Ash fell like snow, glowing at the edges where it still smoldered. The plain writhed in orange and black, a sea of fire hemming the breach.
Obol's lenses narrowed, the gold filigree glinting with the flames reflected there.
"The xenos are marching through fire," he murmured.
The noosphere stilled at his words.
One by one, the Scions turned toward the breach.
—
Through the furnace, they saw it—shapes stumbling, shrieking, but never halting.
'Xenos' toppled in their hundreds, only to be crushed beneath the next ranks, their forms clawing forward with no thought of survival. Flesh ignited, wings melted, bodies sloughed to bone—and still they marched.
They trudged through promethium like it was rain, stepping over corpses, over half-burned kin, black ichor spattering the fire but never quenching it.
"Tch." Isera's hiss cut through the link, sharp and venomous.
"How resilient."
—
Maeric's voice followed, clipped and cool, but edged with something darker.
"And unnerving." His tone carried no awe—only the disgust of a duelist forced to admit his enemy had no sense of pain or honor.
—
"Let's use this breather to get a better position," Obol ordered, his voice cutting through the noosphere like the slash of a drawn blade.
—
He turned, Thanatos' bulk pivoting with the sound of thunderous hydraulics.
His gaze fixed on the shadows looming behind them: two M.U.L.E. crates, each the size of a Rhino, iron hides still glowing from re-entry.
The containers squatted like silent beasts, their parachutes half-burned away, edges blackened, but their machine-seals still bright with Mechanicum runes.
From within came the dull, metallic heartbeats of auto-loaders and servitor-frames waiting to be woken.
"Carry the Forward Bastion," Obol intoned, vox flat, "and follow me."
His lenses narrowed on the tide ahead.
"Thrykos—keep an eye on our analgesic friends."
—
Morvhar's Avenger hummed back to readiness, barrels glowing faint orange as cooling vents hissed.
Thrykos' reply was as curt as the tone demanded.
"Understood, High-Scion."
—
The Avenger's stance shifted, massive form turning to face the green wall that burned but did not break, guns hungry for the first movement across the firefields.
The noosphere pulsed confirmation runes, and the Covenant shifted, heavy titans moving to make space.
Behind them, the M.U.L.E.s locked and rattled as servitors unsealed their clamps, preparing to be hauled forward by machines the size of cathedrals.
—
Obol strode past without breaking pace, Thanatos' reactor thundering as he climbed toward the higher ridge.
Behind him, two Knights bent low and from beneath each arm-assembly, thick hydraulic spars hissed outward, ending in broad, magnetic clamps. The servos whined as they locked into place against the M.U.L.E's ribbed flanks.
CLUNK.
Runes flared across the crate, pale blue light spilling as the locks engaged.
Pistons groaned. The titans rose, the Rhino-sized casket dangling between them, suspended like an offering borne on iron shoulders.
The second M.U.L.E was lifted the same way—another pair of clamps biting down, hauling the box free of the ash with a slow, inevitable heave.
Between them walked Morphael.
—
Isera's voice kept low and steady across the link as her gauntlets skimmed over her uplink runes, guiding the lifts. She paced between the towering machines like a conductor, ensuring every shift was measured, no oscillation left unchecked.
The last thing they could afford was for their salvation to come crashing down before it was ever opened.
"Keep it steady," she murmured, helm tilting as she watched the readouts flow across her slate.
"Step in cadence. No jolts."
—
The crates swayed gently but did not falter.
Astride them all, Morvhar lingered at the rear, Avenger still hot in its mounts.
Thrykos kept the weapon leveled on the burning tide, the muzzle tracking the horizon as if daring it to surge again. His gaze never left the green mountain and the writhing host around it, eyes locked on the inferno that still crawled forward despite the firestorm.
—
Obol stood on the ridge, Thanatos towering above them, reactor-vents sighing pale mist into the scorched air. He turned at last, gold-filigreed lenses narrowing as he beheld the moving fortress behind him.
The M.U.L.E crates swayed between the Covenant, a ponderous bulwark of steel and titans marching in cadence, guided by Isera's calm hand.
For a fleeting instant, it looked less like a column of Knights and more like a city uprooted, carrying its own bastion into the storm.
—
Beyond them, his gaze sank back to the plain below.
The tide still pressed forward. The burning ones were crushed. Daemons pinned beneath their kin did not die, they writhed. Their half-melted bodies were trampled, ground into the ash like so much flesh-pulp, only to become the carpet of the next wave.
The battlefield had become a road paved in their own living dead.
Obol's jaw tightened. The Throne hissed against his back as he muttered low, more to himself than the noosphere.
"They are finally moving."
His voice cut sharper when he voxed again, iron-etched and commanding.
"Maeric—drop your sabres. Switch to Avenger configuration and join Thrykos, keep our them occupied. Do not let them breathe without fire."
—
A rune pulsed acknowledgment, Cinerion's blades hissing as their capacitors wound down.
Mount-ports along its arms hissed open, autoloaders already priming the heavy Avenger cannons that extended in their place. The Knight's frame braced, ready to shoulder a new role in the bulwark.
"The rest of you—set the F.O.B" Obol continued, his voice steady as stone.
"Raise the bulwark. Anchor us here."
—
Kaelthorn's shield flared bright, anchoring like a wall of living light as Vaerin's assent chimed clear across the link.
Morphael strode closer to the crates, its massive silhouette lowering as servo-spars hissed open to accept fresh fittings.
Vorgane's seismic claw stabbed into the ash with a grinding roar, stabilizing the ground itself, carving a foundation for what was to come.
The Covenant moved like pieces on a vast board—each titan sliding into its new role with inevitability, their motions measured and deliberate, shadows drawn long across the firelit plain.
—
Then Thanatos knelt.
The Eternal Toll sank into the blackened earth with the sound of titanic pistons locking down. At its side, ranks of servitors swarmed forward, their hunched frames hissing steam, mechadendrites clattering with tools like skeletal fingers.
They fell upon the great weapon with machine precision. The thermal lance—its coils still glowing from the last barrage—was unclamped with the whine of magnetic locks disengaging. Cables hissed as they were severed, coolant vapor streaming in pale jets.
From the waiting crate, another shape rose under winch and prayer: the Quake Cannon, massive and brutal, a weapon not of precision but of judgment.
Its barrel was broad as a fortress gate, rune-plates still swaddled in oil-cloth that the servitors tore free with iron fingers.
With the groan of titanic hydraulics, the cannon was lifted into place, magnetic clamps extending from Thanatos' shoulders and forearm sockets to seize it.
Sparks spat as the locks fused home, the weapon's weight settling onto the god-machine like a crown of iron.
Obol felt the recoil of its machine-spirit ripple through the Throne Mechanicum—an old, heavy soul waking again, shaking off the silence of storage to hunger for the earth.
The Quake Cannon rumbled, low and tectonic, as its first diagnostics cycled live.
Thanatos stood again.
Now armed with the wrath of sieges, it was no longer a duelist of fire—it was a hammer poised to break the world itself.
—
He moved forward through the ash, each stride of the Eternal Toll measured and heavy as a tolling bell.
Ahead, the line spat fire.
To his left, Cinerion's sabres had been stilled, its frame braced around the wide-shouldered Avengers newly grafted to its gauntlets. their roar was constant, tungsten rivers carving swathes through the tide.
To his right, Morvhar's Avengers joined it in chorus, barrels glowing dull red as they vomited ceaseless tracers into the crimson and violet sea.
Together they reaped a storm of brass and ash, their fields of fire overlapping in merciless arcs.
—
Obol strode between them, his shadow falling across their shared killing ground.
Thanatos' Quake Cannon lowered, its vast barrel groaning into line with the advancing wall.
Its optics painted the horde in targeting runes: crimson swarms, green bulwarks, violet riders, all shifting and crawling toward them like a single diseased ocean.
—
Behind them, the Covenant worked.
Kaelthorn's stormshield towered bright, projecting a dome of rippling hex-light over the ridge.
Morphael's gauntlet drove anchors deep, locking spar-blocks into the earth and snapping armored walls into place.
Vorgane gouged trenches with its seismic claw, servitors flooding the furrows to plant emitter pylons and feed power-lines into the growing network.
Field generators rose in rhythmic sequence, their glow weaving into Kaelthorn's shield until the ridge blazed with layered wards.
Walls locked together, slab by slab, dragged from the M.U.L.E.'s belly and fastened with magnetic clamps.
Ammo stations hissed open as servitors unpacked drums and plasma coils, laying them at the Knights' feet like offerings.
Auto-turrets unfolded on insectile legs, their binary hymns joining the Covenant's noosphere, targeting arrays spinning alive.
—
The Covenant was not just a line of Knights now.
It was a fortress of steel and fire, a citadel rising in the storm.
—
"Bring out the big gun without a Tech-Priest, High-Scion?"
Maeric asked from Cinerion's helm, his voice dry, though not without a trace of respect.
—
Obol didn't turn. His gaze stayed fixed on the advancing tide as the Eternal Toll's Quake Cannon settled into firing line.
"Servitors will do."
—
At that, Maeric's optics flicked back over Obol's shoulder.
Behind Thanatos, a procession of tracked servitors clanked forward, their limbs braced with hydraulic braces and rune-etched loaders.
Each bore a shell the size of a man, gripped in steel talons, their casing ribbed with reinforcement bands and etched with scrawled litanies of ignition.
—
One after another they rolled into place, arms whirring as they began the quick rites of arming: sealing the runes with oil-smeared glyphs, hammering release-studs into place with blunt augmetic fists, feeding the first colossal round into the breach with the reverence of acolytes offering incense.
Censer-smoke curled from their vents, the smell of machine-oil and ash mingling with the battlefield haze. The cannon's breach groaned shut, locks clamping down like the jaws of some steel beast ready to roar.
Obol's hands rested on the Throne's grips, and the Quake Cannon glowing with restrained violence.
—
"So, what is the plan?"
Maeric asked again, Cinerion's optics narrowing back on the tide. His sabres shifted restlessly, the new Avenger's barrels already glowing from the last burst.
—
Obol's answer came slow, deliberate—like the toll of a bell.
"I want to see if that gate will sink… or float."
The words lingered in the noosphere, heavy as iron.
—
Thanatos' Quake Cannon adjusted, the barrel yawning wider as its breach clamped shut with a metallic roar. Servitors scurried at its feet, another shell already in the cradle, incense curling over their augmetic shoulders.
Behind them, the bulwark hummed—field emitters thrumming with power, turrets tracking the seething horde as though eager for their turn.
Ahead, the gate pulsed like a wound in the world, vomiting shapes that screamed as they burned, yet still pressed forward without falter.
—
The firing runes flared green.
BOOOOM.
The Eternal Toll spat its first judgment.
The Quake shell ripped into the earth with the force of a meteor, a thunderous crack splitting the plain as it plowed forward.
The round did not simply strike—it tunneled, boring through the ash-soaked ground in a screaming arc.
Trenches carved themselves into existence where it passed, entire swathes of the tide torn apart in an instant, their forms atomized into vapor and raw warp-light.
The shell vanished into the shadow of the gate, its passage marked by a deep, groaning scar across the battlefield, like a canyon birthed in seconds.
—
The marching wall of 'xenos' buckled, those too slow to scatter collapsing into the molten fissure.
Bodies tumbled, some still half-living, writhing even as they were pressed flat by their brethren climbing over them.
Ash billowed in black waves. Fire licked at the trench edges.
And the gate shook.
Its frame howled like iron under strain. Its lower edge flared, light spilling downward as though the very ground beneath it was pried open.
But it did not collapse.
It held, anchored in ways the earth itself could not match.
Obol's voice was flat, but the noosphere caught the flint-edge beneath his words:
"Reload."
—
Behind him, the servitors stirred into motion, tracked legs squealing as they brought forward the next Quake shell. Servo-claws hoisted it high, litany-runes blinking as the rites of loading began.
The Eternal Toll waited, barrel smoking, reactor light casting its shadow long across the killing ground like a sundial of death.
—Beyond, the tide pressed on—an ocean of claw and bile marching through fire. Yet here, for a breath, the Covenant's ridge was quiet enough for words.
Caldrin's laugh cut across the link—dry, startling in its sudden fondness.
"Doesn't this feel like when Grandpa and Grandma hauled you lot over to play sieges with our sons?" he said, voice roughened by memory but not unkind.
"Little wooden forts, mud for moats. You two—" he angled his head toward Vaerin and Vaeleen,
"—battering each other's walls with sticks until Isera and your mother called us in for supper."
—
The image was so absurd, so ordinary, that even the servitors seemed to pause their hymn for half a heartbeat.
"Which one of you said you'd marry Icaris when you grew up again?" Isera's voice broke in, touched with a rare amusement, almost motherly warmth beneath her helm's vox.
—
Vaerin groaned aloud, her reactor's hum almost masking it.
"Emperor preserve me, that was her," she said quickly, throwing her sister under the engines.
—
"It was not!" Vaeleen snapped back, her usual gravelly edge softened into something dangerously close to laughter.
"You're misremembering, as always. I only said he was clever.
You were the one drawing hearts in the mud."
—
Even Maeric's Avenger paused long enough for him to chuckle.
"Icaris? Emperor's bones, that boy could barely lift a shield. If any of you had married him, you'd have had to carry him to supper."
—
"Oh, please—at least I wasn't the one giving him kisses in the closet!" Vaerin shot back, grin sharp in her voice.
There was a beat—then Vaeleen's vox spiked loud and flustered.
"How—! How did you even know that!" she barked, her voice cracking with embarrassment.
—
Isera gasped, her hand lifting instinctively to her temple as if to press down the sudden spike of irritation.
Morphael seemed to echo her surprise, reactor growl hitching for a beat.
"You two!" she hissed, her voice edged with exasperated disbelief.
"Just wait until I have a long discussion with your mother."
—
Caldrin snorted over the link, the sound rough but amused, like an engine sputtering back to life.
"Come on, honey. You've done far worse during our teens."
—
There was a pause—a dangerous pause.Then Isera's voice cut through, sharp as the spear she carried.
"Oh, shut it, Caldrin. Focus on your tasks!" she snapped, a hiss riding her words.
—
Even Vaerin stifled a laugh, her grin obvious through the vox.
Vaeleen muttered something about revenge under her breath, her voice still warm with embarrassment.
—
And then, like the tightening of a noose, the battlefield roared back into their focus.
Maeric turned from his displays, tilting his helm slightly toward Obol.
"Didn't realize we brought a whole circus."
—
Obol answered with a long, content sigh. His amber lenses swept the battlefield again, calculation overtaking levity.
"You and me both, Maeric."
—
Before them, the ashen plain was no longer recognizable.
The barrage of Quake shells, mortars, and artillery had carved the land into an alien geometry, craters yawning like broken teeth, ridges folded in on themselves, rivers of molten glass cooling in jagged streaks.
And at the center of it all, the gate floated.
—
Once half-buried in the stone, its event horizon now hung fully exposed, suspended above the wreckage like a wound ripped from reality.
Warp-light bled freely across the scarred earth, its edges pulsing with sickly radiance. No longer anchored by the ground, it swayed faintly, as though the world itself could not quite decide where it belonged.
"So" Thrykos muttered, voice a quiet toll of iron.
"It floats."
—
From within the gate, something moved.
At first only the outline—a vast, winged shape too dark to belong to flesh, its horns arching high against the haze, its wings spanning wider than the Covenant's line.
Across its chest, a star of eight flared bright, burning like a single glaring iris peering outward.
The silhouette pressed closer to the veil, one clawed hand dragging slow along its inside edge. The barrier screamed where it touched, sparks of unreality dripping like molten glass, every stroke leaving the storm trembling.
No words came from the shape. No roar, no challenge. Just a presence—immense, deliberate, inevitable.
The titanic form grinned—straight through Obol's soul, as if the gaze had bypassed ceramite, cockpit, and man alike. Then, with deliberate malice, it drew back into the breach.
The Eternal Toll's machine-spirit growled faint static at the sight, as though recoiling from something it remembered but could not name.
—
The gate pulsed in its wake.
From its screaming light poured the new host.
—
Falling.
Bodies toppled out of the wound in reality, tumbling in waves, piling into mountains of writhing limbs and snapping jaws. Others stepped down as though treading stairs of their own kind, trampling the fallen into paste without slowing.
Cavalry hurled themselves forward, riders spurring warped mounts into the river of flesh. Flyers slammed against the gate's rim, rebounding into their kin, wings tearing and bones splintering, only for more to follow and fill the air with shrieks.
The empty river lanes that Thanatos' Quake shells had carved was gone in moments.
Now it overflowed—an arterial torrent of every hue and shape, crimson and violet, rot-green and lapis blue, all foaming together into a single surge.
The tide was not an army now. It was a flood.
—
The four rejoined the line, their fortress complete behind them—walls humming, turrets awake, servitors chanting as the Forward Bastion held its vigil.
Caldin's grumble cut across the link, low and dry."Are they seriously going to repeat the same strategy?"
—
Obol's lenses stayed locked on the surge. His gaze tracked the press of bodies spilling into the 'river' he had carved, already filling as though the shelling had never happened.
"They intend to dry our ammunition with sheer number," he said at last. His tone was not surprised—only measuring.
The tide swelled higher, pressing over its own dead, spilling firelit shadows that seemed endless.
Obol did not waste breath on argument.
—
"Back into formation," he ordered, voice cutting through the link like a guillotine.
"New kill-lanes. Mark them for turrets and servitor mortars."
"Vaeleen—keep your shield and field gens up, keep the shells on central lane."
Thrykos—anchor the right. Maeric, take left."
Isera, guide the unmanned weaponries. Vaerin, Caldrin, keep the counter-battery and air lanes hot."
Acknowledgement-runes blinked across the noosphere—short, hard confirmations.
The Covenant moved, not as seven disparate machines, but as a single slow, inexorable engine.
—
Servitors detached from the M.U.L.E.s in synchronized swarms. Their clamps extended beneath gauntlet-arms and undercarriages, hydraulic seals whining as auto-lifters raised crate-frames. Magnetic clamps graphed to the ridge, then the servitors set the crates down with surgical precision.
Panels hissed; racks unfolded.
From the underbellies, turret legs unfolded like insect limbs and spidered into the ash, wiring into the pylons Vorgane ripped from the ground.
Kaelthorn planted its stormshield and bled a lattice of hex-light into the soil. Where the shield pressed, servitor crews dropped emitter anchors—small brass pylons that hummed with pre-ritualized power.
Vorgane's seismic claw gouged channels for feed-lines; Morphael's gauntlet drove anchor-screws to lock the walls. Auto-turrets unfolded, barrels yawing as targeting arrays cycled and sang. Their eyes blinked amber then green.
Thanatos' Quake Cannon lowered into its reload cradle. Servitor arms—clanking, keyed with ritual glyphs—swept in, ramming new quake-shells into the breach mechanism. The barrel of the new heavy cannon smoked as rites completed and safety-throats sealed.
Obol's Throne whispered calculation-laced approval; the Eternal Toll's reactor steadied as the cannon came online—
—then Vaerin's voice broke across the link.
"No… it can't be, right?"
—
Obol's gaze flicked to her rune on the noosphere.
"Speak plain, Scion."
—
"My scopes," she said quickly,
"look there—"
Her barrels were already leveled, her targeting runes fixed on a silhouette clawing through the veil.
—
Obol turned, lenses focusing.
Something violet and vast forced itself through the rift—four crustacean-like arms gripping the gate's rim, a grotesque tongue darting from its slit maw. The horned head tilted, eyes glittering like knives.
Recognition jolted him.
—
Vaerin's voice came again, sharper now.
"Didn't you already kill it, High-Scion? That must be a new one, right?"
—
Obol said nothing for a long moment. The Keeper's grin seemed aimed only at him, its emergence taunting, as if mockery itself had taken form.
He closed his eyes.
—
The world of ash, fire, and screaming xenos fell away, drowned beneath the churning hymn of the Eternal Toll.
His mind sank into the Throne's iron veins, slipping past data-spools and lumen-etched runes into the deeper sanctum.
The Memoria Archivum.
A vault of echoes, where every battle his god-machine had endured lingered as aftertaste in the machine-spirit's memory.
The Archivum was no book, no library—only a shifting storm of sensory imprints, battlefield phantoms replaying themselves in fragments of light, smell, sound, and pain.
He walked there not with his feet, but with the weight of his will.
—
"Confirm," he intoned across the static halls of memory, his voice merging with the vox-chant of the machine-spirit.
"Is it the same, my blood?"
—
The Throne's spirits answered not with words but with resonance.A thousand iron tongues whispered in static chorals, images flaring before him like wounds reopening—
The Keeper impaled by Cinerion's chained sabres.
Its body splitting beneath Thanatos' lance. Its upper half erased in fire.
The shriek that tore air and soul alike as it came apart.
—
And then—like rot blooming from old meat—its image rose again, violet limbs grasping, tongue lashing, grin unbroken.
The Archivum hummed cold certainty into his blood.
—
Obol's eyes opened. Gold-filigrreed lenses glared hot against the haze as he looked back upon the battlefield, at the Keeper clawing into the world once more.
"Yes," he said at last, voice iron and grave."That thing was vaporized in halves."
—
Gasps broke across the noosphere.
For once, the Knights' voices overlapped—shock raw and untempered, disbelief cutting through even the reactor-hymns.
"That's impossible—" Vaeleen's voice cracked.
"We saw it die," Isera hissed, her iron composure shattering for a heartbeat.
Caldrin snarled, his words grinding. "Abomination."
But the proof marched forward.
—
Behind its violet silhouette strode the mountain of rot once more—the same Great Unclean One, its corpulent mass burning, healing, burning again, the fire still clinging to its wounds where they had left it.
From the gate's rim, crimson claws gripped the edge. A Bloodthirster heaved through, brass wings tearing the storm, its head stilled, from where Maeric's sabre had taken its head.
Then came the shriek of wings: an airborne fury , its nostrils still trailing smoke as if its very existence mocked them.
And finally—the twin-headed bird. A Lord of Change, feathers shimmering in unnatural hues, one head cackling in mirth, the other croaking in solemn mockery.
Both mirrored the one they had already slain, down to the staff still dripping with stolen flame.
—
Four generals.
The same four.
All reborn, remade.
All stepping through as if their deaths had been nothing but a passing inconvenience.
—
Silence swallowed the link. Even the machine-hymns faltered, reactors thrumming unevenly under the weight of the sight.
The Covenant stared into the impossible, and for the first time since the breach had split, none spoke.