[You have now seen the full scope of what time-based weapons do.]
[The Hrud's entropy energy is something beyond conventional logic. They do not understand the principles behind it themselves. The aging, the reversal, the field propagation: all of it operates on instinct rather than comprehension. Were it not for the behavioral limits hardwired into the Hrud by their own nature, by the instincts and habits that keep their migration patterns constrained, they would have consumed the greenskins long ago. Possibly everything else after that.]
[There are older accounts, uncertain in their provenance, that claim the Hrud were not a naturally occurring species at all: that the Old Ones created them as weapons against the necrodermis intelligences who had grown afraid of death during the War in Heaven. A weapon that forgot it was a weapon, left to migrate through the void for millions of years afterward.]
[Hiss.]
[Your magnetic boot slams into the cave floor. The power armor skates between two converging entropy fields by centimeters, the aging effect grazing the edge of Starfire Glory's surface without taking hold. The wings extend on both sides and sweep hard through the Hrud mass pressing in from your left, shearing through bodies in a wide arc. You bring the Staff of the Covenant around and fire twice into the right.]
[Crack. Crack. Crack.]
[Twin lascannons from several Dreadnoughts punch long bright lines through the cavern air above and behind you. The beams arrive faster than the Hrud can close the gaps in their formation, and the entropy fields collapse at the source as the bodies fall. You drive forward through the opening.]
[The circular Hrud war machine is ahead: the one that reversed the Astartes back through their lives. It is already trying to withdraw.]
[You close the distance and bring the Staff of the Covenant down in a single stroke. The war machine comes apart in two pieces.]
[Boom. Boom. Boom.]
[Behind you, the storm bolters of the Deathwatch veterans track continuously across the cavern's width, and the eight Dreadnoughts advance in a steady line, driving the Hrud backward step by step. The frenzied forward press of the alien mass slows, staggers, and begins to break.]
[You turn the skull helmet and read the battlefield.]
[Then you move again, driving toward the passage mouth where the Hrud numbers are thickest.]
[Shortly after, the first major underground chamber is yours.]
[The Hrud that survived the suppressing fire and laser bombardment fall back deeper into the cave network, retreating through passages too narrow for the Dreadnoughts to follow at speed. You count what remains of your force as the dust settles.]
[Eleven of the eighty-nine Astartes are gone. Not all of them died in a conventional sense. The ones the time beam reached did not die. They became something else. None of them lasted long after.]
[You do not allow yourself to stop moving.]
[A gesture forward, and eight Dreadnoughts and the survivors follow, boots and iron feet crossing a floor soaked in Hrud remains, pushing into the next passage before the enemy can consolidate.]
[As you go deeper, the migration becomes aware of you. The full mass of the nomadic Hrud begins contracting toward your position through the branching underground network.]
[Hiss.]
[A stasis bomb detonates in the air above a large Hrud concentration ahead. The stasis field and the entropy field meet and cancel in a radius of tens of meters, freezing Hrud and one of their leaders in place for a handful of seconds.]
[You push through the last edge of the fading entropy field, feeling it claw briefly at your skin, and drive the Staff of the Covenant through the Hrud leader before it can move again. It comes apart.]
[The skull helmet releases a low, hard sound from your throat.]
[The wings sweep. The Staff sweeps. You move in Shadow Step, threading between entropy field edges through the larger cavern beyond, and the Hrud fall on both sides of you.]
[But the cavern ahead is enormous, and the numbers coming through its passages are not stopping. Tens of thousands, funneling in through dozens of tunnel mouths. A dozen Hrud leaders. Several more of the circular war machines.]
[The stasis bombs are the only thing keeping the casualty count from accelerating. Without them, the entropy fields at this density would be continuous.]
[Boom.]
[Your boots hit the ground hard. You step around a field edge, feel it graze your shoulder, and break a Hrud leader's skull with a single overhand strike of the Staff. As you pull back, the next field catches you before you can clear it.]
[The aging hits. You can feel it: time pulling at your body from the inside, the bronze of your face tightening as wrinkles deepen under the skull helmet, years stacking on years in the span of seconds.]
[And then something else.]
[Your right hand, gripping the Staff of the Covenant, tightens on the shaft. The grip is stronger than it was a moment ago. Your legs, driving the power armor forward, are driving harder than the armor's own servo-systems require. The reaction speed that got you out of the last three engagements is not declining.]
[It is increasing.]
[The Staff swings in a wide horizontal arc and the shockwave it produces through the distorted air hits the surrounding Hrud mass like a wave front, scattering bodies in every direction.]
["How is there this much physical strength? Has Khorne decided to bless me without asking?"]
[You clear the entropy field and your thoughts catch up with what your body is telling you.]
[The aging is real. The body is older. And the combat ability is not degrading alongside it — it is climbing.]
["Could it be that the entropy energy is causing some unknown mutation? That the accumulated time aging has inadvertently completed what my enhancement surgery left unfinished?"]
[There is no time to pursue the thought.]
[Your body moves before the analysis is done, and what it does in the next several seconds is something that previously required the armor's full assistance. Now the armor is following you rather than augmenting you. The Staff and the wings work together through the surrounding Hrud mass and what they leave behind is a corridor of wreckage that the Dreadnoughts and the Deathwatch veterans can advance through without slowing.]
[The pressure on the battlefield is shifting. You can see it in the Hrud movement patterns, in the way the leaders are beginning to redirect rather than press forward.]
[If the power armor was once an amplifier for your strength, it has now become something closer to a vehicle.]
[Boom.]
[One magnetic boot strikes the ground and the rock within a ten-meter radius shatters outward. You come off the crater at a dead sprint toward the nearest cluster of Hrud leaders, a trail of golden light behind you in the dark of the cavern.]
["For the Emperor—"]