I've been watching the Hammer and Bolter animated series on Warhammer+, and I'm reviewing each episode as I watch it. There may be very minor spoilers, but ideally no more than you'd get from the episode description.
Lucius the Eternal of the Emperor's Children and a champion of the chaos god Slaanesh. Prior to the Horus Heresy, he was an extremist who disfigured himself to celebrate his victories in battle. Eventually, Fulgrim transcended his own mortality into a daemon, and Lucius himself was transformed into a masochistic and eternal force of chaos.
Lucius is eternal thanks to a special curse embued by Slaanesh. Should anyone kill Lucius and then take any amount of pride in the act, then that person mutates, mind and body, into Lucius. Only their face remains imprinted somewhere on Lucius's new armour.
In Eternal, a Chaplain and a Judicar of the Exorcists (Space Marines working under the Ordo Malleus) are hunting down Lucius. They've captured one of the Emperor's Children and have interrogated him for who-knows-how-long. They're always questioning him about Lucius, and finally one day he cracks and tells them where to find him. But he warns them that nothing can kill Lucius, except maybe Exterminatus carried out by a mindless servitor.
As you can imagine, the Exorcists don't exactly heed the warning. After all, they're Exorcists. One of them has even taken a vow of silence. These guys are blessed by the God Emperor himself. They eat chaos for breakfast.
Act 2 is pretty simple. The Exorcists go to where the big bad lives, and they fight. If you're in the mood for seeing space marines in melee, this is a good sequence. Obviously a lot of space marine battles are just a bunch of big dudes firing bolters at each other, so seeing a proper duel is good fun. The animation isn't amazingly fluid, but you get the idea and your brain fills the details in.
Things happen, and Lucius has a really really clever use for the imprinted face on his pauldron, and in the end Lucius basically wins. That's not a spoiler, because ultimately Lucius always wins. It's in his name. He's eternal.
But seeing how he wins is fun. It's almost so fun, you could imagine a entire series about that. I wouldn't want to have to write it, but I sure would watch it.
Seeing an unkillable baddie always makes me think of what I would do. I figure the captive was mostly right. A mindless servitor pulling the trigger would probably work. But with all the genetic engineering that's possible in 40k, I wonder if somebody could just design a really skilled warrior with no pride. I know the Emperor is the most skilled at it, but surely somebody could give it a shot? It's worth a try, anyway.
This episode is good Warhammer 40,000. I don't think we've seen Exorcists in an animated series yet, so witnessing them at work is a real treat, even if they don't exactly get the job done.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.