V2 Chapter 87: The Hammer Falls
Sveren Counter-Offensive: 00:10:00
The battle drove forward through blood and fire.
Duvette was at the front of the Krieg charge. The power sword hummed in his hand. The plasma pistol fired in short bursts, cutting down the Blood Pact officers and heavy weapons crews attempting to organise any kind of counter-push. Whatever the Blood Pact's reputation for elite discipline, none of it translated into a threat in front of him.
Several Blood Pact assault troops tried to come at him from the flank.
The moment they drew close, their movements went sluggish.
The breath was knocked from them by a pressure they could not see. The fervour in their eyes turned to confusion and pain in an instant. The Gift of the Ocean, given to Duvette by the Iron Snakes, was doing its work: the Abyss of Ithaka pressing down on them, making them carry the weight of ten thousand metres of ocean depth.
Duvette did not give them a second glance.
The power sword swept level. Several heads came away from their helmets and fell into the mud. The plasma pistol fired again, and a Blood Pact officer who had been swinging a heavy stubber's muzzle toward him took the bolt through the chest plate. Blue-white fire blew out through his back.
Another position cleared.
Duvette stepped over the bodies and raised his eyes toward the red markers still burning in the distance.
Behind him, the Krieg heavy artillery continued its sustained fire. The loading, correction, and cooling intervals between shots had been compressed to an extraordinary degree. The gun crews moved as though driven by a single shared rhythm: the breech opened, the shell went in, the fire discharged, and the next cycle began before the sound of the previous shot had finished rolling across the ground. The heavy guns gave the enemy no interval to recover.
Operating from the coordinates Duvette provided through the Grand Strategic Display, the barrage fell precisely on every target that mattered. Fortified fire positions, ammunition stockpiles, vox relay nodes, and anti-armour emplacements were torn open one after another. The command post occupied by the Iron Warriors siege advisor had been marked, and the Krieg heavy artillery turned that position into a continuous churning sea of fire.
The ground shook without pause.
Duvette watched the red markers extinguish one after another. His expression remained flat.
This was only the beginning.
Sveren Counter-Offensive: 00:15:00
The 112th's assault companies, moving out from Nev City, had already worked their way through the outer city underground network and were closing on the enemy's outer positions.
The underground passages were dim, contaminated water running across the floor through cracked pipe joints. The Blood Pact had sent infiltration teams down the same routes in the opposite direction, attempting to push toward the inner city through the same tunnels. They believed themselves comfortable in darkness and confined spaces.
In front of the enhanced 112th assault companies, they were rats in a drainage channel.
Death came out of the shadows.
Stroud did not waste ammunition. He appeared behind a Blood Pact soldier, drew the combat knife across the man's throat, then broke the neck of the next one with a single blow.
Elias's squad cut in from the side and pinned an entire Blood Pact unit at a pipe junction. They were cleared in a handful of seconds.
Anderson pressed forward from another direction with a second element.
A Blood Pact soldier barely raised his weapon before a bayonet drove through his chest. Another reached for a grenade and had his wrist snapped by a kick from Stroud, who then pushed his face into the contaminated water and held it there.
They barely fired.
Gunfire would alert the positions ahead, and knives and hands were sufficient for this work.
Stroud wiped the combat knife clean and raised his head, listening to the vibrations coming through from above. The ground was trembling; both sides' heavy guns were still trading fire along the surface. Each impact brought dust sifting down from the pipe walls.
Their objective was clear.
Silence the enemy's fire.
Stroud raised his hand and gestured forward.
"Keep moving."
The black-armoured soldiers continued into the depths of the pipeline network.
Sveren Counter-Offensive: 00:25:00
The 112th armoured battalion drove forward.
Major Kleist's command tank led from the front. The armoured spearhead of Leman Russ tanks, Chimeras, and Hellhound flame tanks drove into the Blood Pact's flank line from the side, engines roaring, tracks churning through ground gone soft with ash and blood.
They did not know the Chogorian bone carving's Hunt aura was active.
But they felt it. The faster they moved, the more complete the destruction.
[Blessing of the Omnissiah] drove the Machine-Spirits into a sharp and furious response. The main guns acquired targets at speeds that had no ordinary explanation. Shot placement was accurate beyond anything the crews expected of themselves. Enemy anti-armour positions had barely begun to traverse their barrels before Leman Russ fire tore through them.
A Blood Pact heavy carrier attempted to block the armoured battalion's advance route.
Kleist issued one order.
"Go through it."
The command tank did not slow down.
The tracks rode up over the wreckage. The main gun fired at point-blank range and blew the heavy carrier's frontal armour inward. The Chimeras behind came through on both sides, their hull weapons sweeping the Blood Pact infantry in the drainage ditches. Hellhound flame tanks pressed up against the communication trenches and poured fire down into the positions where the enemy had sheltered.
Nothing stopped them.
The enemy's anti-armour fire could not stop them. Their heavy carriers could not stop them. The improvised roadblocks could not stop them. Blood Pact soldiers were ground apart under the advance of the Eisenmark armoured formation, leaving only burning wreckage and broken bodies.
Kleist watched the enemy markers disappearing from the augury screen and allowed himself a thin, cold smile.
"Keep going."
"Tear their flank open."
Sveren Counter-Offensive: 00:40:00
Behind the Blood Pact's lines, well beyond the walls of Nev City, the artillery positions were hit without warning.
When the first explosion went off, the Blood Pact commander assumed it was long-range Imperial artillery. When the third ammunition stockpile detonated in quick succession and the vox link to the anti-aircraft position went dead, they understood: the enemy was already inside their rear.
It should have been impossible.
The route from Nev City's underground network to this position required crossing a wide stretch of outer city ruins, collapsed factory districts, Blood Pact patrol lines, and old communication trenches. No ordinary infantry could have done it. Vehicles could not move through that terrain at all.
But the 112th assault companies had done it.
Under [Flesh Engine], their speed and strength had moved beyond anything mortal soldiers were supposed to achieve. [Iron Crusade] had suppressed exhaustion and pain and driven them through it. The shattered terrain that would have slowed ordinary troops barely registered.
They had covered the distance at a pace that no conventional assessment would have predicted.
Collapsed pipe sections were vaulted without slowing. Abandoned factory districts were crossed at a run. Blood Pact patrol elements encountered along the route were dealt with before they could transmit a full warning. Combat knives, bolt pistols, and brief bursts of laser fire resolved each contact, and the dead were left where they fell.
Stroud personally cut the main vox line at one artillery position.
Elias led his element and packed demolition charges into the base mounts of an anti-aircraft cannon.
Anderson's group drove through an ammunition stockpile, killed every Blood Pact artilleryman still at his station, and then detonated the shells stored at the far end of the supply bay.
Explosions came in quick succession.
The enemy's heavy fire assets began going dark.
When the last anti-aircraft position was destroyed, Stroud raised his head and looked toward the distance. That was where the heart of the encircled Blood Pact mass lay, red markers moving in patterns that signalled something approaching disorganisation.
"Turn around."
He tightened his grip on the combat knife.
"Now we cut them open from behind."
The 112th assault companies turned and drove back toward the enemy's rear.
Sveren Counter-Offensive: 00:45:00
The blade aimed at the heart of the enemy's command reached its objective.
Guided by the coordinates and directional data Duvette had provided, the thirteen Black Shields breached the Blood Pact's disorganised defensive screen and arrived at the position of the Iron Warriors siege advisor's command post.
What they found was already ash.
The outer reinforced bunker had been blown apart. Tactical antennae lay across the ground, their metal frames bent into shapes that no longer resembled anything functional. Around the position there was nothing but a series of dark impact craters, earth still smoking, shattered bodies scattered by the force of the barrage.
Markus Sevian did not speak immediately.
He brought the Black Shields into the deepest crater. There, he found a partial body. Only the upper half remained. The chest plate had been caved inward by the blast. The Iron Warriors insignia on the shoulder had been burned to black.
Markus crouched and pulled a head from the still-warm earth, the shattered helmet still attached.
The lenses had gone dark.
He looked at it for a moment. Then he produced a short, cold sound and dropped it to one side.
They had arrived.
But Duvette's artillery had arrived before them.
Markus opened the vox channel.
"Target is dead."
On the other end, Duvette's voice was level.
"Confirmed."
Markus looked toward the Blood Pact fire positions still operating ahead. Clusters of enemy soldiers were attempting to reconstruct a defensive line. Heavy weapons were sweeping toward the Krieg advance.
"There are still enemies here."
"Clear them."
"Understood."
Markus closed the channel and raised his power sword and storm shield.
"Black Shields, advance."
All thirteen drove forward simultaneously. They crossed the craters and drove directly into the nearest fire position.
Sveren Counter-Offensive: 01:00:00
Duvette's skill duration had ended.
But every strategic objective had been achieved.
The encirclement was complete. The swollen Blood Pact mass was trapped in the centre of the corridor, the roads sealed at both ends, their artillery destroyed, their anti-aircraft silenced, their armoured reserve broken apart by the Eisenmark armoured battalion from the flank.
They had lost their senior commander. They had lost unified orders.
What remained of the Blood Pact could only fight in fragments across a compressed area.
Duvette stood on an enemy position that had just been taken. The power sword's disruption field had gone quiet. He deactivated it and raised the blade, giving it a brief shake. The blood that had been scorched dry by the field's heat fell from the edge in flakes of blackened red.
In the distance, flashes of fire still lit the dark.
Evan's voice came through the vox.
"Commissar. Our force is beginning to fade."
"I know."
Duvette looked at the strategic map.
Red markers still covered the display in significant numbers, but they had fractured into isolated pockets. Those enemies were still alive. They could no longer change the outcome of the battle.
"Notify Holst," Duvette said. "Divide the enemy per the planned pattern."
"Yes."
"Notify Petrov. Nev City continues pushing outward. Don't try to consume them all at once. Seal them first. If the pressure becomes severe, hold in place and contact me."
"Understood."
Duvette paused.
"Every twelve hours, a major push."
He looked at the markers still flickering on the display and allowed himself a brief smile.
"Until every red light is gone. No survivors."
Confirmations came back through the channel.
In the distance, the Krieg assault signal sounded again. This time it was not for a decisive strike. It was for the work of clearing what remained.
Duvette raised his head and looked at the night sky lit by shellfire.
The battle had been decided.
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