Confirms the ladder
The higher-ranked entity killed the lower-ranked one. Record and ladder agree.
This one agrees too, and it is the only page here where losing earns the victim his position rather than costing it. Fifth place is argued from delay: from making an unwinnable engagement expensive in the one currency that mattered, and buying enough of it to change how the war resolves. Three places of separation measures what that purchase was worth. It does not measure the distance between the two combatants, which the record settles in a single direction and which nobody involved was ever confused about.
Horus Ascendant killed Sanguinius in The End and the Death (2023).shown
who went aboard knowing how it would end
Turned on Davin and given power by the four Ruinous Powers together.
Kills Sanguinius aboard the Vengeful Spirit and mortally wounds the Emperor.
Destroyed utterly by the Emperor, soul included, so that nothing can return.
All four powers backed him at once, and briefly he was the strongest thing in the galaxy on that basis. He was not the first — Be'lakor, far below him here, holds that — but he is the one they chose after giving up on a champion they could not steer, and the difference between the two entries is what the gods learned in between. He killed Sanguinius, broke through the Emperor's guard aboard the Vengeful Spirit, and left the Emperor in the state the Imperium has been managing ever since. Second because it did not hold: the same duel ended with his soul annihilated rather than merely his body.
Fights the Greater Daemon Ka'Bandha in single combat on Signus Prime and drives his sword into the daemon's chest. — 2012
Faces Horus aboard the Vengeful Spirit during the Siege of Terra and is killed there. — 2023
The delay he bought is credited with letting the Emperor reach Horus.
He is the reason the Emperor got there at all. Horus at second on this page is Horus at the height the pantheon built him to, and Sanguinius is the only being who stood in front of that and made it cost time — long enough for his father to reach the throne room, which is why the Heresy ends the way it does instead of the other way. He lost, and the losing is the feat. Before Terra he had already fought a Greater Daemon of Khorne in single combat on Signus Prime and put a sword through its chest, which is the closest anyone here comes to a controlled experiment: the same primarch, against a lesser opponent, wins.
One death in one work. It is the only place the record puts these two in the same room, and it is evidence about that meeting and nothing wider — not a general matchup, not a rematch, and not a ranking of its own. The ladder above it is argued from everything either of them has been shown doing; this page is argued from one citation. Where the two disagree, the disagreement is the point, and it stays visible rather than being resolved by whichever of them happens to be on this page.
Both entries carry their full receipts on the Warhammer 40,000 ranking — 6 citations between them.