V3 Chapter 92: A Declaration of War from Mortarion (Extended Chapter)
Hearing that a force is unstoppable on the battlefield, and personally commanding them in the fight, are two entirely different things.
Guilliman walked at the head of the column, the crack of bolter and las-fire sounding continuously behind him. The 112th Special Operations Legion's direct-subordinate infantry regiments were carrying out his orders to the letter, destroying every enemy that tried to block their advance, one after another.
The infected had barely surged out of the abandoned pipework before the heavy weapons teams had already shifted their fire onto them.
The front ranks handled suppression, while the flamers behind them burned away whatever contamination remained. Even when a mutant creature crashed into the line, the nearby squads closed the gap fast, and no disorder ever managed to take hold for long.
These mortals grasped orders far faster than an ordinary Astra Militarum unit.
Guilliman only had to point out the target and the general route; they worked out fire distribution and the manner of advance themselves. Even when a squad took casualties, the soldiers around them filled the gap at once, and the whole formation barely broke stride for it.
The earlier battle reports hadn't exaggerated their performance.
In every task Guilliman set them, these mortals completed the breakthrough at a fraction of the casualties he'd projected. Against the cultist walking dead and the under-hive's mutant creatures, their advance came close to being an outright steamroll.
Duvette's ability was even more absurd than Guilliman had first judged.
These men genuinely didn't need Duvette standing beside them, giving orders; whatever he'd left in them kept working on its own. Body, will, and combat experience had all been fused together, ultimately shaping a force that stood far above any ordinary mortal army, closer in strength to an elite Astartes Chapter.
Still, the column's pace inevitably began to slow.
The plague fog deeper inside the under-hive ran thicker than out on the fringes. Green mist filled every passage, and even with the soldiers in fully sealed helmets, solid shapes could only be confirmed out to about three metres. The thermal imaging equipment was drowned out by countless false heat sources.
Signals kept flickering on the motion detectors, only to vanish again the next instant. The auspex would even show dozens of moving targets right beneath a soldier's feet, but when the engineers cut the deck plating open, there was nothing below but pipework, long since run dry.
Fortunately, [Eye of Judgement] still worked.
Any life touched by Chaos corruption showed up in the soldiers' sight as a bright red outline. Even hidden behind the thick mist, or trying to close in from beneath the deck, none of it could escape that blind-spot-free sense of danger.
Marked weaknesses were shared out to every soldier as well.
Las-beams and bolt rounds landed precisely on the mutated creatures' most vulnerable points, tearing apart flesh already fused with metal. Guilliman didn't even have to tell them where to strike.
As the column pushed deeper, more dangerous Nurgle creatures began to appear.
Some of the mutants could no longer be told apart as having once been human, or under-hive vermin. Rotting flesh mixed with machine parts, broken gears turning in pools of pus, dragging their bloated bodies forward across the deck.
Vast fused masses of walking dead choked entire passages.
Dozens of infected bodies had been welded together by the plague, arms and heads jutting out at every angle. Every impact from them shook the passage, until heavy plasma weapons finally burned clean through their chest cavities.
Swarms of plague rats and mutated insects poured continuously out of the cracks.
Their numbers alone could swallow a soldier caught alone. The flame units had to keep both sides of every passage burning without pause, and the engineers started sealing off any pipe they couldn't confirm with sealant foam.
As they neared the core position Duvette had marked, the infected and the ordinary mutant creatures began to thin out.
In their place came Nurgle daemons, moving in packs.
Plague Heralds bearing swords advanced slowly through the mist, Nurglings crawling out from between roots and rotting flesh. More daemons, impossible to identify with any certainty, hid further off, letting out broken bursts of laughter.
Guilliman began to doubt whether they were still in ordinary reality at all.
The surroundings had already developed anomalies anyone could sense.
Underfoot was still the metal deck of Badab's under-hive, but in the distance now stretched a vast, rotting forest. Thick roots pierced through pipes and walls, dragging what had once been the under-hive's machinery down into wet soil.
Guilliman looked up.
The dome that should have been overhead was gone, replaced by a dim sky choked in green, poisonous mist. That mist rolled slowly, and within it the vague shapes of enormous creatures could be glimpsed, drifting through.
The armour of fate stayed fully sealed throughout.
Given Guilliman's own constitution, even brief exposure to this environment might not have affected him right away. But he had no intention of testing the plague's power against himself, or the war effort as a whole, to find out.
The air inside the armour stayed clean.
Yet the foul stench reached his mind regardless, somehow bypassing the filtration entirely. The smell of rotting flesh, sewage, and diseased organs mingled together, and Guilliman's brow drew into a tight frown.
He tried to recall the last piece of the hive city he could clearly identify.
It had been the main gate of an underground water purification station.
When Guilliman had led the nearest infantry regiment through there, the walls behind them had still been ordinary metal. But by the time they'd cleared the enemy past the gate and pressed on, looking back showed nothing but rotting forest thick with roots.
"Calling all regiment commanders."
Guilliman stopped and opened the tactical comm channel.
A wash of static came through it.
Something was overlapping different frequencies; the channel kept crackling with weeping and murmured voices. Some of them even seemed to belong to soldiers already dead for hours.
Guilliman paid the interference no mind.
After several attempts, he finally reached every commander advancing along a different route. Gaunt's and Stroud's voices came through in fragments, and the remaining infantry regiments confirmed they were still fighting on.
"All units, halt outward movement."
"Leave beacons behind. Tighten formation and converge on my position."
Guilliman looked toward the core Duvette had marked.
"We've entered a space the enemy prepared for us."
"Concentrate force and push for the contamination core."
The regiment commanders acknowledged the order fast.
Just as the last unit finished reporting in, a low, heavy toll suddenly sounded from somewhere far off.
DONG—
The sound seemed to rise from the deepest part of this space.
It passed through the rotting forest and spread outward along the metal deck. Several PDF soldiers nearby swayed on their feet, muffled retching sounding from inside their helmets.
One PDF officer dropped to his knees, black blood running from his nose.
The 112th's veterans felt the same nausea and dizziness, but their line held. Medics dragged the incapacitated wounded to the rear at once, and the rest kept watch, unmoved.
Guilliman pushed down his own unease and turned toward where the toll had come from.
"My lord Primarch, this is very likely a lure."
One of the Honour Guard stepped forward with the warning.
Elias, still moving with Guilliman's group, spoke up over the comm as well. "We should wait for the other units to finish converging."
Guilliman didn't act right away.
He could feel some guiding will woven into that toll, plainly enough. Something was inviting him deeper, hoping he would walk straight into a trap already laid and waiting.
But the direction the toll came from happened to line up exactly with the contamination core.
"The enemy wants me to come." Guilliman said only that much, gripping the Emperor's Sword.
He ordered a retreat beacon set on the spot, and left a company behind to guard the wounded and the comm node. With that arranged, Guilliman personally led the main force toward the source of the toll.
He could sense the danger waiting ahead.
That warning wasn't enough to change his mind.
The burning Emperor's Sword cut through the green mist, Guilliman's tall, blue-and-gold form walking at the head of the column. The Honour Guard and the 112th followed close behind, none of them falling back from him.
Daemonic laughter suddenly rang out nearby.
Great numbers of Nurgle daemons closed in from the rotting forest, red outlines flaring fast into the soldiers' sight. They'd still been arguing over who would taste mortal flesh first, but the moment the mist parted and they saw Guilliman and the Emperor's Sword clearly, that laughter turned to shrieks.
The daemons broke and fled.
Guilliman had no intention of letting them go.
The armour of fate drove his massive frame forward fast, and the Primarch closed the gap and plunged into the daemon horde in short order. The Emperor's Sword swept sideways, and the foremost Plague Herald was swallowed whole in flame, its body and its very essence dissolving together.
A second daemon had barely raised its rusted longsword before Guilliman had already swept past it.
The burning blade cut clean through its body.
Several Nurglings tried to leap onto his shoulder plates; the Hand of Dominion fired in rapid succession, blasting them into scattered scraps of rotten flesh. The Emperor's Sword's flame followed right behind, burning away every remaining spore.
The Primarch cut back and forth through the daemon horde, and with every swing of the Emperor's Sword, another daemon dissolved completely, gone for good, never to reform in the Garden of Nurgle again.
The death Guilliman brought was so absolute, so final, that even the most gleeful Nurgling felt something close to boundless fear in his presence.
By the time the Honour Guard caught up to him, there wasn't a single daemon left standing anywhere nearby.
The Primarch's breathing stayed steady the entire time.
The armour of fate's surface was coated in corrosive fluid, warning alarms sounding one after another, but the flame along the blade's edge burned that contamination away fast.
"Keep moving."
He didn't linger.
The column pursued in the direction the daemons had scattered, the Nurgle daemons fleeing in panic before the Emperor's Sword's edge, and before long that chase brought Guilliman to the source of the toll.
A massive, rotting structure rose out of the thick mist.
No one could say what it had once been.
Great masses of rotten flesh covered its outer surface, thick veins pulsing steadily beneath. Maggots burrowed in through one hole and out through another, eventually dropping into a churning pool of pus below.
A second toll sounded from within the structure.
DONG—
The whole space shuddered in answer.
The rotting forest shifted aside, and the path behind the column vanished into the mist as well. Every comm device present let out laughter at once, before settling back into broken static.
A plague bolt shot out from behind a wall of flesh.
Guilliman twisted his body in time, and the round struck his shoulder plate instead. Corrosive fluid sprayed outward, the damaged section of armour sealing itself at once, and the Emperor's Sword's flame burned the residue to ash a moment later.
Booming laughter rolled out of the rotting structure.
Several Death Guard warriors stepped out of a green, fleshy opening, and more traitors opened fire at the same time from behind the forest and the pus pool. Their power armour had already fused with their own rotting flesh; some had their innards trailing out through gashes in their abdomens, leaving foul streaks across the ground.
"Son of the False Emperor!"
"You'll rot too!"
The Death Guard shouted their blasphemies, raising their bolters to attack.
Guilliman looked at these traitors, and a long-buried anger rose up in him.
He thought of Mortarion.
And of the age when the Fourteenth Legion had still belonged to humanity.
"Open fire."
The Hand of Dominion roared.
The foremost Death Guard warrior took several hits square in the chest plate, his rotting body toppling backward. Even with half his body gone, he kept trying to raise his weapon, until the Emperor's Sword came down and burned him away completely.
Guilliman drove straight into the Death Guard's line.
One traitor swung a plague-blade at his throat, only to have the armour of fate's hand catch it mid-strike. The Primarch slammed him, blade and all, into the wall of flesh, then drove the Emperor's Sword through his chest.
A third toll rang out.
The deck beneath everyone's feet tilted, and in the distance a passage appeared that hadn't existed a moment before.
A fourth toll followed close on its heels.
The sound of fighting began drifting out of the thick mist.
Guilliman cut down the last Death Guard warrior and was turning to destroy the rotting structure, when he saw a great many humanoid shapes closing in fast from the distance.
A moment later, a group of Astartes in yellow power armour burst out of the mist.
"Lamenters?"
Guilliman stopped what he was doing.
The Lamenters had already spotted him. They ceased fire at once, and once they'd confirmed the surrounding enemy was cleared, moved quickly to converge on the Primarch.
More Astartes followed close behind them.
Mantis Warriors in green power armour emerged from a passage behind the Lamenters. On the wall behind them, an industrial designation number belonging to an entirely different hive city was still visible.
"We were three thousand kilometres away, in another under-hive, just a moment ago."
A Lamenters officer said. "The instant we passed through that mist, we ended up here."
Guilliman was about to ask for more.
A fifth toll rang out.
The rotting forest split open on another side, and Huron burst through the mist at the head of the Astral Claws. Great numbers of the Badab Guard came behind them, every weapon still marked with the signs of recent battle.
"Lord Guilliman?" Huron froze for a visible moment at the sight of him.
A sixth toll sounded from within the rotting structure.
Every comm device present cut out for a moment, all at once. Another passage formed within the mist, and the sound of heavy, orderly footsteps came from within it.
The Krieg Death Korps stepped out of the mist first.
The gas-masked soldiers kept their silence, rifles trained steadily on any direction an enemy might come from. Duvette walked among them, and soon took in every force that had now gathered here.
"I think we've entered a region where reality and the Warp overlap." Before anyone else could speak, Duvette's voice came through the comm first. "The lower levels of all four hive cities have been folded, by some power, into a single space."
He looked up at the rotting structure, still pulsing.
"I'm afraid the only way out is to destroy this damned thing."
A seventh toll rang out.
DONG—
At that instant, every trace of green mist stopped moving, and a low, hoarse voice reached every comm device at once.
"Robert."
"So you've finally crawled out of that tomb of yours."