.
So the Prince had decided to use this war to remove him.
Once and for all.
And to claim his soul, subjecting it to endless, ecstatic torment.
This, in turn, meant the Savior's threat had made even the Chaos Gods themselves uneasy.
They no longer wished to corrupt and recruit that entity.
They wanted his existence erased from the galaxy forever.
"Finally… it's done."
Fulgrim raised the slim sword coiled with silver serpents, not daring to show the slightest carelessness.
This venom was so terrifying that even he, a Daemon Primarch, would be easily brought low by it, let alone a Primarch who had not received such divine gifts.
The hypocrite Savior might shield himself with cloned bodies.
But the Prince of Pleasure's venom was no ordinary poison.
It was a manifestation of a certain warp concept.
Once it pierced the Savior, it could use the clone body as a conduit to strike his true flesh.
Plunging him into eternal sleep.
At that moment, the palace shook even more violently, a reaction from the warp.
The approach of several Fallen Primarchs and Daemon Princes stirred the local tides of the empyrean into greater activity.
A figure wreathed in tentacles entered with an almost aristocratic grace.
He was a captain of the Emperor's Children. His gaze could not help but linger on the twisted, blackened mass of flesh clinging to the wall.
Those were the charred remains of Lucius the Eternal.
The man had been struck down by the Savior's curse, roasted nearly to cinders.
Thankfully, the Emperor's Children had managed to retrieve some of his tissue and put it back into the regeneration cycle, instead of letting the Savior take him away and create even greater danger.
"Our Phoenix.