V2 Chapter 57: Tzeentchian Daemons
Duvette let out a long, slow breath, forcing the fouled air out of his lungs along with the urge to kill.
He made himself turn away. He could not keep looking at Heinz Werner's face — that heavyset, fanaticism-soaked expression of a man testing him with every breath. In conditions this extreme, one more second of it and Duvette genuinely could not guarantee he would not draw the pistol and put a round through the man's skull.
He pressed the vox-bead and issued the order across the 112th's tactical channel in the flat register of command. "All companies, contract the defensive perimeter. Cease all clearance operations on the outer zone. Reform by company, wedge assault formation. Advance immediately on the main temple at the complex's centre."
The order went out and the 112th moved. Across the vast temple grounds, soldiers shifted rapidly and without noise, heavy boots grinding against black stone in a rhythm that was entirely their own.
Along the route, they encountered nothing left of the Word Bearers' organised resistance. Only mortal worshippers remained, bleeding out in the rubble, mouths still moving with the words of Lorgar's scripture in the last moments they had. For these incapacitated cultists, the veterans of the 112th produced no mercy. The occasional single crack of a lasrifle marked their passage. Every living threat behind them was cleared with a thoroughness that left nothing to chance.
Duvette's eyes never left the tactical overlay projected across his retina. Long-range communications with the fleet had already been severed by the Warp energy saturating the area.
On the strategic map, the large red markers representing high-threat contacts had not scattered. They were converging, drawn into an abnormally dense formation at the very core of the largest main temple. Every one of them, concentrated in a single location.
That kind of defensive contraction carried a specific tactical meaning. Either the enemy was protecting something of critical importance, or they were massing for a devastating strike that required their full combined strength.
The 112th's advance element was crossing the outer plaza and approaching the enormous black-stone archway of the main temple when the sky above it changed.
A wind came from nowhere and seized the dark, blood-coloured cloud cover hanging over the temple, twisting and tearing it until it spiralled into an enormous black vortex directly overhead. The scale of it was suffocating.
Savage Warp energy cascaded down through the vortex's centre like a materialised waterfall, punching clean through the physical barrier between dimensions.
Then, from somewhere inside the main temple, a blinding burst of blue light detonated against the darkness, and a sound that had no business being heard by mortal ears split open in every listener's skull simultaneously: a piercing, rasping screech, like a bird whose voice had been broken and rebuilt into something that carried malice as its fundamental note.
Duvette narrowed his eyes against the blinding light, his right hand clamped hard around the grip of the power sword at his hip.
Tzeentchians.
As the blue light dissolved at the archway, a mass of entities poured out of the main temple's shadows.
Horrors of both kinds: smaller ones with bodies that made no architectural sense, burning with cold pink and blue flames, and Flamers drifting at mid-height above the stone, vomiting gouts of mutating fire. They came screaming and cackling in sounds that followed no logic, and drove directly into the 112th's advancing formation.
"Heavy weapons sections, establish fire bases! Riflemen, rolling volleys, free engagement!" Evan's voice hit the channel at full volume.
The 112th shifted from march to combat formation in moments. Companies collapsed back together with the speed of soldiers who had done this in worse conditions than this. Autocannon tripods struck the stone with a heavy crack. Heavy bolter feed belts began cycling.
The engagement became absolute in an instant.
This Tzeentchian daemon host the Word Bearers had summoned shared a particular tactical characteristic with the 112th: both forces preferred ranged firepower. The Horrors hurled cascades of multicoloured psychic lightning and mutation-laced sorcerous fireballs. The 112th returned fire with concentrated las-beams, bolt rounds, grenades, and plasma discharge.
Light beams and Warp-fire crossed in a killing web above the plaza.
Against a standard Astra Militarum regiment, the psychic assault carried by that kind of Warp-saturated fire would have broken the line within the first few minutes of contact. The corrupting whisper carried in every sorcerous strike would have worked through the soldiers' minds until the defence dissolved not from physical casualties but from mental collapse.
The 112th was not a standard regiment. Under the combined effect of Duvette's active [Flesh Engine] and [Eye of Judgement], the Warp-corrosion whispers pressing at every soldier's mind were suppressed and held at a level that mortal endurance could manage. The veterans ground their teeth, held their rate of fire with mechanical consistency, and used sheer ballistic volume to tear apart anything that tried to break their formation, reducing daemons to dispersed Warp-matter with sustained physical fire.
The two sides locked into a brutal firefight on the temple steps. For a time, the exchange was even.
Duvette stood behind the line, his gaze crossing the full width of the engagement. Then he noticed something wrong. The Lord Inquisitor Heinz Werner, who had attached himself to Duvette's position like a second coat, was no longer visible in his physical sightline. Neither were the Storm Trooper escort detail.
Duvette raised his eyes immediately to the strategic map.
On the System's overlay, several green markers representing friendly forces sat motionless in a corner not fifty metres away.
A refractor field generator.
He allowed himself a cold, private assessment and nothing more.
Senior Inquisitorial personnel valued their lives, as it turned out. A high-grade field generator capable of bending light and suppressing both heat and sound signatures was, on a battlefield, an instrument of survival that bordered on unfair advantage. The heavyset man had evidently decided to shelter inside an absolute bubble of safety and watch the 112th bleed for his private viewing of whatever miracle he was expecting.
Duvette did not waste further attention on a man who had chosen to watch. What occupied him now was the interior of the temple.
He needed to take the regiment through that archway immediately. The Word Bearers' ritual had to be stopped.
But something was wrong with the numbers, and Duvette could not let it go.
The Warp energy gathered above this temple during the summoning was not comparable to anything he had seen at the Formal Prime hive spire ritual. The scale and intensity here exceeded that event by an order of magnitude of at least ten. Energy at that level, concentrated and directed correctly, was sufficient to anchor a Greater Daemon of the highest tier into realspace with complete stability.
And yet. No Greater Daemon had appeared. Nothing of that scale was present on the battlefield. Only these Horrors and Flamers, expendable cannon fodder by any measure.
Where was that energy going? What was absorbing a quantity of Warp power sufficient to tear a star sector open?
A cold and urgent sense of danger spread through him. Staying at this threshold and grinding through the daemon screen was not acceptable.
"Don't get drawn in. Full regiment, prepare to force through." He pressed the vox-bead and issued the formation change. "Anderson."
"Here."
Anderson, commanding the heavy assault company of the 112th, immediately shifted his soldiers from the formation's flanks to its front with the speed of a unit that had rehearsed this until it had no hesitation left.
"Heavy bolter suppression, covering the break! Drive those blue-feathered bastards out of my way!" Anderson raised the thunder hammer and produced a battle-cry that went through the noise of everything around it.
The assault company became the regiment's leading edge. Absorbing psychic fireballs on their armour and taking the casualties that came with it, they advanced with the heavy, grinding momentum of something that had been aimed rather than ordered, driving directly into the daemon mass.
Close-range weapons fire erupted inside the screaming of the daemon host.
The cost of the forced breakthrough was not low. The casualty count began moving on the tactical overlay.
The 112th did not slow. They crossed over their own wounded and the dissolving remains of dispersed daemons and drove through on fire and bodies until the line broke.
Through the vast archway, past the devastation that covered the ground in every direction, the 112th forced their way into the depths of the temple.