Chapter 86: Slaying the Hive Tyrant
In the fighting that followed, the main internal ramp of Cold Steel Ridge, wide enough to take multiple heavy vehicles side by side, had become a slaughterhouse without apology or relief.
Moving through the surging waves of the swarm, appearing with increasing frequency, were enormous organisms wearing carapace so thick it suggested a walking fortress. Tyrant Guards.
These creatures, defined by every classification the Imperium possessed as living shields for the Hive Tyrant, were behaving contrary to every instinct they had been built with.
Alongside Carnifexes equally capable of absorbing heavy weapons fire, they had been formed into assault teams, and those teams were charging the Imperial line's dense fire net in what amounted to a suicide run, absorbing everything the position could produce and advancing regardless of the cost.
Duvette stood at the rear of the line and watched this with cold attention.
He understood precisely what he was looking at. Tyrant Guards possessed no independent offensive drive, no instinct for active assault. They existed for one purpose: to absorb anti-tank fire on behalf of the high-tier Synapse organisms behind them. The fact that they were now being committed as battering rams, leading the assault without a higher-value organism directly behind them, meant one thing.
The Hive Tyrant, somewhere deep in the swarm's mass, was using its Synapse control to override the genetic defensive instinct encoded into these creatures. It was forcing them forward deliberately, spending its finest living armour in mass suicide runs for one precise objective: to drain what remained of the human position's heavy ammunition.
The calculation was merciless and exact, and it worked.
The reports from tank crews filled the command channel in rapid succession.
"Commissar! Second Squadron, Vehicle Three, main gun rounds exhausted. Co-axial bolter at half a box."
"Fifth Squadron reporting. High-explosive spent. Armour-piercing nearly gone. Requesting resupply."
"Vehicle Seven, fire control thermal overload, ammunition bay empty. All we have left are the treads."
It was not only the 112th. Even the Ultramarines standing like immovable rock at the front of the line were beginning to conserve output. The distinctive deep roar of their bolt weapons, so constant for so long that it had become part of the position's background, began to thin and space out. The Astartes shifted to single, deliberate aimed shots to maintain the line.
Without heavy weapons suppression, the lasrifles of the Astra Militarum alone could barely contain the swarm's advance. The dark purple mass was closing on the first blast wall.
Standing at the centre of a line in the process of failing, Duvette did not activate Overload Drain.
He held the skill clamped in reserve, the ability that could drive machine spirits to burn and empty weapons to fire again. His instinct and his reason were delivering the same answer: not yet. The true abyss, the target that warranted permanent vehicle damage as its price, had not arrived.
"Cease unnecessary fire! Conserve power!" Duvette's voice drove through the howling wind and the alien shrieks across every channel simultaneously. "All units, fix monomolecular bayonets! Prepare for close engagement!"
A single crisp unified snap of metal, repeated across every position on the line, as the surviving soldiers of the 112th drove their monomolecular bayonets into the mounts beneath their lasrifle barrels. No one moved back. The only sound outside the din of the assault was the heavy breathing of soldiers condensing into white mist in the freezing air.
In the nerve-stripped atmosphere that followed, from somewhere deep in the corridor, another shriek arrived.
This one was not a probe. Not a threat display. Its quality was categorically different.
As the echo of that shriek rolled through the mountain's interior and faded, a shape emerged from the drifting smoke and the toxic mist, slow and vast, pushing the chaos of the battle aside ahead of it the way a dreadnought pushes lesser vehicles from its path. Behind it came a living tide that could have swallowed the entire position.
Nearly ten meters tall.
Its body, covered in carapace thick enough to be its own fortress, moved on limbs built for war at a scale that made every other organism in the engagement seem like a preliminary sketch. Four massive upper limbs, each gripping a monomolecular bone sword longer than an Astartes stood tall, moved with a fluid, deliberate intelligence.
The Hive Tyrant.
The apex of what the Great Devourer had shaped through uncountable cycles of evolution. The hive mind's will made manifest in flesh and chitin and killing purpose.
The moment this creature appeared, the entire battlefield seemed to register it at a level that had nothing to do with sight. The vast, cold, merciless attention of the hive mind, operating through this body at close range, reached across the physical distance of the corridor and pressed down on every living organism present with the weight of something that did not understand mercy because it had never needed to.
Even the Astartes, gene-forged, fear-excised, built across decades into something that bore no resemblance to the frightened organisms they had been born as, felt something stir deep in them at this moment. Not fear in any ordinary sense. Something older and more fundamental. Recognition.
Around Duvette, the soldiers of the 112th could no longer fully suppress it. Heavy, uncontrolled breathing came from every position, chests heaving with the involuntary biological response of organisms confronting something at the absolute top of the universe's predator hierarchy.
They held. They were veterans hammered out of blood and fire across months of this campaign, and the System skills at their backs gave them substantially more resistance to this kind of psychic pressure than any comparable mortal force possessed. Any ordinary second-line Astra Militarum regiment, faced with this at close range, would have broken in that moment with no possibility of recovery.
"Now! Full fire! Everything you have, onto that creature!"
Duvette drew his bolt pistol and leveled it at the distant shape of the Hive Tyrant, his voice raw.
Every weapon on the line answered simultaneously. Every bolter, every lasrifle, every plasma discharge, every melta beam. The last one or two shells remaining in each tank's breech. Every round without reservation, all of it directed at the Hive Tyrant in a single concentrated burst.
For a moment the fire illuminated the entire ramp.
The Hive Tyrant did not flinch. It did not slow. It walked into the fire and absorbed everything without altering its pace, and every armour-piercing round, every high-explosive shell, every high-energy laser beam that reached within range of its body struck an invisible barrier first, detonated in mid-air, and dissolved into harmless light.
"Psychic shield."
Duvette understood immediately. Conventional physical firepower could not crack that defence at distance. If Silence was going to reach this organism, he needed to be inside thirty metres when he activated it.
But close combat was already here.
"Prepare to engage!"
He roared it across every channel, slammed down the chainsword's engine, and activated Limiter Break.
The instant the brain's limiters released, his heart hammered at the rate of a heavy industrial pump. Explosive strength flooded every limb.
At the rear of the line, Chapter Master Marneus Calgar raised the Gauntlets of Ultramar above him, their energy fields blazing, and delivered his voice to every living person on Cold Steel Ridge.
"For the Emperor! For Ultramar!"
The swarm's shrieking alien discord and the human soldiers' resolve-laden war cry struck each other at equal volume, and the combined sound made the rock around them shudder.
The swarm crashed into the Imperial line like a black tide that had run out of patience.
Duvette did not retreat. Driven past careful calculation by the adrenaline burning through him, he drove straight into the front of the swarm.
"Die!"
One wide lateral sweep of the chainsword, backed by everything Limiter Break had given his frame, opened through several Hormagaunts that were leaping toward him simultaneously, carapace and viscera splitting apart, the ruined bodies thrown backward by the kinetic force and knocking down the organisms directly behind them.
The killing drew attention from higher-tier organisms nearby. A Tyranid Warrior, twice the size of a human and built for something beyond their scale, gripping a monomolecular bone sword in claws that had been designed for nothing other than this, fixed its crimson compound eyes on the mortal officer causing casualties in its swarm.
Both found each other in the same moment. Duvette tightened his grip on the chainsword and adjusted his breathing, preparing to meet the Warrior directly.
Then: heavy, rapid ceramite footfalls from behind him.
"Stand back, Commissar! This one is mine!"
The voice was full of pride and the kind of fierce certainty that only a warrior who has never genuinely doubted himself can produce.
Cato Sicarius, power sword blazing its blue disintegration field, ornate armour and scarlet cloak moving like a controlled storm, came past Duvette in a single instant and drove directly at the Tyranid Warrior.
The outcome required no suspense.
Sicarius moved with the precision of something that had long ago crossed the line between combat skill and lethal art. In the first contact, he deflected the bone blade with fluid economy. His first strike severed the Warrior's forelimb. His second strike reversed and opened the chest carapace. His third committed everything he had, and the power sword drove through the Warrior's skull and half its body in a single committed blow.
Duvette let out a slow breath watching that. The Ultramarines had fully committed. Over a hundred blue-armoured warriors were driving into the deepest reaches of the swarm, none of them slowing.
These proud Astartes would never permit themselves to shelter behind mortal soldiers and allow mortals to bleed in their place.
But their entry into the engagement did not improve the overall situation.
Because the true nightmare was directly in front of them now.
The Hive Tyrant's enormous body blocked what light remained and drove into the human line like a living wrecking engine. A single violent charge crushed multiple mortal squads that had no time to clear its path. Four bone swords swept in one arc and cut through several Leman Russ tanks as if the armoured vehicles were stage dressing, converting them to burning scrap.
The Hive Tyrant roared a challenge. Its cruel, calculating gaze crossed the entire engagement and fixed on Calgar, standing behind the line.
The several Ultramarines already attacking it received a single casual sweep of those enormous arms in reply. The force behind that sweep sent Astartes and armour both into the rock walls, where they went down.
Then the creature set its gaze on Calgar and charged. Straight. Unstoppable. A battle tank that had decided it needed no road.
The Honor Guard immediately raised their Axes of Macragge and storm shields to intercept.
In the same instant, the Hive Tyrant's Tyrant Guards surged from the mass and threw themselves across the Honor Guard's path, placing their bodies between the Guard and their target with the sole purpose of buying their master the engagement it wanted.
King against king. Champion against champion. The battlefield had locked into a confrontation that had the quality of something that had always been going to happen and could not be stopped now that it had begun.
Calgar did not fall back. The Lord of Ultramar, roaring the name of his gene-father, charged directly into the Hive Tyrant and met it without flinching.
The Gauntlets of Ultramar and the monomolecular bone swords struck each other in a furious exchange, each collision producing a flash bright enough to read by and a detonation felt in the sternum. Every impact gouged deep trenches into the floor.
But Calgar was plainly no match for a creature that stood over him by several times his height. The Hive Tyrant held absolute advantage in raw power and physical scale, and its four bone swords wove a web that gave no opening.
Calgar's power armour began accumulating deep fractures faster than the engagement had any right to produce. His blood was staining the blue armour.
Watching Calgar fighting on the back foot under that four-sword assault, the moment approaching where one of those blades would sever an arm, Duvette finally drew the first of his reserves.
[Fatal Mark]
[On activation, the Commander may lock onto one high-threat enemy entity within visual range. Over the following 10 seconds, that target's vulnerabilities are communicated through instinct to the awareness of all nearby living beings, and the target's resistance to physical damage is reduced for the duration. Cooldown: 3 hours]
[No living thing is without weakness.]
[Cost: 200 Emperor's Wrath]
The moment the skill activated, Duvette drove off a cluster of Hormagaunts attempting to take him from his flanks and locked his eyes on the Hive Tyrant without releasing them.
On the battlefield, something changed. The change was infinitely subtle. Its consequences were not.
Calgar, who had been fighting desperately to survive under the storm of incoming blows, suddenly perceived something in his transhuman visual cortex and his combat instinct with absolute clarity. Something he had not been able to see before. A gap.
He did not hesitate for a fraction of a second.
"For Macragge!"
He did not step back from the bone sword descending at full force toward his right arm. He took it. The blade severed the arm at the shoulder, blood erupting in a pressurized arc, the agony driving through him at a magnitude that would have stopped any ordinary organism. Calgar channeled every remaining unit of strength through the instinct directing his intact left hand.
The Gauntlet of Ultramar, driven with enough force to crack the sound barrier in its arc, struck the Hive Tyrant in the flank.
The impact shattered the carapace at the point of contact and drove deep into the organism's internal structure, damaging organs that nothing from outside had ever reached.
The Hive Tyrant screamed with the specific quality of an organism that has never been hurt before and cannot process what has just happened to it. Its massive body staggered backward involuntarily, breaking the killing combination it had been completing.
That stagger was the only window Duvette had been fighting toward since the moment the creature had appeared in the corridor.
Through the chaos of the engagement, he had been pressing forward the entire time Calgar held the Hive Tyrant's attention, forcing through the mass of organisms between him and his target, keeping his bearing on the Hive Tyrant through every obstruction, steadily and deliberately closing the distance. He was inside thirty metres. An absolutely lethal range to stand at on any rational assessment of this situation.
The instant the Hive Tyrant staggered, Duvette activated both Silence and Overload Drain at the same moment.
As Silence activated, the Hive Tyrant's psychic shield shattered.
The Reality Anchoring Field severed the creature's connection to the hive mind in an instant, cutting its psychic link with the absolute finality of a blade through a cable. For the first time in what may have been the entirety of its existence, the Hive Tyrant was alone inside its own skull. Something that looked, briefly, like the panic of an organism that has just lost the only awareness it has ever known appeared in its eyes.
"Fire!"
Through the command channel, Duvette issued the order to the Leman Russ crews he had earlier directed to remain inside their vehicles even after their ammunition was exhausted, held in reserve for this exact moment and none other.
In the same instant he gave the order, Duvette threw himself without any dignity whatsoever into the track-pit of a destroyed tank beside him, locked both hands over his head, and compacted his body as far as it would go.
The next second, miracle and destruction arrived simultaneously.
The tank formation that had fallen into silence as its ammunition ran out erupted back into furious life under the Soul of the Legion's forced drive. The machine spirits burned in the overdrive, generating a resonance that could be felt in every surface it touched.
The muzzle blast from the tanks directly above him passed over Duvette's position and the concussive shockwave nearly drove the air from his lungs by force. The heat wave swept the entire position without exception.
The Leman Russ tanks fired without reloading. Round after round of 120mm armour-piercing shells at a rate of fire that had no natural explanation, pouring into the Hive Tyrant's body in a sustained, unbroken hammer.
The Hive Tyrant raged. It attempted to reconstitute its psychic shield and discovered with complete despair that its psychic capability had ceased to function. The hive mind's presence it had never been without was no longer there to reach back to.
For a full thirty seconds, the fire did not stop.
When the guns finally went silent and the smoke began to drift in the polar wind, the Hive Tyrant became visible again.
Its carapace, which had absorbed everything the 112th had fired at it for the entirety of the engagement without yielding, had been reduced to fragments. What the fragments exposed was charred organic matter. The four limbs that had been holding bone swords were gone. The head had taken catastrophic damage, half the skull shattered into the floor. One leg was broken. Its ruined body had gone down to its knees in the blood pooling on the ramp.
Even then, with nothing left to spend, the creature would not submit. It forced its remaining structure upright, its throat producing a broken, airless roar. It wanted to reach the Astartes who had brought it to this condition and kill him before the end arrived.
Then, from the smoke and the shell casings scattered across the floor, a blue figure walked through the dying flames without altering its pace.
Calgar. One arm gone from the shoulder. The wound still bleeding. His stride uncompromising.
He walked to the dying creature and looked at it from above, giving its venomous gaze no more weight than the cold around him.
"This is Ultramar. This is Macragge. Face my wrath, alien."
He roared it in a voice that moved the stone around them. He raised his remaining left hand and brought it down from above with the entire force of what he was, shattering the Hive Tyrant's broken skull.
The dull crack of bone giving way echoed across the frozen position.
Calgar stepped onto what remained. He raised his left fist and turned to face Cold Steel Ridge, to face every surviving human warrior on that ice and rock, and roared his victory to all of them.
****
50+advance chapters at patreon.com/Eatinpieces