The creature with scything talons bounded across the battlefield on powerful hind legs.
Each leap also drove the swing of its talons, making every cut sharper and more decisive. Soldiers who couldn't dodge in time were effortlessly hacked apart, dismembered by those blades.
Then it used its fangs to tear further into the corpse, feasting greedily.
It was a Tyranid bioform—known as a Hormagaunt.
The Hormagaunt didn't even get to finish eating. A tank tread rolled over it from head to tail, crushing it flat, and the vehicle rumbled on over the wreck of its body.
On the tank's mount, the gunner poured out a storm of Hellfire bolts.
These weren't standard bolts. The core and tip had been replaced with a small vial of mutagenic acid—its surface studded with thousands of micro-needles.
When fired into clustered targets, the vial shattered; the needles separated and punched into flesh, injecting the acid into "913" targets to kill them.
This ammunition had been developed specifically to punish dense swarms of organic enemies.
The rounds plunged into the tide-like oncoming mass and dropped a wide swathe of the swarm.
But that "wide swathe" was immediately swallowed by even more Tyranids behind it—like a handful of stones sinking into the sea, making it look as though nothing had been accomplished at all.
Around the tank, PDF (Planetary Defence Force) infantry advanced in lockstep, their lasguns lancing into the onrushing horde.
They kept pace with the vehicle, pushing forward without hesitation, determined to drive the bugs back into their nest.
At the same time, countless streaks of fire were falling from the sky—fragments from a shattered orbital fortress, raining into the warzone in indiscriminate, carpet-like bombardment.
In the face of that kind of random destruction, the soldiers didn't flinch.
They executed their current orders. They would not waste a single round or shell trying to intercept whatever might hit them from above.
Their ammunition had only one purpose: killing the swarm in front of them.
Nor could they simply abandon their position. This was their line.
That rigid adherence to orders didn't mean they were silent, machine-like statues, either.
On the comms channel of the company holding the very front, curses and bitter complaints flowed back and forth.
"These damn bugs really know how to pick their timing."
"They waited until the Guard levy got called up and shipped out."
"If those troops were still here, our strength would be two, three times what it is."
"And they chose the moment right after the tithe got collected—munitions stripped out, too."
"What kind of sick joke is this? Two tithes practically back-to-back. Damn it!"
On Imperial worlds, the tithe is often divided into two categories.
The first is the military tithe: one tenth of the planet's PDF is handed over as new recruits for the Imperial Guard, under the authority of the Departmento Munitorum.
And the soldiers sent off to become Guardsmen are invariably the PDF's best.
The second is the Exacta—overseen by the Administratum's tax arm, the Departmento Exacta.
On this planet, one tenth of its military materiel had also been seized as the Exacta and shipped up the chain.
And when weapons were taken as payment, they went in clean, standardized consignments—crated, stamped, and accounted for.
What remained—the other nine tenths—was a mismatched mess.
The planet's logistics officer in charge of armaments truly wanted to flog the responsible party's corpse.
Because the culprit was already confirmed KIA.
Just how much had been skimmed and stolen?
"Yeah… it's a mess—zzzt…!"
As if the channel were being jammed, a harsh, razor-edged sound suddenly sliced through the feed.
Now and then, something came through clearly—wet tearing, like flesh being ripped apart; chewing, grinding, gulping.
Mixed in were the distinct snaps of M35 Galaxy-pattern lasguns and M36 Kantrael-pattern lasguns—at least, if you were a veteran who could recognize weapon patterns by sound.
Alongside the lasfire were the heavier, deeper reports of bolt weapons, and artillery blasts so loud they threatened to rupture the comm-net itself.
"BOOM—!"
That single detonation drowned out every other sound.
Beneath a twisted slab of metal lay heaps of gore—blood-soaked paste churned together with dust and grit.
Look closely and you could still pick out unmistakable fragments: bits of limbs, something that might have been human organs, severed hands—along with shattered Tyranid parts.
Both sides, locked in close combat, had been struck by the falling "meteor."
And this wasn't happening in just one place. The entire battlefield was taking sustained, indiscriminate bombardment from debris.
One fragment in particular was different.
It skipped across the ground like a stone skimming water—bouncing and sliding… and every ricochet burst more Tyranids apart in sprays of ichor.
"Good. Still alive."
A figure crawled out of a fighter that had been mangled beyond recognition, murmuring while taking in the swarm and the struggling melee around him.
At least it hadn't dropped him deep into the enemy's formation.
As for the aircraft—machine spirit or not—it was never invincible.
It hadn't been shot down. The airframe had simply reached its limit and failed.
The machine spirit felt… strangely satisfied. He sensed the emotion faintly—and then it was gone.
By crashing amid a rain of debris, he'd bought himself a momentary breath of space. In that gap, he glanced at the livestream interface and noticed something new.
A recording function had appeared—but it required activation, and that meant spending energy coins to unlock it.
It was like cloud storage: the free capacity was tiny, but if you paid, you could expand it and archive the videos properly.
There was even a download option.
Unfortunately, his current situation left him no time to mess with any of that.
In the blink of an eye, he scavenged what he could from the field, changed his appearance and kit, and passed himself off as a PDF trooper—then merged into a nearby unit.
A "unit," because repeated waves had already chewed through the original formations.
And despite the constant pressure, the line hadn't been pushed back.
If anything, it was advancing.
It was an advance paid for in bodies—layer after layer of lives piled into forward progress.
At this rate, it would take about three days to reach the edge of the nest.
And the location of his ship lay directly along the way.
"Hm?"
A Thunderhawk gunship—truly bristling with weapons—was coming down in a hard landing after concentrated fire bled off its speed.
That wasn't the surprising part. Thunderhawks got shot out of the sky on this battlefield often enough.
The real shock was what leapt out of it: several massive, hulking "tin cans," and what looked like a thousand suits of powered battle-plate deploying in formation.
The insignia—Salamanders?
A moment later, his surrounding units' comms were overridden and an order came through: support their action.
The assignment was clear.
Abandon the original step-by-step push. Collapse the line into a long triangular wedge—like an arrowhead—and drive it straight into the swarm, spearing directly toward the enemy nest.
(End of Chapter)
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