WARHAMMER 40K: SOUL OF THE LEGION Chapter 94 94: Evan's Trail

At the street corner position, the Ultramar auxiliary officer was still catching his breath. His nerves had been wound to their absolute limit under the swarm's assault, but watching this relief force tear through the alien mass like a killing machine built for nothing else had loosened sothing in his chest. He wiped sweat and gri from his face and let his gaze settle on the man at the centre of the group, the one the others were clustered around.

A battered black greatcoat. The peaked cap. And the rank insignia.

The officer's eyes contracted sharply. Colonel-Commissar. That rank was rare enough that its presence here told him sothing significant about what this unit was. Combined with what he had just watched them do to the swarm, there was no hesitation in him at all. He ca to attention, his boot-heels snapping together, and gave Duvette the full double-eagle salute.

"Sir." The awe in his voice was not sothing he was equipped to conceal. "Remnants of 3rd Company, 412th Ultramar Auxiliary Regint. We are at your disposal. We ask that you assu command of us."

Duvette gave a slight nod, Anderson's arm still under his ribs. He held the stabbing pain from his shoulder and leg wounds to the side of his attention and studied the man in front of him.

"Report the tactical situation."

"Sir. The outer city walls have fallen. After the main defensive line collapsed, the majority of our forces have been covering civilian evacuation into the underground fortress network below Macragge City." The officer responded cleanly and without hesitation. "We are ordered to delay the swarm at this position. We will also withdraw underground shortly. All external anti-aircraft coverage has been transferred entirely to the Astartes holding Hera Fortress in the Crown Mountains to the north."

Duvette's brow ca together for a mont. Then he gave a brief, deliberate nod.

He had mapped this out already. Back aboard Macragge's Honour during the pre-deploynt briefing, they had established the three primary attack corridors the swarm was likely to exploit.

The first: aerial assault. Millions of Gargoyles and Harpies pressing through Hera Fortress's interlocking anti-aircraft fire nets, forcing entry through the void shield in near-suicidal attack runs aid at destroying the fortress's interior installations.

The second: the surface main thoroughfares. The Avenue of Glory and the Pilgrimage Steps, the open ground connecting Macragge City to Hera Fortress above it. Open terrain, ideal for heavy armour and Astartes to anchor a defensive line, and equally ideal for the swarm to grind its ground forces to nothing in continuous killing waves.

The third: the vast, deep, labyrinthine underground fortress network beneath the city. The last refuge for the civilian population. The preferred hunting ground for Genestealers and Raveners.

The worst-case assessnt before the drop had been that the swarm had already forced all three lines and was engaged in close combat in the deepest levels of Hera Fortress, within a single step of Guilliman's sacred resting place.

Reading the situation now, they had not reached that point.

That made the next objective clear.

Duvette closed his eyes. The Grand Strategic Display resolved across his vision in an instant, semi-transparent and precise.

In the area representing the Avenue of Glory and the Pilgrimage Steps, blue markers and red markers had locked together in one dense mass, every contact cycling and overlapping. Just watching those markers gave him a clear enough picture: a brutal, sustained heavy-fire exchange, both sides grinding each other down at point-blank range, neither willing to break. The thunder carrying in from that direction confird it.

The main Astartes force. Every Ultramar auxiliary heavy artillery position. Every heavy vehicle still in operation. All of it concentrated on that axis.

His regint had no tanks. No heavy vehicles at all. Pure infantry with light weapons. Driving into that level of killing ground would swallow them in monts, and they would contribute nothing to that engagent that the forces already there were not already producing.

The underground network was a different question entirely.

Urban combat and underground clearance. The Ash Watchers 101st veterans had been doing exactly this since the beginning of their service. They had fought through more underground tunnel networks than most Imperial regints encountered in a generation, and the regint that stood around him now carried those veterans at its core.

The Eisenmark armour crews were an unknown quantity at close quarters, but Duvette had no particular concern about that. With the Grand Strategic Display, in a complex underground labyrinth he was the equivalent of a ghost who had seen the map before anyone drew it. No organism would manage a surprise attack on his blind side.

"We go underground with you." Duvette opened his eyes and addressed the auxiliary officer. His tone did not leave room for a different answer.

The officer nodded imdiately. A flash of genuine relief moved across his face. A commander of this caliber, with a regint of this quality accompanying them, had just materially improved their odds of coming out of this.

"Sir, the nearest entrance is beneath an Ecclesiarchy church three blocks to the west." He pointed toward the rubble-choked ruins to the west, wreathed in black smoke. "We need to break through to it."

"Move out imdiately."

The combined force was over two thousand strong, which was too large a mass for these streets. Sending that many soldiers forward in a single bloc through rubble and Tyranid-infested terrain was an invitation to be caught flat-footed with no ability to maneuver. Duvette reorganized the column before giving the advance order.

The Ultramar auxiliary remnant, under their own officer, took the front as the first echelon, responsible for clearing the route ahead. They knew Macragge City's geography better than anyone present, and they would find the fastest line to the church.

Duvette himself, with a portion of the 112th's veterans, took the centre as the second echelon, positioned to reinforce the front or the rear as the engagent required.

Stroud, Finn, and Kleist led a mixed composite rearguard as the third echelon, tasked with keeping crossing fire on any swarm elent attempting to co in from behind.

"Advance."

The column threaded into the ruined western streets in sections, moving in several long grey lines through the shattered architecture of the capital.

The route to the church was not as clean as it might have been.

At a crossroads, a Genestealer that had been lying still in the shadows of collapsed masonry burst forward without warning, its monomolecular rending claws angled directly at several Eisenmark armour troops walking the outer edge of the formation. These were tank crew soldiers, n who had spent their careers behind reinforced ceramite hulls, conducting war through fire-control scopes from a distance that protected them. Now they stood in open rubble with nothing between them and sothing that could close three tres in a single bound. They went still. Their weapons stayed down. The creature had the space it needed.

"Bang. Bang."

Two shots. Stroud appeared from a high point in the flank ruins, combat shotgun levelled. The burst spread a lethal pattern through the air and turned the Genestealer into a ruin before it had closed another step, purple fluid thrown across the nearest armoured troops.

Stroud cycled the action with the ease of long practice and raised his voice toward Kleist.

"Major. Welco to the infantry's battlefield." His tone was even and entirely without rcy. "Tell your people: out here, the gun in your hand and the soldier beside you are all you have. Next one who freezes hands the enemy a free kill."

Kleist's grey-blue eyes showed a brief flash of sothing. He swallowed it and drove it directly into an order.

"Focus up!" he called to his armoured troops, his voice carrying over the ambient noise with the habit of a man who had spent years projecting it above engine output. "Every one of you who wants to walk out of this city alive, keep your weapons up and keep them firing!"

With the Grand Strategic Display providing continuous advance warning, the column held good speed. Any swarm elent massing ahead of them was engaged and cleared before it could consolidate. The Tyranid main force was committed almost entirely to the Avenue of Glory, and that commitnt took most of the pressure off the western route. The skirmishes along the way were sharp and brief.

They reached the church.

It was a vast structure. Even after everything war had done to it, the Gothic architecture imposed itself: the soaring height, the weight of the stone, the deliberate scale of a building designed to make those who entered it feel the authority behind its construction. Stained glass had been stripped from every lancet window, coloured fragnts covering the floor of the nave in a carpet of broken light. On the great do overhead, the bodies of several Gargoyles brought down by anti-aircraft fire hung impaled on the stone spines like torn banners left after the fighting had moved on. The faces of the saint statues were fouled with alien fluid.

"The entrance is in the crypt at the lowest level." The auxiliary officer directed them toward a large tal double door at the far end of the interior.

The column flowed through the church and moved down in organized groups along the broad marble stairway, pushing toward the underground level.

Duvette was still on Anderson's arm when he stepped through the blast door at the lowest level of the descent. Then the floor moved.

A series of deep, dense concussions traveled up from sowhere far below. Not this level, not the next one. Sowhere fundantally deeper in the network. The tremors were strong enough to make the stone pillars of the church shudder, and dust ca down from the ceiling in a steady fall.

"The underground defensive line is under attack." The auxiliary officer's face lost its colour in a single mont.

Duvette said nothing. He closed his eyes and brought up the Grand Strategic Display at full resolution.

At the edge of the map, in the area that had previously registered as the secured zone of the underground fortress network, a dense cluster of blue markers was flashing in tight concentration, pressing close together. And ahead of those markers, a red mass was driving into their line from multiple directions.

The situation below was critical and deteriorating fast.

But what caught Duvette's attention and held it was not the tactical picture as a whole. In the centre of that cluster of encircled blue markers, several points of a different colour burned distinctly against the display.

Green.

Evan.

Duvette understood exactly what those markers were.

"Sir, what is it? Do we need to move and support those below?" The auxiliary officer had stopped beside him, the anxiety plain in his voice.

"I know where we need to go." Duvette put Anderson's supporting arm aside. He straightened under the pain and stood on his own, and what he showed the soldiers assembled around him left no room for doubt about what happened next.

"All personnel. Prepare to fight."