The so-called "plan" was simple in the way most desperate plans were simple: when the ambush began, the elite troops positioned around the squad would hold the attackers in place while the rest of the formation pushed onward, carrying the shielded containment crate and the prisoner hidden inside it.
At Sael's command, the entire squad moved.
Orders snapped through the vox-net. Boots hammered across rust-stained decking. More than a hundred hardened men surged from the formation's outer ring in disciplined files, hellguns and lasrifles rising as they advanced to intercept the enemy blocking the passage. They were veterans, killers, deserters, deniable assets, and disgraced servants of the Imperium who had been promised that one successful mission might buy back their names.
For three seconds, Sael almost believed the plan might work.
Then the first Thunderborn came for them.
From his position at the center of the formation, Sael watched the golden-black warrior advance straight toward the crate. The jump pack mounted across the warrior's back roared to life, spitting fire and choking exhaust into the Underhive gloom. Heat washed across the tunnel walls. Smoke curled around broken pipes and hanging cables. For an instant, the warrior became a burning silhouette hurtling through the darkness.
The delaying line opened fire.
Hellgun beams and las-bolts lashed upward, stabbing through smoke and dust. Some shots struck sparks from the Thunderborn's armor. Others bent away at the last moment, dragged off-course by the shimmer of his gravitic shield. None slowed him.
As the two sides met, the Thunderborn fired.
A compact sphere of energy struck the ground beneath the advancing troops.
The sphere collapsed inward for less than a heartbeat, then burst.
White light erupted across the tunnel floor. Arcs of contained annihilation scythed through the men meant to delay him. Soldiers who had just raised their weapons vanished from the waist up. Others were reduced to drifting ash before their fingers finished tightening on triggers. Flak armor, carapace plates, flesh, bone, and weapon housings disintegrated together in a rain of incandescent fragments.
Sael saw his closest friend die.
The man had been beside him for nine years. Vardas. Former Kasrkin washout, smuggler, gunman, liar, and the only bastard in the squad Sael trusted to watch his back without checking his pockets afterward. Vardas braced his hellgun, sighted on the airborne warrior, and drew breath to fire.
He never pulled the trigger.
A lance of energy clipped him across the chest. His body flashed once, too bright to look at directly, and then he was gone. The hellgun fell from hands that had already become ash and clattered uselessly across the deck.
Sael's throat closed.
He turned toward the rear formation.
The situation there was worse.
The second enemy had already slaughtered everyone positioned at the squad's rear. He did not leap or rush. He simply walked forward with calm, mechanical certainty, as if the outcome had been decided before the first shot was fired. The multi-barreled weapon mounted along his arm spun into a blur and unleashed a withering spray of laser fire. Beams stitched through men, crates, barricade plates, and support struts. Bodies folded, burst, or burned where they stood.
This was not combat.
It was extermination.
A lance of superheated plasma carved through the left flank, incinerating every warrior in its path.
Then another.
And another.
The blasts came from shoulder-mounted cannons built into the Thunderborn warplate. There was no visible reload cycle, no meaningful pause, no overheated vent glowing red with strain. Each shot landed with the precision of a trained tank gunner and the violence of a field weapon. Every impact erased a section of Sael's formation.
To his veteran eye, it felt as though he was not facing two men at all. It felt as though an entire armored regiment had been compressed into two walking juggernauts and dropped into the tunnel for the sole purpose of proving how fragile human bodies were.
"Status report! Why haven't you checked in?" The Inquisitor's voice crackled over the comms, sharp with irritation. "Are you all dead?"
Sael struck the vox-bead so hard it hurt his ear. His voice came out as a raw, panicked shout.
"We're being massacred! Order them to stand down! Call off the attack!"
For a moment, only static answered him.
Then the Inquisitor spoke again, his voice as cold and distant as the void between stars.
"You are nothing more than a band of mercenaries seeking fortune in the depths of the Tyrone Underhive. If you survive and are captured, that is what you will tell them."
Sael's blood turned cold. The screams around him seemed to recede, replaced by the thin, terrible clarity of betrayal.
"No… You're not just a mercenary handler. You're an Inquisitor. You—"
"We had an agreement," the Inquisitor said. "If you succeeded, I would restore your honor. If you failed, there would still be a reward. Your records will show that you died over a year ago, and your families will receive the compensation due to fallen Imperial servants."
The words hit harder than the explosions.
Sael had suspected it, of course. Every man who worked for the Holy Ordos learned to suspect betrayal before he learned to sleep lightly. Inquisitors did not merely abandon pawns. They built entire networks designed to vanish without leaving a meaningful trace. False identities. Dead records. Cutout handlers. Payments routed through corpses and shrine accounts. Men like Sael were not soldiers. They were tools made useful by the certainty that no one would admit they existed.
Still, hearing it spoken aloud stripped away the last ragged thread of denial.
"No!"
A sharp beep marked the termination of the connection.
Sael shouted in rage and hammered at the vox unit, but the channel was dead. At the same time, his eyes fixed on the Thunderborn carving through the center of the formation. The warrior was not merely killing. He was advancing with purpose, cutting a clean path toward the crate.
The prisoner.
They were here for the prisoner.
Desperation gave Sael motion. He spun toward one of the heavy storage crates, a reinforced container disguised as a munitions case. Its outer plating was scarred, stained, and marked with false logistics runes. To any ordinary augur sweep it would look like a crate of heavy weapon components. To the Thunderborn's bio-scanners, it should have shown the living man inside.
But it had not.
The Inquisitor's shielding had worked. That was the only reason Sael was still alive.
He wrenched the locking bar open and threw back the lid. Inside, bound in restraint webbing and sedated into half-consciousness, lay the captured soldier.
"STOP!" Sael roared.
He dragged the prisoner upright by the collar and shoved his laspistol against the man's skull. The captive groaned, eyes fluttering beneath swollen lids.
"One more step, and I burn through his head!"
The Thunderborn at the heart of the carnage turned his golden helm toward Sael.
To Sael's surprise, the warrior did not seem especially alarmed by the threat.
Not by the pistol.
Not by the hostage.
But by the crate.
The Thunderborn's stance shifted by the smallest degree. Sael saw it because fear had sharpened every detail. Their scanners should have detected the prisoner instantly. They should have known exactly which crate held him. Instead, the shielding had blinded them until Sael revealed the truth himself.
For the first time since the slaughter began, Sael felt he had something resembling leverage.
"Call him off too!" Sael barked, jerking his pistol toward the second Thunderborn still butchering the rear guard. "Order him to stand down!"
The first Thunderborn, Grey, glanced toward his comrade, Anruida, then looked back at Sael.
Sael bared his teeth. His hands were slick with sweat. The laspistol trembled against the prisoner's temple, but not enough to slip.
"I said stand him down, or else—"
Grey activated Bullet Time.
The world slowed.
Sael's scream stretched into a deep, warped drone. Muzzle flashes hung in the air like red glass. Burning fragments drifted lazily through smoke. Blood droplets moved so slowly they looked suspended by invisible threads.
Grey walked forward.
To him, the movement was almost casual. His armor systems tracked every twitch in Sael's fingers, every micro-adjustment in the pistol's angle, every tremor in the prisoner's weakened body. The hostage was alive. Frightened, concussed, chemically restrained, but alive.
Grey reached Sael before the man's eyes could fully register that anything had changed.
First, he searched him.
A gauntleted hand moved across Sael's armor, pulling at seams, checking hidden compartments, scanning for identification sigils, data-slates, oath-tags, cipher needles, anything that might reveal who had sent him. Sael carried weapons, emergency toxins, false mercenary markers, and dead-end authentication chips. Nothing useful. Nothing that would point cleanly to a handler.
Of course.
The Inquisition knew how to cut its strings.
By the time Sael's pupils finally shifted toward Grey's approaching form, Grey had already drawn back his fist.
"Next time," Grey said, his voice low through the helm grille, "don't come back."
His gauntlet struck Sael's skull.
Bone, helmet plating, and spine failed together. Sael's head collapsed downward into his chest cavity with a wet, final crunch.
Bullet Time deactivated.
Sound returned all at once. Weapons fire. Screams. Burning air. The crash of Sael's body hitting the deck.
The corpse crumpled beside the crate. The laspistol clattered away unfired.
Grey caught the captive soldier before he could fall, checked his pulse with two armored fingers, then lowered him back into the shielded crate. This time he locked it himself, marking its location across the Thunderborn command link.
Then he and Anruida resumed their work.
The battle ended moments later.
Beta Squad was annihilated.
When the last hostile fell, the tunnel was left in smoking silence. Bodies lay in torn lines across the deck. Some still burned. Others had been reduced to stains, melted weapon frames, or ash drifting through the disturbed air. The walls glowed faintly where plasma had struck. Broken vox-units crackled with dying static.
The two Thunderborn stood amid the ruin, their golden-black armor gleaming beneath soot, blood vapor, and the harsh light of cooling fires.
"Who sent them?" Grey asked, kneeling beside what remained of Sael.
Anruida stepped over a severed arm, glanced at the false markings on the dead men's gear, and spread his arms with grim indifference.
"The Inquisition. Who else?"
There was no surprise in his voice. Only recognition.
The Inquisition's fingerprints were everywhere in the Underhive if a man knew what absence looked like. Operatives with no records. Weapons without procurement chains. Orders delivered by voices that vanished after one failed mission. Men abandoned, denied, and erased before their bodies cooled.
Grey said nothing. He turned Sael's ruined body over with one hand and found exactly what he expected to find. Nothing. No rosette. No cipher seal. No useful data. Only a dead man dressed as a mercenary, carrying lies purchased by someone powerful enough to make truth irrelevant.
Less than ten minutes ago, Grey and Anruida had been boarding a transport ship.
They had been on leave rotation, like every other soldier stationed within the Talon system who had earned a few days away from duty. Talon-III had been waiting for them. Beaches. Ocean air. Real sunlight instead of lumen-strips and smoke. A sky that was not hidden behind the ribs of a dying hive.
Grey had even allowed himself to think about the sound of waves.
Then the alert came.
A newly deployed patrol squad had gone missing during a field test. Their task had been simple: descend into a mutant-heavy sector, assess contact speed, break away, and report how quickly a standard patrol could escape the Underhive's hostile concentrations. It was not supposed to be a heroic mission. It was not supposed to become a rescue operation.
They never checked in.
A recon drone was deployed.
It found six dead patrolmen, piles of dead mutants, and a column of nearly a thousand unidentified hostiles moving through the depths of the hive with military discipline. At the center of that hostile force, hidden from normal scans inside a shielded crate, was one living captive.
All information was relayed to Grey and Anruida at once.
Then came the final order from Governor Qin Mo.
"Exterminate the intruders. Recover the prisoner. If he is dead, avenge him."
...
The Inquisition is coming. xd
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