V3 Chapter 75: What's Wrong With These Mortals?!
Shalok the Skull Harvester was one of the most powerful Chaos Champions under Kosorax's command.
He had been given one clear task.
Push through Badab Prime's anti-air fire, break into the primary hive's lower reaches, kill everyone in his path, and drown the whole district in blood.
As for the mortal cultists who craved slaughter just as much, they had been nothing more than expendable diversions from the very start, meant to draw the Imperium's attention. Countless transports had rushed toward other sectors, forcing the orbital defences and ground anti-air fire to scatter their aim.
Their blood was blood all the same.
Shalok swung his great execution axe and led the Oathbreakers behind him straight into the tide of Nurgle daemons.
Astartes were already among the deadliest infantry in the galaxy, and these red-armoured berserkers carried the strength of Khorne itself besides. The Butcher's Nails drove their minds without pause, letting pain and fury overwhelm every other sense entirely.
Swarms of Nurglings were trampled into filth beneath them.
A Plaguebearer, still murmuring its silent count, had barely raised its rusted sword before a chain-axe tore its rotten body open. Several massive Beasts of Nurgle tried to block the passage ahead, only to be hacked apart from the front by Shalok and a handful of his berserkers.
These lesser daemons could not stop them.
Their numbers slowed the Oathbreakers only slightly, and did no more than offer the berserkers more targets to cut down.
Five hundred red-armoured berserkers pressed on.
Their roars drowned out the Nurglings' laughter.
Krieg's heavy guns soon began landing near them.
Shells struck transport platforms and industrial rails, setting off explosion after explosion. Shrapnel hammered against blood-red power armour, and while a handful of Oathbreakers were knocked off their feet by the blasts, most kept charging on regardless.
This was, after all, the lower hive.
An industrial dome loomed overhead, and countless load-bearing structures and transport installations lay underfoot. To avoid bringing the whole district down, the artillery crews were forced to reduce their charges and strictly limit their target zones.
Their guns' power fell far short of what it would have been on open ground.
The Oathbreakers who had just been knocked down were soon back on their feet, hurrying to catch up with their comrades ahead.
Shalok had already sighted the Krieg 1168th Infantry Regiment's position.
Three thousand soldiers held the line behind cargo platforms, transit rails, and metal barricades. A storm of solid rounds and las-fire came from ahead, scorching the Oathbreakers' power armour and leaving it dented in dense clusters.
Only a small fraction of those hits actually mattered.
One Oathbreaker's eye-lens was punched through by a string of las-bolts, and his entire head burned away in an instant. Another berserker took concentrated fire to a knee joint, lost his balance mid-stride, and was swallowed by more beams a moment later.
But none of it could stop them.
Three kilometres.
Two kilometres.
One kilometre.
The Krieg colonel commanding the 1168th Infantry Regiment stood at the centre of the first defence line.
"Fix bayonets."
His voice came muffled from behind his gas mask.
"Clear the line."
Three thousand Krieg soldiers fixed monomolecular bayonets to their lasguns as one. Others gripped their entrenching tools tight and rose slowly from behind cover.
The World Eaters' war cries could already be heard clearly.
A bolter round punched through the barricade ahead and struck the metal cover beside the colonel, shrapnel from the blast whipping past the edge of his coat. He did not flinch. He simply watched, through his mask's lenses, the figure of Shalok charging at the head of the enemy line.
Shalok saw him too.
Blood dripped steadily from the execution axe.
The distance between them closed fast.
The instant Shalok crossed the pre-marked alert line, a piercing whistle cut across the entire position.
Three thousand silent Krieg soldiers vaulted from cover at once.
They gave no war cry, and showed no hesitation at the sight of Astartes bearing down on them. The entire line surged forward, launching a counter-charge straight at the five hundred Oathbreakers.
The two forces collided.
Shalok let out a furious roar.
The Butcher's Nails at the back of his skull kept driving into his nerves, tearing away what little reason he had left. He could no longer manage complex thought; only the instinct to kill remained, along with the barest fragments of tactical judgement.
The great execution axe swept through in a wide arc.
One Krieg soldier was cut clean in two, lasgun and all. A second had barely raised his entrenching tool before the axe blade split him open from shoulder to chest.
A third.
A fourth.
More Krieg soldiers threw themselves forward.
They cared nothing at all for how many of their own had already fallen.
An entire Krieg squad charged Shalok at once, some driving their bayonets at his joints, others clamping onto his arms, still others throwing themselves bodily at his legs.
Shalok crushed one man's skull with a single punch and knocked two more away with the haft of his axe.
But more kept coming.
Only now, amid the chaos, did Shalok begin to dimly sense that something was wrong.
Their charge had stalled.
Five hundred World Eaters, held in place head-on by a mere three thousand mortals.
These Krieg men swung entrenching tools and monomolecular bayonets, fighting the Oathbreakers hand to hand on their own strength. Their speed and reactions now far exceeded any ordinary human's; working together, a handful of them could even wrestle a warrior in power armour down to the ground.
One Oathbreaker had barely finished cutting down the man in front of him when seven or eight Krieg soldiers threw themselves at him from the side.
Bayonets stabbed at the seams of his power armour, at the neck and the waist.
Entrenching tools hammered again and again at his already-damaged eye-lens.
The Oathbreaker roared, killed four of them, and still ended up run through by a monomolecular bayonet driven up through his armpit.
Shalok swung his execution axe again.
Then, suddenly, a stab of pain lanced through his back.
A Krieg soldier had circled around to his flank and driven a monomolecular bayonet into the seam between his power pack and waist plate, already torn open by shrapnel.
The blade punched through the soft seal beneath and buried itself in Shalok's flesh.
"Get off!"
Shalok spun and threw a punch.
The Krieg soldier was hurled clean off his feet, his flak vest crumpling inward, and slammed into a heap of metal wreckage some distance off. One of his arms could no longer lift, and a visible crack now ran across his gas mask.
Yet he still staggered back up to his feet.
With his one remaining working arm, the soldier scooped up a chunk of rubble and charged at Shalok once more.
Shalok swung his great axe and tore the man's body apart completely.
Why?
The question surfaced briefly in Shalok's mind.
What was wrong with these mortals?
Why did they have this kind of strength and speed?
The Butcher's Nails quickly turned that flicker of doubt into an even fiercer rage.
He let out another roar and charged the nearest Krieg soldier.
His blood-red vision blinded him to the shifting shape of the battle.
Shalok did not notice that the transit rails, cargo containers, and shattered metal bridges had already split the Oathbreakers into several separate pockets. Krieg soldiers kept pouring in from multiple side passages, surrounding each small cluster of World Eaters in turn.
The five hundred Oathbreakers could no longer reform for another charge.
All they could do was remain trapped in the cramped position, locked in continuous close combat against the far more numerous Krieg soldiers.
Further off, two more Krieg infantry regiments were already on their way.
Major General Holst stood at the observation post, watching the World Eaters' advance, now stalled dead in the flanking position, then drew his gaze back.
"The charge has broken. Threat contained."
He said it calmly.
Once the other two infantry regiments arrived, the encirclement closing around these fragmented World Eaters would only tighten further.
They were still dangerous.
They could still kill a great many Krieg soldiers.
But having lost their momentum, all that was left to them now was to keep bleeding where they stood.
In the end, they would be swallowed by the endless tide of Krieg soldiers, never to break free of this position again, drowned like men caught beneath a rising tide.