This is the bonus chapter for reaching 500 Powerstones.
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It was a squad of Hysman Merchant Guild local enforcers, numbering around thirty men. They wore grey uniforms with purple-and-gold trim and gripped standard-issue lasrifles.
The squad leader, a scarred, middle-aged sergeant, initially assumed it was just another gang of blind, desperate Underhive scum trying to crawl up and steal something.
But when the beams of their las-sights illuminated the four figures rising from the elevator shaft...
His pupils shrank to pinpricks.
What... what were those?
Four colossal figures.
Four suits of power armor, each with wildly differing aesthetics and adorned with ridiculously ostentatious decorations.
Each one was toweringly huge, far beyond the proportions of any normal human. Their pauldrons were broad enough to shatter walls, and the gleaming metallic ornaments fixed atop their helmets...
What the hell were those? Things stacked three layers high and sparkling?!
Before the sergeant's brain could fully process the sight, his body moved instinctively—a reflex honed from years of fighting mutant beasts down in the Underhive.
He pulled the trigger.
A crimson las-beam shot out, striking the chest plate of the leading, bright-yellow power armor dead center.
Crack!
The energy beam exploded against the ceramite surface in a shower of sparks, and then... nothing.
It didn't even leave a scorch mark.
Tax Bro lowered his head, glancing at the negligible, microscopic scorch mark on his chest plate, before slowly raising his head back up.
The voice that boomed from his helmet's external vox-casters carried a deep, resonant, and overwhelming authority.
"You dare fire upon the Angels of Death of the Emperor?!"
His right hand gripped the hilt of the chainsword at his waist.
His thumb pressed the activation stud.
Vrrrrrm!!!
The serrated blade spun to life with manic ferocity, the chainsaw teeth shrieking as they tore through the air at five thousand revolutions per minute.
"In the name of the Emperor, I sentence you..." Tax Bro took a single step forward, the sheer weight of his power armor causing the metal platform to groan under the immense stress. "...to death!"
The instant the words left his mouth, he moved.
The Imperial Fists Astartes moved at a speed that completely defied the limits of human visual perception.
He crossed the thirty-meter distance in a mere 0.7 seconds.
The chainsword swept in a horizontal arc.
The first soldier was bisected at the waist. Viscera and blood erupted outward, painting a gruesome, abstract masterpiece across the corridor walls.
The second soldier desperately tried to raise his rifle, but the revving teeth had already cloven through his helmet, pureeing the skull within.
The third, the fourth, the fifth...
Tax Bro was a threshing machine plowing through a field of wheat. Wherever he passed, he left behind nothing but severed limbs and spraying fountains of gore.
His combat style perfectly embodied the ethos of the Imperial Fists: simple and direct.
There was not a single wasted motion; every swing of his blade was calculated for maximum carnage.
At the exact same moment, White Scars made his move.
The White Scars Astartes was even faster, a literal bolt of white lightning.
He drew his power tulwar.
The disruption field along the blade flared to life, the spectral blue energy carving a blinding, gorgeous trail through the gloom.
His targets were the soldiers attempting to flank them.
The tulwar flashed, and three heads flew into the air simultaneously, their severed stumps as perfectly smooth as if sliced by a high-intensity laser.
G Bro raised his bolter, displaying the legendary marksmanship of the Ultramarines to its absolute fullest.
Thoom! Thoom! Thoom! Thoom!
Four short, deafening barks echoed out, and four soldiers hiding behind cover had their heads violently detonated.
Not a single shot missed.
[Have You Been Loyal Today?] opted for the most brutally straightforward approach.
He hefted his twin-linked heavy bolter, aiming it squarely at the second wave of guards rallying at the far end of the corridor.
He pulled the trigger.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Four massive, large-caliber mass-reactive bolts ripped down the hall in rapid succession, each one detonating right in the center of the dense crowd.
Flesh and bone tore through the air.
Severed limbs rained down.
The thirty-man enforcer squad was completely wiped out in less than fifteen seconds.
The corridor was flooded with the heavy, coppery stench of blood and the sickening smell of ruptured bowels.
Tax Bro flicked the gore off the revving teeth of his chainsword, his expression beneath the visor perfectly calm.
This was nothing to him anymore. During the Kent Hive purge operations, the number of gangers and corrupt officials he had personally hacked to death was dozens of times this amount.
"Notify Paul and the others on the regional channel to start the op," he said, turning to G Bro.
The Ultramarines Astartes behind him nodded.
"Paul, the operation is a go."
–
Paul's eyes snapped open.
"They've started."
He stood up. The servo-motors of his dark grey power armor engaged simultaneously, the joints emitting a faint, hissing purr.
[Tau Buddy You're Right] also rose from his crouched position, his Alpha Legion grey-blue armor almost entirely blending into the backdrop of the rainy night.
"Move out."
The two warriors burst out of their observation post, sprinting through the rain straight for the main blast doors.
What does a full-speed sprint from an Astartes look like?
Forty meters per second.
They devoured the five-kilometer distance in a mere two minutes and five seconds.
By the time they were within three hundred meters of the main gates, the garrison behind the blast doors had devolved into total chaos.
Panicked screams poured out of the vox-casters: "Underhive District 9 is under attack! Four giants! Power armor! They've butchered the 3rd Enforcer Squad! They're massacring everyone! Our 369th Regiment of nearly a thousand men has been routed! Requesting reinforcements! I repeat, requesting reinforcements!"
Inside the main gate checkpoint, the garrison commander, Captain Sikal, was livid, his face drained of blood.
He was a forty-year-old veteran who had served in the Hysman Merchant Guild's local enforcers for twenty-two years. He had survived three hive riots and two mutant beast incursions.
But words like "giants" and "power armor"... he had only ever seen those in the propaganda pamphlets distributed by the Guild.
According to the literature, the Emperor's Angels of Death—the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes—stood over two and a half meters tall, wore completely invulnerable power armor, and could shatter an entire company single-handedly.
But those were just myths.
At least here on Aurelian IV, there hadn't been an Astartes planetfall in the past eighty years.
Aside from that battle eighty years ago, of course, but he hadn't even been a zygote back then. As for the recent crusade against the heretics, he was lucky enough not to have been drafted for the meat grinder.
"Captain! What do we do?" His adjutant's voice was trembling violently. "The boys in the Underhive are saying... those four giants have already slaughtered hundreds of men! They're pushing rapidly into the Lower Hive manufactorums and the Mid-Hive warehouse districts!"
Sikal gritted his teeth so hard his jaw ached.
He only had two hundred men at his disposal to hold the main blast doors—a Priority One defense node.
If he redirected troops to the Lower Hive...
Right at that moment, a soldier in the observation post shrieked in terror. "Captain! Outside! Outside the main gates! There are two more giants!"
Sikal practically hurled himself at the observation port.
Through the rainy night, two towering figures hurtled toward them from the distance.
They were moving too fast—so fast that human eyes could only track their blurred afterimages.
But the livery on one of them... grey-blue. And that insignia...
Sikal's heart seized in his chest.
He had seen that exact emblem in the Guild's propaganda pamphlets!
That was the...
"Alpha Legion..." he mumbled in utter disbelief.
The other figure's livery was even more terrifying. It was dark grey, and its chest plate bore an insignia he had never seen before but instinctively feared—a roaring, monstrous hound's head.
"Open fire!" Sikal screamed his orders, his voice cracking with panic. "All turrets! Open fire! Stop them!"
The order was relayed.
On the lintel above the main blast doors, the ballistic shutters of the four twin-linked heavy bolter turrets slid open in perfect synchrony.
The barrels depressed, the targeting cogitators instantly locking onto their prey.
Inside the firing ports, the barrels of the six concealed heavy stubbers thrust forward.
BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM!!!
The deafening roar of the heavy weapons merged into a single, continuous thunder. At a rate of three hundred and twenty rounds per minute, they unleashed a storm of munitions as thick as the falling rain.
The two heavy lascannons began their charging cycles, their muzzles flaring with a blinding red incandescence.
But they were too late.
In the exact instant the turrets opened fire, Paul and [Tau Buddy You're Right] had already closed the gap to a mere fifty meters from the blast doors.
"Tau Buddy, get behind me!"
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Goal = 250 Powerstones.
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