Duvette made his way through the narrow passage, still thick with the sll of propellant and blood, and found Elias reorganizing the remnant of his command in the far corner of the shelter.
The space itself told the story of what it had been built for. This was a small civilian refuge designed for temporary shelter during aerial bombardnt: cramped, low, nothing about it intended for sustained military occupation. The ventilation system was producing a labored whining note under a load it had not been built to carry. In the dim lighting, soldiers sat against the cold rockcrete walls and wrapped their own wounds with what they had. dical supplies were almost gone. Ammunition was not far behind.
This position could not be held. One determined swarm elent breaching the outer periter would turn it into a sealed killing ground with no exits.
Duvette stopped in front of Elias and said it directly.
"We cannot stay here. The position is indefensible." He kept his voice low and even. "The best ground available to us right now is the main core fortress closer to the base of Hera Fortress. That is where the main force will be concentrated. It has void shield coverage, substantial Ultramar auxiliary presence, and Astartes garrisoning it. We need to get there."
Elias set down the chainsword he had been cleaning and looked up. The bloodshot eyes of a man who had been fighting without adequate rest took in the assessnt. He was experienced enough to know it was correct without needing to argue it. After a mont's consideration, he gave a nod and began organizing the movent.
Duvette watched him go and let his gaze drift toward the shadows at the far end of the shelter.
What he knew, and no one else in this underground space knew, was that the Battle of Macragge had entered its final stage.
His presence had altered so of the local engagents at Parnio and on Cold Steel Ridge. But one regint of survivors, however well-led, could not change the broad arc of what was happening on this planet. The Battle of Macragge would end as it had always ended: at an enormous cost to the Imperium, with a victory heavy enough to feel like defeat.
He knew what the turning point would be. An Emperor-class battleship nad Planetary Overlord, its captain making the decision that could not be unmade, driving into the heart of the Tyranid void fleet and detonating in a manner that would tear open a violent rift in the Warp. The blast would drag most of the hive ships into it. When the shadow of the Great Devourer was pulled apart in orbit, the ground swarm would lose its Synapse coordination in the chaos of mass node deaths, and the assault pressure that had been grinding everything down for weeks would break.
When that happened, the counterattack would begin. After it, the long and brutal work of clearing what remained.
The 1st Company Astartes holding the North Polar Fortress were destined to be wiped out. Nothing he could do about that from here. And Calgar's fleet, pressing too aggressively into what turned out to be a prepared ambush, would take losses that no amount of operational skill could prevent. Not his engagent.
His only objective was keeping the people around him alive until the tide turned.
He found Elias again, and with him the Ultramar auxiliary officer who had been with them since the street corner.
"I'll navigate from this point. During the briefing aboard Macragge's Honour, Chapter Master Calgar provided with partial underground charts for this network. I know the route."
Neither man questioned it. They had what they needed from him, and they moved.
After a brief period of consolidation, treating what wounds could be treated, running off several probing swarm contacts at the periter, the combined force got underway.
The difference between this network and anything Duvette had previously fought through underground beca apparent the mont they cleared the small shelter and entered the main passages. Farrak IV's tunnels had been civilian construction, tight and utilitarian, built to the scale of maintenance workers. These passages had been built to an entirely different specification. The tal decking and dressed stone underfoot were level and solid. Walking the main corridor, he estimated comfortably enough width for several Imperial vehicles to drive abreast.
As they pressed deeper toward Hera Fortress's lower levels, the construction scaled further upward. Later in the march, the passages were supported by giant load-bearing columns and vaulted to heights that would have permitted a Warhound-class Titan to walk through upright without lowering its weapons. The scale of the thing communicated sothing specific about Macragge that no briefing had fully conveyed: the Ultramarines' howorld had not been built for ordinary purposes.
They had been moving for so ti when the situation changed.
Lena had been unconscious since Evan administered the sedative. She woke in the middle of the march.
The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was the low ceiling of an underground passage, soldiers in damaged armour with dried blood on their faces, and the particular darkness of a space that existed below a city at war. The fear hit her before any other response had a chance to form. She grabbed Evan with both arms and held on, and she began to cry.
"Evan." Her voice was not steady and it carried. "We're going to die. I know we're going to die here. Both of us."
Duvette heard this from the front of the column.
Everyone else in earshot heard it as what it was: a frightened young girl overwheld by a situation that would have frightened anyone. Duvette heard it as sothing that needed to be addressed imdiately and with complete seriousness.
He knew exactly what Lena was. He knew what Echo of Fate ant for the people connected to her. If she was genuinely convinced they were going to die, the sa probability-shifting that had been working quietly in the regint's favor since the soul-bind could just as easily begin working in the other direction.
He was not prepared to find out whether the skill had that kind of range at its lower end. He stopped walking.
He turned around and covered the ground to where Lena and Evan were standing at a pace that did not allow for delay. He crouched down to put himself at her eye level, made a conscious effort to release the tension in the lines of his face, and laid a hand on her shoulder.
"Lena." He waited until she looked at him, which took a mont through the tears. "Look at . Listen. We are not going to die."
Her eyes were wet and not quite focused.
He held her gaze steadily and said what he needed her to believe, without qualification.
"Not you. Not Evan. Not a single person in this column. I have led these soldiers out of situations that should have killed every last one of them, more tis than I want to count, and this is not different. Whatever is behind us and ahead of us, we are going to get through it. I am telling you this and I do not make promises I cannot keep."
He waited.
Between Duvette's steady voice and Evan's arm around her shoulders, Lena's breathing gradually ca down. The hard, uncontrolled sobs eased into sothing quieter. She looked at Duvette for a long mont, then nodded.
Duvette let out a breath he had been holding rather carefully and stood up.
What happened in the engagents that followed confird that his concern had been entirely reasonable.
As the combined column pressed deeper toward the core fortress and ran into the scattered swarm elents filtering in through the underground drainage network, a pattern made itself visible.
The situations that should have killed 112th soldiers, the angles that ca from nowhere, the organisms that reached the line at the wrong mont, the encounters where the math did not favor survival, consistently resolved in ways that left the regint's soldiers still standing. Not always cleanly. Not without cost. But with a frequency that went well beyond what their training and the System's skills accounted for.
The Ultramar auxiliaries and Cadian remnants fighting the sa engagents, against the sa swarm elents, in identical tactical circumstances, did not have the sa experience. Their casualties were entirely normal. The full weight of what close combat with Tyranid organisms produced at this density landed on them without mitigation. Their dead accumulated at the rate their situation warranted.
The 112th's did not.
The contrast was acute enough that Elias began turning his head toward Duvette's section of the column at intervals, wearing the expression of a man who has started questioning the evidence of his own experience. After a full career's worth of hard tactical learning, he was watching outcos that his experience told him were not statistically possible, and he could not locate an explanation.
Duvette watched this and made a decision.
During a brief pause in the march, he walked to where Lena was moving beside Evan. He stopped and pointed in the direction of Elias and his Cadian soldiers, currently occupied with reloading their weapons.
"Lena." He kept his voice quiet enough that only she could hear it. "Those soldiers there, and the ones with them. It was them out in front the whole ti, absorbing the pressure while we made our way here. And it was that bearded one specifically who kept you and your brother safe while we were getting to you." He paused. "They're good people."
Lena looked where he was pointing. She studied Elias for a mont, his considerable size, the blood on his armour, the entirely unsentintal competence with which he was preparing for whatever ca next. She turned back and gave a single serious nod.
Whether that quiet observation would translate into sothing Lena's ability could act on, Duvette had no way to asure directly. But in the passage that followed, the luck in Elias's section of the column began producing results that were aningfully better than before.
Elias had two near-misses in rapid succession that he walked out of with nothing worse than additional damage to his armour. After the second one, he stood for a mont with the look of a man whose frawork for what was reasonable had just been revised without his consent.
Duvette said nothing, filed the observation away, and kept the column moving toward the core fortress.
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