A blinking cursor replaces the warmth of formless dreams.
It is in turn replaced by lines of dispassionate text scrolling across his view. But he can hear it at the same time, though his ears lost functionality years ago.
Cogitators alpha, beta, delta, epsilon, gamma, activated.
Life-support systems function. Nerve lattice relays operating at 99.675432% efficiency.
Correcting...nerve lattice relays operating at 100% efficiency.
Logos memorandum operational.
There is time to think. Time to ready himself. His mind is no longer solely his own. It had once been made greater to serve a greater purpose. Now it has
He can hear something else his war-mind.
Initiating testing sequence. Testing sequence initiated.
Not all of his brethren in similar conditions refer to their mental states as such. They consider it a falsehood, a weakness to differentiate from the heart, mind and soul that is the core of the warrior they were and still are. Others share his view. It is an anchor, a minor locus around which his purpose springs and distracts from the pallid existence that some would call living.
The cold is coming. It's gripping. Consuming, settling into meat and bones until he can no longer remember what it was like to be warm. Alone in the chill blackness, his thoughts and memories the only indication this core clings to life.
A half-life his state may be, but it is a stronger life in its own way, a continuation of service, a second chance to bolster a legend of brotherhood and war towards a dream of peace, unity, and civilization.
Civilization. Even now, the changes in perception and definition as relates to that word is enough to make his mind shake in wonder. It's a possibility he and his people would have laughed at. But now, he sees it. He secures it. He reaches for it, beyond the grave.
Engaging engine. Fuel pumps active.
Ignition sequence starting.
3
2
1
Ignition.
It's happiness. Shared prosperity. Trust. The forsaking of barbarism and pointless violence, the spreading of knowledge and means of growth from one corner of the galaxy to the next.
Ah. There is the warmth. It's a false warmth. Somewhere in-between his core and his body, energy floods, a reactor blazes into life, artificial heat surging. Pistons smoothly jerk and revolve.
Engine test successful. Praise the Omnissiash. Engaging systems array.
He shudders with a clank of ceramite on adamantium within the support frame. He sees. His eyes are broken things, but he sees nonetheless. The visual, infrared, ultraviolet and terahertz-wave phases all overlapping into a single mass becomes his view. Runes, informational diorams, blinking Low Gothic runes set into a background of my tomb, moving figures, that despite the sheer complexity of sensation is easily understood. It is not because of his mind. When his eyes still functioned, he could have, with training, comprehended and memorized every letter, symbol, and tiny square piece of digitalized optics. Now, it is because his mind is part of this greater thing, comprehension is as natural as breathing. Asthinking. His arms move back and forth. He doesn't feel it. It is a jarring contrast, as though they are numb. But he has a sense of their position relative to his body. It is a measure of experience, practice, and sensorium functions providing a constant nerve-uplink on the precise location of his body relative to his core.
He can hear now. The clank of armored boots. The myriad voices shouting commands, stating intentions, successful actions taken, the plink of shot and cartridge and batteries being loaded. Preparations for war.
Engine weapons test. Weapons synesthesism successful. Uploading campaign relevant details.
Data surges through the sensorium, information floods his system, and he is made aware in nanoseconds of information that would previously have taken him several minutes of thorough inspection to assimilate and memorize.
A planet. Barbarus.
An enemy...unknown. Warp based. Pestilential and disease-based weaponry and psychic capabilities. Environmental hostility: Extremis. Maximus designation possible, pending.
The strategic assault pattern, mass teleportation. Even he, who cannot help but intake data in ways that defy misunderstanding and incomprehension, feels something twitch deep within. It is well known that the proximity Warp phenomenae makes the use of teleportariums hazardous on a tactical scale. But this is to be a massed metatranslocation of the vast majority of the Legiones Astartes, an entire Knightly House, an entireTitan Legionand millions upon millions of mortal Army troops.
But after the twinge follows a warmth that rises from deep within, from that bit of him permanently tied to a dream, an ideal.
The Emperor is coming as well.
That explains it.
Runes flicker into being as a shape comes before him, brief flashes of illumination of individual segments, intaking data on a hundred different things from armor-type, metallic composition and density, the occupant's name and service history, the names of weapons maglocked to his back and holstered at his side, determined weight, determined height, potential threat in terms of penetrative and overall capability of weapons and wielder, localized temperatures, his place in the command hierarchy, and speculations on viable combat strategies to neutralize or support the individual before him. It as though he thinks it even as he sees it, a bond between mind and war-mind that is two halves of a greater whole.
The girders are unlocked. He stands upright, towering over the Astartes. His knees have been bent for eighteen thousand five hundred thirty seven hours per his chronometer. He feels no strain.
Another second later the data is processed and dismissed with a thought-blink, leaving a perfectly clear and defined image of an Astartes Marshal of the Dusk Raiders, Albian-born, Mark IV Power Armor, smoky grey with a single gauntlet and arm red as blood. It is the human in him, for while he could have had the screen near-covered in runes, alerts, and constantly updating slates of information detailing, fuel levels, elevation, air pressure, air mix, nutrient levels, amniotic status, biological component status, targeting reticules, and ammo counts and still have kept a part of his attention focused on the figure…it feels better to have an opaque vision.
"Marshal Artur."
His voice is a mechanical growl, a machine's hum, a weapon's purr.
It is still cold. Cold enough to make the world a frozen corpse. But the pain has faded as precise anethesic-formulas responded to his thoughts and degraded nerve signals.
Now he cannot feel much of anything.
His Contemptor-Pattern chassis looms, and he notes a team of serfs approaching from two sides with ammo belts and canisters of promethium. He allows it them to begin the process of loading and arming his
Siegemaster Artur Corrius, his own examination complete, responds. "Good day Brother Huron-Fal."
"The enemy. I am reminded of the VIII's reports against the Vhnori. The rumors of Ursh and Kalagann's madness."
"Yes. I feel that we are seeing a veil unraveled, the witchery we do condemned but a toehold compared to the infestation on this planet's surface." Artur mused. "One way or another, this will change everything."
"War is war, Marshal. The only difference is what form it takes."
-----
A loping charge like a falling avalanche smashes through a line of things out of humanity's nightmares. They are scattered, flying and broken, laughing and moaning and giggling, flesh curdling and bones torn in eye-searing ways that his optics struggle and sputter to actualize into mind-images, some falling abruptly, some seeming to mellow through the fogged air as if in water, others flickering like hazy distortions in heat.
His right arm sweeps about as his torso completes a 180 degree contortion in time with his charge, burning promethium spewing in a fiery crescent from left to right, cinders and burning empyric bodies (though his logos struggles to identify their status as burning, oscillating between terms for extreme temperature-inflicted statuses) flailing about. A large thing, skeletal, bovine and baring amphibious features, he punctures with his left claw.
It implodes like a balloon, flabby guts collapsing and warty skin falling into paper-thin bundles of meat that feel as heavy as stacks of ceramite, gas and volatile, phlegm-shaped fluids bursting out. They sizzle against a field of flickering voltaic force inches from his chassis, a distorted space that has been humming almost constantly since translocation onto this planet. The very atmosphere is something his war-mind melding of Astartes cerebral cognizance and Dreadnought machine spirit revolts at, instinctively protecting against with atomantic shields.
As if the planet's existence is hostile in ways far too sapient and conscious, and not for the first time he feels small despite the great mass of his iron form, like a single bacterium in an invading horde making war upon the immune system of a great and terrible conscious--
He discards the thought, partitioning it with cold, mechanical efficiency and arithmetic logic thought-lines, sequestering it in the furthest reaches of his war-mind behind chains and gates of binary. There is no time for superstitions and wayward concepts, this battle, thisplacemakes him think things irrelevant that cling to his forethoughts.
He shakes off thetoo-thin too-heavycorpse, aborting a swipe of his flamer claw through the fly swarms. He'd learned quickly to be conservative with clearing them, more always appeared, but their cluttering about his chassis inspired an instinctive revulsion in him, as though he could feel their chittering mandibles and multidigitated limbs skittering over him. They could barely scratch his plating, he should not even notice them, yet something tickles unnervingly regardless as though his metal body is of flesh and nerves once more. The heavy weapons teams with dedicated flamers and ammunition will keep them down enough, his fires are for more worthy foes.
As if summoned in response great gouts of burning promethium burst about him and across his chassis. Though hot enough to turn flesh and bone to ask, it did not even make a dint in the absolute chill of the amniotic fluids about his core, much less scorch the paint of his metal hide. His augurs adjusted, vision template switching between thermal settings so as to effectively make the flames near-enough to invisible, that he might focus on his true opponents.
It had not been so at first. When the great waves of maggots and worms undulated into being as if the earth was shedding micro-masses in response to those treading on it, the dim light of the endless clouds was blackened further by vast swarms of flies, and hordes of squealing, walking skin-poxes chittered, clawed ad bit as his legs, the pain...the pain had made him react as appropriate in any other situation. Pain was the body's warning, an alert of something capable of posing a threat of some kind. He'd been a wild blur of revolving upper torso and swinging arms, emptying his heavy bolter and autocannon by the tens of thousands of rounds, nigh perpetually engulfed by jets of fire from the flamer in his power claw. The viscera that had painted the world about him, the not-quite-right corpses piling up in scored, burst flabs of meat, only to gradually fade away, dissolving like gas into the atmosphere, swallowed up by the mud and dirt in an accelerated cycle of decay and rebirth.
It was like trying to fight a storm. Attempting to halt a tidal wave with his bare hands, to down a torrent of rain by shooting the drops out of the sky. And just like a storm, there were some things that, while unpleasant, were not deadly. They could be endured. For all his Dreadnought frame was pained as though made of flesh, his armor held, barely scratched by the masses of little things. Pain alone could be ignored, endured. That was what he had excelled at when at his weakest as an Albian, and what he'd been made to transcend human limits as an Astartes. To be so troubled by such minor inconveniences as pain and discomfort without actual threat would shame himself and his Legion. So he ignored the walking poxes beyond some vicious forward marches that stomped them into diseased paste, broke and smashed his way through the waves of vermin as he would a stone maze, and resolutely endured the buzzing insects that cluttered and stung at him.
He moves on, stomping through mud that is a mere handful of inches deep yet pulls at his metal legs like a quagmire. More foes come, corpulent things with horns and lesions and singular or triads of eyes. Flightless avians with rotting feathers and compound eyes leap about vomiting bile that his sensorium registers as stomach acid from seven different kinds of slugs, one of which became extinct seven thousand seven hundred years ago. Massive caterpillars perpetually shedding aerobic skins that sprout mosquito wings and hurl themselves as living vacuum bombs. The only consistent theme is some perversion of the building blocks of genesis; rampant, unfettered, life allowed to fester and congeal into unseemly biological concoctions. His targeting reticules dance over his optics, bio-signs reading negative, temperatures fluctuating from sub-zero to boiling, identification markers in unknown tongues.
Something comes to mind, literally.
"Lean left."
A statement that is also a set of algorithms detailing patterns of precise movement his posthuman, partially digitized mind makes a singular symphony of.
He steps hard to the left, twisting his upper torso to lean away, and the nigh invisible beam of heat that is a a multi melta scorches just past his claw and erases a three-eyed undulating gelatin mass.
A gas-gheist shrieks out of the evaporating bileblood, but he's seen this before. Piston quick his arm shoots forward, power claw clamping,willedwill all his focus to clamp, and it pops with a disappointed groan, sludge incongruously spilling and evaporating in the actinic shroud.
More than fine weapons, he and his have been quick to learn that determination and willpower is key to killing even the most biologically impossible and evolutionarily improbable things on this planet. And the Dusk Raiders are among the most renowned for their stolid resolve, and his has been made as durable as adamantium.
His upper torso rotates one hundred and three degrees. It's not necessary, to his augurs the only thing trustworthy are his allies and comrades, but he enjoys the organic pseudo-feel of glancing back at someone. Another dreadnought stomps forward, caked in grime, the air around it's melta still shimmering from heat discharge.
"Brother Berax."
A mechanical grunt was the reply, before the lascannon he bore alongside the multimelta opened up, spraying more distant targets.
That was the vein of the conflict for a time. Dreadnoughts supported by heavy weapons teams stomped forwards, biting chunks of ash-strewn territory, whilst lighter Astartes elements followed up and reinforced the seized ground and pushed off enemy counterattacks. Bite, hold, bite again. Many subterranean and aerial denizens of the hellworld that bypasses the fire tide inexorably advancing towards the horizon were drawn to these prongs extended beyond the main lines, directing their plague-ridden fury against the most durable of the Dusk Raiders' elements, allowing for the advancing Legionaires to sweep forward and flank them while they were embattled. And while there was no realistic fear response or to morale as would be seen in a foe more governed by reason (though the abeyance of good humor in many Warpspawn was noted, it had no practical effects, more like some rote script than genuine feeing) the poor positioning still allowed for swifter annihilation.
Despite the swiftness of the posthuman advance, the pyre tide in the distance was simply too fast for a ground assault to keep pace. Thoughts of simply allowing it and holding the ground they acquired were suggested and discarded, the war-walker contingents and vast regiments of mortals could hold and check counterattacks into humanity's depth but it was observed that snail-riding pox cyclops and gardeners-sprawling unwholesome chemicals from great shelled-packs could stir debased vegetation from the ash fields, around which the enemies who by digging or flying congregated and fortified. If they were to maintain things, they would need to go faster.
So time and again, when the flames began to draw away in the distance, the heavy "bite" teams were loaded into transports, Stormbirds and Thunderhawks, and darted forward to hold ground whilst mobile elements caught up.
—
Warning alarms went off as the screech of tearing adamantium filled the enclosed space. Pincers and stingers the size of boarding drills. Punched through, protuberances on the end opening up, wriggling larvae sliding forward with distressingly animated gabbling faces to vomit up unguents that hissed on contact with air and metal alike.
In some places at least. One intrusive appendage was grabbed and squeezed shut before being ripped off by a massive claw, the owner of the stinger whining in pain as it drew back, allowing fetid light to enter the hold. His audio-receptors vaguely picked up a giggle before the hole darkened and a skull (?) fell in, bursting on impact with explosive force against his hide. He rocked back, growling as he noticed the swiftly evolving larvae swarming over a fallen brother, prolegs working the helmet with skull still attached off with clumsy precision.
As his targeting reticules failed for the seven hundred thirty second time to immediately encapsulate his foe, he angrily shut off the automatic seeking response and calculated vectors instead. His auto cannon burst into life, precise volleys against intruding probosci severing the daemon-limbs one at a time while his flamer consigned the maggots to fiery oblivion.
As bolter fire rang out and ricocheted around him, the wet thunk of blades on meat melding with the tearing of metal and hiss of acid, flies began to fill his ocular screens as they flooded in; an open-channel vox message rang in his ears.
"Systems are failing, prepare for emerg-"
The voice cut off as another shudder wracked the Stormbird. Pressure shifted, gravity pressing upwards.
Then the world shattered.
—
Grimy pox-riddled hands manipulated an abacus of finger bones on wires of entrails.
"Mmhrmm, yes…did I not say the alignments were synchronized? To think Bixockulin said the seventh liver spot would not be clear enough for accuracy."
The one-eyes potbellied, horned thing of vaguely humanoid design, it's form like a lesion molded like clay, grumbled in good humor as it manipulated its arithmetic tool. Sitting on a hammock of bald raven flesh woven through with cartilage from seven difference species of fish from the great lagoons that the Garden sometimes took shape as, he sighed in satisfaction as the Stormbird skidded to a half seventy seven feet away, his seventy seven strong cyclopean retinue shifting restlessly, moaning their anguish at something he couldn't be bothered to remember at the moment.
It was so very nice to be proven right. A juicy morsel in which the spoor of fresh produce and new souls which might blossom into sweet children of Grandfather was heavy in the air.
"I do believe this calls for a minor celebration. Belch up a tune why don't you Gilgollyi!"
His slimmer, pipe and accordion toting cousin giggled beside him, rancid sounds of lovely, phlegmatic music filling the air and setting his gizzards trembling with joy.
"The rest of you, up and at them! My calculations indicate there's a something special in there, a veritable hive for little lovelies to grow and frolic whilst capering against these pesky intruders!"
And pesky indeed they were. Herald of Nurgle Liczickiel ruminated on how things had come to pass even as he ran further calculations, arthritic, bruised hands moving finger bones back and forth. His paternal smile at the shambling pass of his subordinates toward the wreck briefly flickered. That squeak was not shrill enough.
He held up an opened clawed hand, and a miteling that had been perched on his horned scurried to the proffered limb and coughed up a napkin seeped in its stomach acids. Bringing the soaked bit of festering cloth to the third wire from the top he dabbed and rubbed at areas before nonchalantly stuffing the rag down the Nurgling's throat. Enjoying how the choking giggle harmonized with the pipes rise in pitch he'd predicted, he patted the cheek of its gaping, hacking face.
This world had germinated well, like a well-tended popped boil spilling out to cover the fleshy canvas on something more wholesome in its rancidity. A lovely culture too, mathematical designs and procedures serving as contagion vectors for the Fly Lord's bounteous gifts. The amount of pre-frontal cortices that had stretched to bursting under the unholy numbers deduced and calculated harvests that rang out to those in the Warp who could make of such arithmetic considerations into virulent life filling the brain was quite notable.
Up until those naughty godlings went and bungled things up and the fruits became as a ripe apple swallowed in only six bites.
Ah well. Barely expired milk and all that.
There would be other opportunities. Why, it would take some seven more months of calculations, but he reckoned-
The heavy bolter on the right flank of the downed aircraft opened up, spraying explosive bolts into the startled ranks of plaguebearers. Six point three five milliseconds later (Liczickiel's eye twitched) the unlatched ramp in the rear burst off, a walking coffin with a tantalizingly resilient bit of half-life at its core stormed out, flames spewed and as it laid about, popping and eviscerating daemons.
Liczickiel sighed.
"If it's not one thing it's another."
—
It was strange. So utterly bizarre.
He twisted, tearing apart three walking buboes with one swing of his claw. The effluvium that emanated out with the pus and gore was noxious, though he had no nose and could not breathe.
He was surrounded. Jagged blades of rusted, crumbling iron hacked and carved at his chassis, uncaring of the towering death that could kill them simply by stepping on them. The chips and scratches stung when they were not repelled by his fields in acrid cracks. He had no nerves with which to register the blows, naught but metal was touched, and yet they stung.
His flamer belched forth another gout, a swivel of his torso swinging the blaze across much of the groaning troupe. The stench is acrid. Some fade away, others redden and swell until bursting like furuncles, little balls of walking cancer spewed into being.
Several others beyond the press bore pus-dripping membranes that shuddered and spewed catarrhous geysers, uncaring of their fellows in the arc of fire. His iron legs heaved, electro-fibre systems thrumming as he shot forward, upper body bent low as he bashed his way through at the speed of a light tank, a trail of delirious carnage and strewn splanchnic piles in his wake. Where the mucus blasts hit on the daemons, their flesh boiled and popped before pustulent meat sprouted in gleaming sacks of ablative fat, lesions creaking and splitting to exhume slime that that solidified like heated leather.
His missiles barked, savaging the ranged elements even as rheumy eyes turned to him and the disgustingly resilient horde that seemed to spread and germinate as fast as he killed them moved inexorably towards him.
A fell voice in the air. Charteuse lightning shoots down from the stormwracked skies, the fetid ozone smell as it collides with his atomantic fields distinct. His retinal fields swiveled almost on instinct. The plague-thing reclining on a pallet of organic components. It was the cause. The leader. Even beyond the signs of higher station it seemed even hellspawn abided by, it was just...more. More oppressive in existence, more eye-watering in rancid visuals.
So very strange. He saw through ocular lenses, not organic components of retina, cornea, uvea and sclera.
As if in slow motion even as he swung back and forth in the melee, the abacus-armed plaguefiend moved digits about with an air of satisfaction. Green mist spewed from nowhere about it into the mass of pox-ridden Warp-things, where there was nought but torn and rent cadavers, arms sprouted from lesions and ruptured bellies to pull maddeningly near-identical copies from the corpses thatshould nothave been large enough to house such, making his Mind Impulsed brain ache from the sight. From piles of entrails, meat curdled and writhed, split and fused, flexed and twisted until flabby necrotic chyropterans took flight with oozing white eyes and broken, abscessed fangs, until it was as if his foes had not died so much as taken a twisted step in the cycle of life and death.
"I have a priority target. Cover my advance."
The heavy bolters had not truly stopped firing, merely adjusting to focus on the gaggle of daemons attracted to the life in the wreck as opposed to the rampaging sepulcher. Now it focused on those nearer to Huron Fal as he charged, bolter a staccato of death, flamer and claw a gauntlet of doom. His path of advance he attempted to calculate, running into problems as his systems cogitation array announced errors in identifying, or for that matter recognizing, the foes in his path.
Aggravated at his cyberorganic functions failing him yet again, he overrode everything, switching off automatic systems in favor of direct manual control, identifiers swept from his view, warning runes and numbers banished. He was as a mortal, flesh and blood being again, where pain was a constant of battle, relying on base senses of cognition.
He'd never felt so alive since he'd actually been fully alive.
The feeling persisted as he charged through the ranks of misbegotten blightspawn. It endured as the cheerfully ear-popping pipe tunes sped up into a mad cacophony that poked at his ribs, encouraging laughter from lunges and muscles with no strength to emit them, while daemons were infused with vitality and virulence in the shattered bones and torn flesh that knit itself together in his passing.
It remained firmly embedded as the ash-strewn ground turned into a cloying quagmire sucking at his metal clawed feet before the last of his missiles carbonized a path on which to grip and continue his assault, and a spray of unspeakable liquid foulness pushed passed his atomantic field and begin eating away at his metallic hide, until his power claw, sizzling in the deluge, pushed its way out of the geyser to grab and squeeze and eviscerate the Herald.
And as he basked in the feeling of worthy kill, of slaying something that was so heretical in its existence to common decency, he swore he could feel his heart pounding.
He turned around. The field was wiped clean of enemies, living and dead, or whatever passed for such. It was as if with the slaying of their lord, they were as a nightmare, swept away with the end of dusk and the rising of dawn.
His augurs noted the lack of presence too, except this time it was no falsehood, and therewerepositively identified life signs.
"Temeter, you yet live?" He voxed. The answer was immediate.
"So it appears."
"Mmm. Fine shooting."
"Thank you."
The ash was stirred by strong winds. A Thunderhawk that was part of their squadron was hovering overhead. He received a notification of vox-request, and answered.
"This is Winds of Albia, Venerable Huron-Fal, are you fit for continued duty?"
"I am still battle-worthy. Though..."he reactivated his automated sensorium for a status report and felt a twitch as the lips of the carcass in amniotic fluid tried to grimace."I suspect I will need a thorough decontamination."
"Just as well, we haven't the room to fit you and the delay was such we were the only ones that could be spared. We'll be maglocking you for the conveyance."
"So be it." He noted the gunmetal gray and crimson gauntleted Astartes emerging from the wreck. "I hope you have room for one slightly less inconveniently massed."
—
Huron Fal wouldn't say it was becoming monotonous, for the hellscape that was Barbarus had no end to the horrors in every shape and form imaginable and more than a few that made his ocular units flicker and his barely sustained cerebral matter ache, but the nature of the battle was such that progression felt, measured, in abstract way. It helped that there was a definite time limit set by the Emperor himself, the proof of which was ever on the horizon, peeling away the vile nightmare into burnt ash that was truth. Truth that all his senses, organic and not, corroborated. The only true upset to the steady grind was how his chronometer shuddered and changed its runic units every seven minutes, but like all troublesome aspects of his existence, he had learned to endure.
So it was not a surprise when the grind of devilish combat was interrupted.
"Enemy lifeforms at sector E6-M4 NINER are unusually resilient, the previously successful means of destruction are unsuccessful, they're picking themselves up and regenerating--or something like it--mass at a phenomenal rate. Only near total annihilation seems effective, and at times the slime and guts just become something else. Requesting additional heavy weapons support from any nearby units."
That was a few minutes sprint from his current location--probably, geography was treacherous in ways well beyond metaphorical--so he let it be. There were several squads between in any event. He glanced at his hands, though his internal schematics outline was far more detailed.
He wasn't suited for heavy weapons support anyways, his melta had been swapped out for a siege drill as more and more often the enemy closed in the point he could see the pus gleaming in the corners of their rheumy eyes.
He let the chatter of the vox wash over him, engaged in the savagery of combat as he sought out the toads and tortoise things towering over Astartes as he did, splattering their fetid innards and shell shards across the landscape.
"--Negative impact, the lasbeam is, swerving?"
"Heavy bolters ineffective, they're detonating before they even hit!"
"Damn bubbles are obscuring my view."
What was this? He isolated the frequencies and determined they were originating from...sector E6-M4 NINER.
There was a thick, juicy crunch, like processed meat mixed with metal being slowly flat by hydraulic presses in a grox processing plant.
"Lieutenant Sedulus is down!"
"It's some sort of hypergravity field, maintain your distance!"
"It will not die at range. I will remove the obstacle, cover fire on the nuisances around it."
He swept the area in a retinal scan. They were cleaning up at this point. He expected the same of local companies, even the one suddenly awash with vox activity. That was Brother Garrett, one of the war-minded like himself. They were reasonably close, and his Ironclad chassis, though lacking the advanced generators and shields of his own coffin, was even more heavily armored. Their "little cousins" in Tactical Dreadnought Armor were meant to engage in the most hostile of environments. Increased gravity was on that list.
And then something shattered the calm.
"Gah, what witchcraft is this?!"
There are sounds of combat.
"It's the bubbles, they're, covering him!"
"Engulf me in fire, purge this filth!"
"The things are concentrating around us, support fire, Tachitly, bring your squad forward, get to Garrett, get that mess off him!"
"It's, hard to, move--heavy-"
He is alert now. These are not indications of a clearing up operation. Garrett's voice is...something is in it. Something pained.
"Get the vermin off him!"
"Garrett! Dammit, danger close fire, direct your fury around him, bolters will struggle to scratch him! Garrett, retreat! Artus, flank right, that thing is still coming!"
He checks his augurs. He is the only Dreadnought within six kilometers.
"Captain Celenate, this is Huron-Fal. I am roughly twenty three hundred meters east of your position."His ocular scans run over the ashy hill before him. They insist it's marsh slightly below sea level."I will be there in two minutes."
The voice comes back, still high after the shouted commands.
"Negative Huron, augurs indicate a ravine on our flank shrouded by dense undergrowth. I'm sending a clear path diverting around it to the north."
He is already moving, building up speed as his metal legs pound into the ash, driving him upwards."
"I know with absolute certainty there is no damn ravine."
A low muttering.
"To the hells with this planet...Fine, move. I'm transmitting records since this mess began."
As an Astartes, he could have sped through the videos sent to his MIU in less than thirty seconds where details would blur by for mortals.
His cyberoganic mind takes it all in in .0432 seconds.
He is over the hill, his maximum speed has been reached. His pace is more suited for the cyber-felinids chasing down the most heavily mutant inhabitants of Terra for the entertainment of their barbarian overlords. Ash is thrown about violently with every rise and fall of clawed feet. Distance closes rapidly. He can hear the violence through his machinic ears, see the flashes of muzzle fire and lasbeams.
He is fast enough to almost make it before Garrett dies.
The staggered incline of the terrain suggests it may have once been a kind of moor, before the cancerous environment took over, and the purifying wave of the Emperor's fire scoured that in turn to ash.
Only traces of the sanctic devastation yet remained. Scattered about in disorganized, merging clumps was rank vegetation and flora finding purchase in the cindered ground. Thick dark bushes of moss, stacks of thistles and grape vines covered over with black rot, gangrenous thistleweed stabbing into each other in a morbid, rot-soaked embrace, and great stalks of emerald-shaded sunflowers suppurating the air around them with the tinge of yellow rot.
The air that was usually steaming from the contact of unnatural storm rains and burning embers was thick with soupy, verdant fog, further obscuring visibility, and while his visual display could delineate figures and shapes from the environment previously, the gaseous murk spewed nonsense across his retinal monitors.
For the one hundred and thirteenth time that day he dismisses much of his automatic arrays and external monitoring systems, walking the perilous line between life and death once more.
He doesn't need advanced ocular augmetics to discern the source of the haze. As his gaze sweeps the battle between ash-grey played transhumans and pox-themed hellspawn, he observed how las, bolt, and the rare actinic volkite shot pops the bubbles lining the air, dying it a tad more with Barbarus' colors.
When one such bubble pops, only then does he make out the metal carcass of Garrett.
It was as if he had fused with the newly blighted earth. His chassis was covered and moss and dripping fronds and bulging sacs of pus-filled meat and fatty slabs of gangrene-ridden dermal layers. In many places the adamantium materiel shine through, but it was cracked and rusted from thousands of years of erosion in minutes at best.
But what truly enraged Huron-Fal was not the death of his brother, but the desecration as daemons clambered over his motionless corpse, spreading bile and viscera and other unspeakable things to it, while another pulled and prodded at a lump of flesh that might have once been a torso of an Astartes.
A short barrage of missiles ends the foul vision in blasts of flame. He sends another, to be sure, and to remove the mockery of a monument. Let Garrett's funeral pyre be enemies punished for their distraction, as opposed to a statue commemorating his torment.
Vengeance delivered, he looks about, seeking the cause of this anarchy. It doesn't take long to find.
Plodding away from Garrett, no longer obscured by his sarcophagus, is the culprit.
A stony mass of compressed sand, minerals, and sickly coral inlaid with glowing red bands like molten rock about the size of the armored personnel carriers favored by their cousins in the Tenth. Centered about one side is a drooling mouth of unnaturally triangular teeth, sawing in and out of the opposite gums. Literally, each time the maw opened the denticles were coated a fresh crimson.
Atop it is a crown of seven stalactite funnels pointing skywards, spewing liquid bubbles like a playful lonely child swimming in a lake, each chimney adorned with eyes red with infection looking outward, with no angle to peer at their self. Tears of bloody pus run without end down the chalk-white pillars, and massed around the funnel tips and clumped at the base is spongy, saliva froth like melting candle wax, while bubbles does incessantly into the air.
Carting this abomination were seven pairs of pereiopods, and the crawfish legs carry it away from Garrett's pyre (and Huron Fal) towards an encouragingly beckoning group of humanoid plague beings atop testudines that plodded along.
His target is set. He knows how and why Garrett died. He believes he knows how to avoid that same fate, and remove this gangrenous blockage of their advance.
A short and furious private vox-channel discussion later, he charges. His clawed feet plunge into the algae-ash mix, legs postponing back and forth furiously, atomantic reactor throbbing with energy. A storm of fire erupts in front of him, bubbles bursting as a path is cleared from the efforts of his brothers.
He can feel the attention on him, not some cyberorganic prescience or psykery, the keen instinct developed in the training grounds of the Castram city and on battlefield. despite the tumult and poor visibility, the enemy is vividly focused on him.
The walking seabed-rock notices him too. As he passes what remains of Garrett, the bubbly eruptions intensify, some malign intelligence guiding much of the floating orbs towards him. His brother's covering fire is fierce, but some lone bubbles make it through to pop on his atomantic fields, mossy-algae forming in seemingly midair.
He ignores it. He as good as ignores the things that get in his way, slapping them aside with brief bursts of actinic energy and flying blood and entrails. He ignores the hint of disbelieving joy in the bubble-producer's conjunctivitis-pink eyes. All he is is focused on his goal.
He stomps to a halt before the rock-daemon, the top of its shell a storm of exploding bubbles as his comrades target the bare space between the funnels and his chassis. He slams a clawed foot into the lower lip of its mouth while his power claw grips the upper and begins pulling. Servos whine, pistons pump furiously, he feels liquid and meat give under his lightning-tinged claw. His other, drill arm garbed in red slams in, rotors roaring as grinding cylinders howl, shards of rock and bone and sea-plant flying as it presses in against the roof of the mouth. He can't see much, too much rotten vegetation glued to his fields. The temperature of his chassis has risen drastically, his vision is blurring from the heat—not gravity, some twisted form of thermal expansion—and pressure warnings are rising and he ignores it and keeps pulling, clawing, pushing—
Things are scrabbling at his back, he can smell them, feel the sting of their blades, but he can't turn, if he turns to deal with them he will die there's no time—lascannon beams skid along his shields, carrying away torsos, limbs and heads and he is free.
He diverts non-essential power to his shields, musters strength that makes his languid organic muscles ache, andpulls.
The shell that has been splintering and cracking splits apart, one big mass hurtled skywards as other pieces fly in all directions. His drill arms pressed forward into gooey, meaty internal, soft flesh and punched deep, rotten flesh and tainted blood and organs spattering everywhere until something solid is hit and ruptures.
The fiery explosion blinds his ocular visors. When it clears, it comes with a sense of, accomplishment.
He struggles to move. His drill is partially melted. But he can feel the tide has turned, can sense his brothers overcoming the foe, the change in morale is so tangible the very air smells cleaner in the face of their renewed fury.
He stumbled about. He won't let it be said he did not chase the dawn in this hour of triumph.
