Chapter 362: The Genetic Ascension Warriors
At this moment, Fletcher's face was a mask of absolute victory.
The surviving Ultramarines and Raiders began to fire on the Annihilation Engines. Guilliman's Honour Guard desperately threw themselves in front of their Primarch. Bolter shells, spikes, plasma, and all other forms of ammunition seemed to drown the war machines. But the deflector shields they projected blocked every single attack.
One by one, their mechanical arms were raised. The weapons of the Golden Age began to unleash their power.
Phosphor weapons, neuro-shredders, and gravity projectors.
Neither powersuit nor power armor could withstand the damage they inflicted. A Raider hit by a phosphor weapon was instantly turned to ash, while anyone hit by a neuro-shredder died instantly. A gravity projector reversed the local gravity, pulling two Ultramarines directly into the air and then smashing them brutally to the ground. The two powerful Astartes were reduced to a mixture of power armor fragments and gore.
An Ultramarine with a storm shield and power sword tried to engage the enemy in melee, but he was completely overpowered. A single punch from a force-field-wreathed mechanical arm slammed into the storm shield, forcing the Ultramarine to his knees, the shield's own power field overloading and collapsing. And the power sword in his hand couldn't even completely cut through the Annihilation Engine's armor.
One after another, the Ultramarines died. In both strength and ranged firepower, the Annihilation Engines held absolute superiority.
Ten of the engines charged at Guilliman, while the remaining seven went straight for Lucan. Fletcher left only three to protect himself. The seven debased Annihilation Engines in the hands of the Dark Angels had been enough to hold back the Night Haunter Primarch, Konrad Curze. And as soon as Guilliman engaged these machines, he felt that not only was their ranged firepower powerful, but their melee was even more difficult to deal with.
A weapon that his brother, the Lion, had kept as a trump card was truly powerful.
Although the Emperor's Sword could damage them, their nano-metal armor was also rapidly self-repairing. The powerful analytical ability of their combat AI also kept Guilliman on his toes. Every second, they were predicting his next move.
But even as he took wounds, Guilliman was still trying to push toward Lucan. Lucan was too important to the current Imperium. It could even be said that he could die, but Lucan could not.
"Lucan! I'll hold them off! You retreat! These things are too dangerous!" Guilliman roared. Pushing his strength to its limit, the flames of the Emperor's Sword erupted, cutting off the Annihilation Engines' advance.
But when Guilliman looked back at Lucan, he found that he was still standing in the same place. Apart from the initial shock, there was no longer any panic on his face.
It was true that Lucan's own combat abilities and strength had rarely been displayed in front of others. At this stage, his strongest abilities, apart from the DOOM Slayer, were all derived from the warp and the suppression of it. Faced with these physical, technological creations, Lucan wasn't sure that summoning the DOOM Slayer would be effective. This was also why he had been continuously pursuing breakthroughs in the technology of the physical world.
If he summoned the DOOM Slayer, Lucan was confident that he could kill the psyker before him. His psychic power was strong, but only in comparison to a conventional individual; it was not yet on par with a Chaos God. But based on past experience, the DOOM Slayer would not necessarily help him deal with the more threatening Annihilation Engines. The daemons and warp energy currently swarming through Scintilla would be far more attractive to him. From the very beginning, the DOOM Slayer had never been someone who took orders from Lucan or helped him. His appearance was simply to hunt everything nearby that was related to the warp.
But now, it was different. Besides the DOOM Slayer, Lucan had other means.
Before coming to Scintilla, in order to test just how much combat power the "Very Strong" genetic trait could bring, Pavian, at Lucan's request, had performed an emergency modification on Damon and five other Night Sentinels. This powerful genetic trait required a considerable amount of resources and time to implement, and in the short time they had, they had only been able to complete these few.
But it was enough.
The Annihilation Engines had already begun to bypass the pinned-down Guilliman and were heading for Lucan. Seeing the approaching machines, Damon and the five other Night Sentinels immediately stepped forward to meet them.
"Lucan! Your Night Sentinels can't stop them! Get out of here! Use the fleet to deal with these enemies!" Guilliman screamed. That was the most effective method he could think of.
But then, he noticed that the Annihilation Engines' previously swift movements had begun to slow. The threat-warning systems within the machines seemed to have detected the danger that Damon and his men posed. They no longer blindly charged forward to tear the enemy apart in melee. Instead, they once again tried to use their anti-gravity weapons to crush them into pulp.
But to everyone's surprise, this time, the anti-gravity weapons failed. Even the ground around them had been shattered by a force far exceeding the planet's gravity, but Damon and his men seemed to be outside the laws of physics, their feet firmly planted on the ground. The hundred-fold gravity being applied to them did not cause their bodies to collapse. It seemed they hadn't even reached their limits.
Damon and the others continued to charge. The gravity weapons, which had been so effective against the Ultramarines and the Raiders, only slightly slowed their advance.
Seeing that the gravity weapons were ineffective, the neuro-shredders and phosphor weapons began to fire again. But physical strength did not just increase attack power; agility was also enhanced. They actually managed to dodge the shots with their raw physical speed.
Damon even used his physical strength to pick up a collapsed stone pillar from the palace and hurl it at an Annihilation Engine.
Guilliman's eyes went wide. He knew that these Night Sentinels were originally very strong. As Lucan's personal guard, even their original strength was hard to believe for a unit that had only been established for a few years. But the strength they were displaying now was clearly far beyond what they had shown before.
Damon was the first to reach an Annihilation Engine. He threw a punch with all his might, and a piercing sonic boom rang out.
When his fist connected, the Annihilation Engine was sent flying. The armor on its chest, which not even a power sword could easily penetrate, had been shattered by that single punch.
Seeing this, Fletcher's eyes also went wide. Was this real? To shatter the armor of an Annihilation Engine with a single, bare-fisted punch? Was this really something that physical strength could achieve?!
He had never seen anything so absurd, even in his own era. He could see that Guilliman was strong; after all, he was one of the rulers of this age and wielded a top-tier artifact like the Emperor's Sword. His individual combat power was certainly at the pinnacle of this era. But to have not one, but a whole squad of these freaks appear... was this reasonable?
This was not what the Navigators had told him! Hadn't they said that the ones called "Astartes" were the limit of this era's human genetic technology?! Then what were these people, who were physically overpowering an Annihilation Engine in close combat?!