V2 Chapter 10: Blood Pact. Executioners. Chaos Champion.
In the unlit shadows, three Penitents were concealed in the gap of a half-collapsed building's upper floor.
This ruined hive space of industrial waste-gas and raw blood-smell had become the most natural hunting ground the Chaos devotees could have asked for. Their faces, carved with desecration runes, wore the fanatical and crooked smiles of creatures that have been waiting for their prey to step into a trap. Their hands were tight on crude solid-shot automatic weapons.
They were waiting. Waiting for the false Emperor's servants to walk into the killing position they had arranged.
These three heretics were muttering under their breath without control, every shred of attention on the street ahead. They did not register that death had already arrived from their own shadows.
Three grey shapes, completely without mass or sound, pressed against the rough ferrocrete walls and came to rest behind them. No heavy footfalls, no sound of carapace rubbing against surfaces, not even the rhythm of their breathing was audible.
When a distant fire jumped and threw a sliver of metal reflection into one of the Penitents' eyes for a moment, the shadows behind all three of them detonated.
Stroud's lean, explosive arms drove forward, and the garrote wire traced an arc through the air so fast it was barely visible, snapping tight around the Penitent's throat with precise, lethal intent.
The muscles in his arm locked hard, the jerk backward carrying a force that drove the wire through flesh and into the cervical vertebrae, almost taking the man's head off with the single pull.
At the same moment, two other 112th veterans drew knives across the other two Penitents' throats and airways with the same efficiency, leaving both of them with no ability to raise an alarm.
A series of sounds that did not belong in any conversation. Three bodies with blood bubbling through ruined throats went down without noise on the dusty floor.
Blood moved into the cracks between broken tiles. Stroud released the garrote, pushed the body into a corner shadow with his foot, and crouched beside the gap without looking through it yet, giving a clean-signal hand gesture to the stairwell behind him.
Heavy footfalls, deliberately softened, from below. A moment later, Anderson came up, the last to arrive, carrying the master-grade power maul, making the shadows crowd slightly.
"How far?" Anderson kept his voice as low as a voice that size could go, his body bending slightly in the dark.
He looked through one of the wall's irregular gaps at the smoke and toxin-choked street outside, and at the building ahead that was showing a great deal of red luminescence in his peripheral vision.
Stroud did not answer immediately.
He put one half of one eye past the gap's edge, scanning the outside environment with the careful patience of someone whose life depends on the accuracy of that scan.
The red glow was bright against the fires everywhere, spreading despair across the ruins around it.
Stroud closed his eyes, ran the terrain he had just seen against the coordinates the Commissar had given him on the strategic map, and matched them.
"We're here." He opened his eyes, settled his back against the pocked wall, and kept his voice below conversation level. "See the place with the most red concentration, directly opposite us? Through this street, into the alley beside it. That's the command post the boss identified."
Anderson looked where Stroud indicated. The street was not wide, but both sides offered nothing to hide behind. Any vehicle or person crossing it was entirely exposed to the building's fire arc.
"I'll be honest," Anderson said directly, his weather-roughened face carrying a small expression of uncertainty, "I still don't know what I'm supposed to do here. Assassination isn't my skill."
"Killing everyone inside counts as assassination. At least no one lives to send a report." Stroud's mouth moved. "And that place over there is defended like a drum, and there's something in it that reads red so deep it's almost purple. We can't sneak past that with our configuration. I need you to pull their attention."
"I'm going to get killed," Anderson said flatly, his heavy brows drawing down. He was not entirely satisfied with this plan.
"Same result if you don't go," Stroud said with the air of stating an obvious truth. "You already know what happens on the street. Every time you've been spotted, those lunatics come for you first. You're going to take fire anyway. Better to go out there and drag all of it away from us and give the team room to work."
Anderson scratched the thick beard on his jaw, showed no expression of agreement, and found nothing to argue against in what Stroud had said.
He was the living target. He had been in every fight they had been in. He picked up the power maul and rested it on his shoulder. His acceptance of the job.
Stroud had nothing to add to that. He turned and started moving, bent low.
"I'll get across the street first and work into the alley's side approach," he said over his shoulder, already moving. "We wait for Finn to get back in position before we move."
The team began moving through the shadows quickly and silently.
They threaded the dangerous narrow street using gaps in the fire-light and the dead angles in the rubble, and made it to the deep alley beside the target building.
They had not expected that this insertion they had considered concealed had already been noticed.
The moment they settled into position, the instant their feet found stable ground, Stroud's breathing changed.
A lethal crisis-sense hit his nervous system like a current, the particular quality of something that survival instinct recognises before conscious thought does. Every hair on his body stood up simultaneously.
"Clear the area!"
Stroud's warning had not fully left his mouth when a heavy throwing axe came out of the deep shadow at the alley's end with a shriek, white-black, no warning at all, driving directly at them.
Anderson's reaction speed reached whatever its limit was in that moment.
He roared, every muscle in his body expanding, and chose not to move back. He closed both hands on the power maul's grip, drove from the hips, and met the incoming axe with the maul's shaft, the force field not yet active.
The collision sound in the narrow alley was total.
The throwing axe was deflected and buried itself in the ferrocrete wall to the side.
But the force behind the throw transferred through the shaft and into Anderson's forearms and hands, an impact that left both arms briefly numb and the web of his grip aching.
That was not force any ordinary heretic threw.
The team locked back to back immediately, weapons raised, watching every direction.
What they found was alarming. The red markers that had been static around them were now moving with a speed and a pressure that converged from every approach.
And among those approaching markers was the one that had read so deep and saturated it had almost looked purple in observation.
"Turns out you're still too visible." Stroud's face was flat with controlled tension. He reversed his grip and drew the combat shotgun, single-handed, the other hand closing on the monomolecular bayonet, settling into a standard close-quarters defensive posture. "My fault for the plan."
Anderson stepped forward, putting his frame between Stroud and the alley's depth.
"Run," he said, without turning his head.
"Confirmed?" Stroud did not move immediately, his brow pulling down.
"Get out of here. This is what the plan was." Anderson's voice came up. "And if the mission fails, the Commissar's going to put a bolt through your skull himself. I'm staying to buy time. Stop being in the way."
Stroud made the decision without another word. He had been a soldier long enough to make the hard call without hesitating after it was made.
While the surrounding forces had not yet fully closed the encirclement, Stroud led the team at a run through the broken entrance of the adjacent building and was swallowed by its interior darkness.
In the narrow alley, Anderson stood alone.
The red markers began closing from both ends of the alley and from above.
What stopped Anderson in his assumptions was that these soldiers did not charge the way the Penitents at the outer defences had, screaming, uncoordinated, suicidal. These came in silence.
They advanced through the dark with a tactical professionalism that produced its own specific kind of fear. Disciplined movement, measured spacing, every hand wrapped around either a loaded weapon or a blade that caught what little light reached them. They closed the distance in a controlled cooperative formation without rushing.
No random fire. Just the approach.
Anderson held the power maul in both hands and noted that his job right now was not killing but buying time, enough for Stroud's team to work through the inside and reach the command post.
He had never seen enemy soldiers this quiet on a battlefield.
That quiet was worse than anything that screamed.
In the fragmentary light of the alley, Anderson got a clear look at them. These were not the kind of cult rabble that had been throwing themselves at the outer defences. These soldiers were in proper body armour, well-maintained laser weapons in their hands, their tactical movement precise and dangerous.
But the smell coming off them, even at a distance, soaked all the way into their bones, and the crude iron masks that covered their faces completely, told him everything he needed to know about who they served.
His memory produced the term the Commissar had emphasised in the pre-battle briefing.
The Blood Pact. The formation that had been described as uniquely disciplined among the Chaos forces of the Sabbat Worlds, a genuine peer of Imperial elite regiments.
The men behind the iron masks were, without any question, exactly that.
Anderson took a breath, reached for the activation switch on the power maul's grip, prepared to bring the blue force field up and begin the actual work — and stopped.
From the alley's deepest shadow, footsteps arrived. Heavy. Every step carried the particular sound of something that has no concern about announcing itself.
A figure stepped into the marginal light from the deepest part of the alley.
His upper body was encased in heavy full-coverage ceramite plate, the kind that was supposed to show metallic lustre but was covered entirely with bleached skulls packed into every joint and surface. Even his head was sealed inside an enclosed helm, the design of something from a feudal era of ancient warfare, heavy and absolute. Through the visor's gap, only the sound of thick, blood-tasting breath was audible.
Relative to Anderson, who was already abnormally large, this figure wore considerably more armour and had considerably more mass.
Several bone-construction throwing axes hung from his waist on rope soaked black with old blood. The throwing axe that had nearly caught Anderson badly had clearly come from him.
What held Anderson's attention most was the battleaxe held in both gauntlets: the blade giving off dark red luminescence, as if it were alive, blood slowly seeping from the surface.
Anderson's mind produced the concept the Commissar had introduced to him in briefings.
Among Chaos-devoted mortals, certain individuals who distinguished themselves through sustained killing accumulated the attention of the Chaos powers. They received rewards through the appropriate means, not just mutation and physical enhancement of a severe kind, but an increase in strength far beyond any mortal threshold. When they reached a level that could no longer be measured in ordinary terms, these figures were called Chaos Champions.
Anderson understood what he was looking at. The one in front of him, carrying the smell of blood from every surface, marked with an aura so deep red it sat at the edge of purple. This was a Chaos Champion under the Blood God's favour.
He had no fear of it. He raised his head, produced a sound from his chest that was not quite a word, and hit the power maul's head twice against the stone floor with slow deliberate force.
A flat challenge.
The armoured figure answered through the visor with a burst of something that was recognizable as language only by its cadence, none of it coherent. Then it too raised its head and produced a sound that did not come from a human mechanism.
In the next instant, every Blood Pact soldier in the surrounding encirclement simultaneously abandoned their ranged weapons, drew the blades and axes from their belts and backs, and came forward together in silence.
Wearing down my stamina with the grunts first.
Anderson's face cracked into a smile that showed teeth. He had no weakness in this kind of fight.
"Need support?"
Duvette's voice, through the squad comms channel. Quiet and exact.
Anderson knew what the Commissar's "support" meant. The kind of strength that operated somewhere past mortal physical law, the kind that could run without end.
"No."
He drove the maul's switch down. The blue force field erupted across the head.
He charged with a roar, the veins in both arms standing out, and the first two Blood Pact soldiers to reach him, armour and all, were driven into the wall as one piece of wreckage.
"I can take this rabble myself!"
His voice rose as the work continued, the maul not slowing, his hips putting a vicious reverse rotation into the next sweep that sent three soldiers who had attempted to come from behind cartwheeling away in pieces. The bone-crack sound against the alley wall was crisp and clear.
"Understood. Call if needed. Good luck." Duvette did not say more. He knew his people. Anderson had made his call; he would let the man reach his own limit.
"Grateful for your trust...Commissar!" Anderson roared it, still laughing, enemy blood hitting his face warm and running down his jaw, making him look more like whatever they were fighting than what he was supposed to be.
He worked through the alley like a machine that had no concept of stopping, each hammer blow landing with a bone sound that would register differently on different people, the wreckage accumulating in that narrow space.
No retreat. Into them, always into them, the power maul hammering a clearing through what was between him and the next thing standing.
****
Presently the fight reached a brief interval.
Anderson stood at the centre of the broken remains, his body soaked in dark sticky red from every surface.
He was breathing hard. The carapace chest plate had collected deep gouges from blade and axe impacts; a few of the deeper wounds were still bleeding through the armour.
In the alley, only he and the figure wearing the ancient enclosed helm were still vertical.
Anderson tightened his grip on the maul, turned his head, and held the Chaos Champion's position with a flat stare.
Both of them came off at the same moment.
The alley became the arena for that collision.
Anderson moved first: the heavy power maul came up from a low angle in a diagonal drive at the Champion's chest. The Chaos Champion's force was enormous: a slight lean and the bleeding battleaxe came down like a fall, meeting the maul's shaft and stopping it.
Sparks. Anderson's arms absorbed a force that drove him back several steps involuntarily.
The alley was too narrow for the maul's full lateral sweep. When the Champion pressed forward immediately, Anderson had to change to overhead strikes, each exchange a direct impact of weapon against weapon.
But the Champion showed no fatigue. The battleaxe's rate was increasing. The wounds on Anderson were accumulating. A cut had been opened across the front of the chest plate that showed through to the grey undershirt beneath it.
Two final impacts: Anderson's chest plate cracked apart and fell to the alley floor. Blood coloured the grey fabric underneath it. The wound trembled with each breath.
He did not stop fighting. Both of them drove back and forth in that narrow space, the Champion's shoulder armour leaving arcs of sparks against the walls.
Anderson registered something: the Champion's force was massive, but the full ceramite body covering that gave him his protection also slowed him.
And Anderson, now without the heavy chest plate, was faster.
He used the pain as information rather than an obstacle, ran the bait, and when the Champion committed to the swing that came for him, Anderson rode back just enough and let it miss.
The moment the battleaxe drove through empty air and opened a brief gap in the Champion's guard, Anderson closed the distance back in one movement and put everything remaining in his body into one overhead hammer strike, the force field at full blue, driving straight down at the Champion's skull.
A scream from somewhere in him.
The impact sound was definitive.
The force field tore through the heavy armour's protection. The ancient enclosed helm, built to stop things that were not a power maul driven by this specific person, collapsed inward under the strike.
The enormous armoured body went rigid, then fell backward and hit the alley floor with the sound of a small structure coming down.
Anderson staggered, used the maul's haft against the floor, and stayed upright.
Then — from the corner of his vision — new red markers beginning to approach from both ends of the alley. Reinforcements arriving.
Anderson put his voice into the channel: "Stroud, you idiot, are you finished?"
The channel produced static. Nothing else.
Anderson set his jaw, and spat at the floor beside the Champion's body. A practical comment on the situation.
He raised his hand and found the wound across his forehead from the fighting, deep enough to have reached bone, currently sending blood across half his vision. He shook it clear, tightened both hands on the maul, and turned to receive the next wave.
The ground shifted.
The body with the caved-in helm, the one that was unambiguously dead, came back to vertical.
No sound. No explanation from biology. The Chaos Champion rose in a way that violated the sequence events were supposed to follow.
He moved directly behind Anderson before Anderson had completed the turn, wrapped both arms around his waist, and with the speed of something that was not operating on pain, drew a bone throwing axe from his hip and buried it in Anderson's thigh.
Anderson's vision went full red.
He drove everything he had into one backwards grab at the Champion's shoulder armour, and threw the armoured figure the way you throw a sack of material at a loading dock.
The Champion rolled twice on the alley floor and stood up again.
The head was seeping black blood. The head was caved in. Neither of these things was preventing him from standing.
What the dark god's blessing gave its servants at the far end of the scale: the ability to kill from inside a body that had no right to still be operating.
Anderson's thigh was producing a blood loss rate his vision was tracking with increasing concern. He had the maul as a prop at this point, most of his weight on it, staying vertical by decision rather than ability.
The creature prepared to close the distance one final time.
The Chaos Champion's skull detonated.
No prior warning. One moment it was there. The next, in the way that things become absent when a sniper round finds the right point from a sufficient distance, it was absent. Red and white across the alley floor.
The enormous armoured body swayed once. Fell like a tower that had made up its mind.
And then, arriving from a distance, the muffled report of the shot.
"I couldn't find a decent elevated position. Had to reach your location by the fastest available route."
Finn's voice came through the squad channel, the same temperature it always had, the same complete absence of any scale between urgency and calm.
"Good timing."
Another muffled report. A red marker at the alley entrance that had been closing went dark.
"If you'd been another few seconds," Anderson said between breaths, his chest still working hard, "I'd have actually gone down from this."
He braced the maul, reached down, and worked the bone axe out of his thigh muscle. The haemostatic gel from his kit sealed the wound before the blood loss could complete what it had been starting. He drew a few careful breaths and started moving toward the building Stroud's team had entered, his injured leg making its own separate assessment of the pace.
Finn kept the line open from his concealed position, precision fire suppressing the Blood Pact soldiers who attempted pursuit and covering Anderson's withdrawal one marker at a time.
"Why didn't you call the Commissar?" Finn asked through the channel. No recrimination in the question. Only a genuine request for the logic.
"I keep wanting to prove something to myself." Anderson's voice came out rough through clenched teeth as he ran. "Can't always depend on...the Commissar's power. Every time things go wrong."
In the elevated shadow, Finn heard this. He did not answer it.
He set aside the solid-shot sniper rifle and brought up his old lasrifle, the long-hafted precision weapon, and kept working.