[Boom.]
[The pale red star has barely cleared the horizon when the drop pods begin falling.]
[One after another they come down through the smoke and fire still drifting above the Sacred World's surface, trailing flame, hitting the scorched ground in sequence with impacts that send rock fragments and dust billowing outward in wide circles.]
[The first to land are the Dreadnought drop pods. Retro-thrust rockets fire at the last moment, and the doors crash open. Eight ancient warriors, each standing over five meters of cast iron and machine faith, step out into the ruined air.]
[The Astartes drop pods land a breath behind them. Eighty-nine Deathwatch veterans and the remaining Sons of Medusa file out through the dust.]
[One door slams open last.]
[You step onto the scorched earth of the Sacred World in Starfire Glory, magnetic boots finding purchase on broken stone. In your vibranium hand, the Staff of the Covenant catches the red morning light, its length shimmering with a faint green glow.]
[Deathwatch does not prohibit alien weapons. Their philosophy has always been pragmatic: study the enemy, learn what kills them, use it. This is not something they discuss openly with the wider Imperium. The Inquisition's attention has a way of becoming complicated.]
[Which explained the expressions on both Watch Captains' faces when you casually asked whether they had any Necron melee weapons in their armory.]
[What they produced was not a Warscythe or a Hyperphase Sword. What they produced was something older: the Staff of the Covenant, a weapon held by this sector's Watch Fortress for at least a thousand years, recovered at a cost no one in the records had bothered to document.]
[You check your loadout through the visor. Storm bolter at the hip. Entropy blade from the Hrud leader, stowed. A small number of stasis bombs — a suggestion from one of the Black Shield Dreadnoughts, whose cold, almost mechanical speech pattern and precise tactical knowledge of Hrud behavior has made you quietly certain he is a loyalist of the Iron Warriors. Possibly old enough to have fought alongside Perturabo himself during the Great Crusade's Hrud engagements.]
[Even inside Deathwatch, Black Shields are rare. Ancient warriors given a second life inside a Dreadnought's sarcophagus are rarer still.]
[Thud. Thud. Thud.]
[The Kill Teams form up behind you. The Dreadnoughts take position. You grip the Staff of the Covenant and move.]
[The twelve-hour orbital bombardment did not break the Hrud migration. They are too numerous, and too deep. But it stripped away the surface structure of the city above their warrens and exposed their tunnel entrances to the scorching red sunlight, which the Hrud avoid even at the cost of tactical position. The cave mouths now stand open and visible across the ruined landscape.]
[You select one: wide enough for two Dreadnoughts to enter side by side. You walk through first.]
[Entropy rounds begin streaking up from the depths the moment your boot crosses the threshold, tumbling through the dark air toward your armor.]
[You raise the Staff of the Covenant.]
[Beams of green light fill the passage from wall to wall. The Hrud advancing through the dark detonate into cascades of blazing ash. Behind you, the Dreadnoughts roar forward, lascannons and heavy flamers opening simultaneously, and the Hrud that survive the first pass are vaporized before their entropy fields can reach meaningful range.]
[You advance and fire. The Dreadnoughts advance and fire. The Deathwatch veterans close behind them, storm bolters up, picking off anything that moves at the edges of the kill zone. The stasis bombs go out at the chokepoints, freezing clusters of Hrud in place long enough for the Dreadnoughts to walk through them.]
[The tunnel entrance behind you has been fighting in this ancient, brutal way since the Great Crusade, and it works. The Hrud fall back. The entropy fields never reach saturation in the confined space. You move deeper without losing a single warrior.]
[Then the passage opens.]
[The cavern beyond is enormous. The visor cannot find the far wall. And in the volume of space ahead, the Hrud are present in numbers that make the tunnel fighting look like a prologue.]
[You raise one fist. Everyone behind you stops.]
[Then you drop the fist forward and charge.]
[The cavern fills with light: green beams from the Staff of the Covenant, mass-reactive detonations from storm bolters, lascannon pulses from the Dreadnoughts punching through alien bodies in long straight lines. The Hrud return fire with entropy rounds and push forward in mass, and where they reach the Deathwatch veterans, the fields begin to tell. Several Astartes caught at the field edges slow visibly, their movements stretching as the entropy works on their bodies.]
[Then a Hrud war machine rolls out of the dark.]
[Circular in profile, low, moving on something that is not a wheel. From its forward housing, a beam fires: not a projectile, not energy in any conventional sense. The air around the beam distorts. Time distorts.]
[You activate Shadow Step without hesitation, your figure dissolving into the darkness of the cavern, reappearing several meters to the side already moving, already driving toward the war machine with the Staff of the Covenant raised.]
[One of the Dreadnoughts shifts to intercept the beam's next firing arc. The massive iron body is slow. The angle is wrong. The beam is already tracking.]
[A Deathwatch Astartes steps into the line.]
[Deliberately.]
[The beam takes him.]
[The entropy field expands at the point of impact and the power armor begins to change. The outer surface reverts. Ceramite returns to raw composite. Fittings revert to raw material. The armor's history runs backward in seconds.]
[And from inside the collapsing power armor, filling the cavern from wall to wall, comes a sound that stops everything.]
["Waaah—"]
[A human infant's cry.]