V2 Chapter 55: The Laughable Ambush
Duvette advanced through the temple complex with the 112th spread around him. Within a kilometre radius, a thousand veterans dispersed rapidly, using the twisted Gothic architecture as cover, alternating suppression as they moved forward, clearing each structure they passed.
Behind Duvette, Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner walked with a bearing entirely disconnected from the environment around him. This Thorian Lord Inquisitor moved as though he were strolling through the gardens of a ministry building rather than the stronghold of Chaos.
He followed at a relaxed pace, his smile still pleasant.
Several elite Storm Troopers kept tight formation around Heinz, the energy packs on their hellguns humming at low charge, covering the perimeter. A scribe walked at Heinz's side, data-cables emerging from both eye sockets, recording continuously on a roll of vellum.
Duvette understood that beneath that robe, Heinz almost certainly carried high-grade displacement field or refractor field generators. At this range, conventional direct fire was unlikely to reach him easily.
To avoid giving the Lord Inquisitor any reason to look more closely, Duvette kept the majority of his attention on the tactical map panel at the edge of his retina. He used nothing that could invite suspicion: standard Astra Militarum command signals and tactical hand gestures only.
After the grinding weight of so many campaigns, the 112th's veterans had developed a working understanding of him that needed very little spoken language. A small gesture was sufficient.
It was when Stroud's scout section pulled the perimeter in slightly that the channel carried the familiar bald voice, flat and immediate.
"Boss. Contact."
"Understood." Duvette kept his voice entirely quiet.
He had already seen it on the tactical map. Among the high spires and temple structures ahead, a dense field of red contact markers had appeared. Many of them. Some were significantly larger than the others.
Those larger markers were grouped in threes, each cluster moving with deliberate coordination, the smaller markers surrounding them, all of them concealed in the dark angles of the buildings ahead, waiting for the 112th to pass through.
Duvette stopped walking. A precise and rather cold smile crossed his face. He kept his voice low in the channel.
"Good. Apparently we are not welcome here. Let's give them something to remember."
The 112th moved without a sound, dispersing along the tactical routes Duvette designated, beginning their encirclement.
Behind a towering stone wall in the temple complex ahead.
Drakern Voss, First Chaplain of this Word Bearers warband, had concealed his enormous frame in the shadow behind the wall. His dissatisfaction with his superior, Dark Apostle Kobath, had been building steadily.
In Drakern's assessment, Kobath's faith had begun to lose its purity.
The sceptre was, at its root, a relic of the corpse-emperor's bloodline. Whatever radiated from its core was not a creation of the highest heaven.
And yet Kobath was increasingly reluctant to simply destroy the Entropy's Song, treating it instead as a miracle that had to be guided rather than purged.
Absurd, Drakern thought coldly. Any relic of the Imperial breed should be unmade entirely. Only what the highest heaven creates is genuine miracle.
Then the warning runes flickered across his helmet's tactical optics. Several life-sign contacts resolved at the edge of his vision. The Chaos-carved face split into a predatory grin.
The sacrifices had come.
In the next instant, everything went wrong.
The thick black stone wall beside Drakern was burned through from the outside in a single moment by a surge of extreme heat, the material liquefying where the beam made contact.
Astartes reaction speed saved him: Drakern threw himself sideways and cleared the direct line of the beam.
The two Word Bearers positioned at that section of wall had no time to do the same.
The melta beam dissolved their upper bodies in an instant of boiling matter. The collapsing wall buried their remains under rubble.
"Come on then, you Chaos dogs! Take this from Stroud!"
A veteran in force-feedback power armour appeared through the breach in the stone.
Drakern got to his feet and stared at the mortal soldier who had somehow materialised beside him, his mind processing the situation with an anger that had nowhere to direct itself yet.
Why? How had a mortal closed that distance without a single warning from any sensor?
He abandoned words entirely. A roar, a charge, and the weapon in his hand came up to cut this insignificant wretch down where he stood.
He had barely taken the first step.
Three sustained high-energy laser beams, placed with a precision that left no room for discussion, passed through the weak points in his helmet's optical lenses and removed half his skull.
The enormous body's remaining momentum carried it forward and dropped it onto the stone floor.
"Target down." Finn's voice on the short-range channel, carrying nothing in particular.
"You just took my kill, you miserable shot." Stroud, still holding the melta gun, managed to sound genuinely aggrieved.
"The three coming in from the front to support him. Would you prefer to handle those yourself?" Finn's voice remained completely flat.
"...I think your accuracy is excellent. Thank you."
On the other side of the complex, Anderson was driving into a Word Bearers squad with a force that even Chaos Astartes were finding difficult to absorb. They roared. They backed. They registered, in the way that things register when it is too late to matter, that this figure was hitting power-armoured Astartes hard enough to break them on direct contact.
When one of them attempted to meet Anderson's thunder hammer charge with a chainsword and received half his body shattered in exchange for the attempt, the squad changed approach and raised their bolters.
Anderson was not alone. The squad behind him was already pouring hellgun volleys into those two Word Bearers at a rate that left no gaps to fire through, saturating their position until what remained was not a tactical obstacle.
Anderson drove the hammer into the ground with a sound that carried through the stone, shook the meat off the armour's surface, looked up, and confirmed direction.
"Next target! You damned traitors, give me a proper fight!"
"I never expected to be pushing Astartes around." Elias, behind cover, still sounded genuinely surprised, still putting plasma shots into a target moving fast on the other side of a wall.
"You've had long enough to get used to it." Evan's answer came between directing a full platoon of heavy weapons to seal the Word Bearers fireteam's retreat and suppressing the mortal traitor infantry simultaneously.
"It's not that." Elias paused. "I still find myself instinctively thinking I'm small in front of them."
"Then update the instinct, you coward." Stroud's voice entered the channel at an entirely unhelpful moment. The bald veteran was, while saying this, running at speed away from three Word Bearers and their mortal infantry mob, directly toward the main group.
"You might want to look at which direction you're running before delivering that advice." Elias did not bother turning his head.
Behind the advance, Duvette stood at the rear, ignoring the concurrent shouting and commentary in the channel, issuing precise directives to each combat group as they completed the encirclement of the ambush positions.
On the tactical map, the red markers were disappearing at a rate that should not have been possible.
The instant the engagement opened, Duvette had activated [Flesh Engine] and [Eye of Judgement].
Under those combined effects, across several thousand 112th veterans, the hundred-odd Word Bearers and their mortal cultist attachments found themselves facing numbers several times their own strength, and found those numbers moving and hitting in ways that had no business belonging to ordinary Guardsmen.
These Word Bearers had almost certainly approached this as a straightforward ambush of a standard Astra Militarum regiment. The actual distribution of predator and prey had been established the moment the 112th entered the plaza.
The gunfire moved rapidly through the ruins, contact after contact closing out.
"Oh... how... delightful. Yes. Yes. You are different. Exactly as I..."
The murmur came from behind Duvette. Fanatical, barely controlled.
Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner was staring at the battlefield with his eyes wider than usual, the pleasant veneer stripped back to something that was simply excited.
The physical conditioning, combat reaction speed, tactical precision, and instinctive coordination he was watching from these mortal veterans had crossed the line that ordinary Astra Militarum units lived on the right side of. This was the category of performance he had come to witness.
"It's you, isn't it." Heinz turned his head sharply and fixed his gaze on Duvette with an intensity that had nothing mild about it. "You are their soul. You are the source of everything this is. How are you doing it?"
Duvette turned, looked at him, and gave a completely guileless shrug.
"Faith, perhaps."
He turned back to the tactical map without further comment, leaving Heinz standing where he was.
Behind the cold composure, Duvette was already calculating. He needed to find a way to deal with this particular observer. The daemon world temple ahead might yet provide the right opportunity. Some problems were best solved by finding the correct blade and pointing it in the right direction.