The Intelligent Control Corps hit the walker tide first.
The Scyllax Guardian at the front carried chainswords in their mechanical tentacles and moved into the mass without slowing, their metal frames absorbing impacts that would have stopped anything biological and returning them as forward momentum. Limbs and fragments of corrupted bodies scattered across the ground in their wake, the chainswords working continuously without fatigue or hesitation.
Behind them, the fortress-pattern intelligent control robots advanced in a widening line, their larger frames rising above the walker mass as they straightened to full height. The Lascannons they carried were not point weapons at this range: each beam that discharged was thick enough to pass through multiple bodies in a single line, and the beams did not stop until the energy was spent. Thousands of Nurgle's plague walkers were vaporized with every salvo, the losses in each second outpacing what any conventional force could have inflicted in minutes.
The cyclone missiles from the Stormtrooper company went up again, arcing over the Corps and landing deeper into the mass where density was highest. Then the Stormtroopers themselves moved up on their Taurus vehicles, bolt weapons raised over the vehicle frames, adding sustained fire into every gap the missiles had opened.
Behind them, the Rhino carriers of the Wehrmacht Guards advanced in close coordination, the laser weapons of the Guards firing in overlapping fields that crossed the battlefield like sheets of directed rain, converging on the plague walkers' fragile corrupted frames and burning through them with a thoroughness that quantity alone could not answer.
Above the city, the Thunderhawks continued their low-altitude passes. The turbo-Lascannons and heavy bomb loads they carried worked methodically through the city's remaining structures, not in the hope of killing walkers one at a time but in the strategic sense: collapsing the cover that allowed the walker tide to spread and divide through urban terrain, forcing the mass into the open where the ground forces could concentrate fire.
Without a command structure, without Plaguebearers to direct them or Death Guard to anchor around, the walker tide had only numbers. Against this much organized firepower, numbers required time to spend, and time was being taken from them in every direction simultaneously.
Twelve hours passed.
The Lamenters and Nolan's group pulled back from the city's interior during that period, their role in the direct engagement complete. What followed them was a different kind of operation: not assault but erasure. The bombardment that came down across Lucknow in the dark hours was sustained and total, the sky above the city lit at intervals by the light of impacts walking across the urban mass. And then the Thunderhawks carrying the Firestorm Catalysts made their final approach.
The flames that came from those payloads were blue and did not behave the way fire behaved when it was only fire. They spread across surfaces and into spaces where the walkers had taken shelter: the dark corners of collapsed buildings, the craters where they had crowded together, the places where the density of the infection had been highest. The blue light reflected off every face present outside the city perimeter and turned the night into something else briefly.
The plague walkers caught in it did not scream. Whatever remained of the souls inside those bodies, the plague had not left them anything capable of screaming. But in the final seconds before the heat was complete, something in the quality of the silence from within the flames felt different from the silence of things simply ceasing to function.
As if something had been waiting a long time to stop.
The first war between Chaos and the native world was over.
The cost of it was hundreds of millions of lives.
Nolan's forces did not leave Uttar Pradesh when the city fell quiet.
They conducted a full clearance of the entire state: every town, every road, every stretch of agricultural land. Flamers burned every surface that had been touched, not to a degree that satisfied any conventional safety standard but to the degree that gave Nurgle's plague no foothold to persist from. The operation was methodical and it was thorough and it would make any subsequent use of the land difficult for years.
The local officials protested this in writing. The protests arrived consistently through the official channels and remained there. Not one of them was delivered in person to Nolan or anyone in his immediate vicinity. The presence of two companies of Lamenters and the rest of what had fought through Lucknow had a clarifying effect on the calculations around in-person confrontation.
The war's aftermath reached the rest of the world through a different channel.
The Guardians of Terra's already established reputation as a violent and ungovernable entity became the frame for the initial reporting. A local official released population data: Uttar Pradesh had held approximately 210 million people. Fewer than five million remained. The reaction across global media and public networks was immediate and loud: accusations of atrocity, demands for accountability, the familiar cycle of outrage directed at the most visible available target.
Then footage began appearing.
It was partial. Sound had been trimmed at specific points. Certain details were obscured in ways that were clearly deliberate. But the footage was real, shot in first-person perspective from within the fighting, and what it showed was not something that required detailed explanation to understand. The walker tide. The scale of it. The Plaguebearers moving through the mass with their curved blades. The Hulk's green form visible at the edge of several sequences, the size of it registering differently on camera than it had from a distance. And quieter footage, from after the fighting: ordinary people who had survived inside a barricaded town, alive because something had come from outside and opened the perimeter.
The online cycle shifted.
Not universally and not cleanly. The Guardians of Terra remained a designated terrorist organization in the official frameworks of every relevant government. But in the public conversation, for the first time, there were voices that were not simply hostile. Tentative defenses. Questions directed at the official departments rather than at Nolan's people. An anti-heroic framing that was not the same as support but was something other than condemnation.
The footage had been David's operation, released under Nolan's instruction. Making the threat visible to ordinary people was the purpose: not reputation management but information. The world had to know that what had happened in Uttar Pradesh was not something the existing structures had been built to prevent.
One additional piece of material appeared that David had not released and could not source. A memo from within American officialdom, referencing the incident the records described as the Mexican Ghetto operation. David investigated it carefully and confirmed only that the origin could not be traced. Nolan noted this and moved on. Whatever had released it had served a purpose he would accept without requiring an explanation.
He did not place value on the reputation that had briefly improved. Public opinion moved on the surface of things and required only a few reports to reverse entirely. What mattered was what the operation had actually accomplished, and what it had cost.
David's casualty report was precise.
Twenty-five Lamenters had died in the fighting. Not fallen in a way that permitted recovery or carried the ambiguity of wounds that might resolve: killed, in the final accounting, by the Death Guard and by the accumulated pressure of the plague tide across an engagement that had required them to hold ground rather than fight the way they were built to fight.
The Stormtrooper companies had taken no losses.
Among the Wehrmacht Guards, a full company had sustained breaches to their biochemical protective suits during the fighting. Medical personnel worked through the cases with panacea, but fifty of those soldiers had reached the point where the corruption was no longer reversible. They were executed by the Stormtroopers. It was not a complicated decision and it was not delayed.
Nolan read the numbers. Equipment losses and personnel losses for every unit below the Lamenters were, in the context of what had been faced and what had been achieved, within the margins he could account for without difficulty.
The twenty-five Lamenters were not within those margins. They were not a number he could process cleanly and set aside.
He set the report down and did not say anything about it.
This was the Astartes' purpose and the Astartes' fate: to spend their lives for humanity and the Emperor, and to do it without asking whether humanity would understand the cost or remember the names. The Lamenters had known this longer and more intimately than most, their entire history being a lesson in exactly that. They had gone forward anyway.
He would carry the number. It was the least he could do with it.