Chapter 8: World Eater
While Duvette was still reading through the notebook, the girl screamed.
She had collapsed to the ground and had both hands locked over her head, her whole body shaking violently.
Duvette had not even opened his mouth to ask what was wrong when his chest tightened. Almost simultaneously, the crimson luminescence that Emperor's Gaze had spread across his vision flared from a dim pulse to something blinding. From the far end of the chamber, a mass of red points came boiling toward them through the dark like a tide of blood.
A deep mechanical howl filled the space. Every hair on his body stood up. He knew that sound. He had heard it before, from a much smaller weapon.
A chainaxe.
"Ambush!"
A heavy bolter answered him before the word was out.
The muzzle flash was enormous in the enclosed space. Thumb-thick rounds came tearing across the chamber trailing red fire, and the roar of it swallowed his voice completely.
Something hit him from the side with enormous force. He was shoved hard into one of the metal support columns, struck the column with his back, and the air left his body entirely. He rolled and came up coughing.
The soldier who had pushed him out of the way was still standing in the spot where Duvette had been. From the waist up, he was gone, dissolved into a mist of red. His legs remained upright for a moment, then folded.
Duvette's vision went red.
"Cover!" He hauled himself upright, lasgun already in his hands, voice tearing out of him.
It was already too late.
The heavy bolter's fire had spread across the full width of the chamber. Rounds hammered the support columns and detonated, blasting metal fragments in every direction, the impacts leaving craters in the ceramite. Every surface within range was being struck simultaneously.
He pulled himself behind the nearest column. In the upper right of his vision, a number was counting down.
[Remaining Strength: 37...32...28...25...22]
Fifteen soldiers in a matter of seconds.
His throat had gone dry. He pressed his back against the column and gripped the lasgun until his knuckles hurt. The bolter fire did not let up for a moment. No one could lean out to return fire without being cut apart. The support columns shuddered with each impact. The whole underground structure was vibrating.
Then he heard it under the bolter noise: heavy boots, moving very fast, and a different weapon sound. A bolt pistol, firing in measured single shots. Each shot corresponded to a death somewhere in the darkness.
Listening to the casualty counter move, feeling the shape of what was happening, Duvette reached the only possible conclusion.
A Chaos Astartes.
The moment that settled, his breathing stopped. Despair hit him in the chest like cold water. He forced himself to keep thinking and swept his gaze through the chamber.
Evan and his sister were alive. Several soldiers had pulled them behind a different column in the last moment before the ambush opened. They were there, behind the far support strut.
Anderson had taken the remaining soldiers into the grain storage alcoves on the left side. They were using the storage containers and columns as a makeshift defensive line, but the heavy bolter was already shifting its aim toward that position.
Stroud.
Duvette's stomach dropped. The green name tag that should have been somewhere in his field of vision was not there. But the soul-bond was still active in the Legion's Blade connection. Stroud was alive.
Three minutes remaining on Emperor's Gaze.
The situation was getting worse fast. The slow, heavy footsteps he had first heard were accelerating now, the chainaxe engine rising in pitch. The Chaos Astartes was moving toward them and picking up speed.
Then something moved at the edge of his vision. Green.
He looked up.
On top of the grain storage units on the far side of the chamber, nearly ten meters above the floor, a green name appeared in his vision. Stroud Hammer.
Stroud had climbed while everyone else was fighting. In the darkness and chaos, no one had seen him go.
Duvette had not finished thinking through what that meant when a single lasgun shot stabbed through the black.
The beam hit the heavy bolter's firing position with exact precision. Metal shrieked in the dark. An explosion followed, low and contained, and then screaming from the cultist crew, and the heavy bolter went silent.
Stroud's voice came through the vox, raw with exhilaration. "Sir, I bloody well did it!"
The hope lasted less than a second.
A bolt pistol cracked once from somewhere in the dark.
An explosion sounded from the top of the grain storage. Stroud's name tag went red and stayed red, the serious wound marker, and his body came off the top of the unit from ten meters up and hit the concrete floor with a sound Duvette felt in his teeth.
"Traitor filth!" Duvette came out of cover at a run. "Return fire! All of you, now!"
The remaining soldiers opened up together. Lasgun beams and slug rounds crossed the darkness and drove the surviving cultist infantry back into their positions. But Duvette's eyes had found the movement at the far end of the chamber.
The Chaos Astartes came out of the dark.
A World Eater.
The power armour was deep crimson, every plate carved with profane runes. Skulls and iron spikes covered the shoulder guards and power pack. The chainaxe in his right hand was as long as a man was tall, its teeth screaming at full engagement. He moved with the particular controlled violence of something that had been at war for longer than Duvette had been alive.
Duvette raised his lasgun and fired at the eye lenses and joint gaps, every shot placed as precisely as he could manage. The World Eater moved at a speed that should not have been possible for anything wearing that much armour. Every shot missed.
"Emperor's blood!"
He knew intellectually that the neural reaction speed of an Astartes was well beyond anything a baseline human could track. Actually watching it happen was something else entirely.
The World Eater was coming straight at him. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.
The left side of the chamber erupted.
The heavy stubber.
Anderson Walker stepped out from behind his cover like a man walking through a doorway, carrying a weapon that normally required a vehicle mount, gripping it in both hands with no support. He stood upright, squeezed the trigger, and held it.
The muzzle blast was half a meter long. Rounds hammered out at hundreds per minute and the spent casings came down like rain.
The World Eater stopped. He moved hard to the nearest support column and got behind it. Rounds punched into the ceramite and left craters and scorch marks across the surface.
Even against power armour of that grade, a heavy stubber at this range could threaten the joint gaps, the neck, and the eye lenses. Any of those hit solidly at close range had a real chance of penetrating to the vulnerable systems beneath. The World Eater was not willing to test it.
Anderson did not stop. He roared and advanced, step by step, keeping the weapon up, walking fire into the column that sheltered the World Eater, the ammunition belt visibly shortening by the second.
From behind the column, the World Eater returned fire with his bolt pistol, single rounds aimed to suppress, not to break cover himself. He was waiting.
Waiting for the ammunition to run out.
The heavy stubber roared for ten full seconds.
Then a dry metallic click.
The belt was gone.
The World Eater was out from behind the column in the same instant. The bolt pistol came up, tracked, and fired in a motion that took less than half a second.
The bolt round hit Anderson in the chest.
The explosion took his silhouette and swallowed it in fire and fragmented plate. The big man went back and down and hit the floor and did not move.
The World Eater threw aside the empty bolt pistol and turned toward Duvette. The chainaxe was already howling again.
He knew who was giving the orders.
Duvette pulled the trigger on his own chainsword engine and raised the lasgun in his other hand. His hands were shaking. He was not certain if that was fear or adrenaline or both, and it did not matter. He was going to die in this room and he was going to make it cost something.
The World Eater charged.
Five meters.
Three.
The chainaxe was on the downswing.
The body on the floor moved.
Anderson Walker sat up.
Several plates of heavily deformed ceramite fell from his chest as he rose, clanging off the concrete one after another. He had tied every plate from every fallen soldier he could reach across his torso with strips of webbing, building an improvised multi-layer barrier over his standard kit. The bolt round had punched through the outer layers. The explosion had been dispersed across the inner ones.
He was not dead.
Anderson swayed upright. His uniform front was soaked through with blood and the wounds exposed beneath were extensive enough that any reasonable assessment would have called them fatal. But the augmented body that the Astartes aspirant process had shaped and the crude biochemical work that had followed it, or perhaps simply the fact that Anderson Walker was Anderson Walker, refused that assessment.
He made a sound that was less a shout and more a declaration of intent, and charged the World Eater at full speed.
The World Eater had not expected this. He hesitated for one visible moment, turning to meet this new threat, and the chainaxe had only begun to swing when Anderson hit him.
Duvette could not follow exactly what happened in the next second. He saw both figures go down.
Anderson landed five meters away from where the collision occurred, status indicator showing critical injury, and stayed there.
The World Eater, the devoted warrior of Khorne in his ancient power armour, had stumbled. He was down on one knee, one gauntlet pressed to the floor, working to find his balance.
A demi-god in ceramite had been knocked off his feet by a mortal man.
Duvette did not waste the moment. He pushed his lasgun's power setting to maximum, raised it, and fired.
The first shot deflected off the armour plate.
The second grazed the joint.
The third hit the joint gap directly.
The World Eater snarled and went down again. He tried to push himself back up. The damaged joint ground and shrieked with each attempt.
The remaining soldiers were still engaged with the surviving cultist infantry across the chamber. Lasgun fire cut across the dark in both directions. But every eye that could was watching the Astartes on the floor.
Duvette tightened his grip on the chainsword and started forward. He knew this was the only window that would open.
"Sir, move!"
The shout was from behind him. Evan's voice.
Duvette turned instinctively.
The boy had leaned out from behind the support column with both arms extended and had thrown something with everything he had. The object arced through the air and came down near the World Eater's position.
The last melta bomb. The only one the company had left.
Duvette's first impulse was to run away from it. He changed direction immediately and sprinted toward Anderson.
He dropped to his knees beside the big man, grabbed his arms with both hands, and pulled with everything in him toward the far side of the column. Anderson's weight was enormous and Duvette's arms burned and his feet could not find purchase on the smooth floor, but he kept pulling.
The melta bomb's fuse made a sound like a quiet clock.
One second left.
Duvette got a fist into the collar of Anderson's uniform and wrenched him into the dead angle behind the column.
The world went white.
Heat hit him like a physical wall. The storage containers around them collapsed with a sound like an enormous instrument string snapping. The back of his uniform caught fire and he felt it as a stripe of pain across his spine. His head came down and struck the concrete and his vision dissolved.
The ringing in his ears lasted for several seconds.
When he could hear again, the first sound was his own breathing. Then, at a distance, the last scattered shots of the engagement. Then silence.
He coughed. Something metallic and gritty came up with it. He rolled over and looked back across the chamber.
A sound came out of him then, rough and involuntary, a laugh that hurt and that he could not stop, something that was pain and relief and the specific flavor of having been absolutely certain of dying a moment ago. It echoed through the wreckage of the chamber and the blood and the silence.
The invincible monster was dead.