DONG DONG DONG.
Nolan drove the Six-Ard Iron Cavalry Terminator forward with thunderous steps.
Each footfall shook the ground, magnetic boots locking and releasing with chanical precision. He quickly stepped onto the broken wall, using the elevated position for better firing angles, ceramite steel climbing rubble that would have been impassable to normal humans.
The four servo chanical arms behind his power backpack all raised instantly.
They moved with synchronized fluidity, each limb swiveling on its mount to bring weapons to bear. Targeting solutions calculated. Firing solutions locked. Power cycled to weapons systems that had been idling, waiting for this mont.
The gauss blaster humd with lethal charge. The multi-barreled lta glowed cherry-red with building heat. The ion rifle's capacitors whined as they reached firing threshold. The storm bolter's barrels spun up to speed.
Whether it was the Necron technology or the Imperial weapons, all of them launched simultaneously.
The bombardnt was continuous and overwhelming.
Green beams of gauss energy crossed the distance in microseconds, striking the speeding train traction head and atomizing tal into clouds of disassociated particles. The multi-barreled lta followed, streams of superheated matter washing over the locomotive's surface, lting armor plating like wax under a blowtorch.
Ion beams added to the barrage, spiral coils of electromagnetic energy punching through whatever the gauss fire hadn't already unmade. And the storm bolter hamred mass-reactive rounds into vulnerable points, each explosion chewing through structural supports.
The train kept coming, montum carrying it forward even as it disintegrated.
At this mont, the local defense forces scattered.
They moved with practiced urgency, breaking from their positions around the elevator, seeking cover anywhere they could find it. Behind support pillars. Into doorways. Flattening themselves against walls. Everyone trying to get out of the locomotive's path, knowing that being caught in its trajectory ant instant death.
Only the fanatics stood their ground.
They did not even wear carapace armor, just robes and faith, utterly vulnerable to the kind of impact the train would deliver. But they did not care about possible casualties. Death in the Emperor's service was glorious. Survival was secondary to duty.
They kept shouting prayers, voices raised in religious fervor.
"The Emperor protects! The Emperor provides! The Emperor destroys His enemies!"
The words overlapped, building into a chant that echoed through the lower nest's toxic atmosphere. And while they prayed, they raised weapons.
Whirlwind missile launchers settled onto shoulders, targeting systems locking onto the approaching locomotive. Heavy stubber guns braced against hips, barrels tracking the moving target.
In coordination with Nolan's actions, they opened fire.
The bombardnt covered the sky.
Missiles streaked through the air in dozens, leaving contrails of white smoke. They impacted the train in cascading explosions, each detonation adding to the cumulative damage. Heavy stubber rounds chewed through already weakened armor, finding gaps, penetrating deep.
The train traction head was still hundreds of ters away when the bombardnt finally achieved critical effect.
The locomotive's structure, already compromised by gauss atomization and lta heat, simply couldn't withstand any more punishnt. Support beams snapped. Axles sheared. The entire mass of burning tal began to deviate from its forward track, montum redirected by uneven damage.
Then it rolled.
The train tipped sideways with ponderous inevitability, tons of tal toppling like a felled tree. It struck the ground with trendous impact, ferrocrete cracking beneath the weight. Then it kept rolling, tumbling end over end, sweeping toward the surrounding buildings with unstoppable force.
The locomotive crashed into a structure and stopped, wedged between collapsed walls, flas licking from ruptured fuel lines.
However, before Nolan could feel any comfort at averting the imdiate threat...
Footsteps echoed through the darkness.
Not the organized cadence of soldiers. Not the purposeful rhythm of people moving with intent. These were different. Irregular. Stumbling. The dragging shuffle of things that moved without coordination, driven by sothing other than conscious thought.
Dense waves of footsteps, countless feet scraping across ferrocrete.
Low roars ca one after another in the dim light.
The sounds were inhuman. Guttural moans mixed with wet, bubbling growls. The noise of vocal cords that had rotted partially away, air passing through corrupted tissue, creating sounds that made enhanced Astartes biology recoil in revulsion.
Then they erged from the dark shadows of the lower nest buildings.
Nurgle zombies.
One by one they staggered forward, revealed by the scattered ergency luns and the fires from the crashed train. Their skin was festering, flesh hanging in rotten strips from exposed bone. Pustules covered every surface, swollen with disease, occasionally bursting to release streams of foul liquid.
Wisps of green mist clung to their bodies like shrouds.
The fog moved wrong, too thick, too purposeful. It poured from open wounds and gaping mouths, billowing with each shuffling step. The color was the sa sickly green Nolan had seen on the train, the signature of Nurgle's corruption made manifest.
The zombie tide erged from every shadow, every doorway, every gap between buildings. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. An endless wave of walking corpses animated by Chaos corruption.
At the sa ti, Nolan's enhanced vision caught movent behind the corpse tide.
The rebels with better equipnt were hiding there.
Using the Nurgle zombies as mobile cover, as expendable shields. They waited for opportunities, darting between positions, setting up firing angles. Then they launched counterattacks in the direction of the suppression troops, las-bolts and solid rounds streaking over the heads of shambling corpses.
Nolan's jaw clenched behind his helt.
He quickly glanced at the scene through his eyepiece, tactical overlays painting threat assessnts across his field of vision. The numbers were bad. The tactical situation worse. They were facing Chaos corruption on a scale that could consu the entire hive if not stopped here.
"Mobian Sixth Regint! You really deserve to die!"
The words erged as a roar, amplified by his vox-speakers, carrying across the battlefield with fury and condemnation. These soldiers who'd suffered injustice, who might have deserved sympathy, had chosen the worst possible path. They'd embraced Chaos. Beco the very thing the Imperium existed to destroy.
Nolan turned without looking back, his voice booming toward the forces behind him.
"Everyone gather up! Listen to my orders!"
He needed them focused. Needed them fighting. Needed them to understand what was at stake.
"For your families! And for the thousands of civilians in the hive, we must defend the entrance to the passage connecting the middle nest!"
Let them hear the stakes in terms they could grasp. Not abstract duty, but the concrete reality of everyone they knew dying if this position fell.
"Chaos has corrupted the rebels and the residents of the lower nest! We can't let them pollute the entire hive again! This is our innate duty!"
His voice rose to a shout on the final declaration.
"For the Emperor!"
The battle cry echoed off rusted tal and crumbling stone.
Nolan's words had just fallen when he moved.
He drove the Six-Ard Iron Cavalry Terminator without hesitation, launching a fierce charge toward the vanguard of the Nurgle corpse tide. No more covering fire. No more defensive positions. Just direct assault into the heart of corruption.
His heavy magnetic boots repeatedly stepped on the ground.
Each impact sent shockwaves through the ferrocrete, cracks spiderwebbing from his footfalls. He accelerated with shocking speed for sothing so massive, servo motors screaming with the effort of moving three ters of armor and weapons.
The Heart of the Furnace was already tightly grasped in his palm.
Vulkan's gift, blessed by Ork gods, ready to unleash plasma fury. The weapon thrumd with barely restrained power, capacitors charged to maximum.
And the Blood Scythe surrounded by green light completed his arsenal.
The Warscythe's decomposition field blazed with Necron energy, the curved blade hungry for matter to unmake. Antarctic vibranium edge ready to cut through anything Chaos could produce.
"For the God-Emperor! For the Lord Angel!"
The fanatics erupted in unison.
Almost all of them shouted the deafening, crazy cry simultaneously, hundreds of voices rging into a sound like thunder. Their eyes blazed with religious ecstasy, fear completely burned away by faith's fire.
Holding simple lee weapons, they followed Nolan without hesitation.
Chainswords revved. Power mauls crackled. Even improvised clubs and sharpened tal bars were raised high. They launched a desperate charge toward the Chaos enemies in front of them, knowing most wouldn't survive but caring only that they died well.
After a very brief hesitation, most of the local defense forces made their decision.
They couldn't match the fanatics' suicidal courage. But they could still serve. Still fight. Still hold the line that needed holding.
Everyone imdiately set up airtight fire defense lines around the entrance of the giant elevator.
thodically. Professionally. Years of training overriding terror as they established interlocking fields of fire. Heavy bolters positioned for enfilade shots. Las-cannon crews calculating firing solutions. Missile teams loading warheads.
Temporary fire fortresses rose from the rubble.
Sandbags and ferrocrete barriers. Overturned equipnt creating firing positions. Every advantage of prepared defense brought to bear against the approaching tide.
Whirlwind missiles took off one after another.
They rose on pillars of fire, accelerating skyward before arcing over toward their targets. The missiles launched blanket bombing toward the rebels hiding behind the Chaos enemies, trying to root out the humans controlling this nightmare.
Facing this threat from Chaos, everyone had no choice.
Whether for the Empire or for themselves, this position could not fall. If the corruption reached the middle nest, reached the upper spires, the entire hive would beco a Nurgle breeding ground. Billions dead or worse than dead.
The stakes were absolute.
Nolan crashed into the zombie tide like a teor strike.
The Blood Scythe swept through the first rank with a sound like tearing silk.
The blade, surrounded by green decomposition energy, cut through Nurgle zombies with contemptuous ease. It opened their rotten and slly swollen bodies, bisecting corpses that barely registered the damage before collapsing. Diseased flesh parted like water. Corrupted bone offered no more resistance than air.
The Warscythe swept across a large area, clearing a dozen zombies in a single arc.
Bodies fell in pieces. Limbs separated from torsos. Heads tumbled from necks trailing strears of green mist. The corpses hit the ground and began to dissolve, Nurgle's corruption unable to sustain animation when the host was dismbered.
The next second, Nolan raised the Heart of the Furnace.
His palm brought the plasma revolver to bear on the Nurgle corpses rushing toward him, shambling forward with mindless hunger. His finger found the trigger. He pulled hard.
The weapon erupted.
Plasma balls exploded from the Heart of the Furnace in rapid succession, each shot multiplying through Gork and Mork's blessing. Six beca twelve. Twelve beca twenty-four. The barrage was continuous and devastating.
In an instant, the plasma ford a tide.
Blue-white fire rolled across the battlefield like a tidal wave, consuming everything it touched. The Nurgle zombies within dozens of ters were caught in the inferno, their corrupted flesh unable to withstand temperatures that rivaled stellar cores.
They lted in the blink of an eye.
Bodies liquefied, running like wax, collapsing into pools of bubbling organic matter. Then even that burned away, leaving only wisps of black smoke with a fishy sll that made breathing masks scream overload warnings.
At the sa ti, the ion rifle behind Nolan's power backpack activated.
It automatically launched sniper mode, targeting systems identifying priority threats. The weapon's machine spirit, ancient and efficient, calculated trajectories that compensated for toxic atmosphere, heat distortion, and target movent.
Spiral ion beams lanced out across extrely long distances.
They crossed hundreds of ters in fractions of a second, electromagnetic coils leaving glowing trails through the air. Each shot was perfectly placed, accurately hitting Chaos rebels who tried to control heavy firepower.
A rebel manning a heavy bolter took a beam through the chest. His torso simply ceased to exist, upper and lower body falling separately.
Another preparing a missile launcher died with his head vaporized, the warhead he'd been loading falling safely inert.
A third attempting to coordinate fire teams exploded as the ion beam ignited ammunition on his person, taking three nearby rebels with him.
At this mont, Nolan fought with terrifying effectiveness.
Wearing his Six-Ard Iron Cavalry Terminator, he actually held back most of the enemies on the battlefield with his own strength. The Blood Scythe carved paths through the zombie tide. The Heart of the Furnace burned away entire sections. The ion rifle eliminated threats before they could form. The gauss blaster atomized any concentration of enemies.
He was a one-man army, a walking catastrophe, an avatar of the Emperor's wrath made manifest in ceramite and fury.
However, at this ti, the fanatics following him were dying.
Their casualties beca more and more serious with each passing minute. Bodies fell in growing numbers, zealots cut down by las-fire they couldn't dodge, overwheld by zombies they couldn't all kill, dragged down by sheer weight of corrupted flesh.
Even though the fanatics were never afraid of sacrifice, their courage never wavering, each one willing to trade their life for even a single enemy's death...
But the corpse tide of Nurgle zombies was almost endless.
For every zombie destroyed, two more shambled from the darkness. For every position cleared, corruption refilled it within monts. The tide was self-sustaining, feeding on itself, growing stronger with each Imperial casualty.
Even the fanatics who fell to the ground and died would rise again.
Nurgle's corruption worked quickly, especially in this toxic atmosphere saturated with disease. A zealot who fell with las-burns across his chest would twitch monts later. His skin would pustulate. His eyes would glaze with unnatural green light. Then he would rise and join the chaotic carnival, turning on his forr comrades with mindless hunger.
It was a nightmare feedback loop that threatened to consu them all.
A dazzling explosion of fire erupted nearby.
The multi-barreled lta behind Nolan's power backpack had detected a threat approaching his blind spot. It suddenly spewed out a terrifying stream of hot molten magma, temperatures high enough to vaporize ceramite in sustained exposure.
The stream caught a rebel carrying a lta bomb.
The traitor had been trying to get close to Nolan's back, planning to detonate the weapon at contact range, willing to die if it ant taking down the Astartes. But the servo arm's targeting was faster than human reaction.
The rebel lted completely, transford into wisps of escaping steam in the span of a heartbeat. The lta bomb he'd been carrying went with him, vaporized before its detonator could trigger.
Nolan, who seed indifferent to the danger, continued his rampage.
He desperately harvested the Nurgle zombies that kept pouring toward him, the Blood Scythe never stopping, never slowing. Each swing claid multiple kills. Each arc of the blade cleared space that imdiately filled with more corpses.
But even his superhuman endurance had limits. Even Terminator armor couldn't fight forever without support. And the fanatics were being ground down, their numbers dwindling despite their courage.
Nolan opened a vox-channel, his voice cutting through the chaos.
"David! Tell Inquisitor Glendir to take over the command of the entire hive in the na of the Inquisition! Send more troops to the lower nest imdiately!"
He needed reinforcents. Needed firepower. Needed bodies to hold the line while he drove deeper into enemy positions.
"Also, send all the crusaders and fanatics down to ! If the Caliph Bishop does not listen to the advice, then send him to see the Emperor!"
No more political gas. No more institutional rivalry. This was survival, and anyone who prioritized power over duty could die.
Nolan didn't finish his words before David's response ca.
The chanical voice erged from the vox-speaker with characteristic calm, utterly unbothered by the sounds of battle bleeding through the channel.
"Received, my lord."
A pause, then David added information that changed everything.
"The head of the Caliph Bishop is in the palm of my hand. According to the information he accidentally disclosed before his death, he has been informing the rebel leadership. His original intention was to use this to turn this hive into a church world."
The confession was delivered matter-of-factly. David had executed a high-ranking Ecclesiarchy official on his own initiative, extracted intelligence through whatever ans he'd employed, and was now reporting the results like any other tactical update.
Nolan's response was imdiate.
"Then he will not die unjustly!"
The bishop had been a traitor. Had actively aided the rebellion, fed them intelligence, helped them plan their attacks. All in pursuit of personal power, dreaming of transforming an industrial world into a theocratic state he could control.
His death was justice, not murder.
"David, when you and the Inquisitor are mobilizing the troops that can be mobilized in the nest, any person who resists or disobeys orders will be punished as a heretic!"
Nolan's voice hardened to adamant certainty.
"Shoot without rcy!"
No more hesitation. No more political considerations. Anyone who refused to fight Chaos was, by definition, serving Chaos. And the penalty for that was death.
Nolan returned all his attention to the battlefield in front of him.
He danced the Warscythe back and forth in his palm, the weapon moving in figure-eight patterns that created an impenetrable zone of death. Any zombie that entered the Blood Scythe's reach simply ceased to exist, dismbered before its corrupted nervous system could register the attack.
At this mont, many Nurgle zombies had penetrated past the zealots' positions.
They'd pushed through gaps in the defensive line, exploiting casualties and weak points. Now they briefly exchanged fire with the Planetary Guard's fortified positions, shambling into las-bolts that burned holes through putrid flesh.
The defense force's continuous firepower blocked their progress.
Heavy bolters chewed through zombie formations. Las-cannons vaporized entire groups. Flars painted arcs of purifying fire that set corrupted bodies ablaze. The prepared positions held despite the pressure, disciplined fire creating kill zones the zombies couldn't cross.
But the fanatics were in trouble.
Nolan, wearing his Six-Ard Iron Cavalry Terminator, imdiately changed his direction. He couldn't let the zealots be overwheld, couldn't afford to lose their ferocity and faith. They were too valuable, too important to this fight.
He charged toward their position like a hot knife cutting through butter.
The taphor was literal. The Blood Scythe and its decomposition field made molecular bonds irrelevant. Nurgle zombies parted before him like water, bodies falling in pieces, the path cleared through sheer unstoppable violence.
Nolan passed through nurous waves of corpses, leaving devastation in his wake.
He launched support operations toward the fanatic believers who suffered heavy casualties, his massive armored form appearing in their midst like divine intervention. The surviving zealots rallied around him, their morale restored by his presence.
A few minutes later, the team of fanatics had regrouped.
They'd pulled back from untenable positions, consolidated around Nolan's protective bulk, caught their breath and reloaded weapons. Casualties were severe but not fatal to unit cohesion. They could still fight.
And Nolan, who once again beca the spearhead of the attack, led them forward.
They continued to charge in the direction of the rebels hiding behind the zombie tide. Not toward the endless corpses, which were symptoms rather than cause. Toward the humans controlling this nightmare, the real source of the corruption.
Compared to the endless tide of Nurgle zombies shambling mindlessly forward...
These heretics who betrayed the Emperor and humanity were the real culprits of this Chaos invasion!
They'd made the choice. Opened the door to corruption. Condemned their own world to damnation in pursuit of revenge or power or whatever justification they'd told themselves.
Nolan must try his best to eliminate these guys before they caused more trouble!
His charge drove deeper into enemy territory, the Blood Scythe clearing the path, the regrouped fanatics following in his wake. Behind them, the Planetary Guard held their positions. Above them, reinforcents were hopefully mobilizing.
And ahead, the traitors of the Mobian Sixth Regint waited, unaware that the Emperor's judgnt was coming for them in green ceramite and righteous fury.
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