"Do not halt! Keep pushing!"
There was no time to count the fallen. Leman Russ and Baneblade tanks roared at full throttle, surging forward. The sheer speed at which the broken Skaven ranks scattered left the humans stunned; to Astoren Korr, the sight of the rout was like mercury spilling across a floor—shimmering, erratic, and impossible to pin down.
He immediately voxed his command: no pursuit. Every unit was to focus entirely on breaching the Skaven's secondary defensive line.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The Leman Russ tanks maintained a rolling thunder of fire as they advanced. However, even these rugged iron beasts found the terrain treacherous; the battlefield was a nightmare of craters and jagged ruins that hampered the movement of the Imperial armored fist.
But the Skaven were in their element.
While Korr's decision to avoid pursuit kept the Imperial forces concentrated, it allowed the scattered vermin to recover. Once they regained their wits, the Skaven skittered back in chattering swarms, setting up sniper nests to harass the Imperial flanks with jagged jezail rounds.
As the Imperial tanks engaged in a Kursk-style armored charge across the mangled earth, a rhythmic thrumming began to rise from the Skaven side, a mechanical drone that rivaled the Imperial engines.
Accompanied by the frenzied, high-pitched shrieks of the ratmen, the Imperial forces, barely recovered from the Poisoned Wind Mortar barrage, saw a tide of hundreds of massive metal spheres and single-wheeled motor-contraptions erupt from the dust.
It was a sea of grinding wheels.
These were the Skaven Doom-Wheels. Though they lacked the thick plating of a Leman Russ, their agility far outstripped almost any Imperial vehicle. Twin-mounted lightning cannons on their flanks and a prow-mounted Warp-lightning projector gave these death-engines terrifying lethality. Smaller Doom-Flayers, though diminutive by comparison, were even more nimble and overtly murderous; their whirring blades shredded rock and plasteel alike, never losing momentum as they wove through the carnage.
"Do these filthy xenos truly believe they can match the Imperium in a direct clash? Delusional! Warriors of the Emperor—SHOW NO MERCY!"
The Astra Militarum Tank Commander bellowed over the vox, leading the Imperial iron tide to meet the verminous onslaught.
For a moment, the void between the armies was a chaotic web of emerald Warp-lightning and crimson explosive shells. Debris from shattered tanks and pulverized Doom-Wheels soared into the air before crashing back into the mud. Within minutes, the two formations collided.
The Leman Russ tanks possessed superior frontal armor, but they were lumbering oxen compared to the Skaven wheels "drag-racing" across the battlefield. The Doom-Flayers, emitting a terrifying vroom-vroom mechanical whine, used their speed to ramp directly onto the hulls of the Imperial tanks. Even a Baneblade's flank could not withstand the concentrated discharge of a lightning cannon; the beams punched massive holes through the side armor, flash-cooking the crew and internal systems into a slurry of charred meat and melted slag.
"Watch the flanks! Do not let the xenos get alongside you!"
The commander's voice was taut with alarm. But his orders were nearly impossible to execute. In the claustrophobic congestion of the charge and the horrific road conditions, the tanks could not pivot or turn. Once a Doom-Wheel inserted itself into the Imperial formation, the tanks' side-mounted heavy bolters were useless against the speed of the vermin machines.
The infantry following the armor fared even worse. To the Doom-Wheels and Doom-Flayers, the Guardsmen were nothing but biological speed bumps. The Skaven treated the battlefield like a slaughter-house racetrack, leaving behind red furrows of viscera and pulverized bone in their wake.
Then, the air was filled once more with the endless skritch-skritch-squeak of a million rats. A wave of skeletal, fur-clad vermin, vast enough to blot out the horizon, seemed to pour from every gutter, crevice, and tunnel. Clutching rusted knives, daggers, and Warp-pistols, they charged the Astra Militarum in a suicidal frenzy.
The two tides met. It was a scene of ancient, primitive butchery. A Guardsman ran a bayonet through the starved chest of a Clanrat, only for the vermin to tear a chunk of human flesh away with its yellowed teeth before it died.
From his vantage point, the Warlord of Clan Blackback watched through his Warp-telescope, let out a hacking, wet chuckle. "Those... those slaves. They haven't been fed-given rations, yes?"
The Warlord's Grey Seer advisor nodded eagerly. "Yes-yes, my despicable master. No food-scraps for the whelps! They will be mad-crazed with the Black Hunger! Yes-yes!"
The Skaven metabolic rate was incredibly high, but the cost was a constant, gnawing starvation. If they went too long without food, they succumbed to the Black Hunger, a state of ravenous insanity where they would feast on anything, oblivious to danger. Experienced Warlords used this as a weapon to ensure their slaves fought to the last breath, though it was a double-edged sword; if uncontrolled, the crazed slaves might turn and devour the clan's own breeders and young.
"Hehehe, our rat-spawn are endless-infinite!"
The Warlord laughed, gripping his power-glaive. "Stop-stop stalling! The Brood Horrors and Moulder things have finished the tunnels! Go-go! Take the hairless-things from behind! Let them know how long Skaven claws truly are!"
With a screeching command, the Warlord led his Stormvermin Guard into the earth.
Deep underground, creatures resembling gargantuan, hairless rats, monstrosities known as Brood Horrors, had connected a network of shattered subterranean passages. While they lacked frontal combat prowess, their excavation speed was unmatched. Hundreds of thousands of Blackback Stormvermin and Moulder abominations were already moving through these arteries.
When the first Brood Horror breached the surface behind the Imperial lines, the advancing army realized too late that Hive Fleet Jormungandr were not the only ones who knew how to tunnel. The subterranean threat of the Skaven was their deadliest hallmark.
The Stormvermin, equipped with scavenged and crude power-suits, emerged clutching triangular Storm-Shields and chainswords, with high-caliber Warp-pistols at their belts. Unlike the frenzied slaves, they moved with a grim, practiced discipline. Under their Warlord's direction, they had bypassed the front and emerged directly in the Imperial rear.
The Imperial logistics train, caught entirely off guard, was in the process of ferrying food and ordnance forward in Rhino APCs. They could expect no help from the Dirge Mast sector, which had long been severed by the Orks. When the red-eyed ratmen swarmed out of the earth, the rear-guard had no time to form up. The logistical tail of the army was swallowed by the Stormvermin legion in a heartbeat.
At the front, the Astartes had used the speed and agility of their Land Speeders to punch through the wheel-drift and reach the Skaven's second line. But as they looked past the ruins, a sense of grim realization set in.
Beyond the scrap-heaps and trenches lay not a plain, but a bottomless, yawning abyss. A concentrated stench of rot and Warp-filth billowed up from the darkness, so potent it fouled even the auto-senses of the Astartes' power armor.
In the distance, the Stygian Spires loomed against the sky, their peaks piercing the atmosphere. From the orbital stations above, ice-asteroids were being harvested and sent down the massive space elevators into the depths of this chasm.
"Is this the nest of the xenos?" Astoren Korr hesitated. As the Lord of the Watch, hesitation was a foreign concept, but centuries of combat instinct screamed at him: the abyss was a death trap.
If he committed his forces and failed to retake the Spires, the Imperium's strength in this sector would be extinguished. He would die not in glory, but submerged in the shame of a failed crusade.
As the reports of the rear-area massacre reached him, Korr realized he was caught in a pincer. He was trapped between the abyss and the vermin rising from the grave of his own supply lines.
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