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Chapter 23: Reinforcements! Charge! For the Emperor!
Duvette opened the skill tree without hesitation, his gaze moving directly to the Iron Discipline branch.
[Burn the Boats]
[When activated, the combat will of all forces under your command increases substantially. Morale, Stability, and Loyalty are locked at or above 80%. Chaos Corruption is substantially reduced. While this skill is active, 10 Emperor's Wrath is consumed per minute.]
[Activation Cost: 100 Emperor's Wrath]
"Activate," he said inwardly.
One hundred Emperor's Wrath deducted.
In the next instant, something invisible expanded outward from him, moving through the tunnel in a wave that could not be seen but could be felt in the way a shift in pressure can be felt before it is understood. It reached every soldier in the passage and passed through them and kept going.
The readouts in the upper right of his vision changed.
[Overall Morale: 41% → 80%]
[Overall Stability: 49% → 80%]
[Overall Loyalty: 70% → 80%]
The numbers hit their new positions and stayed there. No further movement. Locked.
The wounded soldiers who had been making involuntary sounds stopped making them. The men whose faces had gone the particular grey-white color that comes from watching Astartes work in close quarters looked at their hands, found the shaking had stopped, and looked up. The grip on every lasgun in the passage steadied. Breathing, which had been ragged and shallow throughout the tunnel, returned to something closer to normal.
In the soldiers' eyes, the figure standing on the remains of the World Eaters with one arm raised seemed to carry something that was not entirely accountable for by the torchlight.
At this moment, what he said was the Emperor's will.
"For the Emperor!"
Duvette's voice hit the tunnel walls and came back from every direction at once, overriding the approaching sound of heretic battle cries that had been getting louder for the past several minutes. The fighting will that moved through the formation was immediate and physical, a change in the air of the passage.
"For the Emperor!" The company commanders took it up.
"For the Emperor!" Every soldier in the column followed.
"For the Emperor! For the Emperor! For the Emperor!"
The sound shook the passage. Dust came off the rock walls in thin curtains. The gas-lamp flames drove sideways against their housings.
Outside the tunnel, Adrian Hock stood near the base of the rubble slope with his arms folded and a cold smile on his face.
He had no particular feeling about the World Eaters' deaths. Blood was blood. More of it only accelerated the ritual, whatever vessel it came from. He had never truly needed the Warband. He had needed what they carried with them.
He turned and looked back at the square's center.
The blood around the eight-pointed star and the alloy-steel wall was beginning to boil. The dark liquid on the floor rolled and bubbled, each burst releasing a wave of iron-smell that reached him even at this distance. The pattern of the star's points was vanishing under the movement.
The four psykers stood at their cardinal positions, unchanged since he had last looked at them. The mouths beneath their hoods moved quickly, the profane recitation continuing without pause.
Nearly there.
Fifteen minutes. Perhaps less.
Adrian let out a short, open laugh and spread his arms toward the direction of the main tunnel's din.
"Come then! Insects! Vermin! Come and try to stop me! Come on!"
The sound of it crossed the square and was swallowed by the general noise without response. He did not need a response. He had already sent half his elite fighters through every tunnel entrance to close on the Ash Watchers from multiple directions simultaneously. These were not the expendable cultists he had been feeding into the surface assault lines for weeks. These were soldiers by any meaningful standard: equipped with armour plates, armed with weapons drawn from PDF armories, trained to fight in the tunnel network they had grown up in.
This was their home. Every passage, every junction, every ceiling height and sight line. They had walked these routes since childhood.
The outsiders had walked them once.
How could this end any other way?
The smile was still on his face when combat sounds came from the tunnel entrance on his right.
Las-fire. Solid-shot weapons. Human voices, screaming and shouting and dying. The sounds were dense and close. Not the distant thunder from the main tunnel but something immediate, within the square's margin.
Adrian lowered his arms.
He turned his head and listened.
The left entrance. Firing. Then the right rear. Then the left rear. Within thirty seconds, every tunnel entrance around the perimeter of the underground square had come alive with the sound of active combat simultaneously: las-fire and explosions and the overlapping cries of men fighting and falling, all of it rising into the open space above and combining into a single dense roar that had no clear origin point.
Adrian's expression went flat and stayed there.
More of them.
Inside the main tunnel, Duvette led what remained of his four hundred soldiers in a fighting withdrawal that was not a retreat. The ground they gave up, they gave up at a price. The elite heretics pressing from multiple directions came in armour and with trained movement, weapons that had come out of PDF armories rather than improvised manufacture, shooting with the accuracy of people who had practiced. They were better than anything the regiment had faced underground before this point.
The Ash Watchers were better than them.
With Burn the Boats active and the morale locked where it was, Duvette's soldiers absorbed fire that should have broken their cohesion and returned it with interest. A round going past a man's ear did not cause him to flinch. A soldier going down beside his squadmate did not cause the squadmate's hands to shake. They were light infantry from a death world, raised in harsh conditions that other regiments could only be told about secondhand, and they had fought Nurgle cultists in the abandoned hive warrens of their homeworld and Orks in dense jungle terrain and traitors in swamps that smelled of rot and old blood. They were not going to break in a tunnel.
Further back in the column, Finn Valentine had not stopped reciting since the skill activated.
[Hatred is the greatest gift the God-Emperor has given to humanity.]
He pulled the trigger. A heretic who had been in the process of setting up a heavy stubber emplacement at the far end of the passage stopped being in that process.
[Never suffer the unclean to endure.]
Another shot. A heretic had pulled the pin on a grenade and was in the process of throwing it when the round arrived. The grenade went off at the point of release and the heretics closest to the thrower were removed from the engagement by their own side's munitions.
Finn noted the result without changing his expression and kept reciting.
At the front of the column, Duvette was working through his bolt pistol with his left hand. One round. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Five rounds. The empty shell casings hit the stone floor of the passage and rolled. Every shot had been placed. No target that entered his field of fire had walked away from the judgment.
He was where he had promised to be. At the front. Between his soldiers and what was trying to kill them.
Rounds came past him close enough to feel the displacement of air. Las-beams left their tracks in the dark and lit up the dust and the blood on his face in brief flashes. He did not move backward. He did not flinch. Whether that was the Burn the Boats effect or something he had arrived at through his own developing understanding of what this role required, he was no longer certain and had stopped trying to distinguish between the two.
The enemy had too many bodies. Every fork in the passage was producing new fighters. The Emperor's Wrath was ticking down at ten points per minute and the skill was holding, but the weight of numbers was what it was.
Then something arrived from behind him.
Footsteps. A great many of them, moving together, the sound dense and fast and organized. Metal soles on broken stone, the rhythmic percussion of it carrying clearly even over the combat noise. Equipment sounds. Breathing, steady and heavy but controlled.
Then Evan's voice, from somewhere in the press behind him, pitched high enough to carry over everything else.
"Commissar!! I'm back! Reinforcements! Colonel Fox has arrived!"
Duvette drew one long breath.
He raised his left arm. The bolt pistol in that hand caught the amber gas-lamp light along its barrel, the black metal carrying a hard, cold gleam.
"For the Emperor!" His voice went out through the tunnel as far as it would carry. "Charge! Break them!"
"For the Emperor!"
The Ash Watchers stopped retreating.
The real counterattack had begun.
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