REVIEWS AND POWERSTONES PLSSS!!!!!
Chapter 21: Point-Blank Melta
Las-fire poured into the corner like a wall of rain.
Every shot missed.
The World Eaters had pulled back around the bend at almost the precise instant the soldiers squeezed their triggers, moving with the inhuman reaction speed of beings that had been fighting wars for centuries. The Ash Watchers were trained soldiers and they responded the way trained soldiers respond when a direct engagement fails to land: they began a disciplined withdrawal, one element covering the other in alternating bounds, exactly as doctrine demanded.
The moment the column's boots began to move, the World Eaters came around the corner again.
A single exchange of fire and two full covering squads ceased to exist. The soldiers holding those positions simply stopped being there. In the sudden gap, Alek was still standing with his autopistol raised, still shooting, not retreating, not flinching, the commissar's peaked cap sitting on his head and the black greatcoat hanging past his knees.
The World Eaters saw him.
The golden aquila on the cap's crest caught the amber light of the gas lamps and burned like a brand. Something in the combination of that symbol and the Butcher's Nails drove all further tactical calculation out of the question. They discarded their bolt pistols. Three chainaxes rose howling into the dark and three transhuman throats opened at once.
"Blood for the Blood God!"
They charged.
Alek glanced sideways, toward the shadow of the left fork. For a fraction of a second, his eyes found Duvette's. The corner of his mouth moved.
Then he stopped retreating. He raised the autopistol above his head and charged to meet them.
"For the Emperor!"
The lead World Eater was on him in an instant. He did not bring the chainaxe down. He drove one fist through Alek's body with the force of a hydraulic press and closed his fingers around the spine, and lifted.
The agony of it sent convulsions through Alek's frame that he could not stop. He was shaking, hanging there, blood coming freely from his mouth, and he looked directly at the World Eater laughing beneath him.
Alek laughed back.
"You Chaos... dog..."
The World Eater appeared to realize something. He wrenched Alek's body apart with one sharp motion and turned.
Destruction arrived.
Two streams of superheated plasma struck the World Eaters at point-blank range, unleashed simultaneously from the left fork. The heat output was sufficient to liquefy the armour plating of a main battle tank. At this distance, in this enclosed space, there was no meaningful distinction between the armour and what it contained. White light swallowed the passage entirely. The air itself shrieked as it was heated past any temperature it was designed to carry.
The torsos of both Chaos Astartes ceased to exist in the same moment.
Deep crimson power armour ran like wax in the heat, the ceramite plates dissolving into rivers of glowing metal that flowed down the warped frames of what had held them upright. Whatever had been inside the armour, flesh and bone and the dark energy of Chaos, vaporized. What remained on the ground was charred and unrecognizable as anything that had once been alive.
The melta guns' discharge rang through the narrow stone passage and shook fragments loose from the ceiling.
Duvette's eyes, both of them shot through with red from the concussive pressure of the engagement, tracked the two ruined suits as they crashed down. The sound was dull and heavy. The air had gone thick and foul with the compound stench of scorched metal and vaporized flesh.
"Bastards." He let out a breath. "Die."
Boots on stone behind him.
Fast. Heavy. Very heavy.
He understood it before he finished turning. A third. He had known there was a third and in the immediacy of the engagement the knowledge had slipped from the front of his mind to somewhere further back, and that gap was now running toward him with a chainaxe at full engagement.
The bolt pistol came up.
Duvette went sideways. The round clipped his shoulder and detonated on the wall behind him. Stone fragments came off the wall in every direction and a piece opened a line across his cheek. He hit the ground rolling, trying to find anything that would function as cover, and the two melta gunners moved to his flanks to buy him distance with the only currency available to them.
The World Eater drove through both of them without breaking stride.
Duvette came up into a crouch with nothing between him and the chainaxe but three meters of tunnel and the specific quality of calm that arrives when there is genuinely nothing left to lose. He put his hands on the lasgun and drove the power setting to maximum.
Three las-beams cut through the dark and struck the World Eater's helmet simultaneously.
The optical lenses detonated. Sparks exploded from the helmet's damaged systems in a burst of white and blue, violent enough to light the whole passage for a second. The World Eater staggered. One step back. The chainaxe arm dropped fractionally. His targeting systems were gone and his balance with them.
Behind Duvette, the soldiers who had recovered from the initial chaos of the engagement opened fire as one.
Hundreds of full-power las-bolts poured out of the tunnel in the space of three seconds. The combined energy of that many weapons firing at the same target in the same direction at that range transferred into the World Eater's frame with enough force to physically spin the body. The sound of it was not the sound of individual shots. It was a single sustained detonation with no spaces between the components.
When it stopped, the World Eater was on the floor in pieces. Power armour fragments, shattered bone, charred sections of meat: all of it distributed across a dozen meters of passage. The helmet, recognizable by one ruined lens, had ended up furthest from the rest.
Even a Chaos Astartes could not absorb the continuous volley of a hundred lasguns at close range.
Silence came down into the tunnel like settling dust. The weapons cooling made a low metallic hiss that filled the space for several seconds. Under it, the sound of breathing, labored and ragged, from men who had been running on adrenaline for too long and were still waiting for their bodies to understand it was over.
Duvette pushed himself to his feet. He patted the dust and stone grit from his coat in a motion that was automatic and did not particularly accomplish much. He stood for a moment looking at what was left of the three World Eaters across the floor of the passage.
Then he turned.
Finn Valentine was lowering his las-rifle. The barrel tracked down in a slow, deliberate arc, and when it came to rest Finn drew the knife from his belt and pressed the tip to the rifle's stock, just below the previous mark, and cut a clean new line into the wood.
He replaced the knife. His breathing had already steadied.
Duvette looked at the tunnel around him. Gunsmoke layered the air in pale drifts. The two melta-fused remains still gave off threads of black smoke from the cooling metal. The third was barely identifiable as having been a single entity. The gas lamps on the walls kept their amber light without comment, indifferent to everything that had just happened in their vicinity.
And the Ash Watchers' own dead were everywhere.
"Clear the battlefield," Duvette said. His voice came out lower than intended.
"Sir." Evan's voice had gone hoarse. The boy had not moved from his position during the engagement and was now standing at the edge of the carnage with his autopistol still in hand. The sight of Astartes up close had not grown easier with repetition. "Forty-seven dead. Six seriously wounded. Thirteen lightly wounded."
Duvette nodded once without speaking.
Forty-seven soldiers. Forty-seven men out of a regiment that had come underground with five hundred and twenty-one. In exchange for three Chaos Astartes. That was the arithmetic of fighting transhumans with baseline humans, and it was already the best version of that arithmetic they were likely to see. Without Alek standing in that tunnel wearing a commissar's coat and charging when everything else was pulling back, the count would have been worse by an order of magnitude.
He looked at the body of the melta gunners. He looked at the space where Alek had been.
Three World Eaters killed. The enemy's elite combat strength had been reduced again. That was something.
Now there was another problem, and it was already running.
They were exposed.
The roar of two melta guns discharging in an underground stone passage was not a subtle sound. It had not been contained to this tunnel. Sound in these passages traveled in ways that were difficult to predict but reliable in direction, and the direction it had traveled was toward the square. Every enemy in that space had heard it. Every Chaos Astartes and every psyker and every heretic with a weapon was now aware that something had happened in the main tunnel.
Duvette checked the timer at his wrist.
Colonel Fox and the other companies needed at least twenty more minutes to reach their designated assault positions.
Twenty minutes.
He looked at the upper left of his vision.
[Current Command: Ash Watchers, 101st Regiment, 3rd, 6th, 7th, 8th, 13th Companies]
[Total Strength: 474 (including 19 wounded)] [Experience: Veteran]
[Overall Supply: 90%] [Overall Loyalty: 76%] [Overall Morale: 65%] [Overall Stability: 68%] [Chaos Corruption: 28%]
[Active Passive Bonuses: Steel Ring (Beginner), Forced March (Beginner), Indomitable]
Four hundred and seventy-four soldiers, against what was waiting in that square.
He worked through it. Charging out of the tunnel mouth now was not an option. The enemy was prepared and waiting, and the tunnel exit was a killing ground. Thousands of heretics, four Chaos Astartes, four psykers of unknown capability, and fixed heavy weapons emplacements already sighted on every approach. Four hundred and some soldiers pouring out of a single exit into the middle of all that was not an assault. It was a contribution to the skull cairns.
His gaze moved across the passage. The soldiers were working in silence, pulling their dead clear of the worst of the debris, attending to the wounded with the focused economy of men who had done this too many times. Blood had collected in the low points of the floor and sat there in dark, still pools, catching the amber light from the gas lamps on the walls above.
Then his gaze stopped.
Something had come together in the back of his thinking. He looked at the wreckage on the floor and turned it over once, and the shape of it became clear.
He went still.