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Chapter 22: The General Assault
Adrian Hock heard the melta discharge from the main tunnel and knew that the vermin had indeed come through.
First the distinctive shriek of melta fire, superheated and sharp even at distance. Then the overlapping crack of bolt rounds and las-fire in rapid exchange. All of it came from the direction of the main tunnel, rolling out across the open space of the square and bouncing off the rough stone ceiling before fading.
So they had not given up.
Adrian stood before the alloy-steel wall with his arms folded and allowed himself a thin smile. What of it? The ritual was nearly complete.
He had no objection to letting the Emperor's dogs watch Heras die. He waited for the World Eaters to return.
The three-man squad had been gone some time now.
By any reasonable calculation, three Chaos Astartes dealing with a group of infiltrating Guardsmen should have resolved the situation within five minutes. They should have been back by now, carrying skulls or dragging prisoners.
The minutes continued to pass.
Nothing emerged from the main tunnel exit across the square.
The alertness that had settled into Adrian's chest became something with more weight behind it. If the enemy had managed to eliminate three Chaos Astartes outright, or even hold them this long, then the force in that tunnel was not a reconnaissance element.
Was it their main body?
He turned his gaze toward the square's center.
The four remaining World Eaters stood near the eight-pointed star. They had heard the distant engagement as well. The breathing from their helmet grilles had changed, growing heavier, deeper. The desire for blood and slaughter had them in its grip and the waiting was making it worse.
The Butcher's Nails were working.
Adrian could feel the pressure of that barely contained killing urge in the air around them, radiating from four suits of crimson power armour like heat from a forge.
Then movement at the tunnel exit on the far side of the square, at the top of the rubble slope.
Dark, rounded shapes arced up from the tunnel mouth into the torchlight, tracing smooth parabolas across the space above the square. Three of them, close together, rising and falling toward the center of the floor.
Adrian had already begun to assess them as grenades or explosive charges when all four World Eaters produced a sound simultaneously that he had not heard from them before.
It came through their external vox-grilles at full amplification and hit the square like a physical impact. The heretics nearest them stumbled back and covered their ears. The sound was not a battle cry. It was not the calculated aggression that preceded a charge. It was something rawer than that: pure, unmodulated fury that had been sitting under restraint for hours and had just found its release.
Adrian looked at the floor.
Three heads. They had rolled several meters from the point of impact and come to rest face up, the empty eye sockets fixed on the ceiling of the square with the particular blankness of the newly dead.
He recognized the armour fragments still attached to two of them.
The square had gone completely still. Every heretic in the space had stopped moving and was staring at the three heads on the floor. The torches burned without interference. The blood-smell thickened, or perhaps it only seemed to.
Adrian's stomach dropped.
A provocation.
This was a deliberate provocation. Someone in that tunnel had thrown the heads of three Chaos Astartes into the square specifically to do what it was currently doing, which was driving the four remaining World Eaters toward exactly the response the enemy needed them to have.
"Do not react!" He raised his voice toward them. "This is a trap! They are trying to draw you in!"
It was already too late.
The Butcher's Nails had been working without pause for hours, the compulsive killing urge pressing at the inside of their skulls without relief. Now their companions' heads were rolling across the floor in front of them and the blood-smell was in their helmets and every factor that might have held the impulse back had been stripped away simultaneously.
One World Eater let out a battle cry that shook the stones.
"Blood for the Blood God!"
Deep crimson power armour ignited into motion. The power pack gave a sharp concussive burst and the first World Eater covered the distance to the main tunnel exit at a speed that nothing that size had any right to achieve. The other three were behind him before the echo of his cry had finished crossing the square.
Four massive figures crossed the open floor at full sprint, each footfall sending a tremor through the ground. Every heretic in their path was thrown aside by the displacement of air alone, those who weren't quick enough struck directly and ceased to be a concern.
In the tunnel, Duvette's expression could not be called a smile. It was closer to the look of a man who has just lit a very short fuse and needs to be somewhere specific in the next few seconds.
He raised his hand.
Ahead of him, both autocannons had been assembled and positioned at the tunnel entrance, their heavy frames settled onto improvised reinforced mounts, the barrels leveled toward the rubble slope and the square beyond. The brass casings in the loaded drums caught the amber gas-lamp light in a clean line. Red-marked high-explosive rounds throughout. Three-man crews on each weapon, one on the sight, two on feed and reload. The empty casings that were about to start coming out the ejector ports would be a tripping hazard within thirty seconds; no one was going to have time to care.
Further back along the tunnel, soldiers with rocket launchers had dropped to kneeling positions and brought the tubes up to their shoulders. They had no ceiling restriction here. They had space to work.
"Ready, soldiers." Duvette held his raised fist steady. "Revenge starts now."
The ground trembled. The World Eaters' roar grew until it filled the passage from wall to wall, vibrating through the rock. The soldiers held their positions and did not breathe.
Duvette watched the rubble slope.
There.
Two deep crimson shapes crested the slope and came down into the tunnel entrance, growing rapidly.
[Focused Volley (Level 1): Activated.]
"Fire!"
More than ten rockets came off their tubes simultaneously, trailing flame into the passage, aimed at two targets moving at full combat speed.
Landing a direct hit on an Astartes in open motion with weapons as slow as rocket launchers was not a realistic expectation. Duvette had never intended it to be. What a salvo of rockets fired at an oncoming Astartes absolutely did produce was a requirement to move. To dodge. To change direction. To commit to avoiding the explosions rather than charging through them.
That was the requirement.
The moment the World Eaters committed to their evasion, the autocannons opened up.
The discharge in the enclosed space was enormous. Brass casings poured from the ejector ports and hit the ground in a continuous metallic rain. The recoil shook the mounts with each burst. The sound was not individual shots. It was a sustained mechanical roar that pressed on the eardrums and showed no sign of stopping.
Under Focused Volley, that fire found what it was aimed at.
The first high-explosive round struck the lead World Eater's chest plate while he was mid-dodge and could not complete the movement. The ceramite armour blew inward at the impact point, a crater the size of a fist punching through the outer layer. Fragments sprayed in every direction. The second round hit before he had processed the first. Then the third. Then the fourth, each one landing in approximately the same zone, the cumulative damage expanding outward from the initial breach, the servo-systems behind the chest armour screaming as they failed one after another.
The World Eater was still roaring. Still trying to move forward. But the fifth round took his right leg at the knee joint, the one point on a suit of power armour where structural compromise translates immediately and completely into mobility, and the knee joint did not survive it. The leg below it was still functional. The connection between the two was not. The leg bone drove out through the armour breach trailing muscle and tendon, and the enormous body pitched forward and down.
The second World Eater was absorbing the autocannons' second barrel with less fatal results and worse ones.
Three rounds struck his left shoulder in rapid succession. The shoulder plate was not designed to absorb that concentrated a volume of high-explosive fire at close range. It came apart. The arm below it came with it, severed at the joint by the third round's blast, the entire limb spinning away and hitting the ground with a sound that was quieter than it should have been. Dark blood sprayed across the armour's torso, painting the runes and the skulls in fresh red over old black.
Neither of them went down immediately.
The life in a Chaos Astartes was not something that respected the normal relationship between wounds and death. Both of them drove forward on momentum for another fifteen meters before the ground took them.
The two behind had watched this happen.
They bent down and picked up their fallen companions. Not to carry them clear. To use them.
The bodies went up over both shoulders and came around to the front, the ruined power armour held like shields, the shattered limbs dragging. Las-fire from the soldiers was already reaching them, the shots hitting the improvised barricades with flat, meaty sounds and accomplishing very little.
"Reload! Reload now!" Duvette's voice cut through the noise.
The autocannon crews moved with everything they had. Drums up, drums off, new drums up, fingers working through the steps in the correct order, sweat running freely, brass casings shifting underfoot as they moved. The hands shaking from the sustained firing were not helping.
The World Eaters fired while the crews were still working.
The first bolt round found the shield connection point on the left autocannon. The mount jerked. The gunner on the sight went backward with the impact. The second round hit the same weapon's hydraulic stabilizer housing and the system inside it made a sound like a snapped cable before going silent.
The right autocannon took a round through the loading crew's protective plate. The round detonated inside the weapon's chassis. The gears and feed mechanism came apart in fragments. The crewman who had been reaching for the new drum was gone from the elbow up, what remained of his upper body turning to spray before he had finished falling.
Both autocannons were dead.
Duvette heard it before he processed it. The specific absence of a sound that had been defining the engagement.
"Throne."
Two World Eaters, both still carrying momentum and their improvised shields, had the distance they needed before the crews could do anything further. The power packs gave a burst of additional output and the speed jumped to something that the tunnel made even more alarming by compressing it.
Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.
The las-fire from the soldiers on both sides of the autocannons was hitting the bodies being used as shields and doing nothing useful.
"Break contact! Spread out!"
The order arrived at roughly the same time as the World Eaters did.
Both suits released their improvised shields simultaneously and threw them. The shattered bodies of their companions went through the air with the kinetic energy of a catapult's release and hit the formation before anyone had finished processing the order to move.
Three soldiers took the direct impacts.
The first man's chest plate and sternum and the organs behind them compacted into something that could no longer be described as a chest. He was dead before he landed. The second man's neck snapped from the impact on his helmet, the head going sideways at an angle that made the outcome plain without further assessment. The third soldier had moved, was still moving, partially clear, and the corner of the projectile caught his lower leg at the knee. The bone came through the skin above the boot.
The screaming in the tunnel went up several registers.
The World Eaters had not stopped moving through any of this. The chainaxes were already running, the engines at full pitch, the shriek of them pressing into the ears over the screaming and the weapons fire and everything else the tunnel currently contained.
"Blood for the Blood God!"
The left World Eater hit the nearest cluster of soldiers at full charge. One man raised his lasgun horizontally to block. The lasgun was not a weapon designed to stop a chainaxe at full swing driven by transhuman strength. The weapon and the hands holding it and the forearms and the chest behind them all encountered the same objection at the same moment. Two halves of what had been a Guardsman went in separate directions. The blood was still in the air when the axe was swinging again.
The right World Eater chose vertical. A veteran rolled, nearly cleared the arc, did not quite make it. The blade went in at the shoulder and out through the opposite side of the torso. The sound the spine made as the chainsaw teeth found it was something most of the soldiers present would spend the rest of their lives working to forget.
The tunnel became a slaughterhouse.
The chainaxes moved and moved and moved, each swing sending another red cloud into the air, the floor becoming a surface that did not resemble a floor anymore. In close quarters, with no room to maneuver and no weapon that could meaningfully threaten power armour, baseline humans had one available outcome against Chaos Astartes and both World Eaters were providing a thorough demonstration of it.
Two living battering rams moving through a confined press of men. No tactics required. Pure mass and speed and the inexhaustible killing urge the Butcher's Nails had been feeding for hours.
In the upper left corner of Duvette's vision, the morale readout had stopped declining in a steady gradient and started collapsing in steps.
He had underestimated the autocannons' stopping power against moving Astartes. He had thought the direct fire at that range with Focused Volley active would neutralize both at the entrance. It had not. He had been wrong, and the men dying in the tunnel behind him were the price of that error.
Five meters.
Duvette's pulse was doing something he was fairly certain was not medically advisable. He could feel it in his throat, in his hands, in the particular cold clarity that arrived when a situation had simplified itself down to the point where only one thing needed to happen and dying was the alternative to it happening.
His right arm had the chainsword. He pulled the activation cord and felt the engine catch, heard the teeth come up to engagement speed, the familiar low vibration traveling up through the grip into his palm.
He took one step forward.
There were still melta charges left. There was still ammunition for the guns. But none of it mattered without a window, and a window required something the World Eaters' attention could not look away from.
This time, he was the bait.
Both World Eaters saw him. They registered the insignia on the coat, the bearing, the weapon. They understood what they were looking at. The roaring intensified and both of them committed to the target, the chainaxes rising.
Three meters.
From the sides of the tunnel, several veterans threw themselves out of cover and hit the ground at the left World Eater's feet.
None of them made any attempt to use their weapons. They wrapped themselves around the legs, one to each limb, bodies across the feet, everything they had committed to not letting those legs move for whatever fraction of a second they could hold them.
Three bones broke simultaneously, loudly enough to be heard over the engine noise. The veterans did not let go.
"Now!" Duvette's voice tore out of him.
The melta gun opened up from the side. The white heat consumed the left World Eater and the veterans holding his legs and everything else in that space at that moment, the temperature sufficient to make the distinction between power armour and its contents and the men wrapped around its legs entirely academic. The light lasted less than a second. What it left behind was not something that required further attention.
The last World Eater stopped for an instant that was not calm.
His companion's death did not produce caution or retreat. The Butcher's Nails drove the killing urge past anything that might have resembled a considered response. All remaining tactical behavior disappeared. The chainaxe went up over his head with both hands behind it, every remaining gram of force behind a single downward strike aimed at the commissar standing in front of him.
Duvette put the chainsword up.
He knew he could not stop it. The strength differential between a Chaos Astartes at full commitment and one baseline human was not a number he could overcome through grip or stance or any physical property his body possessed. He did not need to stop it. He needed to move it.
The weapons met.
The chainsword's teeth shattered on contact, the housing taking the strike and transmitting it with full force through the blade, the metal bending and warping in the same moment. Pain hit Duvette's right arm with the quality of something structural failing under load, the bones announcing their objection loudly. The web of skin between his thumb and forefinger tore and blood came immediately through the glove.
But the chainaxe's arc shifted.
Half a foot. That was all. The blade came down past his face close enough that he felt the wind from it and hit the ground at his feet, driving a deep gouge into the stone. The World Eater's weight had fully committed to the strike and was now committed to the stone floor, the power armour's center of gravity driven forward and down.
One second. Less.
The second melta gun fired from the side.
The white light took the World Eater at the shoulder and continued through everything above it and what remained of the upper body was no longer a consideration. The lower portion of the suit stood for one second, the servos in the legs still cycling, and then fell backward and hit the stone with a crash that came up through Duvette's boots.
The tunnel went quiet.
The cooling hiss of two melta guns. The sounds of men who had been wounded and were managing it with varying degrees of success. Somewhere, a weapon hitting the floor as the hand holding it relaxed.
Duvette's right arm hung at his side. Moving it produced a quality of pain that indicated the bones had not come through the engagement intact. He did not look at it. He looked at the floor of the tunnel, at the remains of eight Chaos Astartes distributed across an arc of thirty meters, and at the soldiers still standing among them.
Then a notification appeared in the upper right of his vision.
[Congratulations. You have eliminated a complete small Chaos Warband. Reward: 300 Emperor's Wrath.]
He read it once. Then he exhaled through his nose.
The enemy was not finished with them. The sounds were already arriving from multiple directions: the battle cries of heretics, the clash of metal against metal, the growing volume of something large and organized moving toward them from the square. The other entry points. The mass of the cult, what remained of it, moving.
Duvette placed his left boot on the nearest section of ruined power armour.
He raised his left arm.
"For the Emperor!"
Then there was only one thing left to do.
Fight.