3reviews+300 ps= 4 chaps, forgive me for not labeling all as ''Bonus"
V2 Chapter 72: Iron Warriors? You Deserve Everything Coming to You.
Their existence was a natural disaster in armour.
The Blood Pact threw everything they had at the thirteen Black Shields to slow the advance. Moving barricades. Heavy stubbers. Thermal charges. Sealed bulkhead doors. Sections vented to vacuum. Fanatical slave-soldiers locked into corridors at the far end with nowhere to go.
All of it bought a few seconds at most.
What Markus did was charge, shoot, and cut. Storm shields held the frontal fire. Bolters cleared the positions at range. Chainswords and power swords dealt with everything that came close.
They pushed forward until they hit a defensive line that was actually worth the name.
It was a wide primary corridor, the far end connecting to the main spine road that led up to the command deck. The enemy had prepared it properly. Armoured blast doors positioned half-open. Mobile fortress emplacements sealing the central passage. Heavy weapon positions elevated on both sides. Thermal traps and demolition lines laid across the deck.
The three storm shields had barely pushed to the corridor's midpoint before fire came from the front and both flanks simultaneously.
Heavy bolter fire, plasma, melta beams, and autocannon rounds turned the entire corridor into a wall of light. Markus took several steps forward under his shield and felt the left-side fire position working systematically to peel their formation apart.
"Pull back," he said quietly. "Wait for the 112th's heavy weapons."
All thirteen Black Shields withdrew without hesitation, back behind the previous bulkhead doors. The enemy fire chased them but broke against the storm shields and the sealed armour doors.
The 112th's main element arrived roughly ten minutes later.
Anderson brought the heavy weapons team into the side passage. Evan directed the demolition group to install thermal charges in a maintenance conduit. Stroud and Finn's element had already worked their way through a narrow pipeline, identified the compartment control panel behind the enemy's right-side fire position, and marked it.
Markus watched them work and said nothing.
Under whatever strange force was running through the Legion, these mortals were operating at a level that bore comparison with Astartes, and they knew exactly how to dismantle a defensive line.
"Demolitions ready," Evan's voice came through the channel.
"Heavy weapons in position," Anderson said.
A burst of static from Stroud's position. "Found the rear door on the right-side fire point. Smells like boots that have been fermenting for fifteen years in here, but we can get through."
Markus raised the storm shield. "Begin."
In the next instant, the maintenance conduit's armour plate was blown open by the thermal charges. The 112th's heavy weapons team immediately poured fire into the right-side position, heavy bolter rounds and plasma beams pinning the defenders in place.
At the same moment, Stroud's element came in from the side and rear. Several fragmentation grenades went through the opening.
The detonations followed.
"Right side open!" Evan shouted.
Markus did not wait.
"Black Shields, with me."
All thirteen Astartes came out from behind the bulkhead doors. Three storm shields at the front, bolters firing from behind. The 112th's fire pressed in from both flanks, holding the Blood Pact down and preventing any reconstruction of the frontal defensive line.
The breakthrough came fast this time.
Markus knocked a barricade aside and a combat brother vaulted past him, chainsword cutting clean through a Blood Pact demolitions man who had been reaching for a thermal charge. Another Black Shield raised his bolter and reduced the enemy still working an autocannon in the far position to debris.
The Blood Pact were still fighting, but they were fragmented now.
As the Black Shield element drove through the enemy in front of them with a momentum that was starting to feel inevitable, Markus felt a sharp and sudden sense of danger. The combat brothers flanking him registered it at the same moment, some awareness firing from a shared source neither of them could have named.
All three storm shields turned in the same instant.
Heavy bolt-rounds came down like rain.
The rounds struck the energy fields and scattered in arcing blue-white discharges. The Black Shields behind the shields staggered under the impact but the formation held.
Markus crouched behind his shield and looked through the gap between them toward the far end of the corridor.
A dozen tall figures were coming down the ship's main spine road at a run.
Their power armour was heavy, the yellow-and-black of their shoulder guards catching the deck lighting. Several carried heavy bolters. Others had chain-axes, power swords, and combination weapons.
Astartes.
Iron Warriors.
Something that was not a simple tactical calculation moved through Markus.
Before Isstvan III, the idea of Astartes killing Astartes had never crossed his mind as something real. They were all the Emperor's sons, all humanity's instruments, and even across different Legions they had bled for the same Crusade. But after Isstvan, bolt-rounds fired into his brothers' backs, the betrayal that had come from the warriors beside them, the Legion's honour torn apart, every remnant of that belief had been stripped away piece by piece.
Ten thousand years later. The traitors were still here.
Still wearing the shell of what Astartes were supposed to be.
"Black Shields?" An Iron Warriors sergeant's voice came through his helmet's vox-amplifier during a gap in the heavy bolter fire, the contempt in it entirely unmodulated. "Has the Imperium run so low it's sending nameless dogs to die for it?"
Markus did not answer.
The heavy bolter locked. A single moment of empty air in the fire.
In that moment, Markus's eyes went red.
"Traitors!"
The roar tore out of him and he drove forward with the storm shield raised.
[Flesh Engine] pushed his body fully into motion at that instant.
The force had no pain attached to it and no visible cost. It drove his flesh the way an engine drives a machine, bringing both hearts, three lungs, every muscle and nerve into a combat rhythm operating above his normal ceiling.
Combined with the fury behind the charge, Markus moved at a speed that exceeded anything in his memory.
The Iron Warriors sergeant raised a chain-axe to meet him and took the storm shield directly in the front. The two suits of power armour collided in the centre of the corridor with a sound that dented the metal deck beneath them. The sergeant was driven backward, his footing gone, the floor panels under him caving inward.
"You are not fit to call yourselves brothers." Markus said, his voice low.
His power sword came in from the side, forcing the sergeant back another half-step.
Around him, the rest of the Shadow Wolves drove into the Iron Warriors line.
One Iron Warrior raised a heavy bolter for a point-blank discharge, but a Black Shield pressed a storm shield into the muzzle. The rounds detonated against the shield face in rapid succession. A second Black Shield came in from the flank, chainsword cutting through the elbow joint of the arm holding the weapon, taking the arm and the heavy bolter off together.
"Dog of the corpse-emperor!" the Iron Warrior snarled.
"Stray without a home," the Black Shield replied flatly.
While Markus held the Iron Warriors sergeant, a second traitor Astartes swung a chainsword at his shoulder plate. Markus did not step back. He let the blade ride off the angle of the shoulder guard and used the storm shield's rim to strike the traitor's helmet in return.
The Iron Warrior staggered. The helmet folded inward across most of its surface.
Markus moved forward immediately, drove the power sword into the gap at the chest plate's collar joint, and twisted the blade. The disruption field discharged inside the armour. The Iron Warrior's body convulsed and went down.
The Iron Warriors were considerably more capable than the Blood Pact.
They did not panic and they did not break on the first charge. Several adjusted their line immediately, attempting to angle melta fire around the storm shields. One drove a power fist into a shield face and cracked it outright.
The Shadow Wolf holding that shield was shoved back half a step. The left shoulder plate took a bolt-round that cracked the ceramite.
He stayed on his feet.
The 112th's heavy weapons fire had not stopped either.
Anderson was personally running the heavy weapon suppressing the Iron Warriors' flank. Evan directed smoke grenades and interference rounds into the upper fire positions in the corridor, forcing the Blood Pact units there out of any position to support the traitor Astartes below them.
This was not a fair fight. It was a decapitation strike.
Markus had no interest in fair.
He needed these traitors to die here.
The Iron Warriors sergeant came back in, chain-axe swinging at the storm shield. The energy field flickered under the impact. Markus used the blow's momentum against the sergeant, pressing the shield face forward and driving him back into the wreckage of the barricade.
"Who are you?" The sergeant's voice came through his damaged helmet with a rasping quality. "Your sword technique. Your combat instincts. They feel like something from ten thousand years ago."
Markus looked at him. "You don't deserve to know."
The sergeant raised the chain-axe again. Markus's power sword moved faster than any Astartes reaction could track and removed the hand holding it at the wrist.
The second stroke took the other arm.
The fighting around him was nearly finished.
Several Shadow Wolves had cracked shoulder plates. Storm shields had taken damage. One had taken a glancing hit to the abdominal plate. None of them were down and none had taken serious injury. The Iron Warriors were being pressed, knocked from their feet, and killed one after another.
The last one was surrounded by three Black Shields. He reached for the melta grenades at his belt. A bolt-round took his arm off before the hand arrived. A power sword came down through the collar joint and the disruption field tore through what was behind it.
Markus looked down at the Iron Warriors sergeant kneeling in front of him, both arms gone, what remained of his life measured in seconds.
"You deserved everything that just happened to you."
He took the sergeant's head with the power sword.
The combat brothers around him dealt with the remaining traitors.
Markus stood in the wreckage and his chest heaved with the force of what the fight had demanded from him. A sound came out of him, low and uncontrolled, the sound of a decade of fury spent in the space of minutes. It moved through the ship's corridors without diminishing.
He did not stand still with it long.
"Advance."
He turned toward the gun emplacements and fire positions still operating ahead of them.
"Tear the defence line open for the 112th."
Thirteen Black Shields raised their weapons, crossed the fallen Iron Warriors, and drove toward the main spine road.