Chapter 505: The Legend of the Divine Elbow
The oppressive atmosphere was finally shattered by a glimmer of light, as if an invisible curtain had been torn asunder.
"Is it over?" asked the youth from Hive Hades.
He gasped for breath, kicking the mangled remains of an Ork into a nearby fire. He leaned heavily against a jagged adamantium support beam, fumbling with the medicae-module at his thigh to extract the spent canister.
The module contained a specialized cocktail for elite shock troops: nutrient-slurry, combat-stims, and rapid-clotting agents.
He checked the gauge. Empty.
Ryan offered a silent prayer for the state of his kidneys for exactly 0.13 seconds before rummaging through his tactical kit to snap a fresh module into place.
"I doubt it, Ryan," Caroline said, shaking her head to clear the lingering cognitive fog. She pointed a blood-stained gauntlet toward the horizon.
Ryan followed her gaze.
Across the wasteland—plowed a thousand times by Imperial macro-shells—shadows were moving through the graveyards of burning tanks. He heard it then: the sound of snapping wood and rhythmic cracking, like dry timber being broken over a knee. It was the sound of the atmosphere being cut, a phenomenon similar to Astartes teleportation, yet subtly wrong.
Infantry.
A ground force was encircling their position from the west. Hundreds of pinpricks of darkness.
"We have time," Ryan said to his squad. He gestured for the combat engineers to begin field repairs on their power armor, scavenging plates from the fallen. "They're still far off. They—"
The black dots grew with impossible speed. They vaulted over mounds of Ork corpses, their velocity defying transhuman physics.
Ryan heard the sound of hooves.
Not the metallic thrum of war-engines or the grinding of treads that had heralded the greenskin advance for days. This was the sound of bone and horn striking the earth.
CRACK!
Massive, cloven hooves slammed into the mire, transforming the ash—once dry and fluffy from the heat of melta-fire—into a charred sludge soaked with fresh blood.
Khorne's hunger for slaughter is never sated. When every other soul thinks the battle is done, the Blood God roars for more. If the life on the field will not bleed enough of its own accord, He will descend to take it personally.
Horns and hooves flickered within the smoke and the freezing sleet, the descent of the daemons driving back the chill with a localized heat of pure malice.
The Neverborn had arrived.
On this soil, eternally cursed since the invasion of the Daemon Primarch Angron, the daemons manifested through the raw frequency of war-lust and the saturation of gore in the crust.
They were savage beasts, horrific architects of the Empyrean. They bore cloven hooves and broad, jagged horns. Their legs were caprine, their torsos like those of bloated ogres. Their skin was the color of scorched meat, and their brass-clad plate gleamed with an unholy light.
From her vantage point, Caroline counted eighty-eight monsters descending upon them—grinning horrors that matched the descriptions found in the "Specialist Bestiaries" provided by the Inquisition.
She looked at the combat blade in her hand. It felt like a toy, as fragile as the shards of "dirty ice" melting on her armor.
A cold terror, hard as a glacier, settled in her heart.
These were not human.
"Heh."
She let out a breathy, cynical laugh, muttering to her squad, "So, the daemons have come to collect the debt on behalf of their masters?"
"By the Burning Angel... why must the fire always blur my sensors?" someone complained, crouching to cycle the core of a heavy plasma repeater. "These Orks are as flammable as the organic ore my father and I used to dig out of the Fire Wastes for warmth."
"You think the ore is the Orks, buddy?"
"?"
The squad displayed a disturbing lack of panic at the arrival of the Khorne-host.
Over the last decade, Khorne-daemons had begun "refreshing" across the galaxy with such frequency that every soldier knew a high-intensity war-zone was essentially a summoning ritual. The secret was out.
And Caroline's team were no mere grunts.
As products of the thirty-year military renaissance, they were elite assets—mortals capable of being requisitioned by the Inquisition or the Astartes to fill out specialized strike-groups. They had clearance to the "Raw Archives." They understood the changing meta of the galactic battlefield.
In every campaign, a professional had to maintain a mental checklist for "unplanned" daemon manifestation.
Specifically, Nurgle and Khorne.
Unlike Tzeentch and Slaanesh, who preferred to play "Riddler" with the high-ranking elite behind sealed doors, the Plague and the Blood tended to arrive before the enemy's own guns did. They were parasites of the frontline.
And in a direct engagement, the Khorne-host was the most lethal. They possessed a staggering level of martial discipline and a terrifying grasp of group tactics. If pushed, they could execute "Feints" and "Flanking Maneuvers" that left Imperial commanders reeling.
The survivors of the squad regrouped, speaking briefly to confirm their status before fixing their eyes on the encroaching red tide.
The Bloodletters moved with a predatory focus toward the paratrooper position. Among them were the "Chosen," wielding hell-forged blades that burned like obsidian torches.
But the squad's Nulls were still standing. They didn't have to worry about the sorcerous fire cutting through their plate—at least, not immediately.
Chaos Furies circled overhead. These creatures, documented in detail by the Departmento Munitorum, had evolved alongside the Khorne-ecology. They had lost their bat-like frailty. To adapt to the lethality of the Dawnstar's weaponry, their torsos had bloated with thick, knotty muscle. They looked like winged "Flesh Hounds," terrifying and lethal.
Caroline glanced at the giant standing beside her—a man born and bred in the Fire Wastes of Armageddon, the harshest environment on the planet. His name was "Rambo," or something similar.
The stories said he had been caught in a bureaucratic crossfire when a suicidal Commissar tried to execute a Catachan Jungle Fighter. He had been "re-assigned" into the Catachan sphere as a punishment, only to survive and thrive. He was the largest human in the squad, yet the daemons approaching were twice—sometimes three times—his mass.
He stared at the frenzied faces of the Bloodletters, his hand tightening on a power-claymore. Behind the front rank came the Bloodcrushers, riding Juggernauts of brass and steel with a clinical, terrifying silence.
The scent hit them. Not the irritating stench of the greenskins, but the metallic, copper smell of blood that triggered a primal murder-lust in any sentient brain.
"Xenos leave, Chaos arrives. Chaos leaves, Xenos arrive," Caroline said, her voice flat as she inhaled the smell of engine oil and scorched fungus.
"How long until extraction?"
They had achieved a magnificent tally, clearing the immediate vicinity of Orks. The remaining tribes were fleeing toward the heart of the sub-continent, their hierarchy shattered by Astartes beheading strikes.
Caroline didn't believe the Supreme Commander would let the Orks regroup. If those green beasts reached the interior hives, they would simply spawn a bigger, meaner Boss within months.
"I don't know, and I don't care—" the vox-operator grunted, fumbling with his array. He tore a piece of scrap metal from a dead trooper and signaled a combat engineer to weld it over the sensitive gear as a makeshift shield.
He doubted the pilot, Alexander, could reach them through the flak. But if the vox stayed live, the main armored column might pick them up when they rolled through the sector.
Even if they had to undergo a mandatory Inquisitorial "Sanitization" for daemon-contact, it was better than the alternative. At least they could eat a hot meal and sleep for an hour.
The operator verified the recording was stable—ensuring their "Final Oaths" reached the archives if they fell—then looked at Caroline.
"But I reckon we should focus on living through the next ten minutes first."
"Hah?" Caroline's voice went up an octave in a question.
The operator offered a look of pure, helpless innocence. He couldn't "call" a Primarch. He wasn't a Librarian. In a zone saturated by the Waaagh! field and now a Khorne-incursion, a mortal vox-tech was effectively screaming into a hurricane.
"Fine. Let's live through it."
She spat. The internal dispensers in her suit hissed, pumping chemicals into her system to bolster her fragile mortal frame.
She raised her volkite rifle and gripped her combat-blade.
"For Humanity. For the Emperor. For Karna. For the Sires. Wherever you are, send a little grace our way. There are still people left to save on Armageddon..."
THRUMM—THRUMM—THRUMM—
The hoofbeats were a drum-roll of doom.
"Throne... this is a lot worse than the cultists in the spire," someone whispered.
Only eighty-eight daemons. But the psychic pressure they exerted felt like an army of ten thousand.
"Can we win?"
"We have to. The main force is on the clock..." Ryan shouted over the hum of his plasma gun, trying to sound firm. "Maybe Lord Pokryshkin will come back for us!"
His optimism earned him a round of dry snickers.
Given the Ork anti-air, Alexander would be lucky to keep the Aeronautica in the sky, let alone come back for a group of grunts.
"Well, if he does, I'm buying the first round of amasec," Caroline smiled, her face hardening as she engaged her HUD and linked to her squad's tactical data-feed.
"Munitorum protocols: use the heavy ordnance first. Don't waste time with las-shots. Champions, to the front. Fire-groups, hold until they hit the hundred-meter mark."
She repeated the anti-daemon drill and stepped to the lip of the trench.
"One thousand meters!" she bellowed.
The shadows were close. She spotted the high-tier threats.
Khorne Blood-Beasts.
Bizarre "Chaos Spawn" that were surprisingly disciplined. Unlike the typical gibbering messes of Tzeentch, these creatures were bio-mechanical engines of war that refused to retreat.
Caroline's expression darkened. What's next? A Greater Daemon? A Juggernaut-Chariot? A World Eater?
"Eight hundred meters!"
As if in response, a massive silhouette emerged alongside the charging Bloodcrushers.
A Skull Throne War-Shrine.
A mobile altar of brass and bone. On the cursed soil of Armageddon, the magma beneath the crust acted as a battery for these icons.
Height: 8 meters. Armament: Gore-Cannon, Chaos Runes, Grinding Wheels...
The HUD highlighted the structural weaknesses in a clinical display.
The Departmento really has fought these things a lot, Caroline thought. How many times have the boys in the 41st Millennium had to kill these things for the records to be this detailed?
BOOM!
The Gore-Cannon barked, launching a skull wreathed in Warp-fire. It punched through the outer adamantium shield-plates, only losing its kinetic potential when it entered the aura of the squad's Nulls.
Against the Warp, material defense was a suggestion.
"Four hundred meters!" she screamed.
"We are so dead, Nana!" a trooper shouted, using her nickname.
"If I hear that again, I'll kill you myself!" Caroline roared back.
"One hundred and thirty meters! Last chance! THREE!"
The lesser Bloodletters hit the perimeter first.
"TWO!"
They ran through the fire, their formation a tight, professional wedge.
"ONE!"
The frenzy in their eyes was visible now. The praises of the Blood God hissed from their lipless mouths.
"FIRE!"
Caroline dropped her hand.
The answer to the daemon's roar was a beam of incandescent gold.
The Volcano-Lance erupted, bisecting the lead charger from crown to groin. The creature slumped into the steaming dirt, its blackened bones exposed to the sun. Ryan's heavy plasma took out the second, the concentrated fire of the heavy weapons pinning the daemons to the ground and reducing them to pulp.
The scavenged las-guns and heavy bolters from the Chimera wrecks joined the chorus.
The line of fire was jagged but effective. Automated "mole-bastions" popped up from the ground, providing cover. The wall of lead slowed the momentum of the elite Bloodletters.
Whine—
"The Lady" charged. Caroline fired a volkite burst, leaving a smoking, dinner-plate-sized crater in a daemon's chest.
The Bloodletter let out a shriek and lunged for her.
"DAMN YOU!"
Automatic fire from the Guard continued. Conical flashes of muzzle-flare danced in the smoke. The bullets struck the brass plate of the daemons with a rhythmic clatter, shells falling like rain onto the deck.
An Extirpator-Special used an "Angel's Tear" grenade-launcher to down a target. It took four high-explosive rounds to break the creature's guard, only for the trooper to be pinned to the earth by a thrown hell-blade.
Caroline dropped her volkite rifle as it overheated, ignoring its high-pitched whine of distress.
She dodged the Bloodletter's first strike. A plasma bolt from the rear grazed her shoulder, slamming into the daemon. It was knocked flat but scrambled up instantly, its only injury a shallow burn on its brow.
The wounded monster pounced. Caroline met it head-on, taking a shallow cut to her thigh to secure the opening.
SQUELCH.
Her combat-blade sank into the daemon's skull from above. She twisted the blade, following the Munitorum's "Standard Execution" protocol, and hacked at the neck.
The head tumbled away.
The headless body collapsed meters from her feet. Pity—Khorne's daemons had such jagged, asymmetrical skulls that they didn't roll well. It was immediately crushed by the hooves of the next wave.
Two Bloodcrushers were upon them.
Caroline leaned back, releasing her blade and reaching for the handle hidden at the small of her back.
"BRING IT!" she screamed.
"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!" the daemon roared, its blade meeting hers.
Caroline felt her bones groan under the impact.
The daemon unhinged its jaw, lunging to take her head.
CRACK.
She gripped the trigger of the weapon she had drawn. The daemon's blade bit into her shoulder-plate as her strength failed, but the charged Plasma Pistol was already pressed against the creature's jaw.
The blue sun erupted, vaporizing the daemon's head in a gout of blue flame.
Caroline fell, firing a second shot into the dirt to liquefy the earth, tripping the two Bloodcrushers attempting to exploit the gap in the shield-wall.
She struggled to stand.
But the Furies were through. The line was breached.
An Extirpator was tackled. He tried to kick the creature off with his reinforced exoskeleton, but the Fury dragged him into the sky, tearing at him until he fell silent—only to be consumed by a secondary explosion.
Two daemons seized a militiaman, tearing him in half in a tug-of-war for his soul. Four more soldiers were trampled, their limbs twisted and bones snapped. Some tried to flee; few made it ten paces.
A Bloodcrusher locked onto Ryan.
He saw the feral eyes of the Juggernaut, its gore-stained maw, and its underbelly as it reared to strike.
The moment it leapt, every heavy weapon in the sector locked onto it.
Even with the Blood God's blessing, the concentrated fire stripped the brass armor from the beast's flanks.
CRACK!
A massive power-sword swept through the air, bisecting the Bloodcrusher and its mount in a single upward stroke.
Ryan stared in shock at Rambo, whom he had thought was dead in the initial melee.
"CAROLINE!" Ryan screamed, scrambling to his feet.
Caroline turned.
A Bloodletter, drenched in gore after killing an Imperial champion, lunged at her from the left.
The plasma pistol was dry.
CLANG!
She blocked with her blade, her right arm going numb as the servos failed. She drove a knee into the daemon's gut, staggering it.
In a final act of defiance, she shoved a melta-charge—along with her left hand—into the daemon's open mouth and kicked it back into the trench.
The point-blank detonation erased the monster, but the shockwave threw her back. Her head struck a steel cable. She slumped to her knees, dazed, her greatcoat shredded and chunks of her power-armor missing.
A Fury spotted the weakness and dived.
THUD.
A radiation-grenade struck the creature. A heat rivaling the core of a star snuffed it out in a heartbeat. But another Bloodcrusher was closing from the left.
Caroline tried to move, but she was pinned to the mud.
"TASTE THIS, WARP-SCUM!"
Ryan fired a super-charged shot that threw the daemon back. The Catachan-bred warrior lunged forward to shield his officer.
Caroline looked up.
The earth groaned.
The giant beast carrying the War-Shrine had entered the outpost.
The world turned red.
"Sorry..." Caroline whispered, a faint smile on her lips.
This is it. The eternal war of the 41st Millennium.
I'm not a loser, though. I killed a hundred of them. Maybe the Sires will find a use for my soul.
She felt the darkness of the "Life-Flash" beginning.
"NO! NOT YET!"
Under Rambo's cover, Ryan dragged his sergeant toward the high ground, trying to keep her from being drowned in the rising tide of blood.
"HOLD ON!"
Wooo—Wooo—Wooo—
A massive shadow swept over them.
Something of incredible kinetic weight slammed into the perimeter. It was as if a thousand thunderbolts had struck the earth simultaneously. Caroline rolled, clutching her comrades as they huddled beneath the adamantium skeleton of the bunker.
BOOM!
The thunder was constant. Dust geysered into the air. They felt the rhythmic tremor of a giant walking—an impact that made the very earth vibrate like a drumskin. The Khorne-daemons were being crushed and pulverized by the sheer force of the aerial kinetic strikes.
The air turned into a soup of yellow dust and red blood-mist.
Airstrike?!
Caroline, pinning the youth from Hades beneath her for protection, looked up in shock.
She used Ryan's hand to wipe the blood from her faceplate.
A familiar Valkyrie was hovering less than thirty meters overhead. It was a silhouette against the burning sky, its downdraft whipping the smoke into a vortex.
The weapon pods beneath its wings were spitting a literal monsoon of suppression fire, reaping the daemons besieging the survivors and clearing the ground around them.
But from above, the situation was grim. Thousands of daemons were closing in on the paratrooper pockets, drawn by the scent of blood.
The Valkyrie climbed, executed a violent 180-degree roll that snapped the wing off an Ork Fighta-Bomma trying to tail it, then flipped into a dive. It dumped its remaining air-to-air munitions into the daemons below.
The automatic cannons roared, their barrels glowing like signal-flares as they spat lead. The pilot was marking targets for the hovering Marauder Destroyers.
Through the blood-streaked HUD, Caroline saw the War-Shrine being torn apart by a Marauder's plasma-cannon. The concentrated energy lanced through the altar like a laser; under the beauty of human industrial might, the Blood God's blessing was shaved away into ash and bone-dust.
SCREECH—!
The weapon pods pivoted, weaving a ring of fire around the paratroopers. The "Durable" nature of the Khorne-host failed against the weight of heavy-caliber fire.
The ramp lowered. The hatch of the Valkyrie—scarred by lasers and shockwaves—opened.
"BOARD! NOW! SPACE IS LIMITED! DROP THE GUNS! DROP THE GEAR! CARRY ONLY YOUR ARMOR AND YOURSELVES!"
The vox-unit on a dead operator's back sparked. In Ryan's ear and over the external speakers, a familiar voice boomed.
"LORD POKRYSHKIN!" Ryan screamed with joy, running toward the ramp while dragging Caroline's severed gauntlet and rifle.
"YOU'RE ALIVE?!"
"Did you think a new bird meant a new pilot?" Alexander joked.
"GET IN!"
"Thank the Throne you're alive!"
"You're too easily satisfied, kid."
Stabilizing the controls, Alexander looked at the horizon.
Massive shadows were appearing through the haze.
Not the chaotic rumble of the Orks. Not the discordant echoes of the Warp.
Something grander. More orderly.
A rhythmic, world-shaking thrum.
It was the sound of an iron giant walking. The hum was the blood of Mankind pumping through its conduits; the boom was the heartbeat of its bone and steel; the crash was the heavy fist of the species striking its foes.
The Great Army of the Imperium was here.
On the ground, a steel tide advanced, centering on the Titans and the Capitol Imperialis command-units.
They were spending munitions like they were water—an advancing "Eraser" that moved through the lanes the paratroopers had bled to open. Traps, tunnels, and enemies alike were being systematically annihilated by the infinite artillery.
In the sky, a dense escort-weave dominated the atmosphere.
Aerial bombs. Nukes. Gravity-charges.
The ground-attack wings were "licking" the earth along the paratrooper lines with surgical precision. Heavy bombers were delivering long-prepared "Gifts" to the enemy-held wastes.
The stockpiles of Armageddon—mountains of ordnance capable of shredding any blessing of the Blood God—were being vomited from the bellies of the craft, incinerating the scavengers emerging from the ash.
Valkyrie after Valkyrie lifted off, laden with survivors.
Behold, Caroline thought, clutching her comrades in the cramped bay. Behold what we have built.
The Gods of the Warp could transform desire into flesh and plate. But the machines forged by the hands of the species would bring the Vengeance of Man.
Khorne wants His claws? Let Him have them. Let Him shield His 'Chosen' from the rain of iron if He can.
Your rage is infinite, Blood God? Our steel is more infinite still.
The paratroopers cheered. They watched the little "flowers" of explosions below and the ribbons of light carved by the strike-craft. They watched the Bloodletters struggle and die under the weight of the assault. They watched the "invincible" monsters of the Warp try to fly, only to be erased by lance-fire from the ships in high orbit.
A surge of heroic pride filled the bay.
The Valkyrie slowed.
They were reaching the inner safety of the column. They would land, re-arm, reflect, and summary. They would lick their wounds.
And then, they would march to the next battle.
Yarrick set down the Inquisitorial casualty count.
"The number of surviving squads is far higher than estimated. The pressure on the breakthrough is lower. But these daemons..."
"Leave them to us," the Inquisitor said, her voice hard. She wasn't about to let the troops panic. "Execute the offensive, Commissar. Find the Beast! We will handle the Warp-taint!"
Unlike the past, Yarrick found he could accept this. To hand his men to an Inquisitor for "cleansing" didn't feel like a betrayal anymore. It was a tactical necessity.
"Very well."
Yarrick returned his focus to the main advance, leaving the Warp-problems behind him.
The shadows of the Empyrean might linger, but his job was to win the war on the ground.
"Chaos again," Arthur noted, reading the tactical reports from the front.
Armageddon had three continents. The Fire Wastes at the north pole, and the dead ice of the south. The center held the human settlements, split by jungles and oceans into the Prime and Sub-Continents.
Nurgle's rot was infesting the poles. The lingering stains of Angron's presence were triggering outbreaks that had pinned down the Mechanicum forces. But Yarrick had breached the jungle. He was on the Sub-Continent. The advance was moving faster than predicted.
It was the result of Yarrick's masterful management of resources and the "Standardized Promotion" protocol that had identified him as a high-tier talent early in the war.
With Armageddon's industrial might behind him, the result felt inevitable.
Arthur was satisfied.
Even the Navy's blunder was being salvaged. They hadn't rushed into a trap at the Mandeville points; instead, they were systematically liberating the neighboring worlds and sending small groups to test the Ork blockade.
The Dawnbreakers were optimists.
The reaction of the Imperial military to an independent threat had reached "Barely Passing" in Arthur's eyes. There was still a long way to go.
If Badab was a textbook for Astartes-Chaos warfare, Armageddon was the proof that the military reforms had raised the "floor" of the mortal soldier.
A man like Yarrick—capable of mobilizing an entire planet's assets for total war—was a treasure. In the future, the Dawnbreakers intended to grant such commanders near-absolute authority.
The risk of corruption was high, yes.
But Arthur looked at the Emperor—currently inhabiting the "Apprentice" and chatting with Ramesses.
If a proactive Emperor and the four of them couldn't hold one man's soul against the Warp, then Humanity was already lost.
Arthur walked toward them.
"What are you two discussing?"
Ramesses' loud voice rang out before he reached them.
He looked as if he had just heard something that broke his logic. He held his head in his hands, staring in disbelief at the "Emperor," who was currently clearing out the Eternal Crusader's food larder like a man possessed.
"What do you mean, there's a legend in the Warp that You once Elbow-Struck the Four Gods to death?!"
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