V2 Chapter 122: The Forests of Tanith Sing.
When the drop pods, landing craft, and burning wreckage fell into the forest, fire spread quickly through the nalwood.
The night was lit. The air was thick with charred wood, promethium, and the smell of earth thrown open by heat. Impact sounds continued from the distance, each one sending a brief tremor through the ground.
The nalwood, sensing the fire and the impacts, began to move.
At first it was a few sections of forest shifting. Then more trees were disturbed. Root masses turned out of the soil. Trunks moved slowly through the darkness. Paths that had been recognisable moments before were crushed out of existence, and markings that had just been placed disappeared behind new walls of wood.
Stroud was leading his understrength Fourth Infantry Regiment through the forest.
More accurately, he was attempting to navigate around the forest while it moved. He had tried once to push straight through it, and even with the Commissar's enhancement behind him, being struck by a moving nalwood was an experience he had no interest in repeating.
He was now quite certain he did not want to become the first Astra Militarum officer in recorded history to be killed by a tree.
"Hold! Let it pass!"
He raised his hand and the soldiers behind him dropped immediately. A nalwood moved slowly across their front, its root mass dragging up sheets of mud. Several of the newer troops watched the thing squeeze past them with expressions that were not entirely healthy.
"I'm starting to appreciate hive cities." Stroud muttered. "At least the walls in a hive city don't get up and walk."
They could only move toward the fires visible in the distance, threading through the constantly reconfiguring forest as best they could.
Along the way they had encountered several groups of enemies glowing red. Those Chaos traitors had been disoriented by the nalwood as well. Many of them had not worked out where they had landed before the Fourth Regiment's fire put them down.
The Eye of Judgement's passive was doing its work.
In the vision of the 112th Battle Group's soldiers, enemies tainted by Chaos gave off a faint red light. Fire, smoke, and moving tree shapes interfered with line of sight, but that red light surfaced at the critical moment and gave position away regardless.
That was a mild comfort to Stroud.
However well the Chaos traitors concealed themselves, they were going to have difficulty disappearing completely in this darkness.
As another wave of nalwood moved around them, Stroud's expression went sour again.
"Stop, stop, feth, stop following me, I don't know where we're going either!"
The column stopped in a stretch of ground that had been broken up by root masses. The two marked trees that had been pointing southeast were gone. In their place was a section of dense forest that had pushed in from somewhere else entirely.
Stroud dragged a hand across his bald scalp and looked at the sniper beside him.
"Where in the feth are we? Finn, you can stop praying, find us a way out."
Finn was half-crouched behind a root mass, his mechanical eye sweeping the distant treeline. He heard Stroud's complaint and replied without particular inflection.
"I suggest asking the Commissar."
"That's the twelfth time I've asked him." Stroud looked at him with visible displeasure. "I suspect that if I ask a thirteenth time he will shoot me. And I am supposed to be in intelligence and reconnaissance."
Finn did not look up. "The forest moves."
"Oh, wonderful, thank you so much for that, Finn, that is such a difficult thing to notice."
Stroud was still composing further complaints when a melody drifted through the burning forest.
It came through the fire and the artillery sound, carrying a quality that could only have been written by someone who had grown up on this planet. It was not loud, but it carried a long distance through the trees, and it seemed to come from multiple directions at once.
Stroud and Finn looked at each other.
Finn said: "Tanith instrument. We heard it before, earlier in the week."
Stroud understood immediately what those tattooed, rough-edged people were doing.
He raised his lasgun and pointed. "That direction. Move!"
He was not the only one.
Every 112th Battle Group unit that had lost its bearings in the forest began moving toward the sound when they heard it.
The enemy heard it too.
The Chaos traitors assumed the music indicated people, a command node, or a withdrawal route. They started moving toward the sound as well.
As the music drifted through the forest, death drifted with it.
A Chaos squad had just crossed through a burning section of nalwood when the music ahead of them stopped.
Before they processed what that meant, organised lasrifle fire came from the flank.
Red light dropped them one by one in the darkness. Fourth Regiment veterans came in from the other side, and las-beams cut through the smoke into the Chaos soldiers' chests and skulls.
In another stretch of forest, a group of traitors who had just come out of a drop pod followed the sound toward where they had seen shadows moving between the trees. They pushed after the shadows and stepped into a stretch of ground that Tanith soldiers had marked beforehand.
Fragmentation mines detonated beneath their feet.
The survivors that rose from the ground were killed by snipers positioned in the canopy above. No one knew when those Tanith people had climbed up, or how they were maintaining their positions in a forest that was continuously shifting.
The 112th Battle Group's soldiers learned the pattern quickly.
They used the red light from the Eye of Judgement to find the enemy. They used the sound of the Tanith instruments to orient on friendly forces. Many of the soldiers recently integrated under Duvette's command had no idea what the red light actually was, but in the interval between life and death, every question of that kind could wait.
The scattered units were gradually pulled together.
The Tanith people played their instruments and guided friendly forces through the moving forest sections. The 112th veterans used firepower to break apart the Chaos formations in their confusion. The Krieg officers reorganised quickly, folding lost soldiers back into temporary combat groups.
The Chaos traitors tried to close on the music as well.
But they could not see the red light, and they did not know the Tanith forest. Every time they moved toward the sound, what met them was fire coming from behind trees, from mud, from slopes, and from the edge of the flames.
When Stroud reached a temporary rally point, several hundred soldiers had already gathered there.
A Tanith soldier with facial tattoos was standing on a fallen trunk with the instrument in his hand. When he saw Stroud, he simply raised his chin.
Stroud looked at him. Two seconds of silence.
"All right." He said. "You lot are actually somewhat useful."
"Commissar. Colonel-Commissar Gaunt reports that he has successfully consolidated forces from three directions and is preparing to clear the nearby Chaos forces in sequence."
Inside the temporary command post, Chief of Staff Evan delivered the report from beside the command table.
Duvette looked at the strategic display and gave a nod.
"Well done. Tell Gaunt not to pursue too deep. Watch for Chaos Astartes. If they were willing to force a drop, they have something down here that can hold a position."
"Yes, Commissar."
Evan relayed the order immediately.
Duvette's attention moved back across the strategic display. The Tanith regiments' markers were steadying. Their lines of movement were becoming coherent. Many of the friendly units that had been scattered were being brought back in.
Gaunt had made it work.
These Tanith people were producing their actual value for the first time. They knew this forest, and they knew how to make outsiders die in it.
Beyond the three Tanith regiments, one other formation was standing out on the display.
That unit was not getting lost in the dense nalwood. Its rate of elimination was matching the Black Shield squad's in the distance.
The Catachan Hunting Company.
Duvette watched that cluster of markers moving through the forest and let out a quiet sound of appreciation.
Not unexpected, given where they come from.
The moving trees were genuinely a problem for them, but their speed of adaptation to a dangerous environment was extraordinary. A forest that was simply disorienting was not something they were going to treat as an unusual situation. Their home was considerably worse than this. They had already stopped trying to navigate around the chaos and started using it to run hunts of their own.
Further out, the thirteen Black Shield markers were pushing hard.
They were not working around obstacles or looking for safe routes the way conventional units did. Markus was driving his brothers straight through, cutting into the densest enemy concentrations, and the red markers along their path were disappearing at speed.
Duvette noticed a large cluster of red markers beginning to gather in the northwest.
That was not a dispersed group of stragglers.
The enemy was consolidating. And consolidating quickly. In the centre of the red cluster there were several markers that burned darker than the rest. Duvette held his gaze on them for two seconds, and his expression settled into something harder.
"Notify the Catachan Hunting Company and the Black Shield squad. Move to the northwest."
He gave the order immediately. "There is a Chaos force consolidating in that direction. Astartes are likely present. Have the Catachans fix them from the outside of the treeline and prevent them from organising further. The Black Shields prioritise any Astartes and command nodes they can locate."
Evan's response was immediate. "Yes, Commissar."
The order went out.
On the strategic display, two friendly markers began to turn.
One drove directly northwest like a blade going in.
The other curved outward along the treeline.
Duvette watched the red markers and slowly closed his hand around the plasma pistol at his hip.
"Come on then." He said quietly. "Let me see what you have left."
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