[Your roar travels across the entire underground battlefield.]
[Something in it reaches the Astartes. The fighting spirit that had been holding steady catches fire, and the Deathwatch veterans and the Sons of Medusa make the same choice simultaneously, without discussion: no more measured advance. Everything forward.]
[Eight Dreadnoughts move with them, iron walls pressing through the stasis bomb aftermath and into the recovering entropy fields, and from across the cavern, different voices and different oaths fill the dark air.]
["For the Lion—"]
[One of the Dreadnoughts, the ancient warrior who had stayed silent through the entire engagement until now, begins to move at full stride. The massive power claw opens wide. The remaining promethium in the heavy flamer clears a lane through the Hrud mass, and the Dreadnought charges directly toward a Hrud leader sheltering behind the bulk of the alien formation. A Dark Angel's battle cry at full volume, almost a roar.]
["For Russ and the Allfather—"]
[On the flank, a Watch Captain has just barely cleared a time beam that would have ended him. He does not stop to take stock of how close it was. The shattered pieces of his helmet fall away as he tears it off, and the two-handed chainsword in his ceramite grip screams to life. He raises it and charges.]
["Purge the weak."]
[Captain Slyll drives his Terminator armor forward across the cavern floor, the ceramite pocked and scored across every surface, storm bolter and power sword working without pause. Entropy warheads are landing against his plate continuously, each one accelerating the aging of the armor around him in small increments. He does not slow. He does not seek cover. The Sons of Medusa and the Iron Hands share the same understanding of what flesh is and what it is worth, and Slyll is demonstrating it now, a tireless machine that happens to contain a man.]
["Courage and glory—"]
["We fight for Macragge—"]
[The Ultramarines voices in the Kill Teams are the loudest and the most numerous. They draw blades at the word and accelerate into the alien line without hesitation. When one of them goes down — aging through the entropy field in seconds, collapsing with the armor still around him — another steps immediately into the gap and continues the advance. When that one falls, another. Guilliman's genetic sons do not fight as individuals. They fight as a line, and the line does not stop.]
["Victory or death—"]
[A dark shape is moving through the Hrud mass, threading between entropy field edges at a speed and with a silence that should not be possible in this environment.]
[The Raven Guard Watch Captain is running Shadow Step at full expression, passing through layers of entropy coverage that would have taken years off anyone else, somehow threading the geometry of the fields in patterns that only the sons of Corax can fully read. He does not slow when he reaches the densest concentration of Hrud bodies and circular war machines. He pulls the melta bomb from his belt without breaking stride.]
[Boom.]
[The flash fills the cavern. The heat radius from the melta bomb catches everything within several hundred meters: Hrud, war machines, entropy field emitters, all of it consumed by a single expanding sphere of scorching destruction. When it clears, the machines that had posed the greatest threat to the Deathwatch line are gone.]
[You have just torn a Hrud leader apart with the wings and are already running again, crossing the battlefield in a charge that feels different from every charge before it. The shockwaves from your footfalls alone are opening space in the Hrud mass around you. The wings extend and sweep in long arcs as you move, harvesting whatever is within reach, and the entropy fields that catch you for moments at a time are adding something to you rather than taking it away.]
[The tide of the battle is shifting. You can see it.]
[Then the sound changes.]
[A high, scraping screech rolls through the cavern from somewhere deep in the tunnel network, reverberating off every wall. The Hrud that had been suppressed by the combined Astartes push begin to emit the same sound in return, a spreading chorus, and visual fog fields bloom across their bodies as a fresh wave of Hrud pours into the cavern from multiple passage mouths simultaneously.]
[And behind them, ducking through an entrance that is barely large enough to admit it, comes something new.]
[Larger than any Hrud you have seen. Head set low with no visible neck, a single twisted horn rising from the crown of its skull. It moves fast for its size, crossing the edge of the battlefield in a handful of strides.]
[The skull helmet's visor locks onto it immediately.]
[Before you can redirect your charge, the nearest Dreadnought to the creature, the ancient warrior who had already been fighting through multiple entropy fields for the better part of the engagement, is enveloped. The expanding field from the Hrud chieftain swallows the Dreadnought completely. The iron body slows. The roar coming from within it, already weakening, climbs in pitch and then fails.]
[Silence from inside the sarcophagus.]
["That is the chieftain of this migration. A Hrud Great-Horned One."]
[The voice comes from a full kilometer away across the chaos of the battlefield. The last Watch Captain, his senses sharpened past anything a normal Astartes could manage, cuts through the noise and delivers it directly.]
["All Dreadnoughts, converge on me! Concentrate lascannon fire and destroy it!"]
[You hear it. You tilt the skull helmet once.]
[Your hand closes on the Staff of the Covenant.]
[The wings fold.]
[The propulsion assembly forms in the instant of compression, and brilliant energy erupts from Starfire Glory's back.]
[Your boots leave the ground.]
[You come off the cave floor like a round from a cannon, driving forward through layer after layer of entropy field, each one adding to what you already carry, each one adding something else besides, and the Hrud bodies in your path become obstacles you pass through rather than around.]
[The Great-Horned One is ahead.]
[You are closing.]