No Planetary Guard force in the Imperium would fire upon an unfamiliar Astartes without hesitation.
Not unless they could confirm what stood before them was a Chaos-corrupted Space Marine, warped by the Ruinous Powers and fallen from the Emperor's grace.
Or unless they themselves were rebels. Traitors who had abandoned humanity and the Golden Throne.
The Heart of the Furnace roared in Nolan's grip.
Six plasma spheres erupted from the revolver's barrel in rapid succession, each one a miniature sun compressed into a ball of superheated fury. Blue-white light painted the corridor in stark shadows, so bright it washed out every other color. The heat was immediate and overwhelming, turning the air itself into a wavering shimmer of thermal distortion.
The plasma streaked down the corridor faster than thought.
Each sphere left a glowing trail in the air, ionized particles crackling with discharge. They crossed the distance to the rebel positions in the blink of an eye, moving too fast for human reflexes to track, too fast for anyone to dodge or take cover.
The makeshift metal bunkers the rebels had erected stood no chance.
Sheet metal barriers, hastily welded together from scavenged panels, exploded on contact. The plasma didn't just penetrate them. It vaporized them. Metal turned to gas in an instant, expanding outward in superheated clouds that added their own killing heat to the attack. The barriers simply ceased to exist, leaving nothing but glowing edges where solid matter had been moments before.
And beyond those barriers, the fragile human bodies had even less protection.
The rebels didn't have time to scream. Plasma washed over them like a tidal wave of nuclear fire, temperatures high enough to turn flesh to ash and bone to powder in fractions of a second. Bodies that had been shouting defiance one moment were simply gone the next, reduced to carbonized shadows on the walls and floor.
The brutal howling that had filled the corridor, hundreds of voices raised in desperate fear and fury, stopped abruptly.
Silence fell like a curtain. Heavy. Absolute. Broken only by the hiss of superheated metal cooling and the soft patter of ash falling like black snow.
Nolan drove the Six-Armed Iron Cavalry forward, each footfall deliberate and measured.
His magnetic boots crunched through debris. Melted metal. Carbonized bone fragments. The remains of human beings who'd made the catastrophically wrong decision to fire on an Astartes. His servo arms swayed with the motion of his advance, decomposition force fields still active, ready for threats that no longer existed.
The Heart of the Furnace never stopped firing.
Gork and Mork's blessing activated with each trigger pull, the Ork gods' capricious favor turning a six-shot weapon into an endless torrent of plasma death. One shot became two. Two became four. The revolver's barrel glowed cherry red from the sustained fire, heat sinks screaming as they tried to dissipate thermal buildup that should have been physically impossible.
A plasma tide swept through the corridor.
Blue-white fire rolled forward in a continuous wave, consuming everything in its path. Rebel positions vanished. Cover evaporated. The hive rebel team, which had numbered in the hundreds, was swallowed whole by superheated destruction that left nothing but char and molten metal in its wake.
By the time Nolan reached the kill zone, the battle was over.
Bodies littered the corridor, or what remained of them. Most were just carbonized outlines on the floor, human-shaped shadows burned into the ferrocrete where men and women had stood their last moment alive. Others were partially intact, the ones who'd been on the edges of the plasma tide's reach. They lay in twisted heaps, limbs locked in death rigor, faces frozen in expressions of terminal agony.
The smell was overwhelming even through Nolan's breathing filters. Cooked meat. Burned hair. The chemical reek of vaporized metals and plastics. His helmet's atmosphere processors cycled frantically, trying and failing to scrub the stench from the air feeding his lungs.
Nolan lowered his gaze from the devastation to the Heart of the Furnace in his palm.
The weapon was still glowing, heat radiating from its surface in visible waves. Vulkan's gift. A plasma revolver that should have been empty after six shots but had fired dozens, maybe hundreds, riding the blessing of brutal Ork gods who loved nothing more than a good scrap.
Movement caught his eye.
Nolan's head turned slightly, focusing his eyepiece on a rebel sergeant lying near his feet. The man's lower body was simply gone, melted away by plasma heat that had caught him at the edge of the tide. Everything below his ribcage had been reduced to carbonized stumps, cauterized by temperatures high enough to seal blood vessels before they could bleed.
But somehow, impossibly, he was still alive.
His chest heaved with shallow, agonized breaths. His fingers scrabbled weakly at the floor, seeking purchase that would let him drag himself... somewhere. Anywhere. Away from the towering figure of green ceramite steel looming above him. His eyes were wide and glazed with shock, pain overwhelming his nervous system to the point where his brain could barely process sensory input.
Nolan spoke, his voice emerging from the Terminator's vox-grille in stiff, grammatically awkward Imperial Gothic.
"Pathetic traitors, why did you betray the Emperor and humanity, why did you start this hive rebellion!"
The words came out harsh, mechanical, lacking the fluidity of a native speaker. Nolan's grasp of the Imperium's language was functional but far from perfect, each syllable requiring conscious effort to form correctly.
The rebel sergeant's reaction was immediate.
His facial muscles spasmed, jaw clenching so hard his teeth ground together with audible force. Veins bulged in his neck and temples, standing out like cables under skin suddenly flushed red with fury. He tried to lift his head, neck straining with the effort, dragging his upper body a few centimeters off the ground through sheer force of will.
"Hiss..." The sound escaped through clenched teeth, more animal than human. Then words followed, spat with venom. "You are just a lackey of the tyrant of Terra! You don't deserve to know anything!"
The shout echoed off the corridor walls, defiant and desperate. Blue veins popped out across the sergeant's forehead, pulsing with each frantic heartbeat. His entire body trembled with the combined strain of mortal injury and absolute rage, every gram of remaining strength channeled into that single act of rebellion.
Nolan stared down at him for a moment, assessing.
No valuable information would come from this one. The man was too far gone, too committed to his cause, too consumed by whatever ideology had driven him to take up arms against the Imperium. Pain and proximity to death hadn't broken his resolve. Nothing Nolan could say or do in the next few seconds would change that.
The decision was simple.
Nolan lifted one heavy magnetic boot, the three-meter bulk of his Terminator armor shifting with practiced ease. The servo motors in his leg whined softly as they adjusted for the motion, compensating for the massive weight distribution.
Then he brought it down hard.
The sergeant's head exploded like an overripe fruit.
Bone shattered. Brain matter sprayed across the ferrocrete in a dark red starburst pattern. The body's final spasm was brief, muscles contracting once before going permanently slack. The rebel sergeant's last act of defiance ended in an instant, crushed beneath Uru-gold alloy and ceramite steel wielded with Primarch-enhanced strength.
Nolan turned away without looking at the corpse.
His helmet swiveled toward David, who had advanced to stand beside him, the three-meter regimental banner rising above the carnage like a declaration of Imperial authority. The Salamanders' black dragon head and golden Aquila seemed to watch the dead with impassive judgment.
"I'm afraid these rebels are ambushing other teams," Nolan said, his tone shifting to tactical assessment. "They heard the news of us entering this place and gathered here. David, look for nearby short-frequency communications. We want to find the friendly forces in the nest!"
The ancient Man of Iron's response was immediate. "Understood, my lord!"
David's metal helmet tilted downward, internal sensors activating to scan electromagnetic frequencies. The air around him shimmered briefly as his systems cycled through thousands of channels per second, filtering out background noise, isolating coherent signals, triangulating sources based on signal strength and direction.
It took less than ten seconds.
David's helmet snapped up, facing a new direction down the corridor. He raised one ceramite steel hand and pointed without hesitation, showing Nolan the way forward with the confidence of absolute certainty.
Nolan casually unhooked the bolter from his waist.
The weapon settled into his left hand with familiar weight, a standard Astartes pattern bolter designed to fire mass-reactive explosive rounds at targets that needed to be destroyed rather than simply killed. Combined with the Heart of the Furnace in his right hand, he was walking firepower on a scale that could level buildings.
He followed David as The Man of Iron moved quickly toward the depths of the passage, their armored footfalls ringing like war drums through empty corridors.
The square in the capital city was dying by degrees.
Las-bolts streaked through the air in continuous streams, crimson lines of superheated light that painted tracers across the gray fog. Each shot hit metal bunkers with sharp cracks of impact, scorching paint, melting through thin sections, heating the barriers until touching them would sear flesh from bone.
The roar of mortal bolters answered back.
Not the deep, thunderous boom of Astartes weaponry, but the sharper crack of human-scale weapons firing smaller ammunition. Still deadly. Still capable of punching through flesh and light armor with brutal efficiency. Each shot was placed with veteran precision, controlled bursts targeting rebels who exposed themselves for even a fraction of a second.
An Astra Militarum veteran crouched behind one such bunker, his old carapace armor scratched and dented from years of service. His movements were economical, practiced, the muscle memory of someone who'd survived more firefights than he could count. He dropped the empty magazine from his mortal bolter, fingers already reaching for a fresh one from his belt pouch.
"Ogryn!" he shouted without looking back, his voice cutting through the chaos with parade-ground clarity. "Bring up the ammunition box!"
The words had barely left his mouth when he heard it.
Heavy footfalls. The ground-shaking tread of something massive and muscular moving with single-minded purpose. A shadow fell across the veteran's position, briefly blocking the sickly light from the emergency lumens overhead.
The Ogryn was two-point-six meters tall and built like a slab of animated beef.
Thick muscle layered over thick bone, a body engineered for brute strength at the cost of anything resembling grace or intelligence. Its face was broad and flat, features compressed by a low, heavy brow that left little room for complex thought. But what it lacked in brains it made up for in loyalty, and right now its small eyes were focused entirely on the task at hand.
It shouldered an ammunition box that would have required two normal men to carry.
The container was easily a hundred kilograms of metal casing filled with bolter magazines, each one heavy enough to be a weapon in its own right. The Ogryn hefted it like it was nothing, thick fingers wrapped around the handles, massive shoulders absorbing the weight without visible strain.
It shook its huge body, fat and muscle rippling with the motion, and charged forward.
Three steps. Four. Five. Each one covered meters of ground, the Ogryn's bulk eating distance with frightening speed despite its ungainly appearance. It rushed toward the back of the metal bunker, focused entirely on delivering the ammunition, on completing the task it had been given.
The Ogryn never saw the las-bolts coming.
A dozen scorching beams converged on its massive torso simultaneously, rebel shooters all targeting the largest threat, the most visible target. The Ogryn's upper body was so broad that missing was nearly impossible. Las-fire punched through its chest in rapid succession, each impact burning a fist-sized hole clean through meat and bone.
In the span of a single heartbeat, the Ogryn's torso became a sieve.
Transparent from front to back. Daylight visible through the network of cauterized tunnels crisscrossing its chest cavity. Vital organs simply ceased to exist, vaporized by sustained laser fire. The Ogryn's forward momentum carried it two more steps before its nervous system registered that it was already dead.
"I... for... for Rehmannia glutinosa..."
The words came out slurred, confused. The Ogryn's limited brain was trying to say something important, trying to remember the phrase it had been taught, but the connections were failing, synapses misfiring as oxygen stopped reaching tissues that desperately needed it.
Then the Ogryn fell.
It went down like a felled tree, massive weight crashing to the ground with a thunderous impact that shook the ferrocrete. The ammunition box tumbled from its shoulder, spinning through the air, landing with a metallic clang that nearly struck the veteran cowering behind the bunker.
"Damn it! It's so stupid that it can't even bend down!"
The veteran's voice was harsh, angry, the words coming out automatically. But his eyes told a different story. Sadness lurked in their depths, carefully hidden behind a mask of irritation and professional distance. Another death. Another good soldier gone because this war demanded bodies, and Ogryns had the misfortune of being very large targets.
The veteran didn't let himself feel it. Couldn't afford to. He simply cursed at the bloated corpse, shoved the memory down deep where it could join all the others, and got back to work.
Without thinking, he poked his mortal bolter out past the edge of the bunker and pulled the trigger hard.
Blind fire. Shooting without aiming, relying on volume to keep rebel heads down rather than accuracy to kill them. The weapon bucked in his grip, spitting rounds downrange in controlled bursts. Empty casings ejected to his right, bouncing off the ferrocrete with tinny clinks.
"Hey! Baldy!" the veteran shouted, still firing, his voice strained from the effort of making himself heard over the gunfire. "Where is our support team? You have been playing with the communicator for a long time. Have you contacted anyone?"
The response came from his left, where a bald woman wearing a metal eyepatch crouched against the bunker's interior wall.
"Don't you understand yet?" Her tone was cold, clinical, utterly devoid of sympathy. "We are a death squad thrown in by the Inquisitor to test the rebels' movements! There has been no support from the beginning!"
The words hung in the air like a death sentence.
The bald woman shifted slightly, her metal eyepatch catching the dim light. The device wasn't decorative. It was a psychic dampener, a crude piece of technology designed to limit her abilities, to keep her power from growing strong enough to attract daemons or worse. She wore it like a brand, a visible reminder of her status as something barely tolerated by the Imperium.
She continued speaking, her voice flat and matter-of-fact.
"The Ogryns are ignorant fools, you are a deserter criminal who habitually runs away from battle and is about to be shot, and I am just a low-level psyker who was taken off the black ship by the Inquisitor."
She paused, letting the words sink in. Then delivered the final blow.
"Whether it is the empire or the hive itself, we are just a bunch of trash that can be thrown away at will. The so-called meritorious service is just an excuse to fool the Ogryns. Do you still have any hope in this?"
The veteran went still.
His finger released the trigger. The mortal bolter fell silent, its barrel still smoking from sustained fire. He pulled the weapon back behind cover, movements mechanical, operating on autopilot while his brain processed what he'd just heard.
He stared blankly at the scarlet blood spreading across the ferrocrete, creeping toward his position in slow rivulets. The Ogryn's blood. Good, loyal, stupid soldiers who'd followed orders to the end because they didn't know any better.
"I'm telling you for the last time," the veteran said, his voice quiet but intense, "that I've never been a deserter."
His hands tightened on the bolter's grip, knuckles going white with pressure.
"When our entire company was planning to fight to the death, I was accidentally knocked unconscious by the heretic's firepower bombardment." The words came faster now, rising in pitch. "But when I woke up completely, I was already imprisoned! They judged me as a deserter on the battlefield without any reason, and even got the fucking unit number wrong!"
His voice cracked on the last word, years of injustice boiling to the surface.
Then he deflated, shoulders sagging, the fight draining out of him like water from a broken vessel.
"I... forget it, it doesn't matter. I plan to accompany my brothers in the company."
The old soldier's face showed every one of his years. Exhaustion written in the lines around his eyes, the set of his jaw, the way his whole body seemed to carry weight that had nothing to do with armor or weapons. He slowly closed his eyes, accepting what was coming.
He didn't change the magazine in his mortal bolter. Didn't check his remaining ammunition. Didn't prepare for another engagement. He just sat down behind the bunker, back against the metal, and waited for death to come collect what it was owed.
"It's good this way," he murmured, barely audible. "I'm all free, maybe I can return to the golden throne."
The bald female psyker watched him for a moment, her single visible eye unreadable.
Then she reached for the metal scepter lying beside her. The weapon was crude, a length of reinforced pipe topped with a focusing crystal that helped channel her limited psychic abilities into something useful. It wasn't much. Wouldn't save them. But it was better than dying without a fight.
She rose to her feet, muscles tensing, preparing to stand and face the rebels for the last time...
BOOM BOOM BOOM.
The sound came from another direction entirely.
Explosions rolled across the hive square in rapid succession, each detonation loud enough to shake the air and rattle loose debris from nearby structures. Not las-fire. Not small arms. Something bigger. Something that hit with the force of artillery but moved too fast to be conventional guns.
The tragic wailing started immediately.
Screams of pain and terror rose from the rebel positions, voices raised in panic and confusion. Men shouting warnings. Officers trying to rally their troops. The sounds of an organized force suddenly thrown into chaos by an attack they hadn't seen coming.
The old soldier's eyes snapped open.
The bald female psyker froze mid-rise, her staff clutched in one hand.
They looked at each other, confusion written across both faces.
"Uh..." The veteran blinked several times, as if trying to clear his vision. "Baldy, didn't you just say that there were no reinforcements? Then who is exchanging fire with the rebels now?"
The psyker's expression shifted from cold certainty to hesitant doubt.
"I'm sure there are no reinforcements!" Her tone carried less conviction than the words themselves. "Because I used my psychic power to eavesdrop on the conversation between the Inquisitor and the Governor..."
She trailed off, unable to explain the contradiction between what she'd heard and what was clearly happening.
The next second, both of them moved simultaneously.
Without speaking, without planning, they poked their heads out from behind the metal bunker at exactly the same time. It was suicidal. Exposing themselves to enemy fire. Risking accurate shots to the skull from rebel shooters who'd been trying to kill them for the past hour.
But they had to see.
They craned their necks, peering across the square toward where the fierce battle continued, where explosions still thundered and plasma fire lit up the gray fog with blue-white light.
The veteran saw it first.
"Fuck!" The profanity exploded from his mouth with genuine shock. "Is this the God-Emperor appearing?"
Green armor. Three meters tall. Moving through rebel positions like an avatar of destruction. The black dragon head symbol on the pauldron was unmistakable even at this distance, even through the fog and smoke.
Salamanders.
The bald psyker's single eye went wide.
"Why are the Salamanders' Astartes here?" Her voice pitched higher, genuine fear creeping in for the first time. Then realization hit, and her tone shifted to pure despair. "It's over! We're dead!"
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