A siege battery had torn a hole into the citadel's sanctum walls, and Imperial forces had spent the last hour and a half attempting to force their way through the breach. An entire regiment of Noregr Dane heavy infantry had made the first attempt to storm the opening, but they had been slaughtered nearly to the man by several scuttling multi-armed techno-monstrosities that spat fire and esoteric beams of energy at any that were too slow to dive for cover. Even the cover hadn’t protected the Danes, Dume’s novel mixtures of industrial solvents and acids eating their way through stone and flesh alike in torrents of sizzling liquid from mechanical arms.

The scuttling walkers had been felled at great cost with the addition of tank fire from a squadron of Abyssinian Armored Pioneers, and the last of the remaining Dane’s had fallen back to trade places with a fresh unit of Merican troops. The 11th Neork Zouaves had surged into the gap, their ostentatious red hats and golden tassels heralding their advance as stubber and las fire licked out at them with deadly effect.

The Zouaves had been through the breach for nearly twenty minutes now, desperately holding onto the small beachhead they had gained on the far side of the sanctum wall with every ounce of courage and grit they possessed.

“Damnit Breon! Get me those frakking reinforcements! Where the frak are the 12th and 13th?!” screamed Lieutenant Smeth as he instinctively flinched away from a lascannon bolt snapping across the top of the rockrete boulder he and his vox officer were clinging to for cover.

“They’re not coming, sir! They’re pinned down six blocks southwest! Something about flesh horrors, sir!”

“Frak!” Smeth exclaimed as he leaned around the edge of the boulder and sent a flurry of hand signals to the next nearest officer to his position to relay the bad news.

An explosion rocked the ground to his right, and he filtered out the screams of his wounded and dying men as he racked his mind for a way out of this kill zone.

“What about the Abyssinian tanks out there? Can they push through?”

Breon shook his head in defeat, “Two are burning now, the other two are engaged with some sort of hoverbourne tanks that are skimming in and out of the alleys, sir. They’re keeping our exit open as best they can, but they can’t press in or we’ll be surrounded!”

“FRA!K” Smeth screamed at the top of his lungs, “Put it out, we’re going to be attrited and pushed back, we can not hold!”

His vox officer pressed his headphones to his ears and began speaking hurriedly into the mic. Smeth risked a couple of las shots around the corner, earning a spattering of rockrete dust as reward from Pacifican return fire.

“Emperor save us,” he sputtered, wiping grit from his eyes.

It would not be the Emperor who saved them, but as a deafening, monstrous roar of engines came through the breach, one could be forgiven for believing that the thunder of the Lord of Lightning had come.

Two groups moving so quickly as to be a blur would zoom past Smeth’s cover at high speed like water passing a rock in the tide, for a brief moment consuming the sounds of combat and the screams of the dying with the challenge of powerful engines pushed to the extreme and near maniacal laughter. Only once the blurring shapes had passed did the near ear bursting tide of bullets start to fly.

Somewhat more braced, the pinned Zouaves would be able to see the second wave more clearly than the first. One of the Emperor’s enhanced human legions had come, though exactly which one was difficult to tell at the moment due to the sheer speed they were moving at.

Two squads of three truly monstrous sized combat bikes followed those that raced past before, the massive armored figure sitting in the seat driving at speeds that a normal human would struggle to properly control or have the reflexes to do safely. Those fast or lucky enough to see would spot what appeared to be large guns on the front of the bike, silent only due to a lack of enemy targets.

The sidecar of the bikes would have looked almost comical, were it not for the equally imposing armorer figure that seemed to be armed with some kind of heavy flamer?

Those able to follow the fast pace of the Legionaries would note that their battle tactic was rather simple, but highly effective all the same; While they would absolutely gun down an enemy that was caught in the open or didn’t get down into cover in time, the heavy guns were firing a surprisingly accurate cloud of heavy suppressive fire onto key enemy defensive points to force them into cover.

At which point the bikes would swing into close range and unleash a combination of grenades and a… it wasn’t fire coming out of the heavy flamers, but some kind of unnaturally blue chemical gas cloud that launched like water from a firehose before spreading out. Whatever it was, screams would quickly start to come from wherever the gas was introduced… followed by explosions that thankfully silenced the screams more often than not.

The bikes did not rampage unchallenged. Between the inhuman grace in which some of the riders could pilot their bike to dodge incoming fire and the armor present in the event a shot landed, the bikers seemed invincible.

The lascannons would change the nature of the story, however. Where small arms and lesser heavy weapons failed, the lascannon packed a much heavier punch with crews who were experienced with waiting until they knew the shot would hit before firing under pressure.

Four lascannons fired. Three of them found their targets as the massive bikes exploded or flew out of control into a wreck, while the biker of the fourth shot managed to control their bike after taking the hit enough to bring it to a stop and ditch it for more traditional foot combat with his companion.

The bikers would strive to make sure that they wouldn’t fire again.

Even as the bikers rained down death and chaos onto the enemy, legionary transports started to roll up to the breach, their ramps opening as they allowed the troops within to pour out and into the contested beachhead to help secure and grow it.

The 8th legion had come.

Smeth watched in awe as the Emperor’s Astartes laid waste to the Pacificans that had been whittling his regiment down to dust. In the span of only a handful of minutes the Astartes had accomplished what his Zouaves had failed to for over twenty. He breathed a sigh of relief as the interlocking fields of fire from heavy stubbers slackened and died completely. He allowed himself to breathe for the first time since they’d entered the damn breach as he watched one of his Medicae sprint from cover to another wounded Zouave without so much as a stubber round attempting to end the man's work.

“Vox command, the Astartes have relieved us, and see if we can get a Medicae Battalion to meet our wounded beyond the breach, there’s going to be far too many for us to handle.” he sighed, his voice still shaky from the adrenaline of their desperate stand.

“Sir,” the vox operator responded smartly before keying up his mic and beginning to relay the commands.

Lieutenant Smith keyed his vox, “Alright sound off, who’s not dead?” he asked with a confidence he did not feel in that moment.

A single other junior officer responded, followed by only a couple of non-comm’s and a half-dozen privates who had simply picked up their platoon commanders' vox beads and spoke timidly when they heard it begin to squeak.

He did not envy the privates, newly battlefield-promoted Sergeants all, as he relayed his next commands. While the Astartes finished their work along the edge of the kill box, his Zouaves picked up as one and began to work their way across the field of death toward the closest building to them. Higher command had presumed it to be an administrative center, but the half dozen fortified machine gun positions and trench works around it tipped Smeth off to a greater purpose.

He slipped into cover behind a burning conveyor and cupped his hands around his mouth as he yelled in the direction of the Astartes, “Chosen! We’re making entry here! Administratum center, but I don’t buy it!” he continued as his troopers placed melta charges on the bunker-like doors of the entrance.

Many of the Astartes ignored the random mortal who was shouting his intentions to breach what appeared to be an Administratum center. In fairness, this may not have been out of rudeness; While the original beachhead killbox seemed to have been dismantled, fighting was still ongoing and they had their own objectives to be pushing towards.

One, however, did stop to focus on the Lieutenant. His gaze turned to the Center for a moment, inspecting it… before seeming to come to a similar conclusion to that which the human soldier had made. As he steadily closed the distance towards the man and those he was gathering to perform their breach, a squad of Astartes that seemed to be following the first fell in behind him.

Clad in power armor, with what bits that weren’t covered by a mesh armoured coating and signs of a hazmat suit being worn beneath, a voice speaking through a rebreather greeted the Lieutenant as “Praetor Muckstead, eighth chapter. Third Squad will be first into the breach; your men can follow as we sweep the building. Understood?”

Smeth recoiled at the sight of the Astartes warrior. He hadn’t been quite so intimidated when they were saving him from afar at speed, but now that the armored warrior was standing before him, he felt exceedingly small and fragile in comparison.

“Yes Praetor,” he began as he waved his engineers away from the armored door, their melta charges blinking happily as they waited for the command to detonate, “I’ll leave the charges to you then… for better timing?” he finished, offering the detonator in his palm to Praetor Muckstead.

Around them, the Zouaves began to take their positions to cover the door in a half-circle.

There were a few seconds as the Praetor waited; While this had the benefit of the Zouaves both getting clear of their own melta bombs and the chance to get into position, in truth he was largely waiting until his squad formed up to breach and clear once the bombs went off.

Once they were ready… an oversized thumb came down on a comically small button.

It took a few seconds for the chain reaction of the melta charges to properly get going… but once it did, the intensity of the light and heat that was melting its way through the doorway was immense.

As the reaction finally died down and before the molten slag left behind could even begin the process of cooling, Praetor Muskstead threw a flashbang grenade through the opening, waiting until the bang went off and his Astartes began the breach and clear operation with inhuman speed.

Warning klaxons were blaring within the building, dim red lights illuminating the space with long shadows and eerie glows.

The Pacifican soldiers, bathed in the red of their emergency lights and deafened by the alarms sounding, found their doom at the end of bolters and chemweapons as the transhuman warriors flooded the corridor with a speed uncanny for their size.

The few Pacificans that managed to squeeze off terrified las-volleys and arc rounds found their aim sorely wanting. A short bloodbath ensued; those not felled mercifully at range found themselves instead mercilessly slaughtered by chugging chainswords and gauntleted fists.

Lieutenant Smeth and his mortal troops followed in the wake of the Astartes of the Eighth, wide eyes surveying the transhumans’ handiwork as they stepped over gutted Pacificans and unidentifiable puddles of smoking organic matter.

“Frak…” his vox operator whispered to himself as their lumens swept the red-lit interior corridor and the carnage within.

Smeth steeled himself as he trudged through a puddle of what he could only assume had once been several humans, and directed a squad to follow a trio of Astartes working their way down the corridor to the right with a point of his fingers.

The rest of the Zouaves fell in behind him or held the exterior of the building.

They were only about halfway to joining up with the Legionaries of the Eighth when the klaxons stopped blaring their incessant alarm and the lights switched back to their normal white tone.

The Zouaves all doused their lumens and squinted as the harsh white light attacked their eyes.

“Thanks for that,” a Trooper to Smeth’s left breathed in relief.

Smeth wasn’t feeling so happy at the sudden change. “Praetor, any idea why the lights just came back on? I don’t like it,” he voxed to the Astartes somewhere further ahead of him.

“I can think of a few reasons. They’re not stupid so I doubt they have their pipes hooked up to the same power grid as the lights so they likely haven’t turned on the power to trigger gas or liquid based traps. More likely they’ve turned on some auto-defenses, alongside some las or electric-based traps.” Was the immediate vox answer… followed by a thoughtful pause.

“...Possibly some crush panels or some spiked walls. Give me a second.” The vox channel went silent for a moment.

Those able to see Praetor Muckstead would witness the man remove his helmet and the various protective materials he and his legion were trying out. His skin was a very dark brown, with small hazel eyes. Without ceremony or warning, he reached down to scoop up some brain material that had been splattered on his weapon after ending the life of one of their foes and popped it in his mouth before swallowing it without hesitation due to not needing to chew it.

What information may have been gleaned by the Praetor’s macabre tastes weren’t necessary as the Pacifican’s made their purpose known at the same moment the Astartes commander took his first bite.

A previously hidden hatch in the floor yawned open just steps in front of the furthest of the Eighth’s Astartes. A haz-suit clad and genehanced son of the the VIII leaned forward to inspect the new avenue of movement - or attack - with his chemthrower at the ready. A chug of green fumes was loosed a heartbeat later.

Smeth watched the event with curiosity from his position behind the lead element of genewarriors. The green chem fumes belched forward from the Astarte’s makeshift weapon into the hatch, and a moment later the Astartes was pulled bodily into the abyss. A number of his Zouaves yelled in alarm as more hatchways opened up and down the hall, effectively cutting the long passageway into many small pockets of resistance. There would be no supporting one another for whatever was to come, Smeth knew.

A wretched arm, its structure too thin and bones too long, reached from the hatchway closest to Smeth. It moved quickly for its size, and Smeth could have sworn something so long and ill-supported by musculature shouldn’t have been able to grab the closest of his Zouaves with such ease, but it did.

Up and down the passage gunfire began to add its rippling staccato to the yells of surprise and dying men. A creature emerged, met by withering bolter fire and las bolts from a ragtag group of Astartes and Zouaves. Its body was slim as its arm, too long and too ill-proportioned to be anything natural. It’s skin was a sickly pale hue, and it lurched forward to crush a mortal trooper under a too-wide open palm before biting another clean in half.

“Form line, double rank! Back to back!” Smeth yelled, panic edging into his words. He hadn’t needed to give the command, his disparate and unsupported men already taking the most obvious route to their own survival even before he had commanded it. A creature rose in front of him, and his stomach twisted into a knot as he noticed the human eyes, too small on its wide face, crying as the thing swept aside another of his troopers with bonecracking force.

“Cassiel!” was all Mauger managed to call out from Qvoro’s side before Cassiel was pulled into the previously hidden hatch. Even at the enhanced speeds in which Astartes could move to provide aid to their literally fallen brother, the vital signs of Cassiel flatlined with a cut off cry of surprise.

Then hell broke loose as more of the damned wretches that had been twisted into monsters of war began to emerge into the hallway.

The nature of fighting meant that Praetor Qvoro Muskstead was unable to see all of his Astartes as some of them were in other hallways, but he noticed as two more sets of squad vitals went completely dark, one after the other.

Vox chatter from a group of four whose vitals had clearly spiked into dangerous levels painted a picture of two of the squad being unlucky enough to be surrounded by several of the creatures in the opening seconds, with the monsters now trying to use that opening success to try and snowball into overwhelming the remaining imperials on that flank. While the squad was taking an absolute battering of injuries, they were still standing and fighting.

Elsewhere, the rest of the squad seemed to be holding their own rather steadily. By all accounts he was willing to attribute this to luck of placement when the ambush began; Those he could physically see had been close enough to each other not to be cut off when the hatches opened and monsters started coming out.

So focused on the creatures trying to come at him from all sides, Qvoro didn’t see the hatch on the roof slide open silently. Didn’t see the monstrous hand that lingered for a moment as it judged where he was going to be for a surprise opening strike…

But Mauger did.

With a sudden body block and a sharp swing of Mauger’s combat knife, a blow that might have maimed or killed Qvoro was avoided as several of the creature’s fingers were taken from it as punishment for trying with an inhuman screech.

Unfortunately, the creature did not flee back into the darkness.

Dropping down with its unnatural body, it landed on Mauger with an enraged fury, battering him with its bleeding fist while using its ‘healthy’ hand to try and pry off either helmet or head with a wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Before Qvoro could help his old friend, two more of the monsters dropped down, trying to take advantage of the situation. One of them quickly discovered that whatever its horrific body was modified to do, surviving a chainsword was not one of them as Qvoro ended its existence… but the other focused on the distracted Mauger and…

Qvoro… didn’t properly remember what happened next.

Or at least, it didn’t feel like a memory. The pain… the hate… they were there but… he wasn’t experiencing them. Instead it was as if they were pouring directly into his limbs. Into his heart… giving him fuel to operate at a level beyond what he believed possible, even with his enhancements.

It brought with it a clarity of mind and purpose: There was a target in front of him and it was going to die. The creature seemed to be moving stupidly slowly when it tried to reach out for him, allowing him to grasp and break its forearm before ripping the limb off completely, even as his chainsword bit into what passed as a collar bone to tear its head and upper torso away from the rest of it and throwing it aside like the nothing it was.

Then he moved onto the second, dismembering it at the knees and stamping its skull into paste. Third… Fourth… Fifth… Each was dispatched in swift, brutal fashion with the same silent energy and dedication as someone clicking a button to make a number on a screen go up.

It was only after his chainsword had finished bisecting number eight from the groin to the skull that the Praetor briefly recognized Smeth… but he didn’t say anything. He merely pressed on to look for number nine to bring an end to.

Smeth hadn’t witnessed the display of martial prowess and savage strength that took place behind him, but he had felt it. Foul blood covered him from head to toe, his troopers behind and beside him fairing no better. Even as his troopers focused down one of the spindly-limbed monstrosities with overwhelming fire in front of him, he felt fear growing in the small part of his mind at the rank behind him slackening their fires.

He turned then, chastisement on his lips, even if it was the last thing he’d do, only to find himself slack-jawed at the sight he beheld.

Praetor Muckstead, previously resplendent in BLANK armor, was now a mess of gore. He strode through the ruined remains of more than a half dozen of the creatures, more than enough to have overwhelmed his Zouaves easily, and still, he seemed out for more.

The young Lieutenant from the Merican Easterlies had heard stories from times long since past. By his schola professors and his eccentric great-great-grandmother before she passed, of a place long since lost to the sands of time. A mountain of such immensity that it towered over the entirety of the people of the world. Atop it sat gods. They bickered and fought, loved and killed one another, not bothering with the lives of the humans going on far below. But sometimes, they graced a maiden in her chamber with their presence, and their progeny strode among humanity and wrought bloody paths of righteous fury on the monsters of fore. Demigods, they’d been called. At once human and more. Now, he found himself truly in the presence of such a figure of old myth. This Astartes, unconcerned with the plight of the little folk before him, and with ease befitting the child of a god, vanquished monsters.

Whatever revelations he was inspiring, the Praetor was blind to them. Maintaining his martial trance while in this pocket of calm on the other end of murderous hate and fury, he simply kept moving forward towards the next target with the certainty of killing it.

Before long, the hallway he had started the ambush in was clear of hostile life. Which was when he turned to spirit at full, inhuman speed back down the corridor towards where the squad had split up with the unstoppable intention of finding new things to kill.

He arrived at a key moment.

Of the four Astartes that were left on that front, two of them were standing back to back, holding their ground against their foes. The other pair of two were doing much more poorly, as one of them had been brought down with his lifesign readings confirming a death; The dead man’s partner was holding on, but it was clear that the fighting had been harsh on him. His injuries were starting to reach dangerous levels, and failure to reinforce him now would almost assure his death.

Fortunately for him, his Praetor arrived in murderous silence just in time.

Smeth found the sight of the Praetor awe-inspiring and terrifying all in the same breath. He did his best to compose himself, tapping on the shoulder of the nearest of his command squad as he tried to bring himself back into the act of leading his men out of this newest house of horrors.
“Get me a map, where the frak do these holes go?” he motioned with a hand to one of the openings in the floor.

His trooper nodded, rummaging through a pouch at his side before he pulled out two orbs. With a tap each, they buzzed to life and floated from the trooper's hands before darting off down the hole.

“Give it sixty.” his trooper assured him as he fiddled with a display strapped to his forearm, “Less…” the trooper’s voice trailed off as he held the display on his arm out for his commander to see.

“Frak…” Smeth agreed as he eyed the three dimensional map the drones had created.

The tunnel led down, nearly vertically for 200 meters, before it came to rest in a small room that appeared to be a containment cell. Outside of the cell, through a door left open either on purpose or in haste, the drones had found something far more important.

Rows of datastacks stretched through a vast chamber beneath the building. Cogitator banks, obvious from their bulky proportions in the imaging, sat in thick clumps at the center of dataspires and assorted workstations.

“I want boots on the ground down there in five,” Smeth spoke to the non-comm to his right, who nodded and turned to gather the survivors, “secure everything, don’t let them remove or destroy anything down there.”

A series of affirmatives rippled through his command squad before Smeth keyed into the vox channel for the Eighth he had been given.

“Lord Praetor, there is a datavault beneath this structure. I am uploading the imaging data we have to you now, the 11th is prepping to secure it.”

The number of hostile enemy targets reached zero as the Praetor… just stood still for a few, tense seconds. There was nothing else to kill, and thus the battle zen-like state that Qvoro had entered was finally allowed to slip away as he now had to be a leader and push on, despite the personal loss.

He finally took the time to slide his helmet back on, hiding his gore-covered features from the world once more as he finally listened to the message that the Lieutenant was sending. As well as checking the map data that had been uploaded to him.

“Give me a few moments, Lieutenant.” was the answer over the vox he got before Qvoro swapped to legion channels while the squad that had followed him into this place regrouped, tended their wounds and… secured their fallen.

While Qvoro was a Praetor and thus had his own company to call upon, he was apart of a wider ongoing battle and thus he needed to get an update of the situation, figure out which forces were free to be moved around to reinforce their position and update other leaders of the datavault discovery.

The whole process took a grand total of thirty three seconds, but once it was done Qvoro swapped to a channel that both his squad of Astartes and the Lieutenant would be able to hear. “The legion has been updated of the situation, with two squads of legionaries currently on route to help us take and secure the datavault.”

There was a moment when Qvoro considered the idea of having himself and his squad taking advantage of the tunnels to drop down directly to the datavaults. He decided against it; The lack of knowledge in regards to the physical ability of an Astartes to survive a 200 meter fall and still be combat effective on the other side was a major pillar of the decision, but another was concerns about the size of the tunnels and them not being able to fit an armored astartes.

A man getting stuck a third of the way down was a tactical issue after all.

“We’ll help your men locate a means down. If we need to get climbing equipment, so be it, but I suspect there has to be an elevator or staircase around here somewhere.”

It didn’t take long for the astartes of the Eighth to locate the elevator, enhanced senses and baroque auspex systems prying the secret from the walls surrounding them given adequate time and skilled operators.

The lift quickly filled, the ranks of the Zouaves falling in at the back of the elevator as the remaining Astartes took positions in the front. The ride to the bottom was quick, and the elevator doors yawned open on silent, well tended to mechanisms to reveal the room beyond.

Bright light bathed the interior of the elevator casting the Astartes at the front in stark shadow to the mortal soldiers behind them. White tiled walls and glimmering surgical tables met the Imperials as they made their way into their new surroundings. The smell of counterseptic stung their noses and gnawed at the corners of their eyes.

“There,” a trooper called out as he pointed a torchbeam at a circular passageway toward what looked to be rows and rows of cogitators and databanks.

“A vault sir?” Smeth’s closest Sergeant asked in confusion.

“Aye, seems so,” he responded with a nod, “stay alert, those bastards won’t let this go easily if I had to guess.”

Above them, in the black of the vaulted ceilings, the darkness stirred.

The legionaries were slow to leave the elevator; instead, they moved at a more measured pace as they secured the room right outside of its doors and continued to move forwards from there slowly to ensure that every inch of ground they crossed was clear of traps, enemies and other such problems.

Torchlights connected to their weapons helped to light the dark, the Astartes turning slowly in order to ensure that no area was left in enough shadow to provide a place that might allow a hiding place.

In the name of this precaution, as well as the history of panels hidden in the ceiling, of the five Astartes that had survived till this point and followed their Praetor down the elevator, two of them made a habit of turning their gaze and lights upwards.

The light reflected off of bare metal, spinning gears, and purulent flesh. Spider-like amalgamations of steel legs and tortured flesh gazed down toward the Astartes with gaping maws locked in silent screams. The first of the twisted experiments died in tightly grouped shots from the two Astartes that had had the forethought to look up.

Blood and oil rained from the ceiling onto the armored transhumans and mortal Zouaves alike, the eviscerated spider-creatures, each twice the size of an unmodified human, crashing to the ground just a moment after the rain began. The pair of Astartes let off more shots, their fellows joining in without so much as a word shared between them. Each shot was a killing strike to another of the many-limbed creatures above them,and the Zouaves added their weight of fire to the transhumans a few seconds later.

The spider-creatures fell from the ceiling, many of them torn apart or shot full of wounds gushing fluids of some form or another, but many more fell with a purpose.

Zouaves were crushed under the weight of the creatures, skewered on limbs as they landed too deftly for their tortured forms, or cut in half by raking limbs as the things fell in the midst of fireteams and squads.

The Astartes handled the rain of corpses much better than their normal human counterparts; Between the power armor they wore and their transhuman strength, the corpses that fell on them were something to be shrugged off rather than an actual threat to them personally.

At least as far as weight and gravity were concerned. The claws of those that were still alive when they reached the ground could punch through metal and shed transhuman blood in the moment before it clotted and the flow ceased completely. By chance or newly gained experience, the remaining Astartes remained standing by the time that the ‘rain’ finally came to an end, with only two new wounds to show for their pitiful foes' hopefully final attempt to slay them.

Praetor Muckstead had actually ceased shooting his weapon, instead focusing purely on melee in order to swat living monsters and corpses out of the air with his power armoured, transhuman fists to keep the dying wretches off of the more heavily injured of his Astartes brothers. He did make a point to at least avoid deflecting or throwing any of the bodies he was intercepting with his fists away from the Zouaves accompanying them.

Smeth ducked away from a swiping blade-limb, crashing to the ground hard as the troopers around him laid fire into the Pacifican creature. It roared in some form of machine pain, collapsing to the ground under the weight of the Zouaves combined fire. He scrambled to his feet, surveying the carnage around them as he tried to assess their position.

There was a brief moment where he thought they might have been on the verge of defeat, but that doubt was quenched as he watched the Praetor finish off the last of the living beasts with his gauntleted fists.

“Clear!” a squad leader yelled out from down the passageway, a number of others reporting the same. He heard his vox operator relay the information, and only a second later the familiar tone of a vox override filled every vox caster and bead in the datavault, mortal and astartes alike.

++“Ensure containment of the vaults, await arrival of follow-on personnel.”++

He exchanged a glance with his radio operator, the man already fidgeting with his bulky vox set as he looked back up toward Smeth.

“Vox override isn’t ours, it’s high, vermillion plus…” the man trailed off a moment, “the Astartes?”

Smeth shook his head, “Sigillites.” he corrected.

The siege had been too quick to escape. City-wide broadcasts had declared all entry and exit prohibited, and a curfew had been put in place. Any and all non-military, militia, or enforcers found roaming the streets after dark were to be declared a saboteur and summarily executed. Even now, dozens hung from street posts and rooftops, their bodies swaying gently in the wind.

The unlucky traders and travelers that had been in the city as the Imperial’s had closed the noose around it had gathered in the basements and shelters of the great entertainment district. It had been tense at first, thousands of merchants and nomads, their families and the unlucky Pacifican civilians too far from their homes all crammed into shelters too small and basements too tight. But they persisted.

There was food enough in the beginning, bands of men had gone out into the entertainment district, collecting anything edible from storefronts, food stalls, and restaurants all the same. Some had even grabbed board games, books and toys. Things to keep the children and adults alike focused on anything but the ever growing sounds of explosions creeping closer by the hour. Then the power went out.

The tense atmosphere shifted almost instantly. Where before there was tentative trust between the people of the shelters and the basements, in the darkness there was only fear. Food stores were picked at silently in the darkness, the quantities of food collected in cooperation slowly dwindling as opportunists took items from the shadows whenever the chance arose. Then the fighting had begun. The distrust boiled over into heated arguments as families accused families of stealing their food, their water. The arguments turned into physical altercations, and desperate people brooked no quarter.

The dead began to pile up under the entertainment center. Families that had traveled caravan routes for decades spilled one another's blood over accusations of thievery. Lone traders were set upon in the darkness by bands of the desperate, those refugees nearby hiding in fear as the scared and the hungry tore the innocent to shreds to keep their bellies meagerly filled.

The woman known to the citizens of the Jade Citadel only as ‘the Lady of Rings’ sat in the darkness. She glittered in what little light pierced the darkness, the veil that gave her her title reflecting all of it back into the dark. It was made of rings. Tarnished, old, lost things. Wedding rings from widows, children’s rings dropped in the water to wash up on a different shore. It covered her black hair in stark contrast. She had taken it off to get into the city, a week and a half before.

She had put it back on, when the power went out. Any guard of the Citadel, who would kill her just for being here, would be busy now with… whatever was happening. Now, her Magpie appearance marked her as someone who was always willing to trade. Someone who was more useful alive than dead.

She and her husband sat, using tiny knives to rip the seams from her brother’s clothes. His clothes had been traded to her last night by a child who had stumbled on his body in the dark. She had given the boy a bit of her dinner for it. He had hovered nearby after, hoping for more, until a man he called ‘Uncle’ dragged him away.

She knew the stories they told of the Magpies. ‘Magpies’ they said ‘will sell anything, and buy anything. From a child, to a life, to a broken dish.’

She finished on her seam. Began carefully unthreading the golden thread that had embroidered the fabric. She could reuse it, or sell it.

A small voice interrupted her. The boy was back. “Lady Magpie? Do you have any more food?”

She opened her mouth to speak. Considered her words, then sighed. “Did you eat all of what I traded you already, child?”

He looked away, then nodded. Her husband sighed, taking the fabric from her hands.

She locked a sharp gaze on the boy, and asked a question she knew the answer to. “What do you have to trade, child?” She felt the gazes of others in the darkness. The price, she thought, would have to be low enough that they felt it obtainable, or they would just kill her. But… not so low she ran out of food for herself.

The boy stuttered. “I-I was h-hoping…”

She stopped him. “I am a Magpie. We trade. If you have jewelry, I would take that, it could be useful to me.”

She watched his face began to fall. Her children had been that small once. They, too, were somewhere in the Citadel, who knew where, now. She began to turn away.

“Wait!”

She turned back. “Suddenly remembered your great-grandmother’s earrings, little one?”

He shook his head, then said, voice shaking, “I could run errands? My Mama says kids are better at seeing in the dark than grown ups. If I… if I go find people who will trade with you, and things that are lost.. can I have some food for that?”

She considered the boy. Reached out to pinch his cheek. He flinched slightly, away from her hand, but not enough to escape her. “Hmm,” she said, “Deal. On one condition.”

He stared at her with wide eyes.

“Do not tell me your name, child.”

Around the Lady of Rings the world shook. Rockcrete dust trinkled from newly formed cracks in the ceiling above and pebbles skittered along the ground with each successive blow. The detonations ceased, far from where they sat, but close enough that many in the dark began to whisper frantically. The war was inching closer every minute, and soon, it would be in the dark pump rooms and basement shelters they had found as refuge.

A loud bang at the far side of the room signalled a new problem as the door, pitifully barricaded with the meager furniture of the store room, slammed open. Voices called out as the silhouettes of men streamed into the room.

“Listen listen, you wretched stains, give us your water and your food and we’ll be gone before you know it!” a voice from one of the shadows began as the silhouettes began to fan out in the darkness, groping hesitantly as they searched for sustenance and survivors.

“Try and fight back…?” the man's voice trailed off and a blade glinted dangerously in the meager light of the room. The other silhouettes continued their search, and some of the refugees began to offer up what little they had in exchange for their snivelling lives.

The Lady grabbed her new assistant by the wrist and yanked him behind her. In her softest voice, she began to whisper to him the instructions that Magpies had been giving their children as long as Magpies had existed.

“If things go wrong,” she whispered, “you run.”

Running was certainly not an option for her.

“If you cannot run, hide.”

She couldn’t do that either.

“If you are found or caught, bargain.”

She smiled at the intruders, knowing one of them would notice her soon enough.

“And if bargaining fails… beg for your life.”

She didn't say the last part. Die before betraying your family. He wasn't a Magpie. Yet.

Done warning him, she gave one final instruction, “Now be quiet and still,” and called out to the men searching the storeroom, “Just supplies you’re after then, or could I interest you in something else?” She grinned. “I’d love to make a deal.”

The shadow with the knife seemed to direct his attention toward the voice of the old Magpie, and there was the quiet scuffing of shoes against the bare rockcrete suggesting one or two of the brigands were groping their way through the darkness toward her, too.

“No deals,” the man hissed as he took a noisy step toward the Lady of Rings, “you give us what you have and we leave you be.” he finished with another noisy step.

The room, still hushed in fear, grew in volume as a refugee began to beg to keep some of their meager supply of water. A third voice joined the discord as a woman begged for the first man to let the brigand take the water. The voices rose in volume for another few moments, the brigand yelling as the sounds of a scuffle could be heard in the dark.

Seconds passed as the sound of two men fighting over something filled the space. Something shattered, a sound of running water filled the silence that followed.

“You frakking wretch!” the brigand exclaimed. There was a surprised yelp, a heavy clunk as a pipe met skull, the thud of a person hitting the ground without attempting to catch themself. A woman began to scream.

“Anyone else? Anyone else want to try m---” a las bolt lit the space in blinding neon red radiance, the brigand crumpled in the incandescence, the afterimage of the las bolt imprinted upon the retinas of everyone in the dingy cellar.

Another las beam reached out across the room. Pandemonium erupted as the refugee with the laspistol began to fire wildly in the confined space. The brigands ran for cover, smashed in the skulls of those closest to them, or ducked out the door back into the hallway. Men yelled and fought back blindly at those nearest to them and their small groups, bodies went limp as laspistol bolts slammed into survivors and brigands indiscriminately. The mass of humanity began to swell, a great wave of sweat and fear pushing for the few exits from the small storage cellar. People floundered, crushed beneath the boots of the desperate and the hungry.

The old Magpie pressed herself against the wall and slid down it until her knees touched her chest. Beside her, her husband did the same, and she pulled the boy down between them. No value gained by joining the stampede. Better to hunker down.

A brigand stumbled, caught in the crowd by where she hid. She reached out to keep him from falling. Her eyes locked with his and narrowed. “Settle down, child. If you’re smart, you’ll get out alive with extra food in the bargain.”

The pipe-weapon in the thugs hand clattered away as the man hit the ground hard. He scrambled to right himself, the hand at his shoulder only adding to his desperation as words simply slid from his mind in the frantic moment. He scrambled back, his hands scraping against rockrete and metal as he did. A neon red lasbolt cut the air above the Magpies, and the man rose to run as a second neon bolt found purchase in his side.

The man crumpled like a bag of bricks, the energy of the lasbolt leaving a burning hole in his side and deep into his chest where a heart and lungs should have been. More bolts snapped around the Magpies, questing shots to find the voice that had reached out in kindness to the now dead brigand.

She thought of her brother, dead in the dark. She thought of her children, somewhere in the shadows, possibly dead as well. She thought of her Family. Their ship waited many miles away down the coast. It would not come for them. No Magpie ship would sail into trouble. Magpie ships only sailed away.

Silently, the Lady of Rings tucked the boy behind her. She curled on the floor, as small as she could get. She reached out and held her husband’s hand. She couldn’t stop panicked people. She just had to hope they would calm down before she wound up dead.

Incandescent lasbolts slammed into the walls around the Lady of Rings at random, her luck holding true by the thinnest of threads.

The ground shook, dust fell from unseen cracks and forgotten duct work above them. The ground shook, shelves toppled over and contents spilled across the room.
The ground shook, pipes burst and cables frayed, spraying water and arcing electricity.
The ground shook, and the bandit disappeared beneath a monumental amount of rockrete, earth, and steel.

The sound was immeasurably loud, the growl of an engine of unknown origin filled the air. The whine of pneumatics overtook the engine’s bass tone as the massive steel object before the Lady of Rings began to rise out of the hole it had created with its sudden appearance. A warhorn blared, and a sound like cracking lightning followed as the sky above was lit with intermittent flashes of light.

The boy crawled into her arms, but the Lady of Rings did not react, staring at what looked like certain death, the ice of dissociative fear stealing across her thoughts and freezing them to nothing. The only sign that she saw the disaster about her was her death grip on her husband’s hand.

The macromachine righted itself, a hulking titan on two legs, a bulbous body bristling with weapons and a command bridge attached at its core in the shape of an oni of ancient myth. Warhorns brayed in anger at its attacker as weapons of exotic and esoteric origin lashed out in radiant beams of color, whips of lightning, and more conventional weapons fire to no doubt smite the Imperial fool enough to attract the titan’s ire.

Colors inverted, lightning dissipated, and shells fell from the air as the oni’s wrath was thwarted. The warmachine’s foe was neither a competing relic of ancient war, nor the massed battalions which even now assaulted the Citadel. Instead, it was a lone man, hanging serenely above Hongol, both hands clasped around a staff.

For those huddling for safety in the shadow of the steel monstrosity, its opponent was no more than a speck - until he spake his retort. A wave of nuclear fire erupted from the eagle head of his staff, a coruscating line of light and fury that glistened with motes of stardust that was stymied by a wall of nothingness as the oni’s void shields held firm against it.

It seemed at first that the attack would be redoubled, the distant speck attempting to overwhelm the macromachine, until it paused in its assault - the man finally noticing whom his fight involved. Cursing quietly, he pulled back his staff and made to retreat back towards Imperial lines, taunting his foe into following.

The Oni followed, its mortal crew hellbent and unable to ignore the opportunity before them to crush the right hand of the Emperor. It smashed through habblocks, leveled Pacifican strongpoint bunkers, brushed aside Imperial armored formations, and crushed the already broken Harmony Gate to dust as it pursued the insolent old man and left the Lady of Rings far behind.

The boy began to move, but she grabbed him and held him tight. She watched the sky, a rabbit that has watched the hawk fly away- and is waiting to see if it will return.

As Malcador feinted, he weaved trickery in his wake, for the aggrieved were the easiest to fool. The lumbering beast proved more bane than boon to the Pacificans then, the Sigilite hiding its friends from view while warding its foes from it. From ruin to ruin he sprang, like a furtive bird, letting frustration and dreams of glory cloud the judgement of its crew, until at last he was left with nowhere to run, floating amid the massive space that had once been one of the city’s great gates.

But he did not flee before it. Instead, he approached the monstrosity of metal, his staff pressed forward head blazing with atomic flame that grew and grew in barely restrained fury before at last with a groan of barely restrained fury it was channeled and released. Nuclear fire chained to the hand of Man, the furnace of creation itself opened and turned to the task of pitiless war.

No one, be it flesh or machine, could gaze long upon what the Sigilite had just unleashed in the skies about Hongol. It was an act known by its shadows, the fate of the oni seen only by those staring at its flickering shade on the distant streets far below. Malcador’s flame was far too hot to merely burn or melt the titan, instead fusing its very matter together. Exotic elements seen only in the deaths of stars were born then, before being forcibly combined in turn in cascading pulses of energy which threatened to rip the warmachine apart.

Yet Malcador bid it hold fast, for now, binding the great energies and hard radiation that he had unleashed to boil away the flesh and steel of operator and machine both until they had sublimated into something beyond - something flung far into the skies, where with a shuddering crack it seemed a new sun was briefly born until the flare died. Of the oni, there stood now two vast and trunkless legs of steel, boundless and bare.

“I am growing far too sentimental for my own good,” the old man whispered, haggard and tired, glancing down to confirm with a smile that those who had sought shelter from the war had survived this latest skirmish.

Far below, the Lady of Rings was emerging from her frozen fear. All around her, the refugees looked around themselves, the building they had been hidden in no longer safe. Some blinked, eyes scalded by the sunlight, after so long, and the battle above them- particularly the last, unfathomable fire. Others wept, ran, trembled, stared at nothing in unbreaking shock at the sudden violences of the day- the transformation of dark, everpresent fear to immediate danger from many fronts. And many, many more lay dead and unmoving.

She climbed to her feet, lifting the boy that sheltered in her arms with her. She stared up at the figure in the sky. Resentment burned in her. Her brother, the Golden Emissary, was dead, because of these foolish men attacking a city they happened to be in. Her children were missing. She curled her lip, sending a look of disgust to the figure in the sky, although she was sure he couldn't see.

She set the boy on the ground and took his hand. She walked towards the exit, her husband following unquestioning behind her. A new hiding place would have to be found. But she stopped when she felt the boy tug free from her grip. She turned.

The boy knelt sobbing beside a woman, her belly slightly rounded. A little sibling for the boy, the Lady supposed, or could have been. The woman’s legs lay crushed beneath rubble, caught in the crashing of the metal monster through the ceiling. Her face was pale. Even from here, it could be seen that no breath stirred in her.

The Lady of Rings sighed. She went to the boy, knelt beside him, and took him into her arms. “Grieve, child, as you must, but it cannot be here. Will you walk or shall I carry you?”

The boy made no response besides to sob and cling tighter to her. She took a deep breath and lifted him once more, standing.

As she walked away, she whispered to him, that which had been whispered to her, once, long ago, among the ashes of a fire that had killed everyone she had ever known. “They are dead, child, and cannot be returned to you, but you will not be alone. Stay with me, and I will love you as my own. I will make of you a Magpie. And since you will be a Magpie, you will know my name.”

And she whispered to him her name, as his sobs dwindled to whimpers, and she, and the boy, and her husband, vanished into the dark.

High, high above them a man bore witness to a thousand tragedies, and hardened his heart as he set out to commit a thousand more.

Unity demanded no less.

The city of Hongol was dying, like a beast with its hide pierced in a dozen places, it spasmed and resisted. But its end was inevitable.

A new wound had been torn at its heart, the palace at the center of the Jade Citadel had finally been cracked, and the doom of so many tyrants and petty kings that the Emperor had brought across Terra had arrived. And it had one name upon its lips, Narthan Dume.

A specter haunted the Jade Citadel. Gilded in gold, it drifted up through the weeping wound in the palace walls and dug deep into what few functional arteries led through to its thrashing heart. Where once desperate men huddled behind barricades with weapons clutched close, now lay only corpses with faces fixed in a death mask of simple confusion. Death came to them so swiftly and with such fierce mercy that they had never even known to be afraid.

Like ants before the sun.

It was kindness, the revenant had explained to her soulless flock. The braying beasts beyond the walls would not be so restrained in their slaughter. She could hear them working their way inwards now, a rising tide of desperate cries and defiant last stands against the Emperor’s overwhelming host. Room by room, and in whatever few ways the two yet remained distinct, the palace transformed into a charnel house.

And so the Custodian led her strike team deeper into the palace, pilfered plans and architectural data spooling out across her helmet’s readout to keep her on target. The Pacificans had tried, in these last desperate moments of the siege, to impede Imperial forces by what tools they had at hand. Together Reva’s retinue passed burned-out stairwells and navigated briskly around explosive ordnance stuffed haphazardly into the walls and floor. Had these lost and damned faced mere men today, perhaps these crude implements might have been enough, but these were neither cruel nor madcap enough to be the machinations of Narthan Dume, so Reva pressed on.

The further into the citadel they moved, the gaudier the décor became. Baudy paintings sat beside titanic statues marking now fetid fountains. A few of her soulless soldiers snatched valuables off the tables they passed, stuffing their pockets with meager riches now abandoned. Reva did not stop them. Worse plunder would come.

She found Narthan in the dust-clogged throne room. Amidst the splintered sunbeams pooling in through a ruined ceiling and past the twenty-meter double doors from which Reva had entered, Narthan stood calm upon the dais. He was not dressed for war, opting instead to face the end in a ragged mockery of kingly clothes and with a scepter in one hand. Behind him lay the ruins of stained glass and shredded paintings in splintered frames. To either side of the room were portcullises of similar size to the main doors, each constructed from crude iron and beaten into the rough shape of a grate.

As the ten witch-slayers spread out to guard their exit with swords drawn, Reva advanced with plain purpose upon the Dais.
“You are beaten, Dume.” She said, standing now only some meters away in what must have been the royal court. Ravings were etched into the walls in unknown script, and piled high in every seat lay half-functional scrap from humanity’s finest hour. “Your darkling empire fades. Sound the surrender and live.”

Dume’s was a great and powerful sigh, and the old man then spoke, any space for ire long lost somewhere in the siege. “There is no place of honor that would suffice.”

“It would not be honor, tyrant. You would be brought before your subjects in chains. You would serve in darkness at the Emperor’s mercy.” Reva knew Narthan was mad, and so she saw no reason to lie.

“An incredible negotiator, you are.” The tyrant replied, too tired to laugh but not so far gone to keep from smiling. “I do not fear death enough for a half-life to be preferable. If my empire should fall, I will go with it.”

Narthan Dume lifted his once kingly scepter, pointing the end towards Reva as if making a decree. He strained then, pulling at the skeins of the waking world, trying to draw familiar power from it and into himself. With such carnage about them, the empyrean was surely alight, both blistering and biting and in need of but a strong hand to give it direction in the affairs of man. He opened his mind to the arcane, allowing it one final time to scour his mind in exchange for unseen aid.

And, for the first time since the death of the Unspeakable King, Narthan Dume felt nothing, his scepter merely flickered with a sickly green light before sputtering back into impotence. Even the voices had gone.

Dumbfounded, Dume again tried to snatch power. Dismal silence was his only reward. It was then that Narthan jabbed a finger at Reva.

“What have you done?” The tyrant demanded answers, mad curiosity replacing cold acceptance. His eyes, once weary and half lidded, now beheld Reva with feverish awe.

“Surrender and you shall know. The Emperor has no need for such trivial secrets between allies.” Reva tempted him now, her tone shifting from one of winter to that of spring. “Already our army has outgrown any this world can muster, and now you see even sorcery cannot avail you.”
True though the Custodian’s words were, they stung Dume deeply, and never had there been a tyrant unruled by pride. “Outgrown? You speak so surely after ruining but one of my plans. Did you truly think me outdone after just the one?”

With sudden speed, Dume swept his scepter from side to side, pointing to both portcullises and activating them with the rudimentary technology housed within his staff. Old and rusted, the gates groaned open, and somewhere from deep down both hallways came crashing footfalls.

“You know it won’t be enough.” The Custodian spoke neither in boast nor condemnation.

Explaining himself to the godling before him, Narthan said with resignation and an all-too-human little shrug of his shoulders, “I have to try.”

“I would have been insulted if you hadn’t.”

She was upon him, lunging with blade drawn before her words had registered in Narthan’s ears, and a crashing blow from her vaultsword struck true against his side, sending the mere man clear across the room. The power field he’d tried to hide within the weaves of his clothes strained to diffuse the energy from the blow, and it was that same diffraction that saved his life when he smashed into the far wall and slumped to the floor agonized but alive.

Without Reva having said anything, her soulless host moved into the room now, trading blades for volkite weapons as the thundering footsteps grew nearer and shook dust from rafters.

Briefly, Reva considered securing her target and making her exit. Her mission was Narthan Dume, and she had him. But when she saw the hulking terrors shuffling out from both abandoned hallways, Reva knew she could not leave the Unification forces to put them down.

They were humanoid in only the vaguest sense and towered at over twice Reva’s height. Too many malformed limbs stitched together upon a vat-grown body, and whatever gene-engineering had been used to promote skin and muscle growth had never been coded with a cessation point. Skin stretched tight across bulging muscles at rest and hung in loose, gruesome flaps elsewhere. Loose, sloughing flesh at the joints had been peeled back and stapled out of the way in some vain hope to promote movement at the cost of comfort. Their stout legs, each as thick as an ancient tree limb, dragged laboriously in front of one another, blood sluicing from unfinished stitching, until they finally emerged in full from the depths of Narthan’s lab.

Their armor, such as it was, had been beaten into rough shape from battlefield salvage and bolted directly into the bones of these abominations. When Reva’s eyes fell upon the armor itself, a tactical readout across her visor confirmed what she’d suspected. The armor had been pillaged in part from fallen Thunder Warriors, and Reva suspected the abominations themselves had been sourced from similar grave robbery.

Dume was not the first to create gene-warriors, nor even the first to try and reverse engineer Thunder Warriors themselves. Few had approached the concept with such vile and cavalier butchery. Scabbing brands upon the scalps of these shambling horrors marked them as the third and fifth of whatever abhorrent imperative Dume had enacted. Had Dume been afforded even a few more days in his lab, Reva could only speculate upon the scale of horrors he might have unleashed.

The mutants were armed with but crude weapons, steel rebar with a ferrocrete slab affixed one end as a brutish sledge. Each held the behemothic tool in one oversized fist. Other arms, grafted upon any joint heedless of whether it might support them, also clutched the titanic club for further support.

When the first mutant lifted the sledge and swung it in anger, a volley of volkite rose to meet him. The stink of cooked meat clogged the air when the slayers struck true, boiling through armor and bursting skin to ash. Yet still the beast’s swing could not be stopped, redundant muscles assuring the follow-through.

It missed the witch-slayers, if it could even be considered aiming for them with how much distance they yet maintained between the two groups, and instead the great sledge slammed into the wall beside the mutant. The throne room shook, and more sickly sunlight spilled in from cracks spiderwebbing their way further up the walls. When the behemoth wrenched the weapon free, it took a shuddering stride forward and swung again in slow, sweeping advance.

Avoiding the brute was trivial for the soulless host, who stepped backwards in unison and fired their weapons once more. This time a shot took off half the mutant’s head, cooking the grey matter within. It merely blinked its remaining unfocused eye and tried to swing once more.
It collapsed in death halfway into the royal gallery after half a dozen more rounds of volkite fire had charred its thick hide. Smoke rose from the corpse in thick columns, dancing amidst the dust.

The death of its kin drove the second abomination to blood-madness, and its wild eyes settled upon the guardian in gold before it. It tried to crush her with a savage overhead swing, but Reva merely raised her sword in answer, catching the ferrocrete slab upon the edge and feeling the ground groan beneath her from the strain. She twisted her body then and brought the gene-mutant’s cudgel down to the floor beside her, sending up splinters of stone.

The abominate creature was not given a second chance to strike. The custodian’s first strike had taken out one of its legs, and the second had swept up from groin to shoulder as the brute collapsed forward, carving meat from bone until the misshapen horror split in half, collapsing to the gallery floor on either side of her. Already the flesh had started to rot.
In death, it too had looked confused.

With the deed done, Reva addressed her pariahs while she shackled the half-lucid Dume and heaved him to his feet. If Dume resisted, no one could tell. His legs were shattered in multiple places, and he breathed ragged through blood-speckled lips.
“Just needed a bit more time…” He managed to say before he spat up another mouthful of blood. “You must admit… they had potential.”
Despite the pain, the mad tyrant laughed.

Reva ignored him, instead addressing her retinue. “Collapse those two hallways. We’ll excavate them later should the Emperor have need.”
A pair of explosions followed soon after, but by then the Custodian had left the throne room. She dragged Dume, mercy-blade pressed to his throat, past the first swell of Unification forces that had broken through into the innermost sanctum of the Jade Citadel. And though word traveled quickly, it was Reva’s voice that crackled through the voxnet to deliver the official word.

Across channels both Imperial and Pacifican, the Custodian’s voice was rolling thunder, “Attention all Imperial forces, this is Custodian Reva. Narthan Dume has fallen, and with him the Jade Citadel. This land and its people are returned again to their rightful ruler– the Emperor. Treat our new Imperial citizens well, for we have liberated them from a madman this day. As for any that still claw at independence?”

The line went dead for but a second before alighting again loud enough to be heard across the dimming din of battle.

“Kill them all.”

For all the cacophony of war, there was an eerie quiet to the work of the Astartes. It was not in their movements or their wargear, for both were as thunderous as any could be expected. It was in the lack of audible communication between them as they swept through the motions of clearing ruin by ruin. Even the most highly trained mortal soldiers could not match the instinctive flow that they had upon the battlefield, they had not been trained for war, they had been bred for it, and each step in the action of a breach and clear was as fluid to them as breathing.

Earlier in the war this alone had often been enough to shatter the enemy, the sight of a being too large and too heavily armoured to move with a fluid and fast grace, terrifying to mortal minds. But what true mortals remained among the fighting forces of Ursh were not in this fight, the Astartes finding their physical, if not mental, match in the foes assailed against them. Each hollowed out shell of a building on the long march through the shattered streets of the outercity was a barracks of horrors, from twisted mutants born of recent Wyrdcraft, to amalgamations of machine and flesh which screamed in binharic death cries even as they lunged at the armoured forms of the Emperor's finest.

The marines had been bred for war, but the foes they fought were made of it, crafted in anathema of peace or reason, with only the purpose of bleeding and delaying the Emperor’s forces.

Along the forces tasked with running this cruel, grueling gauntlet of fighting, building-to-building, street-to-street, were the forces of the 8th Astartes legion. They had come in force, with the entire strength of the 2nd, 4th, 6th, and 7th companies having made the journey to the dark lands of Ursh to see the monsters purged once and for all.

There had been some issues between the Praetors. While Praetor Ulstecht of the 2nd Company was recognized as being in charge, the history between Praetors Al-Allal of the 4th and Praetor Josch of the 6th made having both of them in the same command tense… even if the bulk of the bad blood had been settled.

The real issue was Praetor Loffenbjorn of the 7th. Egoism and a fundamental selfishness were bad traits to have in someone who was meant to be a subordinate and it caused many a butting of heads. Still, despite the difficulties, a battle plan was organized and agreed to.

Fundamentally, this was just the same as any other urban fighting they had done; Melee combat with side arms and close to mid range weaponry being the standard kit, with heavy weapons being kept close by as support to be bought up as needed. As buildings were secured, buildings in key locations to lock down and secure the street they were overlooking would be entrenched and manned by heavy weapon teams and snipers. Grenades of various varieties were to be employed liberally.

Two companies were to be actively pushing at a time, one on active reserve to respond if a crisis or counterattack happened, the last one to start as a secondary reserve before cycling in to allow one of the active companies to step back and rest, recover and resupply while maintaining the pressure.

The issue, of course, was that this was the most logical course of action. The most logical plan of attack was also the most predictable. A predictable plan of attack got people killed.

Spending what little time they could to try and find an alternative, other options were ruled out either due to the timetable the Emperor was demanding for this siege to be brought to a victorious end, or the fact that their advances were objectively worse in terms of predicted losses and difficulty. However, the search for an alternative did provide a plan that might give an edge going forward.

While it was the outer edges of a city, it had been advanced enough in its heyday to have pipe infrastructure. Sewers, water, or other, the exact reason for the pipes to be laid wasn’t important to their needs; merely their size. The major pipelines that would branch off to supply individual hab blocks or buildings could easily allow people to traverse them.

Finding suitable pipes and tunnels was going to be left to the abhuman and mutant retinue forces of the 8th. Once buildings and streets began to be secured, the job of the ‘mortal’ forces of the 8th was to scour the buildings and roads, tearing apart or digging as required, in search of suitable pre-existing pipes or tunnels. Once found, they were to be breached to give access, with the Irregalers going into them with the intention of securing, repairing, or digging as needed to connect existing infrastructure to speed up the invasion.

Ideally, the defenders would not have considered ancient and neglected pipes or sewerage tunnels as a part of their defensive plans, allowing for rapid progress. In the event that they had accounted for them and the situation devolved into tunnel fighting… well, those underground passageways were now being contested instead of simply providing the defenders with a tactical advantage.

A crew of abhumans labored, clearing rubble and refuse from a long-since-abandoned tunnel connecting an arterial road deeper into the city. They sweat, cursed, and joked quietly as they worked, each taking turns manning the torch and stubber on security as the others worked.

They had made considerable progress, carting hundreds of pounds from the tunnel as they worked, so much so that they had to begin moving the growing piles of debris outside, further away from the entrance as not to tip off the enemy as to the work they were undertaking below their feet.

An abhuman, a third appendage hanging limply from his chest, hefted a boulder the size of a man’s head with ease and released a stream of viscous fluid from the rubble. The fluid ran down his uniform in runnels, pooling at his feet as he and his companions ignored it and continued working.

Throughout the tunnel, the work crews were met with the same fluid soon enough. Dark and thick as molasses, it ran from cracks in the tunnels and under rubble through seams too small for anything but the rats to traverse. None thought to radio in the strange finding, for what else would a sewer hold but long since stagnant waste and effluent? The miscalculation was the last for many.

In every tunnel that had encountered the strange substance, all at once, Ursh gave its answer to the enterprising Imperial sappers.

The fluid, pooled and forgotten, began to coalesce. Jet black fluid rose silently out of sight toward the ceiling, shaping into roughly humanoid forms in the shadows of the work lamps and around dark corners. The first sign that anything was wrong, and often the last, was the wailing of the creatures as they descended upon the work crews and ripped them limb from limb with claws and spiked appendages that writhed like liquid.



Between the screaming, braying, and the sounds of those few brave souls that managed to try and fight back against their blatantly supernatural foes, it did not take long for word to reach the surface that combat had started down in the tunnels. The odd survivor who had managed to escape in the chaos was even able to give those above some idea of what was waiting down in the dark.

Praetor Al-Allal, the master of the 4th company and tasked with overseeing the infiltration effort due to his personal experience dealing with ‘supernatural’ hive environments, had been quick to round up what few eyewitnesses of the chaos in the tunnels as he could get and listened to their seemingly mad ramblings and stories with an intensity of attention that few would give the mutant or the abhuman.

His response to the situation was sharp and made very clear so that those who heard it would understand exactly what the assignment was. “Part of the reason we did this was to prevent the enemy from using the underground against us. Considering that we are fighting insane, depraved, and desperate witches, supernatural bullshit was to be expected. Work crews are to focus on widening and stabilizing the tunnels enough so that we can get Astartes down there.”

“Deploy the mortal elements of the Coven and their guardian squads. They are to drive the foe from those tunnels and secure them from Imperial use.”

Ever since the 8th had started to take the field during the early Mercia campaigns, the legion had noticed that some of its members, as well as some of the abhumans that made up their auxiliary forces were able to use what the Imperial government referred to as psychic abilities. They also found that when dealing with other ‘psykers’ or just weird, supernatural things that didn’t have a logical or technological explanation behind them, those with supernatural abilities of their own tended to be the best equipped to counter them.

Thus, the Coven was born. An organization made up of psykers, be they Astartes, abhumans, or more traditional humans or mutants who trained together, honed their abilities to be their anti-supernatural forces. Their guardian squads were not psykers themselves, but still actively trained alongside the Coven to be as resistant to psychic abilities as possible and not freak out when things started to get weird.

Ursh had been harsh and unforgiving on the Coven and its guardian squads. Every step deeper into this wretched land that the 8th had taken, the Coven had needed to fight to protect themselves from the insidious and murderous spells of the Ursh witches, as well as Imperial forces in general. Many had died or broken in ways so horrific that any mention of how they died was censored and redacted from all records.

Those that remained were veteran combat psykers. Luck, training, and the experience that survival provided had created a fighting force that actively used supernatural abilities to counter and destroy the supernatural. And it was these veteran spellcasters, human, abhuman or outright mutant alike, that Praetor Al-Allal ordered to sweep and claim the tunnels under the outskirts of this final hive city with confidence that they would get the job done.

The tunnels closest to the 4th Company's positions were still secure as the Coven made their way down beneath the streets. Work crews scrambled to complete their work and vacate the subterranean death traps as quickly as they could, as the rumors of the fate of those ahead of them began to trickle down to them. The smell of fear permeated the air, the weight of so many minds on the verge of panic licked at the minds of the warp-blessed as they passed and pressed onward toward the Ursh aberrations.

The guardian squads moved ahead at first, their torches sweeping the tunnels as they moved with practiced precision toward danger. As they advanced, group by group, the wytchminds began to take the lead, their extracorporeal senses far keener than any torch and eyeball could ever wish to be. But the mad sorcerers of Ursh had foreseen the deployment of Imperial psykers; in fact, they had hoped for it.

A coven squad reported contact with the aberrants back to the 4th company command post just seven minutes after entering the tunnel systems. A guardian, frantic, claimed that the tunnels were filling with the black fluid, and they were withdrawing. The last transmission from the squad was a garbled scream from liquid-filled lungs.

A sigh escaped Prateor Al-Allal as he reached out and turned off the vox. As entertaining as it had been to listen to those final screams, he needed a moment to reflect on the situation. Besides, any survivors were already withdrawing if they could and didn’t need him ordering them to use common sense. As much as he hated the bitter taste, he was forced to acknowledge that his ploy had completely failed.

The plan had been good and his fault for sending in the abhuman elements of the Coven had been due to the sheer scale on which the defenders of Ursh had produced their literal living tide of corrupt filth then a tactical blunder. Further attempts to take the underground would likely end in failure and wasted lives without even the promise of keeping the enemy’s monster (Monsters? Or was the tide just one massive thing that could split into many?) contained in the underground for the sacrifice.

Flicking the vox back on, he changed the channel to start giving commands. “All Mining, we are activating failure protocols. Rig the tunnels with mining charges at the pre-determined zones to seal the damn things. If you see a tide of filth coming towards you before everyone further up the tunnel has reported in, everyone you can’t see is dead and you should seal it immediately.”

With the miners getting their orders, the Praetor swapped to an Imperial command channel. “This is Praetor Al-Allal, fourth company of the eighth legion. Be advised. Attempts to breach the tunnels and underground of the hive city have been repulsed by what can only be described as a literal living tide of polluted ‘water’. Alongside the normal hazards of large bodies of heavily polluted water, it seems to be able to spit pieces of itself out to create combat forms.”

“While currently it has only been reported in the tunnels under the hive city, there doesn’t appear to be anything stopping it from coming to the surface. Be advised that any body of polluted water within the bounds of the city may be an ambush in waiting.”



The flames roared, competing with the screams until both died down so that only the crackle of ash and embers remained.

Ike stepped away from the door, the heavy flamer in his hands still flickering, even if he wasn’t bathing the room in fire. Sergeant Amutiel was the first over the threshold, giving the room a tactical scan within a matter of seconds: Formally a living area of some sort, most of the objects that had been within it now either ash or actively burning, which included those who had been within the room when the door was breached and Ike cleared it with a preemptive wave of flaming death.

Without hesitation, Konrad aimed his pistol and fired into the head of one of the residents who was still twitching. Against any other foe, this would have been done as an act of mercy to end their suffering; If Ursh had taught him anything, it was that there were some enemies that you couldn’t afford to indulge with petty sadism. A dying Ursh witch could unleash some horrific shit with their final, agony filled breaths if given the chance.

With the primary threats dealt with, Konrad gave the room a second, more measured sweep with the intention of locating hiding places or locations for caches that could prove problematic if left alone.
Having earned a great deal of experience in Urban Warfare due to the campaigns in Mercia, as well as surviving long enough to learn some of the terrifying variations on the practice that Ursh brought to the table, Konrad’s proper inspection took less than ten seconds. The room was clear, and the extra time made damn sure he hadn’t missed anything.

He had been about to leave the room to repeat the breach and clear process with the next when a feeling came over him. Subtle and easily missed or ignored in most situations, but even since coming to Ursh he had learned to trust a rather difficult to explain sense for dangers of the more… supernatural variety.

It was almost like he was detecting a strange scent; The closest Konrad had been able to describe it was akin to the stories some of the nomads told about being able to tell a storm was coming due to a scent in the air. The promise that something dangerous was nearby and about to happen soon.

Closing his eyes and focusing on the ‘scent’, it seemed to be coming from the wall that separated this room from the one next door. Enough so that the idea of kicking in the next door and letting Ike do his thing suddenly seemed like a very poor idea.

The room still needed to be cleared and secured; They couldn’t just leave it alone without compromising the security of the building or their continued advance forward.

Making a few hand signs so as to not need to speak, a ripple of activity spread through his squad… and a melta charge was brought forward.

Planting an explosive charge while wearing power armor was [b]not[/] a silent affair, but the task was carried out without a word or any noise beyond the movement of larger than life bodies wearing metal; The nature of what that movement was attempting to achieve was not betrayed by it.

The charge secured, Ike moved into position. Far enough away to be clear of the detonation, but close enough that he would be able to immediately start flooding the breach and the room beyond with fire hot enough to distort and melt just about anything that wasn’t instantly reduced to ash and cinder.

The signal was given. The charge hissed as it was activated….

And the world went mad in less than three seconds.

As the charge detonated, an unearthly roar that sounded like it was made up of countless different voices crying out at once shook Konrad to his bones.

He didn’t see it clearly; Ike was fast on the trigger of his heavy flamer and whatever was on the other side of the hole was blocked from view by the comforting sight of purifying flame.

But he heard it.

He heard the horrifying noises it made. The sound of the door to the next room exploding as something [b]big[/] burst through it. The cries of alarm from his squad that had been watching the next door with the intention of ambushing anything that tried to escape the flames and the rapid discharge of their weapons.

He witnessed a chunk of the wall explode outwards as [i]something[/] punched through, sending it flying into Ike’s helmeted head and staggering him for a second;Thankfully, the flamer remained pointed at the wall, even if its spray was briefly in the room instead of going through a hole.

Konrad himself was not idle, pointing his weapon at one of the openings and firing through the flames where he had to. For a few moments all that could be heard was violent thrashing, inhuman roaring and weapon discharges.

Soon it was just the thrashing and chorus of gunfire. Then the gunfire alone, as even lacking movement and noise, everyone wanted to make damn sure whatever was in the room was good and dead.

“Status.” Was commanded over the squad vox as Konrad tried to get a headcount. All but two of his squad sent the all clear signal.

Ike himself answered “I’m fine. Took a hit to the head, but it was a glancing blow. Good thing too.” Ike made a gesture over to where the chunk of wall had ended up, letting Konrad see how deeply it had embedded itself into the ground where it had ended up. “This is why you always wear a helmet.”

Once Ike was done, a second voice spoke up belonging to Organa. “Got clipped by some of the door when it exploded, but the armor took the brunt. Still combat ready.”

Letting out a breath as Konrad took some comfort in his squad still being alive, he instead turned his attention to what exactly they had just killed.

It… was honestly difficult to tell what he was looking at. Part of that was because of the combined fire, volkite and solid bullet damage that had worked together to end its wretched existence, but he honestly could say that even without all that, it wasn’t anything that belonged in a sane universe.

It’s… mass seemed to fill up the room they had found it in. Considering how it was literally destroying the building around it, it was possible that it physically couldn’t leave the room, but Konrad was more inclined to think that it had just entered an animal panic due to the fire.

It didn’t… seem to have skin. Granted, the battle damage made it hard to be absolutely certain and its remaining bulk meant that seeing a piece of it that was unharmed would require hacking it to pieces to gain access to the room proper, but Konrad’s impression was that it didn’t seem to have flesh to begin with.

In fact, looking closer at one of its less burned ‘limbs’… it looked like a misshapen human fist connected to a mutated forearm… if both of them were a random amalgamation of body parts from multiple humans.

Once he saw it, understanding revealed the true horror to Konrad in that terrible moment. The whole creature, a singular solid mass big enough to fill up an entire living space (or as good as filled it up from what they could see), was an amalgamation of who knows how many people, twisted into this… thing via methods that Konrad couldn’t help but automatically label as profane in his mind.

On an intellectual level, Konrad knew that this thing would have terrified him back before he became an Astartes; both the thing itself and the ramifications of how it came to be. But now…now it just filled him with hate at how revolting it all was. In both of his hearts, he hoped that his squad would find the monsters who had created this thing so that they could be properly disposed of.

Speaking of.

“Secure the position while we set up another melta charge to try and break up this crime against humanity into pieces so Ike can properly burn it to ash. I don’t want it to return to life behind us.”

His squad only had so many melta charges but making sure this… thing didn’t become an active threat again was worth a second one. You couldn’t trust the monsters of Ursh to stay dead after all.

Still, Konrad doubted that this was the only ambush or trap on this floor but by the Emperor, he was going to see this level secured or die trying.

---

In ages long past the capital of what had become the barbarian confederacy of Ursh had been fed by a river, the long forgotten dream of drinkable surface water flowing into a community of untainted humanity. That dream was long dead, and all that remained of the river was steep blasted cliffs, a chasm running into the heart of the citadel that had been a city.

It was an obvious point of ingress and the enemy knew that too, the terrain around the valley had been blasted flat and festooned with defensive emplacements, while the walls of the valley bristled with horror ready to descend upon any that dared the journey.

Perhaps in challenge, the Imperium had answered.

Bombardment of epic scale had given the forces of the Emperor the ability to approach, to prepare their own positions across the blasted wasteland around the valley, holding the enemy in place while hardier, more mobile, forces prepared to risk the gauntlet of the valley. A blade right to the heart of the Ursh citadel if they would succeed, a death of nightmares in failure.

The forces of Ursh, encamped in trenches, dugouts, and shielded fortifications running the length of the valley wall, were well prepared to weather conventional bombardment by even the most ferocious of artillery fire. They were not granted the opportunity to demonstrate their resilience. Basilisks of the XXI Astartes Legion, behind the cover of other Imperial Forces were deployed, and began to saturate the trenchlines of the valley walls with what was quickly becoming the reputed principle tactical armament of choice for the irregular Legion - specialized chaff artillery. The defender’s lines were saturated with suffocating silvery fog that disrupted auspex and vox in turn, leaving the entire length of the defenses in disarray, unable to see or call out in alarm.

The defenders were not so helpless as most opponents, however. Armed with enigmatic and terrifying weapons from the height of the Dark Age of Technology, they opened fire, blindly, and saturated the already flattened approach to their lines with mortars that unleashed devastating chemical weaponry upon the land; already calibrated and zeroed in to allow for perfect area denial in spite of the crews manning them having been rendered blind. Humming, energetic area-denial emplacements crackled with invisible energies, reducing anybody caught in their cones of effect to heaps of steaming, flash-vaporized meat and metal. Slavering mutant hounds infused with the howling energies and denizens of the Warp prowled the lengths of the trenches, undeterred by the loss of vision - for they did not need eyes to see. They called out warnings along the lines and jumped up onto the trenchtops as the Astartes of the XXI approached through the fires and seething hazards of the approach, many of them falling even as they reached the trenchlines - but the survivors bent to their grim purpose, adapted to mastery of the environment they had prepared with their bombardment. With storm bolters, auto-launchers, and specially crafted melee claw-blades, they crested the ridge of the trenches and rained hellish mayhem down upon their trapped and ambling enemies - able to see each other and their foes with perfect clarity even as the defenders flailed and died blindly in their pit.

The conflict was not quite so one-sided as the XXI would have preferred. As the defending trenchlines began to break, individual section leaders saw to the deployment of their most fearsome weapons before they were cut down. Large, trench-clearing leveler machines, bristling with servo arms, faced with screaming drill-pieces, and spewing noxious chemical fumes that flooded the trenches even further, stirred to life and began to take to pieces anything that dared stand before them - both their own supposed allies, as well as the marines of the XXI.

The Astartes served their purpose as they fought on however - fully occupying and deteriorating the defenders in their trenches, the billowing silvery mist from their chaff munitions spreading over the course of the battle, licks of it blowing along the ground and over the edge of the valley sides. Not enough to spill down into the valley proper, but enough to signal the efforts of the XXI and indicate that the enemy was being met and occupied. Below, the thrust of the Imperium’s attack along the valley floor began in earnest - the dagger thrust.

That blade was the greatest that the Imperium could offer, born from centuries of war and drowned in tempests of blood. They had been there from the start, propelling the Master of the Lines from His enclave in the Himalazians down into the blood-soaked hills of Akkad and across the apocalyptic wastes of Terra. They were born for war, made greater by war, and created to die in war. They were forged with lightning strikes from a brewing tempest. They were born from the ingenious mind of Humanity’s greatest conqueror. They were guided through the conviction, will, and strength of their Master. Their footsteps were the rumble of thunder on a dry plain. Their voices were the crescendo of fulguration. Their will was as indomitable as their souls were pure. Their might was unparalleled, even in the face of Mankind’s oldest monstrosities. Their ferocity was the demise of Terra’s scattered arch-tyrants and cynical hierophants. Their strength cleaved the likes of fleshborn nightmares of titanic proportion.

Thunder Warriors.

A thousand of them strode the blasted rock of the desecrated, shattered valley as if they were thunder itself. Their banners were raised high, each bearing symbols from each of the twenty Legiones Cataegis that conquered all of Terra. They sprinted into the fray with screams on their lips, garbed in the best that the Imperium could offer in their dying throes. The vaults of Himalazia had been opened to them to conquer their last and greatest foe. Shields, old and new, crackled as autocannons and heavy stubbers ceaselessly pelted their great host. Disintegrators, vortex cannons, and magrails unraveled those in the valley. Blades and lances of plasma pierced carapace and shield alike as they descended on the Urshic hordes that awaited them.

None could tell that there was strategy amongst them. Each bore heraldry vastly different from the next, yet each proudly held the Raptor on their chestplate and pauldron. Armored, mechanized machines of flesh locked in steel trudged alongside them, spraying death across the valley from ill-fitted heavy weapons that replaced arms. Great warmachines, akin to the Imperialis Praetoros of the God-Slayers, viciously raced to meet Urshic vehicles that awaited them. The host was everything and all that the Legio Cataegis could offer; nothing was spared from the final task given to them by the Emperor.

At the forefront, the God-Slayers led the way as living legends given form. Fifty was their number. Fifty bore equipment specialized to handle the task before them. They were midnight clad in great suits of heavy ceramite-plasteel composite that rivaled the technobarbarian warlords of the early years. Their helmets were knightly raiments with piercing, crimson glares. Cloaks of alabaster white billowed behind them as their kinetic fields flashed with prismatic light. They bore the weapons of fallen tyrants in one hand and the apocalyptic deathspitters of the Dark Age in the other. Their path was drenched in Urshic blood, caked in the splattered bodies of Kalagann’s followers. They led the way forward.

Primarch Aeternus swung Apocrypha to his right, slicing into a vityaz that had raised their blasphemous axe to defend himself. In the last second before contact, Rex activated the plasmafield and cut through the enemy’s weapon with disgusting ease. He snapped his wrist left, unloading Ea into a group of raiders charging into a formation of Steel Lords. Each of their number exploded into viscera as the bolts connected with pierced flesh. The Emperor’s Blade shouldered his way into the next group of Urshites as explosions and bullets surrounded him. For every enemy that he could not personally slay, any number of the Cataegis died. Every enemy that laid before him, slain by his black blade, was replaced with another that dared to fight back. Their numbers were ceaseless, some were clearly born from Mosvoroth and others as slave-warriors from other techno-barbarian states. He killed them all the same.

A spare glance at his auspex confirmed that they had pushed no further than a third of the way into the valley. Dozens of voices gave their reports over the vox. Some were from Cataegis that were coherent enough to retain their mental faculties. Others were from the Thunder Warriors that were quickly devolving into things that simply fought and died without concern. He had been forced to tune his vox to the command net, linked to the various Thunder Primarchs and their praetors. Regardless of their cognitive resilience, they all said the same thing. They were dying faster than they could charge and the Urshites were filling in from everywhere. Artillery pounded the valley walls, yet they continued to reinforce where they died.

The enthusiastic roar of Alexamandes drew his attention as the Primarch flung himself into a group of vukodlak. Their flesh-metal claws tried to claw into the Infernal Phoenix to no avail, his greataxe cutting into them faster than they could respond. The warriors of his legion followed shortly after, recklessly plunging into the abyss as they died. Coherency amongst the Legio Cataegis was pointless. Too many had lost their minds already. Only a handful of the Thunder Primarchs and their legion were aware enough to execute combat doctrine. He was thankful that the God-Slayers led from the front, guiding those who had lost themselves to the flaws.

He raised his boot and caved in the chest of an Urshic gunman, stepping back down onto his skull to ensure that their corpse wouldn’t reanimate. Aeternus felt every inch of strain in the warsuit as he pushed it forward on unfamiliar limbs. The fibre-bundle muscles of the armor were a mess, yet each movement, regardless of input, saw his enemy flee or die. It was a boon and a burden. Tyrant Armor. The heaviest plating available to the Cataegis, scavenged and repurposed from the deities they had slain across Terra. It was fitting to use the refitted armor and weapons of the technobarbarian warlords to slay the last tyrant.

“Push onward! Glory to the Emperor! Glory to the Imperium! Raptor Imperialis!” Aeternus roared out through his helmet. He raised the banner of the Imperium in his left hand and slammed it down where he stood. Hundreds of voices joined him in their own indistinct cries for their Emperor or Unity. Warriors that had lost themselves to the flaw recovered as the Raptor Imperialis flew over them. They pushed on in their uncertain state, killing and slaying Urshites where they could.

+’We must break the stalemate. Rally to the banner and push!’+ His voice broke through the voxnet, clear and proud as a lion’s roar. If he could not force a breakthrough with the God-Slayers alone, then the combined weight of the Thunder Primarchs would shatter their armor like glass.

+’All that plate, and you’re still too light?’+ Ushotan’s sneer carried through the vox, but Aeternus could have seen it himself had he but a moment to glance back. The Steel Lords held close behind the God-Slayers’ shoulder, a grim monolith of grey metal that caught what was shattered by the speartip and ground it ruthlessly underfoot. Very few of them now remained, a pitiful shadow of the unbreakable phalanx that had once ground Maulland Sen to dust, but each was a veteran of a hundred sieges, a blooded slayer of witches and daemons, and this battle was their element. Perhaps it was that, or merely their legendary stubbornness, but none of them was yet clouded by bloodlust, their squared ranks as firm and close as they had ever been.

The grey-clad Primarch bellowed an order, and like sliding plates of armour the Fourth Cataegis rearranged themselves, forming a marching line before the flag. A fusillade of bolter fire brought low a flock of skeletal gargoyles that had once been men, tearing the fiends out of the grimy sky as they sought to sweep down on the Thunder Warriors’ loose flank. Waves of the dead and the plagued rose to crash into them, the sheer mass of flesh dragging steelclad giants to the ground, but still they grimly held, their deaths buying time for their brethren to assemble.

Aeternus’ rallying cry had come at a providential moment for one of those selfsame scattered wings. There the Red Knights had broken away from the charge in an ill-advised rush, their sight by now misted over with crimson to match their armour. A pack of wily long-toothed oupires had baited them close to the withered riverbank with the temptation of cutting open their blood-swollen bellies, and thus they had strayed into the fire of infernal cannons above. The last of Charmagnol’s lot would have heedlessly perished under the blasts of tainted flame, had the call not snapped their eyes back to the center - and there their old rivals the Annihilators, converging to it from the other end in a feral rush. Where sanity had yielded, enmity won over, and unwilling to be beaten to any prize by Jotharion the Knights turned to rejoin the heart of the fight.

Whereas the frenzied howls and charges of the final Cataegis strewn about the valley, there came a calculated and deliberate movement through the blasted No-man’s Land that had become the valley. The dogs of war had been loosed from their leashes in a maddening final battle, yet there came the forces that brought order to the battlefield. The Steel Sentinels strode forward, operating nothing more than as a reserve force as the tumultuous battles of Ursh had whittled their numbers low. Where the Red Knights had run forwards in a final blood frenzy, the Sentinels came to restore order. Shields were activated, swords flashed as they cleaved through those that the Categis did not, offering a secure rear so that the Thunder Warriors would not be wasted in an encirclement.

Volkite fusilades blared as they stepped slowly and methodically behind those final sources, footholds were secured by their presence, and ground would not be given should the Categis meet their end. Arturas stabbed his sword into the heart of a wyrd, struggling to claw back towards the fight, his entrails spilling as the astartes brought his sword up. He looked to his left to meet the gaze of a Gallahad, speaking, “The Categis push hard, too hard. They risk encirclement the more they lose themselves.”

“Shall I request the Black Hawk to restore order?”

There was a swift response to the question, “No.”

A vox blared as Arturas spoke to Aeturnus, not concerning himself with those who were too lost in the blindness of battle. ‘+ Lord Aeternus, the Categis are at risk of encirclement. We are attempting to secure your rear; be cognizant of this. +’

The vox warbled, a new voice, sanity fraying in the edges of the tinny vox feedback, responded before even Aeternus could, ‘+ Lord Aeternus is aware, we are all aware, runt. My forces push the ridge; the toll is heavy. We push the ridge. +’ the vox cut out

Apocalypsos, his duel-wielded axes thick with blood and unidentifiable ichor, pressed forward on Aeternus’ flank. His men slaughtered all that stood before them, silent rage propelling them to their final glorious deaths as surely as it brought the end of any Urshiite standing before them.

Apocalypsos had seen it first, a gap in the defenses, a stretch of emplacements and trenches where the heads of the defenders numbered just a few less per squad than elsewhere. As much as he found the Astartes loathsome, he could not deny the effectiveness of the suicidal assault taking place at the lip of the ridge. The XXI, for all their worth, were thinning the herd.

‘+ Aeternus, my men break their flank, +’ he voxxed, conveniently leaving out the role the Astartes above were playing in this act, ‘+ Expect opportunity for a breakthrough shortly, Raptor Imperialis. +’ The vox dropped dead as the Primarch of the XVII Legio Cataegis let himself be lost in the bloodshed and smoke of war.

The fighting in the valley grew into a new crescendo of violence. Aeternus could feel the thrum of malevolent power, motorized engines, and the screaming of men and women as if it pounded against his soul. He knew that further afield of the valley was a greater war being won by the Emperor. The battle in front of him, however, was all that he needed to win. Win and survive, he thought grimly as the Cataegis began to reform a coherent line. Fresh vigor filled his lungs as the Legiones conformed to his will.

The western flank reformed as Charmagnol and Jotharion reeled in their Red Knights and Annihilators respectively. Napoleos and his Dawnhunters anchored themselves into the leftmost approach, their spears rallying the Nineteenth and Fifth Legiones back into fighting form. Aeternus was thankful that the regrouping was possible with the assistance of Corvinius and Sunxian on the opposite ridges of Apocalypsos. How many had already died for the ridgeward Cataegis to claim their advantage? It was a thought quickly expelled as the eastern flank returned to fighting form.

Alfovathan and Gilgamenses torched the earth with their combined strength to recuperate, aided significantly by Apocalypsos’ contributions above them. The Umbra Paladins and the Amethyst Tridents pushed the rightmost wing as a single unit. The former echoing the Steel Sentinel’s sword-and-shield tactics, while the latter cautiously used their disciplined polearms and long-range armaments to pound into the Urshic menace. No doubt their advance would’ve faltered were it not for the leaderless legions that blended into their number.

The Radiant Spears, Raptor’s Claws, Titan Scythes, Ashen Marauders, Cobalt Phantoms, and Storm Blades reinforced what remained of their legions. Without their own Primarch to guide them, Aeternus knew they were significantly less effective even with their praetor replacements. It was a fact that was evident in the way they spilled their own blood on Urshic blades or willingly sacrificed themselves to push the advance a single inch. Their valiant sacrifice would be forever remembered to him.

Primarch Bodiciia pulled herself back from the slaughter, her Verdant Raiders now falling into line with the center of the Cataegis Blade. Urshic ichor of varying hues drenched her armor, while fresh wounds weeped Imperial blood from her limbs. The Nightbringers fell in with the Second Legion, Aeternus had no doubt that Theaddon still lived and remained close to what remained of his Thunder Warriors. As Ushotan and the Steel Lords found their ground around him, Rex spared a glance at the auspex one final time. He grit his teeth in frustration. The Infernal Phoenixes and Caged Dogs were far ahead of the advance, lost to their geneflaw or drawn into bloodlust. The Primarch of the First could waste no more time on them.

+’Advance!’+

The continued barrage from the XXI, support from the rearward Imperial Army, and the ridgeward advance from the Cataegis allowed their movement. Aeterneus Rex hefted the banner in his left hand, raising it up into the sky to signal the continuation of the attack. Few and far were the times that the Cataegis ever moved as a single unit. This became one of those times as the Thunder Warriors simultaneously pushed forward with bolter and chainsword. The lumbering dreadnoughts, formidable and slow, lunged into the valley with reckless abandon. The heavy bark of Imperial tanks resounded behind the march, breaking apart mutants and mortals for their continued aggression.

Every step that the Imperials took was a titanic effort. The uneven grounds of the valley were quickly filling with the shattered bodies of the Thunder Warriors, eviscerated carcasses of the slave-mutants, and the remains of Kalagann’s preternatural monsters. The Cataegis, however, were making progress beyond the scope of possibility. Groups of Urshites died for every one Imperial laid low. Sorcerers were crushed by fist and fury. Monstrosities were torn apart by frenzying genewarriors, lost to the geneflaw born to them by the Emperor.

Primarch Aeternus could feel the strain on his mind as he fought from the forefront. His attention was divided a hundredfold between the various Cataegis Legions, the fighting in his immediate vicinity, and the plethora of chronometers screaming in his ear. Perhaps it would’ve been better to command from the rear, guiding his warriors like the Emperor had once upon a time. He refused. He would fight, command, and win from the front. There was no realm where he would accept leading from a comfortable position.

A body flew past him. One of the many Infernal Phoenixes’ who lost their mind, floundered into the backlines of their advance. He didn’t have the time to register it. His attention was affixed to the beings that barred their way past the middle of the valley. The first of many tribulations that would come to meet them. The first of Kalagann’s titanic monstrosities that dared to rear its ugly maw at the Emperor’s vanguard. Where the unwashed masses of arisen corpses, half-bestial slave-warriors, and low-ranking vityaz had battered against the mass of the Cataegis, the true might of Ursh awaited them.

A vast line of unholy creatures with cannons strapped to their back launched wyrd ammunition into the Cataegis. Vityaz with powered armor glowing with the corruption of their unsaid gods patiently waited, guarding the instruments of their God-King against the Imperial advance. Lumbering far and above them, a trio of titanic creatures reminiscent of the Urshic migou waited with their toothy maws splayed open. Warplating was haphazardly bolted to various portions of the creatures’ flesh. As if they needed to be protected from conventional weapons, Aeternus thought grimly.

+’XXI, bring down the wrath of the Emperor on those creatures. Apocalypsos, Corvinius, Sunxian. Butcher the ridges and buy us the advance with blade and bolter. Spread the line and push to the beasts!’+ Aeternus commanded with a roar, affixing the auspex with new telemetry. Fresh battle lines were drawn across the map from tacticians and vox-operators far behind the advance.

“Arturas! Theaddon!” the Primarch of the First yelled, passing off the banner to a nearby Steel Lord. Aeternus began to sprint, charging through a group of dredges and flattening them into pink mist. He had a small window to act in the moments following the Astartes’ artillery barrage. Rex needed to reach the center as the first shells began to pelt the creatures or the advance would flounder. As if notifying the sudden aggression from their commander, the heavily armored God-Slayers started to push the line.

+’Received, Primarch.’+ Came the punctual response from one of the XXI Legion’s Astartes Captains. +’Mechanized artillery repositioning now. Firing for effect in t-minus thirty seconds with standard high-explosive fragmentation shells. We are patching a spotting vox frequency to you and your elements; our Basilisks have an allotment of hunter-killer missiles ready to fire at your designation. Make free use of them.’+

There was a momentary break in the vox signal as the thunder warriors arrayed for their charge - and then the signal came, accompanied by the shrill, keening, resonant hum of a multitude of Earthshaker shells raining down along a parabolic arc to fall straight down onto the assembled Urshic lines in a rolling, staggered wave of munitions, striking first at the titan creatures and the Vityaz vanguard before the curtain of fire drew back to hammer the beasts situated in the rear with their wyrd-cannons.

+’We now greet the enemy with the closed fist of the Emperor’s Contempt.’+

The first wave of shells stabbed into the earth, several slicing directly into the backs of the titanic monstrosities and other landing adjacent to or amongst the Vityaz vanguards. Plumes of explosive flames specked with piercing shrapnel surged like the tide itself, the Thunder Warriors charging towards a wall of flame and death. As the fires began to recede, the damage became evident - Each shell left an impact crater between eight and fifteen meters in diameter, many of them overlapping substantially, the floor of the ravine having been pounded flat in many places by the amassed bombardment. The Vityaz forces had been scattered - the corrupted forces empowering them had prevented many of them from succumbing even to the immense force of the bombardment strikes, but even though could not withstand the raw force that had tossed them about like dolls and upheaved the very earth beneath their feet, disrupting their fortifications and lines. The Earthshaker cannons had lived up to their name, and the Urshic vanguard was left in disarray.

---

Mortal men died as the XXIst swept the trenches of all life. Methodical and smooth, the Astartes snuffed out every bastion of resistance, every pocket of heroic last stands was met with disgrace at the end of Imperial bolter and blade, and every attempted withdrawal was slaughtered as they broke from the cover of their trenches and dugouts to find shelter in a more rearward line. The squads of the XXIst, their senses enhanced by their armor systems able to cut through the dense chaff they had laid in advance of themselves, moved inexorably toward victory.

Out beyond the trenchline, in the blasted land between the Emperor’s transhumans and mortals of Ursh, the damned moved in silence toward the Imperial advance. The systems of the XXIst, honed and tested to cut through the dense chaff, found no signs of the incoming raiders. Cloven hooves splashed through puddles of radwater and blood, wicked curved blades sliced through the smoke of battle, leaving fresh air in their wake as they ghosted toward the bleeding edge of the XXIst legion.

A bipedal, avian-headed, humanoid burst from the smoke and chaff in no-mans-land with a screech, its blade arcing out for a decapitating strike against a legionnaire, too slow. It was blasted back by a bolt round from another of the astartes’ squad, iridescent blue blood raining across the trench as the body simply disappeared into the mist. The only sign it had ever existed at all was the pungent smell of lapping oils and incense penetrating the filter systems of the Astartes armor.

With the first strike failed by the new Urshic raiders, the charge began in earnest. A cacophony of animalistic clicks, brays, and bird-like calls rang out from the smoke and chaff, dulled only slightly as the creatures barreled toward the Imperials, and hundreds of the beasts descended upon the XXIst’s forward squads as one.

It was then that the XXI’s lethal sweep through the trenchlines was stalled - and then driven back. The Astartes had prepared to create a battlefield of their choice; to blind and hamstring the enemy and to fight in an environment where the foe could not strike back - but these new creatures were bound by no earthly sensory limitations. They did not need eyes to see, noses to scent, tongues to taste, or flesh to feel. The Astartes, for all their plans, had partially blinded themselves - and when these new fiendish enemies fell upon them, their lines could not even call out to reorganize, the hideous haze of chaff rendering their own vox all but useless.

The marines of the XXI had trained for this form of scenario - and their squads began to make back in a fighting retreat, looking for their kin to form a stable battleline once more as they did so. Those squads who did not sense that the conflict had gone awry, who did not fall back swiftly enough, who could not find the line reforming behind them - were set upon and torn asunder by the Avian creatures.

The XXI suffered, then. But as they suffered, they continued to embattle the trenchlines surrounding the valley proper - whenever it seemed their wavering lines would be fully repulsed, the lines of Basilisks and Chimera that formed the backbone of their assault would scythe the Daemons down with volleys of rockets and heavy bolter fire - and time and time again, the Astartes drove the Daemons back into the glinting dagger mist of their chaff artillery to renew their prosecution in earnest. Charged by not only Primarch Aeternus, but by the decree of the Emperor himself, unfearing of death or loss, they held the ridge of the vale - even as the pitiless Daemons tore their uneven flanks and exposed squads to shreds.

---

The Steel Sentinels had continued their primary objective and ensured that the forces of the Cataegis did not fall to encirclement. Yet, with the surge the Thunder Warriors took at Aeturnus’ orders, those of the nineteenth legion could not stand idle. They were forced to advance rapidly, cutting down foes that did not die or were simply ignored by those maddened in blood frenzy. The small force of sentinels were cursed to begin spreading themselves to cover more of the valley proper. Each of them had to fight as two Astartes, none firing Volkite and hacking into the ranks of wyrds and abominations.

Arturas knew that he lacked the firepower to deal with the titanic threat that stalked the battlefield and merely needed to hope that the artillery of the XXI could fell them - or merely distract them. He and his first brothers, however, were not ones to shy away from a challenge for they had fought beside the God-Slayers before and they knew how to kill monsters. His retinue prepared what Melta-charges they carried.

The path forwards would be cleared with blood and sacrifice of need be. Those of the most senior of the legion surged forwards quickly embroiling themselves within the ranks of the Cataegis, killing and moving as quickly as their gene-crafted bodies allowed them. They forced themselves through, while the Cataegis gorged themselves on slaughter needing to move faster and faster than what their bodies could allow. Arturas could see the Primarch advancing, yet, he would not stop for him as unstoppable as Aeternus was in the sea of blood and gore.

“Forwards, brothers!” Arturas roared as his brothers sprinted through all they could, not stopping as rounds bounced off their armor or as explosives rocked against their shields, “Bring down the central-most titan! Designate the others for hunter-killer strikes!”

The Urshic line was shattered by the onslaught orchestrated by the XXI. Slave-warriors buckled under the reinvigorated assault of the Imperials. Vityaz desperately tried to rally through prayer and slaughter. Creatures of the Empyrean brayed and screamed in desperation to remain in the mortal realm. The Cataegis and the Astartes annihilated their way through the valley, butchering mortal and godbound alike in remorseless brutality. Unlike in the initial stages, the genewarriors of the Emperor did not suffer under the overwhelming bite of Kalagann’s horde. The valley rigids were contested, their daemonic allies killed, and their morale scattered to the wind.

As if smelling their victory, the Imperial line suddenly began to naturally shift into a three-pronged trident. The Primarch of the First led the center of the spear, Charmagnol on the left, and Gilgamenses on the right. There was no overt command to do so. The Cataegis simply did, executing orders unsung and massacring the enemy before them. The western ridge remained locked in a constant state of conflict, threatening to spill over into the valley with every passing second. The eastern ridge was pressed by the sudden appearance of monsters, though the XXI and Apocalypsos handled it with practised ease.

Each prong of the Imperial trident met with the wayward elements of the Infernal Phoenixes and the Caged Dogs, though they were heavily depleted and still fighting as recklessly as before. They fought faster, harder, and more manic than they had at the start of the fight. For every Cataegis of those legions lost in their geneflaw, the Urshic horde lost entire groups worth of combatants. Their butchery saw even the dead remain unrisen, cut to pieces with such brutality that they could not reanimate. By sheer luck, those that lost their mind hurled themselves into the enemy and not their allies.

Aeternus did not have time to account for the losses of the Tenth and Fifteenth, nor did he have time to figure out which Primarchs were still alive. He barely had time to register that Corvinius and Sunxian had yet to acknowledge his orders. His brain burned in a desperate attempt to keep track of everything while he butchered through a horde of Urshites. Out of the corner of his vision, Rex could see the indicators of his God-Slayers slowly tick down to forty-one of their original fifty. The Primarch, with his sense alone, could feel Ushotan, Theaddon, Arturas, and Bodiciia close to him. Every time he flicked his blade to the right, he could see Gilgamense’s flank fighting and dying. Every time he flicked Ea to the left, Charmagnol was ferociously tearing into the enemy. It was chaotic - yet it was manageable.

Briefly, he could make out the sound of Arturas’ call for hunter-killer strikes. He couldn’t have agreed more as he crashed through a vityaz, whose strength had left them in the artillery aftermath. Apocrypha, edged in crimson, cut through flesh and armor with disgusting ease - beyond what he thought was acceptable. Despite the thought, the Primarch didn’t hesitate to continue cutting them down. An auspex ping alerted him to the location of his last few surviving Captains - Nero - as they assisted leading the God-Slayers on the western flank. Another chime saw Tiberius coldly operating on the eastern flank. Each led ramshackle squads of the remaining First Legio, acting as rallying points and balls of utter annihilation. He was glad they still lived. Few would survive this encounter.

The center of the valley finally greeted his sight as the vityaz attempted to rally out of their battleshocked formation. It was too late for Kalagann’s knights. The thunder had come. He barreled into the first enemy with such herculean strength that their skeleton threatened to rip from their skin. Apocrypha licked out once to the right, slaughtering a pair attempting to flank him. Ea flicked out to the left, demolishing an Urshite with his fist and suppressing a cluster of encroaching migou. An avian creature attempted to ambush him. He headbutted it with his helmet, splattering the wyrd corvid into sulphur-scented ash. Every kill brought him closer to the titans.

Those horrible, abominable titans loomed overhead as he killed more and more of the vityaz. They were still reeling from the artillery, desperately waving their elongated limbs out in vain defense. The gargantuan on the western flank lashed out like a petulant child, slamming their claws into the valley floor to pulverize enemy and ally alike. An untold amount of Cataegis died in that one fit of rage, yet Aeternus couldn’t focus on it. The being in the center, slightly taller than the other two, was his target. He wasn’t alone in aiming for the beast. Bodiciia fought savagely to his immediate left with her axe, while Theaddon lashed out to his immediate right with his powersword. The staccato of bolterfire behind him warned of Ushotan and his Steel Lord’s closeness. The Primarch of the First rushed to the titan with Arturas close behind him.

“Ushotan! Handle the cannons!” Primarch Aeternus ordered. His voice was hoarse from screaming by this point, enough that he wasn’t sure if the command was heard. It mattered little. Those lumbering creatures with metal-flesh, humming cannons would die to one of his allies. Rex deliberately chose to ignore them, trusting in the skill and prowess of the Imperials around him.

+’Bring down His wrath!’+ The Primarch of the First roared over the vox. Their targeting solution had been acquired for several minutes already due to Arturas. All that was required of the XXI was a press of the button and the men to orchestrate another wave of devastation.

The order for the missile strikes went out. This time, there was no preceding vox affirmation or countdown from the XXI. The hunter-killer missiles launched from their chimeras were a breed apart from the earthshaker artillery they mounted. Using solid rocket fuel for propellant and with dedicated logis-engines and gyroscopic guidance, they combined power, agility, and speed that even a Thunder Warrior would have envied. Even launched straight up from the tops of their parent Chimeras, they were able to parabolically loop through the air, dive downwards into the valley, and strike their targets in under a second and a half.

The sight of it could only inspire awe in onlookers. In that second-and-a-half span, the nail-shaped munitions tore down from atop the vale like scathing claws, riding crowns of flame and leaving scars of emission behind them in the air tracing their trajectory in reverse. On approach, the air itself shattered as the missiles violently parted it, a keening wail heralding their approach and a thunderous crescendo accompanied them. Six in total rode down from atop the edge of the vale. The two titanic monstrosities striding abreast the one leading their triad were stabbed into by two of the missiles each. The titan on the eastern flank, reacting to the sound of the approaching hunter-killers, had turned partially to behold them and suffered the misfortune of one of the missiles diving headlong into its gaping maw while a second cleaved directly downwards into its crown. The simultaneous detonations that followed blew the monstrous creature apart from the inside-out while compressing the shredded, visceral remnants and jagged armor metal fragments downward, reconfiguring the titan into a stew of bubbling flash-cooked organic resin heaped with chunks of armor fragments pooling inside a crater where once the Urshic monster had stood while a majestic plume of flame unfurled into the sky, incandescent flames marking the spot where an enemy of the Emperor had been unmade. The second titan fared better than the first, not having turned to look at the oncoming strikes. One missile slammed directly into its armored flanks, while the other obliquely skewered into one of its gargantuan eyes. This time, the twin detonations did not quite kill it - the first missile’s melta-warhead burning straight through the armor with a concentrated lance of fusion-fire that reduced its innards to smoke and caused the crude armor plating bolted to its hide to dissolve into luminous molten fluid that dribbled across its hide and mutilated the creature further. The second missile caused its giant eye to rupture, organic membranes and cerebral fluid alike boiling away as fusion-fire screamed its way through the creature’s cranium to vaporize an entire hemisphere of its brain. That entire half of its bulbous, misshapen cranium deformed and deflated as flames filled it with the molten rudiments of its own skull and nervous tissue - but the creature did not die, instead falling to the ground with a harrowing cry from its gaping maw that would surely induce as much pain in mortal men as the creature actually felt, the resonance of its anguish bearing otherworldly potency.

Two more hunter-killer missiles curved into the back lanes of the cannon-bearing creatures situated behind the titans and their Vityaz elements, striking and eliminating two of the monstrous creatures in an instant, reducing them to billowing wafts of shredded, burning skin. Many more of the wyrd-projectile firing creatures remained, but the raw shock and awe of the strikes in the back lines caused several other of the creatures to be briefly unsettled and distracted from the battle itself as they reacted to two of their own being erased from the face of the Earth, while the Vityaz soldiers were still panicked and seeking cover along the nearby terrain.

That moment of disorientation would prove fatal. The giant gun-beasts that staggered forward, instinctively avoiding the deflagration, found themselves stumbling into a crossfire that suddenly opened its jaws before them. A loose line of Thunder Warriors emerged from the haze, bolters roaring in the hands of those of them who still had not spent all their magazines. At a glance it was impossible to say which Legion they had once been - the metal of their armour was painted many times over with the black of ash, the red of blood and the less mentionable hues of infernal ichors. But there was no mistaking their grim snarls, the ferocious curl of their scarred lips, the guttering red flame of their Primarch’s sword. Firm as the hardest metal, ragged and dented but yet unbroken, Ushotan’s Steel Lords had rallied to Aeternus’ call.

“The whelps beat us to sparking the kindling!” the Primarch bellowed, voice hoarse but vibrant with bloodlust, “Are you going to let them claim the fire, you sons of dogs?!”

The reply was more of a disjointed and elemental roar than a concerted “NO!”, but it was vehemently punctuated by a new bolter volley. The Steel Lords were a paradox; rampant and savage when in the company of more orderly forces, but now that they were among their own, their rage seemed cooler and more directed than that of most Cataegis. While the warriors who had exhausted their bolts hewed into the disorganised vityaz with their blades, the rest aimed their fire upwards. Not at the heads of the cannon-giants, nor even at the joints of their clublike limbs, but at the howling contraptions of brass and wyrdflame chained to their backs.

Horrifically destructive though they were, the cannons were not things of balanced artifice, but volatile amalgams of hellish alchemy, witchcraft and bound spirits. The Steel Lords’ bolter fire would not have been enough to destroy them, but it did damage their perilous construction, puncturing vitriol sacs, cracking blood-painted sigils, splintering warding talismans. The effects did not let themselves be expected for long. One of the stumbling beasts was instantaneously immolated as a pillar of venom-green flame erupted from its back, reducing its midsection to irradiated cinders. Another began to clumsily turn its hunched frame away from the collapse and left itself exposed to a cluster of grenades, whose initial blast bloomed into a streaming cataract of howling brimstone and struck through the knotted shoulder of its neighbour.

Ushotan himself all but vaulted over the staggered bands of Urshite warriors, charging at a particularly large and hideous cannon-beast. It lowered its horned head as it saw him approach, snapping at him with misaligned slanted jaws, but the Primarch was faster. He pushed past its stomping forelimbs and swung his sword in an upward arc, cleaving into the creature’s sagging underbelly. The plasma-coated blade sank into misbegotten flesh and struck churning unearthly organs. A howl broke out from the giant as its own burning bile consumed it from within, turning to wafts of scorching smoke as it reached the air. Clouded in the putrid fog, the remainder of the monsters ceased firing, vainly stumbling to reposition and only opening themselves further to be cut down by the Steel Lords’ onslaught.

Surging forwards with unending determination, the small squad of the Steel Sentinels had carved a bloody path towards the remaining Titan. The force of the Legion’s finest cut hard and fast - beset on all sides by wyrds, witches, and monstrosities alike. Gallahad swung his sword wide, catching many in a wide arc of gore and death. He had spearheaded this assault, acting as a bulldozer that ran through all he could. Yet, the toll of their spearhead had blunted him, his armor cracked and pierced by all manner of weapon. For the Astartes, it took all his strength to continue the rapid surge forth.

A projectile pierced his side, blowing a hole straight through both sides of his armor and almost forcing him to the ground. The Steel Sentinel held his ground, lungs quickly filling with blood that began to travel up his throat. Each of the command squad knew they had traveled too far to turn back now in their blind charge, each of them began to tire and feel the wounds of the damned they fought begin to catch them. Gallahad turned his head just enough for himself and the Legion Master to meet gazes. Arturas nodded in a wordless order and Gallahad obeyed, priming his Melta-bomb as with all the strength he could yet muster began to run forward, dropping his weapon. He gripped the bomb and held it close - none of the wretched stopped him, not that they could as he trampled mortal and abomination alike under his boot. After getting far enough, there was a small eruption in the disorganized melee as the Melta erupted sending hordes of gore and metal into the air.

Arturas noted the loss of his brother, as he and his remaining few continued to surge forwards - through the broken line. The titanic beast had continued its rampage all the while doing what it could to blunt the Imperial line. The Astartes would, in short order, bring this rampage to an end as Arturas shouted clearly into his vox ‘+Bring it down!+’

Those that could threw their Melta-charges upwards, not heeding the enemies that descended upon them to stop this attack. A cacophony of explosions hit the knee of the titan, a pained roar filling the air as its weight caused its leg to break down causing the great beast to collapse upon itself. Still alive - but crippled as it held itself up on its massive arms, trying to steady itself.

The sea of bodies was parted for the thrust of the dagger. The wyrd-beasts could no longer perform their duties as they were butchered by the Steel Lords, Infernal Phoenixes and Caged Dogs. The Verdant Raiders swept left around the kneeling titan, butchering into the defending vityaz with ruthless abandon. The Nightbringers slaughtered to the right, massacring with what little of them remained to fight. Primarchs Aeternus, Bodiciia, and Theadon sprinted on a warpath to the titan. The final blow before the breach of Mosvoroth.

The Lord of the Verdant Raiders vaulted towards the titan’s raised knee, bashing aside a vityaz that tried to defy her. Weeping wounds dotted her ceramite plating, freshly spilling blood onto the battlefield. She mustered on with a single purpose in mind. With the force of forty-thousand superhumans, Bodiciia of the Second Legio Cataegis hefted her greataxe far behind her and hurled it. The weapon ripped through the air like a javelin thrown by a god, threatening to perforate the soundbarrier from her sheer, murderous force. It did not merely bite into the Urshic giant - it tore through plate, flesh, and bone in a single, brutal maneuver. The Primarch disappeared in a sea of bodies as she collapsed in exhaustion.

The response was felt across the valley. The beast bellowed in outraged agony as another knee had been taken, sundering what remained of its strength to stand. It lashed out with one of its colossal arms to swipe away anything and everything that dared to harm it. Urshites and Imperials were tossed like ragdolls or smashed into gory paste by the attack. It’s rampage didn’t last long as Theaddon closed in on the right arm of the titan, leaping onto the giant’s planted hand to slash with his powersword. The beast attempted to pull back in fury, yet the Nightbringer was already unloading his bolt pistol into cut and exposed flesh. Sinew erupted and tore as the gargantuan ripped free from its forsaken extremity. The Primarch of the Eighteenth leapt back into the melee bathed in titan ichor.

Primarch Aeternus thundered forward as the battle unfolded around him. The Steel Lords had cleared the path. The XXI had allowed them the strike. The Verdant Raiders, Steel Sentinels, and Nightbringers had brought the titan down. All that was left was the killing strike. None of the Urshites remained before him except the gargantuan itself. Reality seemed to waver as the Lord of the First Legio sprinted closer to the being. Killing deities was what he was born for.

The titan snapped out at him as the distance was finally closed. Even in tyrant armor, Aeternus was meteoric in comparison to the Urshic monstrosity. The Emperor’s Blade side-stepped the bite and drove his fist into the left hand of the colossus. Bone and sinew detonated as the Primarch shattered the joint connecting the extremity with a resounding punch. Kalagann’s creature roared in defiance as it finally collapsed, writhing on the ground like the long forgotten worms of Terra’s past. The howl was cut short as Aeternus stepped back to his right, swinging Apocrypha into the beast’s cranium. Crimson-wreathed plasma sawed through the armor protecting it’s skull, then into hardened hide, then into maroon sinew, and finally into bone and grey matter. Vitae ejected out onto the Godslayer in burning chunks, unstable plasmic energy cascading out of the being like a river of blood. It screamed anew in an agonizing song most foul, threatening to burst his eardrums with each cry. He ignored it as he did every monster that he slayed.

“Suffer not the unclean to live!” Aeternus roared as he thumbed the activation rune on his greatsword. Steam violently vented out of the crossguard in a thin veil, rapidly cooling the weapon’s systems as it awakened. He lifted and planted his foot atop the creature’s skull for balance, pressing down with enough force not to be blown backwards by his blade’s plasmic power.

A thunderous crack rolled across the battlefield as Apocrypha finally discharged into the dying titan. The body of the gargantuan bloated and swelled, becoming a self-contained plasmic sun, unstable plasma flowing through it’s veins with living crimson energy. It finally burst into a miniature mushroom cloud of vitae and sinew, cascading titan gore in a short blood-fueled shower around Aeternus. His boot lifted and stomped on the creature’s cranial remains, crushing feeble bone beneath him. Molten plasma seeped from beneath his foot, soaking the valley floor with life once more. The beast was slain, leaving one final gargantuan to finish the valley invasion. The vityaz around him were slaughtered as the last of their morale was crushed, butchered by Astartes and Cataegis alike. Aeternus lifted his gaze to Mosvoroth as the last titan began to topple, doomed to follow it’s kin into oblivion.

At its feet, the ground churned with steel and blood, a spiny morass where the frenzied shapes of men seemed to melt into one another. The Annihilators and Red Knights had charged in to fell the beast, blinded in the last throes of maddened rage to anything but the largest living thing they could see - just as well, for all they saw now was to them an enemy to cut down. Aeternus could barely distinguish between the warriors of the two legions now, washed from head to foot in crimson gore, their armour gouged and broken. Only his expert knowledge of his brothers’ ways let him discern better - here were Knights carving into the monster's ankle with their long overhead strikes, there the last sons of the Fifth Cataegis struck at its pillarlike bones with the sweeps of their axes.

He saw, unmistakable, the two Primarchs emerge from the seething quagmire, made more alike than nature or the Emperor ever could by the sanguine fires of battle. Like the closest of brothers and the bitterest of rivals, they jostled and vied for every step, each burning with the singular will to strike the killing blow. They did not see how the titan's rampant swipes thinned ever more the shrunken ranks of their legionaries, carving gouges of viscera and torn limbs into the dense mass of Thunder Warriors who had lost all thought of their own safety. Blades broke, stuck in masses of impious flesh, glanced from bone spurs and clattered away, and so they fought on with nails and teeth like beasts.

Like a mastodon harried by a pack of slavering hounds, the monstrosity bled out, its legs a ruin of wounded meat that could not hope to support its unnatural mass. With a keening howl, it began to fall, first to its knees and then down to the corpse-choked earth. In a final blaze of animal rage, it opened wide its jaws, and its throat shone from within with the bio-plasmic glow of a scream that would incinerate its slayers.

Jotharion and Charmagnol could have seen their demise rising from the titan’s innards, could have taken a single step back, avoided their doom - if there had been anything left in them but the rabid fervour of carnage. The gigantic head plunged towards them, and as one single body they leapt to meet it. All they felt was the hated enemy approaching within reach of their arms, and the other at their side, that hated and inseparable presence that spurred each of them to strive and surpass someone they could not name for a challenge long forgotten.

As one, the two blades struck deep into the colossal skull, and as one the Primarchs screamed their victory. The titan screamed with them, and its voice was blinding death.

When the glare was gone, Aeternus could see nothing move around the enormous corpse. Gone were the Thunder Warriors, crushed under the toppled enormity or scorched to blackened heaps by the plasmic cry. Gone was the horror’s very head, a carbonised gash all that remained above its shoulders. And gone were Jotharion and Charmagnol, vanquishers and vanquished, who had raced one another into the maw of death itself, and whose contest would now only ever be adjudicated by memory.

And in memory did they become immortal. The Godslayer witnessed their final, glorious moments with bittersweet sorrow beginning to fill his chest. He’d never forget any of their valiant sacrifices - so long as his mind remained his own as the Emperor had said. He was grateful that their deaths were as righteous as they had wanted. The moment of remorse passed no quicker than it had begun, but the pain of their loss remained. His attention was drawn back to the immediate battlelines, now beginning to progressively thin.

An endless cry of victory rose up from across the battlelines as the vityaz attempted to retreat. They were butchered for their cowardice by Astartes and Cataegis - those that had managed to survive the reckless assault on the valley. The last of Kalagann’s wyrd-managerie were slaughtered by relentless cavalcades of scissoring bolter rounds and volkite beams. Combat blade, motorized chainsword, and powered blade mercilessly murdered the wretches that attempted to surrender. Banners were raised in righteous victory, each bearing the raptor and thunderbolt of the Emperor. Glory for Him of Himalazia was on every scarred lip across the battlefield.

The Urshic defense collapsed as whatever remained of their stalwart defenders began to retreat back into Mosvoroth proper. Heavy weapon crews attempted to organize a tactical withdraw, only to be hammered by Imperial artillery and surgical strikes from surviving genewarriors. Limping warmachines tried to scurry back into the gates of the hive-citadel, where murderholes poured out an ever-dwindling deluge of lasfire and bullet into the invaders. The bulk of the Imperial Army quickly filled in where the Cataegis charge had butchered the darktide, units beginning to set up new firing solutions and reinforce the genewarriors where necessary.

Yet the Cataegis continued onward, leaving their dead in the blood-soaked ground of Ursh. Primarch Aeternus remained as the Imperial line readjusted for the final dagger thrust into Mosvoroth. Their objective was completed in the valley - only the fight for the hive remained. He dared not request for the Primarchs to take stock of their numbers. Rex already knew what the casualty list would look like. Twenty five of his God-Slayers remained to fight in Kalagann’s fortress. How many of his siblings remained? He shrugged off the thought. Not now, he thought to himself. He would mourn their loss when Kalagann was dethroned. When the Raptor flew over Mosvoroth - or what remained of it.

+’Reform the line! We will not stop until Kalagann’s head has been cleaved from his body and the Raptor flies over Ursh! For Him of Himalazia! For Unity! Raptor Imperialis!’+ Primarch Aeternus roared over the vox, pushing the Cataegis onward even as they fell to the geneflaw. He knew that he pushed them to their death. In the words of the Emperor - it was His final gift and His last mercy.

The titan-gates of Mosvoroth that had held Ursh from invaders for centuries fell within several seconds of the order. Their defense fell in a shower of artillery fire that rivaled the destruction of Sanctii, vomited from Basilisks, Minotaurs, and Baneblades. The walls of the citadel fractured and cracked from Imperial reckoning, sundering new breaches for the various Imperial forces to enter through. Death sang from every mouth on the battlefield. Glory was gained from every Urshite murdered in their bastion. The end of Ursh was upon them.

---

Credits: @MarshalSolgriev @FrostedCaramel @Terminal @Oraculum @Lauder

---

Consciousness returned to Agama Zur, and he wakened to a dream.

Entombed within the adamantium walls of his sarcophagus, the Astarte floated listlessly as his mind processed the twin streams of memory and digital readouts.

His body was broken, but he was strong. A strength beyond any man, beyond any Astarte, beyond even the Thunder Warrior that had struck him down. His withered muscles, his missing arm, his shattered legs - none mattered now, while he still had his mind. Time was lost to him in his long sleeps, but he still remembered when he was reduced to such a state, and how he had accepted what was to come, for his end.

Agama Zur was right about many things then - never again did he walk, but on one, he had been sorely mistaken. He had once again seen the face of his master, for not even in death did duty end.

The flood of data declared his second body, his salvation, and his grave, ready for combat, and with a shudder of creaking metal, he walked, the sound of his armored foot slamming down echoing back at him as his brothers and sisters took their first fateful steps towards the war they had been created for.

From a hundred battlefields had the Master of Mankind scavenged His soldiers, and to the revenant warriors the campaigns of the First Astartes had come into a cynical clarity. Time and time again, the Legion had been thrown into butchery, but of a calculated sort, leaving just as many maimed as slain to disappear into the tents of chirurgeons and Biotechnical Division laboratories, never to be seen again.

Until now.

The dead marched into the breach, the massive bulk of the warframes marked only with the simple sigil of their Legion and the Raptor of the Emperor. Immense avatars of war walked forward from their transport bays, treading inexorably towards the breach in the black citadel’s walls. They towered over all others upon the field, save the most fearsome of daemon Ursh had brought to bear, and cared nothing for their lessers.

As the Saturnine deployed, Agama Zur began to sing. His death-song rang out, joined by his siblings in their waking dream. The Emperor’s judgement had come.

The wyches of Ursh answered the assault of the dead in kind. A tidal wave of flesh spilled forth from the great breach in the walls. Thousands upon thousands of the civilian mortals of the city, their lives snuffed out from starvation, artillery shelling, or their own “defenders,” poured out toward the advancing Ist Legio Saturnines.

The warmachines, yet unseen on the battlefield, unleashed hellish firepower upon the tidal wave of the dead. They scoured the front ranks, eviscerated the middle, and hammered the rear all at once. But the tide continued. The groaning of the mass of the undead was so loud, its frequency so bass, as to rattle the teeth of the assaulting Astartes, Saturnine or not, as they charged inexorably toward their doom.

The lines clashed. Power fists met rotting flesh, blowing great arcs of the undead apart as the strikes connected. Flamers belched promethium and melted the foe in great sweeping gouts of flame. Assault cannons spat rounds at dizzying rates, point-blank into the mass of flesh. Saturnine fists crushed torsos and scattered brain matter with every sweeping blow. The dead, their morale unbreakable, wavered. But only for a moment.

Above the cacophony of combat, the true enemies arrived. Daemons, their bodies twice the size of the Saturnines, bloated and rotting, swatted their undead allies out of their way. They drooled acid that burned their own flesh as they ponderously galloped toward the advancing line of the Ist Legion. Guttural roars sounded as the two unstoppable forces met in a world-ending display of martial might. Saturnine’s melted under gouts of brown-green vomit from the daemons, or were cleaved in two by rusted blades attempting to pass for swords. Yet the warp-beasts did not go unharmed, several were rent in half by crushing blows or torn to shreds by concentrated supporting fires as the Ist acquitted itself well against such inhuman force.

The melee raged.

The Ist’s Terminators strode forward as the daemons materialized, the greatest among them hefting axes and hammers forged by artisans in the lost days when Mankind had freely strode the stars. The living fought to defend the dead, holding the tide of unreality at bay as the sarcophagus-engines divined targeting solutions from beyond the haze of death. Ancient energies were roused to war once more, and the material anchors of the daemonic host were banished from the sight of the Astartes, born and bred for the salvation of the birthworld.

“We are His judgement,” the Legion Mistress declared, cleaving a daemon’s head off of its body with one swing of her war axe, her Saturnine armor covered in the badges of Unity’s campaigns. The statement, for it was no dramatic cry, was taken up all along the line, an affirmation of will that required no bombast.

A reply came, but not from the enemy. Towering above them, the half-dead heroes of the Legion blared their answer from warhorns, announcing the Emperor’s will to the field.

“Death!” Agama Zur sang as he advanced.

The dreadnoughts arrival on the field tipped the scales. The larger monstrosities, and their smaller companions, their morale unbreakable, pressed their counter assault against the incursion at the breach.

A tide of undead, rotting adversaries continued to spill forth from habzones further into the beleaguered citadel. They stood little chance against the Ist, their ranks obliterated with martial prowess and technological might. But they gave their betters scarce seconds they needed to advance.

The rotting, bloated daemons trampled their smaller allies without care, and batted Ist Legion Astartes aside as afterthoughts in their singleminded rush for the dreadnoughts. The dead things recognized the dead within the Imperial machines, and a hunger to add those lost and broken souls within to their ranks appeared to drive them into a frenzy.

Dreadnoughts cleared huge swathes of the undead with ease, allowing their still living companions room to breathe and maneuver against the onslaught. But it wasn’t without loss. A dreadnought, isolated in a tide of the dead, was dragged under the roiling mass of bodies as a larger of the true daemons slammed into its front with reckless abandon.

With the judgement pronounced, the living Astartes of the Legion fought in a grim silence as they cleared the field for the great titans to do battle. Terminators cut down lesser abominations by the score as they kept themselves well clear from dreadnought and daemon both, the greater conflict becoming a series of duels between the greatest forces to ever stride the surface of Old Earth.

Reality wept as ancient technologies and profane sorceries both made a mockery of physics, each encounter a contest between forgotten science and forbidden warpcraft. But in the end, this was to the advantage of the empyreal host. A daemon shorn of its limbs with a chest cavity made principally of rapidly dissipating elementary particles could still fight, still kill. A dreadnought exposed to the raw fires of the Immaterium was simply dead.

Yet there was one thing that they had which the daemons lacked, one weapon which they did not expect. For as his brothers and sisters continued dying around him, Agama Zur continued to sing. A song of death, of defiance, of all they had fought for and all they had lost - all these things were in the death-song of those trapped in their undying dream. But also of the hope they had carried to their graves, the dream of what they had sought to accomplish, and the will to see it made.

And there before the walls of Ursh, where the fabric of reality itself had grown thin, such things had more power than they ought. Blades and claws, which should have hewed flesh and pierced armor, found themselves catching upon the most unlikely of impediments, while the weapons of the Emperor seemed to hone in on the weakest portions of hide over and over again.

The Legion Mistress hesitated at first, until she too rose her voice in the chorus, the Terminators joining in a dirge as they made ready for their dying day.

The bloated beasts of Ursh pressed forward into the Ist Legion, their numbers felled by blade, bolter, and flame. Yet they did not hesitate; even as they were cut down, they laughed. Their limbs, jerking in death and rent of flesh, caressed the dreadnoughts' armored sarcophagi. Their maws of rotten teeth and swarming carrion flies smiled as they found their ends in the thunderclap embraces of power fists. They sang their own song, insidious and low, a bass thrum that vibrated the teeth of those nearest them and hazed the vision of those further.

Whispers carried on the wind, enticing promises of a future yet to be seen, fleeted at the edge of the Ist Legion’s perception, suggestions of voices tugged at the still fresh minds of the dreadnoughts. Even as flamers belched their acrid concoctions, melting the monsters before them, the dead promised salvation.

“no.”

The voice was so quiet, so small, that it should have been impossible to hear over the din of battle. Yet heard it was, embracing the Astartes in warm reassurance and rebuking the daemon in cold denial. Even so, the song and the whispers continued, as did the fighting and the death.

“No!”

Louder now, firmer, the battlefield seemed to pause as every combatant froze in confusion. The veil was thin here, but not even the creatures of the wyrd knew what their transgressions had roused the attention of. They would not have long to contemplate it.

“No no no no no no no no no no no no no!” the voice cried out again and again, breaking down into choking sobs, sounding from everywhere and nowhere at once. And then the most impossible thing of all happened.

For the first time in countless years, rain began to fall over the blasted lands of Ursh - not the dark, fetid droplets of the bile-storms of the sacrificed hives or the caustic vapor-steam blown in from the rad-wastes, but water pure and untainted. Tongues of silver flame lapped up from where the raindrops fell, engulfing all in the sudden downpour.

The very touch of the corrupt sloughed away where those flames licked, and the wyrdcraft of the enemy quailed at the sight. The Astartes of the Ist were changed as well, infected wounds purified and cauterized, fatigue dropping away as the burden of many wounds was removed as a pack from a weary traveler, and their armor with its stolen colors changed then and there into soot-black etched in blinding silver.

“No!” sounded once more across the field as the Astartes joined in the cry, and the living and the dead poured their wrath into the ranks of the Neverborn, surging then into the breach, entering into the black walls of Earth’s last sorcerer-king.

Behind them were left scores of their fallen, their bodies left in silent repose, united in death in a way none could have foreseen. Whoever they had been before, all now bore the same face.

---

Radiation had long stripped the tundral wasteland to the South East of the city of any lingering life, a long past disaster leeching any vitality remaining in the scorched rock. Even generations of twisted technobarbarian warlords had not bothered to attempt further building or settlement of the territory, a few haunted ruins all that spoke of a long dead metropolis.

The Emperor’s forces were better equipped against such lingering death, however. The power of technology providing defence against a problem of its own making. The grand firepower of the Emperor's armoured legions, vehicle and astartes both, could at least linger in the shadow of the clicking death, and so they rolled forth in number, preparing to bring the heaviest guns of the Imperium to bare on the citadel from a direction it would have been weakest.

Ursh did not care for the survival of its people, but mortal men would die before they could even be of use to their final purpose. So, as the Emperor's vehicles ground on, they found the earth beneath them bursting with activity. Forms made of flesh and metal, towering above even the largest of the Emperor's armour erupting from the rock, intent on carving open the metal shells before them, unaware that to breathe the air around them would mean a slow death to even their twisted forms. Would such things even care if they had the mind to know?

The armoured vanguard that raced to meet them had resolved to render any such question hollow, bearing a far swifter demise. A fleet of light vehicles, rapid and temperamental like wild steeds, had fanned out across the plain ahead of the heavier bulk behind. Rhinos and their manifold cousins from all across the hemisphere, a few wolflike Predators, even armoured and converted rigs of dubious origin made up this scything blade, their drab colours and wreaths of savage trophies marking them as the war-convoy of the Reviled. To cross forbidding wastelands and strike at the enemy’s weakest point was their way, as it had been that of their ancestors, and they would not be halted by either the rad-fields or their monstrous guardians.

Beneath the strung bodies and studded chains, the vehicles had been readied for their greatest battle yet. Their guns were primed and charged. Improvised weapons had been affixed to their prows, giant spikes, boring lances and threshing blades to aid in the slaying of the foe. Most striking however were the shapes that crouched on top of the armoured hulls, uncaring of the radioactive phages that soaked the air. These were Astartes of the Ninth in the final throes of their curse; those afflicted by swollen flesh, plagued by piercing bone or the many consumed by decay until they were almost more machines than men. Their faces were daubed in ash, running with blood as the exposed skin blistered and cracked in the foul air. They knew this would be their final charge, for they had vowed to die for Unity that day rather than slowly rot away.

Engines clashed with mutated muscle, and battle was joined. The guns of the Reviled spat steel and flame, prow-blades impaling monstrous gargantuans even as they flipped transports to the side and cracked open their hulls. Those Astartes within who were not crushed outright spilled out to join their ash-painted brothers, bones broken and skin torn, but their warlike spirits undimmed. From the top of their vehicles, the overgrown bloat-giants fired weapons as heavy as the Rhinos’ own, autocannons and beam carronades bellowing in concert. The plagued and the crippled vaulted onto the colossal bodies of Mosvoroth’s beasts, clambering over them like murderous beetles as their blades sought openings for a mortal strike. They cut, they fell and they died, harsh warcries on their corroded lips.

The beasts of Mosvoroth, their minds of singular searing purpose, seemed to revel in the bloodshed. Bloated warmachines, taller than a Rhino and consisting of crab-like appendages and ballooned, fleshy bodies, hulked weapons meant only to be fired until their short ammunition supplies were drained. They let loose great barking reports from cannons fused to the centers of their bulbous bodies, rending armored vehicles to smoldering hulks with every muzzle flash.

Smaller, more agile monstrosities skulked in their shadows. While their larger allies wrought death en masse, these creatures leaped and bound with a berserker's grace. They wielded wicked swords of barbs, twice their own height, and employed them with brutal efficiency.

The monsters left from the shadows of the artillery walkers, descending upon passing transports of the Ninth in pairs and threes. Rending swipes of their swords took the Reviled closest to them from atop the Imperial machines, and the beasts, skin as red as hot embers, bellowed in excitement as the Astartes of the Ninth turned to face them.

Each vehicle had soon become a tassel in the restless mosaic of battle. Red and brass was everywhere, washing over grey and drab green. The Astartes who clashed with the screaming assailants had found an enemy to their measure, one whose way of fighting unsettlingly mirrored theirs and whose ferocity was no lesser than their own. Fighting in small squads was for the Reviled as much of a necessity now as a well-accustomed tactic, and the narrow space of the transport roofs constrained them while the fiendish creatures bounded about with superhuman agility. Every struggle among dozens swiftly became its own contest of skill and strength. Space marine chainswords interlocked to block the slashes of incandescent blades before unfolding like roaring petals of predatory plants, the pointmen of each squad hacking at the snarling faces while their brothers kept their sides covered. It was a cruel game of attrition, a stricture the Ninth Legion was loath to be forced into. Yet for now the bestial warriors struggled to pierce the nigh-instinctual coordination of each band’s sworn brothers, and a concerted dance of strikes and parries tipped the balance time and again between the evenly matched numbers of each clash.

A struggle no less dire was being fought under their feet by the Legion fleet’s drivers. Harried by the crimson skirmishers and now pummeled by the fire of the crablike monsters, they were at the same time given very little space to manoeuver. The vanguard of the Imperial armoured advance depended on them. The Charge could not afford to lose momentum, or, bogged down in a chaotic battle, its ponderous engines would be easily picked apart by the enemy.

The Legion vox network, until that point tensely silent, came alive with rapid, clipped coordination chatter. In the heat of the moment, communicators barked into their sets louder and louder to overwhelm the strange and grating interference that mounted the closer they came to the walls of Mosvoroth.

“Zathrin cohort command to third, fourth, shift to unakna!”

“Turning by fifty, clear the path!”

“Voithir, firing on tungal center-two!”

“Ruptured, advancing till graachal! Glory!”

“Sikigal cohort, clear fire path!”

Embattled as they were, the Astartes pilots worked wonders with their scarred machines. Here two Rhinos swerved abruptly from their formation, crushing a pack of snarling assailants under their treads, and at the same moment a salvo from their fellows tore through the air where they had been and blasted a segmented leg from under one of the crawling monstrosities in a shower of bilious fluid. Here another, its ramming spikes still stuck in the fallen carcass of a colossus from the first wave, was joined by four more, who together pushed the great corpse forth like a macabre bludgeon that swept foes from its path and slammed a crab-beast to the ground. There a command Predator burst through the burning ruins of a Rhino, smearing the remains of fallen brothers over the irradiated earth in its unmerciful advance, and wreathed in smoke it struck a crawler from its blind side, felling it with a ferocious burst of autocannon fire.

Yet for all their formidable efforts, they were losing more than blood and men - more grievously yet, they were losing speed. Even the smoothest turn into a firing position shaved precious instants from the counter, and that was the purpose and victory of Kalagann’s defenses. Delay was impardonable. The Reviled could welcome death, but they would not accept failure.

“Legion command to breacher force!” Legion-Master Skorr’s voice called out over vox-waves issuing from the Ninth’s command vehicle. It was a trophy from the whisper-shrouded Mallaund Sen campaign, a relic machine of strange and unique form: alike in size to a Mastodon, but vertically towering and bristling with turrets where it lacked a landing ramp. Festooned with chained and impaled bodies of felled foes, it was an inviting target for the crimson-skinned marauders, but none had thus far breached past its autoguns and the defensive circle of lesser transports that surrounded it.

“Forward elements, match our fire!” the Master spoke with a hurried yet precise hardness that brooked no disobedience. Wary though many in the Exercitus Imperialis may have been of the aptly-surnamed Reviled and their uncomely features, a far more hideous enemy lay ahead now, and in the field the authority of Astartes was not to be contested. “Strike at Legion-marked targets as given!”

“Understood, Legion command. Executing.” The reply had come with some slight delay, no doubt to organise the input of multiple channels into a singular communication, yet faster than such an operation ought normally to have been possible. The reason became evident when elongated plumes of radioactive dust from the southeast heralded the approach of an armoured division that was detaching itself from the rumbling Imperial column and nearing the crux of the combat. The cold teal markings on their battle tanks and their unit heraldry, a circle asymmetrically ringed by four lesser ones, marked them as Timaini Cragrunners, dwellers of the cratered lands far east of Arkhangelsk. Word had it that they had often traded with the Terrawatt Clans, and that machinery dug deeply into their bodies as well as their traditions. Their cybernetic coordination, however, had left them no less eager to visit their homeland’s vengeance against Ursh.

The forward tanks began to fire long before optical contact. As imposing as the monstrous crab-beasts were, the Timaini’s cannons could not possibly strike them past the chaos of battle unless their gunners minutely tracked the Reviled’s signals by the instant. But once again augmented bodies and unity of purpose worked miracles. The first Cragrunner salvo gouged the earth close to their targets; the second, guided by cybernetic eyes and wire-strung brains, cut down two of the crawling brutes, shreds of muscle and warpborn armour rattling like shrapnel from the nearest Legion transports.

Again and again came the directed fire, more intense by the volley. Rhinos and Predators swerved and scattered ahead of it, Astartes and hell-warriors both clinging grimly to their shells even as they indefatigably traded blows. The rad-field had become a chaos of fire, wreckage and mangled bodies, but the charge was not about to be stopped.

The sudden arrival of the Cragrunners began to tip the scales back into Imperial favor. Artillery beasts, battered and bleeding, lost legs to the incoming fire and toppled over with ponderous speed. Other beasts burst into viscera and flames as the Cragrunner’s shells found ammunition stores and esoteric energy reactors buried within the masses of flesh and metal that strode the battlefield as gods mere moments before. The Cragrunners ran up their tally with machine precision.

The reinforcing mortals were solidly engaged with the line of hell-beasts, trading fire and lives even as their most forward vehicles were still several kilometers out from joining the XI Legion’s advance. Then, new nightmares arrived.

Auspex warnings screamed inside the Cragrunners’ vehicles. Two new contacts closing fast, ghosting in and out of detection, were advancing from behind. Tank commanders, torn between trading fire with the beasts ahead and facing an unknown advance from behind, divided their attention. The inhuman speed of coordination between the mortals saw the reaction measured out in heartbeats rather than confused minutes. A platoon of tanks split from the main advance, five tanks, their cannons still smoking and targeting auspexes growling in anticipation turned to face the new threats.

Five tanks versus two new vehicle contacts. The Cragrunners, cold logic, and experience their guide, had by all accounts overcommitted to the new auspex blips. The lead tank fired, the shot seemingly random through the dust and smoke of the armored battle raging around them. The shell screamed into the dark, disappearing long before the telltale flash of a detonation heralded the end of its brief flight to a target the tanks could not see. Auspex, unreliable against the backdrop of burning vehicles and the titan claps of battlecannons, screamed a warning to the platoon.

++PROXIMITY ALARM++

The contacts emerged from the smoke as nightmares given steel flesh and unholy purpose. Pistons slammed home as four legs carried each beast too fast and too far for their size. Furnace heat vented from maws of steel teeth and between red-hot ribs. Balefire, cold and white, thrashed against steel as if attempting to escape.

The first tank was batted aside without a thought. Tracks screamed as the fifty-five tons of armor and steel slid at speed across the radwastes. A tread bit deep, and the tank levered over, ejecting its turret and pulping the crew as it slammed into the mud. The rest of the platoon fired.

The beast took three rounds to the chest, not so much as losing an ounce of momentum as it charged with a gleeful machine smile toward the next nearest tank. Auspex warbled and failed to lock as the first beast closed. The second beast leapt into the air, landing atop a tank with ease as it sank its bladed claws through armor meant to stop tank shells. To observers, it appeared to flex its hands, almost testing the strength of the steel it clung to before it ripped the tank in half as a rusted can opener might similarly open a canned ration.

The Cragrunners began to take the threat seriously. More tanks peeled off the main thrust to assist the IX Legion. Targeting solutions returned null errors, auspex wailed in horror as instruments tried and failed to lock and track the pair of beasts, and gunners vomited in their rebreathers as they attempted to sight the nightmares manually.

An iridescent beam of energy lanced out from the reinforcing tanks, a single Destroyer Tank Hunter finding its mark as it came to a stop and let the true tanks continue headlong against the pair of mechanical horrors. Armor dripped away in molten slag, and the nightmare screamed not in pain, but in anger. The second nightmare shifted its focus from the tank in its grasp, the turret whining in steel pain as it attempted to traverse against the creature's grip, and simply crushed the tank between two clawed arms before taking off at a sprint to end the Destroyer. The new counterattack began to meet the same fate as the original five tanks to advance on the pair of nightmare engines as clawed limbs and balefire dissected Imperial armor and laughed at incoming fire.

Waves of unnatural disorder spilled from the bodily carnage into the ether. The fevered vox-chatter of the Imperial fleet suffered no less from the metal monsters’ mere presence than its hulls did at their hands. Unearthly wails and shrieks of white noise cut through the chatter in operators’ ears, deafening and wounding as surely as blades. Invisible tendrils of chaos slithered through the communication networks, threatening to spill into the backlines.

More than one vehicle screeched to a halt or spun wildly off-course before even reaching in sight of the beast, and the Cragrunners, bound as they were to their machinery, suffered all the more grievously. Yet the Astartes were made of sterner stuff. Severed from one another by the failing comms, their crews fell almost by reflex into the order of scattered battle, where every unit was its own force.

Three of the Rhinos closest to where one of the metallic terrors had broken past the vanguard swivelled about in roaring turns, brushing hairs past each other as their pilots forcefully drove their stocky machines into feats of agility. Their topside complements had been decimated in the skirmishing against the daemonic boarders, only a few legionnaires hunkering stubbornly on the bloodstained decks. Badly wounded and doomed to a swiftly approaching end by rad-exposure, they did not flinch as the transports under them swerved and careened into a broad semicircle, nor when they were brought to face with the blasphemous hulk itself. Beneath the hulls, drivers and gunners ground their teeth, biting into their cheeks and tongues as their eyes began to dim and throb from the baleful power of the monster’s very sight.

Pain. Blood. Real as the ground under a warrior’s feet. Too real, perhaps, in this cauldron of madness - hands clenched violently around their levers, eyes grew wide and bloodshot, the already misshapen features of the Reviled appeared to change with dreamlike ease, growing longer, feral, less human. But they were set on their courses.

The Rhinos’ fire thundered against the monster’s metallic hide. It looked up from its latest prey with an eerily lifelike movement, almost visibly amused by the harmless rattle of heavy shells. In a sickeningly fluid lunge, it swung an arm out to strike one of the transports, gargantuan talons tearing into it too fast to evade. No sooner had the vehicle crumpled under its force, however, than the other two abruptly accelerated, the full vigour of their engines withheld until the last dearly bought moment. Their prows slammed into the beast’s forelegs, folding under their own momentum. The survivors topside, seized by some bloodthirsty madness, threw the weight of their bodies into the tangle of metal and leaking fuel. As the monster struggled to free its limbs from the ruinous mass, one of them braced his flamer and wildly sprayed forth.

The conflagration shook the ground and hurled up clouds of tainted ash atop a pillar of flame. The beast’s grotesque frame listed forward as its front pair of legs were blasted from under it. It swiftly drew itself up on its arms, ape-like, venting balefire from its jaws in a strange imitation of animal fury. Its head snapped from side to side, as if seeking upon what best to vent its rage, but what caught its eye first was not prey.

As the destructive crash unfolded, the ponderous Legion command tank had been slowly rotating its turrets, angling them so as to expose the fewest possible of its crew to its target’s corrosive presence. Now was its moment, and as the monster stood mired in the wreckage of the Rhinos, the superheavy unleashed at once a salvo of its ordnance. Cannon shells and heavy missiles arced through the poisonous air and struck the metallic amalgam like the Emperor’s own fist. Sickly fire and shrapnel burst from among the black smoke as the crippled monstrosity was pummeled into scrap, the otherworldly force animating it bleeding out from its fractured shell.

Yet the barrage had marked the Reviled’s relic vehicle as a threat. The Cragrunners’ reinforcing waves had only briefly distracted the second beast, and now its snarl turned to the large and inviting target. In a few ground-quaking bounds, it was among the command tank’s encircling force, flipping a Rhino on its side as a gutted carcass with a single swipe. The other armed transports froze or gave disorderly jolts, their drivers momentarily stunned by the psychically disruptive enemy suddenly in their midst, as the superheavy began to sluggishly crawl backwards.

This hesitation only lasted seconds, however, as almost at once the Astartes operators found the presence of mind for a simple command. The landing hatches of a score of Rhinos rattled open, like so many mouths recklessly gasping for irradiated air, and out rushed the warriors of the Ninth. They were more remote from death than their hull-riding brothers had been, not bound by oath to precipitate their end on the contaminated field, but each of them was just as ready to meet it, eager to perish in glory rather than be gnawed to nothing by their flaw. Their cries rose above the roar of engines, and for a moment even the turbid pall over the vox seemed to part before their voices.

“Raptor Imperialis!”

“Graachal!”

“The Oath of Death!”

“Qasechik!”

“Reviled by flesh!”

“Death walks with us!”

“Unity!”

Even the abominable construct appeared, for the merest of moments, incredulous before this madly single-minded charge. It swatted away contemptuously at these minuscule rushing figures, crushing them like insects, but more of them came from every side. They climbed its jagged shell, heedless of the disorienting throbs of bile in their throats, of the infernal incandescence heating their own armour to the point it burned the skin beneath, of their struggling organs failing one by one. One after another clung to spurs and edges of metal and set alight the grenades in their hands, the suicidal blasts cascading along the bandoliers strapped around their chests. Each detonation was less than the sting of a gnat to the colossus, but beast-like it snapped and struck fruitlessly at the tiny pests that dared to needle it.

In these moments of bloody diversion, the Legion’s drivers had regained their bearings, and their guns now stood aligned at the same target. The command vehicle vomited fire once more, and this time it was joined by the chorus of its escort. The last of the rushing Astartes were caught in the roaring blasts along with their foe, blood and scrap and pale flames crushed into a hellish display of inorganic mutilation. When the cannons and missile pods quieted at last, the monster’s unnatural fire was extinguished, its remains a mountain of blades thrust skyward.

Behind, the rumbling of the Imperial armoured force approached, its fury soon to rain upon Kalagann’s walls.