The missiles went out in sequence, each one launched from the Cyclone systems that had been stripped of their carrying warriors for this purpose, the teams working through the load in steady rotation while the cave mouth provided concealment. Outside, the angry roaring that followed each impact rolled back across the frozen terrain and up the mountain slopes, and the slopes answered it by sending snow down in cascades that became something closer to rivers the further they traveled.
The plan did not require them to be outside for any of this.
Bloodletters and Plaguebearers who had been sheltering within the monastery's collapsed interior sections were exposed as the walls came down around them, the detonations uncovering them from the rubble that had been their cover and leaving them in open ground where the next missile found them. Chaos daemons were not easy to kill: they were made of something other than flesh, and the explosive aftermath that would end a human being could leave a daemon merely incapacitated. But incapacitated and exposed with more ordnance incoming resolved the problem by attrition.
The Chaos believers who had come out of the rubble to scream curses at invisible enemies had bodies that the blast radius treated more simply.
In the silence between one salvo and the next, something else happened that no one was watching closely enough to register as it occurred. The broken floor of the monastery received the scattered remains of the dead with the specific quiet of material that is taking something in rather than simply being covered by it. Blood and flesh and ash found the cracks in the ancient stone and descended through them without the assistance of water or air. In under a minute the debris field around each impact zone was considerably cleaner than it should have been.
The last missile fired.
Nolan came out of the cave mouth first.
He had the warscythe in his right hand and Forgebreaker in his left, and the wolfskin cloak was gone because it had served its purpose and the power armor served a better one. He crossed the open ground between the cave and the monastery entrance at a pace that the Cyclone launchers' cooling cycles had made possible: the Chaos defenders in the open were no longer a defended perimeter.
The Blood Ravens came out behind him in their assigned order.
The monastery entrance was a gap where the original gates had been, the frame still standing but the doors themselves somewhere inside under collapsed stone. They went through it and the ruined interior opened around them, the fires from the missile strikes still working through the structural material, the smoke catching the falling snow and making it gray.
The Black Legion Astartes came out from behind the rubble.
Their ceramite was the flat black of the Black Legion's colors, scratched and notched in patterns that said these were not new recruits, and they had positioned themselves behind whatever cover the interior rubble offered with the patience of warriors who had been holding defensive positions for a long time. The boltguns they carried opened at close range, the fire concentrated on the most visible target in the entry group.
Nolan raised his left forearm.
The bolts that hit it hit the vibranium pauldron and the upper arm guard without changing his forward momentum. He was already closing the distance, and at the range where boltguns are most accurate they are also most relevant to someone standing outside of them, and he was not standing outside them anymore.
The warscythe came across at an angle that accounted for the bunker as well as the warrior behind it: blade first, then the body of the weapon, then the follow-through that carried the cut past the point of resistance. The Chaos Astartes and the cover he had been relying on became different distributions of the same materials.
Ten meters to Nolan's right, Orion's psychic lightning found a gap in a second Chaos Astartes's guard and held it there, the sustained discharge traveling through the armor systems and the warrior wearing them with equal disregard for the distinction. The Chaos Astartes was still in the process of processing this when Gabriel's war hammer connected with the top of his helmet from directly above, the impact carrying the full weight of Terminator-adjacent power armor and a captain's arms behind it.
The Black Legion Chaos Astartes fell in a direction that suggested his relationship with upright posture had ended.
More came.
The fires in the monastery interior were generating enough light to show that the first group had not been the full complement. Black-armored forms were assembling in the depths of the burning ruins, and the fire volume from them increased as they settled into their positions, bolts crossing the space in numbers that made movement through the open ground between the entrance and the interior a question of timing rather than cover.
Three Blood Ravens who had been moving forward at a run with assault cannons raised were caught in the denser fire before they reached the next set of cover. The rounds came through their helmet eyepieces with the specific accuracy of people who had done this before and knew where to aim. The three Blood Ravens stopped. They went down.
Nolan chopped the Chaos Astartes he was engaged with across the neck and turned.
"Cover and advance!" His voice carried across the combat noise without difficulty. "Step by step. Nobody charges unsupported."
He flicked the Ten Rings from his forearm and sent all ten at the cluster of Black Legion Chaos Astartes reforming twenty meters ahead.
The rings crossed the distance at speed and found the cluster.
Something intercepted them.
A power sword came around in a fast horizontal arc, the blade charged with a deep red field that carried an edge that was not purely mechanical, and the ten rings that struck it were deflected rather than driven through. Not all of them: three continued and connected with the cluster beyond. But seven were knocked aside, ringing off the blade with the sound of impacts that had been intended to do more than they did.
Ancient Terminator armor, painted black. The proportions of it said something older than current manufacture. In one hand, the power sword with its red-burning edge. In the other, a combi-flamer, the secondary barrel of it already oriented toward the Blood Ravens' position.
The metal helmet turned toward Nolan.
"Blood sacrifice to the Blood God. Skulls to the Skull Throne." The voice from inside the helmet had the quality of something that had been saying that particular phrase for a very long time and had not grown bored of it. "Look at what we have here. A lackey of the rotting Corpse King himself."
He took one step forward, the Terminator armor's weight carrying through the rubble beneath it.
"Your skull gives me the offering I need to ascend. I have waited a long time for a skull worth presenting." He leveled the power sword. "Champion of Khorne. Plunderer of the Black Legion. Araghast. Your enemy is me."
The combi-flamer raised.
Nolan put Forgebreaker through the last Chaos Astartes between him and Araghast, the thunder discharge scattering the remains, and straightened.
His eyes had the particular quality they got in the moments before something very serious happened: not narrowed in concentration, not widened in alarm, but fully open and entirely present, the bloodshot quality of hours of combat making the color of them seem deeper.
The vibranium power armor's systems activated to full output.
He drove toward Araghast.