Chapter 346: The Shield Trucks
The two sides weren't even in the same league. The Stealers were pinned down under a wall of terrifying firepower, unable to lift their heads.
Crimson beams of las-fire tore through the air, laced with heavy stubber rounds carrying brutal armour penetration.
The Stealers tried to use their familiarity with the terrain and the maze of container-housing as cover, trading fire with Kian's line.
One Stealer huddled inside a sheet-metal shack, poking a lasrifle out the window and loosing a feeble, underpowered beam.
The instant the muzzle flash lit up, Kian's line spotted him.
Hundreds of crimson beams and dozens of Stubber bursts converged on the position in an instant, blowing a hole the size of a dinner plate straight through the shack, and the man inside was shredded by the laser fire and rounds punching clean through.
Some of the sheet-metal shacks had been reinforced with stone, more like small bunkers, tough enough to shrug off las-fire and Stubber rounds.
For those, the troopers carrying rocket launchers stepped up and put a single rocket through them, collapsing the whole structure in one shot.
The first-generation Stealers were little more than mindless beasts, barely recognizable as anything human, low intelligence, and there were a lot of them. Most of what was flooding the streets were these frenzied animals.
Driven by something like a hive-mind instinct, they felt no fear, and threw themselves at Kian's line in wave after wave.
And wave after wave, they were shredded by the incoming storm of laser and rounds, dropping in heaps.
Less than three minutes into the engagement, the ground was already carpeted thick with first-generation corpses.
One third-generation Stealer, passable enough to look almost human, crouched inside a sheet-metal shack, peeking out with terror in his eyes at the firing line ahead.
"No, no, this is wrong! These aren't the Governor's soft little soldiers! Their firepower is insane!"
The Governor's troops always looked tall and imposing, but in truth they were soft as pudding, snapping at the slightest touch.
His own kind, born with reinforced bone density and monstrous physical strength, could kill the Governor's pathetic lapdogs without even trying. A layer of scrap iron armour was enough to shrug off anything those troops could throw at them.
But these soldiers were different. Their weapons fired beams thick and long enough to blow a comrade's chest apart on a direct hit. Those thunderous heavy weapons could tear through anything, cover included, taking their kin with it.
This couldn't go on. If it kept going like this, they were all going to die.
This third-generation hybrid seemed to hold some kind of leadership role among them. He reached out through the hive-mind to the being he thought of as an Angel, the Genestealer itself, and reported the situation.
After a long moment, the Angel's voice came back into his mind.
"Keep charging. Charge without regard for losses. Create me an opening. I'll try to kill their leader myself. Once their leader falls, the Governor's lapdogs will fall apart on their own. Go. Send our kin forward. Living or dead, their souls will ascend with me to paradise the moment the Day of Ascension arrives."
At the words "Day of Ascension" and "paradise," the hybrid trembled with fervor.
"By your will, Lord Angel! I'll rally our kin for the most fearless charge yet! For the Day of Ascension!"
The so-called Day of Ascension was, in truth, simply the day the Hive Fleet arrived.
When it came, the Hive Fleet would strip this entire world clean, converting everything on it into biomass to feed the fleet, and that included the Genestealer itself and every one of these hybrids. All of them were going to die.
These hybrids still carried a shred of human consciousness somewhere underneath, twisted and warped by the hive-mind. In truth, they feared true death as much as anyone. The Genestealer had simply bent their minds around a comforting lie, the so-called Day of Ascension.
It had told them that when that day came, all of them would rise into a paradise beyond suffering, beyond oppression, and that this ideal was worth fighting and dying for.
Only in the instant the Hive Fleet actually arrived would these poor wretches break free of the hive-mind for one brief moment, see the world as it truly was, and realize they were running straight toward their own annihilation.
Until then, though, every one of them fought like the most fanatical of crusaders, throwing themselves at the enemy without a shred of concern for their own lives.
Back on Kian's side, the Stubber mounted over his head had been roaring continuously for five straight minutes.
Wherever his eyes moved, the turret tracked a fraction behind, and wherever the muzzle pointed, death rained down.
The 20mm rounds carried absurd kinetic force, punching clean through thick iron plating, blasting rubble apart behind it, and shredding any Stealer trying to hide in the debris.
Whenever the beast-like first-generation Stealers massed for a charge, all it took was a single sweep of Kian's gaze.
A crimson whip of fire would lash across the charging mass, instantly blowing apart limbs and spraying unidentifiable fluids in every direction.
Kian could feel it, the machine spirit riding the Stubber above his head was practically drunk with satisfaction.
Its hunger for slaughter and destruction was being fed, burst after burst, and it was clearly loving every second of it.
Even its Warp-nature seemed to be deepening. Kian could feel the spirit growing stronger by the moment.
He honestly had no idea what this thing would evolve into if he kept feeding it kills like this.
Just as the thought crossed his mind, he caught the sound of engines roaring somewhere down the street ahead.
A moment later, a line of mining trucks rolled slowly around the corner up ahead, dozens of them.
These had to be vehicles the Governor used for excavation work, hollowing out the asteroid's interior chambers, somehow commandeered by the Stealers at some point.
The Stealers had heavily modified them, welding massive, thick iron shields onto the front loader buckets.
By eye alone, the composite plating on those shields looked to be well over a hundred millimeters thick.
They formed up into a rolling wall and began pushing forward toward Kian's position.
The wall of trucks blocked every line of fire, and a mass of Stealer infantry advanced behind them, using the vehicles as mobile cover, slowly closing the distance.
If they weren't dealt with fast, the Stealer main force would be able to push their cover right up to Kian's firing line, and that meant real casualties.
Kian swung the Stubber above his head onto one of the shield-trucks and hammered it for several seconds straight.
The heavy rounds only chipped a few small dents into the plating without punching through.
He gave the order immediately. "Rocket teams, switch to shaped-charge anti-armour rounds! See if you can crack them open!"
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