With a crackling hiss, the beast came charging—bio-plasma orbs forming and sparking around it.
The Planetary Defence Force troopers who couldn't dodge in time didn't get scorched into charcoal by stray arcs of light.
They were simply hit.
Slammed by raw, savage momentum until their bodies were crushed into something like wet pulp.
Then, a battle tank—its bulk not much smaller than the beast itself—tried to block its path.
The creature, having already fired its bio-plasma orb, lifted its claws as it surged forward. Those claws punched through the tank's heavy armor as if it were paper, then yanked outward—
—and the tank was torn cleanly in half and flung aside.
Bang—!
A melta round struck one of the tank halves.
It had been aimed at Kain.
Bang bang—!
More rounds hammered into the beast—the Screamer-Killer—but didn't slow its charge at all.
It sacrificed two scythe-like foreclaws to block the melta shot's destructive force from reaching its body.
In the blink of an eye, it was so close Kain could almost feel it with his fingertips.
At the same time, it unleashed that piercing shriek again. Its maw was charging—rings of light gathering, swelling into a concentrated orb.
And in that shriek, Kain could almost hear mockery.
As if it had already decided he was dead.
Because right now, Kain's situation was this:
He'd jumped to avoid the bio-plasma orb that had just been lobbed at him, and he was still airborne.
The Screamer-Killer's charging speed was enough to hit him before he could touch the ground again—turning him into a splatter, like a mosquito slapped mid-flight.
Unless those two melta rounds had killed it.
But they hadn't.
It had forced the shots onto its foreclaws and tanked them.
And at this distance, if his melta rounds landed cleanly—especially on the bio-plasma mass it was charging—he could kill it. He might even survive the impact, since the beast wouldn't physically slam into him.
However…
If it didn't smash into him, and his melta round hit its charging bio-plasma core—
the result would be an explosion.
A bigger, denser bio-plasma orb detonating right on top of him.
He'd be erased without a trace.
In other words, he was dead either way.
Crushed.
Or turned to ash.
"Sorry."
He said it suddenly.
Saying those two syllables cost him one second.
One second was enough for the Screamer-Killer to reach him—
—and yet Kain landed calmly on the ground.
Then a heat wave rolled over him, so hot his skin felt like it might start sizzling.
The Screamer-Killer—about to hit him—was swallowed by a massive flash erupting from the ground beneath it.
It was instantly vaporized.
A melta mine.
A melta mine he'd planted there.
He'd gotten it during that brief moment of breathing room earlier—teleported over from A2.
The design was essentially fifty melta charges wired in parallel. When it detonated, it burst like cluster munitions, overlapping subatomic shear-fields.
The effective kill zone was wide enough to completely engulf a Screamer-Killer's massive frame.
Besides mines, there were grenade variants too—cluster-style melta grenades.
Each one hit with roughly ten times the power of the melta grenades he'd originally brought to A2's world.
…Hm?
Kain frowned.
The ammo A2 could teleport into his personal space was almost depleted again.
Of course, he could have A2 send more.
And as for the energy coins—those were supplied by Kain.
Right now, his account still had 13 left.
Yes. Since returning and starting the stream again, he'd earned 14 in total.
Which meant he could still purchase thirteen more ammo deliveries.
But this assault was consuming supplies far too quickly. At this rate, he'd burn through every coin in less than an hour.
Of course, he could trigger Cross-World Invitation again and accelerate it—go live again.
But it wouldn't help.
All that would do was give him another hundred hours of rest.
When he came back, it would still be the same time, the same position, the same encirclement.
Unless, within those hundred hours, he could obtain equipment strong enough to break this deadlock.
And among the dimensional group, only A2's world could supply weapons. But even if they rushed for a hundred hours, producing another set of that transformable powered armor—plus upgrades—wouldn't make it absurdly stronger overnight.
Still… it might be enough to change things.
Escaping the battlefield was probably impossible.
But reaching the location of his ship?
That might be doable.
And on a battlefield like this, how had his ship not been discovered?
This was Tyranid territory—how could they not see it?
…Unless they truly couldn't see it.
Couldn't touch it.
After all, it was an advanced vessel from humanity's Golden Age.
But for now, Kain wasn't planning to have A2 teleport another powered armor set over.
Because he'd realized the Astartes' current route overlapped perfectly with his own destination.
So that brought him back to the same problem:
He was using melta mines and melta grenades way too often.
Wasn't that suspicious?
Wouldn't anyone wonder where it all came from?
But right now, the Astartes weren't in the mood to argue about where he'd "coincidentally found" these things.
He could claim they'd been buried here, or left behind in a previous battle and hidden by accident, and he'd stumbled on them.
They knew he was lying.
He knew they knew he was lying.
But this wasn't the time to pursue it.
As long as he could keep "accidentally finding" munitions, boosting the squad's firepower, they would temporarily look the other way.
"Lawrence—found another box of melta grenades here."
As he handed it over, several beams tore through the nearby darkness and speared two claws into the box seam.
The attack came from the Dreadnought's laser cannon. The barrel looked like it hadn't rested at all—glowing red to an almost unnatural degree, as if it could overload and detonate at any moment.
"…"
Lawrence—ordered by the squad leader to keep a bit of an eye on this kid—could only stare in wordless disbelief.
This one looked so new it didn't even pretend to have been buried.
Couldn't he at least make the "camouflage" a little more convincing?
Still…
He had to admit these were better than the melta grenades they'd brought.
Honestly, it was lucky Kain had run into them—the Salamanders.
If it had been another Chapter, his "weirdness" would've gotten him into serious trouble.
He also felt it was strange. For some reason, he felt an inexplicable sense of closeness to Kain—like Kain was one of the Salamanders, too.
Almost as if he carried Salamanders gene-seed.
Thinking of their mission, Lawrence began to consider another possibility:
Could Kain be the "recipient" they were supposed to deliver to?
They hadn't come to this planet as part of a sector-wide relief deployment.
They'd come on a delivery mission.
They'd just happened to arrive in the middle of this planetary crisis.
Once they reached the destination and completed the drop, they were supposed to rendezvous with another Astartes force and assault the nest together.
Suddenly, the squad channel crackled with the captain's voice—and Lawrence's face changed.
"Exterminatus? The Imperium's going to abandon this planet?"
And when Kain heard Lawrence's shocked question, his own expression hardened.
No…
The worst-case scenario was still coming.
(End of Chapter)
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