Chapter 142: Violent Art, Courtesy of the Astartes
Through the billowing smoke and debris, the vampires inside the temple raised their rifles and submachine guns and aimed into the thick haze where the two figures had landed.
They looked at each other. Every set of eyes had the same caution in it.
Quinn held his submachine gun and shoved the nearest subordinate toward the cloud. "Go take a look."
The subordinate wasn't enthusiastic about this assignment, but a direct order from the second-in-command wasn't something you argued with. He moved forward with visible reluctance.
"Watch yourself. Could be a bomb," one of the other vampires called after him.
"I don't think so. If it was a bomb it would've gone off on impact. Why would it sit there quiet this long."
The debate was still running when the subordinate stepped into the smoke.
Everyone watched.
A large hand shot out from the rolling haze, closed around the subordinate's skull, and dragged him in.
He didn't have time to scream. What everyone heard instead was a sharp crack, the sound of bone under sudden catastrophic pressure.
The next instant, the subordinate's body came flying back out of the smoke like a thrown sandbag.
The impact shattered the vampire next to him. The released blood mist spread outward like a smoke grenade, flooding the space in an instant.
The assembled vampires hadn't even processed what they were seeing when two enormous figures burst out of the haze at full speed, moving like a pair of high-velocity trains plowing straight into the herd.
Quinn recognized the situation before anyone else did. "Human troops! Open fire! Open fire!"
The vampires were slow on the uptake but got there. Rifles came up across the hall and triggers pulled, fire pouring in from every angle. Dozens of guns lighting up the space simultaneously with everything modern automatic weapons could produce.
Against ordinary human troops, that volume of fire would have counted for something.
Against the Astartes, it couldn't even slow them down.
Rounds sparked off the powered armor like gravel off steel.
Illuminating a faceplate with no expression on it.
Astartes One advanced into the incoming fire without any change in pace. Each footfall cracked the stone floor beneath.
He brought his left arm across.
A fist came down on the nearest vampire's skull.
The sound of the skull shattering never finished forming before the head had already become a mist.
The headless body hadn't dropped yet when another vampire screamed and threw itself forward.
Astartes One's right hand came up. Five fingers closed around the vampire's entire face. He picked it up like a doll and drove his helmet down.
The helmet hit with the force of a piston. The vampire's head and shoulder caved in together.
Blood and bone fragments spread across the chest plate.
The bolt gun was already up.
The barrel swung right, tracking the cluster of vampires trying to scatter.
The bolt round fired.
A vampire's body couldn't even offer resistance. The round punched through the first one's torso, tore it apart, and kept moving. It hit the second vampire, the one in body armor, before the force began to slow.
Even then, the bolt had already buried itself in the body. It detonated on delay.
The body blew open from the inside. Limbs and shattered flesh sprayed across the corridor like a burst pipe.
At the same moment, the figure marked Two came out from the right.
The two of them advanced on converging angles. Their fields of fire overlapped completely. There was no dead zone.
The sight of it sent cold through every vampire in the hall.
In the Quinjet above, Hawkeye stared at what was happening below and found his capacity for words had temporarily left him.
These were supposed to be people?
He looked at Matthew, who was checking the straps on his parachute preparing to drop, then back down at the two figures cutting through the interior like they were walking through an empty room. His fingers did something involuntary.
That level of strength, defense, speed, and mobility. A dozen of them could probably match a fully equipped mechanized brigade.
"Mr. Lawrence." Natasha's mouth was doing something she was working to control. "You called these two your bodyguards?"
Matthew looked up and nodded. "That's right."
"Combat-capable, wouldn't you say."
Capable.
That was one word for it.
These two were a pair of small Supermen. She hadn't even needed to come.
Inside the Temple of Eternal Night.
The Astartes moved through the hall the way a predator moves through open ground: fluid, brutal, and precise in a way that somehow made it worse. What they were doing had the quality of craft. The art of slaughter, practiced until it was clean.
The surviving vampires watched their numbers shrink one by one, and the panic in their eyes had curdled into something else. Something they hadn't felt in a very long time.
They understood that running wasn't going to help.
One of them, deciding that the ceiling was better than the floor, ran straight up the wall with the speed of a gecko, moving so fast he left only a blurred afterimage. At the top he pushed off and dropped toward the two figures below.
"Warning. Unidentified contact approaching from directly above."
The combat assistance system's alert reached Astartes One.
He didn't look up. He raised the barrel of his bolt gun and pulled the trigger in one motion.
The blast went up.
A blood mist dispersed where the vampire had been.
The two of them looked at the encircling mass of vampires pressing in from every direction, then at the bolt guns in their hands, ammunition running low.
The bolters went to their backs.
Arms reached behind. Each of them drew a weapon that was still running when they pulled it.
A chainblade. The teeth already moving, the mechanical howl already building.
This was the moment the engine-soul screamed.
Vampire speed was real. But in the Astartes' visual frame, every one of them was slow. Moving like insects with lead in their legs.
The chainswords roared to life.
One downward stroke.
The blade caught a vampire at the shoulder.
The impact alone shattered the joint. Then the teeth engaged, spinning at full speed, tearing through the body with a wet, grinding shriek.
The vampire was in two pieces before the sound had time to travel.
Astartes Two's approach was less measured.
One stroke, left side to right. Entry at the left ribs, exit at the right.
Upper half and lower half parted and slid in opposite directions.
Before the top half had reached the floor, the bolt gun in Two's left hand had already found the mouth of another vampire charging in. The cold barrel shattered the fangs and went deep.
The trigger pulled.
The bolt came out through the back of the skull, trailing red, and the body came apart.
The chainsword's tearing howl ran without pause. The bolt guns punctuated the gaps, picking off anything that tried to create distance.
"Is this hell..." One vampire stumbled backward.
Its abdomen had been opened horizontally by a chainblade stroke. What was inside was beginning to come out through the gap.
It was preparing to run when a powered armored boot caught it square in the chest, knocked it flat, and planted itself there.
Astartes One looked down at the figure pinned beneath him, which was producing a string of sounds that amounted to please no.
He had no expression.
The chainsword drove down.
The blade cut a scorched groove in the stone floor, and the vampire's spine along with it.
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