Confirms the ladder
The higher-ranked entity killed the lower-ranked one. Record and ladder agree.
It agrees, without the qualification nearly every other page here needs. First place is argued from this encounter and would not survive its removal: the death is not evidence supporting the rank, it is the rank. Second place is argued from the same few minutes read the other way — the ascendancy was total, and it lasted exactly as long as the duel did, ending with the loser erased past any recovery rather than merely defeated. One place of separation, one source, two entries that depend on each other to make sense.
The Emperor of Mankind killed Horus Ascendant in The End and the Death: Volume III (2024).shown
and unmade his soul entirely, so that nothing could bring him back
The Golden Throne sustains the Astronomican and the webway project at enormous cost to him.
Established as the creator of the Primarchs and the architect of the Great Crusade.
He made twenty demigods to specification, held a psychic beacon open across a galaxy so ships could navigate at all, and beat Horus at the moment Horus had everything four gods could give him. The Throne is the asterisk and not the rank: for ten thousand years he has been a dying body maintained by machinery, and the Imperium's entire theology is an argument about what the man on it used to be able to do.
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.
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 — 5 citations between them.