Aru Industrial Zone, surface level.
In a thousandth of a second, the entire night sky was painted with the brilliance of daylight.
Twelve miniature suns ignited in the center of the crater, each exceeding two hundred meters in diameter, their core temperatures reaching millions of degrees Celsius.
Upon impact, shockwaves propagated outward from each detonation point, ring-shaped blasts of air expanding at kilometers per second.
Wherever they passed, rockcrete was shredded, metal structures melted into liquid, and meters of topsoil were violently stripped from the earth.
As for the Nurgle daemons caught within the blast radius...
The Nurglings were vaporized in a millisecond, eradicated before they could even utter a scream.
Massive numbers of rotting daemonic husks carbonized and disintegrated in the extreme heat, turning into a blizzard of black ash.
Even the embryonic Beast of Nurgle still forming in the pus took three direct hits from the macro-shells, blasting it into hundreds of charred, meaty chunks.
The entire three-hundred-meter radius at the center of the crater was utterly flattened.
The ground level was sheared down by three to five meters. Every uneven surface was completely erased, leaving behind nothing but a smoking, scorched wasteland slick with molten glass.
But that Warp rift...
It still existed.
Green pus continued to ooze from it. In fact, the sheer kinetic shock of the bombardment had caused the rift's edges to widen slightly.
Behind the defensive wall, Seranaphy pushed open the door to his bunker.
The sight that greeted him made even this battle-hardened Champion of the Blood Angels freeze for two seconds.
The mountainous piles of daemonic remains that had littered the area in front of the wall were gone. The pus-soaked ground, previously covered in a disgusting fungal carpet, was gone.
All that remained was a flat, steaming, pitch-black plain. The surface was coated in a cooling shell of glass, reflecting an iridescent sheen under the fading glow of the fires.
"Emperor above..." a young Blood Angel warrior murmured.
But Seranaphy did not lower his guard.
His combat intuition was screaming at him like a klaxon.
Because right in the center of that scorched earth, deep within that green rift, the colossal, putrid psychic pressure...
Had not weakened in the slightest.
On the contrary... It was angrier.
"Prepare for battle!" Seranaphy roared.
As if to confirm his premonition, the rift violently expanded.
Its diameter instantly tore open from seventy-one meters to seventy-five meters!
Pus geysered out like a burst dam!
And crawling out from the filth were organized squads.
Plaguebearers wielding rusted blades, and Plague Drones riding bloated daemonic mounts. There were even several Beasts of Nurgle with bulks rivaling Leman Russ battle tanks.
Roaring and shrieking, they scrambled out of the rift at three times their previous speed, charging straight for the defensive wall!
"Fire!" Seranaphy raised his bolter and shot.
But this time, there were simply too many daemons.
And they had wised up. They no longer charged mindlessly; instead, they scattered into dozens of smaller squads, swarming the wall from multiple directions simultaneously!
With only a little over four hundred Blood Angels manning the wall, multiple gaps instantly appeared in the defense line.
A Plague Drone reached the base of the wall. Its bloated daemonic mount suddenly swelled up...
And violently detonated.
Rotting flesh and acidic pus blasted outward, eating a two-meter-wide breach directly into the rockcrete foundation!
"Eastern section! Breach!" Seranaphy tried to rush over, but three Plaguebearers lunged at him simultaneously. Their rusted blades hacked against his power armor, emitting ear-piercing screeches of grinding metal.
He cleaved one apart with a swing of his sword and put down the second with a burst from his bolter, but the third's blade managed to slice across the armor joint of his left shoulder.
Sizzle!
A corrosive hiss rang out. The environmental seal of his power armor was compromised, and a stream of putrid Warp energy seeped in!
Seranaphy grunted, a searing agony flaring in his left shoulder.
But far worse... the edges of his vision began to tint a faint shade of red.
The Red Thirst.
The genetic flaw of the Blood Angels—an overwhelming craving for blood—was beginning to manifest amidst his injuries and the intense combat.
"No... not now..." Seranaphy gritted his teeth, using sheer willpower to suppress the primal urge.
But the battle was rapidly deteriorating.
At the eastern breach, five Warp entities had already crawled through. Though they were slain by nearby warriors, even more were pouring in.
On the western section, a Warp monstrosity battered the wall with its bloated bulk, every impact drawing an agonizing groan from the overstressed rockcrete structure.
And from the rift, new daemons continued to spew forth in an endless tide.
Seranaphy's eyes grew redder and redder.
He was losing control.
Once the Red Thirst fully erupted, he would lose his mind and become a mindless beast consumed by slaughter. To the defense line, that would be a disaster even more terrifying than the daemons.
But just a fraction of a second before he lost control...
New fires lit up in the distant night sky.
It wasn't the blinding white of an orbital bombardment.
It was the dull red streaks of artillery shells tracing across the sky. Dozens, hundreds... a dense swarm resembling a meteor shower.
Those meteors plummeted to earth two hundred meters in front of the defensive wall.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A continuous, deafening chain of explosions erupted!
High-explosive shells, incendiaries, cluster munitions... a torrential mix of ordnance detonated in the exact same sector, forging a wall of lethal fire one kilometer wide and three hundred meters deep!
The horde of Nurgle daemons that had just charged out of the rift was utterly decimated by this sudden saturation bombardment!
Nurglings were shredded by shockwaves, and lesser daemons were riddled with shrapnel.
Even the Beast of Nurgle battering the wall was sent staggering backward by a direct hit from a 155mm high-explosive shell. A massive chunk of its rotting carapace was blown clean off!
Seranaphy was stunned by the sudden artillery barrage.
He looked in the direction the shells had come from.
At the edge of the dark horizon, columns of vehicle headlights flickered to life, casting blinding white beams into the night.
Painted in the standard crimson livery of the PDF, Leman Russ battle tanks, self-propelled artillery, and multiple-rocket launcher vehicles rolled into the battlefield in perfect combat formation.
At the very vanguard of the convoy, the top hatch of a Chimera transport popped open.
A man wearing a PDF officer's uniform, both of his arms and eyes heavily cybernetic, stood up and raised a vox-caster.
His voice, amplified by the external speakers, carried clearly across the lulls in the artillery fire:
"Aurelian Kent Hive Crimson Dawn Local PDF Defense Force, 3rd Composite Brigade! Reporting for reinforcement! Angels of the Imperium, Blood Angels! Hold your ground! Incoming fire saturation!"
--
Goal = 500 Powerstones.
Wanna read ahead?! Join Patreon.com/AHumanMadeMOFO to read 20+ chapters ahead and support me if you wish.