V2 Chapter 82: Triumphant Entry
When the first light of day reached the inner gate of Nev City, the ground around it held nothing but bodies and blood.
The Blood Pact attacks had barely stopped through the night. The damaged gates were buried under bodies on both sides, shattered weapons, cracked shell armour, and split helmets pressed into the fouled water pooling across the ground. The air carried the smell of powder, blood, and scorched metal.
The artillery was getting closer.
Petrov could hear the difference. The heavy gun reports coming from outside the city were steadier now, and the impact points had begun to fall on the Blood Pact's rear assembly areas. That meant the main relief force was actively breaking through the corridor to Nev City.
For Petrov, who had very nearly run out of anything left to hold on with, this was welcome.
He was sitting against a section of wall some distance behind the gate, close to collapse. His uniform no longer showed its original colour. His gloves were crusted with dried blood. The chainsword lay across his knee, debris still caught in the teeth.
He had stopped worrying about his appearance.
The soldiers around him were in the same state. Many were propped against walls and breathing. Some were sitting near bodies and staring at nothing. Others were reloading weapons using magazines stripped from Blood Pact corpses. How many major assaults they had pushed back through the night, Petrov had lost count.
He remembered only that everyone's ammunition had been close to gone by the second half of the night.
After that, the fighting had become close-quarters. The Blood Pact had pushed through the gate breach repeatedly, and the defenders had pushed them back repeatedly. There were moments when Petrov could not tell whether the body at his feet was enemy or friendly.
Fortunately, the enemy they were facing was only a portion of what remained outside.
With that thought, Petrov used the barricade to pull himself upright and looked toward the inner gate.
The thirteen tall black-armoured figures were still there.
They stood among the bodies and waited for the next assault. Severed limbs and broken corpses had piled around them to the point where the debris could serve as rough cover around their enormous frames. The grey cloaks were soaked through with blood. The black power armour was covered in impact marks and scorch patterns.
Petrov looked at them, and the feeling in his chest was still one he could not entirely resolve.
These black-armoured Astartes had held the gate breach from the moment they dropped in the night before until now, and they had barely left it. The enemy had thrown numbers at them, heavy weapons, frenzied Blood Pact assault elements. They had stayed.
Their movements had slowed in the second half of the night.
The prolonged fighting had depleted something in them, and there were several moments when the enemy had come close to pushing through their line. Petrov had already made his peace with leading his last guard element up to fill the gap himself.
And then, in the most dangerous of those moments, Petrov had seen something stranger.
The bolters in the black-armoured giants' hands had come back to life.
He could not explain why those bolters were still firing. In the early hours the giants had still paused to re-aim between bursts, but later they had simply held the trigger down. By any reckoning of time and rounds expended, those magazines should have been long empty, but some unseen force kept filling them. The barrels had gone red and the chambers had begun making sounds they should not have been making, yet the fire had continued.
With the firepower of just over a dozen warriors, they had held several thousand Blood Pact outside the gate for nearly half an hour.
Petrov had watched it and been unable to move.
Eventually he had stopped trying to understand.
It was not something he was capable of understanding.
After that half-hour, the bolters had failed entirely, and the black-armoured giants had drawn chainswords, power swords, and bolt pistols and continued holding the gate. But that half-hour had been enough. The Blood Pact outside had been suppressed, and the inner city garrison had used the window to rebuild their barricades.
During the same period, Petrov had sent people to check the drainage network, the water station, the temporary medical points, and several underground maintenance conduits.
He knew the Blood Pact would not restrict themselves to the gate.
When they were on the edge of defeat, they would try to destroy whatever they could reach inside the inner city. But the 112th's soldiers had been at all those positions, and the key nodes had reported back clear one after another.
With that thought, Petrov's mind produced Duvette's face with its particular self-assured smile.
Back at Formal Prime, he had understood that the young commissar brought trouble wherever he went.
It appeared the trouble had grown considerably larger.
Even these black-armoured Astartes were operating under his orders.
Then the watch signal sounded from the city wall again.
Another assault was coming.
The Blood Pact remnants were massing outside the gate under their officers' pressure, the confused sound of feet and low commands carrying through the broken gates. The black-armoured giants drew their weapons and lowered themselves behind the cover of the bodies.
Petrov drew a long breath and called out in a voice that had gone hoarse: "Ready!"
The garrison pulled themselves to their feet. Their eyes were empty, all of them past their limits, looking like people who could simply stop at any moment.
Then a series of explosions detonated outside the gate.
The ground shook under the sustained impacts. The shells were landing very close to the gate, close enough that Petrov's instinct was to curse the artillery. But in the next instant he understood: the impacts were falling on the Blood Pact's massing area.
Those were friendly guns.
Petrov stopped moving. Then he looked sharply through the gate to the outside.
Friendly heavy artillery was now able to reach the ground immediately outside the inner city gate. That meant the artillery positions had completed their forward move. That meant the breakthrough from outside was approaching Nev City. The relief corridor to the inner city was about to open.
---
Duvette stood on a piece of shelled high ground and raised his observation scope toward the last two defensive lines in the distance.
In the upper right of his field of view, the tactical map showed the Krieg units' green indicators holding inside the previous trench line, waiting for the final assault order. The 112th's armoured battalion was further back in a brief recovery pause, supply vehicles, engineering vehicles, and tech-priests working through the damaged armoured carriers.
They had been fighting for most of the night.
In fact, once [Flesh Engine]'s one-hour duration had ended, the advance rate had visibly dropped.
The Blood Pact elite had finally begun to demonstrate what made them elite. The trenches, anti-armour fire positions, and underground passages had recombined into a defensible line that created real problems.
If they had not pushed fast enough in the first half of the night to disrupt the enemy's coordination, the casualties in those subsequent hours would have been considerably worse.
Without the near-Astartes physical enhancement, relying only on [Eye of Judgement]'s passive indicators, the Krieg punching through the last two lines in a short time would have required paying a high price in bodies.
Duvette did not intend to do that.
He had told Rein and Holst he was going to give these Krieg a new meaning. Having said it, he would not have them fill fire positions with pointless final charges.
The next skill cooldown completing was when the corridor would be opened properly.
Through the second half of the night, to keep Nev City from falling under the Blood Pact's intensifying assault, Duvette had activated [Blessing of the Omnissiah] for the designated forces holding the gate sector.
During that window: Machine-Spirits pleased, automatic targeting, inexhaustible ammunition. The Black Shield element and the gate garrison had used that anomalous fire output to hold the Blood Pact's heaviest assault push by a narrow margin.
After it ended, their weapons had begun failing badly.
But the Krieg heavy artillery had completed its forward move.
That was sufficient.
"An hour of skill duration is still too short for a large-scale engagement," Duvette thought to himself as he put the scope down.
He briefly reviewed the System panel. When active skills continued to advance, their duration would extend over time, eventually approaching something that resembled a passive presence. At that point he would no longer need to calculate constantly between cooldowns, timing windows, and front-line pressure.
This perhaps meant that his own capabilities were being freed, one step at a time.
If there came a day when every mortal soldier under his command permanently touched the Astartes threshold, then tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of those soldiers would give him a footing in this deteriorating galaxy that nothing could easily contest.
He was not there yet. For now, he could only wait.
The time moved.
At 1300 hours, direct sunlight fell across the enemy's last trench line.
Duvette raised the observation scope again and looked at the red indicators in the distance.
"Good weather for it." He said quietly. "Good weather to harvest their lives."
[Flesh Engine] reactivated.
The 112th's armoured battalion engines roared to life. Leman Russ tanks, Chimeras, Hellhounds, and engineering clearance vehicles started simultaneously and drove toward the enemy's final line under Major Kleist's orders.
Almost simultaneously, Colonel Holst gave the command.
The assault signal sounded.
Over ten thousand Krieg soldiers came out of the trenches.
Their speed was not something that could be associated with ordinary Astra Militarum. Heavy boots crossed mud and shell craters. Demolitions teams ran with satchel charges alongside the armoured spearhead. Entrenching tools, bayonets, and lasguns caught the daylight.
The enemy's anti-armour positions opened first.
A Chimera took a hit through its side armour and pitched sideways. Another Leman Russ had a track broken, but its turret kept rotating and firing at the emplacement ahead. Fire from the trench line's concealed apertures raked several Krieg combat engineers and tore them apart.
But this time, the Krieg did not stop in the fire zone.
They crossed the exposed approach at a speed the enemy had not planned for. The crossing fire that should have covered the entire advance zone only had time to tear through the first wave before the demolitions teams were already at the fortification's side walls.
The 312th Engineer Battalion's charges went into the firing apertures below the main positions.
Detonations followed in sequence.
One anti-armour emplacement was blown open from inside, the Blood Pact gun crew destroyed with it. Kleist's Leman Russ immediately fired and brought down a second emplacement still pouring fire.
The Blood Pact line began to break.
They did not stop fighting. Officers waved their standards. Heavy stubbers and fixed bolter weapons continued firing. But the Krieg were already inside their trenches.
The enhanced Death Korps at close range was a frightening thing.
Bayonets punched through shell armour. Entrenching tools cracked helmets. Satchel charges were pushed directly into trench corners. Blood Pact units tried to seal passages with grenades, but the Krieg had already marked their positions through the [Eye of Judgement] indicators, and accompanying mortar fire reduced them to fragments.
Duvette watched the front.
Red markers went dark in rapid succession.
The last defensive line began to collapse.
When the line was fully broken, Krieg soldiers pushed along the trench network and quickly found the Blood Pact field commander's temporary command post for the Nev City outer encirclement group.
It was concealed inside a semi-underground reinforced bunker, surrounded by heavy weapon teams, commissar-troopers, and two autocannons corrupted with Chaos runes. The Krieg did not wait for heavy artillery. They blew the side wall with demolition charges and went inside.
The fighting lasted less than three minutes.
The Blood Pact officer commanding the outer encirclement of Nev City was killed by a Krieg combat engineer's entrenching tool.
His head was put on a marker stake outside the command post, informing everyone in range that the objective had been cleared.
The Blood Pact defensive line in the northwest corridor finally lost its unified command. The surviving enemy still outnumbered Duvette's advance element considerably, but they could no longer organise an interdiction of any meaningful strength.
Duvette did not delay.
He ordered the Krieg combat engineers to continue clearing the enemy remnants on the flanks, and ordered the armoured battalion to escort the first ammunition, water, and medical personnel forward toward Nev City. Then he led the main advance element toward the inner city gate.
The corridor was not clean yet.
Blood Pact remnants were still on both flanks. But it was enough to let the first relief elements enter Nev City.
For Nev City, that was enough.
When Duvette reached the outer side of the inner city gate, the thirteen Black Shields were still there.
Their power armour was covered in impact marks. The cloaks were badly damaged. The bolters had been pushed to their hips, clearly no longer functional. Markus Sevian stood at the front, power sword hanging at his side, the red glow behind the helmet lenses still steady.
Behind them, standing at the street's edge, was a middle-aged man with a hollow face and a uniform that had mostly ceased to look like a uniform.
General Petrov looked at Duvette and produced a tired smile.