V2 Chapter 14: In the Emperor's Name, Cut Down Humanity's Foes
When the twisted multi-limbed construct was fully exposed in the firelight, an unbearable wave of nausea seized everyone present at the level of the chest.
Eight long mechanical limbs moved across the broken structures beneath them in a manner that defied every law governing how something of that mass was supposed to behave. The central body was considerably smaller than the limbs that carried it, but a primary cannon occupied its core and an array of additional weapon systems surrounded it on every facing.
The young cadet commissar Ibram Gaunt bit down hard and held on, fighting the burning in his eyes and the churning in his stomach. He pressed himself behind a fractured load-bearing column, staring at the blasphemous construct that had no business existing in the physical universe.
He watched the weapon arrays mounted across its back begin to roar. Every burst of fire and every flash of muzzle flare represented casualties being taken by friendly forces somewhere in the dark beyond.
Beside him, Duvette did not waste any time deliberating about how to deal with this thing. He made his decision and activated.
[Flesh Engine: active.]
[Iron Crusade: active.]
The rules of ordered physical reality imposed themselves on everyone at once. Every warrior under Duvette's command had their state restored in the same instant.
Gaunt's eyes flew open. He felt what was happening inside him, and the shock of it hit harder than anything he had felt that day.
The suffocating nausea receded like a tide pulling back from a shore. In its place, something surged through his muscle fibres, a strength with no reasonable explanation, and his mind went to a state of absolute cold clarity that he had never experienced at this particular pitch.
He did not know what had happened. He knew clearly that he had never felt like this before.
Duvette's voice came through every channel at once.
"Nobody stands still! Spread out — warriors of the Emperor, prepare to hunt this blasphemous construct!"
Duvette raised the plasma pistol and squeezed the trigger experimentally toward the Daemon Engine.
The bolt of blue-white plasma fire shrieked outward and connected with a visible, shimmering distortion in the air roughly ten metres short of the construct. The plasma's energy vanished on contact with it completely, without residue.
He drew a slow breath. A Void Shield, sustained by daemonic energy rather than conventional generators. Conventional ranged fire at anything beyond close range would not penetrate this kind of barrier.
Which meant getting close and activating Silence. The same approach that had worked against the Hive Tyrant at Cold Steel Ridge. The difference was that this time he did not have Chapter Master Calgar and the Ultramarines fighting alongside him.
Gaunt was still working through the disbelief of what had just happened to his own body, entirely unaware of what the legendary commissar standing beside him had just decided he was going to do.
A sharp crack of displaced air pulled Gaunt's attention back before he could finish the thought.
He looked up and witnessed something that he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
A large number of black-carapace-armoured figures moved through the ruins and the cover between buildings at a speed that no mortal human frame should have been capable of maintaining. The 112th's veterans were demonstrating mobility that did not belong to anything ordinary.
Duvette's voice came through the channel again.
"This construct is operating behind a Warp shield. Heavy weapons teams, find cover and hold your positions — wait for my order! Infantry, spread out, we're drawing it away from the buildings!"
He raised his head. The Eye of Judgement ran at full capacity. Red luminescence flickered and pulsed across every surface of the blasphemous construct, and at the junction where its main body connected to the limb assemblies, one point blazed with a red so intense it was blinding — an energy core, marked precisely.
"Anderson! It's too fast — get it into the tanks' field of fire!"
"Received, Commissar!"
Anderson came down from the second floor of a ruin on the flank, dropping without hesitation. Wounded as he still was, with Flesh Engine driving him and his own augmented physique underneath that, he had recovered. This man of extraordinary mass moved with the loose, controlled speed of a hunting cat.
At a charge speed that was frightening to watch, he closed the distance to the Daemon Engine while it was still directing fire at distant positions. Both hands locked on the power maul. He used the full momentum of the charge and drove the weapon's force-field head into one of the Daemon Engine's external mechanical limbs.
The sound of the impact was followed immediately by the sound of metal fracturing.
That thick mechanical leg buckled severely under the blow.
The Daemon Engine produced a roar that shook the air at a register that was not entirely sound. Mortals not sheltered by Duvette's command had their hands driven to their heads in the same instant, their minds taking a blow that left marks.
The construct immediately ceased its fire suppression on the 8th Hyrkan. Its enormous frame swung to face Anderson. The main cannon began charging.
Black lightning accumulated at the cannon barrel, converging with an accelerating energy shriek that the air itself resisted. The boundary between realspace and the Warp was being torn.
"Run! Anderson!"
Anderson did not look back. He hauled the power maul and threw himself into a swerving sprint through the ruins. The instant he rolled into an underground drainage channel, the devastating purple-black beam fired.
Everything directly ahead of the beam's path simply ceased being a building. The structures dissolved without a sound, leaving a death trench hundreds of metres long in whatever they had been.
A single shot like that into a trench line would erase an entire regiment company instantaneously.
The Daemon Engine's damaged stride crashed after Anderson.
Beneath its feet, the 112th's warriors moved like a sharp and purposeful wolfpack, using the dead angles between buildings to throw melta charges in a continuous feed. The shield absorbed most of the force, but the violent concussions slowed the great machine's movement with every impact.
The enraged Daemon Engine swept its core weapon arrays continuously across these damned insects. A single hit on a 112th warrior was sufficient to reduce half their body to red mist. The thick mechanical limbs, coming down, could impale a human body on their way to the ground.
Real casualties began accumulating. Against machinery capable of killing gods, the 112th fought with Flesh Engine and Iron Crusade active and still moved like ants pushing against a wall, and they did not falter. Not one step of retreat.
Only sacrifice. Only sacrifice.
When one squad gave their lives, another took up the position they had held in the hunt.
They were primitive hunters encircling a great beast, taking heavy losses under its fangs and claws, but their will did not bend. They placed their blood and their lives as the stake, and they gave it entirely to their friends somewhere ahead in the dark.
Anderson gritted his teeth. He knew what his people behind him were buying. He had to be faster.
In the firelight and the chaos, Gaunt caught sight of his commanding officer and mentor through the gaps in the fire.
Commissar-General Delane Oktar. His 8th Hyrkan had completely broken apart around him. Two "Penitent" heretics, their bodies lit by daemonic fire, were charging with weapons raised at the old commissar-general where he had fallen.
Gaunt let out a shout and broke cover. He was moving fast enough that he was slightly out of his own control. The bolt pistol fired three rounds in rapid succession through his sprint, obliterating one heretic's chest cavity. Then he put his whole body into the second heretic.
Under Flesh Engine's strength, he closed one hand around the heretic's throat and drove him into the wall.
The heretic's neck broke.
Gaunt hauled Oktar up from the ground and got him over his shoulder, running for the safe zone.
The eyes of Commissar-General Oktar, wide with shock, were filled with something past ordinary disbelief.
He had seen what Gaunt had just done, strength that exceeded any physiological limit. Now he looked at the 112th soldiers moving in the distance, silent, cold, completely without fear, threading and coordinating beneath the Daemon Engine's footfalls.
"Kid... Gaunt, you... they... what in the Throne have these people been through?"
"I don't know, sir. I don't know..."
Oktar pushed Gaunt's supporting arm away. "Kid, I'm fine." He raised the intact chainsword in his right hand and directed it at the scattered Hyrkan survivors around him with a full-throated roar. "Regroup! Clear every Chaos heretic in the surrounding area! Don't let any of this filth interfere with the 112th!"
Under Oktar's voice, the 8th Hyrkan began coming back together. They assembled quickly and drove into fierce blocking action against the ordinary Chaos believers flooding in from every direction.
Simultaneously, Duvette was making his death charge.
He had to reach Silence's extreme close range. He gritted his teeth and drove forward across rubble-covered ground, working through the area not far from the Daemon Engine, searching for the moment he needed.
The 112th's infantry teams surrounded the construct like a net, guiding this blind, furious, maddened thing — at the cost of blood and lives — toward its final position.
Duvette watched his warriors falling under the Daemon Engine's roar. His eyes went red at the edges. He made his decision and charged alone to within fifty metres of the construct, into the shadow at the edge of the clearing.
This was the absolute death line.
The ozone smell in the air at this range was thick enough to choke on. The Daemon Engine's toxic exhaust discharge would cause organ failure in an ordinary human at this distance.
He fixed his eyes on the Warp lance cycling up to charge again. The edges of his greatcoat were already scorched by the radiated heat. He held his position. He was waiting for Anderson to bring the behemoth into the final target square.
"Now!"
Anderson threw himself into a roll and came up in the centre of the crossroads. The Daemon Engine roared into the open square, its enormous frame completely exposed within the main thoroughfare's field of fire.
Duvette's gaze sharpened.
[Silence: active.]
A pressure representing absolute physical law swept across the Daemon Engine. The twisted Warp shield, at the instant it contacted that pressure, came apart.
The Warp lance charging inside the cannon had its energy circuit broken in the same instant. The interrupted charge triggered a series of violent backlash detonations inside the weapon housing.
"Fire! Kleist! Fire!"
On the main thoroughfare behind them, the Leman Russ tanks' main guns spoke simultaneously.
Armour-piercing high-explosive rounds concentrated like a steel whip and drove into the Daemon Engine's now-unshielded mechanical joints.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
The great machine's limbs were blasted clear one by one. The towering frame lost its supports and came down, joints grinding in a sound that set the teeth on edge, onto its knees in the rubble.
The weapon arrays mounted across its body had been reduced to wreckage by the barrage. Only the heavily protected core housing remained intact.
Duvette gave it no chance to recover.
Under Flesh Engine's overloaded drive, he moved like a bolt of black lightning, climbing the Daemon Engine's tilted armour plate at a run, three strides taking the distance of six, straight to the top of its spine.
At the apex, the core of the daemonic binding threw arcs of electricity from the overload, sparks cascading from every seam.
Duvette gripped the power sword with both hands, the force field driven to its absolute limit. He roared and drove the blade inscribed with his name through the gap in the armour, buried it to the hilt in the Daemon Engine's core reactor.
"Get back to your hell. This is our world."
He wrenched the hilt.
A deep internal implosion sounded from somewhere below the armour. The Daemon Engine's massive metallic frame convulsed once. Then every light, every trace of daemonic fire, and every sound it had been producing died simultaneously.
It became a massive, still, foul-smelling heap of dead metal.
Duvette stood at the summit of the wreckage, breathing in great pulling gusts.
[You have personally killed a Daemon Engine. Emperor's Wrath +800. The Emperor appreciates your courage, Commissar!]
He did not look at the notification. He looked instead at his 112th soldiers watching him with steady eyes, and at the 8th Hyrkan fighters still engaged with the heretics in the distance. He raised the power sword.
"In the Emperor's name — cut down humanity's foes!"
"Let them learn what fear is!"
"Kill!"
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