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Chapter 27: Picking Up the Pieces
All four of the purestrain's arms struck at once.
The upper limbs drove their serrated claw-limbs into the Nob's abdominal cavity. The two smaller lower arms locked around the Nob's belt, anchoring the purestrain to the wall of green muscle and bone.
The Nob let out a roar that shook the corridor.
It grabbed the purestrain's body with both hands and tried to pull the thing off itself.
But the claw-limbs had already punched through the abdominal wall. The chitin blades worked inside the cavity, cutting through every blood vessel and organ they could reach.
The Nob's strength was going fast.
It finally tore the purestrain free. The cost was a football-sized hole ripped open in its abdomen, with a length of green intestine sliding out through the gap.
The Nob stuffed the intestine back in with one hand and drove the other fist into the purestrain's skull.
The purestrain was knocked clear, rolled twice in the air, and landed steady. A web of cracks spread across its skull. All four arms opened again, ready to come back in.
Through Shared Awareness, Rosen watched without moving.
He was waiting for both sides to reach their peak exhaustion — the point of maximum commitment, maximum damage, minimum remaining capacity.
The casualties kept climbing. Greenskin bodies and hybrid remains built up across the corridor floor in a thick layer. Both Nobs were draped in purple flesh and fluid. All three purestrains had green cleave-marks across their chitin plates.
Forty minutes in, the balance shifted.
The greenskins had dropped from five to six hundred down to under two hundred.
The Genestealer hybrids were down from two to three hundred to fewer than eighty. One of the three purestrains had taken both of its left-side arms destroyed by the Nob's fists.
The bare-handed Nob finally went down from blood loss.
The other Nob was still fighting, its left arm cut through at the elbow by a purestrain's claws.
Both sides were spent.
"Now."
The two words cut through forty minutes of silence.
Rosen pushed the order through Shared Awareness simultaneously to all participating squads.
He had committed four full squads to this operation — Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, forty Death Warriors in total. The remaining two squads held the base.
Alpha and Bravo attacked from the north end of the corridor, hitting the greenskins from behind.
Their target was what was left of the greenskin force.
Twenty Death Warriors firing in line in a sealed corridor produced a rolling wall of fire with nowhere to shelter from.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Boltguns and lasguns opened up together.
The greenskin remnants, already cut to pieces by forty minutes of fighting with the Genestealers, had no warning. They were hit from behind without any cover.
The last Nob still standing didn't even manage to turn around. Four bolt rounds hit its back simultaneously. Two deflected off the armour plate. The other two mass-reactive rounds detonated inside the muscle tissue of its back, shattering several ribs from the inside.
The Nob lurched forward and went down directly on top of a hybrid that had been coming in from the side to attack it.
Two creatures from opposing factions, tangled together in a final absurd embrace.
Number 1 put a bolt through the back of the Nob's skull. The round detonated inside the cranial cavity.
[Life Points +25.]
The hybrid pinned under the Nob was still moving.
Number 7 stepped forward. Chainsword, top to bottom, separated its head from its neck.
The system produced a notification Rosen hadn't seen before.
[Xenos organism detected — Genestealer subspecies, hybrid variant — kill confirmed.]
[Biomass energy extracted.]
[Biomass +13.]
Biomass.
Another new resource type.
No time to examine it. The fight was still going.
Charlie and Delta cut in from the corridor's flanks, targeting the Genestealer remnants.
The hybrids were harder to deal with than the greenskins had been.
Even exhausted from forty minutes of sustained fighting, even reduced from two to three hundred down to fewer than eighty, they still showed the same tactical coordination. When Charlie squad's first volley came in, the hybrids scattered to both sides at a reaction speed that was close to impossible — they appeared to read the trajectories before the rounds arrived.
The Patriarch's psychic coordination network. One hybrid saw a muzzle flash and all of them saw it.
But they were tired. They were damaged. The network's response time was noticeably slower than it had been.
Rosen caught that immediately.
"Concentrate fire on one target at a time. Don't split it."
Charlie squad's ten Death Warriors focused on a single hybrid attempting to break right.
Three bolt rounds and four las-beams hit its torso simultaneously.
The chitin plates fractured under the bolt impacts. The las-beams burned several smoking holes through the grey-purple skin beneath.
[Biomass +13.]
"Next."
Rosen picked targets through Shared Awareness one after another, funnelling all ten weapons onto a single point within a one-second window.
A hybrid's psychic pre-reading could dodge one or two rounds. It could not dodge ten weapons firing at the same point.
They went down one at a time.
The purestrains were a different problem.
The injured purestrain — the one with both left-side arms destroyed by the Nob — still demonstrated a level of combat capability that was hard to look at, even reduced to two functional limbs. Its speed was at least three times that of the hybrids.
When Delta squad's volley came in, the purestrain's body shifted two metres sideways in a movement that bypassed what inertia should have allowed. Ten rounds hit the space it had just occupied.
Then it counterattacked.
Number 31 and Number 34 were both hit simultaneously.
Number 31 took a claw-limb across the chest, right lung damaged. Number 34 lost his left arm at the elbow — a clean cut through the joint.
"Number 11, Number 15 — encircle from both flanks. Keep that two-armed purestrain contained."
Crossfire from multiple directions forced the purestrain to spend everything on evasion.
It was fast. But it wasn't fast enough anymore.
Two destroyed arms meant its balance and mid-air orientation were significantly compromised. When it tried to launch another of its bounding assault charges, its trajectory in the air showed a small deviation.
Just that moment.
Rosen came out from the flank cover position and levelled his plasma pistol at the purestrain's exposed abdomen while it was still airborne.
The plasma bolt hit the purestrain's abdominal cavity at high velocity.
Three thousand degrees of heat vapourised the chitin plating on contact, then continued inward and reduced the organ tissue in the cavity to charred mass.
The purestrain convulsed once in the air, dropped, and twitched for two seconds before going still.
[Biomass +30.]
Rosen's eyebrow moved slightly upward.
Two undamaged purestrains were still on the field.
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